Life under Capitalism – Page 3

“Now is not the time to play the blame game”

Published on July 17, 2012Leave a comment

As some government spokesfucker said on PM this afternoon.

So when is it time to blame G4S for their fuckup and inability to deliver the security personnel they were paid for? Not to mention those who thought it a good idea in the first place to contract a private security firm for such a sensitive assignment? Because really, it’s typical that once again the public sector has to make good the failures of oh so efficient free market:

The G4S chief executive, Nick Buckles, has told MPs that he regrets ever signing the Olympic security contract that has turned into “a humiliating shambles” that has left his company’s reputation in tatters.

But Buckles made clear that he is not going to fall on his sword and resign his £830,000-a-year job before the Games are over and astonished MPs by insisting that G4S is not going to waive its £57m “management fee” despite accepting 100% responsibilty for the security debacle.

The G4S chief executive clearly dismayed MPs on the Commons home affairs committee by saying he still couldn’t guarantee that all the 7,000 security guards the company is contracted to supply will turn up on the opening day of the Games. He disclosed that a further 500 troops could be called up if the 3,500 put on standby last week don’t prove enough.

The G4S boss confirmed that his company will pay all the extra costs faced by the military and the police for replacing private security guards when they fail to be supplied, including accommodation. He also made clear that the company will now also consider paying £500 bonuses to armed forces personnel whose leave has been cancelled to cover for the Games.

Really, at this point what needed to happen was to a) yank G4S off this contract and b) replace their employees with proper police and such while c) billing them for the costs and not paying them for anything they’ve done so far. Preferably the few security guards they actually did manage to hire/train should be transferred to the olympic organisation itself. I really don’t understand why, since their head honcho can’t even say how many people they will have available, anybody is still counting on them to deliver anything.

It really is privatisation in a nutshell: take the money, fuck up, fuck off and let the public sector clean up your messes.

It’s super crip!

Published on July 11, 2012Leave a comment

You know how sometimes you notice something interesting but can’t really talk about it because you don’t have the right words for it? From an Canadian course about disability in the media:

The second disability stereotype that will be explored is “disability as hero by hype”. This stereotype is more commonly referred to as “the super crip” pereception. When not pitied, persons with disabilities are sometimes seen as “heroes,” or in other words, outrageously admired for their “courage” and determination. This stems from the belief that life with a disability must necessarily be horrific and unsatisfying, and as such, we must admire persons with disabilities for being able to live “the way they do.” Much like portraying disability as a form of lesser self-worth (as is often the case with the “disability as pity” stereotype), placing persons with disabilities on a pedestal is another way to denote this social group as “other”. This particular stereotype is also linked to the idea that disability in one area is complimented with superior abilities in another area (for example, the misconception that people who are blind have superior hearing)

“Super crip” is a good term for an phenomenon that has long irritated me, the way in which certain disabled or chronically ill people are periodically held up by the media as heroes for “overcoming” their disabilities. It’s always some nice middle class boy who got paralysed in a car accident but doesn’t let that stop him from fullfilling his dream of going white water rafting in the Amazon or mountain biking off Everest or whatever, who always take pains to distinguish themselves from all those other disabled people by showing how little they let their disabilities dictate their lives.

To be fair, it’s not so much those people themselves, though they can be annoying, as the narrative in which they are placed, which is threefold. On the one hand, it’s all about how, if only you believe hard enough, you can overcome any adversity and still be what you want to be, as a moral example for all us ablebodied people struggling with our petty problems. On the other hand, these are also stories about assuaging our own fears about becoming disabled and worthless, by showing disability as just another obstacle to overcome, rather than something that shapes your day to day life. Finally, on the gripping hand, it others all those disabled or chronically ill people who can’t or won’t fit the super crip profile, who just live ordinary lifes of quiet desperation like the rest of us. If you’re not hang gliding off the Niagara Falls you’re just not trying.

The super crip than is the other side of the coin of the stereoype of disability as pity, the idea that if you’re disabled or chronically ill your life is basically worthless and you’re very brave if you haven’t killed yourself yet — “in your place i’d killed myself! — cheers. Sandra, who of course had been chronically ill in one way or another, hated that. She was very firm in insisting that she wasn’t a hero, she was just an ordinary person dealing with life just like everybody else, even if she had to be more aware of her limitations than a temporarily able person need be.

The super crib stereotype is a stick to cudgel both temporarily able and disabled people for not being good enough to be as wonderful as them, yet another tool to keep the status quo. Clearly if Oscar Pistorius can compete in the regular Olympics on prostathic legs, surely you in your wheelchair are able to make your way through everyday life without our help and we don’t need to worry about ways to make society as a whole more accessible, physically and mentally, for people with disabilities. Similarly, why are you, a perfectly healthy worrying about your trivial problems when heroes like Pistorius can make history? Surely there’s no need to do anything for you, when he can pull himself up by his bootstraps and he doesn’t even have feet!

(Nothing against Oscar Pistorius, who seems a perfectly decent chap and who I hope will do well in his races.)

A simple demonstration of a complex problem

Published on July 10, 2012Leave a comment

Take a staircase in an underground station in New York with one step slightly higher than the others, point a camera at it, then watch as one after another people stumble over it. Et voila: a ready made metaphor for the uselessness of discussing social problems in terms of individual merit. For any given person walking up those stairs it is true that, if they knew about that step in advance, or paid attention to the people stumbling in front of them, or just looked a little bit closer at the steps, they wouldn’t have stumbled, as you can see many people didn’t in that video. But it is not true that everybody can do that: people don’t pay attention, misjudge why the people in front of them stumbled, are new to staircase and so on.

So it goes too for e.g. the recession. If there are three million people chasing two million jobs it is arguably true that any of those three million could get a job if they just made the right decisions, put more effort in it, knew the right people, did everything right, but you’re still left with one million people unemployed who did do everything right but still couldn’t get a break. Therefore, any unemployment policy that doesn’t take into account this simple fact, but is based on trying to spur individual people back into work, is doomed to fail.

It’s left to the reader to extend this analogy to other societal problems like the obesity epidemic, ballooning student and mortgage debts, and so on, as well as to explain why consumer action is not enough to end child labour, exploitative business practises or make companies green.

The only way to win is not to play

Published on May 26, 20121 Comment

Via Blood & Treasure, Kosmograd on the Olympics Brand Exclusion Zone:

In essence, London has abdicated all rights and responsibilities to the International Olympic Committee, and implemented legislation which creates radical new spatial demarcations not only within the Olympic Park, but because of the distributed nature of the Olympic venues, across the whole of central London. London has surrendered the traditional rights to the city to the demands of the Olympic ‘family’ and their corporate paymasters. What the IOC want, London will give. London will be on brand lockdown.

The most carefully policed Brand Exclusion Zone will be around the Olympic Park, and extend up to 1km beyond its perimeter, for up to 35 days. Within this area, officially called an Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restriction zone, no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed.

Kosmograd also mentions the “guerilla marketing” (sic) efforts by rival brands to subvert these kinds of exclusion zones, something which of us will instantly sympathise with, but which is of course just as obnoxious. In either case we’re only pawns of the branding masters and the only way to win as a people is not to play either game and just stay away from the games altogether.

Which is one reason why I’m opposed to any attempts to bring big sport events like this to the Netherlands; let them happen in Dubai or China, countries adapted to their hypercapitalism.

Rich people may be old, but old people are not rich

Published on May 9, 2012Leave a comment

The Mighty Mighty Godking imagines a commencement address for coffin dodgers, giving old people some of their own medicine in the form of unwanted advice. The key paragraph is the following

Rich people are generally old people; even well-off people are generally old people. And old people look out for old people, and unfortunately over the past twenty or so years the number of old people has been increasing steadily, which means that the interests of old people dominate over the interests of young people, who just have to eventually take care of the old people. I mean – global warming! We all agreed that that was important, right? And then suddenly rich people – who were also old people – all decided it really wasn’t that important any more, and lectured us all about how the economy demanded that we pretend climate change wasn’t happening. (The economy demands a lot of things. Like tax cuts for rich people – who are, once again, mostly old people.) And when the economy gets better, it doesn’t get better for young people. The story of unemployment in every first world country right now is the same: young people are unemployed at vastly greater rates than old people, with rates double or triple the general unemployment rate.

Most rich people might be old, but most old people aren’t rich. While it is true that younger people are affected more by the current economic crisis, for a lot of elder baby boomers it’s not been a happy time either. MGK’s hypothetical sixty year old, who in his version has had everything going for him would’ve also been eligble for the draft when the war in Vietnam was still ongoing, left university just as the mid-seventies economic depressions (stagflation!) hit, had to suffer years of low to non-existing wage raises in the early eighties in order to safeguard his pension later, be suckered into all kinds of 401(k) schemes that paid out more to the fund managers than to his retirement fund, had hoped to have his house as a nest egg but saw the bottom drop out of the housing market just as he lost his job as well, while the only new job he can find is as greeter at Wal-Mart. And to add insult to injury, he now keeps hearing that social security is broken and needs to be privatised to be saved, when he spent most of the eighties moderating his wage demands to save it…

We shouldn’t really be talking about a generational conflict, of a struggle between old and young people, but rather realise that both generations have been suckered by a small elite of rich people. After the Second World War we had roughly thirty years in which all western countries build up an as fair and equal welfare state as was possible in each country, which in the last thiry years has been steadily attacked by those who saw profit in dismantling it. Talking too much about “old” versus “young” just plays in their hands.