The Trillion Dollar Trick. Margaret Thatcher R.I.P.

Meltdown Monday

The age of Reagan and Thatcher is over. Everyone's agreed on that. The US taxpayer is paying for its government to nationalise property in a desperate bid to stop the international financial house of cards from collapsing. As it will be again in 20 years time, or less, given the same culture of greed and competition. It will be no use saying 'We told You So' then, either.

The real money wagered on this desperate attempt to save the markets from themselves has to come from somewhere. And unless the taxpayer already footing the bill is also expected to suffer fewer hospitals, schools and transport improvements, then the age of the corporate tax-dodge has to be over. The biggest free lunch in history has closed its All-You-Can-Eat buffet.

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The inherent ability of the Chinese dictatorship to endure more financial hardship than Western democracies will pose a greater ideological attraction than ever. The Beijing Olympics really couldn't have been better timed. And the new oil-rich, Russian oligarchy may have McDonalds and iPods, but the bulk of Mother Russia still knows what it is like to suffer, and will merely see a great world depression as their generation's rite of passage, and blame it on the west, as they always have done. Both these dictatorships will seem more cuddly political animals to a property-harassed western electorate trying to recover from the blessings of unbridled Consumerism, and hoping to find a way of not repeating the experience.

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One lesson of this week is that competitors do not co-operate even in their own survival. The truth is that, with the amount of sheer technological power and historical experience available, the social need for competition has shrivelled to almost nothing. The same power which could be used to provide a decent standard of free life for everyone has been used instead to fuel competition for its own sake. The result being the chaos of regular Depressions, constant wars, the manipulation of the food markets to create profit and starvation, and the sabotage of the climate.
The market-worshipping ideology fashionable until last week was still operating in the Steam Age. It was historically obsolete. A deliberate, perverse attempt to hold back the process of technology which tends to make the lives of more people more bearable and reduce the need for competition and war. The social formula which states that the more technology is available, the less brute labour and competition are necessary to maintain a civil society.
A certain ratio of competition to co-operation has always been needed, but with each labour-saving, information-sharing, pain-relieving advance, there is less need for human beings to fight each other for their survival. The required amount of conflict today must be down at spice level, from its heyday as a bulk staple in the stone age recipe. Never has more technology been available, but making it work for people is not profitable, while making it produce cheap Kalashnikovs, cosmetic surgery and sub-prime mortgages is very profitable - for a short time. But short term profit is now discovered to be a very dangerous thing, it makes planets uninhabitable, and if allowed to rampage, will mean there is no long term to worry about. Wall Street and the City of London will be under thirty foot of water. This week was another warning that if we insist on behaving like cavemen, we will probably end up being cavemen.

"freaky friday" "meltdown monday"
crash08

Tom Daley Vs Primark

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44300000/jpg/_44300583_thomas_daley2.jpg
How can this boy on the end of a diving board help being compared and contrasted with the millions of child labourers in India and other places, at the sweaty end of the Primark profit-chain? How can the sight of this child with the eyes of the world on him not remind us of the millions of lives which are destroyed each year so that we can cheer ourselves up cheaply with a new shirt or dress every week, so that consumerism can get its quick fix behind the bikesheds?
 The answer to both questions must be because it must seem natural to us that these lives are destroyed. Otherwise, we would never shop again with confidence. Just as it seems natural and worthy that India is now a rich and powerful country, with a growing oligarchy of billionaires, and a market presence to be proud of.
 It is also natural that with access to such token wage bills, Indian entrepreneurs should attract manufacturing jobs away from the west, causing unemployment, but at the same time, making unemployment more tolerable by reducing the cost of clothes in Primark. And naturally, unemployment is more tolerable in Britain than in India because we have a welfare state. So isn't it time India had one too? Now that she is an embryonic super power. In fact, isn't it time that the western business cabals started demanding that India bear its fair share of global poverty, and allow the jam of manufacturing employment to be spread a little thinner but a little wider. In other words, it is time that the CBI started lecturing India (and China) on social policies it would once have described as socialist.
 This is assuming, of course, that the likes of the CBI do not relish the prospect of India sliding into a form of Neo-Feudalism, based essentially on slave labour - because if they are prepared to accept that political model in India, why should we assume they would be hostile to it in Britain? Especially as it seems to be so profitable. In fact, why should Digby Jones have any problems with the Chinese political model, given how stable and long-lasting it obviously is.
 Whatever muffled outburts of defiance we get to see in the smoggy Beijing august, it's safe to predict that there won't be many demands for fair housing benefit and access to universal trade union rights from many western media machines. And yet without this economic safety net, a system based on a vote every 5 years is a pale imitation of democracy, and can still run on slavery, as India, the biggest democracy of all, shows.
Beijing Olympics 2008

The Unique Human Dilemma.

We've never been as certain that things are going to change so radically.
Millenarianism of some kind is a natural state in human nature and affairs. The sense of an ending is innate. But the difference between previous Armageddon hysterias and us is that now the concern is truly global, and based on a generally (if not universally) agreed system of thought and deduction - science.
For a long time, there has been too much competition and not enough co-operation in the recipe for human progress. In fact, co-operation is our defining human characteristic, far more so than competition. Civilisation has always needed a specific balance of competition and co-operation. But old habits die hard, and industrial capitalism definitely forced more primitive competition into the mix at exactly the same time when the added productivity it delivered provided the opportunity for more co-operation. This 'decision' of history to take the wrong fork in the road lead to the planet-threatening excesses of Consumerism. And now we know, with the benefit of hindsight - another difference between us and almost every other generation of human history - that we are stuffed if we don't do something fast.
I think that amounts to a unique dilemma in human history.

The Uses of Visual Literacy

50 years on, after the masses have become producers of imagery rather than mere consumers, it is surely time to re-examine Hoggart's fears of a consumerist conquest of individuality and culture.
With more people creating and using images, surely they will begin to learn to see through the lies being told them. They are now increasingly members of the Magic Circle, rather than members of the gullible audience. The printing press has been invented again only this time, everyone has one.
As even the most impoverished people in the world begin to access global communications, so their global presence will grow. And as they learn to tell their own stories in their own way, we will be less able to see them as mere flotsam, the collateral damage of capitalism, and more as real people like us.

photo collect