PEOPLE'S ASSEMBLY: A call to action

More than 4,000 people from trade unions and community campaigns attended the vibrant and successful People’s Assembly Against Austerity om 22 June in London’s Westminster Central Hall. You can read full detailed reports of sessions on the CPB website and on the Morning Star website, below is the final declaration of the event:

We face a choice that will shape our society for decades to come. It is a choice faced by ordinary people in every part of the globe.

We can defend education, health and welfare provision funded from general taxation and available to all, or we can surrender the gains that have improved the lives of millions of people for over more than 50 years.

We do not accept the need for the government’s austerity programme. Banks and the major corporations should be taxed at a rate which can provide the necessary resources.

• Austerity does not work. It is a failure in its own terms resulting in neither deficit reduction nor growth.
• It is not just. The government takes money from the pockets of those who did not cause the crisis and rewards those who did.
• It is immoral. Our children face a bleaker future if our services and living standards are devastated.
• It is undemocratic. At the last election a majority voted against the return of a Tory government. The Con-Dem coalition has delivered us into the grip of the Tories’ whose political project is the destruction of a universal welfare state.

We therefore choose to resist. We refuse to be divided against ourselves by stories of those on “golden pensions”, or of “scroungers”, or the “undeserving poor’. We do not blame our neighbours, whatever race or religion they maybe. We are not joining the race to the bottom. We stand with the movement of resistance across Europe.

We are clear in our minds that our stand will require us to defend the people’s right to protest, and so we support the right of unions and campaigns to organise and take such action as their members democratically decide is necessary.

We stand with all those who have made the case against the government so far—in the student movement, in the unions, in the many campaigns to defend services, the NHS, and in the Coalition of Resistance, the People’s Charter, UK Uncut, the environmental movement and the Occupy movement.

We do not seek to replace any organisations fighting cuts. All are necessary. But we do believe that a single united national movement is required to challenge more effectively a nationally led government austerity programme.

We have a plain and simple goal—to make government abandon its austerity programme. If it will not it must be replaced with one that will.

We will concentrate on action not words. We aim to provide the maximum solidarity for unions and other organisations and others taking action. We support every and all effective forms action and aim to build a united national movement of resistance.

Our case is clear. The government’s austerity programme does not work—it is unjust, immoral and undemocratic. Alternatives exist. Debts can be dropped. Privatisation can be reversed and common ownership embraced. A living wage can begin to combat poverty. Strong trade unions can help redistribute profit. The vast wealth held by corporations and the trillions held by the super rich in tax havens can be tapped. Green technology, alternatives to the arms industries, a rebuilt infrastructure including growth in manufacturing are all desperately needed. We are fighting for an alternative future for this generation and for those that come after us.

Proposed Actions

• The People’s Assembly will support every genuine movement and action taken against any and all of the cuts. We support all current industrial actions by the unions. We encourage and will help to organise the maximum solidarity action with the PCS and teaching union members taking protest and strike action the week after the People’s Assembly, as well as with other action by unions planned for the autumn.
• Peoples Assemblies against the cuts should be organised in towns and cities across our nations, bringing all those fighting the cuts together into a broad democratic alliance on a local basis.
• The national and the local Assemblies, in partnership with Trades Unions, Trades Councils, campaigning and community groups, can unite our movement and strengthen our campaigns. Local Assemblies will help us to organise a recalled National Assembly to review our work in the early spring of 2014.
• We will work together with leading experts and campaigners both here and abroad, and friendly think tanks, to develop rapidly key policies and an alternative programme for a new anti-austerity government. We will continue to welcome support from all who fight the cuts.
• We will call a national day of civil disobedience and direct action against austerity on November 5thand a national demonstration in Spring 2014.
• We will support the call for local demonstrations on 5thJuly, the 65thBirthday of our NHS and specifically, at Trafford Hospital, Manchester, the birthplace of the NHS.
• We will work with the trade unions, campaign groups and others to organise and mobilise for a national demonstration at Conservative Party Conference in Manchester in support of our NHS on 29thSeptember 2013.
  

What Civil Disobedience has Done for Us

The Kinder Scout Trespass

Peter Frost, the author of the definitive Haynes Camping Manual, has been writing about a memorable event in the history of political struggle in the UK—in this case the struggle for access to land grabbed in centuries past by so-called noblemen—the Kinder Scout mass trespass. The great act of civil disobedience was inspired by young communists and is widely recognised as the event that opened up the enjoyment of the countryside to ordinary people and led to the establishment of our National Parks and to countryside access legislation. Though it happened 80 years ago, those who enjoy the British countryside are still enjoying the benefits of this act of political defiance, and act that shows what mass resistance can do, even in our right dominated supposed democracies.

Then, in the shadow of mass unemployment, lads and lassies from northern mill towns with little or no money sought free entertainment by walking the high countryside, much of which was private shooting estates and grouse moors. Frequently turned away by gamekeepers protecting the private shoots, members of the Lancashire branch of the British Workers Sport Federation (BWSF) decided they would make a public mass trespass on Kinder Scout, the highest point in the Derbyshire Peak District. Some of the BWSF were members of Manchester Cheetham Young Communist League, and they advertised their trespass in the Daily Worker, the forerunner of the present day Morning Star. The leader of the trespass was a Young Communist called Benny Rothman.

Fortunately Benny wrote the whole story down and his book was published in 1982 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the trespass. Today his book, long out of print, is a collector's item. Rothman's unique story is still an inspiring read, so a much enlarged version has been published to mark the 80th anniversary of the trespass (The Battle For Kinder Scout, Benny Rothman, Willow Publishing, £9.95). The new volume has more pictures, many in colour, more eyewitness reports and tributes to some of the participants such as Communist folk singer Ewan MacColl. The new and additional material, albeit focused on a single issue, makes this an inspiring guide to those in the battle for equality, fairness and justice for ordinary people.

Ignoring “Trespassers will be prosecuted” signs, Benny led about 400 ramblers from Bowden Bridge quarry on Sunday, 24 April, 1932. The trespassers scrambled up towards the Kinder plateau and came face to face with the Duke of Devonshire's gamekeepers armed with sticks, and a scuffle ensued in which one gamekeeper was bruised. The ramblers pressed on to the plateau, where they were greeted by a group of trespassers from Sheffield who had set off that morning, crossing Kinder from Edale. Five ramblers were arrested, four others besides Rothman, and they were charged the next day with unlawful assembly and breach of the peace. Rothman had a previous conviction. He had been jailed earlier for chalking slogans welcoming the launch of the communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, in 1930. Benny Rothman was a firm supporter of the Daily Worker and the Morning Star all his life.

All pleaded not guilty and were remanded to be tried at Derby Assizes by a jury consisting of army officers. Five were found guilty and were jailed for between two and six months, with Rothman getting the longest sentence. It unleashed a huge wave of support and public sympathy, and brought unity to a divided community. Previously, other more respectable and more middle class bodies like the Ramblers and Holiday Fellowship had strongly opposed direct action and the trespass, but public opinion shifted with the reports of the prison sentences.

A few weeks later more than 10,000 ramblers—the largest number in history—assembled for an access rally in the Winnats Pass near Castleton and the pressure for greater countryside access continued to grow. That pressure led in 1949 to “The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act” and to the establishment of Britain's first national park to preserve our countryside treasures. It also led to the Countryside and rights of way legislation that we enjoy today.

At the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the trespass, the Duke of Devonshire and owner of the Kinder Scout grouse moor made an amazing admission:

I hope to have the opportunity of making an apology on behalf of my family. The ramblers were entirely in the right. My grandfather, I think, took the wrong attitude.

In April this year, the Kinder 80 festival, which spanned a week, included nearly 30 walks, talks, exhibitions and events in and around the Peak District. The event was launched at the Moorland Centre in Edale, Derbyshire, where there was a Trespass exhibition. The event saw the launch of the revised, updated and expanded version of Benny Rothman's book. To end the festival was a ceilidh in Sheffield. Kinder 80 committee chairman Roly Smith said:

The 1932 mass trespass was an iconic event not only for freedom to roam legislation, finally achieved by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000, but as a catalyst towards the creation of our National Parks of which the Peak District was the first in 1951. The Trespass anniversary has become an important date in the outdoor calendar and many people believe that the sacrifice made 80 years ago by these ramblers should never be forgotten.

Today the fight to protect the British countryside goes on. Cameron and his coalition government have slashed National Park funding by a quarter and have sought to sell off much of our national forests. Public bodies charged with protecting our landscape, like the Environment Agency and Natural England, have seen their budgets slashed too. The right to enjoy Britain's landscape was never just handed down freely as many people, devoid of historical knowledge and even interest in it, think. Like most of the rights we enjoy, we have fought for them. They have come to us as a result of political struggle and activities like the Kinder Trespass, struggles that still go on today. We let them cease at the risk of again being enslaved.

More can be read by Peter Frost in the Morning Star by searching for “Kinder Scout”, and there is a web page at Kinder Scout Trespass. The book by Benny Rothman is available from Amazon.

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.

Join the Protests against the Greedy Bankers and their Rich Clients

Politicians, most recently European ones, tell us the bankers know best, and so we are wise to let them be in charge of defaulting economies like Greece and Italy. No democratic elections have been held to let the voters pick a new government but technocrats are bringing in total banking domination, as the world’s real economies go down the tubes. So much for the democracy that our banking paid politicians go to wars so frequently in the name of.

Now bankers lent money to weak economies in the first place, so, in the logic of capitalism, bankers made bad investments, and when those weak nations default on their debts, the bankers ought to carry the can. Instead they are given control of the defaulting countries—with the cover propaganda echoing through our ever so fair and democratic media that the countries are bankrupt—so that they must impose austerity, squeeze the people, sack government employees, thereby increasing government costs and decreasing tax income, with the outcome that the banks can lend more to the blighted nation to incur more returns for the banks! It is insane for everyone except bankers and their clients, the über rich class.

At one time, pre-Reagan and Thatcher, if banks took undue risk, they were penalized by the system, but, since Reagan and Thatcher set the greed ball rolling, the more risk bankers take the greater the rewards they get, being bailed out at the cost of empty treasuries when necessary rather than letting the duds and cowboys go bankrupt, and to jail.

Interest rates are zero or fractional per cent so the money is not fed back to customers as a reward for keeping their assets safe, as they used to be, and banks were intended to do. While the banks pay negligible percent, they are lending the money, everyone put in their care, to defaulting countries at exhorbitant interest rates, effectively directly extracting the difference in interest earned from the people working in that country into the banker’s coffers. With bank deposits yielding almost nothing, and inflation growing, the banks are effectively robbing the accounts of their customers. Such blatant larceny and theft has not been seen since the Nazis stole from Jews and opponents in Germany in the 30s.

Yet these gangsters, banksters, bandits are being put in charge of our destinies to preserve the fortunes of the 1 percent of very wealthy people. Join the protests against them. Your own rights are rapidly disappearing. Defend them!

How Incentives Destroy Co-operation and Will Destroy Society

Human societies depend upon each of us helping our neighbors, and not exploiting them, and about 80 percent of us are willing to participate fairly in joint projects of mutual benefit. The other 20 percent are skivers, people who will try to get the benefits with as little effort as they can get away with. The skiving free loaders are not popular with the others who pull their weight, and usually sanctions or punishments are applied to those who try to exploit other people’s mutual effort for their own gain. It is called norm enforcement, the norm being that everyone should pull their weight, and those who do not are deviants from the norm.

Data like these are not difficult to get by testing in controlled situations. If my neighbor and I could each build a house on our acre plot in six months, but by co-operating we could do a better job making use of our complementary skills and finish the two houses in eight months, then we have a clear benefit from co-operating. If the houses still took six months each and were no better, we might as well build our own, and we only have ourselves to blame for anything that goes wrong. The act of co-operating must itself have a benefit or there is no point in it. So setting up a test in which people can share a sum of money they have been given with other participants to get a benefit from the pooled resource mimics my neighbor and I helping each other build a house, as long as it is likely that by sharing we can all be better off.

In such tests, Professor Stephan Meier, Assistant Professor in Management at Columbia Business School, and co-worker, Andreas Fuster, PhD candidate, Harvard University Department of Economics, discovered that when people were given private incentives, norm enforcement became less effective. The incentives seemed to take the edge off the hard feeling towards the skivers.

1. Participants were asked to contribute to a common pool of cash to be divided equally among them all at the end of each of six rounds, whether or not all participants contributed. No kind of norm enforcement was used. People gave only small amounts to begin with, and gave less in each round.
   
2. By adding an incentive to contribute (a lottery ticket), with no opportunity to enforce norms, people contributed more gladly, including free riders.
   
3. Norm enforcement was introduced to the first test, in the shape of a fine on free riders at the end of each round. Those who were fined, most of them, increased their contributions in subsequent rounds.
   
4. Adding the lottery ticket incentive made contributors scale back their punishment of free riders by almost half, and free riders were less likely to make larger contributions in subsequent rounds whether or not they were punished. The result tended towards the previous test without incentives.
   

Fuster says:

Individual incentives can really change the structure of how we deal with one another, what the norms are, and how we enforce norms. If social forces in an organization are important, managers need to be attuned to norm enforcement and peer effects. They should understand that adding monetary incentives can dramatically change this dynamic and lead to a net negative effect.

The point is that the lottery ticket became the aim of participating, there being nothing to be gained by sharing through the common pool. Free riding therefore became irrelevant. Everyone would give just enough to get a lottery ticket, whether a free rider or not.

On the face of it the experiments are flawed. There is no co-operative gain to be made by contributing to the common fund. The pool needs to be enhanced in some way to make it more like human co-operation. Even so, it is easy to see that a separate incentive can draw attention from the whole point of a co-operative venture—the advantages of co-operating—by distracting attention from the primary objective.

It is the reason, for example, why sports can be so easily disrupted by gambling. Whatever is to be gained from illegal betting can make sportsmen actually want to sabotage the supposedly co-operative team objective, and lose for their personal gain.

The same is true of senior managers and board members who begin to give themselves bonuses from the company’s earnings. The drive to maximize bonuses distract from the corporate aims, and when shareholders will not sack managers and board members who are lining their own pockets at the expense of the shareholder, then the managers can run amuck.

That is what happened in our banks. Barclays’ shares for example sank by a half over several years when top managers in most banks lifted their own compensation, including bonuses, by obscene amounts, and shareholders let them get away with it. Needless to say, the holders of large blocks of shares, able to sway any shareholders’ meeting, are often themselves large banks and city institutions, so effectively they are in a scam to rob the ordinary small shareholder and the customers.

Politicians are the same. Their objective is supposed to be to represent the interests of the people who vote for them, but they are all too easily distracted by the wads of maney waved at them from corporate bosses. Tony Blair is getting his compensastion now for his sacrifice of pretending to be a Labour Party Prime Minister, when he was a Republican Quisling. The incentives of the rich soon make most career politics forget what they are there for.

Our societies used to take an extremely dim view of bribery, but no longer. Bribes are today incentives, and the law enforcers themselves are too ready to accept them. A cabal of superrich people have corrupted the western world beyond redemption. Western society is decadent and immoral. Democracy is superficial. We are run by this megarich class, which controls every party with its incentives, incentives to do as they want, and not what is good for society.

The often despised Arabs are showing more courage and awareness now than the once militant workers of the UK and France. Workers in the US have always been too easily fooled by their betters. Even after thirty years of declining real wages, longer hours and poorer conditions for those in work, and a labor pool of twenty or thirty million unemployed or part time workers, while the top thousand or so people have trebled their wealth, the average American is still beguiled by the moribund American dream, Republican crooks and pastors, and their own inability to comprehend what is going on. They are the ones without the incentives, but rather are offered carrots.

Carrots might be incentives for donkeys, but Americans ought to be more sophisticated than those famously uncomplaining beasts of burden. Its time they started to do what the Arabs have already begun. Get out in mass on to the streets, trash a few corporate HQs and banks, and threaten revolution. Social instability is one thing the rich do not like, and can do little about, except getting national guards to shoot citizens.

Then everyone will realize that the state is not theirs, and democracy is an illusion.

Tory Toff Cameron, British PM, Greets His Deputy, Liberal Toff, Nick Clegg

Cartoon by Chris Riddell from Guardian Newspapers and the Observer.

David Cameron is the British Prime Minister. He is a toff, a man with very rich parents who had a very expensive education, the best you can buy in the UK. The British Deputy Prime Minister is Nick Clegg. He is another toff from a banking family, and had a superior education, albeit not quite in the Cameron bracket.

Cameron is a Tory, the traditional conservative party of the UK, while Clegg is a Liberal Democrat, but the two have united in a coalition government against the New Labour Party created out of the traditional Labour party by the machinations of one odious opportunist, Tony Blair. The New Labour Party became unelectable because of the lies, spin, lack of principle, and the general careerism and dishonesty of most of Blair’s pick of grifters who stepped forward to be selected as a candidate for New Labour in the Blair and Brown years.

Clegg’s party pretended to have taken the mantle of the old Labour party in standing up for the ordinary worker and the middle classes, the old, the disabled, the deprived, and generally those struggling to manage in a world increasingly designed to favor the sharks and other financial raptors. But he welched on his promises, and joined David Cameron in the most vicious attack on the standards of anyone less than minted in almost a century.

Clegg, however, leads the junior arm of the coalition, and hence he is depicted as a doormat by Chris Riddell, having to endure the muck and mud of popular ire, and growing sense of betrayal by the Lib-Dems, because the attack on the people would have been impossible without Liberal help, and their full ire would have been directed against Cameron’s Tories.

As it is, the anger is growing, the pressure is mounting. Already students have wrecked the entrance of the Tory HQ on Millbank in London, knowing that good humored, quiet, and orderly demonstrations never get the demonstrators anywhere. They are ignored or subverted from their original aims.

Look at the orderly million strong demonstrations against the Iraq war. The antiwar feeling was rapidly extinguished and turned, by ceaseless military publicity and propaganda, into pro war sentimentality and “charities” like “Help The Heroes”, a way of keeping in the public eye the “heroism” of our soldiers killing peasant farmers, their wives, daughters and sons, in their own homes and homeland 4000 miles away.

All of this is meant to distract public attention from the way they have been robbed of trillions by the bankers and those who depend upon financial fiddling like Cameron and Clegg, not to mention the creepy Blair, so much admired, it seems, in the Land of the Free. Please take him and keep him, treating him to the same torture that he and Bush have meted out in the world, by Bush’s own admission, when the US eventually gets to prosecute war criminals instead of sheltering them.

How Does Mixing Business with Politics Differ from Corruption and Bribery?

Most people would disapprove of corruption. It is one of those things people think are bad. Yet few of these same people realize that politically connected firms get massive benefits from their sponsoring of favored candidates in elections, once their favorites get into government. The bailouts of the banks deemed “too big to fail” are the latest and most obvious example.

A study by Russell Crook and David Woehr of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, found that when firms engage in corporate political activities, such as lobbying and making campaign contributions, they get roughly 20 percent higher profits. So, to fatten your company’s profits, donate to a political campaign!

The analysis of 7,000 firms over various time periods, showed what led them into corporate political activity. The larger the firm, the more likely it was to be politically active, and politicians closer to power, more able to influence policy and legislation, were more likely to receive corporate donations. Incumbents more often got money than new candidates.

Yet in January 2010, the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission overturned an old ruling limiting corporate donations to politicians. It gave the nod to higher levels of corporate political influence. Consequently, corporate political donations will be subject to less scrutiny and transparency, and it will be all the harder to know who is sponsoring whom, and to what amount. Crook said:

Given this, we think that the Supreme Court ruling means that corporations and politicians will develop closer relationships than ever before.

In fact, corporations have already donated more money to politicians in the recent elections than ever before, despite the parlous state of the US economy. It reflects the money that big political donors seem to find quite readily to support supposedly grass roots Tea Parties, despite the country allegedly being on its uppers. Plainly the rich donors are not on their uppers.

Why then do corporate political donations lead to fatter profit margins? The corporate bosses do not like throwing money away to no purpose, so political corporate spending has a purpose, obviously. It is to get favorable legislation enacted. The donations are actually bribes! Besides the bank bailouts, another example was the “Copyright Term Extension Act”, sarcastically called, the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”, in which Disney successfully lobbied to extend US copyrights by 20 years.

Though Crook and Woehr are careful not to say these practices are corrupt, they plainly think they are a cause for concern to citizens. Sticking with the market model, Crook said:

We do not believe that this activity is illegal, but this activity constrains natural market forces and is thus undesirable. And with the new Supreme Court ruling, it is only going to get worse.

The journal, Financial Management, has also revealed that corruption is widespread in the corporate world, and has confirmed successful corporations are often the ones with the most extensive political connections.

Mara Faccio studied several thousand firms and found:

Politically connected firms have higher leverage in the form of preferential loans, pay lower taxes, have regulatory protection, are made eligible for government aid, and have stronger market power. They differ more dramatically from their peers when their political links are stronger, and in more corrupt countries, although these characteristics can be observed worldwide.

She alleges that connected firms appear to enjoy substantial favors from governments, distorting the allocation of public resources. “Firms with no political ties appear to be at a disadvantage”, so, it seems, the pressure is on for all firms to corrupt government! Her study was not restricted to the USA. She looked at 47 countries all together, but political influence by companies was common in both emerging and developed countries, although the methods of political influence varied somewhat.

These studies show that the ordinary voter is oblivious to the way that democracy is commonly swindled by political bribery and corruption, in the USA and in most other capitalist countries, whether advanced or developing. People consider corruption as wrong, but show no curiosity that it is happening daily, and the one who suffers in the end is Joe and Jane Doe, the common man and woman, you and me.

It is time this corrupt system was ended, and it is certain that right wingers dressing up as Captain America and in tricorn hats—led by the nose by private sponsors from among the rich—will not do it. A genuine grass roots movement is needed, and it will probably be led, as it is in France and latterly in Britain, by serious students and angry unemployed young people.

The increasing commercialisation of science

The British Medical Journal reports that increasing commercialization of science is restricting access to vital scientific knowledge and delaying the progress of science. The scientific community is reacting to the increasing commercialization of science. Varuni de Silva and Raveen Hanwella, from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka, argue that copyrighting or patenting medical scales, tests, techniques and genetic material, limits the level of public benefit from scientific discovery.

For example:

• Many commonly used rating scales are under copyright and researchers have to pay for their use.
• Extreme commercialization of science can also lead to patents on medical procedures and techniques. However, the American Medical Association recently concluded that it is unethical for physicians to seek, secure or enforce patents on medical procedures.
• Some genetic tests also carry patents, which prevent other laboratories from doing the test for a lesser cost. Earlier this year, a New York court ruled that patents held by Myriad Genetics for the diagnosis of mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes—linked to breast and ovarian cancer—were unconstitutional and invalid.

The fundamental philosophy of Western science is sharing knowledge, which is why all genome sequences generated by the human genome project have been deposited into a public database freely accessible by anyone, while organizations such as the National Institute of Health and Wellcome Trust insist on open access to publication resulting from research funded by them.

While patenting is a useful tool for protecting investments in industry, the authors write:

We need to rethink its role in science. Although those who consider science as a commodity are willing to invest in research and development, much medical research is still carried out by non profit organizations using public money. It is only right that such knowledge is freely shared. This is possible because academic scientists still consider the prestige of discovery more important than monetary reward.

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.

Protests Make Political Parties More Responsive

Latin American protests have caused deaths and national crises since the 1970s, but democratic reforms too. Moises Arce, an associate professor of political science in the Missouri-Columbia College of Arts and Science, has found that political protests, although they can be violent, can bring about stronger political parties and more responsive policies (published in Party Politics):

Many of these protests in Latin America have led to changes in policies and the direction of the government. In some cases, protests may ultimately be helpful for democracy. The established parties may be taking things for granted. Political protests become forms of street accountability. The change that we have seen after many of these protests is the creation of new parties that better represent the popular interests of society, and, therefore, serve as more effective communication channels for political discourse.

By studying political activity and parties in 17 Latin American countries since 1978, Arce found that most protests were because economic policies favored the business sector. Most recent policies have given Latin America large scale economic stability but little improvement from the general public's perspective. There is still a high level of unemployment, and the public has become more knowledgeable of political corruption:

People have died, so it's unfortunate that government reforms happened that way. Currently, almost all Latin American countries have left or left leaning presidents who tend to be more responsive to popular demands and will create a new political equilibrium between those popular demands and the business sector.

Politicians often argue that protests are disruptive and should be suppressed, and that protests are unnecessary in a democracy, but they are happening and have not damaged democratic stability. Of course, generally the political right are ultimately not interested in democracy, only their own power, and many so called Liberals, and even New Labour “socialists” in the UK, are dupes of the rich anyway, so the trend towards unrestrained global capitalism means that “the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own formal democratic rules”, as Slavoj Zizek puts it. The Patriot Act in the US and similar repressive legislation laid on incredibly thckly by the Blair and Brown governments are far more dangerous to democracy than a few protests, or even the terrorism attacks they pretend to be to prevent.

People in Latin America are becoming tolerant of protests. In Europe and the US, politicians are getting more and more scared of it. Democracy needs both parties and protests. We have the duff parties. All we need now, according to Arce, are more and more determined protests.