Author: blogministrator

As the world teeters on the brink of who knows what, and the leaders of the G7 discuss it all on a conference call, here’s a few ideas for them:

Some statecraft is needed here: we need to leave behind the discredited ‘orthodoxy’ (epitomised by the extremist views of the swivel-eyed terrorist-Tea Partiers but followed in one form or another by most western governments) and wake up to the fact that the markets are a madhouse fundamentally at odds with the interests of the vast majority of the real world, and need to be reined in and chained down like a mad dog. After bailing out the banks in 2008, and then mismanaging the sovereign debt that ensued, world debt is now three times world GDP. So either we have calamitous defaults, or we print money and stoke up enough inflation to make the numbers add up. When world GDP is equal to or greater than our debt – in numbers at least – we can settle down and balance the books again.  A litre of fuel may cost a fiver, rather than £1.40, but it’ll still be a litre of fuel.

Most importantly, we must wake up and realise that there is no ‘wisdom’ in the markets, only savage and feral self-interest that needs to be caged, tamed and closely monitored with robust and thought-through regulation that has not been written by the likes of Goldman Sachs.

Like it or not, the eurozone probably needs fundamental no-quibble fiscal union – effectively turning it into the United States of Europe with strong local government.  And that means Germany picking up the bill for a while.  They’re scared of it now, because its been their ambition for 150 years to dominate Europe again (for the first time since the collapse of the medieval Holy Roman Empire) and having gone the wrong way about it twice they’re baulking at having it given to them on a plate.  But its the only way forward now. [STOP PRESS – first moves toward this now underway]

Here at home in the UK, I have to say the man still making most sense is Vince Cable.  The rest of the coalition don’t seem to get it at all, and Ed and his crew have a lot of ground to make up yet before I’ll be convinced they’d be any better.  Probably the best way out here would be fundamental Land Reform, enabling us to tax the 0.36% of the population that own 2/3 of the land of the British Isles.

And do I think it likely that the G7 leaders will take this advice?  No.  I bet they’ll all just batten down the hatches, declare even more austerity, and run the world economy into the ground.  Having a meeting without China, is, after all, part of the hubris that brought about the problem in the first place.  ‎“What we are witnessing is not just the decline of the US but the decline of the west.”

Soon, then, will come the defaults, and the rioting will really get under way.

OK so the world can lurch on after a deal is finally being struck to stave off default in the US.  The Euro’s latest sticking plaster is more likely to last as long as many hope.

But aren’t we being chivvied headlong – by a tea-drinking dog that believes the elite should be properly rich, that there should be those who are above, and those who are below – down a road in which the middle classes are those who are progressively being culled?  Viewed from left field, although their consumption patterns are gargantuan, the super-rich – even the burgeoning global plutocracy whose hegemonic strategies dangle the tea-drinkers on their invisible strings – are probably individually (even collectively) responsible for much less of a climate change inducing carbon footprint than that being enacted by the great mass of the middle classes created since the second world war.  This road, indeed, might actually be good for the planet.  Along with a few nuclear power stations to reduce dependence on fossil fuel faster than we can create enough sustainable sources.

Pull the other one?

 

 

“Benjamin Ferencz, an American lawyer who was a US prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials and who lives in New York state, asked whether the killing was justifiable self-defence or premeditated illegal assassination. He would have preferred he had been captured and put on trial.

Ferencz, 92, said : “The picture I get is that a bunch of highly trained, heavily armed soldiers find an

old guy in pyjamas and shot him in the chest and head and that borders, without access to more facts, on murder.” He added: “Even [the head of the Luftwaffe Hermann] Göring had a right to trial.””

Ewen MacAskil et al Guardian 4/5/11

 

I am pretty annoyed. Quite aside from the current arguments about humanitarian help for the beleaguered rebels, in my opinion this is Cameron and Sarkozy’s war, and its about Libyan oil. (The biggest reserves in North Africa). Italy’s ENI are the biggest players, followed by Germany’s Wintershall, and France’s Total. The US have only started getting back into Libya since 2005 – the famous Blair handshake. The UK government has been working behind the scenes trying to get Shell and BP into this market for over a decade – Blair and Major before him (Major representing US company Carlyle).

The UK want the rebels to grant us oil rights in gratitude. The French are in there protecting Total’s investment.  The Germans and Italians know better what war is all about and don’t want to be a part of it.  What’s going on is all about the oil, just dressed up in humanitarian/democratic arguments: if it was really about the latter we’d be enforcing NFZs over Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and there’d be more than just Qatar and UAE on the UN ticket sanctioning action.

Tomahawks – the US navy’s cruise missiles (which they only sell to the UK navy), of course, are made by Raytheon – a US/UK arms company, and have control systems made by BAE.  The Brits bought a load of the new ones in 2004 and have just used up a load of their old ones on Libya.  A little googling turns up some really quite wild conspiracy stuff!

Funnily enough – the Turkish Prime Minister agrees “Using incendiary language directed at France in a speech in Istanbul, Erdogan said: “I wish that those who only see oil, gold mines and underground treasures when they look in [Libya’s] direction, would see the region through glasses of conscience from now on.”

STOP PRESS:
26th August 2011

Sept 1st Update:

And so the bidding begins, with French and British companies set to do well.

Feb 10th 2012 Update:



http://www.cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/2196

I went to school at Eltham College in the 1970s, where the Headmaster and Chaplin gave lectures in morning assembly against the ‘evil sin of homosexuality’. I suffered some pretty horrific homophobic bullying from my peers, too. As a result I failed my A-levels, and didn’t get to University til 10yrs after leaving school. Now I head-up the leading Research Centre at the University of Salford, and Peter Tatchell is giving a guest lecture to the sixth form College Society, today.

What with :

• the Tea-Party – the Taliban of the American Right – gaining power in the US Republican Party
• the Tories finishing what Thatcher started, wearing a dapper LibDem hat to confuse us
• Darth Ratzinger landing the Death Star on British Soil spitting hate at women and gays, with an army of paedo’s hidden in his skirts…

…it feels like the world is still going to pot since Bush stole the White House, despite the blip of hope when Obama got there to weather the wake…

We seem to be staring at least a decade of austerity and right wing rule in the face, and I have to say, I for one, with memories of my 80s radicalism stirring in my heart, am finding it increasingly necessary to ‘take sides’ in the debate – to radicalise my own thinking in the general drift toward polarisation: the usual effect of right wing rule.

As John le Carre put it, once the Cold War against the failings of Communism had been won it was time to focus on the failings of capitalism. Instead there are those who still believe they should be able to get away with being better off than everyone else at everyone else’s expense, and happily deploy the most insidious strategies to ensure we gleefully beg for them to take more. With bread (in the form of palatial supermarkets) and circuses (yes those theatres of dreams) our ‘owners’ marshal their populations carefully to avoid unrest, driving engines of mass slavery to keep us too occupied to realise who we are, let alone why on earth we are playing this deadly game for people we don’t even know…

I guess one outcome of becoming more radicalised by a political environment shifting to the right, is that I am likely to become more outspoken.