New Actors Can Challenge Austerity With Equality: Lessons from the Fawcett Society Legal Challenge

A study by Dr Hazel Conley, from the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary College, University of London and a member of the Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity (CRED) analyses the 2010 Fawcett Case. It finds the UK government has failed to apply laws that protect working women in the wake of the economic crisis. The paper also shows that equality legislation has created opportunities for women’s rights groups besides trades unions to influence industrial relations.

A legal challenge to the 2010 emergency budget was made by the Fawcett Society—an old established feminist organization which campaigns and lobbies for equality for women—on the grounds that it would have a disproportionately negative impact on them. It attempted to get a judicial review of the ConDem coalition’s new austerity drive.

It argued that 72 per cent of public sector cuts announced would be met from women’s income, as would £6bn of the £8bn savings generated in one year. Dr Conley explains:

In addition to these measures on public sector employees, the majority of whom are women, child welfare benefits were frozen, Sure Start maternity grants limited to one child and child tax credits significantly reduced. Poor mothers and women from black and ethnic minorities were the main financial losers.

The overlapping roles of the state as legislator, employer and paymaster, all seem to have had a bearing on the Fawcett Society challenge and its outcome. Before the budget was unveiled, gender equality duties were introduced as part of the Equality Act 2006. These duties were regulations that required public authorities actively to remove unlawful discrimination and inequality from their practices and processes. Failure to enforce could have resulted in a judicial review.

The article draws on documentary evidence, including the Fawcett case judgment produced by the Royal Courts. In the transcript’s opening sections there is a government admission that it had not undertaken the duties’ legally required equality impact assessment of the budget. Despite this legal compliance failure, the Fawcett challenge did not secure a judicial review. Dr Conley says:

The state is the UK’s largest single employer and the judiciary is not class-neutral. Being armed with reflexive equality legislation did not provide Fawcett with any additional powers to challenge the state machinery. The enactment of equality duties and the provisions for enforcement would seem to suggest the government’s commitment to change. In the aftermath of the banking crisis, however, the coalition unleashed a political zeal for economic austerity that has been unrelenting since it took office. If the Fawcett challenge had succeeded the impact would have been momentous. The emergency budget would have been declared unlawful and the new and fragile coalition government would have been rendered virtually paralysed. The government and the judiciary appear to have moved to protect the interests of capital at the expense of working women. There is a clear gap between rhetoric and compliance in this specific but crucial case.

In spite of the High Court ruling, the Fawcett challenge fuelled an intense media debate on the inequality of the budget, particularly in relation to the loss of jobs in the public sector and the ensuing impact on women’s working lives. One tangible outcome of the challenge was that the government produced an equality impact assessment of sorts for the 2011 comprehensive spending review and budget. Another is that, because the Fawcett case failed, the problem is being pushed down to local government and, as the public sector budget cuts continue to bite, equality groups are applying for judicial reviews against several local authorities axing services.

The actions of the Fawcett Society, says Dr Conley, provide empirical evidence that challenging the loss of thousands of public sector jobs need not lie solely with trade unions. Although in the Fawcett case this is likely to complement rather than compete with the role of the unions in industrial relations. Dr Conley warned that equality duties have opened up important ways for “new actors” such as Fawcett to use the law to challenge inequality at work, but “they do not meet their potential if the enforcement mechanisms can be undermined and weakened to suit political and economic objectives”.

The Upper Classes are More Dishonest—Official!

A series of studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto in Canada and reported by the NSF reveal something the well off may not want to hear. Those who are relatively high in social class are more likely to engage in unethical behavior. Lead researcher Paul Piff of UC Berkeley said:

Our studies suggest that more positive attitudes toward greed and the pursuit of self-interest among upper class individuals, in part, drive their tendencies toward increased unethical behavior.

Relative to the lower class, the upper class are more likely to break the law while driving, more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies, more likely to take valued goods from others, more likely to lie in a negotiation, more likely to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize and more likely to endorse unethical behavior at work.

Piff explained:

The relative privilege and security enjoyed by upper class individuals give rise to independence from others and a prioritization of the self and one’s own welfare over the welfare of others—what we call greed. This is likely to cause someone to be more inclined to break the rules in his or her favor, or to perceive themselves as, in a sense, being “above the law”.

They therefore become more likely to committing unethical behavior.

Procedures

Piff and colleagues conducted seven survey, experimental and naturalistic studies to determine which social class is more likely to behave in unethical ways—to engage in behaviors that have important consequences for society such as cheating, deception or breaking the law.

In two naturalistic field studies that examined unethical behavior on the road, researchers were surprised by the differences between upper and lower class people, finding upper class drivers were significantly more likely to pursue their own self-interests and break the law while driving than were lower-class drivers. In these studies, the researchers defined social class by an observable cultural symbol of social class—namely, their car. Drivers of higher-end automobiles were four times more likely to cut off other vehicles before waiting their turn at a busy, four way intersection with stop signs on all sides. In addition, they found upper class drivers were significantly more likely to drive through a crosswalk without yielding to a waiting pedestrian.

In another laboratory study, the upper classes were more likely to cheat to improve their chances of winning a cash prize. Piff and colleagues first measured social class using the MacArthur scale of subjective socioeconomic status, where participants rank themselves on a 10-rung ladder relative to others in society in terms of their wealth, education and the prestige of their jobs. Participants then played a “game of chance” in which a computer presented them “randomly” with one side of a six-sided die on five separate rolls. Participants were told higher rolls would increase their chances of winning a cash prize, and were asked to report their total score at the end of the game. In fact, die rolls were predetermined to sum up to 12. The extent to which participants reported a total exceeding 12 was a direct measure of their cheating. The researchers concluded greed was a “robust determinant of unethical behavior”.

Plato and Aristotle deemed greed to be at the root of personal immorality, arguing that greed drives desires for material gain at the expense of ethical standards.

Due to their more favorable beliefs about greed, upper class people are more willing to deceive and cheat others for personal gain.

Study 4 sought to provide experimental evidence that the experience of higher social class has a causal effect on unethical decision-making and behavior. It was the only study in which researchers manipulated participants into temporarily feeling either higher or lower in social class rank to test whether these feelings actually caused people to behave more or less unethically.

At the end of the study, the experimenter presented participants with a jar of individually wrapped candies, ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory, but informed them that they could take some if they wanted. This task served as a measure of unethical behavior because taking candy would reduce the amount that would otherwise be given to children. People in this study, who were made to feel higher in social class rank, took approximately two times as much candy from children than did people who were made to feel lower in social class rank. Piff concluded:

Across all seven studies, the general pattern we find is that as a person’s social class increases, his or her tendency to behave unethically also increases.

Anybody recognize this?-

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It is the very beginning of the Constitution of the United States, of what is called the Preamble to it. This opening sentence declares clearly the purpose of the constitution, and you will note it includes “establish Justice”, and “promote the general Welfare”, not to mention “insure domestic Tranquility”.

It is easy to understand why rich, right wing demagogues like Rick Perry do not want to accept these fundamentals of the constitution, but why on earth do ordinary US citizens listen to these greedy Republican half wits, spouting off their own interests while confounding the foundational law of the USA. The whole selection procedure is a farce. None of them care who get selected as long as they stick to the right wing game plan. Their slight interest is to go down in history on the list of presidents, but they have no intention of serving “the people”—only their own people. They are selfish frauds. Humiliate them!

The News Media Help Us Understand the Wall Street Demonstrations

Posted originally by COMIC

Empathy—the Hallmark of a Compassionate and Civilised Society

Science is beginning to unravel the mystery of why some people have less empathy than others and the implications are potentially far reaching, not least for the criminal justice system:

Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world. It might even have relevance for politics and politicians, so that when we try and resolve conflict, whether it’s domestic conflict or international conflict, issues about empathy might actually be useful. Given this assertion, it is puzzling that in the school curriculum empathy figures hardly at all, and in politics, business, the courts or policing it is rarely if ever on the agenda. We can see examples among our political leaders of the value of empathy, as when Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk sought to understand and befriend each other, crossing the divide in Apartheid South Africa, but the same has not yet been achieved between Israel and Palestine, or between Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan. And, for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are lost.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Baron-Cohen adds:

The hallmark of a compassionate and civilised society is that we try to understand other people’s actions, we don’t try to simply condemn them. There is even a question about whether a person that commits an awful crime should be in a prison as opposed to a hospital. When people commit crimes, there may be determinants of their behaviour which are outside their control. No one is responsible for their own genes.

More at http://mikemagee.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/empathy-the-universal-solvent.

Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.

Our Decline Begins with Glenn Beck

Kevin Kalmes (opednews.com) writes that the decline of a civilization begins with a breakdown in the most basic principles of a civilized society:

• morality
• spiritualism
• social mores
• rule of law
• moral philosophy
  
  • good v evil
  • virtue v vice
  • justice v lawlessness
  • truth v prevarication.

Sounds just right except for “spiritualism”, but I’ll take it to mean spirituality, and I can accept that when it means the oneness of things.

Kevin continues saying that the degradation of moral responsibility and the deterioration of moral character defines Glenn Beck. He embodies all that is wrong with a civilization that has lost its moral compass. The loss of a moral code allows the basest of human flaws to surface and spawn the antithesis of civilization. When Beck speaks of the antichrist, the beast God will destroy just before the final defeat of Satan, he is speaking of himself. And for the first time, he would be correct in his splenetic blasphemy!

The moral supervision of our Nation needs to first defeat antichrist Beck before we can recalibrate our moral compass and return to the moral code that Americans used to value.

That's all right on the nose, say I. Basically the man's one of a load of opportunistic self serving creeps, who haven't a Christian thought in their heads, and never have had. They are only qualified to speak evil, so that's what they do.

Massacre of the Innocents? Flaws in US Justice

In the USA, which boasts itself the model of all justice and fairness, Cornelius Dupree, 51, had spent 30 years in jail for rape and robbery when Texas District Judge, Don Adams, said he was “free to go”—cleared of his conviction by DNA evidence. Yet just 266 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, according to the Innocence Project, which aims to reform the use of science in the criminal justice system. That most of them are black shows the continuing racial injustice of US justice!

Black men accused of raping white women are falsely convicted than than others accused of rape, and young suspects under 18 are at greater risk of false confession than others. Capital exonerations are less common among those convicted of murdering more than two victims and those convicted of murdering children. When defendants would not confess, and vigorously asserted their innocence at trial, yet were found guilty, the rate of later exoneration is higher.

Attorney Barry Scheck, who heads the Innocence Project, said:

Cornelius Dupree spent the prime of his life behind bars because of mistaken identification that probably would have been avoided if the best practices now used in Dallas had been employed.

Critics say the US criminal justice system is riddled with injustice through bad practices and outdated science, even though modern science and technology can prevent it. The police identification lineup is grossly flawed, and has been known to be for a long time. 75 percent of all convictions proved wrong by DNA evidence start with mistaken identity by eyewitnesses. In 1979, Cornelius Dupree was himself picked out of a photo display by a rape victim. She picked the wrong man!

Brandon Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, points out that people are not as certain of details as they think, and are subject to all sorts of subtle suggestions by police, even subconscious and inadvertant ones, but also, when they want to nail a victim, deliberate ones. Garrett added:

There have now been thousands of studies with incredibly consistent results all showing that suggestion has this outsized powerful effect on eyewitness memory… Even if police are trying their best not to signal anything, the eyewitness—who may be a victim of a crime and hesitant about participating—may be looking to the police officer for reassurance and for cues and may perceive things that weren’t even intended.

The big question, in a country where tens of thousands of cases each year rely on eyewitness testimony for convictions, is “do the administrators of this ‘justice’ want to change their bad but often convenient practices?”. Some, but only a few, do. Some police departments, perhaps a few hundred, have begun to change the way they conduct lineups. One way is to have an officer not involved in the case supervising the parade. Another is to tell the witness that the suspect may not be in the lineup at all.

The same criticisms hold true for other old fashioned police methods that remain in practice even though modern day science has disproved their reliability. Michael Saks, law professor at Arizona State University, calls the pseudo science still used by the police departments “wannabe science”. It includes handwriting, fingerprints, fire and arson investigation, and even forensic dentistry.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for setting the house blaze that killed his three small daughters. Attorney Scheck and other legal experts engaged several fire science experts to review the evidence that convicted Willingham. They concluded the fire was not arson. University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross, said:

The problem with arson cases is that if the defendant wasn’t guilty it is not because someone else did it, it is because there was no crime!

Much US justice, especially in emotion loaded cases, is concerned with having a victim, not catching the real criminal. People want to feel exonerated that someone, anyone, has been punished for what they think is a heinous crime. A conviction will convince them the punishment is just, though they have no idea of the strength of the evidence presented.

That is so in the Lockerbie case, the destruction of an airliner for which Abdul Baset Almagrahi was convicted. The case against him is extremely thin, and looks to have been bought because it suited the US authorities to pin the outrage on to Libya. The conviction does not look just, and unless justice is seen to be done, no one should pretend it is just. Gail Jaspen, chief deputy director of Virginia Department of Forensics, says:

Evidence by itself doesn’t prove somebody’s innocence, because the (forensic science) department doesn’t have the ability to exonerate anybody. Only the court or the governor does.

So however strong the evidence, scientific or otherwise, it may not be enough, when the legal authorities, police, judges, governors, and even presidents, in international cases, already have made up their mind which outcome they favor.

The irreversibility of a death sentence, when evidence is found that undermines a death penalty, is a big argument for its abolition in civilized societies. To keep a man imprisoned wrongfully for thirty years is bad, but the man still has his life, and the state can offer some compensation for wrongful imprisonment. Bringing a dead man back to life remains impossible. Yet, the senior authorities of most states in the Union will not consider abolishing the death penalty, confident as they are it will never be used against them.

Another Election: But US Voters Still Not Being Heard

A poll in Ohio shows independent voters are unhappy with the political system. Previous polls have already demonstrated a low level of trust, among independents especially. 70 percent of respondents reported low satisfaction with Ohio politics, with higher figures among independents than among Democrats or Republicans. Dr John Green, distinguished professor of political science at UA, said:

This unhappiness raises questions about the legitimacy of the political process.

Independent voters thought the political system has been unresponsive to the public, especially on the economy. Participants had a variety of views about the problem:

• we’re not being heard
• politicians were self-serving careerists
• politicians were arrogant and insulated from the problems of the public
• corruption was a common allegation, symbolized by the large sums of money raised and spent in campaigns
• politicians should “wear patches on their suits from their sponsors” like NASCAR drivers.
• people were alienated from the political process
• public officials were puppets of special interest groups.

In the US political system, the buck stops at the presidency, so Obama carried the can, not just for Tea Partyers, but because he had not done enough to address the problems of the average American. But views on Congress were also negative:

• it needed to be revamped
• anything would be better than the system we have now
• members of Congress did not respond to the needs of the public at large
• we just need new people in government
• parties were viewed as hell bent on their own agenda
• parties too far apart on every issue
• it takes years to get anything done
• parties needed to put America first
• parties needed to stay more to the Constitution
• a third or fourth political party was needed to keep the system honest
• a “common sense” party was needed to revive the economy and limit the size of government.

Some thought additional parties would not be “common sense” parties, but a base for lunatics, and would not be competitive. If any were a base for lunatics, it would have to be competitive to match the Republican Tea Partyists. Indeed, many independents were skeptical of the Tea Party agenda, but others were supportive. Many accepted that problems were partly their own fault for not being more involved in politics, but anger and distrust were strong motivations for political activity:

• the people need to exercise their power
• it is time for a revolution

There needed to be more free access and response from politicians:

• more and regular town hall meetings
• quick and thorough responses from contacted officeholders
• a greater presence of politicians in the community
• being a politician should not be seen as a job choice but a service to the country.

These lists of solutions offered are incoherent and inconsistent, illustrating the voter disunity, and failure to comprehend what is happening. It reflect the sense of being ignored by the government among independent voters. There is no way that Americans can solve the problem. They live in a society in which the ordinary people, workers and middle classes, refuse to accept they live in a class society in which the ruling class, the rich elite, control their system from top to bottom. As long as that is so, there can be no change unless the ruling class volunteer to give up some of their wealth and power in a redistribution for fairness and justice. It is not likely to happen. So, revolution is the only option, but that requires unity, and US workers are utterly divided and will remain so while the right wing media are so influential, and their target audience are so gullible.

It is Time We Removed Inequality

Robert H Frank, an economics professor at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, wrote in the New York Times about the present financial crisis, comparing it with past times and using a new survey.

Incomes in the US rose at about the same rate, almost 3 percent a year, for all income levels in the three decades immediately after World War II. Prosperity extended across the whole population, irrespective of class. The country's infrastructure of highways, railroads, dams and bridges were well maintained, and new industries in communications, electronics and airlines were growing.

In the last three decades the economy has grown only slowly, infrastructure is decaying, and many people have trouble finding adequate work because industry is floundering.

Moreover the change in circumstances has not been evenly distributed. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent. The rich have been getting richer ever more quickly while the poor and the squeezed middle classes have remained static or lost out. The situation is plainly unfair and antisocial by any standard.

Societies must be founded on a sense of fairness and justice even if they are not unquestionably fair. The people of the US have been ready to tolerate a degree of unfairness in income and wealth distribution providing that they felt they had a chance of joining the wealthy by dint of personal effort, and proving that living standards generally improved because a large number of people were working in concert to build a better country. In short, providing that income was not distributed unfairly to a minority of the already rich while everyone else struggled.

Frank notes that the founder of modern capitalist theory, the Scot, Adam Smith, who wrote Wealth of Nations, the capitalist's bible, peppered it with trenchant moral analysis. He was, after all, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow.

Yet rising inequality has created enormous losses and few gains, even for its ostensible beneficiaries, the mega rich class, who now have reason to worry that social instability will ruin them, if it is allowed to develop further. In any case, increasing riches alone never improves overall happiness once people have sufficient not to feel insecure. All that happens is that they notice that others are just as well off, and they then want another increase. Everyone wants to keep up with the Joneses, but these people are already loaded!

Frank reveals that he and two co-workers have found that the US state counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress. Even after controlling for other factors, counties with the biggest increases in inequality had the largest increases in bankruptcy filings, and also reported the largest increases in divorce rates, divorce rates being reliable indicator of financial distress.

Families short on cash will try to make ends meet by moving to where housing is cheaper, usually farther from work. So, long commute times are another footprint of financial distress, and the counties where commute times had grown the most were those with the largest increases in inequality.

Even basic public services are no longer being properly maintained because of the persistent objection the rich have to paying their proportionate share of taxation. Rich and poor alike endure crumbling roads, weak bridges, an unreliable rail system, and insecure cargo containers, and many Americans live in the shadow of poorly maintained dams that could collapse at any moment. The right wing lobbyists and their academic parrots say nothing can be done, and most advocate policies like tax cuts for the wealthy that put the burden on the poorest in society.

There is no compelling evidence that greater inequality bolsters economic growth or enhances anyone’s well being. The rich remain a minority, though they hold a majority of the country's dollars. They can buy bigger mansions and host expensive parties, but it will not keep the majority employed and adequately compensated, and in any case the wealth of the rich is mainly invested abroad in places like China and India where the best rates of return can be had, and the exchange rate offer a hedge against losses. Then again the obscene bonuses wall street bankers and brokers pay themselves attract the most intelligent graduates, leaving vital sectors like industry, science, technology and engineering devoid of creative talent—and bang goes any competitive advantage we might expect to have in the future. Yet, any grifter can learn how to gamble in junk bonds but not how to succeed in science or engineering, or even in proper good stock picking.

No one dares to argue that rising inequality is required in the name of fairness. John Rawls in his theory of justice as fairness (A Theory of Justice) though inequality was only justifiable when the poor were nevertheless getting wealthier, albeit maybe not as quickly as the wealthy. So we should agree inequality is a bad thing, and do something about it.

In the UK, Professor Greg Philo suggested that the top 10% should pay a one off tax of 20% of their wealth. It caused some outcry, but surprisingly, a lot of wealthy people were willing to do it. They were the ones who realized it would be far worse if social unrest got so bad, especially if it were worldwide, as is the financial crisis, that all of their wealth might be threatened by social instability. They knew that the one off payment, though substantial, would repay itself if we got into a new ers of financial stability as a consequence. Their remaining investments would soon grow to pay back the lost 20%. Though the short sighted greedy rich would moan like hell until the benefits came through, everyone would end up happy.

War Criminal Blair Tries to Buy Redemption

Catholic Demon tries to buy Sainthood.

This man along with his master, George Bush, went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, causing the deaths of myriads of innocent people, and disrupting and destroying  what had been a stable country, albeit under a dictator supported for decades by the US. He has reaped his reward addressing conventions of rich Republicans, advising banks and businesses, getting unknown expenses and no one knows what other rewards as a so called Middle East ambassador for Israel the United Nations, and now getting an advance on his memoirs of around £5 million. This latter sum and any additional royalties from the book, he has donated to a military charity for damaged servicemen, of which there are quite a number to add to those who are dead. Some of the families of dead soldiers say this is blood money.

Charles Taylor, a petty but cruel dictator of another country, Liberia, is standing trial for much lesser crimes than Blair and Bush, supporting the bloody rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone, financed allegedly by “blood diamonds”, where Blair, attempting to imitate his heroine, petit bourgeois Tory shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher, by sending in a British battalion, got his first taste for military glory.

If this petty murderer is standing trial, then why isn’t Blair and his puppet master G W Bush. Impeach the War Criminals and have them face a judge and jury too.

Tony Judt is Dead

Talking is the point of existence.

Tony Judt

Tony Judt, the progressive historian, has died of a form of motor neurone disease. He described himself thus:

I am regarded outside New York university as a Looney Tunes leftie, self-hating, Jewish communist. Inside the university, I am regarded as a typical old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that.

It is likely that Judt has not moved a lot since he was a boy in south London. What has moved is the center of gravity of politics. Being a liberal was, until a few decades ago, being in the center of the political spectrum. Now, especially in the USA, it is to be a Looney Tunes leftie. The center of gravity of American politics especially has moved so far right, that most of the Republican party sound like raving Brownshirts.

I think what we need is a return to a belief, not in liberty, because that is too easily converted into something else… but equality—equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old, or those with different skills, or from different regions of a country. It is another way of taking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent.

Tony Judt

Three cheers to all that! Can it be achieved though without overthrowing the established order? A language of dissent might be needed to express it, but capitalism and society are mutually antagonistic, and, if the dissent does not lead to action, then western society will collapse or only a successful revolution will have prevented it.

Jail the Banking Confidence Tricksters

Clever bank executives lend money at mortgage to poor people unlikely to be able to repay it. The bankers do not mind because the housing market is rising. They know that when they inevitably foreclose on the mortgage, the property will have risen in value, and they will be able to sell it on, get back their mortgage money and have some left as profit.

This scheme is fraudulent because it is effectively a “Ponzi scheme”, in other words, it is is pyramidal selling. It works as long as the housing market is rising according to expectations. Housing looks like a reliable investment, so people are keen to enter the property market in the hope of making a profit. But eventually, the market will saturate, as it always does once everyone able to enter the base of the pyramid—expecting to move up it—has done. Once this happens, there is no one left to buy up the foreclosed houses, and expectations change. The housing market stutters. Banks cannot sell foreclosed properties, stop lending on mortgage, and the house market collapses.

The banking gangsters—banksters, as Rooseveldt called them—know this, but cunningly decided to package the mortgages they had lent out into bonds giving anyone willing to buy them a proportion of the annual profit from houses foreclosed and sold on. While the housing market was rising, they looked like a risk free investment and were snapped up by stock market traders and even other banksters. Of course, the banksters knew they had to fail ultimately, so devised a cunning plan to get rich while the gravy train was still running. They paid themselves massive bonuses because they were turning over so much money trading in these junk bonds. Bonuses were in cash, so they did not have to risk holding the bonds. Their customers, including the customers and shareholders of the banks took that risk, and even the general public, because the banksters knew that no government could allow major banks to collapse. So the buck ultimately ended with the taxpayer—you and me!

That is what happened, and that is why banks have been given $trillions to bale them out—$trillions of our money.

And have the governments sought to catch the banksters who devised this scam, and others like it, doling out $billions of our money in bonuses to themselves? Not a bit of it. Politicians hope to get their rewards when they leave office by cashing in on the gratitude of the banking gangsters by becoming one.

We all knew it was a scam, except—it seems—governments. But the banks have been so blatant and unconcerned that they will be caught and convicted that they have been utterly blasé about it all. Now we have evidence, perhaps proof, that Goldman Sachs knew all along they were acting fraudulently. One of its executive directors emailed:

The whole building is about to collapse… only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab [himself, Fabrice Tourre]&hellip standing in the middle of all these complex highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of these monstrosities!!!

He understood enough to know the bonds were junk and were about to collapse, but Goldman Sachs approved because he was indemnifying the business by selling the bonds while being in collaboration with Paulson and Co who were short selling the bonds knowing they were junk, so they could buy them at less than they sold them, profiting from the knowledge that they were bound to end up worth less.

Meanwhile Goldman Sachs the famous banksters are paying out $5 billion in bonuses. Or rather we are paying out the banksters $billion bonuses.

It has to be time these people were charged. Do not vote for anyone who does not:

1. undertake to stop banking fraud
2. puts the fraudsters on trial and jails the guilty ones at the top
3. breaks up banks that are considered too big to fail
4. splits lending banks from trading banks
5. properly and firmly regulates the banks that remain.

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

A Judge’s View on the Law and How to Protect It

Lord Bingham, until he recently retired, the most senior British judge was interviewed for The Guardian by Stephen Moss in connexion with the publication of his recent book, The Rule of Law. Bingham’s last three jobs were Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and senior Law Lord. One imagines he is a man who knows the law. He unequivocally condemns the Iraq war of 2003 as illegal:

I took the view which Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst [legal advisers to the Foreign Office in 2003] took—that it simply wasn’t authorized. The whole of the Foreign Office thought this… It is not at all clear to me what, if any, legal justification of its action the US government relied on… If I am right and the invasion of Iraq… was unauthorized by the security council, there was a serious violation of international law and the rule of law… It is, as has been said, “the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante”.

Yet Jack Straw told the Chilcot inquiry he often ignored the legal advice his law officers at the Home Office as well as the Foreign Office gave him!

Michael Wood drew attention to the fact that the ministerial code obliges ministers to act in accordance with national and international law, so it isn’t really good enough to say I don’t take the advice of law officers.

Can anyone tell me how these New Labour ministers, from Tony Blair onwards and downwards, manage to get away with such cavalier disregard for the law, and centuries old British parliamentary and ministerial convention that is meant to save us from fascists. Isn’t it plain that it does not do what it is supposed to do, because a bunch of crypto fascist neoconservatives have taken over Labour as New Labour, and have done just as they wanted in office. And no one is raising a stink about it.

It is one thing to enjoy parliamentary privilege, which is the right to be able to say in Parliament anything an MP thinks has to be said without fear of libel actions or jail—something irrelevant to the fiddling of expenses—but it is another to march roughshod over the country’s hard earned laws and customs, meant to protect us, the people, from becoming subjects and not citizens. New Labour’s thirteen years of legal flatulence has made us subjects again—subjects of any undemocratic authoritarian government, one that has put in place every requirement for a fascist putsch. Why is no one outraged at the unknown number of super injunctions that stop us from knowing what is going on? Why are students not incensed, especially now that Labour is hitting them and their universities harder than ever while continuing to feed the country’s wealth to the bankers? Why are there no lawyers willing to risk being jailed to protect the sanctity of the law?

Lord Justice Bingham notes that the government is using the threat of terrorism to erode our basic freedoms. He approves of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum:

He who would put security before liberty deserves neither.

Precisely, and that is where we are! Bingham believes we are getting the delicate balance between liberty and security wrong:

Liberty is losing out at the moment. Extraordinary inroads are being made into principles that would once have been regarded as completely inviolate, such as the growing practice of putting material [evidence] before some decision-making tribunal or judge that the defendant never sees. When I talk to the young, I’m struck by how, even when they have impeccably liberal instincts on things like torture and the death penalty, they tend to make an exception for terrorists. They’ve grown up in a world post-9/11 in which terrorism has been seen as this colossally potent threat.

The danger of terrorism is no more serious than it was in the seventies and eighties, probably less so, but the threat to hard won liberties is indeed real! Thus Bingham’s Belmarsh ruling in 2004 was that indefinite detention without trial of foreign terrorist suspects was incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. He is proud of it because he felt “the stakes were quite high”. Plainly there are. They put anyone at risk of the same treatment. What can ever be just about jailing, without trial or evidence and possibly forever, someone who is merely a suspect? That is now British law!

Someone thinks someone else might commit a crime so they are confined for an indefinite time. It is the Inquisition. It is witch hunting. It most certainly has nothing to do with any concept of justice. Yet who is bothering. Lord Bingham seems to believe there is nothing to be done to defend good law other than through the ballot box. But no UK party is promising to remove all the bad law New Labour has brought in, and they are all complicit in the neoconservative terrorism myth. So the ballot box can solve nothing. What then? Bingham says, if that fails, we should turn to revolution!

Supposing a government came into power that wanted to introduce a whole lot of measures borrowed from the statute book of Nazi Germany, we would be justified in rebelling, just as we were against Charles I.

So what are the British people, and particularly the youth who have most to lose, doing about it? They have not even noticed. They are too busy having fun, watching reality TV, reading the gutter press, getting pissed, and, like half wits, pretending they are all celebrities.

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 Chilcot 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.

Is Your Incentive a Fat Bonus or Threat of the Sack?

When industrial changes causing hardships to some workers happen unexpectedly and without the government preparing for retraining, the workers remain conservative about their trades, and dislike innovations, new processes and new methods. When such changes are in the permanent interest of the community, they ought to be carried out without allowing unmerited loss to laborers whose old fashioned work is no longer wanted.

Why should, say, a coal miner suffer when the pits become uneconomic, or coal usage has to be curtailed because of climate change? He has not committed any crime, and the closures are entirely outside his control. Instead of being allowed to starve or suffer humiliating poverty, he must be paid to retrain, be given instruction in whatever other trade is within his grasp and is in demand. Everyone ought to have sufficient pay to ensure a livelihood, whether or not the work they are skilled in is wanted at the moment or not. If it is not wanted, some new trade which is wanted should be taught at the public expense. Is that socialist planning? It is capitalist planning because capitalism depends on public spending. Poverty restricts spending, and suppliers fall on to short time, and bankruptcy. It makes sense to ensure a minimal spending level, even when people are unemployed. Welfare is not a dead loss. It lubricates the economy.

Natural human conservatism tends to hold back progress. But most workers are interested mainly in security, security of employment and security of income. Workers determined to stick with dead end jobs are few and far between—a newspaper editors fantasy. People protect dead end jobs only because they know no, or inadequate, provision has been made for them when the obsolete factories close.

The tyranny of the employer, which robs most people of liberty and initiative, is unavoidable so long as the employer retains the right of dismissal and loss of livelihood. It is a right supposed to be essential for anyone to have an incentive to work properly, but, by some curiosity of human nature bankers and corporate bosses, people supposed to be highly motivated, actually need the opposite incentive—vast bonuses and “golden hellos”—to entice them to work. It needs no massive study to realize that this dichotomy of human nature is nonsense. It is the mentality of the slave master over the slave, propagagated largely by overly rich newspaper editors.

Bertrand Russell said as we get more civilized, incentives based on hope become preferable to those based on fear. Everyone, not just bankers, should be rewarded for working well rather than the right wing dogma of punishment for working badly. The banking instance of it is simply a scam—a way of robbing us all by dubious methods—but the system has always worked properly in the civil service, where anyone is only dismissed for some exceptional degree of vice or virtue, such as murder, or refusal to participate in immoral governments plans.

The civil service is always the first target of reactionary newspaper barons, but they are mainly exemplary workers. New Labour has done its best to destroy the civil service even at the highest level. To restore civil servants’ confidence and the esteem we had in them is another essential of any government that is to replace the odious one of the last decade or so.

Greed, Justice and Revolution

The philosopher, Bertrand Russell pointed out a hundred years ago that human beings may be motivated broadly by the desire to possess things or the desire to build things. Property is the direct expression of possessiveness. Science and art are direct expressions of constructiveness. The dominant feature of possessiveness is hostility toward others, either because what others possess is envied, or because the possessor of something others desire is concerned to prevent them from having it. Generally anyone taking what is another’s is doing wrong, but, in the case of great injustice in society, redistribution of wealth in favour of greater fairness is just, and then resisting this justice is unjust. The reason is that society must be stable to survive, and gross injustice renders it unstable. John Rawls allowed that this is so. Even wealthy people have a greater interest in keeping the society which has allowed them to get very wealthy stable rather than collapse in disorder or revolution, and to yield a little of vast wealth is no hardship to them. And the United Nations Charter of Human Rights—much maligned by the right wing press—also recognizes that revolution can be justified when society is grossly unjust.

…it is essential, if man is not compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…

Rawls, bending to US realities, allowed that a society did not have to be egalitarian when inequality helped the poorest in society to be better off, but he saw that excessive inequality could only destabilize society, and consequently that class differences, if necessary, ought to be small. The modern USA has ignored this hitherto, and, if Obama, now is trying to do something about it in the one field of health care, Americans ought to be glad. Regrettably, too many of them are conditioned by bigotry and selfishness. The dangers to America are not from outside. Americans need to examine themselves more closely.