Supermarket Sweep

Frozen Planet Shock New Footage from The Poke on Vimeo.


When I read the other day of supermarket uberchain Tescos £5 billion collapse in its share values, I was unable to sleep...for celebrating. After initially pondering exactly just how much cheese and wine "celebrity" chef Anthony Worrall-Thompson had taken from their shelves, I reckoned that those who live by predatory capitalism will die by it too - apparently over Christmas, marketing initiatives by the other big chains, Sainsburys especially, made big inroads to Tescos customer base. And so now the shareholders are worrying about their dividends following the company issuing a profits warning - coincidentally just after their Chief operating officer sold some £200,000 of shares for "necessary family expenditure"; must be quite a family!

Really? What exactly?

Of course, given just how totally unethical Tesco has been in its rampant takeover and destruction of local high streets, reaching a point now where it has a third of the food trade in the UK and a fifth of the clothes trade - nearly one in every four pounds spent by Britons is handed over in one of its outlets - the prospect of one of the other three big chains (Asda-Walmart, Morrisons and Sainsburys) benefiting from its decline is frankly cold comfort. Between them, these four outlets supply nearly 80% of our food - a dangerously high concentration in anyone's book for a whole variety of reasons.

All the supermarkets behave in questionable ways - undercutting small local shops, hammering suppliers to produce goods at ridiculously low cost (which is passed on in the form of higher profits to shareholders, not lower prices for consumers), paying low wages to marginalised workers on insecure contracts and using production and distribution methods for their "Just-In-Time" delivery systems which are environmentally devastating.

With the focus in the last three years on the corruption and crisis in the banking and financial sector, the retail food sector and the supermarkets have quietly continued their aggressive expansion into every nook and cranny of our lives. With even corner shops and petrol stations now sucked up by the four chains, they have moved online as well with home delivery - so that you buy even more of your needs from the one capitalist supplier. Relentlessly pushing the concept of convenience, they provide everything - food is nearly a byline set next to any household good you might want, books, dvds, clothes, medicines and even banking and insurance.

The result is a super-concentrated and inherently precarious system of supply - as the petrol dispute ten years ago showed, when supermarket bosses warned they had only 3 days supply of food in their stores, any significant disruption to their national distribution arrangements could spell real crisis for ordinary people. Imagine a major dislocation of energy supplies, or severe weather, or a financial crash that bankrupted a couple of these chains - the bailout required by Governments would totally eclipse the banking crisis. With hunger a real prospect within a few days, the potential for riot and chaos predicted in the NEF publication "Nine Meals from Anarchy" would be a direct result. We could face a national emergency of unprecedented proportions.

So, ecosocialists and any others concerned about sustainable and just societies need to ensure that the food retailers and supermarkets are as much a focus of campaigns like Occupy as the banks. The damage they have done is arguably more significant than the financial sector's misdeeds and the continuing risk they pose is massive. We need to legislate to create local, community food initiatives and revive small-scale production and supply of food and other goods. It is not just good for the planet - it is safer for society too.

NYPD Raids OWS Livestream Studio, Arrests Volunteers | AlterNet

Click on the link: NYPD Raids OWS Livestream Studio, Arrests Volunteers | AlterNet 

Freedom of speech is struck another blow in the USA as Republican voters split 2:1 in favour of homophobic racists in Iowa.

They Came In the Night In the Land of the Free

New York police have cleared the Occupy Wall Street camp in the dead of night. Arriving at 1 am, they gave demonstrators 20 minutes to pack up and leave, arresting 70. The authorities told the demonstrators they were to remove all "private property" (like tents!) and could return presumably to stand all night in the open, in November. Allegedly, the camp in Zuccotti Park, was a health and safety hazard (sounds familiar to St Paul's protest in London?) and followed the clearing of a similar Occupy camp in Oakland in California a few hours earlier.

So much for freedom of speech and assembly in what is meant to be the land of freedom. If Egyptian police had done this in Tahrir Square, they would rightly have been condemned for squashing freedom of expression. Likewise, in many other countries, like Ukraine during the neoliberal "Orange Revolution", the USA squarely backed and even funded demonstrators as they brought down the mildly socialist government.

Different then when it is in their own backyard. Different when it is protest against the greed and excess of the 1,000 corporations and their political puppets who run our planet and rip us all off. These demonstrators have got it all wrong, it seems.

Freedom has its limits, it seems, if you are opposed to the Establishment. And so, as well as all the powers of surveillance and detention built into laws like the ludicrously named Patriot Act, they authorities will use by-laws to ensure that, in effect, prevent the protest continuing - as winter deepens, who on Earth will be able to stand in the streets of New York in the middle of the night, night after night?

Health and safety risk, the Powers-that-be claim. Yeah? Who's exactly?

Chilling, in more ways than one.

OCCUPY CONSTANTINOPLE – Back to the future with Byzantine Economics

“The more powerful should not injure the less powerful, but that everything should be weighed by a just measure...”                        
                                   Prologue to the Byzantine “Book of the Prefect”, 912 AD.


Last week came the news that, at the same time as they have been urging wage restraint by their workers and insisting that the “bloated” public sector needs to be slashed, Britain’s bosses have dug their snouts even deeper into the trough. In the last recessionary year, the Chief Executives of the Top 100 Listed Companies in the UK have been awarded 43% increases in their pay packages, while the next level down of Directors has gained even more – 49% increases on average.

There was much awkward wringing of hands by Government Ministers, embarrassed by the extreme extent and blatant arrogance of these people, many of them funders and supporters of the same Tory regime that has assured the suffering public that “we are all in it together” in facing the economic downturn. But none of them undertook to implement any hard and fast action that might change this utter fest of rapacious greed.

Finally breaking the Church of England’s silence over the demands of the Occupy London protesters, the Archbishop of Canterbury last weekend asked “Are economics too important to be left to economists?”, positing the need for some ethical underpinning of the economic framework – including supporting the so-called Robin Hood tax on financial transactions. And yet, is capitalism capable of delivering such a benign outcome at all? So how do we deal with these people? If not capitalism, then what?

Given that the entire raison d’etre of capitalism – the maximising of profit – inevitably drives this grasping process of exploitation of resources to exhaustion coupled with the excessive accumulation of wealth, the long-term answer can only be through adopting a new economic ideology – one embracing sustainable stewardship of resources and a genuine redistribution of both power and wealth. It is a measure of the success of the capitalist media’s propaganda that socialism remains a dirty word even among many progressives, but that makes the need for new solutions and the potential for a new society no less possible, nor any less imperative.

All economic systems have to accommodate choice and exchange in some way – the central question has to be whether this is determined by wealth measured and expressed by monetary power or by human need identified and agreed by a wider social construct. In this, market mechanisms may have a greater or smaller role to play according to the culture of the society in question – and this has as often as not in human history depended on ethics or morality as much as on cash in hand.

For example, ninth century Byzantium, the eastern successor of the Romans and the most successful state of its time, purposefully adopted an economic ideology based on self-sufficiency and just distribution. The Emperors, driven in part by Orthodox Christian theology and in part by political considerations, adopted a series of laws which held “just exchange” to be at the centre of any market transactions. In particular, policy focused on tackling the rapacious excesses of the dynamoi, the powerful nobility, over the poorer citizenry and especially the peasantry.

And so, in a society that was significantly monetised in its exchange process (as opposed to barter which remained a significant component in other contemporary economies), we find a series of edicts which, among other things, forced the free return of land bought from famine-struck peasants by their exploitative lords for less than half the assessed “just value”. We find laws rendering void any contract where the workman had agreed a rate lower than the “just wage” and in the realm of lending, the rich were forced to charge lower rates of interest than less prosperous lenders. In the capital, Constantinople, craft guilds were established to licence producers in such a way that, while competition was permitted within a particular sector, even the most successful producers in one field could not diversify into others and come to dominate the supply of goods to the consumer. The Prefect of the City regulated the production of key goods to ensure sufficiency of supply to the population, with the Government intervening where this was threatened (especially in terms of staple foods like bread and fish), and to prevent “unreasonable profit” – an established principle in Byzantine law.



The Byzantine Economy  - putting the Just into Justinian?

 Perhaps of greatest contemporary relevance, it was the Byzantines establishment of the practice that, while supply and demand might inevitably affect the costs of producing goods and that Government might be limited in its long-term ability to temper this, it was both possible and indeed a moral imperative that there should be a legal limit on profit margins. Consequently, Patriarch Nicephoros in the ninth century set this as no more than 10% of cost, a figure so low that it would have many a modern venture capitalist choking on his swill.

And yet, in the precarious Medieval world, Byzantium’s adoption of an ethical, redistributive economics worked highly effectively. With a million inhabitants by 1100, Constantinople flourished as the wealthiest city in Europe and the Near East, inevitably incurring the envy and desire of predatory neighbours.

Briefly, it is of note that the effective end of the Byzantine Empire did not come through economic ruin. Rather, the death blows fell through a combination of the violent reassertion of power by the military aristocracy, who rolled back many of the laws during the turbulent late eleventh and twelfth centuries, and then through the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade, led by the avowedly mercantilist Venetian Republic. Although the Empire lingered on in various forms for a further quarter of a millennium, these two forces – the propertied and the moneyed – between them destroyed what had been one of the most successful and long lived civilisations in the Mediterranean world.

Sustainable and ethical economics, and equitable distribution of wealth, were not new even at the height of Byzantium. Aristotle had written of justice in exchange in 360 BC, Roman law incorporated the concept and the 4th century Church Fathers advocated justice as including material equity. And all accepted the role of the State as the “judge” (Aristotle’s concept) in “restoring equality between those who have much and those who have little, by giving to one what he takes from the other”.

Indeed, for most of humanity’s existence, societies have functioned on the basis of a “steady state economy”, where output expanded slowly and in tiny increments, if at all. Consequently, how resources and material wealth were shared inevitably became a central policy issue. It has only been since the early Renaissance that first long distance trade and then the technological and productive potential of the Industrial Revolution led to the fairly recent capitalist construct that wealth can be skewed horrendously disproportionately, yet everyone can be better off.

Plainly, with so many key raw materials near or past peak production while demand rises inexorably, if this nostrum ever contained any truth at all, it no longer holds. With growth rates now facing long term decline, the capitalist system is morally bankrupt and in the coming decades will be practically bust. Even beyond the current recessionary cycle, resource scarcity looms and the need for an Aristotelian Judge has never been greater – we need to re-embrace an economics where, once again, as one economic history has described tenth century Byzantium, “...individual economic action is limited by the needs of society as a whole.”(as succinct a definition of contemporary ecosocialism as I have seen).

The question for our society and our world is whether we wait for our system of economics to collapse in pain, blood and violence, or whether we take control of our contemporary dynamoi now and begin the transition to a happier, more egalitarian, and sustainable future.

From The Wall to Wall Street: Learning to Say "No"

(Note - Spoiler)



I've already posted on Rise of the Planet of the Apes; but, as a self-confessed and unashamed  Apes addict since the age of 12, having seen it a second time, I was moved to post this scene. It is one of the most powerful moments in the film, when the lead character's awakening self-consciousness (and his larynx!) reaches a fear-driven crescendo as he faces yet more cruelty from his captors. And once the genie is out the bottle...

The Power of NO - pretty clear in the clip above; but one of the hardest things people often find to say, usually for some fear of consequence. As a result, all manner of injustices and wrongs are tolerated beyond reason and the Powerful know this. Education, media and authority are combined sometimes incredibly subtly to create a zeitgeist where dissent does not (always) need to be physically crushed - rather it is simply isolated and neutralised. A phony consent is manufactured where the status quo is accepted because anything else seems ridiculously impossible.

Just as the Soviets used to treat their dissidents in mental hospitals for failing to evolve obligingly into homo sovieticus, so capitalist societies drive people to the belief that the work ethic in the service of profit-seeking corporations is not only their preference, but indeed the only sane or feasible choice - in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Say otherwise and at best you are a hopeless dreamer, and at worst a potential terrorist poised to wipe out civilisation as we know it (hence the police targeting of completely peaceful environmentalists via use of the anti-terror laws).

The Arab Spring, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, has shown the world some of the potential when people, no matter how oppressed, decide to refuse the dictates of their rulers. Their bravery has shown that, ultimately, those in power depend on the unspoken compliance of those they govern - no matter how pervasive or brutal a system is, it is operated by humans, ultimately as vulnerable as those they oppress, whether by the terror of the Cairo police, or by the restrictions of the US Patriot Act. From the taking of the Bastille to fall of the Berlin Wall to the thousands of Americans currently camping at Wall Street and in the financial sector of Boston to protest against the power of the bankers, ordinary people can make a difference when they finally refuse to accept the threats, lies and abuses of the Establishment, whose power ultimately is no greater than that which we collectively grant it.

So whether the trailblazing Bryant & May strikers of the 19th century, or Spartacus the Slave or even Caesar the Ape, the act of saying "No", while learned with great difficulty and often requiring great bravery and even supreme sacrifice, can be one of the most positive things any sentient being can do.

"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble." 
                                                                                     - Gandhi

Caesar as Che