Atomic Ranch

Liverpool electronic music group, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, also known as OMD, produced a string of mainstream hits back in the 1980s and early 90s. However, alongside their perfect-pop tunes, in many album tracks, they had a darker, edgier experimental side firmly rooted in the German "krautrock" movement of the late 60s and early 70s, largely founded by the prodigies of the Dusseldorf School of Electronic Music by bands like Kraftwerk and Neu!

These groups, prefiguring some of the genres associated with later Punk and Alternative movements, not only focused on the sounds made possible for the first time by emerging synthesiser technology, but they also peered into the bleak nightmare worlds of past futurists such as HG Wells and Orwell and into contemporary fears of societies controlled by computer. From these bleak landscapes emerged Frankenstein-like nightmares of people isolated from each other by both the possibilities and threats of robots, computer systems and corporations. Tracks like The Man-Machine and Computer Love foretold a time where humans become eclipsed by the very technology they create. In a world of increasingly intrusive surveillance via anything from internet spying by the authorities (and by corporations seeking to profit), to tracking systems on mobile phones and supermarket loyalty cards, to the deadly payloads of automated drone aircraft, time is proving their dystopian visions to be far from inaccurate.

OMD re-formed in 2006 and produced a comeback album History of Modern in 2010. This year, returning to their experimental roots, they will release English Electric in the spring. The video below is a taster trailer and shows a return to the themes they started with long ago, when they sang about the cold war, solar energy , genetic engineering and the Hiroshima bombing.

Atomic Ranch is an ode to the supreme dangers of unsustainable consumerism and synthetic lifestyles, underpinned by hopelessly destructive energy sources (and complete with a dash of conservative sexism in the style of The Stepford Wives). Especially relevant given the current crisis in our industrialised food systems and with 1950s retrostyle graphics by German artist Henning M Lederer, it is a short but imposing piece and a welcome return by a group from a more politicised age.

Skynet is Coming - A Warning from History

Today In History -10 February 1868, Florida

Republican conservatives draft new constitution which concentrates
political power in the hands of the governor and limits the impact        

of the Black vote.  This is made possible by Conservatives, aided by military forces, who seize the convention hall and establish

control over the reconstruction process in Florida.

This violent act to restrict the rights of minority citizens and suspend the operation of normal democracy is by no means an isolated incident in the history of rightwing politics in the USA or elsewhere. Conservatives eschew the ability of the State to do very much at all - whether economics, education, welfare or whatever, private enterprise is favoured. Its definition of democracy is all too often a deeply qualified one and all about defending the elite's privileges in the face of what is termed fanaticism on the part of the democratic majority - that is, anything that in any way challenges the power and wealth of the richest.

The military however is another matter - neoliberals accord military and policing as the key responsibilities of the State, although even there the private profit motive is introduced wherever possible. Whole wars have been found to support the corporate business agenda - Iraq being a major recent case, with Libya following on.

Not all conservatives are blind to the dangers or as unprincipled as the neoliberal wing which dominates the Republicans in the USA and other conservative parties around the world in pursuing ever more vicious and unyielding ideologically-driven policies. It was one of their own, a former military commander, President/General Dwight Eisernhower who, in his farewell address of  January 1961, warned of the growing danger of the then emerging military-industrial complex. Driven by its need for conflict to feed its business needs, he voiced his concerns about the armaments industry taking on a life of its own in needlessly and endlessly fostering conflict and war. In this, it would seek ever more influence over politics and threaten democracy, liberty and freedom.

Eisenhower also warned against the rise of a scientific elite, linked to the military, being allowed to drive public policy in a range of fields, not least the military. In this, the ceaseless development of ever more powerful, devastating and even sinister weaponry has proven him right: from "tactical" nuclear weapons and the neutron bombs of the 1980s to the drones of today and, being developed now, the DNA-seeking, 100% computerised, non-human operated drones of tomorrow. Terminator seems just a few steps away.

Yet his words went unheeded by both Democrats and Republicans, so that now the USA spends nearly as much on weaponry as the rest of the world put together. This in a society where thousands die each year from malnutrition, where tens of millions even now have little effective healthcare and where life expectancy is lower than in many so-called Third World countries. This too in a country where the Patriot Act has done away with many legal safeguards and where progressive political and environmental protesters are officially ranked alongside jihadists as potential terrorists, especially where their views bring them into conflict with the arms industry or the military.

But the neolibs don't care - and in the 145 years since the coup d'etat in Florida, possibly the only thing that has changed is that they would not need to physically seize the convention: they would already have the whole process stitched up and probably outsourced. War, rumours of war and threats are what keep the military-industrial complex going - peace is anathema to it. And so the President's words ring prophetically true, but go unheeded.

Here is Eisenhower's full farewell address to the nation 17 January 1961:

100% Massproduced Horse-sh** - Guaranteed

In the wake of Tescos and a string of other retailers being found to have horse rather than beef meat in a growing number of their beef products, jokes have abounded - photo shopped pictures of cows complaining about horses coming over from France and stealing their jobs; Youtube videos of people in pantomime horse costumes going into supermarkets shouting "Mum! Dad! Where are you?"; and even references to the recently exhumed King Richard III having perished because when he offered up his kingdom for a horse, someone turned up with a Findus lasagne instead.

Great value - but for who exactly?

All very droll. But tonight, making the sickest joke of all, the Prime Minister has told the nation that the issue is that people are being misled about what is in their food. It is not a health and safety issue, Mr Cameron assures us, but a shocking betrayal of cultural sensitivities where British people don't eat horses, preferring instead to slaughter cows - whose inoffensive, perhaps rather dull nature makes them fine for killing and consumption. On the other hand, horses are far too nice to eat it seems, unless you are some nasty French person.

But not for the first time, of course, Mr Cameron is wrong on so many levels.

Firstly, how is it not a health and safety issue when what is in a box of food turns out to be something other than it is meant to be? If someone is flogging untraceable dead horses and calling their carcass offcuts beef, just exactly how careful and hygienic have they been with their sourcing of the meat? Environment Secretary Owen Patterson says he is sure criminals have been involved - so how on earth can the Government be so off-hand about the safety of the material put in these food products? Moreover, many, many horses are frequently given anti-inflammatory phenylbutazone drugs that stay long in their system and are significantly carcinogenic, increasing the risk of cancer in any humans consuming horse meat. The health risks cannot be ruled out so lightly.

Secondly, it is ingenuous to complain that people are being sold a lie if there is horse instead of cow in their Tesco burgers or Findus beef lasagnes. Yes, of course it is deceitful to replace one meat with another; but the real lie is all the other stuff that is quite legally in ready meals and processed "food" sold by our supermarkets. It may be on the label, but nearly no one buying them has a clue what it is - amazingly, they trust the authorities and even the supermarkets to sell them food that is safe. It is perhaps the impact of "horsegate" on this blind trust that worries food retailers and the Government they fund most.

Beef burgers can contain legally as little as 62% beef to bear the name, with a pile of other really cheap and nasty stuff to bind and preserve it making up the rest - bones, gristle and guts. This filler was what the horse meat in Tescos beef burgers was found in . Sometimes, burgers even contain the faecal matter of the dead animals ground up to make the binder substance. And so with nearly every other item of the ready meals and processed foodstuffs peddled by the four huge supermarkets, and the smaller ones too, that have over 90% of our food supply sown up.

Not what it seems?

A current supermarket advert, seemingly rushed out to counter the worries that the public won't eat beef meat because they can't be sure it really is, posits the fantasy of them being so committed to traditional British meat that, gosh, they have their own farm, complete with happy cows licking the celebrities fronting the advert. What they don't tell you is that the public image of  the little idyllic farm is now largely a myth - supermarkets do have farms; lots of them, huge big ones that have turned parts of the country into poor imitations of the American prairies, destroying communities and centuries of farming traditions, industrialising our food on an unprecedented scale. In other cases, they invent farms to trick consumers into buying what they think is premium food harvested from some sort of quality estate, like Tescos non-existent Willow Farm and M&S's equally fictitious "Lochmiur" (try finding it on a map!) And as for the cows, don't be fooled - dairy cows only produce milk because their calves have been taken away and slaughtered while still feeding from their mothers.

As the video below shows, if you can stomach it,the food chain is now on an unbelievable and wholly artificial scale from start to finish.

The current government, as with the previous one, happily colludes with all of this. It is significant that we only know about the horse meat because the Irish Food Agency identified and alerted the UK Government to it. This is because, in spite of their faux claims to be champions of the consumer, the Con Dem Government took responsibility for food safety inspection away from the Food Standards Agency and devolved it to local government and reduced the inspection requirements, supposedly to cut red tape. 

The third lie, though not articulated by Cameron today but rooted deep in the popular psyche, is that supermarkets are cheap and convenient. But in fact, like for like, several surveys have shown that food is cheaper in local markets - and where is the convenience in having to drive sometimes miles to wander round a huge supermarket collecting thickly packaged food?

Yet deceit and duplicity is the whole story of corporate retailed food - exemptions by every Government from the monopoly rules applied to other sectors (so that one in every five pounds spent in the UK on any type of product at all is spent in Tescos); deregulation of planning rules (sometimes after effective blackmail, other times via effective bribery) to allow them to build huge out of town sheds that have sucked the lifeblood out of all too many town centres; and ever-laxer rules on the content and safety of what they sell. All underpinned by cheap and even free labour courtesy of Government "training" schemes.

So we can't expect any genuine action from Cameron and his cronies on this, nor from Labour - both parties have received substantial funding from the supermarkets and will not effectively challenge them. Instead we will be sold the story that action is being taken to ensure the current fiasco can't happen again, while all along the huge corporations that own our food supply continue to bastardise it into standardised gunk and sell us a lie as they keep filling their shareholders' pockets and emptying ours.

And as for us? Well, in the end, by sheer biological fact, you are what you eat.

Further links:Tescopoly website, click here

                       "Eat All You Can" Viridis Lumen post, click here

                        Green Party Food Policy, click here

Hubris Huhne

He lied to his colleagues and constituents; he lied to the police, the papers and the Courts. His former wife is left defending her case on grounds of marital coercion to lie on his behalf when he was caught speeding and she took the blame. His son's texts to him came to light today during the preliminaries to his trial, including one where he told his father "you are the most ghastly man I have ever known." 

And it was only when Chris Huhne, former Energy Secretary, failed to have this evidence excluded from his upcoming trial that, finally, he realised the game was up and changed his plea to guilty, declaring he will shortly resign his seat as an MP - we now face a curious by-election in his Eastleigh constituency where the two Coalition parties are at least the notional main contenders, though time may tell another story.

Huhne has form on changing his story - and not just on speeding fines. Just look at how he changed his tack on nuclear power from when he was in Opposition to Government - it didn't need a court case to alert us to this man's exceedingly dodgy character and the damage he was willing to inflict to further his career.

BEFORE 2010 General Election:

AFTER 2010 General Election, i.e., once he was Energy Secretary:

What a work is he! Hubris Huhne, a man who thought he could get away with anything at all - he just had to be sufficiently brazen. Unique? Certainly not. Among our utterly arrogant political class, his only real crime is that he got caught.

The Golden Sands of Mali

How quickly things can change. Harold Wilson is credited with saying a week is a long time in politics. Well, two months is an eternity.

Back in November, a book was published showing that Britain has attacked 90% of the countries of the world at some point in our history. Only 22 countries had escaped our ire.

Now, after the UK Government's declaration that it is sending 240 military "trainers" to war-torn Mali and its neighbours, arguably that total is now down to 21. As if desperate not to miss out on the action, the Cameron Coalition has pledged support to the French-led force that has arrived in the country and is driving northwards, taking the legendary city of Timbuktu just yesterday.

The official narrative, of course, is that the western troops are saving a moderate regime which until their intervention was at the mercy of foaming, bloodthirsty al-Qaeda terrorists - Islamists, the news reporters keep parroting. And yet, as ever, the truth is far more complicated.

The official Mali government is in fact a military dictatorship that seized power in 2013 and whose troops stand accused by international human rights monitors of the same atrocities as its opponents. Its coup d'etat sparked long-oppressed Tuareg tribes in the north to declare their independence and within a short time fighting broke out. Always ready for conflict in the name of religion, there is no doubt that a fair number of mujahadeen turned up to aid the Tuaregs - but to characterise the northern insurgency as some sort of jihad is overstatement of the highest order and indeed northern Mali (renamed Azawad) has also seen heavy conflict between the Tuaregs and the Islamists. Rather, the issue is the declaration of independence being viewed as a threat to the corporate interests of French mining and mineral companies operating in the country - because Mali literally is a gold mine. As well as being the third largest producer of gold in Africa, it additionally has large deposits of uranium, diamonds and other precious metals.

And so, yet again, our troops are being sent off on a dubious mission creep, placing them in harm's way and our nation at risk for the benefit of multinationals under the guise of a war for freedom and faith. Along with a range of other western countries, we are supporting the bombing of towns by French and Malian aircraft - precisely the same tactic we have condemned the Syrian regime for deploying in its bloody civil conflict. But yet again, under cover of nobler aims, we excuse the excess and justify it by anathematizing the other side. So the blood continues to flow - and so do the profits.

21 countries to go (these are the only countries in the world never invaded by Britain):

Andorra

Belarus

Bolivia

Burundi

Central African Republic

Chad

Congo, Republic of

Guatemala

Ivory Coast

Kyrgyzstan

Liechtenstein

Luxembourg

Marshall Islands

Monaco

Mongolia

Paraguay

Sao Tome and Principe

Sweden

Tajikistan

Uzbekistan

Vatican City

Government by Psychopathy

psy·cho·path  (sk-pth)

n.

A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse.

In the popular imagination, the psychopath is a bloody serial killer, typified by characters like Norman Bates from "Psycho" or Kevin Spacey's character, John Doe, in the film "Seven". Yet, in the real world, such extreme characters are relatively few and far between - rather than stalking and physically slicing a string of victims, most psychopaths find different outlets for their needs: business and politics being major fields for them to live out their psychologies.

Dr Paul Babiak, the psychologist who developed the "psychopath test" popularised by the Guardian's Jon Ronson in his recent book of the same name, has through extensive research estimated that around 1% of the population is psychopathic - broadly in line with the definition above, these are people usually with a massively inflated ego state who function in complete self-interest with no empathy or social constraint beyond doing something self-evidently counter-productive to their ends (although even then, they will sometimes take extreme risks). Adept at smooching and charming their way on the backs of others who they will first befriend, then suck dry and finally discard, their key traits are often confused with positive skills of leadership and decisiveness. It is not a mental illness - it is a psychological state. Scientific American put it this way in 2007:

Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it... Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead.

In pre-modern societies, often these people found an outlet for their urges in killing - in hunting and in warfare. Their pathology has come particularly to the fore in civil wars which so often, even more than conventional wars, lead to ever more extreme behaviour as, by default, social order and conventions collapse.

In more settled times, other avenues have to be pursued and perverted to their self-centred ends and their superior sense of entitlement. These are the people who, in the workplace, will be quite eager to "make difficult decisions" when it comes to parting others from their livelihoods, chirruping simultaneously that only they understand the real world and rewarding themselves substantially for their hard work. 

Consequently, Babiak and his colleague Hare have found that, among people in senior management roles, the proportion of psychopaths rises from the average of 1% to around 3.5%.  Around the same time, Board and Fritzon identified a higher rate of psychopathy among the very top levels of management than among criminals.

No test exists for politicians, but by default similar traits to those prized in management tend to be promoted positively among successful politics: decisiveness, coupled with charm - the "magnetism" of candidates who promise so much, so sincerely, who go to endless lengths to assure voters of their identification with them, but, once in office, renege so completely on their promises. Or, alternatively, leaders who happily divide society against itself to maintain themselves in power.

Scapegoating, a trait of many individual psychopaths in having others take the responsibility for their own failures, can be transposed to whole groups: the Jews in Hitler's case; more recently, Muslims by rightwingers in many European states; or, in the UK, welfare claimants, whose support is being chopped up and significantly reduced or withdrawn. Through repeated propaganda, this is being done with the apparent approval of large swathes of the populace, who seem to have concluded that they themselves will never be out of work, face homelessness, be sick or grow old. The fearful selfishness at the core of a lot of rightwing thinking - of "man mind thyself", or Thatcher's infamous "there is no such thing as society" - emphasises a lot that is core to psychopathic thinking and, while not all rightwingers are psychopaths and the Left is not immune to or devoid of psychopaths, there can be little doubt where the psychology of an ego that views itself as superior to others sits politically.

It is in this context that, in the last week, a few episodes in British politics have thrown into sharp relief the psychopathic nature of the Coalition Government, which lies easily with its doublespeak of efficiency cuts and "targeting resources where they are really needed" (implying by default that when they are withdrawn, they are not actually needed). Like individual psychopaths, a soothing message is given out to the majority - cuts are necessary for the greater good so that, by default, those in need are  selfish obstacles to common betterment.

So we had these dreadful cases this week:

First, the laughingly titled "Welfare Minister", former banker Lord Freud, has been busy introducing his so called "bedroom tax" on recipients of housing benefit (the majority of whom work but earn so little in low wage Britain that they qualify for help to keep a roof over their heads). Under the new arrangements, if you have a spare room in your home, your housing benefit will be reduced by 14% and by 25% if you have two rooms spare - about 600,000 people are expected to be affected.

The Minister of State for Work & Pensions:
 "Do as I say, not as I do?"

In an instance which shows just how arrogant the regime is, Lord Freud told an Inverness caller on a radio talk show that he needed to move into a smaller house if he wanted to keep his housing benefit because his Lordship reckoned he did not need his spare bedroom. When the man explained his three sons come to stay with him at the weekend and he needs the space for them (he is separated from their mother), Freud told him they should simply share a sofa bed! This from a man born into privilege - he is the grandson of Sigismund Freud - and the owner of an eight bed country mansion and a luxury City flat shared only with his wife. 

Yet in so many ways much worse was the reaction in the House of Commons of Ian Duncan Smith, the "quiet man" of the Tory Party, who somehow wormed his way into a self-appointed position as some sort of poverty specialist after spending an afternoon dodging pools of vomit on a Glasgow housing estate a decade or so ago. This man, trumpeted as if he is some sort of compassionate genius, has presided over the so-called welfare reforms which have processed hundreds of thousands of disabled people through the dreadful ATOS assessments. Here the doublespeak has been about providing support to lost souls who need a job to regain their self-esteem; while in truth the whole process has been one of mental torture pitched at reducing the disability welfare costs and which has led to hundreds of thousands of perverse decisions and in some cases years of gnawing uncertainty for those affected. Simultaneous to their honeyed words of support, the Con Dems have quietly but relentlessly stoked the fires of hostility against disabled people, leading to growing abusiveness in public and a marked rise in assaults on visibly disabled people.

In the eleven months to November 2011 alone, by the DWP's own figures, over 1,300 people were told by ATOS they did not qualify for disability benefit and needed to find work, only to drop dead within six weeks. In addition, there have been a growing number of suicides by people waiting for or going through assessment: and it was note left by one such person that led to a telling but chilling scene which in so many ways sums up the dark emptiness in the cold heart of the regime.

Ian Lavery, Labour MP for Wansbeck, told David Cameron at PMQs that he had in his hand a letter left by a housebound man who had taken his life after a fruitless battle with the Department of Work and Pensions (headed by  Secretary of State Iain Duncan Smith). Mr Lavery called for future cases to include an impact review to be done before removing someone's payments. An uncomfortable Cameron trundled through the usual hollow hand-wringing about his thoughts being with the man's family before claiming that those still on benefits would be better off (true in only a tiny, tiny number of cases - just enough so the Government can make the claim).

But more telling was the look and reaction from Duncan Smith himself. The "quiet man" found his voice, his angry, snarling face and curling lip more than ample testimony of his fury that anyone would dare raise such an issue. His comments were unrecorded, but just like his shouting down of the political activist Owen Jones on a recent BBC Question Time programme when he similarly started to name deceased victims of ATOS, his utter lack of empathy and disregard for the real, flesh and blood victims of his cold, crass ideological crusade against the weak and vulnerable was more than evident.

It should be enough to show no one should indulge his attempts to stake a claim to anything moral for a single moment. For, regardless of his personal psychology, which this article is not qualified to assess, this is not by his deeds a good man.

But his antics are quite perfectly representative of how this coldest of Coalitions' behaviour manifests itself all too often against the weakest and most vulnerable members of society; Government by Psychopathy.

Gideon Osborne - Benefits Scrounger

Financial efficacy - Gideon knows

It is sickening to hear the parade of Government Ministers and their Media Masters in the rightwing gutter-rags parroting endlessly the lies about "benefits scroungers" - the impact of this on some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society has been evident in so many ways. From vilification in the news to mental torture via ATOS reassessments and free-to-Tescos workfare programmes, through to a marked rise in violent attacks on disabled people, the Con Dems have wildly exaggerated the level of fraud in the benefits system from the Government's own assessment of 0.7% of total spend to a point where a recent survey showed that on average people think the correct figure is a massive 27%.

Bad enough, but worse follows. Although he has decided to more than double the amount of fees having to be incurred by people before the state will pay for their old age care (from the £35,000 proposed by the Dilnot report to £75,000), Chancellor George Osborne has a bit of form on encouraging those with access to accountants and financial advisers to get free state paid care while avoiding paying their tax. In the video below, he popped up on the BBC to reassure the better off that they don't have to sell off their parents homes to pay for their care. Not at all - here he is on Andrew Neil's show explaining how they can avoid this legally with the help of some "clever financial products". This way they can avoid inheritance tax and get personal care paid for by the state.

So here we have our austerity-fetishist, service-cutting Chancellor helping the rich to get free social care which they are not intended to obtain free: now, isn't that benefits scrounging if ever? Or tax avoidance? Or both?

Oh, my apologies, taxes are only for the little people!

Marx Reloaded

"I told you so..."

"Somehow it is supposed to be easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism..."

As we enter another year of neoliberal mayhem, from the fiscal cliff of the USA, to the war on welfare in the UK and the dash for growth of the Chinese kleptocracy, try to see this film if you can - or even organise a showing of it in your community or college.


Don't stay calm - get angry; get active.

Weimar Britain

Deployed to Glasgow - British Army tanks at the Gallowgate cattle market, 1919

"Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?"
The Watchman said, "The morning cometh, and also the night."

These words, from Isiah Chapter 21 were quoted by the German sociologist, Max Weber, in a bookstore lecture on the chaos surrounding him in the interwar German Republic. This is known to history as the Weimar Republic after the town where its "most democratic constitution in history" was drawn up by the constitutionalist parties in 1919, after the fall of the Kaiser's autocratic regime in the final days of the First World War.

We do well to recall that not even a century separates us from these turbulent times, nor were the uncertainties about the democratic settlement confined to Germany or even the nascent states arising from the collapsed Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empires. Britain after the Great War saw a string of strikes, violent repression by the army (tanks and ten thousand armed troops were deployed in Glasgow in the conveniently forgotten battle of George Square to suppress protests about working conditions), and concerns about a Soviet-style takeover among the Establishment that led, among other things, to a fearful King George V refusing refuge to his cousin, the deposed Czar Nicholas of Russia. The forged Zinoviev letter  linking the rising Labour Party to Soviet Russia saw off the first minority socialist government in 1924 (its dissemination carried out courtesy of the Daily Mail then as now happily peddling a few myths to buttress the status quo). Democracy was skin-deep and the forces of reaction ranged against progressives remained as ruthless as ever.

Germany embarked on a course that was to see its constitutional democracy lurch from crisis to crisis, with only a brief respite in the mid-1920s, before it collapsed into the eager arms of the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. 1919 had seen an initial rush of support for the new political system, when a range of Social Democrats, Liberals and conservative Christian Democrats combined to draft a political constitution with the intention of using it to argue out their different ideological views of society and the economics that underpinned it. However, the economic instability of the times, as well as the continuing nationalist narrative of betrayal by democrats and humiliation by foreign powers at the Treaty of Versailles, meant that Weimar Germany was on the defensive from nearly the very start. The liberal democratic parties were challenged by growing electoral forces on both the left - with the USPD (independent social democrats) and later the KPD (Communists) rising rapidly  - and on the right, where a variety of nationalists, conservatives and extremists eventually coalesced under the Nazi swastika.

The constitutionalists were typically unimaginative and unresponsive to the public need, and complacent to boot. Rather than provide genuinely different paths to voters to choose within a democratic context, they drew together, blurring their differences and putting defence of the constitution ahead of anything else - there was to be no land reform, no tackling of the excesses of the rich, no change to the autocratic running of factories and no genuine change to the lot of the ordinary person. With hyperinflation creating real hunger, scapegoats such as the Jews were created by nationalists and the myth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a forgery created several decades earlier by the Czarist police in Russia to justify anti-Jewish pogroms) became a deep-rooted belief among Germans of all classes as an explanation for their troubles. Arrogantly believing there to be no viable alternative, the "Weimar parties" increasingly acted as a single block trying to exclude the more ideologically focussed parties of the left and right. It was to be a vain strategy.

At the ballot box, the process of democratic disintegration was evident - the main constitutionalist parties polled over 70% of the vote in the elections of 1919; but by 1929 this had fallen to barely 51% and in the final election of 1933, just 33%. The Nazis had eclipsed the conservatives, polling 52% of the vote (along with an allied party), while the Communists still polled nearly double the vote they had taken in 1919 in spite of a violent campaign of repression by the authorities - Communist deputies were barred from taking their seats in the final Reichstag, where with the brave exception of the remaining Social Democrats, Hitler bullied and bribed enough deputies to vote through the Enabling Act that gave him total power. As the historian William Shirer was to comment, the Nazis came to power by means of one of the most democratic constitutions ever written.

Funeral oration for a democracy: Hitler speaks on the Enabling Act 1933

As we face a New Year, what are the lessons of history for us today?  Can we write off these days as events distant in time and place, or are the parallels with today, in Britain and elsewhere, sufficiently striking to provide more than a passing interest?

The British political class is as isolated and irrelevant to most of the public as were these Weimar liberals, and many other liberals of their day. For example, take the inaction of the liberals in the 1917 Provisional Government in Russia, whose near-religious belief in the apparently magical powers of a constantly delayed constitutional settlement meant no action at all on bringing the hated war to an end or reforming the ownership of land which condemned millions to starvation. In this way, quite justifiably, the Bolshevik promise of land, bread and freedom easily undermined the support the liberals had previously enjoyed after the overthrow of the Czar.

What are we witnessing now but a re-run of history? Since before the banking crisis of 2008 and the ongoing recessions, politics have been in open crisis, but a crisis of complacency rather than one of action. The boom of the the late 1990s and early 2000s, was sustained on the personal debt of tens of millions of ordinary people while market-oriented government of all supposedly different political hues adopted strikingly similar political strategies. The State has been reduced in scope; market economics and PFI deals proliferate in public services; bloated capitalists control ever bigger swathes of the economy - much of their "venture capitalism" and "social entrepreneurship"  funded and underwritten by a desperately misled public.

And, now that it has all gone sour, what true difference is there between the main parties, the managerialist politicians of Weimar Britain? Barely a jot. They squabble over the tiniest shifts in spending priorities as if these would make a huge, transformational difference to society and life, their fury and froth masking the truth - that these people are all part of the same establishment, the same tiny elite of political servants of big business and international corporations. In such a context "liberal democracy" as it is expressed and portrayed in Britain is not democracy at all - but quite the opposite. It is the semblance of democracy; a form devoid of content, existing to create the illusion of choice while in effect denying genuine choice. Governments come and go, but the Establishment remains, and ordinary people remain as powerless as ever.

And yet, under this liberal form of regime, there is ultimately, as with all regimes, a need for some sort of social contract, however transactionally Hobbesian it may be. As with even the most brutal dictatorship, some sort of equilibrium is required to sustain a regime in power, and there are plenty of signs that this equilibrium is breaking down faster and in a more sustained way than in any previous crisis in the west, such as the riots of 1968 or the industrial disputes of the 1970s. The Occupy Movement has transformed political action around the capitalist world, the first major insurrection of the internet age: what started as one day marches and "flash mob" demonstrations has morphed into a truly international, sustained movement against not just the political establishment and the odd tax dodging financier; but rather against the entire capitalist system and the lies on which it is based. And so too against the politicians who cravenly defend it and grease the palms of its elite owners.

But how the future will go remains the same conundrum raised by Weber in his bookstore lecture back in Weimar Germany - the morning cometh, and also the night. Occupy, Ukuncut, the trade unions, the green movement and others on the left argue, as yet not entirely coherently, for a new, fairer society with transformed financial relations, and with social ownership, co-operative and smaller scale economics as a response to the crisis of capitalism. There is a gradual coalescing behind broad concepts of collectivism, egalitarianism and more direct democratic forms of politics. But, perhaps reflecting the truly democratic and participatory nature of the movement, there is as yet no all-encompassing idea, and perhaps there never will be. Yet some unified and coherent platform is urgently required because, elsewhere, other more malicious forces are gathering, and Capital, with all its vested interests and incumbent power, will not go down without a fight, the likes of which we have not seen.

For the narrative that is put out repeatedly in the media, in Government legislation and the official zeitgeist, is that the problems of society are caused by scapegoats - by too much welfare, by slack workers, by red tape on health and safety and hiring and firing or by migrants either taking too many jobs or not taking enough jobs. The true causes of grief are not the tiny, tiny number of people who own the vast majority of wealth on the planet, but the disabled person who needs support accessing a shop, or the illegal migrant who, according to complete myth, is given luxury accommodation, free cars and phones (as opposed to the grim reality of working long hours for little pay in often dangerous conditions at the hands of violent gangmasters). Muslim plots to take over the world are raised up, viciously echoing the Zionist Protocols of Czar Nicholas, to sow further divisions, some of them so fantastical that they invite equally fantastical responses from conspiracy theorists (- themselves an echo of some of the thousands of messianic wandering prophets of interwar Europe).

In this direction lies the path being bulldozed by the likes of Golden Dawn in Greece, the MSI in Italy, FN in France and various currently disparate right wing parties in Britain, targeting groups of vulnerable people and minorities to divert attention from the true inequities of the wealth gap and the economic and political grip of the elite. It is a road that starts with shocking tales of individuals who fiddle social security or fake disability, or groups who look a bit different and have strange traditions, and ends up at the doors of gas chambers and on the edges of execution pits. It is an unconscionably brutal path which we pretend is distant at our peril. There is in every society a desire to find easy solutions; to conform to the norms that are drilled into us about ownership and supposed opportunity from the school desk to the retirement party; and all too often, even in the most democratic society, a willingness to find some sort of salvation in the form of a "strong" person or party. In the context of a society without genuine political choice but one with increasing economic hardship and personal insecurity, this desire grows even deeper.

And so we can see our current political class - still smugly asserting itself, wringing its hands about the deficit, blatantly lying about everyone being in it together, rewriting their manifestos and changing their offer as frequently and easily as a used car salesman reviews his prices. Personally and professionally isolated from the people they supposedly represent more than ever before - with huge numbers having never worked outside politics and many having no ideological belief whatsoever - the careerists at the heart of our system do know something is not quite right, something is wrong. But they don't get what; indeed, they can't. Isolated in their self-created bubble, they are not programmed that way. Rather, they turn to suppression of civil liberties, increasing surveillance and the all-embracing "war on terror" as a means of demonising all their opponents and entrenching their hold on power - yet, in doing so, rather than create a solid base for their own survival, they may in fact be simply paving the way for even more authoritarian elements to rise.

The turnout in elections is dripping away, lower and lower. From 84% in 1950, it decline to just 59% in 2001, rising slightly to 64% at the 2010 election, even although people were choosing a government in the midst of an economic crisis. There is a proliferation of support for the non-mainstream: UKIP, a right wing force described by some as "fascists in suits", has emerged recently as the third party in national polls and performed well in recent by-elections. It is not a Nazi party, but it is riding on a tide of xenophobia and scapegoating (while quietly proposing tax cuts and other benefits for the very richest members of society). And it is accompanied by a multitude of other parties - the BNP, the EDs, BFP, NF and other groups.

At the Rotherham by-election a few weeks ago, although UKIP stole the limelight with their showing of 21.7% of the vote, other far right candidates took a further 12% of the vote. This meant one in three voters chose hard right parties, while the left parties Respect and TUSC took nearly 10% of the vote combined. With the Tories in fifth place and the Lib Dems in eighth place, the Government parties were out polled by the non-mainstream parties of left and right by 43% to 7.5%. Even the Labour Party managed only a 46% vote share in what was once its heartlands.

Rotherham is not an isolated case - two other by-elections showed similar patterns on the same night, while Respect pulled off a stunning and largely unexpected victory in Bradford West earlier in the year. National opinion polls show the "Others" constantly polling around one in five votes and the support for the three so-called main parties is increasingly soft; identification and party loyalty is at a historic low; and no wonder, given the utter contempt of the electorate demonstrated by the main parties. It will take little to force a major change to the party political paradigm - one fear must be that a UKIP win at the 2014 European elections may mark the moment. Our complacent political class may want to reflect that the Nazis polled a meagre 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 national elections - just five years later, the length of a British Parliament, they assumed total power.

And so the question that remains is not are we in Weimar Britain, sitting precariously on the edge of momentous, potentially transformational change. The answer to that is given: we are undoubtedly in the last days of traditional politics; only the bashed, discredited system keeps what remains together. The real question is what will come next, and from what direction and in what form. In this country, as in the world, we stand at a crossroads as not since the turmoil of 1919 that rent Europe apart. One way marks the route to a fairer society where resources are shared more equally, but with the requirement that we break down big corporations, regulate our economies as never before, reintroduce some of the protective measures that were once common and change our views completely on ownership of socio-economic resources, common and collective rather than exclusive and individualist.

The other route marks a far more brutal and authoritarian course - isolated from the world, distrusting of many of our fellow citizens, targeting people in new forms of pogroms, blaming rather than sharing, controlling rather than caring for one another.

We can choose: and events will force the choice probably sooner rather than later - day or night, left or right; or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, socialism or barbarism. Capitalism and liberal democracy are in terminal decay, their failure hastened by the gathering environmental and resource crises. The German Republic passed into history when Hitler himself screamed down the incredibly brave Social Democrat leader, Otto Wels, as he voiced the very last words of legal opposition to the Nazis, his speech in effect the funeral oration of the young democracy. If Weimar Britain is to similarly pass, it falls to those of us on the Left to ensure it passes to a better place than the gates of a new Auschwitz.

"At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible ...."

- Otto Wels, addressed to Adolf Hitler at the debate on the Enabling Act,  at the Reichstag meeting in the  Kroll Opera  House, Berlin, 23 March, 1933.

Otto Wels - Hitler's final opponent in the Reichstag, 1933

From Their Cold, Dead Hands - the killing of innocence

Yet again, hot on the heels of the Dark Knight killer, a gunman has shot many innocents dead in the USA. In this case, at least 27 people, 20 of them very young children in a kindergarten school in Connecticut have been shot dead, apparently by the 20 year old son of a teacher in the school. Others have been injured, while some remain unaccounted for.

The coming days will see more details revealed about the pathology of the killer, perhaps his obsession with some PC game or obscure film, his apparent normality to others or his "loner" style behaviour. People around the world will fulminate about the impact of films, social media, and so forth. And also, very briefly, they will talk about America's gun culture and the ease with which people in most states can obtain firearms legally and often without needing a licence. Foreigners will shrug their shoulders, taking a view that a country with the fewest holidays on the planet and the most guns has to equal serious trouble; while Americans, even under the allegedly liberal Obama, will take no real steps at all to curb the phenomenal levels of gun ownership in their country - there are 89 privately owned guns for every 100 Americans (adults & children); 62% of US households contain more than one gun.

Taking their cue from the second amendment to their 230 year old Constitution which, responding to the 19th century needs of Frontier Conquest, confers the right to bear arms, American citizens are proportionately more heavily armed than the people of the troubled state of Yemen and possibly even the failed state of Somalia. It is little wonder then that in an environment so soaked in the power of the gun (a culture fostered by the profit-seeking gun-making business) that violence results and on far from infrequent occasions manifests itself in the appalling acts carried out yesterday.

No joke - American guns-for-Xmas advert

America is in decline; its global reach is shortening; like any decaying Imperial power, many of its people are perplexed by the levels of dislike registered towards their nation (though usually not them personally) by people around the world, and they are fearful of their future. The Patriot Act, the Tea Party, Fox News and a welter of Evangelical Christian and rightwing neoliberal Republicans add to this anxious zeitgeist by repeatedly preaching that a largely fictitious white American society is under perpetual threat from crime, terrorism, liberals, gays, people of colour and foreigners. On these grounds, with the National Rifle Association at its head, they justify the need to continue with widespread gun ownership. "From my cold dead hands!" the (now dead) Charlton Heston defiantly proclaimed to an NRA rally as he held a rifle aloft, just days after the murders of children at the Columbine school.

The consequences are obvious - little children, having barely begun their lives, destroyed by terrible acts of violence; their teachers dying as they tried to save their tiny wards; distraught parents and siblings damaged for life. All so shock jocks and fundamentalist preachers can continue to spout their spite and sow the seeds of fear and alienation that casualise and glorify violence. And each time one of these gunmen (and they always have been men) walk into a school or cinema  or workplace and take vengeance for some minor or even entirely fantastical grievance, the media attention sets the scene for the next similar atrocity.

Some liberal Americans fear it is about the very nature of their society - one friend of mine cast it thus:
Have you seen "Bowling for Columbine?" Regardless of what one feels about Michael Moore, his films are good, and that one goes through the factors involved in our school shootings. The common denominator turns out to be our culture of violence. We are a competitive, punishing, violent, isolating culture. Thankfully we can all work together in our own lives to create a supportive, loving, cooperative, & nurturing culture.

Well, culture may be part of it- a doggedly individual and overtly competitive society undoubtedly breeds more aggression and resentment than one which emphasises community and co-operation. But America is not alone in fostering such traits via its political economy and yet other countries, including increasingly neoliberal Britain, still register infinitely lower levels of gun violence and firearms offences. It seems fairly unlikely that ordinary Americans are so very different from people in other nations that they have an inherently greater tendency to undertake such appalling acts of random violence. So what is the driver?

The one thing that is different to most other socities is gun ownership and the ready ability in the USA to become a gun owner - Obama has made this even easier in recent years. Hence the huge levels of ownership of guns by private citizens. And there is evidence from the UK that gun owners are far more likely to commit violent crimes than people who don't have them.

Consider this- only 1 in 60 Britons legally own a gun; applicants for firearms certificates are background checked (though not always as thoroughly as imagined) and even many of them are not allowed to keep ammunition outside of a gun club. However, in the UK, even with these checks and restrictions, 1 in 2 domestic killings and 1 in 5 of overall murders are committed by people using a legally owned fire arm. So, putting it crudely, if you are British and your partner owns a gun, you are thirty times more likely to be killed by them than if they do not.

Britain has had three massacres carried out by lone gunmen - the shootings in Hungerford in 1987, Dunblane in 1996 and Cumbria in 2010. All of the gunmen held firearms certificates and killed their victims with legally owned guns. QED.

America and the world mourn the dead children of Newtown. They are the latest victims of a string of tragedies permitted by the selfishness of rightwingers, survivalists and pseudo-patriots. If America does not want more toddlers' and teens' blood spilt, rather than dwell too long on the psychopathy of the man who committed today's crime or argue about violent movies, it should do what is obvious to nearly everyone else in the world - get rid of the guns.

Shane left town 150 years ago.

Twisted patriot - Charlton Heston and his cold dead hands.

Looking After His Own

Well, it was a slip of the tongue but somehow it just seems so appropriate.

From the pages of the Parliamentary record, Hansard, Prime Minister David Cameron, the millionaire who leads the richest Cabinet in history (its 29 members have a combined personal wealth of £70 millions), standing up for his own....

Yep, the rich kid has taken the biscuit - probably a RICH Tea one.

"I will eat you all..."

We Love Big Brother

"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

(Orwell, "1984")

When fiction becomes fact.

The Froth of Deception

Some years ago, sitting in a Starbucks outlet in a northern city (well, it was a long time ago!), I heard an elderly gentleman remonstrating with the "barrista" that his cappuccino needed topping up.
"Look," he complained, "It's half empty and I've not even had a sip!"
"Ah, sir," the barrista responded, trying seriously to blame the customer,"You've let it stand too long. It has settled. You see sir, 50% of the product is hot air."
The customer's reply was unprintable, even here, and he immediately became an ex-customer.

Apparently, Starbucks seem to be masters of deception, a trait never more in evidence than when two of its senior executives haltingly tried to explain to British MPs earlier this week how in 15 years operating and expanding in Britain, they have made losses in all but one year and have consequently paid virtually no corporation tax at all. On sales of £3,100,000,000, it has paid just £8,600,000 in corporation tax - that's a meagre 0.2 (yes, zero-point-two) per cent. Along with Amazon and Google, who have similar records, it was criticised for failing to pay its "fair" share of tax - and so now it is likely that tomorrow it will make a pledge to pay more tax in the future.

Well, sorry if I am not partying, but how generous of them... They pledge to pay more in future. What does that mean? What about this pledge instead - they declare their true profits rather than hide them behind a charade of in house cross-charging and pay their proper whack. Starbucks had briefed their shareholders that their UK operation was making a 15% profit on turnover - very broadly, if that was the case over all 15 years, it would have generated around £450 millions profit with around £100 millions due to be paid in Corporation tax; not a mere £8.6 million. But of course the story they have given the HMRC and now MPs was rather different.

We hear endlessly from the giant corporations and their mouthpieces in the Lib Dem and Tory parties about the need for Britain to cut its already near worldwide low corporation taxes - even though it seems most of them pay a fraction of their dues (if indeed anything at all). A further reduction is pending for the next tax year. Otherwise, apparently they might go elsewhere and we would lose the alleged benefits of their presence on our shores.

Benefits? Tell that to the the countless perfectly good local coffee shops put out of business by Starbucks' undercutting them; or the bookstores - independents and even the once powerful Borders UK shops - put out of business by the march of Amazon.

And just this week, as Starbucks was finally caving into the bad publicity about its tax record, it implemented a fine wheeze to appear to be contributing to the community that succours it with one hand, while taking away with the other. The fig-leaf of its already piss poor corporate social responsibility record has never been more precariously worn.

On Monday, all its staff - mainly low paid, part-time barristas (their employment protection rights slashed since April by the Lib Dem Ministers of the Coalition), were told to sign away their contractual rights to a 30 minute paid lunch break and to some of their sick pay or face the sack. Rubbing salt in the wounds, they also told their pregnant staff no longer to expect a complimentary food hamper when their babies are born - instead they can look forward to a handy, Starbucks branded baby-gro and bib. Useful for wiping away all that deceptively frothy baby sick.

The Indian Parliament is currently debating whether to open up the third largest economy in the world to foreign direct investment (FDI).  This would open the doors to overseas corporations - with supermarket giants Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour leading the charge - to open up and start undercutting and destroying an economy currently 97% owned by small businesses, families and self-employed people. The western neoliberals and bankers claim that this will unleash a wave of creative competition in India; but the track record elsewhere shows the lie of these claims. India beware.

We can only hope that India resists the threats and charms of the multinationals; and, though sadly very much more in vain hope than genuine expectation, we can dream of the day that Britain's HMRC clamps down sufficiently on the tax games of the corporations that they do indeed depart. Because, whilst some of these mega-multinationals use their proxies in the popular press to peddle lies about immigrants, the EU and even political correctness having wrecked our way of life, it is in truth large, state-less corporations that have destroyed whole local economies, emptied our high streets and plundered our national wealth. As their tax and employment records show, they are totally self-serving and without conscience - the psychopaths of Joel Bakan's opus magnus - and we continue to treat with them at our own risk.

We have lived well without them before; we can easily and happily do so again. Just imagine if they were indeed gone, and all we had left were...bookshops, local cafes, and independent music stores.

And no more hot air in our mugs.

Police Alert: Nick Clegg for Wasting Time

And so the Police & Crime Commissioners elections roar into the record books: as the ones with the lowest turnout in modern British history. With less than 15% of the electorate voting - and one polling station in Wales having a remarkable turnout of precisely zero - the validity of the entire process has fallen into question. Record numbers of spolit papers - many deliberately so - have turned up as the citizens of England and Wales give, in effect, a decisive thumbs down to the whole farcical process.

Over £100 million of taxpayers' money has been wasted on holding this exercise in the middle of November - totally out of time with the normal voting cycle in early winter, in the dark. An additional £25 million was wasted on moving it from the original plan of coinciding with the local elections in May.

So who is responsible for this mess? Who has wasted taxpayers money and a lot of people's time? And left us with the policing system in a total mess with Commissioners formally elected but without any mandate or legitimacy at all?

Step forward our old friend, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancer in Chief Nick Clegg.

Yes, that one - whose Lib Dem Party sunk into fifth place behind UKIP and the English Democrats in Nick's own home territory of South Yorkshire, only just keeping their deposit. As brazen as ever, the Lib Dems pushed and pushed for these elections to be held in mid-November rather than the previously agreed time of May when their costs could have been reduced and (whatever your view about the posts themselves) more voters would have participated.

Why?

Quite simply, though laughably, they thought this would help them hold seats at the council elections As the BBC trailed a year ago, Lib Dem high command thought that if the police elections were held in May, they would both distract Lib Dem efforts to hold onto council seats contested at the same time and buoy up the Tory vote by creating a focus on law and order.

So, after confronting David Cameron with threats to vote down the Police & Social Responsibility Bill if he did not concede on the timetable, the Lib Dems achieved the change and, in spite of the additional £25 millions in  costs, the vote was moved to yesterday. At the time, they claimed it was an altruistic move to depoliticise the elections, but a BBC investigation found otherwise - and unlike the recent Newsnight farago, no one denied this one's findings. And besides, the refusal to provide a freepost facility as normal with this level of election effectively removed the chance for independents to seriously participate unless they were wealthy - leading in fact to very highly politicised elections.

It is therefore touchingly and wonderfully ironic that the Lib Dems' results have been relentlessly pisspoor - not only did they fail to field candidates in half the country, but where they did they were frequently beaten out of sight. With most results in, their national vote total barely reaches 7% and they have been overtaken by UKIP even although that party was also only standing in half the contests.

Clegg and his party have a lot to answer for - and a big bill to pay.

Umm..err...umm..oh, gosh.....it wasn't me, officer!