Manufacturing consent – Page 13

Faradiddles and Fairytales

Published on April 10, 2008

Have you heard the one about the jihadi on the No. 81 bus? What about the apparently professional people who believe in witches and demons?

But first the jihadi on the bus.5 Chinese crackers illustrates how an Islamophobic urban myth is slipped into general currency:

Urban myths and Muslim bus drivers praying

[…]

I thought something might be fishy when I saw ‘Get off my bus, I need to pray’ in the Sun last week. Having pictures or even video of a Muslim bus driver praying on his bus does not prove that the driver made his passengers get off so he could pray.

Via Islamophobia Watch, we can have a look at this article from the Slough and Windsor Observer, ‘Bosses defend Muslim who stopped the 81 bus to pray’, which explains:

London United Busways say they have carried out a full investigation after driver Arunas Raulynaitis rolled out his prayer mat to perform his daily prayers, facing Mecca on the number 81 bus in Langley.

Bosses have analysed evidence, including CCTV footage, and say the driver was actually on his 10-minute break when the incident took place at around 1.30pm on Thursday.

They added that the control room had in fact radioed Mr Raulynaitis to terminate the bus outside Langley Fire Station in London Road because it was running late due to road works. Passengers were asked to leave the vehicle while they waited for another bus to pick them up to complete their journey.

[…]

But a 21-year-old passenger – who was hoping to join the bus before it terminated – told the Observer: “People were fuming because they said the driver had asked them to leave so he could pray.

“Most people ended up waiting for 15 minutes and weren’t happy. I was late for work so I got a lift with my friend. But it was a hassle I didn’t need.”

So, the driver was told to stop the bus because it was behind schedule, and he decided to pray at that point because it was time for him to take his break. Not really worth reporting in a national newspaper. Unless you make dodgy assumptions about the guy’s motives.

It’s exactly this sort of story that led the passengers on the bus to believe that the driver had told them to get off so he could pray. If you’re primed to think a particular group are arrogant and prone to demanding other people bend to their whims to accommodate their needs, you’re far more likely to conclude that anything a member of that group does that you don’t like has been done for that reason.

We visited friends in Langley (close to Slough) quite recently and I was surprised – hardly any of the locals were noticeably Moslem or even non-white, oddly so considering it’s so close to Heathrow. Other than at Heathrow itself and in Tesco in Slough did I once see a hijab or a brown face. (Though to be fair, we were only there two days. Perhaps it was the weather.) Funny how these kinds of stories emanate from mostly all-white enclaves, though.

That said, I don’t think anyone should get prayer time at work anyhow, no matter what their religion and/or job is. Do it on your own time and if your prayer schedule doesn’t fit the normal working day, or your Sunday is sacrosanct, then you should look for work that will specifically accomodate that, or be self-employed as many religious do, quietly and with no fuss. But some religious make a hell of a fuss and think their religion should be the way of life for everyone, regardless of their beliefs or lack of them, and many of them are Christians.

Perhaps the media might choose to report on that, or on the increasing stridency of religious people in secular life generally? What about reporting on the government-funded, class and race-based faith schools, currently institutionalising religious sectarianism and embedded privilege into yet another divided generation? The situation can only worsen once this ghettoised cohort of British children gets into the workforce.

As it is a Christian doctors’ association has already pressured the doctors’ ruling body, The General Medical Council, to release new guidelines that allow them, the religious, to refuse treatment to patients for conditions which they find personally morally suspect, on the grounds of a vague all-encompassing ‘conscience.’

The lobby groups, some funded by spiritual/political mentors in the USA, are triumphant, having already successfully bullied UK pharmacists over the matter of refusing contraception and particularly the morning-after-pill.

even that isn’t enough for some religious:

David Jones, a Roman Catholic professor of bioethics at St Mary’s University College, London, said that doctors with a strong objection to abortion may feel like “an accessory to murder” if they directly referred patients to other doctors for the procedure, as the GMC suggests. “How this guidance will be implememented is crucial,” he said.

Jafer Qureshi, a co-founder of the Islamic Medical Ethics Forum, which advises Muslim doctors on issues including medical euthanasia and organ transplantation, added that medical students had recently complained about a “climate of intolerance” to their beliefs.

But where are the lurid red-top headlines about medical missionaries and foreign fundies interfering in the NHS and policing our morals?

If I saw the tabloids campaigning against fundamentalism generally – if only in defence of Page 3 stunnas – and there were a few more disapproving (and true) stories of fundamentalists of other religions than just Islam interfering with the rights of others, then I’d be less inclined to think this Langley item is a made-up story designed specifically to appeal to the average BNP voter.

Fundamentalists of all types seek to overcome their own weakness and ultimate lack of faith by imposing on us. Many (and they’re usually the most visibly pious) secretly lack the ability or the will to hold to the tenets of their religion or to live a right life acording to their chosen beliefs; they know they are weak and it’s so much easier to comply when all the discipline comes from outside.

So they seek to construct a society in which to sin is impossible, a place where they won’t have to try at all and can just go along with the rules, parrot the right words, and be saved with no exertion at all. Which slightly misses the point of the spiritual life, which is all about the personal effort.

But to get back to the way the media treats fundamentalism and the religious; Islamic fundamentalism is demonised because of the way many Moslems look. Many British Moslems are non-white, an artifact of postcolonial immigration patterns. But Christian fundamentalism is nothing to worry about, the media think; after all it’s homegrown, sort of, and mostly practiced by whites (though becoming less so, witness the influence of African evangelicals and EU Catholics). Nevertheless the tabloid news equation can be ultimately reduced to Moslem=non-white=bad, Christian=white (ish)=good.

Myself I’m much more concerned about the GP who’s goes all ecstatic and happy-clappy on Sundays and who thinks dominionism is no bad thing, or the cabinet minister who shirks his duty to his constituents in order to appease an archbishop, than I am about a tired bus driver taking a restful little contemplative break on his own time.

UPDATE: Now see, this is exactly what happens when you give any public ground to the religious.

“We Shall Fight them On The Beaches…”

Published on April 8, 2008

I’ve been looking at New Labour’s security strategy(pdf file) recently and there appears to be a strange omission – what will the government do when food shortages start to bite at home and when the rising human cost of globalisation and climate change pushes more and more desperate refugees to flee starvation, only to wash up drowned on the shores of Fortress Europe?

The Times:

In Sierra Leone, the price of rice has risen 300 per cent and in Senegal and much of the rest of West Africa by 50 per cent. Palm oil, sugar and flour, all imported, have also surged.

[…]

Food riots have been reported in recent weeks in several countries. At least 40 people were killed in protests in Cameroon in February. There have also been violent demonstrations in Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Senegal and Burkina Faso, where a nationwide strike against any more food price increases started yesterday.

Rice shortages in the Phillippines Thailand and Vietnam, long queues for Indian imports in Bangladesh simmering violence in Egypt over inequality and the price of bread: soon unrest over food prices and global inequality will begin to get closer to the borders of the developed world. If prices rise high enough and staples become scarce it may even infect those countries themselves.

Many commentators think that food price hikes and resulting civil unrest may not be temporary events or restricted to poor countries. They say this is a crisis: it’s not just about markets or cyclical recession or inflation, but results from more long-lasting causes, such as globalisation, subsidies, spreading desertification and the growing demand for grain-fed meat from unchecked, exponentially increasing populations.

In Brown’s security strategy

There is to be a significant increase in anti-terrorism police capability, new regional intelligence units, disruption of violent extremist activity, unified border controls, compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals, stronger action against those who stir up tensions and – yes – an extension of preventative detention to 42 days.

Blair and Brown have imposed ever tighter controls on the liberty of the UK population and abrogated unprecedented emergency powers to themselves via the Civil Contingencies Act, in the name of fighting terrorism, but we won’t really feel the full force unless and until there’s public unrest, whether it’s over fuel or taxes or floods or food prices.

The styrategy may not mention it overtly, but possibility of unrest due to food and commodity shortages, complicated by an influx of starving refugees from the rest of the world, is really what New Labour’s oppressive laws have been passed to deal with; the orchestrated fear of terrorism is a convenient fiction to manufacture consent for the oppressive laws that are really there to control us, not some unknown idiot jihadi with a bottle of peroxide. Those biometric databases and ID cards do actually have a purpose other than faciliating the natural tendency of civil servants to commit petty oppressions.

Take entitlement to rations: how can you ration anything, whether it’s carbon, gas, rice or water, if you don’t know who’s entitled to it – or more importantly, who’s not entitled? Much easier for each citizen to get his or her allotted minimum share – and no more – if all their fingerprints or iris scans are on file. Much easier to control who’s entitled and who’s not. But the manipulation of entitlement to food and fuel is a known political weapon: you only have to look at Zimbabwe. Do we want New Labour’s clever boys and girls to have similar power over us?

It’s notable that the UK Resilience website has a section dealing with public protest, but not with food shortages. DEFRA studies show that the UK food chain is not well-prepared for any emergency at all, let alone food shortages.

British civil defence types would point out they’ve been planning for disasters for a long time. Well, they might call it planning, but it’s more about who’s in charge. Rather than making sure infrastructure is sound, commodity stockpiles are sufficient and the population is informed enough to weather a world food crisis, (much more likely to happen than some idiot schoolboy with a dirty bomb) they’ve concentrated on consolidating their own political power. It’s clear that the future that the government has in mind is a dystopia in which we’re all considered criminals, potential terrorists and a threat to the state.

Why might any one of us be considered a terrorist? The prospect of food shortages also puts another twist to the antiterror laws: in a time of scarcity anyone who interferes in any way with the food supply must ipso facto be a terrorist. This could include battery farming protestors (we may yet see a time when Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver are banged up without trial for 42 days) and anti-GM agitators, anti-globalisation activists, potentially even Granny, who’s obviously an antisocial hoarder putting the nation at risk with her cupboard full of flour and sugar.

Environmentalists have been warning politicians of the potential for a food supply catastrophe for years and yet the government and prime minister seem to have spent little time considering that threat to public well-being. What they’re actually worried about is the threat to their grip on power.

Brown’s spent the last 7 years wasting our national resources and public goodwill in spending billions ‘fighting’ the chimaera of terrorism; he’s obsessed with the idea of subversive enemies without and within, when in fact the real enemy of the people has been the political and economic system we live under.

Brown’s very fond of quoting Churchill so perhaps he should think on this:

” One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half.

What, Me Worried?

Published on March 17, 2008

I wrote this post about the lessons Credit Anstalt has for today’s economists last September, just as the Northern Rock will they/won’t they nationalise fiasco was coming to a boil and it seems just as appropriate (see also “I’m No Economist…” now, as the first dominoes of the US banking system start to topple. For Northern Rock read: Bear Sterns – for Bank of England read: Federal Reserve.

Is Northern Rock the new Credit Anstalt? .

It’s a spreading meme and I’m probably one of many thousands of bloggers making this comparison this morning.The British media is ramping up for a full blown panic – could the impending collapse of this overextendxed and undercapitalised bank be just the first of many dominoes to topple in our precariously-balanced economy?

“Don’t Panic, Mr Mainwaring!”

Grimly satisfying as it is to see baby-boomers desperately trying to get their comfy pensions and the profits from their hiousing speculations out of a crumbling bank, unfortunately this won’t just affect the comfortable middle classes.

The knock-on effect will be broad and deep: so many are employed in the financial services and derivative industries that if the panic continues and more banks get into trouble, even if there is bailout and the situation stabilises there will be a massive retrenching and many, many people will be out of a job, from call-centrre operators to cleaners to copier technicians to consultants to sysadmins. If doesn’t stabilise… well, then all bets are off, so to speak.

The UK government’s spokesdroids and our laughable chancellor Alistair Darling are desperately trying to convince us in increasingly shaky voices that it’s not a bank crash – as the public sees right through their feeble protestations and continues to queue for its cash. Reportedly ~~6.1 billion~~ ~~1 ibillion~~ 2 billion pounds has been withdrawn over the last couple of days. It’s Financial Contagion in action

What is financial contagion

“When the thunderclap comes, there is no time to cover the ears” –
– Sun Tzu

A large number of bank failures occurred in the 1930s, accompanied by declines in asset markets, mostly triggered by common adverse business conditions. This seriously weakened the US financial system, and left it unable to support economic activity effectively through financing. Consequently, there was a continuing vicious circle of economic decline and financial weakness.

When asset bubbles burst, or economies suffer a severe downturn, weak banks can become insolvent, and their failure then further weakens other banks causing the problem to spread.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget on September 23, 1998 Alan Greenspan said:
“Developed countries’ banks are highly leveraged, but subject to sufficiently effective supervision both by counterparties and regulatory authorities, so that, in most countries, banking problems do not escalate into international financial crises. Most banks in emerging market economies are also highly leveraged, but their supervision often has not proved adequate to forestall failures and a general financial crisis. The failure of some banks is highly contagious to other banks and businesses that deal with them, as the Asian crisis has so effectively demonstrated.”

But regulation and supervision of individual financial institutions, however much they may be effective, may not necessarily guarantee the stability of the financial system as a whole. Problems in one bank may spread to other parts of the financial system by the common involvement of other banks in one particular risky business area that turns bad, through counterparty exposure to events such as the Baring Brothers crisis of 1995 or the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crisis of 1998, or loss of confidence in one institution may result in funding problems for other institutions if they are perceived to have something in common.

Banks are interconnected through interbank deposits, loans, payment systems, and common markets. An adverse event that drives one bank into insolvency may then cascade to other interconnected banks by generating losses for them. If the losses generated for the next bank in the chain exceed their availability of capital to absorb the losses, then a domino effect of contagion can occur that threatens the whole financial system.

In May 1931, the Austrian Credit-Anstalt bank failed after customers withdrew funds on worries over the soundness of the bank’s loans. A cascade of financial problems ensued, which contributed a great deal to the economic problems of the 1930s.

It started when the bank’s depositors grew concerned about the Austrian economy and the state of the bank’s non-performing loans. After it failed, general confidence in banks was damaged and there were runs on banks in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland. The top four banks in Germany declared themselves bankrupt and the Berlin Stock Exchange closed for two months. British investors in Europe and exporters lost money, the UK suffered a rapidly growing deficit, and foreign investors withdrew, deserting the Pound Sterling for gold and other currencies. The British government raised taxes to try to restore confidence, but investor confidence collapsed, and the pound was allowed to float, declining by over 20% against gold.
Comparisons have been made between the Credit-Anstalt crisis and potential risks in China’s banking system:”

More…

Even if the Bank of England does manage to maintain confidence in the short-term, this is a globalised economy and the US debt situation is so precarious that it could still tip us all into a worldwide depression.

Recession, resource wars and climate change, what a prospect.

I’m going out into my garden to sit in the last of the summer sun and to try not to think about it any more for today but perhaps I will think about investing in a wheelbarrow.

Lord knows what’ll happen today as the financial markets open and realise the precariousness of the economic precipice they (and we) are teetering on the edge of. We’ve already seen at least one suicide from the subprime mortgage crisis.

Increasingly shrill financial commentators and market pundits are all over the tv and radio attempting to talk things down; but even they. the eternal cheerleaders of the neoliberal corporate agenda, are having to admit something they never thought they would: that they have no idea – no idea whatsoever – what will happen next. And they’re scared.

Some of us have been scared for a long time, since Bush was elected. How is it we’ve seen this coming but the pundits haven’t?

First They Came For The ‘Malingerers’…

Published on March 13, 2008

Who’s David Freud, and why’s he getting such an easy ride from the media?

Freud a connected City banker and former journalist who made his name in PFI deals and massive privatisation schemes and was therefore of course the perfect choice to conduct the review of welfare policy which resulted in yesterday’s budget announcement that sick people will be forced into to work, fit or not, by the imposition of even harsher medical tests.

Incapacity benefit is a benefit paid for by national insurance contributions from working people and payable to working people off sick, and the current regime is already one of the harshest in Europe:

For the first 28 weeks of absence from work due to illness or injury, an employed person is entitled to just 72.55 a week. This is called ‘Statutory Sick Pay’ and it is paid by the employer. Self-employed people can claim the Lower Rate Short Term Incapacity Benefit, currently 61.35 a week, plus 37.90 for an adult dependant.

For weeks 29 to 52, for both employees and the self-employed, the Higher Rate Short Term Incapacity Benefit is 72.55 a week for the claimant and 37.90 for an adult dependant.

After 52 weeks, a single adult is eligible for as little as 81.35 a week in State Incapacity Benefits (4,230.20 a year). If that same adult had a spouse, they may receive just 130 a week (6,760 a year). Additional benefit depending on age also applies – 17.10 for under 35s, 8.55 for those aged 35 to 44.

Furthermore, Incapacity Benefit is taxable after the first 6 months of claiming.

But then you can’t sell off a social security system and bureaucracy that actually pays out money, can you? Where’s the profit in that?

The second element of his report is the proposal that responsibility for such support and training programmes should be handed over to 11 large contractors, each of whom would have total responsibility for one region. They would be given the contracts to look after claimants for up to three years and would be paid according to results, with a ‘successful’ long-term outcome being that the claimant stops claiming for up to three years. In other words, they would share in the benefits ‘saved’.

This would be a recipe for coercion of claimants, as well as creating untold opportunities for fraud as the corporations seek to provide training and support for claimants with their sister companies. This bonanza for the employment services companies comes despite Freud?s admission that there was no conclusive evidence that the private sector outperforms the public sector on current programmes.

Let’s face it. Darling and Brown have nothing else left to sell to cover the great gaping hole in the public accounts.

The bloated rich got away virtually unscathed in the budget, as did corporations; a sop of a rise in universal child benefit was thrown to the vast, struggling, indifferentiated middles (the poor won’t get it, it’ll be deducted from their benefit, so that’s all right) and the chancellor also chickened out on green taxes for fear of the wrath of the airline and transport industry. but the least able to fight back, well, screw them.

There is no black hole in the public accounts, apparently, there is no looming recession – no, it’s all the fault of those lazy workshy sick people – just look at them leeching off the state to the tune of 50-odd quid a week. Each! There’s your hole in the public accounts!

Why, they should be out there picking leeks in Lincolnshire in the rain for a fiver an hour less four fifty in deductions – what’s a little diabetes or kidney disease or arthritis? Nelson commanded a ship with his arm blown off. Bunch of frauds says Freud:

Fewer than a third of the 2.7 million people claiming incapacity benefit are legitimate claimants, a government welfare adviser has said.

David Freud, an investment banker, said up to 185,000 claimants work illegally while on the benefit.

He told the Daily Telegraph it was “ludicrous” medical checks were carried out by a claimant’s own GP.

What? Their own doctors said they’re too sick too work? Then they must be lying. Or there must be something wrong with the tests. Stands to reason. But no, David Freud doesn’t even know the system he’s criticising. ICB medicals are carried out by BAMS, the privatised medical service.

State Incapacity Benefit can be claimed for an initial 28 weeks on the basis of assessments provided by the individual’s doctor.

After 28 weeks, individuals must complete a lengthy questionnaire and be assessed on their ability to carry out any occupation – not just the role carried out before they became ill. Fifteen different functional areas are examined covering physical, mental and sensory abilities. Each functional area is assessed and State Incapacity Benefit only continues when the total impairment is sufficiently significant across the full range of areas.

Whatever – the government can’t be spending all this money on unproductive sick people, not when there’s a war to fund. (Funny how Iraq didn’t get mentioned in the budget..).

You’d think the media would notice and investigate the background to these draconian changes; remember when Thatcher stopped the free school milk? Then it was all “Thatcher, Thatcher, milk-snatcher”. But unelected crony David Freud does something much, much worse and yet the British media consistently say nothing that’s not laudatory about the very rich man who wants to drive the already poor into deeper poverty.

Why?

It could be because British journalists have swallowed the myth of New Labour meritocracy, largely because it justifies their own privileged positions as deserved, seeing those who are poor, or sick or otherwise disadvantaged as being there through their own fault, the converse of which is that the rich, like Freud, are rich because they are such superior being).

I’m pretty sure there’s a generous helping of that, yes, but I think mostly he’s getting an easy ride because of his name and his connections. No-one wants to offend a Freud, it’d be career death to any budding journo.

Freud is related by birth and marriage to a family that’s embedded in the cultural and public life of the country, not least in the media and journalism.

Other notable members of the Freud family in the media include such luminaries of spin as Edward Bernays, the father of public relations. Cousin Matthew of Freud Communications, PR agency for Live8 and the G8, is married to Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert and a media mogul in her own right.

The backing that Live 8 has won from media mogul Rupert Murdoch is just one indication that a massive business machine has been set in motion. Murdoch?s British tabloid the Sun gave the event enthusiastic support, although it is not a paper noted for its interest in Africa or liberal causes. It is, however, a key supporter of Blair.

The Murdoch and Live 8 connections are close. Elisabeth Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch?s daughter, is married to Matthew Freud, one of the organisers. Freud runs a leading public relations company that is, according to the Financial Times, one of the most influential in the UK. It has the largest media and entertainment client list in the country, with clients including famous actors and major companies such as AOL?of which more later. He and his wife also have connections to the Blair government. They sit on various government committees, and his company, Freud Communications, has organised events for both the government and the Labour Party.

And of course the man himself is a former FT journalist. How very nicely circular.

Should any future scholar want a case study of how Labour turned into a party of patronage and moral corruption they could do worse than study the history of the younger sprigs of the Freud family during the Blair years.

The rise and rise of the Freuds and the abolition of Clause IV are all of a same piece, as is the victimisation of disabled people by someone who’d probably spend more on feng-shuiing their conservatory than 6 months incapacity benefit pays someone with cancer. Yes, very socialist.

When – and they will be if there’s any justice in the world – Labour politicians are called to account for the ruin of the country, they’ll probably claim that they were deliberately subverted from within and it was all a capitalist plot.

But no. It’s no plot against them, it’s by them –New Labour know and have always known exactly what they’re doing. Eventually corporations are to have complete control over people’s livelihoods and the conditions of their existence. David Freud and his colleagues in the media/Westminsterl/City nexus are right in the vanguard of the process.

The experts and academics present were the theorists and ideologues of welfare to work. What linked many of them together, including Aylward, was their association with the giant US income protection company UnumProvident, represented at the conference by John LoCascio. The goal was the transformation of the welfare system. The cultural meaning of illness would be redefined; growing numbers of claimants would be declared capable of work and ?motivated? into jobs. A new work ethic would transform IB recipients into entrepreneurs helping themselves out of poverty and into self-reliance. Five years later these goals would take a tangible form in New Labour?s 2006 Welfare Reform Bill.

Incidentally Unum Provident is already delivering incapacity benefit medicals for the government while selling policies by emphasising the lack of state benefits. No conflict of interest there, then.

I wonder if (and if so, how many) Unum Provident shares Brown, Darling, Freud et al have in their private portfolios?