In Politics, Money Talks Loudest. What Can Be Done?

Ted Honderich made the opening speech in a debate in the Oxford Union on 29 January 2010, the evening of the day when Tony Blair appeared at the Chilcott inquiry into the Iraq war. The motion was that this House believes that in politics, money talks loudest. The motion was carried. Here is a slight synopsis of the full speech online at Ted Honderich’s website.

“The motion before us two parts, one explicit and one implicit. There is the explicit proposition of fact, and there is the implication of it—that it raises a question of rightness, or indeed isn’t right. Talking openly of what is right or wrong is unusual in this time in England, and may seem curious, perhaps moralistic, maybe innocent or immature, anyway not familiar.

Cant, in particular cant by our democratic politicians, is the dismal order of the day, along with the brazen policy that the response to a question is not an answer but an evasion of it. The cant and the evasion have reduced the clarity and hence the intelligence of public discussion, indeed brought it to its lowest state in 50 years. A society in decline since 1979 has declined further.

Instead of speaking of right and wrong, of what ought not to happen, the political class declares or intones the cant that this or that is “unacceptable”. They are saying that is wrong—what we must not do. They prefer to be inexplicit instead. When you say plainly that something is wrong, or right, you are expected to produce a reason, an argument, something clear headed.

So, what are the things that according to the motion money talks louder than in politics? One answer is truth. It is not only the first victim of war. A second thing that money talks louder than is the logic of ordinary intelligence. That consists in clarity, analysis, relevance, consistency, validity, and completeness, not leaving things out. Truth and logic bring along some humanity with them. You can’t be truthful and logical without humanity—humanity being what is right.

Being simple minded, which our political class is, is also to be avoided. One way of being simple minded about the motion in front of us is to think the part that is the factual proposition can be settled just by some figures. It can’t be settled that way, useful as some general figures are.

It is true that the economically best off tenth of population in Britain and America have something like 70% of the wealth, and the worst off tenth has as good as none. As for income, the best off tenth has about 30% or 40%, and the worst off 2% or 3%. That means that the poorest have nothing to spend on politics, indeed no time left to engage in it after getting their 2 or 3%, and the very richest have a lot.

I say, without fear of any economist or student of the dismal science in this house, the dismal science that never gets around to quantifying what is fundamental, that the richest have more than 1000 times the political influence and power of the poorest. Remember that the poorest have as good as no wealth. 70 times zero is infinitely less than 70 times 1. What does the 1000 times more political influence and power do? More than corruption in the House of Commons, and more than the fact of lobbying even on an American scale. More than industries and interests infesting the regulation of themselves.

The 1000 times more political influence and power can make and maintain what can mildly be called a certain convention of thought and feeling in a society, mainly a successful pretense about what is necessary and what is possible. It consists in illusions upon illusions. About war, classes, the economy, public services, private profit and the profitization of things, taxation, banks, competition, co-operation, foreign ownership, utilities, health, education, politics itself, ideologies and religions, terrorism. Today, there is the illusion about the need to reduce public spending rather than reduce private profiting.

Illusions work better than an army and police on motorbikes. Owning newspapers and paying for ordinary advertisements in them is part of the convention. So is a government broadcasting service. A compliant church despite a brave Archbishop is another part. There is no need for conspiracy, although there is some of that, to make the whole thing intentional.

The illusions bring to mind the other part of the political cant about the “unacceptable”. Our dim but not too dim political class, when they intone “unacceptable”, don’t only mean that something is wrong, they also mean it is somehow unthinkable. Its ambiguity saves them from being challenged either about something’s being wrong or its being or its being believed necessary or impossible by all the relevant persons.

Let us think a little, which you’re allowed to do in a university, even in a debate, by asking what can best be said for democracy. What can best be tried in its justification? The hope is that it is a better decision procedure for a society than any other, for a particular reason—in plain English, it is that two heads are better than one, and more better are than two. What is in heads, according to this argument, is different and compensating kinds of knowledge, different experiences of a society, different wants. But it only works if what is in the heads gets equal and free expression.

In our hierarchic democracies, there is nothing of the sort, nothing remotely like equal and free expression. So there can be no reasonable assumption that our democracies are right about anything at all—social goods, or profitization against co-operation, or terrorism, or our own terrorist war. So put aside the fiction, indeed the illusion, of a democratic guarantee of good policies.

How should we go about judging the result of money talking loudest in our democracy—thinking about that outcome? What principle or other method should we use? Our political class never asks how you should go about judging the outcome. Should we do it by the viciousness of the tradition of conservatism, New Labour wholly being within it? Conservatism is no more a political tradition of self interest than any other, but the politics has no principle of right and wrong at all to support its self interest. Liberalism has better impulses than conservatism, but it is without a real principle to give content to its better impulses. It is without a will to act on those impulses, including its decency in opposing a terrorist war.

Should you judge the result of money in politics by the principle of the Utilitarians, that what is right is what produces the greatest total of happiness, well being or satisfaction—no matter how it is shared out, even if the biggest total rests on some people, a class at the bottom, having lives that are really nasty, British and short? Should you throw psychoanalysis and neuroscience into the plan, as they now say at the London School of Economics, to make people happier without changing the world that was making them unhappy?

Maybe you should try instead a principle of judgement heard of in Cambridge sometimes these days? That is the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative. It tells you to treat everybody not only as a means but also as an end. It’s all about respect. Its clearest upshot is that you should nod decently to the homeless fellow in the street when you don’t buy a copy of The Big Issue magazine he sells for a crust.

So, how should we go about judging the result of money talking loudest in our politics? What sums up what is right on any subject anywhere, is the Principle of Humanity. It is that what is right is what according to the best judgement and information gets and keeps people out of bad lives. Bad lives are defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, denial of the fundamental desires of human nature—six of them—a decent length of life, bodily well being, freedom and power, respect and self respect, goods of relationship, the goods of culture.

“Money talking loudest” is a standing violation of the Principle of Humanity. It denies every great human good, every denial aided by suppression of truth and evasion of logic. If you’re not pushy or a pusher, you live less long for a start, you have less consciousness, and you suffer pain, constraint, weakness, disdain, self disdain. Your children don’t learn. You read Murdoch newspapers that stop you from escaping the stupidity owed to your ignorance.

Earlier today Blair, a man who managed this democracy into a terrorist war, the Iraq war, insulting the decency that remains in this democracy, appeared before a weak committee, a wretched committee of old boys neither capable of questioning him effectively nor willing to. Not a court. Not Nuremberg. Blair sought today, by the audacity of a shyster lawyer unconstrained by a judge, his policy in the House of Commons, to blunt the truth that he is a war criminal, a criminal against humanity. Old Germans around Nuremberg can feel less bad tonight about the German past. They can say that Nuremberg happened.

In Blair’s wholly intentional killing of innocents in and after the war, wholly intentional since wholly foreseeable, and in his wholly intentional causing of fear supposed to be the stuff of only terrorism, and in everything else of his New Labour, Blair has been and is a creature of money talking. He has been a creature who listens to it talking, goes to ask for more, and pays for it.

What should we do? What should be done about all the denials of the great goods, about taking from people what we all desire? What should be done about the monstrous selfishness? Truth and logic is all we have to rely on, some say. But surely it can’t be the only hope. That would be too terrible. A colonel of the British Army, at the time of English civil war, said:

For really I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he…

Thomas Rainsborough”

Honderich wonders whether revolution could be an answer, or mass civil disobedience, much more insistent than the large demonstrations at the outset of the Iraq war, or a boycott of the market. Any such insistent demonstrating, or a colonel driving a tank into Parliament Square is likely to be what a neoconservative government like this New Labour one would love. They could institute martial law, and declare plainly the fascism they have hitherto been hiding but preparing for.

Honderich thinks revolution isn’t a rational means to the end of the Principle of Humanity. Nor is it, it is the breakdown of society for the very reasons he is outlining, and the Principle of Humanity can only work in a functioning society—by civilized people! Mass civil disobedience, funded by the US has worked in a few places in the last couple of decades. “It brought down a wall, ended an empire. It has changed governments.” Revolution is getting more feasible as the western powers weaken, the very reason for their drive towards fascism.

The eastern countries India and China are becoming serious rivals to the US and Europe. The financial system, as Honderich shows, is getting more and more openly corrupt, and politics too. Society is crumbling and revolution, consisting of the components Honderich mentioned looking more likely, but it will have to fight off fascism first, or somehow force some government to scrap the mass of repressive legislation New Labour has introduced. At present the British are sleepwalking. Mostly they are ignorant of what is going on as long as they have Murdoch’s media, reality TV and celebrities, and can still borrow on credit. They have a rude shock ahead.

Oceania, a Quarter Century after 1984, the USA

In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes a superstate called Oceania where truth and lies are indivisible, so that lies become truth when they passed into history, and peace is not peace but a permanent war. Oceania used to be thought of as being the USSR, but obviously it was not. What then was Oceania? What is it? The USA!

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. He is the Supreme Commander of a country that fights a permanent war, yet it is peace, and Obama wins The Nobel Peace Prize for faithfully leading it, like his neofascist predecessor. Obama says the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no such authority. It “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan to disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”, he tells us. A decade after invading Afghanistan, the President of Oceania says to the Afghans, “We have no interest in occupying your country”. US forces remain in Iraq, invaded with the support of the whole world after 9/11 except that it was not—all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup were overwhelmingly opposed to it, yet Iraqis and others remain in Guantanamo Bay. This is “global security”.

Another lie is that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden”, yet Pakistan, the adjacent country, said that the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, in 2001, and Oceania ignored them. Two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Bush administration told Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik that an American military assault would take place. The Taliban regime in Kabul, secretly supported by Clinton, was too unreliable to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines in the Middle East.

Though we hear continuously from Oceania’s new President, and his surly puppet, Brown in the UK, that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for Al Qaida, General James Jones, a national security advisor, said in October there were less than 100 Al Qaida in Afghanistan, and US intelligence admits that all but a handful of “Taliban” are tribal rebels “opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud, and, while in the UK, sycophantic media, notably the BBC, play upon the coffins of “our boys” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in Wiltshire on being flown in from Asia, no mention is made of the body count of the Afghans, over 1000 a month—all Taliban murderers of course, and deserving of it.

Meanwhile Americans do their utmost to set Afghan against Afghan just as they set Iraqi against Iraqi, Sunnis against Shia against Kurds, destroying communities that had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunni, driving millions abroad, and ravaging the country of Abraham, a multiethnic society which included Christians. So much for the Godliness of these self proclaimed lovers of God. They created a desert and called it peace. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite of peace was true.

The British in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the twentieth century tried to tame Afghanistan and failed, though after terrible bloodshed in each case. Cemeteries are their memorials. In the latter case, the Taliban were armed and financed by the USA. Though Yankees are proud of their revolutionary past, they have all now adjusted comfortably to imperialism, and perpetual wars called peace. The old revolutionaries are now the neocolonialists. Yet barring superficial differences, people are the same everywhere, and these Asians, whether Vietnamese, Palestinians, Iraqis, or Afghans all do not differ a jot in wanting to defend their own land against the machinations of foreign powers, just as the American states did against the British.

Orwell was describing what has turned out to be the USA. Even then US propaganda was working overtime against Asia, then against the communist countries, who were never the threat they were painted as. Events have shown that the USSR was a paper tiger, if it was any sort of tiger at all, but the real monster is the USA, Oceania today, a military state inhabited by pious idiots and run by rich maniacs.

From an article by Jon Pilger

Do not Submit British Law to Zionism

Dr M D Magee—You can add me to this list (below)! The neo-Nazi, pro-Zionist, New Labour party has added so many oppressive laws to the British Statute Book, that we have lost count, and will only remember them when they start being used against us, as all such laws eventually are. Here the aim is to let the Zionist ministers of the elitist, racist, neo-Nazi state of Israel, like Tzipi Livni, enter the UK without molestation from court orders drawing attention to her involvement in state terror and war crimes in Gaza, which might have led to her justified incarceration in a British jail.

This Labour Party leadership is devoid of any principle except self aggrandizement. Each of them expects to be repaid, just as Blair was, for involving us, against our will, in unjust and illegal warfare.

They bowed to the wishes of Zionist mogul, Rupert Murdoch, to get his support to win a series of elections in the nineties and the so-called noughties, but Murdoch has abandoned New Labour, so they want to suck up to the Israeli state directly.

We must all abandon New Labour, if we haven't already done so, and decide to support individual candidates of principle. The party system itself is bent and bankrupt.

The Labour MPs listed below evidently have some principles left, but the New Labour party as a whole is such a disgrace, it wants tipping down the drain. We must do so, and instead support individual candidates who will change the first past the post electoral system that has led us into mess after mess since the 1970s, and will also erase all the fascist Acts of Parliament Blair and Brown have legislated.

Letter to the Guardian

“We are shocked at suggestions by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office minister Ivan Lewis and foreign secretary David Miliband that Britain may consider changing its laws to avoid any future attempts to prosecute suspected war criminals, Israeli or otherwise. The UK must not renege on its international treaty obligations, particularly those under the fourth Geneva convention to seek out and prosecute persons suspected of war crimes wherever and whoever they are, whatever their status, rank or influence, against whom good prima facie evidence has been laid. We reject any attempt to undermine the judiciary's independence and integrity. A judge who finds sufficient evidence of a war crime must have power to order the arrest of a suspect, subject to the usual rights to bail and appeal.

The power to arrest individuals reasonably suspected of war crimes anywhere in the world should they set foot on UK soil is an efficient and necessary resource in the struggle against war crimes, and must not be interfered with (Report, 6 January). Nor should the government succumb to pressure from any foreign power to alter this crucial aspect of the judicial process. We urge the government to state clearly that it will not alter the law on universal jurisdiction and will continue to allow victims of war crimes to seek justice in British courts.”

John Austin MP, Katy Clark MP, Frank Cook MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Ann Cryer MP, Paul Flynn MP, Neil Gerrard MP, John Hemming MP, Paul Holmes MP, Kelvin HopkinsMP, Brian Iddon MP, Lynne Jones MP, Tom Levitt MP, Martin Linton MP, Bob Marshall-Andrews MP, Gordon Prentice MP, Linda Riordan MP, Terry Rooney MP, Baroness Jenny Tonge, Baroness Lindsay Northover, Bob Russell MP, Clare Short MP, Phyllis Starkey MP, Sir David Steel, Sandra White MSP, Derek Wyatt MP, Tayab Ali, Partner, Irvine Thanvi Natas Solicitors, Sir Geoffrey Bindman, Richard Burgon, solicitor, Daniel Carey, Public Interest Lawyers, Ian Cross, solicitor, Jim Duffy, Public Interest Lawyers, Shauna Gillan, barrister, 1 Pump Court, Andrew Gray, solicitor, Tessa Gregory, Public Interest Lawyers, Beth Handly, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors, Michael Hagan, solicitor, Michelle Harris, barrister, 1 Pump Court, Susan Harris, solicitor, Jane Hickman, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors, Sam Jacobs, Public Interest Lawyers, Salma Karmi-Ayyoub, barrister, Paul Kaufman, solicitor, Aonghus Kelly, Public Interest Lawyers, Daniel Machover, Chair of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Michael Mansfield QC, Anna Mazzola, Partner, Hickman and Rose solicitors, Sarah McSherry, Partner, Christian Khan solicitors, Clare Mellor, solicitor, Karen Mitchell, solicitor, Simon Natas, Partner, Irvine Thanvi Natas solicitors, Sophie Naftalin, Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, Mary Nazzal-Batayneh, Human Rights Legal Aid Fund, Henrietta Phillips, solicitor, William Seymour, solicitor, Navya Shekhar, solicitor, Phil Shiner, Public Interest Lawyers, David Thompson, solicitor, Paul Troop, barrister, Mohammed Abdul-Bari, Secretary-General, Muslim Council of Britain, Anas Altikriti, British Muslim Initiative, Lindsey German, Stop the War Campaign, John Hilary, Director, War on Want, Kate Hudson, Chair, CND, Betty Hunter, General Secretary, PalestineSolidarity Campaign, Dan Judelson, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Hugh Lanning, PCS Deputy General Secretary, John McHugo, Chair, Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine, Gerry Morrissey, General Secretary, BECTU, Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary, UNITE, Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK, Jackie Alsaid LLM, Rachel Bowles, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Dale Egee, Sarah El-Guindi, Deborah Fink, David Halpin, Sharif Hamadeh, Samira Hassassian, Professor Ted Honderich, Victor Kattan, Asad Khan, Miriam Margolyes, Professor Nur Masalha, Professor Steven Rose, Professor Jonathan Rosenhead, Andrew Sanger, Dr Aisha Sarwar, Tareq Shrouru…

Blair Finally Admits He is a Liar and a Sociopath

Ex UK PM Tony Blair has just admitted, in a BBC interview, that he would have gone to war even if he had known Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. However he would have used “different arguments” to remove Saddam, he said, undermining his case that Saddam was a danger to everyone because of his threat of WMD, the case actually offered and rejected by many people worldwide by Blair and his puppet master Bush.

What Blair has done is admit, not only that he lied to Parliament and the British public about Saddam having WMD, but that he would have used different lies—these “different arguments”—if he had thought the WMD lie was inadequate.

Hans Blix, head of the UN weapons inspectorate in 2003, commented that Mr Blair’s confession had left a “strong impression of a lack of sincerity”, adding that the WMD argument was a “figleaf”. Blix's expressions “figleaf” and “strong impression of a lack of sincerity” are either euphemistic or sarcastic. He too thinks Blair was lying, and is an habitual liar.

From his own mouth Blair unwittingly confirms he is a sociopath, as AskWhy! has always maintained. Blair just cannot distinguish lies from truthful arguments. He should be impeached for leading the British into an illegal war which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. Yet he thinks he can make his peace with his maker via Catholicism.

Has he noted that many Catholic mass murderers are now saints? Let us help him. All the best saints were martyrs. Let him be tried according to the law, something he denied many others, not only those who died but those he connived in torturing. Many of us would cheer to hear of his martyrdom, and that justice has been done. Impeach him!

Great Angel or Dangerous Psychopath—the US Today

US Popular Opinion

America has a great analyst of their political situation in Noam Chomsky, yet Americans are so indoctrinated by their Brahmin class of plutocrats that they take no notice of what he has to say, which is a lot, it is blunt, easy to comprehend and it is true. US politicians harp on about their uniquely brilliant democracy, but while most Americans will parrot what is said out of misguided patriotism, they just do not believe it. They do not believe they create their own institutions or run their own country. Pollsters find 80% of them think the government is controlled by a few big interests looking out for themselves and not for the people. Popular opinion is that less than 20% think much of Congress, yet voters re-elect most Senators and Representatives, though they have no real choice and play no real part in running the country.

In a true democracy, people would feel they are shaping their own lives, and would therefore, Chomsky says, be celebrating 15 April, the day when taxes are paid. It was the day when the financial flesh was put on the democratically chosen skeleton, when people publicly put their money where their democratic mouth is, to implement policies they had chosen. It is nothing like that. It is a day people resent because they are obliged to pay their hard earned tax dollars to maintain policies and programs they mostly find useless at best and objectionable at worst. They do not feel they have any stake in government, and none in leading corporations banked up by government. Voters have little regard for most institutions, little say in what they decide, and little enthusiasm for having to finance it.

Political issues hardly bear on electoral campaigns, and many electors, maybe most, are not even sure what the issues are. How then is democracy possible? US Elections are run by the PR industry and so are effectively bought by the parties and candidates with the deepest pockets. The Obama campaign was no different, as the annual award by the advertising industry for the “best marketing of the year” shows. It went to Obama’s campaign which beat Apple! Advertisers work on mood not meaning, and it works! Obama had little definite to say about the issues, but concentrated on the warm feeling words “hope” and “change”. When people vote for such objectively meaningless slogans, it shows that hope and change are what they do not have. It should tell the politicians that people felt hopeless, and did not like what they had, and that ought to be a warning. It shows that society is crumbling at its foundations.

The Reality of Capitalism

No feeling of hope exists in these depressed days, but the Great Depression was different. In the depths of despair people did not lose hope, they always felt there was a way through, things would come good. Admittedly, it took a world war and many deaths before brighter days came after the Second World War when the Brahmin business classes of the US built an incredible, yet unremarked propaganda campaign to eliminate all ideas of proper democracy, and social feeling while promoting social Darwinism, the false belief that survival of the fittest should be the norm of civilized communities, that selfishness was the essence of humanity as it was supposed to be in Nature. Capitalism was driven by greed and selfishness, and those who could not stand it went to the wall, or rather had a pauper’s funeral… and that was supposed, under the “Darwinian” capitalist ideology, to have been what society was all about.

Yet what did this capitalism actually do? It was a production and marketing strategy, not a creative one, except perhaps in PR and labor productivity. Where did technological innovations like computers and the internet come from? Overwhelmingly from research institutions like universities, mainly funded by the Pentagon. In other words, the principle fount of new products was a dynamic and creative public sector of the economy. Capitalism was not where technological novelties came from. It simply manufactured and distributed them for personal profit after communal endeavors had invented them. Inventions like computers and the internet were in use for decades before private enterprise made use of them for profit. Most of the economy is the same still. So, where is the capitalism that is so much vaunted and praised by the propaganda machine? It does not exist. What exists is this:

1. the public pays the costs
2. the public takes the risks
3. the plutocrats in the private sector take the profits.

The reality of capitalism can no longer be hidden after the collapse and bale out of the banks in the last two years. Saving inept and greedy banks is justified by the “too big to fail” slogan of our cringingly servile governments, who now are exposed as the paid monkeys of the profiteers, none more obviously than Tony Blair. Every attempt since Adam Smith to live purely by supposedly self regulating, free market principles has led to disaster.

If the banks have to be baled out because they are “too big to fail”, they are being treated as public utilities, except that the profit goes to the Brahmin caste, the bankers’ own class. In the UK, the government has had to take a dominant share in some banks, yet has been timid in acting, as a dominant shareholder should, to protect its investment from being siphoned off into private coffers, like some tinpot dictatorship supported by the US, contrary to the will of the local people. That is the democracy exported by America. Whatever is essential in a state must be publicly owned so that the state can make sure it does not fail, but the public get any profits and all of the benefits they produce. That is what a public utility is for.

Change?

As long as important peaks of the economy are protected by the public, our capitalist system is not capitalist, is it? Contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s slogan TINA, or “There is no Alternative”, and as Obama’s slogan of “Change” emphasized, change is possible, but it is undeniably difficult, and needs open public support to counter the well funded vested interests of the plutocrats. Indeed, swifter changes were needed during World War II, and the government made them. Wartime command economy enabled us to win the war, and mixed economies have proven to be more successful in economic history than doctrinaire capitalism. Why then is economic change not happening now? Why is there no firm move to regulate capitalist enterprises, and even to nationalize those that cannot be allowed to fail. Because Wall Street would not get enough out of it.

Better still than nationalization would be to let stakeholders—the workforce and the local community—take over these industries and make them produce what’s needed by the society with the profits going back to the workforce and community, and kept out of the already bulging purses of the mega rich. The trouble is that Americans have been brainwashed to think of such solutions as evil, as socialist or, heaven forbid, as communist. Yet no society, except the cooperatives of Spanish anarchism, has implemented genuine social production. The reason has nothing to do with these alternative systems not being feasible, or even being evil—cooperatives work!—it is because the Washington caste of lobbyists and the capitalist PR industry will not allow it to enter the consciousness of the US public.

Adam Smith, discussing England, pointed out that the principal architects of policy in England—merchants and manufacturers—made sure that their own interests were attended to, however grievous the effect on others, especially the common people of England. The US has remained stuck in this eighteenth century time warp in its economic philosophy. A lot has changed since Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, and, though much of what he wrote remains true, after over 200 years, it is as doctrinaire to stick to an old economics tome for political economy as it is, after 2000 years, to stick unreservedly to the bible for our moral guidance. The function of US “intellectuals” is to suppress any proper consideration of reform of received thinking. Feigning objective advice, in lofty, obscure and profound rhetoric, they emphasize the objections, difficulties and risks of doing things in a better way, intending all along to discredit any progress. They are servants of the rich. The only real difficulty to economic progress is one of public will, and that exists largely because of the PR success of the ruling class.

Trying a Little Self Reflexion

Chomsky says Americans must adopt an often recommended but rarely applied principle—look in the mirror. Before they advocate murderous incursions into foreign countries, they must look at themselves to see whether they practise at home what they preach. Maybe the trouble is the fossilization of ancient practices. From the outset, the American nation was based on “extermination”, as the founding fathers put it, and its image as “an infant empire”, as George Washington put it. These ideas seem to be instilled into the American psyche when no one gains from them except the arms manufacturers and the military industrial complex. They were a poor moral basis to build upon, but were profitable for some, and that makes it all right in America.

So too was slavery immoral. The Civil War should have ended slavery, but, after about twenty years, in the South it started to be introduced again, and with the acceptance of the North. The former slaves were criminalized through spurious acts yielding racist laws against “vagrancy” or “talking too loud”. Much of the black male population were thrown into prison by these petty but seriously immoral laws. The victims found themselves permanently incarcerated, various machinations being used to suspend parole and extend the sentence indefinitely. This body of reintroduced slave labor built the accumulated capital at the base of modern industrial society—that of the mining, steel, cotton and other industries. Black men were worse off than they had been under slavery. Slave owners valued the slave to some degree because they had paid good money for him, and so mostly they took care of him. Now black men were like galley slaves, tormented by jailers, and with no appeal for mercy.

Only World War II ended it. The need to recruit, and the absence of soldiers abroad meant black labor had to be freed for more than the prison jobs they had been doing. The new liberation lasted for several decades after the war in the years of the “Golden Age” of capitalism. Then, from 1980, the incarceration of black men again went up sharply to new heights, higher than anywhere else. It was slavery again, prison slavery. So, today, slavery continues in the US where black men are disproportionately held in penitentiaries, and locked up for absurdly cruel terms. To take the moral high ground over what it perceives as injustice abroad, so as to justify sending punitive armies to correct it, the US should first correct its own faults.

What too of the 80% of the US population that sees their own government as run by big interests looking after themselves? Do they really think the US should export a system that they themselves find so grossly unpopular? When 85% of the US population think their government should cut medical costs from their exorbitant level, and leading Congressmen and Senators use dirty tricks to try to stop it, what right do they have to tell distant countries they should not be corrupt, but copy the US. The US can hardly teach anyone lessons. It needs to learn lessons of its own.

Americans brag about their model of US democracy and the American way of life, but seem unable to compare the image and the reality they experience directly, as revealed by opinion polls. People think the US can take freedom to others, but they do not live up to it themselves. Time after time the principles of freedom and democracy are violated. The self perception of the US is entirely distorted.

Iraq and 9/11

When the US first wanted to go to war in Iraq, Bush and Blair gave their war aims as to make Saddam give up WMD. The great intellectual, Condoleezza Rice, thought he was capable of nuking New York. Opinion polls showed US citizens went to war because they feared danger. Many people in the world hated Saddam, but America was the only country in the world scared of him. Saddam had no WMD, then, suddenly, the reason was that the love of democracy was so strongly in our hearts, it justified killing tens of thousands of innocent Arabs to rid ourselves of one dictator. As if in a totalitarian state, the media and intelligentsia enthusiastically fell for it.

The 9/11 attacks were an attack on US policy in the Middle East in particular, and an attack on the West in general because mostly it supports US policy. None of the intelligence agencies or senior policy advisers doubted it, but it could not be admitted to the public. As far as Al Qaida was concerned, the US was picking on Islam, and they were going to defend themselves, but the propaganda is that the US is too Christian to pick on people.

Though 9/11 was a horrible atrocity, what if Al Qaida had been more ambitious and had more resources, and had bombed the White House, killed the President, established a military dictatorship, tortured hundreds of thousands of people, set up an international terrorist center to overthrow governments and kill people all over the world, and introduced economic reforms that ruined the economy. It would have been terrible. Well, it actually happened on 9/11! On 9/11, 1973, when a rogue state, the US, organized the overthrow of the legitimate president—Allende—and government of Chile. It is never counted as terrible, especially in the US, because it was US terror, US violence. US terror is never terror.

America is psychopathic. its citizens are incapable of self reflexion, and self criticism. Whatever they do, however disgustingly immoral and murderous, is always right. Chomsky says Americans have to learn to look at themselves before they start moralizing and punishing the rest of the world. They should start fearing God, instead of thinking they are His Great Angel.

Reform Jews Resolve to Defend the Integrity of Science

A few years back, at the height of the Bush administration, the Union for Reform Judaism, concerned by the politicization of science, passed the following excellent resolutions. Others, especially science organizations, should do the same:

1. Demand that public officials and appointees to governmental and advisory bodies respect the integrity of the scientific process, and not manipulate scientific data and evidence, to achieve political or ideological objectives
2. Call upon all levels of government to ensure that the appointment of scientists to government positions and advisory boards be made on the basis of scientific experience, expertise and accomplishment
3. Demand that federal funding of scientific research result from a merit based peer review of proposals, relying strictly upon scientifically objective criteria
4. Demand that government employed scientists and scientists conducting research under government sponsorship be free from threats and intimidation that might compromise their scientific integrity
5. Support appropriate measures to ensure that all of the above principles are adhered to and valued
6. Oppose government efforts and policies that seek to redefine science or the scientific method to incorporate religious, theological or other theories, including “intelligent design” and creationism, that are neither testable by experiment nor observation.

The Politicization of Science

Further to the humiliation of Professor Nutt by the neocon New Labour government of the UK for giving it proper scientific advice as he had been appointed to do, it turns out that similar politicization of science has been going on under the neocon Bush administration. Policymakers within the federal government were trying to suppress objective scientific evidence, to distort scientific findings, and to put people in positions, notably in environment and public health, where they could promote a political and ideological agenda.

Objective science should not be subverted to serve political or ideological goals.

Science is being misused—through efforts to suppress or distort scientific findings, through the appointment of scientists and researchers who meet certain political and ideological rather than professional criteria, through funding politically self serving scientific studies, and through the intimidation of scientists. Newspapers, congressional hearings, and reports from respected scientific organizations such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Union of Concerned Scientists, have expressed concern. Politics is undermining the integrity of the scientific method.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) conducted an investigation into the politicization of science within the government. It found a systematic effort to suppress and distort scientific findings to promote political ends. For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) replaced a web site fact sheet containing information on proper condom use, the efficacy of different types of condoms, and a study showing that condom education does not lead to an increase in sexual activity, with information on condom failure and the value of abstinence. Also, information suggesting a link between breast cancer and abortion was posted on the National Cancer Institute’s web site against the objection of CDC staff who denounced such information as long refuted and unsubstantiated.

The same report indicates that the Bush administration delayed for nine months an EPA report (eventually leaked) that indicated that 8 percent of women between the ages of 16 and 49 have blood mercury levels that could lead to reduced IQ and motor skills in their children. When new rules of mercury emissions were finally released by the EPA, at least 12 paragraphs were included, sometimes verbatim, not from scientific sources but from a legal document prepared by industry lawyers.

Reports commissioned by Henry Waxman documented many distortions of science by the executive, on a par with the suppression of Professor Nutt by the UK government, such as the widespread incorporation of erroneous, politicized information in federally funded “abstinence only” curricula. Some of these misrepresentations include inaccurate statistics about contraception, a false linkage between abortions and breast cancer, the labeling of a 43 day old fetus as a “thinking person” and the notion that “sweat and tears” can transmit HIV.

There is also growing use of political criteria for scientific appointees. Applicants have been asked about their political affiliations rather than their professional credentials. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine released a report entitled “Ensuring the Best Presidential and Federal Advisory Committee Science and Technology Appointments”. Among their recommendations was that “it is no more appropriate to ask Science and Technology experts to provide irrelevant information—such as voting record, political party affiliation or position on particular policies —than to ask them other personal and immaterial information, such as hair color or weight”.