Wis[s]e Words

See figure one

Published on December 29, 2008

The British culture secretary wants to censor the internet; not just the British portion of it, but the entire English language internet:

The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites — registered with cinema-style age warnings — to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.

He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English language websites, which may include forcing internet service providers, such as BT, Tiscali, Sky and AOL, to provide packages restricting access to websites without an age rating.

“There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That’s my view. Absolutely categorical,” Burnham, the MP for Leigh in Greater Manchester, told the Daily Telegraph. “If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now.”

Apart from the fact that his proposals are just unworkable, naive and done with no understanding of the internet, why the fuck is the culture minister is proposing these measures? Shouldn’t he defend freedom of speech on internet rather than scare monger? Or is he just another lazy fuck who wants to outsource the raising of his children? It seems to be, since he talks about leaving his children on the internet without supervision. Typical New Labour, never taking responsibility for their own actions.

Mr Burnham, see figure one:

figure one

I know it’s unfair, but

Published on December 8, 2008

Twilight movie poster

…Everytime I see the movie poster of Twilight I can’t help but see the smug, self-satisfied faces of the Bush generation (I’m sure the actors are lovely people really). It’s just that there’s this whole cohort of kids having come of age during the Bush administration many of whom wo’ll have internalised the ethics of the Bush White House and that poster captures perfectly what I imagine they’ll look like: vain, self absorbed and thick. Unfair perhaps, but Twilight from all I’ve heard and read about does have that Bush entitlement syndrome down pat.

Once again, justice for Jean is denied

Published on December 4, 2008

Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered by police now more than three years ago is once again denied justice, as the coroner in the inquest to his death ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing:

The family of Jean Charles de Menezes walked out of his inquest yesterday as the coroner ruled the jury was forbidden from considering whether he was unlawfully killed.

Sir Michael Wright said he did not believe the testimony justified him allowing them to return a verdict which was tantamount to accusing police officers of murder or manslaughter.

As the De Menezes family and their supporters walked out the coroner said he knew the jury’s hearts would go out to the dead man’s mother, Maria Otone de Menezes. “But these are emotional reactions, ladies and gentlemen, and you are charged with returning a verdict based on evidence,” he said.

And so the establishment once again take care of its own. Can’t embarass the police, especially after they have been so obliging to the government recently. No wonder Craig Murray is furious, especially about this shitty bit of reasoning from “sir” Michael wright:

But he urged caution on judging anything they viewed as lying too harshly. “You must decide whether the person has lied or made an honest mistake. If you can prove that the witness has lied you should bear … in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to put their own part.

“Do please excuse the police for not just murdering Jean, but lying about it and covering up their murder almost from the moment his body hit the floor”. Disgusting, but it fits in with how this case has been treated from the start. This has never been about getting justice for Jean, but about exculpating the police for his murder. It’s an old, old pattern in British policing, which has a shameful record of wrongful killings and people dying in its custody and getting away with it. It’s the other side of the same coin that saw antiterrorist police arrest Damien Green MP. Three years ago the government allowed the police their ritual murder to relieve their frustration, last week we saw the police returning the favour through a nicely staged bit of political intimidation.

Both cases sent a message to the British public. In the de Menezes case it’s “we can and will murder you with impunity if we feel like”, in Green’s case it’s “it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, step out of line and we’ll squash you”. With Green, he himself may “only” suffer a humiliating and frightening arrest and questioning, but to everbody with less clout than him this message comes through loud and clear.

Together these two cases are the clearest indication of police state Britain, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. As Jamie said, talking about the Green case:

People have a crude idea that a police state involves a leader ordering the cops to arrest his enemies. It’s mainly an environment where the police have expanded powers over the general administration of the state which they can exercise with a large degree of autonomy. Their turf gets bigger, and is defended and expanded more aggressively.

Which is exactly what has happened under New Labour. From the very beginning they’ve used the police and the justice system as a political tool, unleashing a torrent of ill-thought out, unworkable policies to curry favour with the tabloids, an equally large torrent of dodgy statistics and press releases to show the succes of these policies, all topped with the occasional potemkin showpiece of serious policing. After September 11 these tendencies only worsened. Remember the tanks at Heathrow the day before Parliament had to vote on the War on Iraq? Long before the British establishment finally noticed last week therefore the police had been politicised and the murder of Jean charles de Menezes as well as the arrest of Damien Green are a logical outcome of this. New Labour flacks may not even been lying when they insist Green’s arrest was the police’s own idea, but the responsibility is still theirs.

And then the crisis hit the real economy…

Published on December 2, 2008

A government short time working scheme set up to help companies that saw their monthly turnover and orders plummet since October reduce salary costs without redundancies was opened this Sunday and already has 64 companies applying, including the steel manufacturing giant Corus. Under the scheme a company introduces mandatory worktime reductions for its staff, with the shortfall in salary paid for by unemployment benefits. For any company hit hard by the growing recession but still viable it’s a good way to cut salary costs without compulsory redundancies of employees it might very well be hardpressed to replace if the crisis proves to be only temporarily, as economists are predicting for the Netherlands.

Unfortunately however the scheme is strictly limited in both duration and resources. It ends on the first of January and it only has a budget for 200 million euros. What’s more, to be eligible for the scheme a company has to have had a thirty percent loss of turnover for at least two months, leaving a lot of other struggling companies out in the cold. Compared to the lavish treatment the banks got in the last few months, billions spent with little oversight, this seems remarkable stingy. Yes, you need banks to keep the rest of the economy in capital, but that doesn’t mean we can let other parts of the economy go to waste.

Capital, it fails us now

Published on December 2, 2008

This crisis has been a real eye opener, hasn’t it, in that it made visible how much of the world economy was based on credit driven overconsumption, both on a consumer level as in the more rarified air of Wall Street. Ever since “communism” was “defeated” we’ve forgotten how wasteful capitalism is. we’ve been conned into believing there was no alternative, that we could not control its destructive tendencies and at best we could hope to only migitate some of its worst excesses, but that ultimately we were locked in a race to the bottom that would however somehow bring us untold riches someday, if we followed the rules of the free market. The fall of the Berlin Wall spelled the death knell for the perverted version of “communism” practised in the USSR, could this recession bring the same for thriumphant capitalism?

Because one thing is certain. We do have the resources, the abibilty and the ingenuity to make everybody in the world rich without destroying the planet and without engaging in the dance of mutal assured destruction that is free market capitalism. But it would mean the end of the priviledged classes and they’ve never given up their power without struggle. One good suggestion to start the struggle comes from Ian Welsh, on how to stop the obscene bonuses and salaries managers and CEOS have awarded themselves over the years:

The simplest thing is to just count all income equally, tax it all at the same rate, don’t allow deductions beyond a certain level (50K or so) and tax all income above, say 1 million at 90%, 95% for all income above 5 million. Don’t allow too much income deferral and there you go. Slap on some “in kind” rules for corporations (yes, if your corporation pays for your car, that’s salary) and while there will always be loopholes, you’ll still rein in the worst excesses.

This of course presupposes a government anywhere in the western world on the side of the workers, rather than the rich, which might be a problem…