‘What we’ve go to do here is get people to understand it’s not a referendum it’s a choice and as a choice it has consequences,’ says Sean Woodward MP at the Labour party conference.

And the fast emerging electoral strategy, as reflected by Labour Matters, is all about ensuring that the voters see the clear blue water between Labour and the Tories. 

 The focus, say the electoral strategists and the PR people, should be on the way Labour is dealing with the economy, and the 1937-style  disaster that may well ensue if the Tories get into power.

And as election strategies go, it’s pretty good one, especially as it’s starting to be sharpened up by a concentration on how the Tories will ‘target investment on a tax giveaway of £200,000 to the 3,000 wealthiest estates’; in general the focus is on reminding people that, in the end, it is the Labour party that is wedded to the interests of the working class, not the Tories.  

Leave aside the small matter of the actual record of New Labour on commitment to the interests of the working class for just a moment, and we get an electoral pitch which is, on the doorstep at least, starting to gain some traction.  The slight narrowing of the opinion polls since the party conference is not all about the Tories failure to ‘seal the deal’, or about their indecisiveness over Europe; there is the start of a real move back to Labour, and the message is starting to get through in places where it is being well sent.

Time then, for Labour members, you’d think, to get behind the message.  

If you’re on the so-called moderate wing of Labour, it’s all about the best way of winning a new term; if you’re on the Left, at least the broad narrative is swinging in your favour, and it’s something to hang on to till the real opportunity to organize anew starts in May 2010.  The main thing for now is to defeat the Tories, because their winning really will be a disaster for everyone but the privileged few.

Unless you’re Frank Field, that is.

Our loveable old maverick Frank has been thinking the unthinkable again, decided he doesn’t care for any of this ‘spending our way out of recession stuff’, and has come over all biblical 

In his Comment is Free article, Frank warning of an impending economic apocalypse, and says that the only way this country can possibly survive is to cut savagely, and cut now.

 The fact that he is utterly, utterly wrong, and wouldn’t recognize a considered leftist economic argument if it struck him on the head from a very great height, need not detain us long. 

Briefly, his fear of massive inflation is simply nonsense, when the by far the biggest threat is Japanese-style deflation if the economy is kick-started.

Likewise, his argument that we run an imminent risk of losing our AAA+ credit status if we don’t cut now (no mention of other ways of reducing the deficit, note) is simply scare-mongering, and only likely to come true if he and his right wing friends keep the scare-mongering up. 

As Martin Wolf has pointed out, cutting the UK’s credit rating would mean that logically, the US’s credit rating would also need to be cut, and can anyone really see that happening (especially given the rapid flight to ‘safe’ US government bonds in the light of the Dubai crisis)?   Logically, even if the US rating were to be cut, the AA+ rate would simply become, in the case of the biggest world economy, the new AAA+, because for the medium term at least a stable US economy cannot simply be dispensed with.  The market, with their servants in the credit rating agencies, is not going to cut off its capitalist nose to spite its capitalist face.

Such real world thinking is, in any event, of little concern to Frank Field.  What is important to him, it seems, is that he should be out of step with mainstream Labour thinking, and be seen to be.   That’s our Frank, the loveable maverick.

So long as it was a vicious disregard for the real lives of the poor, in his ‘unthinkable’ welfare reforms, it was all ok, because it was only one step beyond where New Labour and Purnell were headed anyway.

This time, though, it’s different.  In setting out a line on economic policy which is absolutely out of the Tory mismanagement manual, Field is setting his face directly against the government’s electoral strategy, which is to create an ‘investment vs. cuts’ distance between themselves and Tories.

As such, the only reasonable assessment of Frank Field is that, given his high media profile, he has become an electoral liability.

And what does the Labour party do with people that it considers make it unelectable?   It expels them.  Ask Terry Fields (well he’s dead, but you know what I mean), another Merseyside MP.

If there’s any consistency in the way the Labour PLP deals with rebels that are damaging its electoral chances, Field should be given his marching orders, and a more compliant PPC put in place in time for the election.  

Yes, there’s a small chance that it might backfire and the seat be lost, but there is any event no guarantee that Field isn’t simply biding his time in a fairly safe Labour seat before switching sides after the election, and that might mean the difference for Labour between loss and hung parliament, or hung parliament and victory.

Better, I contend, to take the bull by the horns now and get rid of Field. 

In so doing, Brown would send out a message not just of new found strength and authority as PM safe from Compass-led plots, but – more importantly – send out a stronger message than any second hand party political broadcast can ever get over that Labour is serious about having a distinctive economic policy, one which really does defend Labour ‘hard working families’ in the tough times.

Will it happen? Well, if the idea gets taken up by @bevaniteellie on twitter, it might just.

Of course, if the Labour grassroots builds a head of steam on this, and gets rid of Frank Field, then Tom Harris MP (who had the same virulently ’anti-Gordon’ banner advert as Iain Dale on his blog all weekend), would surely be next in line.

But business before pleasure.

Meanwhile, don’t know why Obama’s long time associates possibly could be mistaken for party crashers when they came into the tent with a Bravo Reality TV Show “Real Housewives of DC” professional camera crew and makeup artist in tow unless he was hoping for a Reality gig for wife Michelle, CBS celebrity Katie Couric or Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Obama could end the “party crasher” goose chase for White House Secret Service in a proverbial New York Minute by coming clean on his almost 5-year-old social/political relationship with Tareq and Michaele Salahi.

Full Story

Yes but that would require him to 1.) Tell the truth. 2.) Own up to his past. 3.) Take responsibility for his actions.

That’s just not his style. The Obamessiah bows to no one…except the Japanese Emperor and the Chinese President.

Oh and Saudi Princes!

If we define democracy as a way for the will of the majority to be carried into law, then the recent Swiss vote banning minarets is an example of democracy. Plenty of analogies exist in Western Europe – such as the French ban on religious symbols in schools. What offends, it seems, many democrats is that this is a measure directed by one section of voters against another section which maintains a deliberately separate identity.

We on the Left know very well that this measure, far from being a triumph for democracy – except in the formal sense – serves only to divide the people of Switzerland one from another. If democracy is merely about the relationship of individuals to authority then I’m wrong, but if democracy is about associative relationships and how we collectively relate to authority, then the Swiss have weakened that associative relationship and its collective relationship with the Swiss state.

The populist party which called for the referendum to ban minarets, as the most obvious sign of ‘Islamisation’, now knows that the Swiss people can be divided and scapegoats for the ills of our social system blamed, as a way to avoid changing the really key elements of that system. In this sense too, democracy is weakened, because democracy can only really proceed from a correct understanding of, for want of a better phrase, how things work. This is one of the key problems with a democracy based on capitalism.

Issues can be manufactured which have only a tentative relationship to reality, but about which people feel strongly enough to throw their time and energy into campaigning about (on either side). We see this in the US all the time, the apotheosis of which is ‘astroturfing’, where those with a lot of PR muscle spend time and money trying to mask their PR operations as ‘grassroots’ behaviour – such as Californian ‘big water’ recently, in a continuing attempt to ignore clean water guidelines and grab more public trust water through groups such as the “Latino Water Coalition”.

Or, more famously, the tea-baggers and their march on DC. Some seventy thousand people (amply subsidised by big business so they could all get to the march) genuinely believed that Obama is a socialist, who is going to make the country worse than the Soviet Union. It’s the ‘democratic’ right of people to express their beliefs, but these beliefs clearly aren’t based on rational argument or, dare I say, reality. And that makes the whole process less democratic and more responsive to material investments in PR, to further the cloud of lies and half-truths.

It does this by breaking down the associative ties which can be used to counteract media untruths, bias, selective reporting and the range of other features of our mass information networks that prevent some people forming a totally cogent view of the world. Whereas a properly integrated Islamic group might have pursued a ‘mass strategy’ of public meetings to discuss the issue and reassure the Swiss people – indeed co-opt their support in a defence of religious liberalism – instead, this field of activism was vacated and the far right occupied it.

The Swiss People’s Party gathered one hundred thousand signatures, amongst a population of about eight million, in the 18 months stipulated by Swiss law.

Now, as a result of all this, the Swiss People’s Party hold themselves up as paragons of democracy, as no doubt they will be held up by others of a right-wing persuasion. In actual fact, they were simply better able to work off the perversions of democracy intrinsic to capitalism, and the weak associative bonds that a system of private ownership of business fosters.

Further reading: Left Outside (edited version at LibCon), Paul Sagar, Old Holborn, Jim Jepps, Methodist Preacher and Derek Wall.

Should he be found to be responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington State.

Yeah, the failure was that you commuted that bastard’s sentence in the first place, you asshole.

Full Story Here

UPDATE: Hot Air Pundit has some more links that give background on this disaster.

Huckabee: It's everbody else's fault!

The guy that shot the 4 cops dead in wash state was in jail for 68 years in Arkansas. Then Governor Mike Huckabee COMMUTED his sentence at 11 years and let him out early: way, WAY early.

I hope that the families of the slain officers have legal recourse to go after Huckabee. This is inexcusable. Maurice Clemons should have been left to rot in prison for his crimes.

Let this be a lesson to other governors. When you’re soft on crime, you pay in blood.

Full Story

UPDATE: Police are looking for two men in relation to the 8 a.m. attack. One of the suspects is described as an African-American man, between 5 feet 7 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, wearing a black coat and blue jeans, with a “scruffy” appearance, Troyer said. The man is believed to have fled the coffee shop on foot. Officers were working on getting additional descriptions from witnesses. - SOURCE

Yesterday was the first major national demonstration of the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign. Perhaps just over a thousand three hundred young people attended the march, which moved from Malet St, just outside the University of London Students Union, to the Imperial War Museum in Kennington – via Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and Parliament Square. Yours truly was one of those at the front, occasionally waving a red flag and looking angry, so watch out for that, when the pictures are released.

I was impressed by the character and political clarity of the march (if not by all of the chants). A lot of the young people there were genuinely angry that they faced rising costs of their university courses, or their university courses being cut altogether (witness the recent happenings across the country from Sussex, to Birmingham to LCC), or the prospect of finishing their university courses or college courses and not having a job to go to. Their call was largely for the government to take a bigger hand in the provision of jobs.

Instead of privatisation, nationalisation. Instead of spending billions to bail out banks and secure the bonus culture of the self-styled masters of the universe, spending billions to provide jobs in reconstructing our national infrastructure – education, transport, health and so on. From a capitalist point of view, these are not extreme demands; and capitalism benefits in the long term from a better educated populace, from more efficient transport networks and so on. But of course, the market deals in short term fixes, not long term.

More encouraging was the way cries of, “The workers united / will never be defeated!” and “Workers of the world / unite!” received the most thunderous support from the assembled crowd. It was a fairly clear message to the thousands of people passed on the route that these students were not merely looking out for their own selfish interest. Similarly cries of, “No ifs, no buts, no public sector cuts!” demonstrated the solidarity of these students with their teachers and with other workers.

The PCS had a strong contingent on the demo, from what I saw, so the solidarity there was practical rather than merely theoretical – and both the CWU and the RMT have endorsed the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign. On a local level, one of the Kent district trades councils funded our minibus, which we used to take people up to the demo – a process which, I’m sure, was replicated around the country. This is the sort of gesture which builds support and trust between politicised workers and students and it augurs well for the future.

As with most demonstrations, I’m not sure what it has achieved. Sean Figg, one of the Socialist Party organisers for the South-East, went to Downing Street with a petition of some ten thousand names. Yet this is the same Labour government which simply ignored demonstrations of millions. That said, I heard some interesting remarks repeated – that the political character of this demonstration was different to the recent anti-war march, that it was better, angrier and definitely more aggressively socialistic.

Certainly the Socialist Party will have had a good day recruiting; during the lead-up to the march, there were several stalls selling books and t-shirts and badges, plus members wandering through the crowd selling newspapers and talking to people about joining the SP. This type of active propagandising is important – because it’s one thing to demand jobs, it’s another to turn that into a conscious desire to join and agitate with a revolutionary socialist party. So on that score, I hope they did well.

Other groups weren’t hugely in evidence, beyond the PCS banner. There was one flag from the AUCPB, though I’ve never heard of them.

So, a particular socialist party grows a little, more people come over to the ideas of revolutionary socialism, but the practical effect of the day on the situation is nothing much – at least, nothing with regard to the stated objectives of getting the government to provide jobs. It may be said that this is really just the start of the campaign, so I look forward to seeing the next steps, particularly in getting students not just interested and to meetings, but to take on practical activities like defending the jobs we have.

University occupations may well be a tactic we see more of – it came back on the agenda with the attempt to force universities to divest themselves of any interest in arms manufacture and export (esp. to Israel) over their use in Gaza, and with the recent attacks on university jobs has come back into the picture. Yet we need to do more. There are a lot of young people who don’t go to university, and jobs for them are looking equally precarious.

This is one thing I believed to be lacking on the demo; no talk about supporting private sector workers, but emphasis on public sector. A lot of the people we walked by will no doubt be reading the same papers or watching the same news channels that bleat about bloated public sector pensions and government spending that is too high. We offered those people very little. We need to be carrying across the message that it’s not just the public sector we care about; the fightback is for all sorts employed by business.

Absent from the demonstration was a USDAW banner, or emblem of USDAW support for the campaign. Considering that many hundreds of thousands of young people get jobs with the major retailers and in the other trades represented by USDAW, this is significant. Because whatever the government does, you can bet that Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda and the rest are doing it too. Getting rid of well-paid overtime for example. Anything that cuts the wages or lowers labour-related overheads for the company, to boost profits.

Unions like USDAW could take strong roles in offensive campaigns, such as demanding of the biggest companies that they spend money on providing more places for young workers and better training, training in transferable skills, across the board. This is not, obviously, what these unions are used to doing, but right there is where students come in. Plenty of students should be members of these unions, should be taking control of local union branches. We can be unionizing those young workers, and their non-student equivalents.

Our cry yesterday was “When they says cutback, we say fightback!” That’s eminently practicable. I’ll be reporting over the next few weeks how we do, and maybe by the time of the next march, it’ll be private sector young workers and unemployed leading the demonstration.

Wang Chung tonight

No, this is not the clever title of the new ‘Wedding Crashers’ sequel, unfortunately.  However, if you’re not up to anything this year Vince Vaughn, give me a call because I have a great idea for you.

I have absolutely no idea how you sneak into the White House, supposedly the most secure place on the planet, but Michaele and Tareq Salahi snuck their way into a Presidential soirée honoring the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh this past Tuesday.  Now, I don’t know about you, but after hearing about this story I had a pretty good idea about how this whole night had to have gone down.

"Joe and I go way back. To the beginning of tonight."

First, Michaele and Tareq hatched a plan to sneak into the White House to steal the Queen’s Crown Jewels, which were on display for the Prime Minister of India’s awesome State Dinner Celebration Extravaganza.  Michaele then contacted his saucy black friend, (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who also works inside the White House to take a plate full of Maryland crabcakes to the snipers on the roof.  Only the crabcakes are chock full of sedatives.  When the snipers passed out, Michaele, Tareq, and their little Asian-gymnast friend parachuted onto the roof of the White House.  After rendezvousing with saucy black friend, they employed the skills of their Asian gymnast friend to shut down the laser-alarm system in the vents, which allowed the Salahis to strip off their jumpsuits into their formal party-wear, sneak through the vents into the party, hobnob with the Chief of Staff and VP before giving the President a casual by formal head nod.  They then were able to sneak into the crown jewel room while everyone was distracted, talking about who that couple was that no one knew, hide the jewels in Tareq’s purse and walk out the door with them.  Easy as 1-2-3, right?

Actually, it was apparently a lot easier than all of that.  And, sadly, none of it involved a heist with the Crown Jewels either.  That was just an awesome catalyst for the plot of a heist movie I’m going to write and then sell to the director of the movie ‘2012′.  No, I guess the Salahis were just looking for a good party and they heard there was a bitchin’ one at the White House.  So they showed up, passed through a couple of security checkpoints and voila, there they were in a room with some of the most important people on the planet.

Boy, Secret Service’s face must be a little red right now.  Obviously these people aren’t even real spies.  Real spies would never post their espionage pictures on facebook.  So, this naturally begs the question: if the Salahis aren’t spies, but can sneak into the White House, where, then, can the real spies sneak into?

If you’d like to read the original article about the Salahi Spies, check it out here.

From listening to his spiel, it is ostensibly about national security concerns. Certainly hacking attempts on government websites are dangerous to our safety as a nation, not to mention another drain on the taxpaying citizens. If I were tasked with the job of cybersecurity, I’d probably feel much the same way.

However, the subtle context is there: the internet makes it harder for the government to disseminate propaganda.

Now, before you think I am going off on a General Jack D. Ripper type rant, I assure you that I am not. All I am saying is that the government does have a much harder job at spinning lies and deceptions, as do the dinosaur news media outlets.

And it really bugs them.

But, hey: watch the video for yourself and decide.

Hat tip to Moonbattery commenter SK

I love America; to an extent. Sometimes we, not only as Americans but as people, tend to let certain ideologies and categorical beliefs direct our judgment. As of lately, there seems to be one such area where everyone seems to have a strong dissenting opinion, and I am not talking about who is to blame in the Jon and Kate Plus Hate fiasco or “why are those people in the Snuggie commercials wearing their robes backwards,” hence my conditional love of our country. No, that center-ring star of the national circus would be public health care. I have heard and participated in many debates, both of sound mind and body and those of more sound, less mind (drunk), where both sides assessed the merit of a public health care system.

And what did all of those conversations have in common? They were all pointless.

No one ever wins when it comes to these debates and we always just walk away thinking about how big of an idiot that other person is. So I decided to try and figure out a way to convey my opinion of a public health care system in the most productive way possible. My first thought was that I could write portions of MY IDEAS IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, AS TO CONVEY A SENSE OF THREAT AND URGENCEY. As enticing as it would be to write while completely ignoring any literary conventions and general intelligence, that would be just too folksy for me. My next possible avenue was that of extreme conservatism. I could roll up on my adversaries’ place of business and just forcibly tea-bag my opinion down their throat. That method, although enjoyable and making for good television, would just get messy. My third option was that of the liberal route. I could be painfully meticulous and boringly informative in the explanation of my opinions, and at the first sign of political opposition I could fold up like a Prius in a head on collision – also no.

With potential teaching methods exhausted, I thought to myself, “What would Tom Emanski do?” It was simple. Since I do not personally know the Crime Dog, I had to return to teaching fundamentals myself.

When offering simple advice like “be careful before you cross the street,” you do so assuming that the person doing the crossing knows that getting hit by a car is painful. Otherwise by not knowing, said person sees no possible harm from the cars and your advice comes off as just hollow and preachy. So, like learning the simple knowledge of getting hit by a car hurts, I will go back to insurance basics for my reasoning why public heath insurance is actually a benefit to you.

To begin our return to the basics of insurance, we shall begin our quest for knowledge like anyone generally does these days: by looking up “insurance” on Wikipedia. Now I know using Wikipedia is not the most scientific and sound research engine, but it’s the most common. Wikipedia states that insurance “in law and economics, is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed and known small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss (“Insurance”).” So in a nut shell, insurance is all about managing risks.

The earliest known uses of insurance can be traced all the way back to early Chinese farmers and Babylonian traders. These people would send their goods to market in group of ships or vessels. The idea was that if something happened to one of your ships, you still had the others left to sell. Your risk was spread out among the many, as opposed to the potential crippling loss of transporting with one. Various forms of insurance and risk management groups evolved and grew throughout many civilizations as time passed. In modern times, you become part of the insurance group by paying your insurer their required premium. This small premium is then combined with the other members of your insurance group’s premiums into a larger insurance pool. The size of this pool is what affects the premium you pay and the overall effectiveness of the insurance.

The larger the insurance pool, the lower your individual premium. This is in the case of when the insurer is trying to offer you the fairest price possible, as opposed to maximizing profit. You also assume that not all members of the group will need to collect on their policies at once, which would cause any insurance to fail. Since I do not expect you to take my word for it, I will give you some examples of how this would come into play. I found an article by Gerri Willis on CNN Money that gave a good example of how the size of an insurance group can affect your premium (Willis, Gerri). The article compares a small company with that of lets say 10 employees to that of around one thousand – and I will add that we will assume similar sample demographics. In a company with ten employees currently enrolled in your group health care, a few people incurring large health bills will greatly reduce your insurance pool and will most definitely increase your premiums. With the larger one thousand employee pool and lets say 40 people running up large health care costs, there will be no change in the cost of your premium as the costs are distributed throughout the larger group. This is the simple reason for supporting a public health care program.

In the previous example, smaller numbers were used to make it easier to grasp. With a public health care option, your insurance pool will see a drastic increase in size. Let us say you are, like me (yes, I am insured), a member of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Pennsylvania. Their website lists membership in their health care programs is 4.6 million (“Corporate Profile”). Now with a national health care system your membership would jump to around 308 million. I do not have any numbers to relate what this could do for your potential decrease in your individual pay requirement, but I am going go out on a limb and say that it is probably going to go down when your risk pool is about 67 times larger. You are probably thinking that not all of those 308 million will be paying members, and you are right. Subsidies withstanding, even if only a fifth of those pay into the plan, that would still leave your group at a contributing 61.6 million members. So in our return to insurance fundamentals, which by our previously established definition is basically risk management, a national health care system should be supported for its ability to greatly distribute risk and reduce your individual premium.

There you have it, my simple apolitical reasoning behind supporting public health, “it’s just science” of risk.

So far, I have been examining health care on a large scale, now I will narrow the scope. Writing an article about a national health care system really couldn’t be done without at least touching on current health care providers. Many people claim to be happy with their current health care provider, but most of these people who champion their current health insurance are in fact healthy. This raises the question of what happens when you become sick. An article from CNN points out that in a survey of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2007, 62.1% of those had to do so as a consequence of medical bills and medically related issues (Tamkins, Theresa). The more interesting fact is that of those who went bankrupt due to medical bills, 78% of them had health insurance. So, is your current health care provider really a warmer of the human heart? Most likely not.

This October, a mailer campaign by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina garnered a lot of attention for its proposed “customer concern.” The letter asks that people campaign their local lawmakers to oppose the public health care option (Avery, Sarah). I can understand their concern. How can they be expected to pay their top executives like Dr. Kenneth R. Melani of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of western PA, who earned $3.2 million in 2007 (McCoy, Craig R. and Von Bergen, James M. page 1), when a public health care option would increase competition and lower individual costs. Melani’s salary rose from less than $1.7 million in 2004 to the $3.2 million in 2007 (Snowbeck, Christopher), a pay increase of 88%. That must of meant that the insurance group was doing fantastic and we were rewarded with a huge drop in premiums too – ah, no. But I am sure Highmark is already running their company at maximum efficiency and the government is just trying to bully them around. I feel for you BCBS. I really do, but I also think I will be better off under a national health care system. I am not the only person who would feel better under a national health care plan, just ask a guy who is ridiculously smarter than any of us. In reference to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, Stephen Hawking said “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS.” Also saying, “I have received a large amount of high quality treatment without which I would not have survived” (Ellicott, Clare). But then again, health care is probably way too complicated for Stephen Hawking to understand.

Another favorite argument of people against the passing of a national health care system is the old “I don’t want my money paying for other peoples health care.” I can understand that. I would also rather have my money going to my own personal gain. But the problem with that statement is that you are already indirectly paying for a large portion of the general public’s health care bills. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ 2008 summary of Medicare and Medicaid states that in 2006 government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program accounted for $718 billion in spending, or more than one-third the country’s total health expenditures for that year (Office of the Actuary page 4). There was also an additional $252 billion in spending for other public health care sectors that year. This means that about 45% of that year’s national health care expenditures where from public funding. So, not only are you already paying for you own health insurance, but are also indirectly helping pay for about 1 out of every 2 others. You might as well just pay for the one larger national insurance program and reap the rewards of a reduced premium. Does this mean our current congressional attempts at public health care reform will be a fiscal saving grace for all American citizens? They probably won’t, but not from their lack of potential.

A public health care program has the possibility to benefit all Americans, but its potential could be limited by bipartisan lobotomies. Our current stumbling block to any meaningful reform or progress seems to stem from our desire to faction and oppose based purely on political party. Don’t get me wrong, I like to “jabber-jaw and go tit-for-tat” as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean you always have to take an idea with prospect and make it a bad one for the sake of bipartisanship.

For an example of what I mean, I will be describing a situation where a group of employees is deciding on what to make for there cook off fundraiser. The overwhelming majority of the employees decide that it would be a good idea to make apple pies, and the minority wants to serve raw onions. Of course no one will buy white bitter onions, making apple pies the clear decision. But upon defeat, the onioners decide to make work unbearable and just harass everyone with an opposing opinion. You probably think these onioners would just get fired, but for the sake of this example these are not real people, they are congressman. Now as a result of all this conflict, the senior member of the Bake-off caucus decides that it would be in the best interest of the organization to create a bipartisan resolution. He proposes that they will sell apple with onion pie, which the onioners gratefully approve. The apple pie-ers see this as a deformed mutation of what was their once good idea, which is now coupled with a bad one. The apple pie-ers seek clarification from the Bake-off leader who responds, “My decision was made in the vein of preserving peace and bipartisan reform, and now everyone gets to feel like their idea was part of the solution.” The apple pie-ers retort, “You have taken our delicious idea and doomed it to disappointment by making it taste awful.” The leader responds, “Actually, I think it tastes like democracy.” In a final defiance the apple pie-ers reply, “Really, because we think it tastes like failure.” Now in my fictional example, much like in real life, a good idea was weighed down by an equally bad one in the hopes of maintaining political civility. As you can see, when someone proposes an idea that can lead to beneficial reform, like public health care, it is unwise to oppose it on grounds of party affiliation.

There is the apocalyptic belief that after passing a public health care bill, we will all be reading the special edition of Marxism Hot 100: The Commies That Really Turn You Red, as we wait for seven hours to receive the kind of substandard health care that even a third-worlder wouldn’t subject their pet goat too. There is also the parallel universe where this new health care reform will be so successful that even the conservatives will sing its praise, and consequently Glenn Beck’s head will implode like a dying neutron star under the pressure of its own density. Now are these just prophetic extremes or do we need to call the O’Connell brothers so they can slide in and quantum mechanically engineer us some solutions? In those two cases, I would say that its highly unlikely, and only if we’re lucky. But that is where the beauty of the American governing system, and a reason for me to love America, comes into play. When something we create is not working for a majority of the people we can evolve or amend it, we do not have to adhere to a single cultural code or religious belief system when making our laws, thank god. To wrap it up, by just looking at the basic defining principle behind why you would insure against anything, a national health care system makes perfect sense. You are now greatly reducing your risk by increasing the distribution. I think as long as we return to the fundamentals of insurance, much like learning about the dangers of being hit by a car, we can all cross the road to a healthier tomorrow.

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Works cited:

Avery, Sarah. “BCBS plea to customers on reform hits a nerve.” Newsobserver.com. October 28, 2009. November 12, 2009.

“Corporate Profile.” Highmark. November 12, 2009. https://www.highmark.com/ hmk2/about/corpprofile/index.shtml

Ellicott, Clare. “’I owe my life to the NHS’: Stephen Hawking tells US to stop attacking health service.” Mail Online. August 13, 2009. November 12, 2009

“Insurance.” Wikipedia. November 12, 2009. .

McCoy, Craig R. and Von Bergen, James M. “Top salaries key to approval of Blues merger.” The Philadelphia Enquirer. December 2, 2007. November 12, 2009.

Office of the Actuary. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Department of Health and Human Services. “Brief Summaries of Medicare and Medicaid.” November 1, 2008. November 12, 209.

Snowbeck, Christopher. “Bonuses boost compensation of 10 Highmark executives.” Post-gazette.com. March 17, 2006. November 12, 2009.

Tamkins, Theresa. “Medical bills prompt more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies.” CNNHeatlh.com. June 5, 2009. November 12, 2009.

Willis, Gerri. “How does group health insurance work?” CNNMoney. October 26, 2009. November 12, 2009.

A few days ago, at an extraordinary conference of the PSUV in Venezuela, Chavez announced his intention to form a “Fifth International” built around Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, while not resurrecting ‘old structures’ and ideas that have become useless. Like real socialism perhaps. In earlier remarks, Chavez defended Carlos ‘the Jackal’ as a revolutionary, along with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Elements conveniently absent from the reports by Chavez’ cheerleaders amongst the British Left.

A fine account of the deficiencies of Chavez’ regime can be found here, including details of his sending two hundred PSUV members to China to be trained by the ‘revolutionary’ regime of Hu Jintao. Chavez’ claim that the new international should provide a school for cadres to study ideology, it hardly bodes well that he considers the Chinese model of education to be a good one. Meanwhile the Mision Robinson, the programme undertaking the abolition of illiteracy in Venezuela, is stalling – along with many other programmes of reform.

Is the call to a Fifth International liable to gain any traction? A certain section of trades unionists certainly like to parade alongside the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, and will be touring the UK with members of the trades union leadership from Venezuela in the next few weeks. Attending the conference of the PSUV were members of the Labour Party ‘Friends of Venezuela’ campaign (of which the founding secretary and treasurer were Jon Trickett and Jon Cruddas). But in terms of wider working class sentiment in support of Chavismo, not much can really be said.

People don’t want another war, so they’ll come along to Hands Off the People of Iran (HOPI) or Hands Off Venezuela (HOV) marches and demonstrations – but there are frequent reports of the Venezuelan state using repressive measures against Venezuelan workers – and our own workers are not soft enough in the head to believe that the dictators Chavez praises, like Colonel Gadaffi of Libya, really are ’socialists’, with the interests of workers at their heart. There’s a good chapter in Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed which explains the type of echo Chavez might get.

At present the chief contribution to the treasury of thought is declared to be the Webbs’ book, Soviet Communism. Instead of relating what has been achieved and in what direction the achieved is developing, the authors expound for twelve hundred pages what is contemplated, indicated in the bureaus, or expounded in the laws. Their conclusion is: When the projects, plans and laws are carried out, then communism will be realized in the Soviet Union. Such is the content of this depressing book, which rehashes the reports of Moscow bureaus and the anniversary articles of the Moscow press.

Friendship for the Soviet bureaucracy is not friendship for the proletarian revolution, but, on the contrary, insurance against it. The Webbs are, to be sure, ready to acknowledge that the communist system will sometime or other spread to to the rest of the world.

“But how, when, where, with what modifications, and whether through violent revolution, or by peaceful penetration, or even by conscious imitation, are questions we cannot answer.”

This diplomatic refusal to answer – or, in reality, this unequivocal answer – is in the highest degree characteristic of the “friends”, and tells the actual price of their friendship. If everybody had thus answered the question of revolution before 1917, when it was infinitely harder to answer, there would have been no Soviet state in the world, and the British “friends” would have had to expand their fund of friendly emotion upon other objects.

These were the same Webbs who opposed the General Strike in the UK, for example. The sort of middling people who enjoy popular enthusiasm for almost anything, from a comfortable distance, whilst lacking the principles which would hold their own feet to the fire and provoke them into real action to achieve anything on behalf of the ideals they espouse. Not that I’m necessarily characterising Cruddas or Trickett in this way. I’m simply saying that, as during the Russian Revolution, it’s easy to support anything when you don’t have to act yourself.

Bottom line: I don’t see that Chavez’ call for a fifth international will get much more than tepid hangers-on here in the UK. In Latin America, however, the story might be different – and this is perhaps why socialists elsewhere need to take cognisance. A top down approach to organising a Latin American socialist congress might divert the needed pressures away from the governments of participating countries, governments which while they are left wing do not unambiguously represent workers. This is what the Comintern did for Stalin and it was disastrous.

A grandiose plan to rally the world’s socialists (such as are acceptable, no doubt, to Chavez himself) to his banner may be an internationalist gesture – an attempt to reach agreements that will allow expansion of social democratic tendencies on the part of leaders. Left-mayoralties, governorships and presidencies of the world, unite! It may even pull together sections of the working class in areas where the Bolivarian Revolution has great prestige. But coupled to Chavez’ antipathy to the US and friendship towards dictators, it could be another Comintern.

Speaking of his antipathy towards the US, Chavez’ militarism, particularly the spending of money on Russian and Chinese military hardware, even while infrastructure reforms are hardly begun, is disturbing. Fronting off between Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia is not encouraging either. Yet the sort of quasi-nationalist rhetoric that emerges from Chavez, as well as his moves to squash any socialist activism independent of the PSUV, coupled to his reconciliation with sections of the capitalist class, potentially make war more likely, with Chavez as a new Bonaparte.

The last thing the world’s socialist movement needs right now is a self-proclaimed socialist hero, newly garlanded by a gathering of international socialists, to suddenly encourage or begin a war that will do little but butcher peasants or invite the wrath of US imperialism upon more jungle villages. For all these reasons, we need to be very cautious in our approach to this Fifth International. Patient work by socialists of and amongst the working class will produce socialist cadres; they will not be commanded into existence by even the most gifted of Generals.

Today’s email from Compass smacks of desperation – a desperation to remain relevant.

It exhorts me to send in my alternative manifesto ideas, though I am told to keep them to 200 words:

‘At our AGM we told our members that we would be working with other organisations to put together an alternative manifesto which would be released in early January. But to do this right we need you to tell us what you think about the things that really count in your daily life and those of your family, friends and work colleagues. This cannot be another manifesto full of left clichés but something that appeals to normal people we have to attract.’

I may be wilfully misinterpreting, but what this seems to suggest is that Compass’s previous missives on what should be in Labour’s manifesto have indeed been ‘full of left clichés’, and they’re desperate for someone, anyone – even normal people will do – to give them some cliché-free words.

We have, of course, been here before.  It’s only a few short months since Compass were running a big razamatazz competition for policy ideas.  The plan was that the winning ideas:

‘will now form the campaigning priorities for Compass in the upcoming months. We will pick up on these ideas over the next year and incorporate them into our campaigning, in our calls for real change and in our alternative manifesto for the next election.’

How exactly is that different from this time around?  I’m afraid I just don’t know.

What Compass pretends to be is a mass political movement of the centre-left, ready and waiting to take over the Labour party and save it from itself. 

Unfortunately, for Compass, it is none of those things in reality.

While it claims a support base of some 30,000, which would be impressive enough, the reality is that figure is based on the number of email addresses it has garnered through its website.  It calls everyone a ‘Compass supporter’ in its emails, including me; I have never given any indication of support.  Nor has Kerry McCarthy MP.

Compass is not a political movement as such.   It has never bothered to try to establish itself at the grassroots of the party, preferring to rely on a press release strategy and a well-designed website.  It has not even bothered, as far as I know, and unlike other left and centre-left organisations, tried to get its representative on the to NEC through participation in the grassroots slate. 

In fact Compass is little more than a think-tank, privately funded initially by Neal Lawson, and now funded through the membership fees of around 4, 000 people who have decided the publications it provides to members are worth the fee. 

Relatively few of this 4,000 are political activists.  Its membership, such as it is, does not even bother with its internal elections (237 people voted this year), because they know there is little real influence to be had; the decisions on what Compass stands for, if anything, are made by the worthy few, and the membership is invited to participate in the competitions.

And as we approach a general election, Compass is becoming an irrelevance. 

Its last great hurrah may turn out to have been its much commented, much derided attempt by its ‘management committee’ to stage a coup against the parliamentary leadership. 

To what extent this was ever serious, or simply the dinner party witterings of its illuminati, is not very clear, because the whole notion was dead and buried almost as soon as it was born, but the reaction it got from both left and right in the party summed up the changing attitude to Compass pretty well.  As Luke asked succinctly, ‘who do Compass think they are?’.

As Compass fades from view over the next few months, so will the opportunity increase for a proper political movement – the Labour Representation Committee – to raise its profile.  

If you are an LRC member, you are generally politically active, and there will be a lot of political action in the next six months, and in the year that follow the general election (whatever the result).

The LRC will, I hope, distinguish itself both through its commitment to a general election campaign waged on the basis that, while New Labour may be a long way from perfect, a Conservative government will be much, much worse news for the working class.  

Beyond that, the LRC will seek to extend its organisational reach into CLPs up and down the country, and to engage at proper grassroots level with working class organisations and causes. 

Compass will do none of these things, perhaps with the notable exception of the work that Sam Tarry and his comrades in Jon Cruddas’s own constituency.

I don’t yet believe that the LRC political organisation strategy is as well developed as it could be, and I have said so, beginning here, and at length. 

But as the Compass lustre fades, and it becomes recognised as the media-oriented think tank that it is, the LRC has the opportunity to pick up some of  the Compass membership, and help them to get involved not in silly policy competitions, but in proper political activity.

Compass has served a useful purpose, of that I have no doubt, and while I am critical of some of the stuff that comes out of it, and of its lack of political organisation,  I think Dave is right to point out that talk – any political talk – is a step forward. 

But now I sense Compass’s usefulness is drawing to an end, and that an organisation focused as much on action as on words will need to take its place.

I admit to being something of a misanthropist, on occasion. Sitting in my regular coffee house, I have to wear earphones because listening to some of the ill-informed conversations going on around me really gets me uptight. One conversation today about goings on in Venezuela managed to get past my usual defences of either music or my own conversations with other people and instantly I was irritated. And I was wrong to be.

The conversation was being carried on by people who clearly didn’t know much about the different political groups in Venezuela, much less the relationship between them or to the people. Moreover, it was being conducted by someone I’ve never seen on a picket line, or at a political meeting. These days I know by sight the majority of Socialist Student or SWS members, UAF participants, Kent Labour Students etc. And even if the person was somewhere, somehow politically active beyond my ken, plenty of others who talk like this simply aren’t.

This gap between talk and practice is basically what I define as pretension. It is someone striking a pose, perhaps self-consciously, perhaps because they really believe they care. It is true of virtually every aspect of how we define ourselves; plenty of people talk the talk about things like politics, but rarely do they really walk the walk – as defined by me, obviously, because inside our own heads we’re all judge, jury and executioner of those we come into contact with.

Insufferably arrogant as that may seem, strolling home I was struck by a thought. The nature of Marxist dialectics is to think in terms of process, of becoming and ceasing to be, rather than in the abstract – because nothing exists in the abstract. This puts the gap between talk and practice into perspective; it is not irreducible, but in reality one is connected to the other. More talk, more learning, will lead to some form of action, the logical conclusion of every strongly held opinion, which opinions often are if people are waxing lyrical about them.

Of course, from the outside, we can facilitate this process by spreading word about issues ourselves as well as being available to provide ways in which people can move from talk to action. This is the correct response, rather than dismissing such talk with derisive comments along the lines of, “Bloody students”, which contains so many invalid assumptions that my head should have exploded.

Indeed, we should recognize that even talking about the matter is helpful, as it encourages others to think about their own position – and ultimately a great quantity of people thinking and talking will result in a qualitative change – towards action. Likewise blogging is a form of this coffee-house chatter, which encourages others to think and talk about political issues, undertaken as a pose – as happens – or in the hope that enough evidence gathered to our side, the correct persuasive argument, will convince readers that now is the time to do something.

What we suggest doing is usually inherent to the arguments we’re making – such as the conviction of myself and Paul that a local network of points of resistance is an absolutely necessity; trades councils and unions in general, socialist parties, interest groups and so on. It’s up to us not merely to pontificate but to be prepared to offer channels for that activity. As anyone who blogs will know, however, what activity we should be undertaking is often hotly debated – everyone wants to encourage ‘the right kind of activism’.

Discussions on this blog and elsewhere, between organisers and supporters of the Power 2010 campaign on the one hand and those who dispute their method, exemplify this sort of debate.

Just how hotly this is debated, I think, depends on the stakes – and because blogs (and political activism generally, for the present) exist on a large sea of continued depoliticization (not the same as apathy), the stakes are huge even whilst having tiny ramifications, because every group and every approach is prepared to fight to the death to convince anyone they possibly can. One more or less activist can mean the difference between being able to declare something a success or having it declared DOA.

One more or less criticism can mean the difference between feeling vaguely self-satisfied that you are contributing to ‘the cause’ or feeling that you’re just a poser behind a keyboard with a few posh friends and contacts you can lobby.

Yet anger at other approaches is the same as anger at the student sitting in the coffee house, being completely politically inactive but wanting to seem intelligent, or radical or whatever. It is inappropriate, even if it is an easy pressure valve for activists to vent through. Some other approaches exist that are utterly contrary to everything we, as activists, want to achieve – but a great many are muddled, inconsistent and unlikely ever to possess real social weight through a failure to orient towards the real social divisions in our world.

This is the difference between being actively conservative, reactionary, and groping towards one’s own position through a fog of information mediated by one’s one role in and practices vis a vis society. This is a situation that will be clarified and polarised rapidly through the onset of an active revolutionary movement, larger and capable of bigger achievements than at present. Again, rather than an irreducible gap between two political positions, the living processes that sustain politics can bring people around to a correct orientation.

All that is required is to continue articulating those processes, and providing the sort of organisation which can understand how best to intervene in them. None of which requires unnecessary hostility or even an over-emphasis of and concentration upon differences – something I have been guilty of. With that said, I want to make clear that Jon Cruddas and his Compass lot will still not escape the odd verbal battering around here. Said with all the love in the world of course.

As an establishment with a growing reputation for its social scientific research, Though Cowards Flinch (TCF) has decided to approach the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) with a view to the funding of a major inter-disciplinary research project into the socio-political and psychological aspects of the  climate change debate.  

Letters of support (and offers of matched funding) for our application are welcome.  Here, as an aid to the writing of your support letter, is our own letter to the Chief Executive of the ESRC which summarises our proposed research.

Dear Chief Executive

We do not know much about climate change.  How would we?  We’re social scientists, not real scientists with test tubes and a white coat (pictured).

However, we do have a big multi-disciplinary social science project we’d like you to give us a lot of money to do, and which we think will be helpful in further in knowledge about why a lot of people talk utter bollocks about climate change, while some other people talk comparative sense.

The research can be divided into two separate parts: statistical analysis and psychological assessment.

Statistical research

We will create a massive dataset in SPSS to examine the extent to which scepticism about climate change expressed by some ’bloggers’ and internet-based journalists has a statistically positive correlation to a range of other belief patterns.

Further, through a range of complex regression analysis techniques we will assess whether any or all of these other belief patterns have a causal relationship with these bloggers’/journalists’ scepticism about climate change.

These beliefs, expressed as hypothesised independent variables, will be finalised at the pilot stages of the research, but are likely to include the belief that:

a) we are all taxed too much;

b) poor people are generally to blame for things because they are feckless;

c) it’s all a conspiracy by leftwingers – all of it, especially ‘multiculturalism’;

d) the BBC is full of Marxists with a big plot;

e) scientists are all part of a global conspiracy to do with green taxes, which will then be siphoned off to may for equality and diversity officers in loony left councils;

f) the Labour government should really be called ZaNuLiebour because it’s like living in Zimbabwe, what with everything;

g) Paul Krugman’s proposed extension of Godwin’s Law is not a critical comment on the state of the blogosphere, but a worthy challenge.

Psychological research

This aspect of the research will involve in-depth interviews with bloggers/journalists who  are climate change sceptics.  The main purpose of the interviews will be to examine the extent to which their view that scientists only use/reveal data which supports their existing theory of man-made climate change, is in fact a case of psychological transference, whereby they impute to the scientific community their own characteristic behaviour, of which they are secretly deeply ashamed,  of making wild generalisations based on selectively chosen data. 

The working hypothesis for this aspect of the research is that the greater the blogger/journalist’s own propensity to make massive and totally unvalid assumptions about things based on pretty well no evidence at all and without even bothering to do even the slightest background research, the more they are likely to suggest that climate change scientists do the same, in the belief that this will make them look intelligent and balanced, as opposed to the total foaming nutjobs that they really are.

Assuming you are content with our proposal, please send the research money in a big envelope, marked ‘holiday money’ for our administrative convenience.

Yours sincerely

TCF team

Alex Smith has an article over at Labour List celebrating the ICM and UKPR polls which show a fall in the Tory lead, and a bump in Labour’s figures, after the by-election victory in Scotland secured the party a few days of coverage. Alex’s says this shows ‘the Tory lead is vulnerable and that the arguments are there to be won’.

I’m not so convinced. Certainly, any party can get a bump in the polls by winning a by-election or by preparing a popular raft of measures to announce for the Queen’s Speech. But the reality cloaked by such announcements as Gordon Brown put in the mouth of Mrs. Windsor is a casts a worrying pall over the optimism of Labour activists on the doorstep.

For a start, the Queen didn’t manage to get past paragraph one without evidence of Brown’s attempt at misdirection. “Through active employment and training programmes…my Government will foster growth and employment.” Neatly avoiding the estimated £350 million being stripped from youth training programmes across the country.

A lot of groups which draw support directly from Labour’s heartlands are earnestly campaigning against this move, which they do by pointing out the fact of the cuts. Labour loyalists can talk all they want about how the argument is still up for grabs, but that’s blatantly not true as it’s our own supporters mobilizing to fight Labour’s agenda, the one behind the rhetoric.

Whatever polling figures say, this disconnection will be reflected come election time. It’s the same with the public sector; almost any public sector employee can tell of unfilled positions, tasks being postponed in order that more important ones can have manpower hours and all set to a cacophony of “We’re coming for the pensions you get, after forty years of paltry wages!”

The Left across the country is gearing up to fight cuts, whoever makes them. And so the rhetoric of Gordon Brown, and the naive belief of the Party faithful that the arguments put forward by Brown are arguments worth fighting for, is made a mockery of. So while Labour consoles itself with propaganda videos of disgusting proportion, and dupes the odd voter on the doorstep, the victory of the Tories is still all but assured because there’s no way for Labour to mobilize the real support that exists in the hearts of many millions of people without basically abandoning all New Labour has ever been.

Meanwhile we need to be asking, what is the cost of these stories we’re telling voters about Labour being the progressive party, party of the NHS etc, even whilst our leaders are preparing to march in a reactionary direction? The cost is the success of the far right; the gap between rhetoric and action leads to disillusionment – and disillusionment finds many willing accomplices in the right-wing media, singing consoling songs of how much better things were way back when…

So it is certainly time for Labour activists to stop talking like this is ‘our’ party, even if we hope that some day it will be. It is time to turn off the music drowning out the reality of war, higher taxes, capless tuition fees, hollowed-out public services and a growing rich-poor divide. If we don’t talk honestly on the doorstep, and give the lie to Gordon Brown, even if urging a Labour vote, then when we come back, we’ll find Tory voters, Lib-Dem voters and BNP voters. Anything but Labour voters.

This has a knock-on effect on those activists beyond the careerist core that hitherto has sustained New Labour, and the die-hard Labour Left; those who go in to this election with false expectations – expectations which are encouraged by Brown’s rhetoric – then they will come out disillusioned, and join the legion of ex-Labour members, depoliticized or members of any of the Left parties which hate Labour’s guts.

Bonus material: Dave’s Wanker Watch spotted this.

Just a short one before I depart the blogosphere for the weekend. With news that the leaders of the EU27 have decided to appoint Baroness Ashton the High Representative for Foreign Affairs of the EU Commission (or something similarly convoluted), you would think this might be a good time to be talking about further democratic reform, you know, to assuage the fears of millions that the EU doesn’t listen and doesn’t care what they think.

Not if you are Baroness Ashton. Courtesy of the BBC:

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Baroness Ashton dismissed claims that she had never been elected and that millions of Europeans had had no say in her appointment. “Their 27 elected heads of state have had a say and they all decided on me,” she said.

So that’s alright then.

She rejected criticism the appointments had been decided in secret saying: “We should never take away those opportunities for heads of state to talk frankly to one another.” EU leaders were “very comfortable” with her appointment, she said. “This is not about a fudge, it’s about trying to reach a conclusion.”

Because people who aren’t national leaders obviously can’t be trusted to reach a conclusion and vote accordingly.

The whole thing just reeks of smugness on the part of the Baroness. Never mind that the European electorate haven’t been allowed to choose who they want standing at the top of the European pyramid they didn’t vote to have. Never mind that diplomacy in secrecy means diplomacy in secrecy from the electorate, not from other world leaders or from European bureaucrats who took part in the scheming.

Hardly very democratic.

WAKE-UP AND PAY ATTENTION!

STOP Worrying About Your SPECIAL Interest. It Won’t Matter a HILL OF BEANS If Obama Signs Away OUR SOVEREIGNTY at the ‘UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE TREATY’ MEETING next month.

Signing away our sovereignty means we will NO LONGER be an independent Nation. Therefore, our Constitution and Bill Of Rights will be null and void. We will be lumped into the NEW WORLD ORDER and subject to their Laws under the Jurisdiction of the World Court served by the IMF under an elitist’s regime headed by Soros.

We have published a 12 part series detailing how the takeover of our society is being accomplished by the elitist’s agent, George Soros.

The final nail in our coffin will come next month, if we are too busy with other important issues to pay attention to a silent government takeover under the guise of Global Warming that will in the end, be irreversible, taking centuries to undue the damage done if it will even be possible. STOP IT NOW!

Watching these two videos will fill you in on all the details answering any questions you may have. Just bear in mind, Obama is a puppet president working for George Soros NOT in the Best Interests of fellow Americans…

*****************

Ask yourself, why is it the Obama White House can’t seem to get their Health Care Plan straight? The video below illustrates the ever changing goal posts stated by Obama himself. Confusion and Chaos to keep you occupied making you sick and tired of knowing what they are really up to that will take away your Freedom of Choice.

Listen to their response below (2nd video) making note of the speaker’s lips not matching her spoken words… Because even she has been edited by the vaunted transparent policies Obama proclaimed during his campaign as part of his “CHANGE” coming to Washington.

You know as well as I do, all Obama has done is BANK BAILOUTS and Corporate takeovers since he’s taken office. Providing NOTHING in the way of HELP for the American People ,saving Homes from foreclosure and creating jobs to keep those homes. All Obama represents is more of the same gloom and doom, hardship and austerity for years to come. If allowed to sign the Climate Treaty this will be our permanent way of life.

]]> http://conservativewanderer.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/obama-calls-troops-a-pretty-good-photo-op/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:56:38 +0000 Conservative Wanderer http://conservativewanderer.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/obama-calls-troops-a-pretty-good-photo-op/ http://conservativewanderer.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/barack-obama-beyond-radioactive-for-2010-candidates/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:46:40 +0000 Conservative Wanderer http://conservativewanderer.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/barack-obama-beyond-radioactive-for-2010-candidates/ http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2009/11/19/a-brief-reply-to-harpymarx-on-feminism-and-social-totality/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:23:17 +0000 Dave Semple http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2009/11/19/a-brief-reply-to-harpymarx-on-feminism-and-social-totality/

Two interesting posts reached the blogosphere over the past day or so, from HarpyMarx and Dave Osler. Dave laments the passing away of what he recognised, in his days as a young Trot, as feminism. “These days, feminism – if it means anything at all – seems to mean raunch culture on the one hand and the right of women to compete on equal terms on City trading desks. Progress? Maybe, but this is not the way my generation thought it was going to turn out.”

What Dave describes is a ‘feminist’ movement that has completely parted ways with the socialist project of political, cultural and economic emancipation of all people. Yet Dave also goes further than wondering if the deteriorated ‘feminist’ movement has pulled away from socialism, he openly asks whether or not Marxism and the ‘patriarchal’ theories of a certain strand of radical feminism were always destined to part company. I think a lot of what he says is very valid, though HarpyMarx disagrees.

“…the usual argument that has been thrown at me in the past is that feminism is ‘petit–bourgeois’ [...] and this reminds me of Barbara Ehrenreich when she wrote about ‘mechanical Marxists’ who ignore the totality of society and how patriarchal capitalism invades every sphere of life. [...] Yes, there are various different strands of feminism but why is it when it is debated sometimes on the Left it is belittled, disregarded, devalued and parodied by mainly men, who, to be honest view oppression in a very reductionist way. And ask yourself, why do many active and organised feminists by-pass the Left…?”

By this, Harpy, who ‘despairs’ of Dave’s post, attempts to outline her view that ‘feminism’ should not be dismissed, as it is by some sections of the Left. Yet Harpy’s attitude – or at least her article – suffers from a failure to define its own terms of enquiry. ‘Feminism’ includes many ideas which are mutually contradictory, and cannot be viewed as part of a cogent whole. Thus elements of feminism may well be petit-bourgeois (spart-speak for pro-capitalist) or at odds with Marxist historical materialism, whilst others may not.

For example, feminism – as a demand for women to have equal rights to men, the broadest possible definition – is easily accommodated within capitalism. As is any form of identity politics. To that extent, socialism and feminism can exist independently of one another. It is important to note, however, that feminist ambitions of suffrage, for example, were not achieved merely through ‘feminist’ tactics – feminism was merely one arm of the socialist move to mobilise the working classes in their own interest immediately before and after World War One.

Thus, it would appear to me, that socialism has the primacy, not feminism, in terms of understanding and changing the world. Fighting oppression of all forms is important – whether racism, sexism or homo- and trans-phobia. Not to move beyond the narrow remit of such identity politics, however, is to abandon analysis of what underpins all oppression, and thus to abandon an anti-capitalist perspective, to become precisely the type of petit-bourgeois activist the Weekly Worker might criticize.

That is why so many ‘feminists’ can by-pass the Left. They focus merely on their ‘identity’ rather than on the fact that their subjective experience is constituted by the same structural features of our world which underpin all oppression, and that these features are ultimately rooted in and reproduced by the extortion of surplus value from workers. The position of the proletarian, in Marxist thinking, is what enables the working class-for-itself to shatter the chains of private property, which ultimately fetter all identities; a feminism which ignores this both neuters itself and is incompatible with Marxism.

I doubt many feminists will be terribly upset by that idea – but this is the point; Dave Osler is right to question how well feminism sits with Marxist theories of society. Finding them lacking, from a Marxist perspective, he is right to dismiss them. This is not the same thing as dismissing the need to fight against sexism, but if our tactics flow from our understanding of what this oppression is and what causes it, then it stands to reason that the Marxist feminist and the Conservative Party-orientated feminist will have two completely different approaches.

So why shouldn’t we deride the approach of the latter?

I have in the past described myself as a feminist; I am for a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. I am for equality between men and women. But I am a Marxist first – which means I have a particular opinion on why women are occasionally denied their right to choose, or denied equality and how we can rectify that through campaigns that dissolve identity barriers by bringing together all identities – including the ‘majority’ identities – to attack the basis for oppression and the entrenched ruling class which reproduces it anew for every generation.

This is not reductionist or mechanistic; quite the opposite – it addresses the social totality whilst identity politics manages only to address a small sphere, and that not necessarily in a manner liable to change the status-quo.

Moreover, I reserve the right to mock and belittle anyone who tells me I’m wrong – so long as I can convincingly explain why I do so.

It is not the normal practice of this blog to leap to the defence of Conservative politicians under fire from the media, as they usually deserve it.

But this is different.

The matter concerns one Cllr Jim Hothersall (Con), a member of South Ribble Borough Council, and also mayor of the town of Penwortham, nr. Preston, Lancashire.

Regarding the local police decision to advise homeowners against opening the door to young carol singers, Cllr Hothersall is reported to have commented in the following way on the Jeremy Vine radio show:

‘They are teenagers from a renowned area in Penwortham. I have got to stress Penwortham is a super place to live but there is a particular ward where there is a particular problem and they are instantly recognisable. In fact, the local ward councillor refers to the area as Beirut.’

Now to compare a pleasant Preston suburb to a Lebanese port city renowned for its ‘war-torn’ status in the 1980s would be unacceptable, and an insult not just to the teenagers of Penwortham, but to all the town’s residents.

But of course this is not what he said.  This is simply the uncultured interpretation of his words Mr Vine and his BBC colleagues.

It is perfectly clear that the place Cllr Hothersall was referring to on the radio was not Beirut, but the northern Bavarian city of Bayreuth, pronounced in fairly similar fashion to Beirut when using a Preston accent.

Now anyone with an ounce of cultural history in their bones will know that Bayreuth is most famous for its association with Richard Wagner and for the annual performances of his operatic works at the custom-built Festspielhaus.

As Cllr Hothersall says, the teenagers of Penwortham are ‘instantly recognisable’ (one pictured above).   

This, as would have become clear had Mr Vine bothered to investigate, is almost certainly because they are all dressing up as Wagnerian characters, ringing doorbells on the pretext of carol singing, and proceeding to deliver Romantic Period operatic works at high volume and to a mixed vocal standard.

Frankly, if I opened the door anticipating a short and sweet rendition of Silent Night, only then to be met by a group of young hoodlums in large horned hats and flowing Nordic apparel, presenting themselves on my doorstep simply to subject me to the whole of the Ring Cycle, including the Vorabend, spread of a total of four evenings and with few comfort breaks,  I would be more than a little upset.   

Most people only know the Ride of the Valkyries from its appearance in Apocalypse Now, and it is simply unacceptable for these young tearaways to expect people to stand on a drafty doorstep for some 14 hours while they sing away lustily in German and prance around with fake spears pausing occasionally to wipe their brows in a tragic way. 

IT IS JUST NOT ON.

These young people clearly have no regard for others and are simply content to impose their own questionable operatic values on others, whatever the weather, and I FOR ONE AM SICK OF IT.

Cllr Hothersall is quite right to bring to attention this level of rampant anti-social behaviour, and if we had more councillors like him then perhaps we would not be in quite such a mess in this country.

Mr Stanley Kubrick made an influential film in the 1960s named Clockwork Orange, in which the main character, a psychopathic delinquent named Alex Delarge, indulges in orgies of violence only then to return home to play Beethoven’s Choral 9th on is stereo system. 

The incongruity between the violence of the evening and the beauty of the music highlights the level of the dystopia envisaged by Kubrick, but it also hints at a level of redemption attainable through the musical arts, in a way similar to the feeling of peace which washes over Gregor Samsa, the man-become-beetle in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, when he hears the sound of his sister’s violin shortly before his death.

What Cllr Hothersall is telling us, it seems clear to me, is that modern youth culture in Penwortham has moved even beyond the dystopic vision of Kubrick. 

Now, the quite literally deranged teenagers of this seemingly unassuming Preston suburb not only inflict needless,  gratuitous suffering on their fellow residents, but they pursue the ways of their new barbarism through the cynical misuse of  the very artistic tools that preceding generations handed down in enlightened good faith.

Surely, we are a broken society, a benighted land.

We owe Cllr Hothersall a debt of gratitude for making this so clear to us.  Yet Jeremy Vine, a radio ‘celebrity’, abuses him.  For shame.

Highlights of Current Senate Legislation:
-Insures 94% of Americans
-Reduces deficit by $127 billion over next decade
-Includes public option opt-out for states

Be prepared for the potential filibuster and make sure that you understand how a filibuster works. Should it be something we fear though? Maybe not according to this opinion piece:

With health care now consuming more than one-sixth of America’s GDP and a recent Harvard study estimating that 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance, the nation can no longer afford this pattern of legislative deadlock. The solution is for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to exercise his right to restore the traditional filibuster. Were Senator Reid to do this, the opponents of health care reform would have to make their arguments against permitting the majority to vote in full public view.

The outcome of such a public debate is by no means preordained. But it would take a matter of urgent public policy import out of the backrooms of the Senate and into the public arena. Democrats who favor health care reform should not shrink from an old-fashioned filibuster, but welcome it. And if Senator Lieberman and his colleagues wish to argue their case in the court of public opinion, then by all means let them do so. For the result may be not only the end of an untenable status quo in health care, but also the weakening of an archaic Senate tradition that has debilitated the legislative process.

The question is: how many Americans that aren’t steadfast in their beliefs already would even care to watch it?

Sources: 1, 2, 3