The Case Against the EU

The response of the European Union to the 2007-9 global crisis lacked democratic solidarity, protection of individual rights and social renewal, exposing starkly the lack of proper democracy in the EU. Its forms of democracy were generally observed but not the content of them, and even the forms were sidelined by emergency measures.

National electorates had a free choice of whom they wanted in their parliaments but the parties thus elected had no freedom to choose their economic or social policies in response. Big business and big banks used an army of lobbyists to set the political agenda in Brussels and thus the equivalent policies by national governments. The electorate, especially the working class and those deprived of work, as well as small business owners, found themselves deprived of any voice in how they were governed—how they wanted to respond to the crisis.

Liberal democracy everywhere seemed blind to its own erosion, but the working class directly experienced the hardships of neoliberal EU policies which they had no means of influencing. The proletariat experience was that of a growing awareness of their loss of sovereignty, the issue that had motivated British trade unions, many in the Labour Party, and bold spokespeople like Tony Benn, to oppose the referendum of 1975 to Remain in the EEC—as the EU was then—after Heath had taken us in with no reference to the people's wishes.

Popular sovereignty is the working people and small business owners that rely on them having some influence on their living and working conditions. In ensuring the real participation of the lower class, liberal democracy has always been deficient and social democrats also failed to notice it. It has led to a growing sense of despair and powerlessness among poor workers who had seen their jobs and communities disappear. This was the cause of the mass protest visible in the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum. To ignore that protest will only exaggerate their despair, and lead to the response often seen in the last century, and increasingly today in the European Union—fascism.

The decline of democracy and loss of sovereignty indicate the shift the EU was intended to generate in favour of capital and against labour, leading to a escalating insecurity of employment, income, health care, social provision,pensions, etc. Meanwhile capitalists rapaciously appropriated national wealth, thereby vastly increasing inequality. These trends were happening throughout the capitalist world ever since Thatcher and Reagan had made greed and therefore neoliberalism respectable, but the EU with its "Social Chapter" conjured by Jacques Delors to persuade workers and particularly trade unions to get onside—and succeeding—rather than trying to counter inequality failed adequately to confront its own crises—like that of the Eurozone—continued to favour capital and worsened labour conditions, wages and social action needed to mitigate the problems.

On top of these systemic failures of the EU caused by its self inflicted legal obligations to favour competition, the migrant crisis—exacerbated by the US and Nato's military bullying of nations in the Middle East and North Africa—gave right wing, fascist and cryptofascist forces a perfect excuse to spread fear of a threat of alien hordes taking over white peoples' countries in Europe. Islam was again posited as the historic enemy of Christian Europe. It was an ideal excuse for the right to claim to be the guardians of national sovereignty as guardians of Christian Europe and claim popular leadership on all matter political.

Yet in the UK, for long a multicultural country with a national fondness for foreign food—Indian, Chinese, Italian—the fear was not of the Asian or African refugees so much as the impoverished workers from Eastern Europe entering because it was one of the EU's Four Freedoms, that of free movement, whereby these poor people were willing to undercut the wages and conditions of those working people here who were already suffering poverty and deprivation themselves. The aim of the free movement clauses of the four freedoms set in the concrete of EU law is precisely to boost capital at the expense of labour by the legal enforcement of the right of poor Poles, Rumanians and others to move to wealthier countries in Europe to undercut local wages and conditions, thereby cutting capital costs and maximising profits.

Those of us on the Left advocating leaving the EU do so because it cannot be a liberal--meaning free and fair—democracy when it is conditioned by immovable pro-capital, pro-competition laws built into the roots of its legal structures. It is "neoliberal", a modern economic ideology hearking back to Adam Smith's description of early capitalism in "The Wealth of Nations", but devoid of Smith's precautions. Smith considered Liberal to refer to the freedom of the bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—to do as it liked economically. Neoliberalism differs from it in that the precautions that Smith foresaw as needed in liberal capitalism—because it could be foolishly rapacious and potentially unstable, needing those limits to be placed upon it by the otherwise liberal state—could be bypassed and just applied in exceptional circumstances. Marx went much further in the next century, explaining that the intrinsic instability of capitalism meant that it could not be permanently managed. It was a sort of house of cards that could be built with care, and repaired to a degree, but ultimately would collapse. The periodic crises we find in capitalism are the equivalent of a few cards falling out of place and needing attention, but eventually there will be a terminal crisis leading to social revolution and socialism, often preceded by imperialist wars to grab the resources of other people like a burglar robbing a house when needing fresh funds.

These crises keep happening but so far the capitalist class, with the aid of its lackeys in government, have been able to avoid the collapse except in certain circumstances where the might of world capitalism us subsequently exerted by sanctions or military intervention to overthrow the revolution. So neoliberalism ultimately is a synonym for blatant capitalism and has little or nothing to do with what most people would understand as "liberal". Of course, the Liberal Party is capitalist as was New Labour, the remnants of which are still in the Parliamentary Labour Party and doing their utmost to stop us from leaving the EU.

Germany is the ascendant member of the EU, initially making use of its industrial leadership and favourable trade balance to become the EU's creditor nation, enabling it to force EU debtor countries to accept internally oppressive policies like market liberalism and austerity as conditions of its financial bail-outs—Greece being the archetypal example. Such adverse practices causing income maldistribution and weak demand, impacting on our high streets, is a consequence of the devotion of the EU to its capitalist and neoliberal bases in the treaties. Governments have to try to solve the crises in the interests of capital and competition at the expense of labour and the social policies that could mitigate the effects. Of course, the proper answer is to reject neoliberalism all together, as the Corbyn led Labour Party proposed to do, but for which an exit from the neoliberal restraints of the EU is essential. The social democratic attitude within the EU is precisely what is not needed—and the reason for its rapid decline—as exemplified by Martin Schulz, leader of the German Social Democratic Party in 2017 who argued that austerity could be stopped and national investment promoted by aiming to have a fully federal United States of Europe by 2025 (achieving what Hitler in Germany and his henchman Moseley in Britain wanted before the last war). As if to emphasise the EU attitude to democracy, he wanted to expel member states who opposed his plan. The UK could still be the first if leavers refuse to accept the establishment bullying and propagandising that has saturated the country in the three years since the decision was taken.

The social democratic left in the UK seem to hold similar views to Schulz, defending the EU in the name of socialist internationalism. They imagine the EU offers simply a neutral structure of union government and administration able to adopt and apply any policies based on their merits. The EU is, to repeat it yet again, structured in law to favour capital and obstruct labour. Inasmuch as this means industrial capital, it is the German industrial capitalists who benefit. The EU is beyond left wing reform. The notion that some campaign to co-ordinate left wing governments in enough countries simultaneously so that they can enforce a programme of anti-neoliberalism is utter fantasy, for even if it happened, restructuring the Eu would still be an almost insuperable problem. It is not in the least likely because the "democracy" of the EU is designed to make it essentially impossible. What is possible is to leave!

The democratic deficit of the EU is the reason for the popularity of the right wing authoritarian parties across Europe. The paradox is that the EU's own authoritarianism would suit them, if they were able to control the EU bureaucracy. To counter this menace the policies hitherto proposed by the Corbyn government need to be followed, and real socialist internationalism would be to use them to influence the left across Europe, whose own leaders have sold out to neoliberalism. These are policies to favour labour, strengthen democracy, regain sovereignty, and offer socialist rather than purely capitalist recipes for change could be spread from a successful implementation here.

In short the left must reject capitalist conformity and recapture its traditional radicalism. Not to do so leaves that field open to the bogus offerings of the ultra right and cryptofascists to gain even more strength from popular support, only to turn to their real masters, the capitalists and their militarists, once they believe the left has been out maneouvred and the working class have been conned.

The Political Threat of Today

The political threat of today is the attempt by the billionaire backed radical right to undo democracy, centrally in the USA, but world wide.

That something was happening began to be realised in the early 2010s. Extreme decisions were being made by some US elected officials:

• In Wisconsin in 2011, the newly elected governor, Scott Walker, submitted legislation to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights, by new rules decimating their membership.
• In New Jersey Governor Chris Christie started vicious attacks on teachers who were left wiondering why.
• Some other GOP-controlled state legislatures were cutting public education by legalising unregulated charter schools and offering tax subsidies for private education.
• In 2011 and 2012, legislators in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills, mostly aimed at low-income and minority, young and less mobile elderly voters, to suppress voter turnout.
• Finally the Republicans aimed a massive campaign to defeat Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
  

Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, “we are destroying our institutions”. What he and other, even conservative, critics never considered was that was the objective!

Well, some did. William Cronon, a University of Wisconsin historian and the incoming president of the American Historical Association, having looked into Wisconsin Governor Walker’s attack on trade union rights, declared:
“What we’ve witnessed [is part of a] well-planned and well-coordinated ‘national’ campaign”.
He suggested that others look into the funding and activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose members were not revealed to the public. Every year Republican legislators could draw on hundreds of “model laws” for them to introduce to their states. Such laws covered:

• attacks on labour unions
• rewriting tax codes
• reversing environmental protections
• privatizing public services
• acting against illegal immigrants.

A fifth of them succeeded in being passed!

What was going on? Jane Mayer, a well known investigative journalist, in 2010 drew attention to those who had poured more than a hundred million dollars into a “war against Obama”. She wrote Dark Money a book revealing that two billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch (each worth $48.7 billion in February 2017, according to Forbes) were training operatives to staff supposedly independent but really connected institutions like the Cato institute. Rich right-wing donors led by the Koch brothers were supplying masses of untraceable money to groups and candidates intent on crippling unions, restricting voting, deregulating corporations, taxing the poor, and denying climate change all informed by the schools of trained operatives they had built. The current vice president, Mike Pence, is an example having been with many of these organizations over the years.

Historian, Nancy MacClean, extended Mayer’s discoveries and this year published a controversial book, Democracy in Chains, explaining them. George Monbiot wrote that the book was “the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past half century”. She found James McGill Buchanan to be the intellectual source of the threat to democracy. Charles Koch became interested in Buchanan’s work in the early 1970s when he called on his help to start the embryonic Cato Institute. Buchanan became a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute.

Charles Koch was an entrepreneurial genius who had multiplied the earnings of the corporation he inherited by a factor of at least one thousand, but he also had a dream of liberty—not individual liberty for all, though that is how it is always presented, but of a capitalism all but free of governmental interference and thereby able to achieve the prosperity and peace that only this form of capitalism could produce—well that is his dream! How, though, could it be achieved in a democracy? Only by grooming the most promising libertarian thinkers to find a way. Koch had obsessively worked for three decades to do it.

From the outset, Charles Koch made it clear to Buchanan he wanted no one to know what the objective was. The people would not support the plan, so the cabal had to work in secret. Stealth was to be an intrinsic element of the conspiracy, and Buchanan agreed. They would use their knowledge of “the rules of the game”—how modern democratic governance works—to win.

Buchanan sought an economic definition of incentives to analyse and influence government behavior. Justice and fairness did not come into it for Buchanan. He was only aware of “collective” power, and that, once formed, democratic movements tended to persist, keeping tabs on government officials and sometimes using them to vote out those who stopped responding to their needs. The only fairness that concerned Buchanan and Koch was that the rich minority (and those who dreamt of joining them) suffered, and that was not “American”.

Buchanan regarded the need for elected representatives to respond to the demands of the electorate to win their votes as “government corruption”. He determined to stop it, but he recognised few politicians would risk electoral rejection to carry out his ideas. He named the study of how government officials make decisions (ie political behavior) “public choice economics”. His analysis of how the rules of government might be altered so politicians and administrators could not act on the will of the majority he called “constitutional economics”. The electorate and their organized social and political groups that sought to influence government representation became “the collective order”—the enemy!

So, by the end of the 1990s, Koch had from Buchanan the ideas he wanted. From then on, he donated generously to save capitalism from democracy—permanently! Buchanan’s deep analyses of how incentives guide government action was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 having initiated research on how politicians' and bureaucrats' self-interest, utility maximization, and other non-wealth-maximizing considerations affect their decision-making!

Buchanan believed that government failed because of bad faith—because activists, voters, and officials alike used talk of the public interest to mask the pursuit of their own personal self-interest at others’ expense. By the 1970s, he was insisting that the people and their representatives must be permanently prevented from using public power as they had for so long. Those diligently representing their electorate had to be manacled. The plot is a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance.

The dream of this movement, its leaders will tell you, is liberty. Buchanan told an interviewer:

I want a society where nobody has power over the other. I don’t want to control you, and I don’t want to be controlled by you.

It sounds so reasonable, fair, and appealing. But the last part of that statement is by far the most telling, because the “you” Koch, Buchanan and their trained cadres do not want to be controlled by is the majority of the people. To them, unrestrained capitalism is freedom. What this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few, an elite. It is fascism.

The way forward was by shifting the focus from “who rules” to “changing the rules”. For “liberty” to thrive, Buchanan decided the task was to figure out how to put legal—indeed, constitutional—shackles on to public administrators and legislators. They would no longer have the ability to respond to the mass of the people to get government to do their bidding. Once these shackles were put in place, they had to be binding and permanent. Though euphemistically called the “constitutional revolution”, by legally enforcing the permanent rule of a capitalist elite, indeed, it was a stealth road to fascism!

Realising that the vade mecum of revolutionary organization had already been written by Vladimir Lenin, Koch appreciated the power of Lenin’s system of cadres. So, paradoxically it seems, he funded “cadres” of high-level operatives to build a movement that refused compromise. The cadres fed morsals of the plan to elements of the large active conservative grassroots base thereby gradually drawing them in. Indeed, after 2008, the cadres increasingly adopted a cloak of conservatism, seeing advantages in doing so, though contrary to their aim to destroy the democratic system. Similar opportunism motivated Koch’s courting of the religious right, even though many libertarian thinkers, Buchanan included, were atheists who looked down on believers. Their aims had considerable common ground with TV evangelical types—men like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Tim Phillips, money grubbing exploiters themselves. So they were happy to sell libertarian economics to their flocks, especially campaigns against public schooling and calls for reliance on family provision or charity in place of public welfare.

The Koch team’s most important stealth move, beginning in the late 1990s, and the one that proved most critical to success, was to wrest control over the machinery of the Republican Party, tough the plotters had no loyalty was to their own anti-democratic cause.

US senator Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, spotted the mischief makers, perceptively describing the infiltrators as “cannibals” seeking “the end of governing as we know it”. The Reagan Republican and six-term US senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, exploded after being targeted by a challenger from his own party in 2012 and declared:

These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re radical libertarians… I despise these people.

They were not what they claimed. This cause is different. Pushed by relatively small numbers of radical-right billionaires and millionaires who have become profoundly hostile to America’s modern system of government, an apparatus decades in the making, funded by those same billionaires and millionaires, has been working to undermine the normal governance of our democracy. And the Republican Party is now controlled by fanatical believers in a selfish capitalist goal that brooks no compromise.

Although its spokespersons would like you to believe they are disciples of James Madison, the leading architect of the US Constitution, it is not true. One of their manifestos calls for a “hostile takeover” of Washington, DC. Their real eighteenth century hero is John C Calhoun. He developed his radical critique of democracy a generation after the nation’s founding, as the brutal economy of chattel slavery became entrenched in the South—and his vision horrified Madison.

Their cause, they insist, is liberty, by which they mean the separation of private property rights from the reach of government, and the takeover of social services (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations. For the many it is anything but liberty, it is slavery. The objective of the Kochites is to stop democratic resistance, and they have almost succeeded.

How Easily We Forget!

We read that within two months of the outbreak of World War I, as many as 640,000 young men had volunteered for service in the British army. They gathered outside recruiting offices in crowds so large that mounted police sometimes had to be called in to control them. 90 years on, Tony Blair had to lie to the nation trying to convince it of the moral and legal justification for invading Iraq. A century after “the war to end all wars” the British seemed convinced it should have been, and a million demonstrated against Blair’s fraud. But had popular opinion about warfare really been transformed from a stance of naïve patriotic fervour, to one of widespread aversion or abhorrence?

Cambridge visiting historian, J Winter, thought it was the consequence of a process of cultural evolution:

I do think that one reason Tony Blair lied about weapons of mass destruction was because he couldn’t take the nation with him in support of war. That is a consequence of the contribution artists, poets, filmmakers and others have made to our understanding of the horrors of war. Only a fool would argue that cultural history only moves in one direction at any given time. Nevertheless, there is clearly something that has brought most people to the view that war is simply not a legitimate human activity any more. Time and again culture has shown us that the best defence we have against the ravages of war is the human imagination itself.

There is a certain absence of reality here. It is true that artists and poets were in the forefront of those objecting to the mass murder justified as war, but in the intervening decade, the establishment has pushed warfare down our throats continually, and now there seems to be no substantial body of people willing to object to us acting like fascists in invading other people’s countries and killing poor people, men, women and children in their own homes. The lauding of heavily armed soldiers as heroes is nothing less than obscene, yet the BBC TV does it ad nauseum. With Wootten Bassett no longer the featured town for public displays of sickening one-sided sentimentality, it has now found a new one in the appropriately named, Warminster.

Our utter failure to comprehend the scale of our crimes is that we soak up the propaganda of intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries, something that for decades after WWII was wrong because it was considered as openly fascist, the very thing that the fascist countries recently defeated, like Nazi Germany and Bushido Japan, had done in their attempts at power grabbing, but following the lead of Tony Blair—a Catholic Saint in the making when the miracle appears—in West Africa and Serbia, then Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of other people’s countries has become acceptable as the norm, and people now write to newspapers demanding it.

Yet, while condemning Assad in Syria for killing allegedly 8000 of his own people, the figures of how many people we are killing in Afghanistan are never published except as journalistic estimates, but they are not slight, and are certainly of the same order. The long term propaganda against Gaddafi ended up in another lie, a so-called no-fly zone, which even the Russians and Chinese were willing to accept, but which turned out to be a full scale air attack which destroyed the country’s main communications and fuelling centers, and killed 50,000 people, according to the government of the anti-Gaddafi victors. Everyone knows that at least a million people were killed in the Bush/Blair WMD attack on Iraq, and the Clinton/Blair sanctions on medicine and supplies that preceded it.

Do we seriously expect that we can treat people like rats and expect them not to bite back? Six British soldiers were killed in one explosion, to be accompanied by the usual BBC and Sky sentimentality, and mock shock.

“Ingrates! We try to help them and this is what we get.”

Just what would these people do if a foreign army landed in this “Sceptred Isle” and started to kill us in our homes, streets and fields? We certainly would not feel gratitude for the brave foreigners dying to “help” us.

Well, get real! Nor do the Afghans, and nor will the Syrians, if we try the same trick there, and nor will the Iranians, who are the real object of this continuous war build up, and propaganda.

Now we hear from politicians advocating the mayhem and their brain-dead supporters—including some parents of the dead, but not others—that we ought not to stop because, if we did, “our lads” will have died in vain. Does anyone seriously buy this? We have to keep sending in battalion after battalion to lose their lives until maybe we might win. It is the gambler’s insane way to recoup his gambling debts. Double up, each time. Eventually he must win. Yes indeed, if he has infinite resources to risk. In this case lives! These dolts are gambling with the lives of our own youth, and are murdering mostly innocent peasants abroad, assuming that we must win before our resources run out—before we run out of young men.

Well, at present we have plenty of young unemployed. They had better be ready to lose their lives as well as their incomes, if the present insane strategy is to work. Major economic crises, like the one between the world wars, ended up in mass brutality. The west is building up to a mass attack on Iran which could be nuclear, and will lead to many deaths and possibly a new World War with Russia and China.

It really is time for us all to begin objecting on a serious scale, to follow the lead of the sensitive souls who wrote moving verse, sang sad songs, made troubling images, and produced films exposing war for what it is—mass cull of human life—in the hopes that it really would end all war. Jay Winter thinks they succeeded, but we are fighting one long continuous war, and have lots of heroes, many dead and more horribly injured.

How can a mass cull of our own children be of value to us? We are not facing any serious external threat like Hitler. Our threat is right here at home. It is our warmongering rulers.

The UK Far Right is Ready to Arm Against British Moslems

In a survey of political extremism—From Voting to Violence? Far Right Extremism—Dr Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations, and Professor Jocelyn Evans, of the University of Salford, examined a YouGov survey of 2,152 supporters of the British extreme right wing parties, the British National Party (BNP), the UK Independence Party and the English Defence League (EDL).

To call a spade a spade, these are fascist or crypto fascist parties, so the results are hardly surprising. Large numbers of BNP and UKIP supporters agree that violence between different ethnic, racial and religious groups in Britain is inevitable. The BNP holds that view more strongly. Many went as far as approving armed conflict to ldquo;defend &the British way of life”, evidently a euphemism for killing British Moslems. Dr Goodwin said:

It is current and former BNP members who are the most likely to think that violence may be needed to protect their group, and that inter group violence is largely inevitable.

Large majorities of BNP and UKIP supporters are convinced that Islam poses a serious danger to the West. Dr Goodwin added:

Both groups express high levels of anxiety over Islam and its religious institutions. Both BNP and UKIP supporters would feel bothered by the presence of a mosque in their local community, but to a much higher degree among the BNP supporters. BNP supporters in our sample are overwhelmingly concerned about immigration and Muslims, almost to the exclusion of all other issues. Both BNP and UKIP supporters are considerably dissatisfied with the way democracy is functioning in Britain, and again BNP supporters are the least satisfied.

The authors stress that the report is exploratory rather than a definitive assessment of far right views. Their intention is that this will lead to far bigger research project analysing the beliefs held by far right extremists.

We want to examine whether these views, taken from a relatively small sample, are specific to the far right in Britain. This would include a much larger national population and serve to strengthen the evidence base we have, which is currently weak compared to that on religious extremism.

No doubt a lot of ordinary British people, readers of the dominant right wing press which daily stirs up hatred for immigrants, feel the same way. The answer is not to kill people but to stop hate mongering by millionaire press barons. Certainly, if we are to believe the history of Christianity, that Christians cite proudly, making martyrs of a persecuted monority is only likely to feed religious fanaticism. The Christians boast of their martyrs, just as do the Moslems, but Christians have few martyrs these days, they have millionaire TV evangelists instead, but our insane governments are giving Moslems all the modern day martyrs they need.

Fascists always pick on some unpopular minority to foster hatred of. It is a way of uniting people who otherwise have nothing in common, except their hatred or suspicion of the minority. For Hitler it was the Jews. For the Zionist Jewish state of Israel it is the Palestinians, who are, of course, Moslems. For western fascists the Moslems are the hated and feared minority, but the fear has been engendered by western and Israeli governments grossly abusing Moslem people in their own countries for decades, and indeed centuries.

Despite the justified suspicions of Romans, Christians ended up dominant, forcibly closing all rival religions and introducing a thousand year dark age in Europe. Those who refuse to learn from history are forced to relive it, as George Santayana famously said, though few people ever took any notice, especially the far right and our right wing politicians, whose simple philosophy is “if a battalion is not sufficinet to win, then send in a division, and if that is insufficient then send in an army, and if…”. Greater force is their perpetual answer, but all they do is lose the people, causing massive bloodshed in the meantime. If there are devils in the world, these right wingers are they. They are a distraction from our real enemies, the 1% and their management and banking prostitutes.

Most Moslems by far in the west are poor, they are with us among the 99% and so are our allies. Unite with them!

Media and Ruling Class Undermine Social Values by Labelling Valid Demands as Extreme

Ever wonder why the media will report a few protesters breaking windows or fighting police when a hundred times as many register their protest peacefully? Naturally, like much media focus, it distracts from the purpose of the protest, but new research shows how support for a popular cause can be cut by labeling it as “radical” or “extreme”. Thomas Nelson, co-author of the study and associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said that is why calling political opponents extremists is so effective, and popular as a political tactic. he added:

The beauty of using this “extremism” tactic is that you don’t have to attack a popular value that you know most people support. You just have to say that its supporters are going too far or are too extreme.

And people fall for it because we mostly consider ourselves civilized, and not at all extreme, and so tend to divorce ourselves from the extreme cause or group, even though we might actually prefer it given a fair chance. Thus people supported a gender equality policy when other supporters were not mentioned, but when the proposers of the same policy were described as “radical feminists”, participants in the study supported the policy much less.

Experiments in Evidence

1. 233 undergraduate students were asked to read and comment on an essay that they were told appeared on a blog. The blog entry discussed the controversy concerning the Augusta National Golf Club’s “men only” membership policy. This policy caused a controversy in 2003 before the club hosted the Masters Tournament. Participants read one of three versions of an essay which argued that the PGA Tour should move the Masters Tournament if the club refused to change this policy:

1. One group read that the proposal to move the tournament was led by “people” or “citizens”.
2. Another group read that the proposal was led by “feminists”.
3. The third group read that the proposal was led by “radical feminists”, “militant feminists”, and “extremists”.

Additional language reinforced the extremist portrayals by describing extreme positions that the groups allegedly held on other issues, such as getting rid of separate locker room and restroom facilities for men and women.

Participants were then asked to rate how much they supported Augusta changing its membership rules to allow women members, whether they supported the Masters tournament changing its location, and whether, if they were a member, they would vote to support female membership at the club.

The findings showed that participants were more supportive of the golf club and its rules banning women, less likely to support moving the tournament, and less likely to support female membership, when the proposal to move the tournament was described in language redolent of extremism and radical feminism. Nelson explained:

All three groups in the study read the exact same policy proposals. But those who read that the policy was supported by “radical feminists” were significantly less likely to support it than those who read it was supported by “feminists” or just “citizens”.

By associating a policy with unpopular groups, opponents are able to get people to lose some respect for the value it represents, like feminism or environmentalism.

2. In another experiment, 116 participants read the same blog entry used in the previous experiment. Again, the blog entry supported proposals to allow women to join the golf club. One version simply attributed the proposal to citizens, while the other two attributed them to feminists or radical feminists.

Next, the subjects ranked four values in order of their importance as they thought about the issue of allowing women to join the club:

1. upholding the honor and prestige of the Masters golf tournament
2. freedom of private groups to set up their own rules
3. equal opportunities for both men and women
4. maintaining high standards of service for members of private clubs.

How people felt about the relative importance of these values depended on what version of the essay they read:

1. Of those participants who read the proposal attributed simply to citizens, 42 percent rated equality above the other three values. But only 32 percent who read the same proposal attributed to extremists thought equality was the top value.
2. On the other hand, 41 percent rated group freedom as the top value when they read the proposal attributed to citizens. But 52 percent gave freedom the top ranking when they read the proposal attributed to extremists.

Observations and Conclusions

Nelson commented:

Tying the proposal to feminist extremists directly affected the relative priority people put on gender equality v group freedom, which in turn affected how they felt about this specific policy. Perhaps thinking about some of the radical groups that support gender equality made some people lose respect for that value in this case.

This tactic of attacking a policy by tying it to supposedly extremist supporters goes on all the time in politics. Opponents of President Obama’s health care reform initiative attacked the policy by calling Obama a “socialist” and comparing the president to Adolf Hitler. Nelson explained:

These tactics can work when people are faced with competing values and are unsure what their priorities should be.

Environmental values, for example, may sometimes conflict with economic values if clean air or clean water laws make it more difficult for companies to earn a profit.

If you want to fight against a proposed environmental law, you can’t publicly say you’re against protecting the environment, because that puts you in the position of fighting a popular value. So instead, you say that proponents of the proposed law are going to extremes, and are taking the value too far.

The problem with this tactic for society is that it damages support of the underlying values, as well as the specific policy. Nelson:

If you use this extremism language, it can make people place less of a priority on the underlying value. People may become less likely to think environmentalism or gender equality are important values.

Maybe that is why supporters of the Republican Party in the USA seem to be utterly immoral and obnoxious in general, although large numbers of them profess Christianity. As their bibles say, if they ever got round to reading them, you cannot serve God and Mammon. They serve Mammon, and so their Christian values, if they had them in the first place, evaporate.

When the media run down anyone whose policies seem fair and right, remember these studies. Even civilized people might have to protest violently to stop the propagation of obnoxious and selfish ones by the 1% and their media and academic lackeys. So look carefully at what extremists are extreme about. You might agree with them.

The Banker by C-J Moncur

The Banker

Hello, my name is Montague William 3rd
And what I will tell you may well sound absurd
But the less who believe it the better for me
For you see I'm in Banking and big industry

For many a year we have controlled your lives
While you all just struggle and suffer in strife
We created the things that you don't really need
Your sports cars and Fashions and Plasma TV's

I remember it clearly how all this begun
Family secrets from Father to Son
Inherited knowledge that gives me the edge
While you peasants, people lie sleeping at night in your beds

We control the money that controls your lives
Whilst you worship false idols and wouldn't think twice
Of selling your souls for a place in the sun
These things that won't matter when your time is done

But as long as they're there to control the masses
I just sit back and consider my assets
Safe in the knowledge that I have it all
While you common people are losing your jobs

You see I just hold you in utter contempt
But the smile on my face well it makes me exempt
For I have the weapon of global TV
Which gives us connection and invites empathy

You would really believe that we look out for you
While we Bankers and Brokers are only a few
But if you saw that then you'd take back the power
Hence daily terrors to make you all cower

The Panics the crashes the wars and the illness
That keep you from finding your Spiritual Wholeness
We rig the game and we buy out both sides
To keep you enslaved in your pitiful lives

So go out and work as your body clock fades
And when it's all over a few years from the grave
You'll look back on all this and just then you'll see
That your life was nothing, a mere fantasy

There are very few things that we don't now control
To have Lawyers and Police Force was always a goal
Doing our bidding as you march on the street
But they never realise they're only just sheep

For real power resides in the hands of a few
You voted for parties what more could you do
But what you don't know is they're one and the same
Old Gordon has passed good old David the reigns

And you'll follow the leader who was put there by you
But your blood it runs red while our blood runs blue
But you simply don't see its all part of the game
Another distraction like money and fame

Get ready for wars in the name of the free
Vaccinations for illness that will never be
The assault on your children's impressionable minds
And a micro chipped world, you'll put up no fight

Information suppression will keep you in toe
Depopulation of peasants was always our goal
But eugenics was not what we hoped it would be
Oh yes it was us that funded Nazis!

But as long as we own all the media too
What's really happening does not concern you
So just go on watching your plasma TV
And the world will be run by the ones you can't see

Written By Craig-James Moncur
16/10/2009

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Scientists, Republicans and Democracy

A 2009 study of US scientists by the Pew Research Center found that:

1. 6 percent consider themselves Republicans
2. 55 percent consider themselves Democrats
3. 39 percent consider themselves independent
4. 9 percent consider themselves conservative
5. 66 percent consider themselves liberal or very liberal.

It seems scientists have no affection for conservatives and Republicans, perhaps a good reason why Republicans are now the anti-science party. Or maybe scientists simply reject Republicans because they are anti-science (Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science). Science denial today is more pronounced on the political right, which, unlike the center-left is far more likely to question climate change, evolutionary theory, and biomedicine.

One reason for the latter is that Republicans now depend upon fundamentalist Christians in the South and the Midwest to get elected at all, and this means they have to pander to biblicist posturing on creation and evolution. Psychologists have repeatedly shown that highly intelligent, educated people reject religion as childish and unreasonable. As our leading scientists are necessarily intelligent and educated—quite unlike far too many Republican candidates for high and even presidential office—they are not likely to be impressed by those who think Bronze Age myths deserve more respect than modern science.

Washington is a magnet for unprincipled spinesless worms keen only on their own political and financial progress, and not on serving the people, or doing so only to the extent that they will benefit somewhat incidentally from doing so. Such men get their rewards from the mega rich whose wealth bankrolls the party, and put themselves in a position to receive them by pandering to the lowest common denominator of their electorate.

We are seeing what J S Mill, in a work much admired by right wing libertarians (Liberty) feared most of all, the oppression of the minority by the majority—the dictatorship of popular opinion. The right wing media feed the intolerant dogmata of the ignorant and their representatives by forcing into prominence false “controversy” on supposedly liberal grounds. Needless to say, Mill was against such false liberalism. Feeding false ideas to suppress true ones is not liberal, it is fascist. It is the “Big Lie” method of the Nazi propagandists.

Fascism is elitism, and elitism never supported democracy and liberalism. When the elite has all the money, it has all the power. In particular it owns the media, and so controls popular opinion, controls the financial apparatus, and controls where the jobs are. If the media cannot fool enough people, the banks and corporations will destroy their lives, by foreclosing on their homes, or by shipping their local factory somewhere else, often not even in the USA.

Liberty is expressed metaphorically as letting a thousand flowers bloom, not covering every acre with the same monocultured plant. Liberty is tolerating a plethora of views, not forcing one, usually wrong one, on to everybody, like it or not. That is the theocracy that the fundamentalists aim for, and the wealthy elite will gladly go along with it, if it means they keep their wealth and power.

Scientists are among those who can be relied upon generally to see what is going on, and to question it. The professional bodies of scientists ought to be standing candidates for office. They can aim to, at least, set a high intellectual and moral standard for candidates. If the electorate rejects them, it deserves what it gets.

The British Labour Party in 1931 put in its election manifesto that the electors had before them the choice to plan their economy or to perish. Hugh Dalton, a Labor minister, wrote:

By a majority of two to one they voted for perishing.

In the next twenty years under the victorious right wing government, the depression continued and led into WWII. Today, Americans have a similar choice. To get and preserve a liberal society, you do not vote libertarian, you vote liberal.