The Whale Who Talked

This has been getting quite a bit of coverage today - a white whale who, with incredible difficulty given the absence of a larynx, attempted to impersonate his human keepers. Humans have been known often enough to impersonate animals, usually either as a means of endearment to a pet or unpleasant mockery in less kind circumstances. It is a somewhat rarer phenomenon, outside the world of parrot-keepers, for animals to seek to return the gesture by impersonating us for whatever reason.

The whale in question was press-ganged into the service of the US Navy and after several years in captivity at its San Diego research facility, he came up with this speech to his captors, and continued to do so for four years before giving up in his attempts to make sense to them.

Who knows what he was trying to say? Given humans' willing slaughter of all manner of sentient animals in the course of man-made conflict (and apart from Boudicca and Thatcher, it nearly always is "man" made), perhaps his was a plea for peace, or at least to be left alone. Whales and other highly intelligent marine mammals, especially dolphins, have been dreadfully abused by the military around the world.

- the US Navy, as well as keeping these creatures in long term captivity, have sought to use them, amongst other things, as mine-detectors and even trained dolphins and sea-lions to catch enemy divers - this programme stretches back to the First World War, and the Soviet Union ran its own until the 1990s. Even more appallingly sinister have been unsubstantiated reports to use them as substitutes for torpedoes by teaching them to respond to directional signals and then strapping bombs to them to send them towards enemy vessels with no chance of a return swim.

She's in the programme; but who asked her?

- in other circumstances, there has been much evidence to suggest that sonar signals from submarines frequently confuses the signals whales send each other, often over hundreds of miles. This appears in at least some cases to have led to them getting lost and beaching themselves - or, in one tragic case, becoming disoriented and swimming up the River Thames into central London, where it died. There is also evidence that sonar, especially the increasingly powerful and long range systems used by the British Royal Navy, damage whales eardrums, potentially disabling them and causing slow, lingering deaths.

- and more generally, both military and civilian human activities are both emptying the seas of the fish that whales eat and poisoning the plankton that might substitute for them. Slowly, with the seas turning acidic and "dead zones" stretching for hundreds and even thousands of square miles in the seas, our species is threatening not only its own survival but the habitat of the whale as well. And all this is before we even begin to discuss the so-called "scientific research " carried out by some countries involving harpooning whales and eating their meat as an allegedly accidental by-product of the research. Or of the apparent desire of some American citizens to sail out into the Gulf to shoot or even, remarkably, pipe-bomb bottlenose dolphins, using their friendly curiosity as the perfect bait for their cruel "sport".

These are magnificent beasts - their longevity is attested to by an example from 2007 of a whale being killed and, buried in its flesh, was the remains of a harpoon that was last used in the 1890s. They have been here much longer than we have; we can only hope that if we don't save ourselves perhaps at least we can spare them the extinction we have lined up for all too many of our companions on the planet.

Listen to the whales. Whatever he was saying, his song is older and deeper than ours, and deserves our respect.

On the Right Side of History? - Christianity and Homosexuality

The debate on rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people has not been so prominent as it is now for several years. The breakthroughs of a few years ago, with civil partnerships and gay marriage being legalised by more and more places around the world, at least appeared to put to rest much of the old bigoted arguments that in so many respects made LGBT people at best second class citizens - perhaps no longer outlawed for their sexuality, but by no means enjoying the same rights as heterosexuals.

But in the last couple of years, something of a backlash has emerged - parts of the Christian church have become ever more shrilly vociferous in their condemnation of gay people; and in Uganda, driven on by the urgings of evangelical zealots, the Government has even been debating whether or not to make homosexuality a capital crime. In the USA, the rightwing of the Republican Party has been complicit with this agenda, seeking to drive back President Obama's support for greater equality - one of the few areas where he has worked hard to deliver on his original promise of genuine change.

That 2,000 year old Scripture is invoked in determining the laws and rights of 21st Century people in so many parts of the world is a depressing commentary on how narrow and pernicious supposedly democratic politics have become - and how diversionary: the rightwing especially is happy to indulge in debates about sexuality, welfare and migration, portraying all three as threats to civilised society, as it shifts the focus of public debate away from the real issues of social inequality, poverty and unsustainable economics. It also shows how, in so many ways, old arguments are rehashed to provide supposedly eternal principles - old wine in new bottles, to use a biblical analogy - and to coat with a fake respectability arguments against one progressive agenda that were previously used against another, but would be deemed out of order now.

In this video, we see a powerful speech by a Christian pastor calling for legislators in the US city of Springfield to stand on the right side of history when it comes to laws on gay and lesbian people - but which side is the right one? Please watch to the end to see.

(With thanks to Michael Emperor of New York Green Party for highlighting this video.)

Dragonfly In Oil - a study in "humanity"

From the Tar Sands of Canada - this is how we power our way of life, our cars, computers, holidays, homes...

Alberta in Canada once boasted one of the most beautiful wildernesses in the world. But then came the exploitation of the Tar Sands, part of the dirty oil drive which, by the appropriately named process of fracking, has made North America energy independent for the first time. The remains of millennia of decay, the matter of the carbon fuel now extracted and burned to power the world's greatest polluters - the human species - spew into our air and silently, invisibly poison our future. 

But earlier, much earlier in the process of extraction and refining, the spills and detritus of drilling and fracking the oil from the virgin soil have already claimed the most delicate of creatures, in the pursuit of profit and human profligacy happily destroying as mere "collateral damage" the precious, living and vibrant children of nature. Forests have been felled, ground stripped of its topsoil and heated water flushed deep down to force millions of barrels of oil out the ground: coating and trapping the once free and beautiful dragonfly in a shroud of black.

"Let us not, however, flatter ourselves  overmuch on account of our victories over nature. For each such victory, nature takes its revenge on us.”

                  Blake & Engels, quoted in The Rise of the Green Left (Derek Wall)

(with thanks to Calvin "Spiralling" Smith for drawing attention to this)

Thieving Gid...eon: Obsorne the Fare-dodger

So, rather than sit with the Plebs in Standard class, it emerges that Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Gideon Osborne, multi-millionaire (and  allegedly highly "tax efficient" with it) sneaked into First Class on the Wilmslow to London train earlier today - without paying the proper fare. Unfortunately for him, the ticket inspector refused to recognise the "natural order of things" and made him cough up £160 to stay seated in the First Class carriage after an argument with the Chancellor's aide, who argued that he should be allowed to sit there with just a standard ticket.

The Good Old Days...

But even more unfortunately, the whole event was witnesses by an ITN reporter, Rachel Townsend, who provided a blow by blow account of Osborne and his official's argument with the rail official about why he should not have to pay full fare. The farrago is now running the rounds on social media, complete with photo. (Twitter -  #classgate )

The current Tories are beyond belief and their behaviour is often far beyond even causing any surprise at all - their coarse disdain for the rules when it comes to themselves and their wealthy friends, while crushing down on the slightest transgression by the poor and vulnerable (and, indeed, by a combination of welfare cuts and black propaganda, turning the very fact of being poor and vulnerable into a transgression itself), is more than evident. They are without doubt smugly supreme in their self-proclaimed superiority over their social lessers, their view on the need to comply with the rules applying only to one half of society is redolent of the Georgian and Victorian hypocrisy that saw violence, corruption and promiscuity rife among the upper classes while public morality kept the lower classes in check by ostracizing and even imprisoning those who did not comply with the strictures of religion and social deference.

And so we have Gideon, hot on the heels of Andrew Mitchell, whose tirade of f-words and "pleb" taunts at police simply doing their job came from the man who was meant to ensure good order and appropriate behaviour among Tory MPs. It recalls too the Tory Cabinet Minister of the Thatcher era who wouldn't travel on the Underground because it was "full of ordinary people" - and Thatcher herself is rumoured to have only gone on a train once in her life; so to be fair Gideon is a positive man of the people by comparison.

These attitudes are de rigeur among our ruling class - a deeply ingrained sense of entitlement that sets them above the rules, above the norms of society. Little wonder so many Cabinet members were schooled at Eton and then reached political maturity (if that's the right word) under the rabid individualism of the Thatcher era, a trait barely reined in by New Labour under Blair - Peter Mandelson of course was intensely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich. Filthy and rich indeed, and in more ways than one.

All in it together? Of course not - some of us are riding it out on the comfy chairs in first class...

Watch the Flag: Putin Comes to the American Elections

The media has been full of commentary on President Obama and Governor Romney's "aggressive" debate last night at Hofstra University. But as these two mouthpieces of corporate America squared up in their pseudo-boxing contest, the real aggression was taking place outside the gates of the University.

There, Green Party Presidential nominee Dr Jill Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala, wrapped in the US flag, attempted to gain entry to the debate. Dr Stein pointed out that as she is on the ballot in 85% of states (local nomination rules in the remaining 15% make it virtually impossible for non-Democrat/Republican candidates to gain ballot access) she has satisfied the rules set by the League of Women Voters, which originally ran these debates. At least in theory she could win enough electoral college votes to become President and so, like John Anderson in 1980, and Ross Perot in 1992, she should be allowed to take part in the televised debates. But of course Anderson was a Republican Senator and Perot a multi-millionaire businessman.

Multimillionaire Perot made the 1992 debate

However, as the video below shows, the response of the authorities was not to open up the debate to the Greens, or any of the other "third party" candidates running. Instead, while Obama and Romney posed in their testosterone-fuelled debate as candidates for the alleged "leader of the free world", their Green rivals were arrested and handcuffed, driven to a special facility prepared to hold debate protesters, tied to chairs for eight hours and only finally released in the dead of night. 

This then is American democracy in the 21st century.

Last year, when the Russians staged-managed democracy led to protests on the streets of Moscow, Obama criticised President Putin's handling of the parliamentary elections. After last night's blatant suppression of free speech and democratic protest, America has finally been exposed for its utter hypocrisy in ever castigating other countries (and most especially Venezuela's exemplary elections) for the conduct of ballots and for daring to refer to itself as the Land of the Free.

Watch the video and as the two women are led away by police, one officer hurries to pick up the Stars and Stripes they were draped in when it falls on the ground. "Watch the flag!" he intones urgently.

Yes, indeed, Watch the flag.

World Food Day

Today is World Food Day, founded in honour of the United Nations' Food and Agricultural Organisation, which was set up to develop food security for the people of our planet. Yet, while securing some advances in its 67 years if existence, its objectives are as far from being fulfilled as ever. And the outlook is not good.

2012 has seen yet more terrifying changes to our global climate – the entire Greenland ice sheet melting, to wildfires across Europe, floods in Asia and the worst drought in the central USA since the 1930’s “Dustbowl”. It is this last event that may, for now, be the one with the greatest impact – the Obama Administration expects that production of wheat, maize and soybeans will be the lowest for decades. With the USA the largest producer in the world of these staples, this environmental disaster is set to drive global food prices sharply upwards. In the last two months alone, cereal wholesale prices have risen by 60% and the FAO has warned of a return to the shortages of 2008, when the cost of US staples rose by over 120% on 2005 prices.

The effect in 2008 was a 12.8% increase in UK food prices and lurid speculation in the gutter press about hoarding tins and buying a shotgun, but in many poor countries, with food costs already far higher in real terms, scores of people were killed when riots ensued. Burkina Faso saw food prices rise by 65%, while impoverished Haiti saw a 50% increase. Worldwide, several hundred millions went hungry for the first time.

Climate was one of several causes: but other factors included the impact of “food futures” speculation by the international City traders, whose betting on higher future food prices led to many physical food traders hoarding stocks in anticipation of a price hike. This was a self-fulfilling process and one which no action at all has been taken to curb. Speculation has also led to a modern land grab in Africa and Latin America, where the Chinese and Arab governments compete with the likes of Richard Branson and Nicola Horlick in snapping up millions of acres of prime agricultural land, anticipating food shortages as the gold rush of tomorrow. And so, with the next 12 months likely to see more malnourishment and starvation, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe may shed crocodile tears at best as children’s development is stunted and the corpses of the starved are committed to the dust.

Few deny that with increasing competition for dwindling resources, the coming decades will see a perfect storm which will seriously disrupt and even destroy the Earth’s ability to feed humanity. Yet food supply projects, current among them work by the Government BIS and the Chatham House think-tank, still predicate the solution on elusive and likely counter-productive technological fixes such as genetic modification. Moreover, they specifically exclude fostering national self-sufficiency in food supply, quixotically clinging to the alleged virtues of a globalised food chain. Needless to say, land ownership is not even contemplated as an issue.

In “The Enigma of Capital”, David Harvey has characterised the impact of humans on the environment as “creative destruction”, which has hastened exponentially under capitalist industrialisation with irreversible damage to our biosphere. But he warns, “The Revenge of Nature signals the existence of a stubborn, recalcitrant and unpredictable physical and ecological world that, like the weather, constitutes the environment in which we have our being.”

Our species is sleepwalking towards disaster – yet the coming food crisis could serve as a wake up call. In a world where so many are chemically addicted to superficially cheap “food“ peddled by McDonalds, KFC and our grasping supermarket chains, ecosocialists will have to work hard and loud to expose the vested interests at the root of the problem. But our message of self-sufficiency is one with which many people may increasingly identify. If we can demonstrate the multiple benefits of local, sustainable food production and just distribution, we can show that a better world is still possible.

This bulk of this article originally appeared in the Green Left "Watermelon" Autumn Green Party Conference print edition.

Fixing It For Jim

Just like everyone else suddenly, I never liked Jimmy Savile. I was always mildly upset each week it turned out he was hosting Top of the Pops when I was a kid - the hair, the specs, the faux good humour...I was never into Glam Rock and to me he epitomised its shimmering nonsense, its near-pantomime-like quality.

I remember him as well on Jim'll Fix It - for those too young to recall a programme where kids (usually) wrote to him and asked him to fix their dreams - driving a bus, feeding lions in a zoo, meeting Gary Glitter, that sort of thing. And how innocent it was sold as being. Occasionally someone's Gran got in on the act, being suitably patronised by the Great Man, who usually gave the old lady a peck on the cheek as she cooed about how lovely he was and how much work he did for charity.

It is of course being suggested that it was his charity work that protected him from the allegations now swarming around the British media, one year on from his death, about his being a serial child abuser and rapist of vulnerable young women. Not only did he use his celebrity status to overawe (and over-power) too-young fans; he also used it as a means of deflecting claims that he physically forced himself on scores if not hundreds of women, and at least one man, often people in hospitals or wheelchairs who could not possibly fight back. As one person who was in Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital when Sir Jimmy groped her has pointed out, no one in a mental health unit is believed at the best of times, let alone if they made a complaint against a national icon - a British treasure as one middle-aged man told me when I discovered he was on his way to Savile's funeral in his adopted home of Scarborough.

The claims against him are deeply disturbing - the people he assaulted have been silenced victims in some cases for four decades and even with the catharsis of disclosure, they may never completely get over what he did. Possibly for many the sudden exposure of his activities now may create new traumas as they relive what happened - in their own memories even if they decide not to come forward to the glare of the public and the prurient media so apparently ready to "sympathise" with their plight.

And yet...

Was this media not the same one that built him up in the first place in spite of, we are told now, many, many people in the BBC and other parts of the media being very aware of, at least, rumours if not outright accusations of misdoing by Savile? We are supposed to believe that, when some newspapers were ready to expose the claims against him, he would threaten to stop doing his charity work and that would damage the reputation of the newspaper - which has to be one of the most spuriously tenuous lines of defence ever offered.

Let's suppose that Savile did get away with groping and raping to his heart's content through the 1970s and early 1980s because, as we have heard, attitudes were different then. Yes, they were, and rape victims especially had to fight to be taken seriously. Many lies about male "needs" were accepted then where now they would not be given a second of credence.

The great and not-so-good

This may well have been the case in 1977 - was it still so in 1987 or 1997, or in 2007? The fact is that there was a revolution (albeit it still unfinished) in attitudes towards women's rights, child abuse, rape and protection of vulnerable people during that time. Yet Savile died, undisturbed and unquestioned about his deeds, in 2011.

So why the silence? So many people apparently knew at least something, but did nothing - or worse, they even passively colluded by allowing him to carry on unfettered. Was it really because they didn't believe the rumours or the handful of accusations that were made but dismissed out of hand? Were hard-bitten journalist hacks really cowed by his threats to stop working for the very charities whose clients he was abusing?

Or was it more a case of our Establishment not wanting to expose one of their own? Of worrying that if they had to own up to their mistakes with him, their own authority might be questioned? Given we are told everyone at the BBC and elsewhere knew, while you might forgive his OBE in 1972 before the rumours became widespread, what is the story behind his knighthood - granted in 1990? Or his admission to the Order of Saint Gregory the Great by Pope John-Paul II in the same year? Possibly an insurance policy for him, and perhaps a hope by others of letting sleeping dogs lie - yet it seems he was far from asleep as the last alleged assault took place in 2006.

So, more sociopathically, did some take the view that vulnerable people in hospitals and asylums didn't really count against Sir James Savile OBE, KCSG, friend of Royalty and Popes, and Maker of Dreams? After all, if these women were needing mental health treatment at 14 and 15, well, perhaps they didn't really matter and certainly why should anyone bother with their hysterical ramblings? Pop them another pill and tell them to shut up.

Even if there was no grand conspiracy, no meeting of some secret Masonic Lodge to sanction Savile's protection, the whole issue reeks of the stench of moral decay that lies at the heart of our civic life - a strand in the thread of corruption that winds its way protectively through our political class, our bankers, media, "celebrities" and the increasingly obscene wealthy. I've seen it asked before - if he had been plain Jim Savile, Lollipop man at the local school with an over-fondness for "helping" children cross the road, would he have been as fortunate as Sir James? Or would the tabloids have rushed to out him as a "nonce" complete with his address and photos of him running from a baying crowd before the police had even laid a single charge?

The answer goes without saying. But there again, perhaps that's what they hope. Who fixed it for who?

A Desert Called Peace

Not for the first time, the Norwegian Nobel Committee have courted controversy in their choice of laureate for the Peace Prize: this year, it has been granted to the entire European Union for promoting the cause of peace in..er..Europe.

Now, for many who support the European Ideal of a Continent living in peace and harmony with itself, its nations linked fraternally rather than in the constant combat which is much of Europe's tribal history, the EU was once favoured as a potential vehicle for bringing this aspiration to life. But reality has not in truth borne such hopes to fruition and now of all times seems perhaps the least appropriate moment to laud this institution.

Consider that in just the last year:

- leading EU members France and Britain lobbied hard and took the lead in the bombing of Libya, causing literally billions of Euros-worth of damage and killing unknown numbers of Libyans (no count was made). The bombing/missile campaign was at one point so intense that the Britain and France ran out of munitions and had to borrow more from Germany. (Notably, although not part of the EU, Norway also took part in this along with Denmark).

- in spite of the Arab Spring, EU states continued to send Government Ministers and officials out to arms fayres in the Middle East, the Abu Dhabi one in particular being the largest in history, selling weapons indiscriminately. France and Britain are both in the top 4 countries for arms exports in the world. Got the cash? get the guns! Who doesn't remember British PM Dave Cameron's sickeningly hypocritical visit to Tahrir Square in the midst of the protests against the Egyptian military regime? There he was, pathetically hailing the calls for democracy while, in his entourage, arms merchants were busily proffering their business cards to the same military who continued to undermine progress to democracy until President Morsi just a few weeks ago finally asserted some control over the wayward armed services.

In 2010, the European Parliament debated arms exports from the EU - their main findings centred not on the need to curb these revenue earning sales, but rather on the need for greater co-ordination between European arms manufacturers who apparently have not been co-ordinating sales properly with each other. So the EU, supposedly the paragon of free trade, appears to want to stitch up some sort of arms selling cartel to maximise the financial benefits of peddling weapons around the planet.

- and within Europe itself, while there may be little real prospect for the foreseeable future of a war between nations inside the EU, the rising social conflict brought about by the straight-jacket that is the Eurozone austerity programme and the overweening, neoliberal European Central Bank hardly makes Europe a region of tranquillity. Just this week in Greece, the cradle of democracy, we have seen scores of leftwing protesters tortured by the authorities for protesting against the extreme right Golden Dawn party (now the third largest in the country) and in one appalling incident, a young woman protester shackled and marched through Athens by the police to be used as a human shield against protesters demonstrating against the visit of the cuts-wielding German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

This woman was handcuffed and used as a "shield" by Greek police.

On peace, the EU has a mixed and unhappy record: it is true it has at times found just about enough unity to strike out on mildly different initiatives from the USA on the Palestinian question, but to little avail. And when there was a major conflict on its doorstep in Bosnia and Croatia from 1992 to 1995, it seemed paralysed or, even worse, covertly encouraging of the Serbian leadership as it "ethnically cleansed" towns and cities of Bosnian Muslims. Over 100,000 lives were lost and although Europe did fund and participate in the still shaky reconstruction of the country, it failed totally to stop the conflict and we live to this day with the geopolitical consequences - it was there in the Balkans rather than anywhere else that many young Muslims first became attracted to the Islamist claims about the West's hostility to their faith.

The Nobel Peace Prize has been given to surprising recipients in the past - Henry Kissinger received it while he was bombing Laos (though at least he was doing so in secret!) and President Obama was handed it before he even took office in what must be a unique instance of giving a prize in anticipation of some success - given his track record, you might think they would want it back. But then, they hand it to the EU (it feels troubling that this is now seen as a "person" - the prize is meant to be given to a human being under its remit).

Alfred Nobel of course was no man of peace - he invented dynamite and owned the huge arms manufacturing company Bofors, which profited immensely from the First World War. So the whole thing reeks of hypocrisy and we probably shouldn't be too surprised that as the EU sinks further into its current socio-economic mess, the international Establishment may see the award as something to buttress its tattered reputation.

Europe's history has for centuries been one of conflict - interestingly, the only two periods of apparent sustained peace before now have striking parallels to the EU's current dilemma of crisis at home and war abroad. In the eleventh century, the only international institution on the Continent, the Catholic Church, proclaimed crusade and directed the energies of warring nobles towards the Muslim states on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, giving Europe some respite from their constant quarrelling and fighting. The people of the Middle east, however, including many non-Catholic Christians, would have had a rather different experience, far from peaceful.

And earlier still, the Romans conquered almost the entire Continent. They imposed a single currency; they created a single government; they homogenised city society; and they exported their wars into the forests of eastern Germany and the mountains of Persia. The Pax Romana held for several centuries, albeit often turbulently, before collapsing before the German invasions.

And yet when it happened, few mourned Rome. For, as even the Roman historian Tacitus acknowledged, the Pax Romana was not to the benefit of all; it crushed and damaged and imposed a false unity that forever belied its claims of Universal Triumph and Benefit. Rome was an authoritarian regime, its armies and spies crushing opposition when not fighting each other - and so the "peace" achieved was more than a little hollow.

Similarly now: what may appear to be an amazing achievement of decades of peace in Europe needs to be tempered with the fact that this was for a long time set against the context of the Cold War, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and a lot of bloodshed via proxies outside of the Continent. The European Ideal is a wonderful one - but, a bit like the myth of the Pax Romana, it perhaps remains just that - an ideal, not a reality. And so perhaps we should view the Nobel Peace Prize award for the EU as being of the same level of hubris as the Emperors' when held their Victory parades in war after war in supposedly Eternal Rome.

When he recorded the history of his father-in-law Agricola's expedition to Caledonia (now Scotland), he attributed to an enemy chief, Calgacus, the chilling words in which he described the Roman Mission to his warriors: words which echo chillingly through the centuries to whisper in the ear of Europa Moderna:

"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant" - They make a desert, and call it peace.

Jape Number 54: Gideon tears up the Magna Carta

"Workers of the world unite!" Gideon, son of privilege, gassed to his baying blue hordes in Birmingham this afternoon.

A couple of weeks ago, appearing on the US programme the Letterman Show, British PM David Cameron guffawed as he failed the UK citizenship test by, among other things, failing to explain what the Magna Carta, the document widely seen as commencing constitutional government in England, translated as. He later feigned that he did know but didn't want it to seem he has Latin seeping from every pore and orifice.

But today, when his school pal and multi-millonaire Chancellor, George Gideon Osborne, gave his annual talk to the blue rinse and the Sleeping Dead at the Tory conference in Birmingham, it became swiftly evident that the Coalition Government is utterly ignorant of the contents of the said document, especially Clause 29 which states that "we will sell to no man...either justice nor right."

What a jolly jape this Flashman of Finance had to unveil for the chavs - give up your rights to unfair dismissal and get £2,000 of tax free shares, allegedly making you an owner of your company (though apparently one that the other owners can fire with impunity). On top of that, if your a gel, well, if you get a bun in the oven, you will need to tell your company two months sooner than now that you need to take time orf to have the kid - makes you wonder why you ladies really bother working, what, what? Unless of course you live in rented; then having a kid is just your benefits meal ticket and you know what we think of that!

Torn up by Tories - the Great Charter

Oh, how they laughed at Little Piggy as he mocked the Marxists, turning their cri de couer on its head. He had been up all night preparing for it and he really was most excited...
This has to be the most twisted, sick-minded notion to emerge yet from the Coalition, all in the name of supporting the multitude of would-be entrepreneurs poised to enrich our country, if only they can do so without paying decent wages or settling their tax bills. All so they can piss some of their trickledown wealth onto the cracked streets of impoverished communities and vulnerable people.

Encouraging workers to sell their rights takes us into new realms of modern slavery; indeed, it may soon be that smaller, start-up companies will use this approach as the default one - soon it may be standard for people working in smaller companies to have no employment rights; and then the larger ones will argue that this makes them competitively disadvantaged so they need to strip out protection as well, all for a bag of transient tax free cash. What a wheeze indeed, one apparently endorsed by that waste of space Vince Cable - yes, the same guy who attacked Tories for getting a kick out of firing people.

Somehow, with the Coalition, just when you think that it couldn't possibly get worse, it does. We plumb new depths of inhumane, perverse politics. Just how much worse will this get?

Will workers be offered a bonus if they sign waivers on using dangerous equipment? After all, having to maintain safe stuff is just such a drag on our budding entrepreneurs. How soon before single parents can sell their kids off to save the state benefits money? How long before the deeply indebted can "redeem" what they owe Wonga.com by converting their loans into serfdom?

Boundaries are crossed with this latest initiative from the Party of Privilege and their delusional fags Cable and Clegg - boundaries not even Mrs Thatcher neared in her wildest fantasies. We are going back, beyond even Victorian "values". King John (yes, the bad guy from Robin Hood and signatory of the original Magna Carta) would be proud of little Gideon. The Tories like to preserve traditional values - but it seems these are traditional values that go even further back than we suspected.

At least King John had the grace to get dysentery and die after running up a huge deficit to fund his wars; we seem likely to be stuck with Gideon's verbiage until at least May 2015 - just one month short of the 800th anniversary of the great revolt that forced John to sign the Great Charter (yes, Dave, some of us paid attention in Latin class...)

We can only hope that if history repeats itself in one direction, it can do so in the opposite as well.

Workers of the world unite! Chains for sale...

A Real Choice for the USA

Jill Stein - Green Party candidate for President of the USA

Throughout the western world, more and more people are switching off to politics as the mainstream becomes ever more centrifugally clustered around a narrow, pro-free market, capitalist consensus. At best, the choice of leaders and parties is about the same as choosing your corporate bank: variations on a theme. There may be a pseudo-democratic process of voting, but in truth there is no real choice. For all that the western media castigates the "managed democracy" of Putin's Russia, there is little effective long-term difference between Labour and Tory/Lib Dem in Britain, between CDU and SPD in Germany, or Republican and Democrat in the USA.

Sure, there is a lot of noise - a lot of anger and boiling debate - but the dissonance mask the ever smaller and smaller real differences. Tax policy, ownership, banking arrangements, the trade system, energy, outsourced and privatised state services...the practical differences are fewer and fewer. And with big business funding the parties (in some cases, companies even give money to more than one party), it is clear whose agenda is prioritised by the political elite.

But there are choices: the system is stacked against them, whether because of their exclusion from the mainstream media, or by the first-past-the-post voting system in Britain or the huge obstacles to democratic ballot access in many US states. But they are there.

This November, while the media and the money focus on Obama and Romney, Americans do have a real and very different third choice. A politician who stands for a very different, democratic system, one that challenges and tames the corporations, breaks down the influence of big money and big business, brings services back into public hands and takes action on clean energy.

Jill Stein is the Green Party candidate for President of the USA. Thanks to the undemocratic nomination system, she is not on the ballot in every state, even although it is a federal election. But she is mounting a challenge on the ballot in 38 states, as a write-in in a further 5 states and is litigating for access in 6 more. In only 2 - Oklahoma and Nevada - have the Greens no prospect of being a choice for voters.

Jill Stein is a physician, from a Jewish background and is a former candidate for Governor of Massachusetts. She advocates a return to public service and values, a "Green New Deal" to get ordinary people back to work in a more sustainable economy and a redistribution of wealth. She has marched with the Occupy Wall Street Movement, supporting its rebellion against the power of the 1% and criticised the brutal police crackdown on the protests. Last month, during a sit-in at a Philadelphia Bank to highlight housing repossessions, she and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested along with other Green activists. She has characterised Barak Obama as "a wolf in sheep's clothing" and Mitt Romney as "a wolf in wolf's clothing" - so similar are their agendas.

Cheri Honkala, VP candidate

In foreign policy, she has called for a big reduction in US military spending (which is currently more than all the rest of the world put together), and dialogue rather than confrontation with America's opponents. She opposes the drone strikes which have been used so massively and counter-productively by the Obama Administration in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. On Palestine/Israel, she has criticised the USA's favouring of Israel and called for diplomatic action to respect human rights, bring down the Separation Wall built by Israel, restore free movement for Palestinians and commit Israel to getting rid of its huge nuclear arsenal and banning its policy of assassination of its opponents. In the event of lack of action on these, she believes the US should apply economic and political sanctions.

In one mock election, at Illinois University, Stein polled 27% of the votes cast to 33% for Romney and 39% for Obama. In national surveys, over 90 million Americans have said they do not intend to vote for either Romney or Obama - if rather than sitting at home they came out and chose Jill Stein, they could really make history. 

Interview with Jill Stein here.

Video - Arctic Ice Melts to new Record Minimum

The Arctic ice cap has just started to re-freeze after reaching a historic minimum last week on 19th Sepetmber. An ice-free Arctic during summer-time is now a few years away at most, with untold consequences for our weather systems and the follow-on impact on our ability to live on the planet.

As well as the effect of cold melted ice on the milder sea water systems of the mid-Atlantic, bringing more extreme weather - hot and cold, wet and dry - to many parts of Europe and Britain, the decline in white ice will reduce the planet's albedo effect, which reflects much of the heat of the sun away from Earth. This will increase the rate of global warming even faster than now.

It also augurs extremely badly for many Arctic species' survival.

Nothing Wrong...Really.. part 349

"If we do not exert the right of eating our neighbour, it is because we have other means of making good cheer"

                                                                                        - Voltaire, Candide, Chapter 16

Denial

Wisdom may not quite entirely lie with the gloomy; but the continued denial of global warming, not by scientists, but by a range of right-wing politicians and their profit-seeking corporate sponsors has reached Panglossian levels of delusion as, this year, more and more climate extremes are being reached and records broken. The results are devastating communities across the planet by fire and flood, severely damaging natural resources and pushing the price of food significantly upwards as the US grain belt is devastated by drought unprecedented in 80 years - just a year after Russia suffered similarly.

NASA, no left-wing conspiracy, has published charts this week showing how the summer ice melt in the Arctic has reached unprecedented levels: most observers are now expecting an ice-free Arctic in summertime by 2020 if not earlier. This is already affecting the weather in northern Europe, with increasing rainfall and gales as colder oceans whip up storms unknown in the region in human times. Yet again, the Gulf Stream "conveyor" which has traditionally kept Britain milder than similar areas at our geographic latitude, may be slowing as cooler northern waters, chilled by melting ice, drive the warmer waters and air from the south-west away.

Arctic summer ice 1984

Arctic ice cover last week

The NASA website can be accessed here. 

Yet, even at the highest levels of political life, climate change denial remains widespread: Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has mocked President Obama's commitments to tackle global warming thus: "President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family."  His words deny the reality that should strike the heart of any loving parent stone cold - that, if not in their own lifetimes then certainly in the lifetimes of their children global warming, if unchecked, threatens to overwhelm our biosystems: their offspring may trade inaction now for a long, lingering farewell to any sort of civilised way of life.

Yet Obama, for all his emissions of promises and commitments to curb carbon emissions has presided over a massive expansion in fracking for dirty coal and gas to the extent that the US is now energy independent for the first time and private investment in research and development of renewable sources of energy is plunging (more evidence of how the market system can not deliver truly green solutions). Carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise unabated across the world.

And, behind all this, misinforming, misleading and ripping off the bewildered public, mass media continues to proselytise for us all carrying on as if nothing is wrong, as if the party never needs to stop - those who warn the house is on fire are decried as hair-shirted killjoys. As the ice cap melts across the Arctic, rather than sounding a global emergency, politicians from Putin to Palin and corporations from Moscow to Dallas are rubbing their oily palms with glee at the prospect of new fields of carbon energy opening up to them. 

In his satire, "Candide", 18th century French philosopher Voltaire has the main character reject the eternal optimism of his teacher's belief that the "all is for the best in the best of all worlds" somehow follows naturally - instead, we need to take responsibility and act ourselves: "we must cultivate our garden".

Yet, as multinationals tear down our forests and rip open ever new fissures to drill and frack for dirty energy, our garden is distinctly wilting and barren in many places. But still it is the words not of Candide, but his Professor Pangloss, that echo in endless, selfishly complacent denial of reality: "Troubles are just the shadows in a beautiful picture."

Better perhaps to heed Candide's own thoughts on the Professor's boundless optimism in the face of the truth:  "It is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell...I confess that when I consider this globe, or rather this globule, I think that God has abandoned it to some evil creature"

Spanish Revolution

Marx - saw it coming and got the teeshirt!

The last twenty four hours have seen a wave of anti-austerity protest in Madrid. Galvanised by social media, the Indignants have marched on Congress in their tens of thousands to demand an end to the harsh austerity measures of the conservative government which, deferring to the European Central Bank's "tight money" regime, have slashed public services and catapulted one in four Spaniards onto the dole.

They have faced rounds of rubber bullets from the police, but they remain in place even now; follow them here.

The Spanish Government's fiscal policy is the same that is being applied across Europe for the sake of saving the beleaguered Euro - while in Britain, which is not part of the Eurozone, the Con Dem Government pursues deficit reduction as its first and, many would argue, sole monetary policy objective. All this in spite of the fact that cutbacks depress economic activity and cause the whole economy to spiral down in an ever-decreasing circle - and with less tax generated and more unemployed people needing state assistance, the deficits continue to grow.

Madrid on Tuesday evening

There are alternatives - Keynes and Roosevelt demonstrated that borrowing to invest in employment pays dividends many times over - a tack echoed in the current round of Green New Deals proposed by Green Parties (including US Presidential candidate Jill Stein). And in the case of sovereign currency states like the UK, expanding the monetary supply by "quantitative easing" (printing money) can kick-start a stagnant economy (and as a nation that can print its own money, the UK can never go bankrupt contrary to Tory and Lib Dem claims of pending insolvency).

But on another analysis, this round of austerity, just like the previous period of expansion, is just part of the never-ending capitalist not-so-merry-go-round; a cycle of boom and bust followed by more boom and bust. It will never end, never be resolved, especially in a world where many resources are fast becoming expensively scarce. On this analysis, the only real answer is to change the economic and social systems completely - to a more planned economy, with resources used to the benefit of all and strict limits placed on what private individuals and companies can take from the common wealth. 

Otherwise, we are condemned to Austerity Groundhog Day:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "The Communist Manifesto" (1848)

Et Tu, Davey?

Cassius Cable and  Praetorian Davey - yond men hath a lean and hungry look! 

Nick Clegg's beleaguered Lib Dems gather in Green Party-run Brighton this week for their annual Federal Party Conference, their third since they entered the Coalition Government with the Tories and began to implement perhaps the most right wing fiscal and social reform agenda in British history - much to the chagrin of many of their members and the likely permanent alienation of swathes of their former voters.

Clegg's personal ratings are at an all-time low and the party's have plunged by two-thirds since the 2010 election - today, two opinion polls (Opinium & Survations) have them on just 8% and 10% of popular support, in fourth place nationally behind the UK Independence Party - others are a little kinder, but still show UKIP breathing down the Lib Dems necks close enough to raise the hackles of fear. With hundreds of councillors culled at the local elections last May and more losses likely in spring 2013, Clegg's own position is increasingly rumoured to be at risk, at least in the longer-run. As leading pollster Peter Kellner of YouGov has warned, on current trends, the party will lose 80% of its MPs in the 2015 election.

For now, the party rank-and-file have shown an almost lemming-like willingness to follow Clegg over the cliff, but cracks are beginning to show as the leader's desperate strategy of trying to emphasise differences with his Tory partners fails to make any electoral impact. Likewise his attempt to apologise for voting to raise student fees in full defiance of a pledge to vote against any such thing (note, "vote against" - whether in Government or not) has fallen on deaf ears.

Mr Clegg is facing two potential challengers - interestingly both from former SDP members who may be seen to represent a slightly less full-on charge to the right by Clegg and his Orange Book ally David Laws (now returned to the Cabinet table in a rather odd arrangement as he is not a full-member).

The first is the Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise, Vince Cable. Cable, a former apologist for the Shell Oil company, has enacted some pretty right wing changes to employment law while in office, but he still laughingly tries to pass himself off as the "Marx of the Lib Dems" - though he could do with clarifying whether he means Karl or Groucho. His hubris is boundless, and fuelled by a finding that Lib Dem ratings could soar to as high as..12%!, he has told the Sunday Times that he does not rule out being leader of the party - one day. Soon, we might imagine him whisper under his impatient breath.

The other rumoured challenger is Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary. He is closer to Clegg politically, but views himself as a credible challenger to Cable. The Mail on Sunday produced an article today covering his ambitions to succeed Clegg. On Channel 4 News this evening, he hotly denied the article's veracity - he is, he claimed "one of the Praetorian Guard surrounding Nick Clegg".

Now, Mr Davey could either be being opaquely clever here or alternatively betraying his lack of historical knowledge: for over two and a half centuries, the Praetorians were the bodyguards of the Roman Emperors. So he might be suggesting that he would take a political bullet for Emperor Cleggie, so deep is his belief in him. Alternatively, given the Praetorians' propensity for bumping off Emperors (on one occasion even putting the throne up for auction), he could instead be giving a coded signal that he may bury the knife in Caesar's shoulder-blades any day soon. Notably, when invited several times by the C4 interviewer, Davey repeatedly avoided saying "No" to the question of whether he wants to be leader.

Either way, the third-going-on-fourth party, faces a dismal time ahead - yet doggedly still clinging to the belief that nuanced changes to party pronouncements (the latest being that parents can use their pensions towards their kids mortgages!) will somehow win their lost legions of followers back. If Vince Cable is all their "left-wing" has to offer, they may as well shut up shop and follow their National Liberal ancestors in the smothering bosom of their Tory Masters.

A third candidate for the leadership is rumoured to be Lurcio, currently the MP for Westmoreland and Lonsdale. Oh don't ye titter!

The Government: An Apology...

The Government - an apology.

Yes, it is an apology...one big apology of a Government!

√ -1 = Reason Without Reason: A review of Zamyatin's "We"

"We" - 2006 edition from Modern Library (New York)
ISBN 0-812907462-X

Yevgenny Zamyatin was a revolutionary: a Bolshevik agitator against the Czar, he was arrested and beaten up by the police in 1905, kept in solitary confinement and then sent on internal exile - the punishment of choice of the Romanov authorities: Russia was large enough to send dissenters far enough away to neutralise them, but still within the purview of the God-anointed Father of All-Russia.

After the collapse of the Imperial regime in 1917, Zamyatin's hopes were high as the social liberal experiment of the Soviets began - initially unsullied by the dogmatic centralism of the Leninist Bolsheviks. He enthusiastically participated in Maxim Gorky's House of Arts at Ryabushinsky in Petrograd, blazing a trail with others in developing Soviet "NeoRealism" in writing - the florid, repetitive language of the Old Days was to be swept away. The Revolution was not just about breaking down the old barriers and extreme inequalities; it was also about a new way of thinking, living and expression - rational, efficient, and all the more powerful for it. One word should convey what in the past a dozen were used to describe; "written with 90-proof ink", as he put it.

But like many artists and thinkers who initially supported both the liberal and socialist revolutions, Zamyatin began to diverge from the strain of Bolshevik thinking that placed the Party at the centre of all things. This vanguard of revolution not only crushed the bourgeois liberals and Kadets, but also turned on fellow socialists in the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties before weeding out wrong-thinking Bolsheviks, such as Kollontai and those in the Workers Opposition. It is no coincidence that his completion of "We" in early 1921 coincided with an upsurge of strikes by trade unions and leftists across Russia against the privations of the increasingly repressive Bolshevik regime - a cycle of unrest that concluded only with the extermination of the Social revolutionary sailors at the Kronstadt Fortress as Lenin reasserted his authority. Later that year, all factions within the Bolshevik Party were abolished, apart from his own.

Sensing where these changes were leading, Zamyatin penned "We" as a breathtaking combination of science fiction, political allegory, mathematics and romance. Set a thousand years after the tribulations of the Two Hundred Years' War swept away current society, this unlikely combination resides in the mind and, as the story develops, the soul of the protagonist, a cypher (as people are called by then), D-503. In a glass city hermetically sealed from the natural world, men and woman are designated with a letter and reference number; children are raised by the One State under the benevolent guidance of the Benefactor; sex is reduced to a series of appointments via pink slips; people march in step with each other and everyone lives and works to times set out in the Table of Hours. All mail is read by officials and everywhere, the Aeros of the Guardians with their proboscoid cameras hover above the city, watching and listening, seeking out any remote sign of dissent, any threat to order - even the cyphers' rooms have glass walls and ceilings, a true police-state Panoptican.

Ryabushinsky - site of Gorky's House of Arts

George Orwell clearly owed a great debt of the imagination to Zamyatin, but that is a side-issue: "We", written as a series of notes left by D-503 as he struggles to come to terms with the challenge of his love for the mysterious I-330, is a fast-paced assault on the senses. Zamyatin's NeoRealism may reduce people to curves (D-503's regular sex partner is O-90, who is described as a circle) and angles (the exciting new I-330 is portrayed as an X), but at the same moment it captures humanity at its most intimate and genuine.

D-503's battle to reconcile his role as the Builder of the One State's great scientific project, a space machine, "The Integral", and his painful physical and emotional reactions to his growing love for I-330 is contrasted with his lifelong anxiety as a mathematician of being unable to determine the square root of minus one.This is a torture begun by his school teacher that has plagued him ever since. In a world built on reason alone, how can there be such a conundrum as the square root of minus one? If maths can explain everything, how can there be a question with no answer? And if cyphers are to exist efficiently and happily, surely the irrationality, the emotions of love, can only be a malady - D-503 turns to his doctor to get a sick note for his love.

Zamyatin's dystopia was founded on the centralist drive of the Bolsheviks who, by 1920, had seen off their White, Black and Green opponents in the Civil War at huge human cost (a price, to be fair, exacted by all parties in the conflict). Lenin and his cohorts were already tarnishing dissent of any hue with the badge of counter-revolution. And so, in "We" part of the debate is about whether there can ever be a final revolution: Zamyatin clearly saw humanity functioning in continually evolving cycles, never reaching any End of History, while Lenin's interpretation of Marx was that the communist revolution was the ultimate phase in the history of social relations.

As part of his pretty idiosyncratic interpretation of Marx, one rejected by the vast majority of socialists before and since, Lenin truly exalted the collective above the individual - not only in terms of social equality and security, an objective that IS shared by most socialists - but in terms of valid existence and free will. To this end, he was initially repelled but then fascinated by the writings of the US labour theorist Frederick Taylor.

Taylor was a proponent of the then-nascent field of scientific management and saw the most efficient organisation as one which broke the means of production down to the lowest single process-step. Workers would be trained to repeat the same tasks over and over endlessly. In this way, by reducing the individual to mere cogs in a huge machine, Taylorism argued that maximum efficiency of production and design would be achieved - the worth and needs of the individual human within this no longer mattered.

Lenin had taken a similar approach in the brutal days of the Civil War, sacrificing millions of civilians and military to combat, cold and starvation for the sake of the Revolution, and he extended this into the functioning of the new Soviet State. Taylor's thinking (also much loved by arch-capitalist Henry Ford) was transposed to the USSR and developed further by Alexei Gastev, head of the Institute of Soviet Labour, who advocated workers as "proletarian units" and came up with the idea of exchanging names for cypher designations. There was no compassion, no humanity - these were old, bourgeoisie concepts, necessary sops to the need to survive in Czarist times but at best diversions and at worst obstacles to progress in the New Era . Logic and reason, cold but ultimately True, come in replacement of the former barbarism.

Taylorism Triumphant - Cyphers at work: from Fritz Lang's Metropolis

In "We", Zamyatin refers to Taylor as the spiritual guide of the all-powerful One State: children are taught to revere him and he is central to the lives of the cyphers. Thus, D-503's love-sickness juxtaposes as powerfully as anything the world-views of Zamyatin and Lenin. Just as Bolshevism originated to create a fairer society but was warped by ideologues, so the One State's ultimate purpose was originally benign, aiming to free its citizen-cyphers from the chains of uncertainty and unhappiness: "What", asks the Benefactor, "have people prayed for, dreamt about and agonized over? They have wanted someone, anyone, to tell them once and for all what happiness is - and then to attach them to this happiness with a chain..."

Yet while the novel takes the political philosophy of Lenin to its logical conclusion of a de-humanised state, its final objective epitomised by The Operation, which will isolate and remove the imagination of all cyphers, it is not by any means a pessimistic tale. Unlike Orwell, there is no boot stamping forever on the face of humanity - rather, even after a full Millennium of the One State, people's essential humanity is intact, no matter how suppressed or self-controlled or, as D-503 contemplates his hairy hands, how frighteningly misunderstood.

"We" was almost never published in the Soviet Union - its allegory meant it did not get past the newly-reconstituted censors and a single manuscript had to be smuggled out to be published in Czechoslovakia. Zamyatin was himself twice arrested by the Soviet police under suspicion of counter-revolutionary activities. "We" was finally released to his compatriots to read legally only in 1989, in the dying days of Lenin's state. In a fine demonstration of their ideological bigotry and narrow-mindedness, the Soviet authorities by their actions completely validated Zamyatin's case.

As Stalin assumed power in the years following Lenin's death, Zamyatin disagreements with the new Communist state and his fears for his personal safety grew. With the intercession of his friend and patron, Maxim Gorky, he successfully requested permission to leave the USSR in 1931 and settled with his wife in Paris, where he worked on script-writing with film director Jean Renoir. He died in 1937.

The Twentieth Century owes a huge debt to this little known author, both for the creation of a genre of science fiction which is powerful in its warnings for the future, but also for a message that is ultimately deeply humane and optimistic. His arguments may have been forged in the chaos of revolutionary Russia, but they speak as much to us today with societies gripped by the supposedly irreplaceable system of capitalism and under surveillance whether electronically or by Aero-like drones. Just like the cyphers of the glass city, our lifestyles are increasingly geared to ignoring and sealing us away from the seeming unpleasantness of natural reality - from the weather to our food, to the plight of our fellow humans.

The One State, with its fixed elections and social conformity, is not unknown to any of us - but equally, the cri de coeur for change remains, as does the inherent power and potential that is within our species. Even in the dark winter streets of frozen, starving 1920's Petrograd, Yevgeny Zamyatin saw this and in "We", his Opus Magnus, he released the true spirit of revolution - one which may indeed be guided by the thoughts and writings of scientists and moral philosophers but ultimately is born in the soul, in the beating compassion and great love of the human heart.

"True literature can only exist when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics" - Yevgeny Zamyatin