The Long, Bloody Struggle for Freedom

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008), English Poet

Why do so many ordinary Americans, mainly Republicans, think the ruling class is on their side in their struggle for freedom? They are far from free. Their electoral system is a rich man’s toy mean to keep out the poor and middle classes, yet the poor and middle classes in the USA think they are free, and brag about it. Not only that but they want to export their brand of freedom and their rulers to the rest of the world, and cough up the tax dollars they can ill afford to keep the military going, and send their sons to distant fields to die murdering foreign families. That is the Christian nation, is it?

Hardly an advert for the US ruling class or their Christian supporters.

US Middle Class ready to Revolt against Wall Street Parasites and Financial Terrorists

The Max Keiser Report 65

A Better way of Organising our Politics

Something is profoundly wrong, with the way we live today.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

We have wasted the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have been consumed by the locusts, or more precisely by the shamelessly greedy. It has been the era of all the Dicks, from Cheney to Fuld, politically “an age of the pygmies”. Unregulated markets have crashed. Wars of choice have left bloody destruction in their wake. The snouts have been buried deep in the trough. Beyond the noise of guzzling, we can hear no moral critique of what has happened, no shout of rage that things don’t have to be like this.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed, not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt… encourages dissent from conformity, for which there is much to be said. Blessed are the troublemakers.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

[But] social democracy is not something that Americans can talk about, though there is a bit of cognitive dissonance about their attitudes to the public and private realms of social provision… [In the first thirty years after the War] planning, progressive taxation, high public spending and nationalized services brought inclusive economic growth with increasing equity and social harmony. A mostly benign state provided the security for which people yearn, replacing the market’s invisible hand with more visible supportive direction. Maybe all was not for the best, but it was pretty good all the same—and would have gladdened the heart of that scion of egalitarian Eton, John Maynard Keynes… According to Judt, since the 1980s, from Reagan to Bush, from Thatcher to Brown, it has been downhill all the way, with growing inequity, a declining belief in the role of the state and a falling away from civic engagement.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt is proudly a man of the left… He is intellectually brave—witness his well founded criticisms of Israel’s policies in Palestine. Beyond the imaginings of most of us, Judt is personally brave, too; motor neurone disease has left him quadriplegic.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

From The UK Observer

Stop the Afghan War—Save our Public Services and Jobs

Dozens of soldiers are spilling out of choppers around the villages. The insurgents are on their radios, getting ready to strike. [Captain] Dan is not going to let them, and soon the night sky lights up with air strikes, gunships, rockets and bombs. Around dawn, Dan's lieutenant radios. He is with the village elder. There are five dead and 11 wounded women and children. Dan is depressed. he wants to go down and explain. He wants the villages to know there were bad guys there… NYTimes, writer, Elizabeth Rubin

Rubin asked Captain Dan whether he knew this would happen. “Yeah, I did”, he replied. She adds that his choice was “my soldiers or the Afghans”.

Rubin is content to leave it at that, but Captain Dan was attacking Afghan people, men, women and children in their own homes in their own villages, and to Captain Dan—doubtless one of our heroes—the Afghan men, by defending their homes and families, are defined as being “bad guys”. Naturally, the Afghans, defending what is theirs, do not realize they are bad guys at all and have to have it explained to them—if they are still alive!

Is it right that we should be killing people in their own homes, thousands of miles away from our own homes, because our odious and gruesome leaders have decided that they are bad guys who will kill us in our beds if we do not kill them in their beds first? It plainly is not. The enemy has metamorphosed from being international terrorists, Al Qaida, to being the Taliban, a local Moslem sect who had nothing to do with 9/11! They are the heroes, not our brave boys. Our brave boys are the bad guys, by any standard of morality. Which one of us would not defend our own homes if we were placed in the situation the Afghans have been put in? The Americans did it against the British. Why then are they objecting to others doing the same? Why are they acting as imperialists, like king George's British? Are they hypocrites?

Stop the War!

Incidentally, the UK’s heroic Christian leader, Dr Gordon Brown, says he will spend an extra £5 billion on the war next years, yet he is cutting public services and sacking people allegedly to save a few million pounds. Are our leaders insane idiots, or do they just take us to be? Do not vote for a war party!

Freedom for Sale: John Kampfner

John Kampfner at Index on Censorship, says by the time Blair left office, he had built a surveillance state unrivalled anywhere in the democratic world. Parliament passed 45 criminal justice laws—more than the total for the whole of the previous century—creating more than 3,000 new criminal offences. That was two new offences for each day parliament was sitting.

• Police and security forces were given greater powers of arrest and detention.
• All institutions of state were granted increased rights to snoop.
• Individuals were required to hand over unprecedented amounts of data

New Labour has made the left suspicious of civil liberties, liberties it was always concerned to protect, for they are necessarily removed always by fascist governments intent on destroying liberty as a whole. From ID cards to CCTV, to a national DNA database, to long periods of detention without charge, to public order restrictions on protest and curbs on free expression through draconian libel laws, New Labour rewrote the relationship between state and individual. It laid the footings of a fascist state, just as the USA Patriot Act did.

Meanwhile, blatantly unprincipled and hypocritical, Blair’s government colluded with US “special rendition” flights, the transport of terrorist suspects to secret prisons, with transit rights at British airports, and serious questions have been raised about the UK’s role in torture.

A party that should have intervened for social justice and greater equality instead allowed the bankers to rob us by setting up pyramid schemes to pile up bonuses, then, when the scheme inevitably went bust, arranged for we suckers to pay them the huge deficits they had created, and without any noticeable inclination to seek retribution. Instead, ministers sought ever more ingenious ways of watching us, listening to us, and telling us how to lead our lives. Why is all this not sending out a strong whiff of Naziism?

It is all surprising because, in Britain, since Victoria, we have prided ourselves on liberal traditions. Yet now those who complain about individual rights are regarded with disdain or hostility. Kampfner in a new book (Freedom for Sale) thinks people around the world, whatever their different cultures or circumstances, have been too willing over the past 20 years to trade certain freedoms in return for the promise of either prosperity or security. We have elevated private freedoms, especially the freedom to earn and spend money, over public freedoms, such as democratic participation and accountability and free expression. What he calls “globalised glut”, the thirst for material comfort, the ultimate anesthetic for the brain.

If he is right, we are now moving from the new 1929 to the new 1930s, with the prospect of a new world war in a decade. Sounds as if we should all be reading this book. The we had better wake up.