The State of the Republicans: 2013

The end of the Romney campaign ushered in a new era for the Republicans…. apparently. They insisted they must change. Their appeal must broaden. Their hate-filled, politics of over-the-top Glenn Beck style fear had to go. They had to be presentable. Change or die! The old days of a Party of old, white, male, Christian, heterosexual, angry-at-everyone-who-isn’t-EXACTLY-like-them, funded by big corporations had to go. And so we were informed that a new breed of Republicans would appear. Ready to present a reformed GOP to the electorate. They were radically different from their predecessors.

So how’s that going?

Well, in November 2012, the residents of Texas’ first district re-elected Louie Gohmert for a fifth term in the House of Reps. If the Republicans are intending to break from the past, surely we’d expect Gohmert to perhaps be a little more moderate than his more radical Tea-Party-esque contemporaries. That’s what we’d expect. However, when asked about his opposition to any gun control legislation, Gohmert gave this rather odd answer:

“In fact, I had this discussion with some wonderful, caring Democrats earlier this week on the issue of, well, they said “surely you could agree to limit the number of rounds in a magazine, couldn’t you? How would that be problematic?”

And I pointed out, well, once you make it ten, then why would you draw the line at ten? What’s wrong with nine? Or eleven? And the problem is once you draw that limit ; it’s kind of like marriage when you say it’s not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?

There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage and it’s the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it’s just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal.

- You read right. In a discussion about gun control, Gohmert managed to take a shot at same-sex marriage, by employing the insufferably weak slippery slope fallacy. I cannot work out which is more impressive; his ability to link gun control and same-sex marriage… two completely separate issues that in no way overlap, or his intense lack of sensibility in recognising that there is no reason to believe a slippery slope with either of the issues he’s commenting on. I could equally say “If we let women vote, what next, letting camels vote?” or “If we ban cocaine, why not ban cough medicine? Where does it end!!” It’s absurd and it is baseless. He isn’t the only Republican to use this fallacy recently. John Cornyn, the new Senate Minority Whip said:

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right…. Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.”

- Yes. the Republican Senate Minority Whip has just compared a loving couple wishing to express that love via marriage, and wishing only to be considered equal under law….. to a man marrying a turtle. That’s the standard of top Republicans in 2013.

Back to Gohmert. The man who tried to link gay marriage to gun control, also claimed that the liberals are going to make Churches:

….hire whatever Satan-worshiper, whatever cross-dresser you think might be immoral, that’s against your religious belief. You are going to be forced to abandon your religious beliefs, and we’ve been seeing that with some of the requirements under Obamacare.

- Yes! Someone had to say it! Obamacare is simply a mask to make Churches hire cross-dressing Satan-Worshippers! It’s SO obvious. Wake up America!
The fact that this man gets the privilege to vote on gun legislation; a vote on the safety of your children in school, would be laughable if it weren’t so utterly terrifying.

Bobby Jindal won a 2nd term as Louisiana Governor in 2011. Since then, he’s been rather excitable at promoting misleading figures to promote an agenda of fear. Whilst one fifth of all residents of Louisiana lack health insurance, Jindal refuses to expand Medicaid expansion, claiming it would cost Louisiana $1bn over the next ten years. Quite where he gets this figure from, I’m not sure. Especially given that a Department of Health Report noted that Louisiana would actually save around $400mn over the next ten years, by expanding Medicaid. He appears to have invented his own figure, to scare people. Despite this, and despite a petition signed by…

Advocates for Louisiana Public Healthcare.

Advocacy Center.

Capitol City Family Health Center.

Capital City Alliance.

Citizens United for In-Home Support.

Coalition of HIV/AIDS Nonprofits and Governmental Entities.

Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation, Harvard Law School.

Children’s Defense Fund-Louisiana.

Children’s Bureau of New Orleans.

DEAF Louisiana.

Doctors for America.

Depression & Bipolar Support Alliance, Northeast Louisiana.

Health Law Advocates of Louisiana.

HOPE For Homeless.
Along with 30 other groups, and countless more individual signatures….. Jindal refuses to expand Medicaid.

And then there is the apparent darling of the Republicans new bid for power in 2016; Marco Rubio.

“We’re bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.”

- Here, Rubio is subtly promoting the myth that America was founded a Christian nation, and that religion must be considered part of the fabric. A subtle hint that non-belief, cannot be considered an American value. Thus, in a single, tiny quote, we see the saviour of the Republicans alienate anyone who isn’t slightly obsessed with ‘God’ being a key component to Patriotism. So that’s 15% of Americans who claim no religion. That’s a lot of people to alienate, for a man promoted as the key to solving the Republican Party’s problem of appealing to minorities. Rubio is following the conservative trend of telling people who should and shouldn’t qualify as ‘American’. This in itself, is divisive.

Rubio also still appeals to tradition when dealing with same-sex marriage, insisting that marriage cannot be redefined. Seemingly ignoring all evidence that the current definition of marriage, is just one that has evolved over time, based on modern Christian understanding of the term, and differs from other cultures entirely. So, that’s gay people alienated, as well as non-believers.

Brand new Senator for Senator for Arizona, assuming office in 2013, Jeff Flake also doesn’t like the idea of two people in love getting married. Whilst despising ‘big government’ and the intrusion of the State into people’s lives, Flake voted in favour of a Federal Marriage Amendment, Constitutionally banning same-sex marriage. For someone so obsessed for getting government out of people’s private lives, Flake seems more than happy to use government power to ban love.

Back to Rubio. As well as not particularly liking gay people, Rubio voted against the Violence Against Women Act, stating:

“I have concerns regarding the conferring of criminal jurisdiction to some Indian tribal governments over all persons in Indian country, including non-Indians.”

- Essentially, a non-Native American male being tried under the law for sexually assaulting a Native American woman, concerns Rubio, because he doesn’t trust Indian Tribal Governments. And yet, he puts his full faith in the States to fund programs properly:

“These funding decisions should be left up to the state-based coalitions that understand local needs best.”

- So trustworthy are local areas in dealing with domestic abuse cases, that due to budget cuts, the Topeka, Kansas City Council and Mayor actually repealed the Domestic Abuse law, in a bid to start a bit of a war with the County Prosecutor. This came about after Shawnee County D.A Chad Taylor, moved to stop investigating domestic violence entirely due to budget cuts. This meant that the City of Topeka would have to take up the cases, which they couldn’t afford to do either. So their Council voted to repeal the domestic abuse act. Which, forced it back into the hands of Shawnee County. Taylor said:

“My office now retains sole authority to prosecute domestic battery misdemeanors and will take on this responsibility so as to better protect and serve our community. We will do so with less staff, less resources, and severe constraints on our ability to effectively seek justice.”

Rita Smith, executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence said:

“I really do not understand this. It’s really outrageous that they’re playing with family safety to see who blinks first. People could die while they’re waiting to straighten this out.”

- All of this comes down to budget cuts. Shawnee County DA Chad Taylor refused to prosecute domestic violence cases, after facing a 10% budget cut, despite half of all cases being domestic abuse cases, which increased substantially in the past three years, without any extra funding from the County. How very trustworthy! Interestingly, Rubio voted against the Budget Control Act in 2011, and the Fiscal Cliff 2012. Rubio evidently trusts the localities to make funding decisions, which is much easier, if those localities don’t have any funds in the first place.

Rubio isn’t the only Republican with odd reasons for voting against the Violence Against Women Act. Steve Stockman, Representative of Texas’ 36th District announced his shameful reasons for voting against:

“This is a truly bad bill. This is helping the liberals, this is horrible. Unbelievable. What really bothers—it’s called a women’s act, but then they have men dressed up as women, they count that. Change-gender, or whatever. How is that—how is that a woman?”

Stockman also voted to repeal Federal laws that ban guns in schools. Why so? Well, given that among his campaign contributors are the ‘National Association for Gun Rights’ and ‘Gun Owners of America’, it perhaps isn’t that surprising that Stockman feels the need to put their interests above the safety of children. Just to make sure we all understand where his allegiances lie, here is incredibly ridiculous, almost comical campaign bumper sticker, tweeted for the World to see, by the man himself.

- I’m not sure if Stockman is calling for semi-automatic rifles to be inserted into the vaginas of every pregnant woman. I wouldn’t be surprised.

The scientifically illiterate are still abundant in the Republican Party. Marco Rubio once announced that he didn’t know if the Earth was made in 6 days or not, and that we’re never likely to know. But Georgia’s 10th District Rep. Paul Broun (planning to run for Senate in 2014) and, quite horrifyingly, serving on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology once took Rubio’s toying with Creationism one step further:

Earth is about 9,000 years old, it was created in six days as we know them”

- Broun also said of embryology, genetics, evolution, and the Big Bang theory:

“they’re lies straight from the Pit of Hell … lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

- Broun also said of climate change:

“Scientists all over this world say that the idea of human induced global climate change is one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated out of the scientific community. It is a hoax. There is no scientific consensus.”[

- Echoing his scientific illiteracy, Broun gives us enlightening views on politics, when brief mention of a National Security Force by President Obama, before the 2008 election:

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force, I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may _ may not, I hope not _ but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”

- Yes. A US Representative, thinks the Earth was made in 6 days, evolution is a lie from the pit of hell, climate change isn’t man made, and convinced President Obama was going to create his own Hitler Youth, to take over America and create a Marxist haven.

Now to move on from bat-shit crazy, to slightly less crazy, Paul Ryan. The spritely Paul Ryan. You may think he’s irrelevant as a symbol of this great new era for Republicans, given that his ticket lost the Presidential election. But let’s not forget that Ryan is the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, in 2013. A pretty important position. He’s also Wisconsin’s 1st District House Representative. He looks young, he seemed fresh, he wasn’t the grey haired typical old Republican. Nor was he the gun tottin’ Sarah Palin slightly vacant Republican. He was paraded on the networks as a hero of fiscal conservativism, brave to speak out against Obama overspending! His brand new House Republican Budget released in March this year, which the brave, fiscally conservative hero claims will:

“end cronyism, eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse and returns the federal government to its proper sphere of activity”

- So it is worthwhile to note that the anti-big government, pro-deficit reduction Paul Ryan voted for the two Bush tax cuts (both considered a great failure, and added significantly to the deficit), the $700 bailout of the banks, and the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, whilst voting against Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Most of Paul Ryan’s economic voting record, has added significantly to the National deficit.
His House Republicans Budget, unveiled by Republicans on March 12, noted that $931 billion of the creatively accounted $4.6tn apparently savable over the next ten years, will come from counting the savings from ending the Iraq and Afghanistan wars…. wars that Paul Ryan voted for in the first place. Economically, Paul Ryan doesn’t know where he stands.
Socially, despite absolutely no evidence to back up its claims, in 2009 Paul Ryan cosponsored the ‘Sanctity of Life Act’. A very odd little Act that sought to protect fertilised eggs, stating that the eggs:

“shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood”

Ryan also believes that abortion, in all cases, including rape and incest, should be made illegal, and States given the right to criminally prosecute women who have abortions, including for rape and incest.

Before being elected as Senator for South Carolina in 2013, Tim Scott was House Representative for South Carolina’s first district. During his time in the House, Scott cosponsored a truly horrifying Bill that would deny food stamps to poorest families, if a family member was taking part in strike action. The right to strike – a key component of a democratic society – used by the weak against the powerful, used to secure freedoms and security for generations, Tim Scott voted to essentially end. Threatening the poorest people in society; you either strike, or you eat. Scott is also convinced that the private health care system in the US is the greatest in the World, and that the Health Reforms of 2010 should be repealed. This is no surprise given that one of his main campaign contributors, has been Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the health insurance company. Among other campaign contributions, he has received donations from Goldman Sachs. Tim Scott is a politician, for the wealthy, by the wealthy. The Insurance Industry Candidate.
Speaking of complete contempt for the less wealthy, Mark Meadows, a member of the January 2013 intake for The House, and Tea Party favourite, representing North Carolina’s 11th District voted against the Sandy Relief Fund.

Dean Heller, the Senator for Nevada, who will hold that position until 2019, voted against the Health Care Reform, and against Fair Minimum Wage Act. Heller has also voted against subsidising renewable energy, whilst voting to support development of oil, gas and coal…. two of his top campaign contributors, are Alliance Resource, and Murray Energy…. two coal companies.

So, gay marriage leading to marrying an animal, Church’s having to hire crossdressing Satan-worshippers, manipulating figures to suit an agenda, a refusal to expand Medicaid to help the most vulnerable, evolution a myth from the pits of hell, refusal to protect victims of domestic abuse, including transgendered people, a desire to see women who have been raped imprisoned for having an abortion, guns in schools funded by the gun lobby, Obama trying to raise an army to enforce a Marxist Utopia, anti-renewable energy, candidates wishing to disenfranchise poor people and their right to strike, and wishing to repeal health reform whilst taking campaign contributions from the wealthiest insurance companies in the country.

This new Republican breed sound, and act, and speak, eerily familiar to the old breed.

Margaret Thatcher

“I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.”
Martin Luther King

It would be wrong to claim that a person is deserving of our unquestioning respect, simply because they’ve died. We do not have to respect Margaret Thatcher as a politician, or a person. I have very little respect for her as either. We should however consider the tone of our comments on her death, if only for the sake of her family. We do this, because we are decent people. The openly “dance on her grave” barrage of hate aimed at her today, for all to see, so publicly, is another legacy of her awful ‘no such thing as society‘ legacy.

It does no good to publicly celebrate the death of person, regardless of how divisive or even how evil they were (parading the body of Gaddafi around on TV was horrific). The person is dead. They are not going to see the comments. It is irrelevant to them. The only people who will notably suffer from the comments, are the family of the person who has died. She has family, and grandkids who shouldn’t have to be exposed to some outward display of public joy and declarations of “dancing on the grave” of their grandma. Gloating and demeaning, is giving up the moral high ground to the people who created a society based on suspicion, fear, greed, selfishness, human values replaced by commercial values, me-me-me, and uninformed vitriol in the first place.
It also feeds the right winged trolls. As we see with the insufferably irritating, and vacuous Louise “You shouldn’t drink coffee from Starbucks if you have ANY issue with modern Capitalism” Mensch:

- Apparently, subtly hinting that anyone on any sort of Welfare could be capable of murdering their family, is fine by Tories. Saying “I don’t like Thatcher” makes you Socialist scum.
It is worrying that dissent in any form, will be seen as a show of ‘disrespect‘, by ‘spiteful lefties‘. Anything short of portraying her as some great figure, putting ‘great‘ back into ‘Great Britain‘ or anything equally as meaningless and clearly contradictory to reality, will be seen as simply worthless vitriol from bitter socialists. This cannot happen.

There is a notable difference it seems to me, between demanding street parties and grave dancing, to openly criticising her and her shamefully awful legacy. The latter, should be just as open as it is for those who seem to be bombarding the airwaves with talk of how she was some sort of God-like saviour. She was a political figure, a public figure, a divisive figure, we cannot and should not shut off criticism, especially at a time when her legacy is up for grabs, and will most certainly be leaped on by the right winged media wishing to portray an angelic, hero of freedom.

I therefore find it equally as disrespectful for Downing Street to have released this horrendously provocative statement:

We have lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton.
As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds, and the real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn’t just lead our country, she saved our country, and I believe she’ll go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister.
Her legacy will be the fact she served her country so well, she saved our country and that she showed immense courage in doing so. And people will be learning about what she did and her achievements in decades, probably for centuries to come

- This quote shows a complete lack of shame for the millions of people who suffered immensely because of her. It threads perfectly into the Tory-lack-of-shame-tapestry with how they have treated every minority in this country since 2010. The Downing Street statement is a right winged version of “We’ll dance on her grave” aimed at those they continue to despise, and punish every day. The unjustifiable needless rise in suicide rates, in homelessness, in child poverty, in poverty in general was horrifically high by the time she left office. The catastrophic nature of Thatcherite deregulated finance that Tories are now trying to “fix” by demonising the poorest and most vulnerable. To ignore this, to ignore the suffering inflicted upon the nation under the Thatcher government, simply to make a right winged point is as disrespectful to the families of those who suffered losses to suicide, the misery caused by the Hillsborough cover up, those who suffered through the nasty little Section 28, the dreadful poll tax concept that eventually brought her down, those who lost their homes and their livelihoods that she cruelly named “the enemy within“, those who will never be able to afford a home now, a huge inequality gap, those who died during her time supporting Pinochet; horribly disrespectful from Downing Street. People may well have benefited from her reforms. But a lot of people suffered horrendously, and they should be afforded respect also. They should also be freely entitled to speak out. Let’s not forget that whilst Thatcher spent the final months of her life in the expensive Ritz, many of the people left broken by her policies are now struggling to deal with the fact that they have a spare room tax to deal with. Judging a Prime Ministerial legacy should be based on how the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable were improved, not on how rich the richest were able to become. The Thatcher sycophants will inevitably demand uniformity of ‘respect‘ for her as a person. This is unnecessary, and is completely wrong to demand.
When the riots kicked off in London in 2010, A study by the business information group Experian found that inner city poorer areas are not equipped to deal with economic shocks like that of austerity, because they are still dealing with the after effects of the economic shocks of the 1980s. It found that Elmbridge in Surrey was the least likely to be affected by austerity, coincidentally, Elmbridge in Surrey was labelled as the town with the highest quality of life by a Halifax Estate Agency, and the “Beverly Hills of England” by the Daily Mail. Let’s not rewrite history to present her as a hero.

Let’s not dance to the death of a person. Save it, help to defeat her horrific ideology. Dance at the death of Thatcherism.

No one is denying that she changed Britain entirely. She was a towering figure. She climbed to the top of a male dominated profession, and for that, she is pretty special. I confess I have abandoned much of my socialist zeal from my younger days, however, my principles still lead me to stand firmly against everything she stood for. I have nothing but contempt for her politics.

But on the day of her death, I feel for her family. That’s about all.

From Jefferson to the Tea Party

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.
- Thomas Jefferson

If the Tea Party section of the Republican Party wish to cling onto ‘small government’ advocates from the Founding days of the Republic, then perhaps Virginian Congressman and later, Minister to Russia, John Randolph of Roanoke would be a better candidate for their hero worship. Randolph lead the House of Representative fight against Jefferson, despite being of the same Party; later leaving the Democratic-Republican base that he shared with Jefferson, because he perceived Jefferson’s Presidency as overstepping Constitutional power several times over.
Randolph saw Jefferson’s Presidential first term as vastly exceeding Constitutional power, especially when it came to purchasing the Louisiana territory. Randolph again gets angry when Jefferson attempted to buy Florida from Napoleon. In fact, practically everything President Jefferson did, was opposed by the extreme small government, States-Rights advocate, John Randolph. With regard the Presidency of John Quincy Adams, Randolph refers to him as a traitor, and insists – like the drama queens of the Tea Party movement’s references to President Obama today – that the Government had been overtaken and he wished to ‘take it back’. Any form of economic equality, he opposed. It is Randolph that the Tea Party Republicans of today should call their own. But if you’re in Florida, or the Louisiana territory…. your very existence as an American citizen, was opposed by those small government advocates. Thomas Jefferson can most certainly not be held up as a hero of the Tea Party.

It is apparently without parody nor any sort of critical thought process, that often we hear the Tea Party sect of the Republicans refer to their party as “The Party of Jefferson!”. Tea Party fanatics hold up placards demanding a return to the principles of long lost ‘Republican Party’ icons. They insist that government has become too tyrannical! Alex Jones insisted on Jefferson’s libertarian credentials a couple of times. These are big claims. Most notably, they don’t appear to appeal to Jefferson’s thoughts nor actions, except in a very limited sense of what the man said and achieved.

The simplistic tendency to hold Jefferson up as a model of small government. The rewriting of history to attempt to appeal to a modern narrative – as when those still insistent on flying the Confederate flag tell us it’s a flag that represents State’s Rights – should be taken for the pitifully weak interpretation that it is. The dogmatism of free market liberalism, and anti-government interference in any way, is a relatively new phenomena.

Thomas Jefferson can very thinly be linked to the 21st Century Tea Party Republican Party ideals, if we play loose with history and just claim a common link between the Third President, and the Tea Party in regard ‘small government’. Or we could accept that the Republican Party’s Tea Party incarnation as it exists today is not in any way to be reconciled with any incarnation of the Republican Party of the 18th Century; that the Tea Party would most certainly reject Jefferson if he were alive today, and that whisking Jefferson away from the context of his time, and understanding of America, achieves nothing.

The opening line of the Republican Party’s website states:

“We believe in the power and opportunity of America’s free-market economy.”

- We should then measure Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on Capitalism alongside this unwavering dogmatic commitment of the 21st Century Republicans to free market Capitalism.

We know that Jefferson romantically wished for a Republic based primarily on agriculture. He was a product of 18th Century Virginia. A Southern Plantation owner, who mistrusted commerce and industry in the North. He worried that the growth of industry would eventually take over; an industrial Capitalist class would emerge, and people would be reliant on low wages, unable to pursue other means of self fulfilment which would inevitably be the intrigue of a wealthy few; a new Aristocracy. According to Clay Jenkinson, in his book, “Becoming Jefferson’s People” Jefferson supported:

“a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign redistribution downward.”

- Jefferson’s worry about an agrarian American being over taken by wage labour within an industrialised and commercial context goes further. He worried that commerce would lead to an economy based on want (which, is what we have):

“And with the laborers of England generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?”

In the wake of moneyed interests beginning to take hold in the new Nation at the beginning of the 19th Century, Jefferson seems just as skeptical of their power to engage politically, as he does of Monarchical power:

“I hope we shall crush… in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

I wonder then, if Jefferson would ever have identified himself with an apparent ‘grass roots’ political movement funded largely by the Koch empire and perpetuated by the Murdoch News Empire. How would he have reacted, to a right winged Judiciary, who, in 2010 declared that it was unconstitutional to limit the amount a Corporate entity can spend endorsing a candidate for office, claiming that to limit it, would be to undermine the Corporations 1st Amendment right to free expression; essentially making a citizen out of a corporation. I will accept that premise, the moment a law enforcement body imprisons Exxon for shipping oil to the Nazis after Pearl Harbour and happily funding Himmler’s personal bank account.

American Petroleum Institute, whose members include Exxon, financed mainly Republican candidates in the 2010 mid-terms. Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs quite openly said:

“At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.”

Koch Industries Inc (those wonderful funders of the Tea Party – giving power back to the people!), gave $1.79mn to candidates. 90% of those candidates were Republicans. This of course comes as President Obama proposed ending subsidies for Gas and Electric companies by 2012. Apparently those companies aren’t happy that their Welfare cheque is about to be scrapped. A Welfare cheque that adds up to over $45bn. I wonder how Jefferson might have reacted to that little gem.

Jefferson is somewhat of an enigma for those of us who claim his opening line of the 2nd paragraph of the Declaration, that he penned at such a young age, to be the very definition of Enlightenment thinking applied politically:

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

- This sentence, whilst beautifully crafted, and the first port of call for those of us who happily claim liberal secular democracy to be the most superior framework of governance thus conceived by man, is not wholly Jefferson’s making. He is paraphrasing Locke. In his second treatise, Locke writes:

“man hath by nature a power …. to preserve his property – that is, his life, liberty, and estate – against the injuries and attempts of other men.”

- Jefferson omits property, and estate from his own rewriting of the quote. Locke is convinced that property, is a natural right. Jefferson is not. The very first measure of Capitalism; the right to private property, Jefferson does not see fit to protect. In his private writings, he expands:

“It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land. By an universal law, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common.”

His views on property extends to his views on taxation. We all know that the Republicans of 2013 are quite adverse to raising any sort of tax on the wealthiest few, insisting as they do, that those. I have written previously on the Myth of the Wealth Creators. Jefferson however, most certainly takes a bit of a different view to modern Republicans. Writing to the great Polish and American General, Thaddeus Kosciusko in 1811, Jefferson says:

“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied… Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone – without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”

- Jefferson’s views on tax, are similar to his views on Government. That, less is better, but it is necessary, it must be progressive, and it can be used for government funded projects (including healthcare, as we shall see later in this article). He certainly was no Libertarian as Alex Jones suggests. Likewise, he was no fan of economic inequality, nor did he base Republican philosophy on a refusal to tax the wealthy, nor did he accept Corporate power as legitimate in the political sphere, nor did he believe that wealth is individually created, free from a government funded framework; he believed much the opposite, that the wealthy must bare the heaviest tax burden, and that the government can and should provide for the general well being of the public, especially against, as we have already noted, the growth of commerce and industry.

He is no friend of the wealthy either:

E”xperience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

- He has as much contempt for the prey of the wealthy on the poor, as he does for the Monarchs of Europe. Though we must point out the inconsistency in this quote, given that Jefferson was a rather wealthy man, who used slave labour to build, and rebuild, and maintain his place at Monticello. If that isn’t preying on the poor, I’m not sure what is.

The claim that Jefferson was a strict Constitutionalist is, much like every other claim on Jefferson’s character and actions; both true and untrue depending on the situation. At one point, he rejects the idea of funding a National Museum, claiming it to be beyond the power for government set out in the Constitution. He also argued against a National Bank put fourth by Alexander Hamilton, noting that the Constitution did not give that specific power. And yet, he’s quite happy to double the size of the Nation with the purchase of the Louisiana territory, using money not appropriated by Congress; this is a hugely unconstitutional show of executive central power. Let us also not forget the quote posted at the top of this article. Jefferson was not a strict constitutionalist. He was a pragmatist and an advocate for well reasoned public policy.

The right winged writers such as Thomas DiLorenzo; famed for positioning Lincoln as an awful tyrant, whom claim Jefferson stood against government funded infrastructure projects, standing opposite the big bad centralised Government proposals of the Hamiltonians. This is of course, untrue. During Jefferson’s administration, as Dumas Malone’s most wonderful six volume biography (of which, I am still making my way through) of Jefferson points out,

“The congressional session was nearing its end when the President transmitted to the Senate (April 6, 1808) a report on roads and canals, drafted by the Secretary of the Treasury, which comprised the most comprehensive and constructive domestic program that emanated from this administration.”

- He notes that the programme was not put into affect, because the threat of being drawn into the conflict in Europe at the time, loomed heavy. Whilst Jefferson stood against debt-financing of any sort, including government debt-financed programmes (though, as most things in his life, his principles and his private life seem to contradict each other), he most certainly wasn’t against State intervention for infrastructure spending. Speaking of government spending on roads, railways, canals, and public education He says:

“By these operations, new channels of communication will be opened between the States; the lines of separation will disappear, their interests will be identified, and their union cemented by new and indissoluble ties.”

He was however, in theory (less so in practice) dedicated first to the Constitution. He made his worries known that the Constitution may not give adequate power for great government funded improvement projects, and may require an amendment further down the line, to make those powers possible. And yet, Jefferson then authorises the biggest nationalised road building project, with the Cumberland Road, with an extension of the road granted under the Presidency of Republican James Monroe in 1820.

He also notes that publicly funded education, is as important to the defence of a free people, as any other (guns etc):

“The tax which will be paid for education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up if we leave the people to ignorance.”

Further, it wasn’t just the Federalists of John Adam’s Presidency that supported government run healthcare. The Congress of 1798 passed “An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seaman”. This meant that the government ran a series of hospitals that were paid for by labour merchant marine sailors via a tax. Whilst we may expect this from the Adam’s administration, we wouldn’t expect it from the hero of the Tea Party movement, Thomas Jefferson. Government run healthcare, according to these people, is the worst of the worst. You must be a socialist if you support it! Well, according to Adam Rothman, a Georgetown University history professor:

“…Jefferson (Hamilton’s strict constructionist nemesis) also supported federal marine hospitals, and along with his own Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, took steps to improve them during his presidency. So I guess you could say it had bipartisan support.”

We should also note the vast difference in Republican rhetoric on the use of religion in the public sphere. Jefferson did not believe that religion could be used to define an American citizen. In his own words:

“But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

- For this, and other such quotes, he angered the Christian Right of the day, many during the 1796 election campaign insisting that he was an Atheist, unworthy of public office. Pamphlets and newspapers denounced him as a heretic, whilst Church sermons were conducted insisting that if elected, Jefferson would work to destroy Christianity. Even as late as 1830, the Philadelphia public library refused to shelve any works by Jefferson, for being anti-religious. New York minister John Mitchell Mason’s “Voice of Warning to Christians,” states openly, before going on to explain why Jefferson is an ‘infidel’:

I dread the election of Mr. Jefferson, because I believe him to be a confirmed infidel: you desire it, because, while he is politically acceptable, you either doubt this fact, or do not consider it essential. Let us, like brethren, reason this matter.

- In essence, if he were alive today, the Christian Right – the Tea Party Republicans – would undoubtedly be comparing Jefferson to Hitler at some point.

Republicans today have no such problem, because they have spent the past fifty years slowly eroding secular rights, in favour of theocratic Christian ‘morality’. Reagan was the ideal candidate to play on this anti-Constitutional religious dogmatic approach to politics. He was quite willing to break down the wall that was so brilliantly erected between Church and State some 200 years previous.
In 1988 Reagan completely destroyed any trace of Enlightenment thinking within the Republican Party, that brought around the creation of the secular United States of America with his State of the Union address, in which he states:

Well now, we come to a family issue that we must have the courage to confront. Tonight, I call America — a good nation, a moral people — to charitable but realistic consideration of the terrible cost of abortion on demand. To those who say this violates a woman’s right to control of her own body — can they deny that now medical evidence confirms the unborn child is a living human being entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Let us unite as a nation and protect the unborn with legislation that would stop all federal funding for abortion — and with a human life amendment making, of course, an exception where the unborn child threatens the life of the mother. Our Judeo-Christian tradition recognizes the right of taking a life in self-defense.”

- By linking “good and moral people” to “Judeo-Christian tradition” and ensuring that public policy be not only influenced, but entirely informed by “Judeo-Christian tradition”, Reagan severs the link between the Republican Party of today, and the so-called Republican Party of Jefferson. This continues to the present day. Jefferson is insistent that belief in ‘God’ is not a requirement to be bound together as Americans. The new hope of the Republican Party, Marco Rubio seemingly doesn’t agree:

“We’re bound together by common values. That family is the most important institution in society. That almighty God is the source of all we have.”

- Jefferson therefore, is not bound to the common values that Rubio insists make up the collective “we”. Jefferson, for Rubio, is unAmerican.

The ideological hero of the Tea Party Right disagrees with their principles in most ways.

We cannot claim that Jefferson was a free market Capitalist, nor that he was pro-government spending. We cannot claim he was an Atheist, nor that he was religious. He seems to transcend rivalry between many two opposite ideals, and instead chooses a course of pragmatism. A great commitment to the absolutely necessity of secularism for the sake of human rights. Modern day Republicans are still at war with the Soviet Union, claiming Socialism and ‘War on Christianity’ at every turn.
He was a pragmatist. He was neither on the Tea Party Right, nor the Democrat Centre-Left of today’s political spectrum.

Jefferson was a man who believed that small government was the best government; and yet he doubled the size of the nation with the Louisiana Purchase. He was a man who wrote that all men are created equal; and yet he owned over 200 slaves. He was a man who was deeply committed to Republican values of equality; And yet, when asked to promote women to Federal offices insisted that the Republic wasn’t ready for such an “innovation”. He was a man who often retreated back to Monticello claiming to be done with public life, only to find his way back soon after. He was a man of many contradictions, but many brilliances. He was supremely gifted at the art of the written word, but lacking in putting into practice many of the principles he so eloquently professed. His contribution to posterity is timeless, and brilliant.

He must be remembered in the context of his time, and for aiding in the creation of a spectacular new way of running governments; based on reason, the right for people to govern themselves, and equality. He wasn’t perfect, he didn’t take his Republican principles to their rightful conclusions with regard slavery and women’s rights. But he understood that eventually, slaves would be emancipated, that rights would be extended beyond white, male land owners and that government would have a future role to play in providing for improvements, and general well being, and that the founding documents that frame the new Nation provide for such updates when the people demand it to be so. This is where Jefferson and his undeniable genius can be placed; not within a curiously narrow framework of revised history by a 21st Century Christian Right Winged funded-by-billionaires incoherent Tea Party movement that reshapes history to suit its ends.

To fly the flag of the Confederacy

In his 1953 novel ‘Bring the Jubilee’, Ward Moore imagines a revised history in which the Confederacy wins the Battle of Gettysburg and thus the Civil War. A key theme of the book, is the imperialist ambitions of the Confederate States between the end of the war, and the 1950s. President Robert Lee, whom takes over at the end of Jefferson Davis’ term in Office fights and fights to stop an imperialistic Congress invading Central and South America. The novel is of course imagined alternate history, but it is shockingly close to reality when we note the future aims of the Confederacy during the Civil War period, and the complete ignorance of this by those who still fly the Confederate Flag under the misapprehension that it represents “State’s Rights”.

I have now travelled to Michigan three times this year. The three seasons I have encountered have all had their merits, and the wonderful landscape adapts each time to reveal a hidden beauty that I hadn’t seen previously. The red leaves of autumn are calming whilst the summer evenings provide beautiful sunsets over the lake. I love Michigan.

However, as an outsider, I have been shocked to see that people still fly the Confederate flag.

I am ensured that it is a symbol of the South in general – and in particular, States rights. This is of course, nonsense. It pre-supposes that the Confederate flag and the Confederacy in general, along with secession was ever about State’s Rights. I believe this mythical idea of the old South used to be referred to as the ‘Lost Cause’; a devious yet charming little term of propaganda romanticising the South to a degree that it absolutely doesn’t deserve.

The ‘State’s Rights’ claim as to the cause of the Civil War suggests that the Southern States were ardent defenders of the individual States as a loose collection of autonomous States that could vote on and set their own laws and regulations, and trade with each other, without Federal interference. This is simply not true. The Southern States were far more anti-freedom, and anti-States Rights than the North.

For example, on the eve of secession, South Carolina issued a declaration entitled:

“Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.”

- Their grievences listed, are almost entirely based on slavery. In the most telling attack on State’s Rights, it is clear that South Carolina did not like that Northern States had at times refused to send fugitive slaves back to their ‘Masters’ in the South:

“an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery. … In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed …”

- Tellingly, the South Carolina Declaration demands that the Northern non-slave holding States conform to the views of slave holding States by allowing Southerners when visiting the North, to bring their slaves with them, as slaves:

“In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals.”

- The South didn’t care for States Rights. The South employed the most imperialistic, totalitarian, anti-liberty social and economic system, dreaming of empire, in the entire nation.

Now Southern propagandists will argue that tariffs, and Federal planning grants were just as to blame for secession, but those points are not mentioned in most Southern literature from the time. The Southern States seceded, because of the issue of slavery. It isn’t State’s Rights, it is White Male Rights.

Similar to South Carolina, Mississippi’s Declaration of Secession states:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world … a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Perhaps most tellingly of all, is the Confederate Constitution. Section 9 of which states:

(4) No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

- This shows how little the Confederacy cared about State’s Rights. The State’s have no right to abolish Slavery. No individual State can pass a law impairing the right of property in slaves. The Confederate Federal Government did not care for State’s Rights. They cared only about maintaining and spreading slavery as a system.

So, the South essentially means that it is an ardent defender of States Rights, as long as the Southern States have the Right to demand the Northern States do as the South demands. But not only did the South wish to ensure the North did as it was told, they wished to expand their slave holding empire into different continents.

The American lawyer and journalist William Walker, in 1854, after a failed attempt to set up a Republic of Sonora in Mexico, with the intention of it becoming a State of the Union; invaded Nicaragua for control of a vital trade route between New York and San Francisco. He succeeded in his efforts, and took control of Nicaragua, renaming it “Walkeragua” (seriously, i’m not making this up). In 1856, President Franklin Pierce, officially recognised Walker’s regime in Walkeragua as legitimate. His regime began to Americanise Walkeragua, by instating slavery, using American currency, and making English the official language. He advertised his new Country to American Southern businessmen by advertising the fact that his new quasi-State was pro-slavery and would remain so.
By the time Walker revoked Nicaragua’s 1824 Emancipation Act, the rest of Latin America took note, and invaded. He fled and was bought back to the U.S where he was welcomed as a hero of the South.
He died before the Civil War kicked off, but the South referred to him throughout the Civil War as “General Walker“ and “The grey-eyed man of destiny”. The South did not just fight to preserve the institution of slavery, they wanted to expand it, on a grand scale, to the point where Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky proposed that the 36°30′ parallel north be a line that separates the northern free states, and the southern slave states, all the way down to the tip of South America.

Walker wasn’t the only Southerner with Imperialist ambitions. The Confederate Secretary of State John C. Breckinridge decided that Southern States had the right to invade whomever they wished:

“The Southern states cannot afford to be shut off from all possibility of expansion towards the tropics by the hostile action of the federal government.”

As autonomous “States rights” go, invading another sovereign nation and revoking its anti-slavery laws, in hope of creating a slave owning empire, is about as big and as bad as a Federal Government can get.
So far, that’s State’s Rights to own people as property, and the State’s Rights to invade sovereign countries and force slavery upon them. Let’s also not forget State’s Rights to wander into other countries, and capture locals to be shipped back to Southern lands as slaves, as President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davies suggested when he mentioned reviving the slave trade because there was an abundance of:

“….new acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande.”

- The imperialist fantasies that prominent Southern politicians were expressing quickly evaporates the intensely faulty premise that for the South, the Civil War was about State’s Freedoms and Rights. It is therefore absurd to claim the Confederate flag stands for those qualities. It stood in defiance of those qualities.

By flying the Confederate flag, what social system are you showing your support for, or your nostalgic sense of loss for? What economic system? Certainly the civil war pitted the more industrialised and Capitalist Northern economic system, against the more agrarian and slave-holding Southern economic structure. So what are you advocating? Surely not Capitalism, as Capitalism was most certainly considered a great evil in the old South, so much so that George Fitzhugh – a leading Social Theorist of the time, insisted that slavery protected African Americans from the pains of Capitalism, and attacks the idea of “free competition” no less than 42 times in his book ‘Slavery Justified’. On a Social level, Fitzhugh (who went on to work in the Treasury of the Confederacy, as well as counting numerous Confederate politicians among his friends and admirers) says of African Americans:

Half of mankind are but grown up children, and liberty is fatal to them as it is to children.

- The line of reasoning is reasonable when framed in the cold ignorance of the mid-19th century, but is widely unacceptable, and entirely incorrect by 21st century logic. We must remember that Fitzhugh was writing prior to Darwin’s understanding that racial differences were not biological. Fitzhugh would have been influenced by social theorists on racial and cultural differences, culminating in the studies of anthropologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan, who argued in his work ‘Ancient Societies’ that societies and thus peoples could be classed as primitive or civilised, and that the white European civilisation was far more advanced than ‘primitive’ African cultures. Morgan’s work was less based on evolutionary biology, and more on a Euro-centric cultural study, and very little else. His works later influenced Marx in his theory of Historical Materials, thus proving that his writings were widely available and respected.

State’s Right’s. What they mean is, the rich white male’s right to own people as property based on skin tone, without anyone telling them that it’s wrong. The African American had no right to complain, had no right to vote, no right to not be beaten, no right to anything. As the great Senator of the time Charles Sumner stated:

By the licence of slavery, an entire race is delivered over to the prostitution and concubinage without the protection of any law.

- Here Sumner is noting that the South revokes its claims on “Rights” when it imprisons the vast majority of its population in a state of bondage; breaking the ties of family, and brotherhood, of marriage and replacing parent/child relationships (natural relationships) with master/slave. When you appropriate the fruit of labour freely, when you take away their right to active political participation, when you deny education, and when you break natural bonds like that of family; you can no longer claim the defence of ‘State’s rights’, and any future generation flying the flag that represented that putrid system should be ashamed.

Often, I read insistences that the Confederate Flag today means Southern pride, or Southern heritage, or other equally manipulative benign terms. That narrative is misjudged. The Confederate flag was a very specific flag, for a very specific system, at a very specific time. It is a reason. So, if you must insist on ensuring the World knows just how proud you are to be from Southern States, why not have a new flag, predicated on State’s Rights, or Southern Pride? Designed for that purpose. Why use the EXACT same flag that was designed purely for the sake of representing the slave system. It is disingenuous to attempt to suggest the Confederate Flag is anything but a provocative flag of hate.

The Confederacy Flag represents, not States Rights, not Southern heritage or pride, but the following: An Economic and Social system built on slavery. Anti-Capitalism. Anti-liberty. Imperialism. Scientific ignorance. White Supremacy. The Confederate flag represents that system. Nothing else. Certainly not “State’s Rights”. It is very specific as a symbol.

The attempts to pose the Civil War as a State’s Rights issue, is simply to ignore and revise history in an attempt to create a sort of “David V Goliath” narrative in which the South is the victim of the big bad Federal Government. It is ignorant, lazy, and wrong.

To fly the flag of Confederacy today is shameful.

Secession from the Union can only happen by violent revolution.

Today, citizens in 20 States over in the US have petitioned the White House’s ‘We Are The People’ site to secede from the Union, based on their continued bitterness that their preferred candidate-for-insanity didn’t win the election.
Amusingly, the secession petitions carry with them a quote from the Declaration:

“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…”

- Deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. Well, the governed just democratically chose not to give any power to your candidate. Deal with it. That’s democracy. The form of government has not become destructive to that end. You lost. Democracy doesn’t mean you must win, all the time. If you want to secede, because you lost the election, then you absolutely do not understand democracy or America. It really is amazing what a bunch of regressive idiots will do when a man with dark skin is in the White House.

It is interesting to me, that New York has a petition. It has a couple of thousand signatures so far. What a curious understanding of democracy. Their State voted Democrat. The majority of those in New York, are Democrat. So, if a vote was theoretically put to New York State legislature, based on the will of the people, it would lose. What would secessionists then say? Secede, but only the conservative areas of New York? It really is absurd reasoning… again.

They are unhappy that they have been democratically defeated. So, they’re calling for a new democracy. Because apparently that’s what democracy means. If you don’t win, no longer observe the rules of democracy. But call for a new democracy. Based entirely on you winning. Essentially, secede, until you win. Eventually it’ll come down to individual homes. And then their wife will vote against them. And so they’ll secede from the home.

Granted it’s a very small number of Americans that have actually signed the petition. Just to give you some perspective, my article titled Bad day for bigots has so far today received 11,327 views. The State of South Carolina’s petition for secession so far has 10,722 signatures. 4,679,230 people live in the State of South Carolina. So, that’s 0.22% of the population of South Carolina calling for secession. Not even half of 1%. And less than the amount of people who have viewed one article of mine, in less than 12 hours. If we take Texas, which has the most signatures for secession so far with 67,834, and we note that the population of Texas is currently 25,674,681, we see that a weak 0.26% of the Texan population; just over a quarter of 1%… calling for secession. So, a very small number, by anyone’s standards. Unlike this guy, who thinks it’s practically the entire population, and has curiously “never happened before”:

(Posting Tweets is becoming somewhat of a fun new game for me).

Judging from secession tweets currently occupying Twitter, it would seem that they are citing States Rights (that old chessnut) derived from the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment States:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

- The inference being, that the Federal government under Obama has wrestled too much power away from the States. Oddly, there weren’t too many calls for secession from right winged Americans when Reagan massively expanded Federal payroll, tripled the National Debt, raised taxes in ’82, ’83, ’84, and sold arms to Iran, all whilst covertly funding terrorists throughout Latin America. But I suppose that’s hypocrisy for you.

The Tenth Amendment is quite clear. But it is not the final say the Founders had on the matter of the supremacy of law in the US. Article 6 states:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

- Essentially, Federal law is supreme. State law does not override Federal law. Regardless of the ‘Constitution of Laws of any State’, Federal law is supreme. If Congress votes, and the President signs, and the judges see no unconstitutional problem with the law, then whatever bitter and angry ‘Confederates’ think about the law, it does not change the fact that they must abide by it. In the same way that whilst I dislike the changes the Conservative Party over here have implemented with regards the NHS…. I can’t suddenly call for the city of Leicester to secede from the UK. Well, I could… but i’d be wrong. My side of the argument lost the election in 2010. I have to accept that.

The great enlightenment thinkers that provided the US Constitution certainly realised that there may well be some people, after an election goes against them, that might demand secession. And so Article 1 Section 10 of the Constitution states:

“No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or Confederation. No state shall, without the consent of Congress, keep troops, or ships of war in times of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger.”

- Obviously a State, to succeed alone, would have to enter into treaty’s or alliances, or Confederation. Thus breaking the guide set out by the Constitution. The Founders anticipated secessionist nonsense. And they reiterated it AGAIN with Article 4 Section 3:

“Congress will make rules and regulations for territories and for property of the federal government.

- The Federal government owns the land. Specifically, Congress. Congress is empowered by the Constitution, and so cannot act outside of its power. Thus, any secession acted through Congress would be illegal and unconstitutional, rendering it meaningless.
As if that isn’t enough restrictions on right winged States-Rights advocates, then perhaps Article 1 Section 8 Clause 18, which garnered a lot of debate during its ratification process that including it in the Constitution would grant too much power to the Federal Government above the States. Hamilton and Madison argued for its inclusion. And it got included.

The Congress shall have Power – To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

- Hamilton used this clause to defend his Bank of America (arguably the biggest centralisation of power in US history).

States, through their representatives to Congress, give up certain State powers when they vote to ratify certain Federal Laws. Those laws that haven’t been given up to Congress, stay within the remit of the States. That is my reading of the entire subject of States Rights. Talk of secession is not only illegal and unconstitutional; it is based on a very simplistic and flawed reading of the Constitution and the motives of the Founders in particular. More than that; it is based on the undemocratic hysterics of “our candidate didn’t win, so we don’t recognise the outcome”.

These people, the very same people who insist on telling everyone what a ‘real’ American is. If you’re Atheist, you’re not a ‘real’ American. If you’re socialist, you’re not a ‘real’ American. If you support gay marriage or abortion, you’re not a ‘real’ American….. are now showing just how American they are, by demanding to leave the Union, simply because they very democratic principles that America was built on, did not turn up the result they wanted. They should be ashamed.

If they feel disenfranchised, then become politically active. Run for office. If your position isn’t gaining enough support……. maybe that’s because people don’t agree with it. Again, that’s democracy. There’s only so many times you can secede from all forms of social governance, before you’re on your own…. living in a Hobbesian hell hole. Grunting, as you chase your prey, with a spear. The point being, eventually, your point of view is not going to be the most popular. This is how democracy works.

I imagine a seceded Tea Party Confederacy would be pretty hellish. Walmart and Starbucks would be the two parties fighting for power. Leave your house and walk out onto the road? Pay for it! Everything is private! Including the roads you walk on. Don’t have police insurance? Well then your property will be robbed, tough. The land of the free! Unless you’re gay. Which would obviously be outlawed, as a sin against the word of the Lord. The land of the free! Where you have the democratic right to vote…. for a conservative…. You get the idea.

Now, obviously the Constitution sets out how States must act when in Union. There is no legal framework for secession, nor is secession legal. But, once seceded (violently), the States obviously wouldn’t have to abide by US law. The problem for them is, they absolutely cannot secede. Their legislatures are bound by oath to fully support the rules set out within it, and the land belongs to the Federal Government. They therefore, can only secede after declaring war.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution

- James Madison, writing in the Federalist Papers Number 44 progresses this point:

The members of the federal government will have no agency in carrying the State constitutions into effect. The members and officers of the State governments, on the contrary, will have an essential agency in giving effect to the federal Constitution.

- State officers must abide by the Constitution. They are compelled by its powers. Therefore, given that the Constitution limits States rights, and places Federal law as supreme, and compels representatives in Congress and State Legislatures to abide by it, by oath, it follows that secession cannot be brought about by legal nor peaceful means. The only way these people can secede, is violent overthrow of their State legislature. And to do that, simply because your candidate lost an election, is abhorrent.

I wrote my political thesis on President Lincoln’s relationship to the pro-slavery movement coming out of the South. And what stands out more than anything, as it does today, is that hysterical right winged lunacy pushed Lincoln into a vehement abolish-slavery position that he absolutely did not support in the run up to his first election win. He simply expressed his intention to prevent the spread of slavery westward, thereby keeping Congress 50% free, 50% slave. The Confederacy did not just want to preserve their right to hold human beings as slaves, they wanted to expand it as far as possible. Lincoln was worried that slavery would be Nationalised. He did not wish to outlaw slavery in the South, until pushed to it, by a manic, overly paranoid Confederacy. An over paranoid Confederacy, that whilst completely discredited, is still in part using the same hysterical tactics it used 150 years ago.

The reason they wish to secede this time is simple; they didn’t win an election.

“Question with boldness even the existence of God” – America as a Christian Nation.

The often quoted claim that the United States of America is a “Christian nation” is not an attempt to link the percentage of the population who identify themselves as Christian, with how the Country should be governed; but is in fact a suggestion that the Country was founded by devout Christians, developing a country on the Christian system of belief and values.
This simply isn’t true.

The true genius of America’s Founding Fathers lies in their commitment to the separation of Church and State. It is impossible to quantify how huge an experiment this was. Church and State had been intrinsically linked without question for at least a thousand years. The merging of the two, was based on religious authority. To question that, was to question the legitimacy of religious rule itself. A truly revolutionary concept.

It is true that none of the Founders were Atheists, (unless you count Benjamin Franklin as a Founding Father), they were almost all secularists, several (and the ones we consider the most important) were deists, and few were devout Christians. Christianity cannot claim the Founders as their own, nor can they claim the intention of a Nation built on Christianity. We Atheists, similarly cannot claim the Founders as our own. Neither have a strong case. To understand the brilliance of the Founders barrier between Church and State we must examine the context of the period in which they lived. We must not view them through 21st Century Atheism/Christian Right tinted specs.

1776 was a time far before Darwin produced the greatest scientific discovery of all time, the greatest story ever told; The Origin of Species. It was a time when, up until very recently, to question Church doctrine was punishable by torture, imprisonment, or even death. For over a thousand years the basis of government was questioned very periodically and with very little acknowledgement of the fusion of Church and State. The two were the same thing. Kings and Queens derived their ‘right’ to rule from God. That they were the middle men between God and humanity, and so they were not accountable to anyone other than God. Powerful barons at times tried to overthrow the Monarchy; Simon De Montfort (power hungry, had no intention of popular rule), Oliver Cromwell (Puritan; as fundamental as Christianity gets). But the logic that the Monarch derives their power from God was left unchallenged, and was still at the heart of the understanding of how Government works by 1776.

The Church was at the centre of the community. Education was predominantly Christian by nature. And Capitalism was developing in the Northern States whilst the Southern States seemed poised to hold onto an economic system built on slavery; the two systems would one day clash violently, resulting in the triumph of Capitalism. We almost instinctively link the birth of modern Capitalism to the United States. But Capitalism has its roots in Christian thinking. Weber once argued that the type of Protestantism that made its way to the United States in the 17th Century differed vastly from the old Catholic powers, in that it exhalted the importance of the individual and his/her duty to improve the materialistic needs of those around them. Before the Constitution officially separated Church and State we can see that the new Protestant work ethic surrounding the materialistic desires of the individual was helping to foster the atmosphere of a nation built around the individual. In this respect, Christianity played a pivotal role in the building of America.

During their schooling the Founders would have attended Catechism classes, sang hymns, and made to learn and recite Bible passages as was the norm for the education system at the time. The majority of the population would have been subjected to Christian literature, and not much else. And this is where the Founders differ.

They were all, without exception, members of the upper classes. Their education would have been mixed. It would certainly have included the necessary Catechism classes and hymns and Biblical recitals, but it would also have been mixed with new Enlightenment ideas coming out of Europe around the time. It is important to note that Thomas Jefferson was schooled in Latin, Greek and Classical Literature. His Philosophy teacher was a man named Professor William Small; himself a child of Enlightenment ideals. Jefferson’s philosophy lessons covered morality, ethics, and the study of early Greek atheist writers.
Benjamin Franklin was a student of the Socratic method, and idolised the Ancient Greek Atheist. Franklin himself states quite openly:

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.”

Franklin exemplifies Socratic reasoning with:

“The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason.”

- We may call Franklin a Deist, but I’m pretty convinced he’s as close to Atheist as the 18th Century could ever produce, given the lack of scientific understanding for much of how the World, and human biology worked.

It would seem that the United States of America, as a political entity is wholly secular. The Constitution itself is a beautiful piece of Enlightenment literature. It unequivocally states the end of the Divine right to rule. A 1000+ year old settlement that not even the Magna Carta could break. It gives power to the people in a way that had never been considered before. But whilst the political resolution was indeed secular, the majority of the American public in the 1780s, were Christian. But that is largely irrelevant to our understanding of what America “is”. For that, we have to understanding the Constitution, and the people who framed it. As already noted Franklin was pretty much an Atheist. Jefferson on the other hand, was simply anti-Christian. He was Deist:

“But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

“Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity.”

“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”

“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear.”

And, I think most importantly of all Jefferson’s writings…. a letter he penned to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

- In fact, the Christian Right in Jefferson’s time attempted to block his Presidency based on the belief that he was an Atheist. Jefferson is a deist. He believed in a creator, but not the God of Christianity. He believed more strongly in the principles of the Enlightenment; individual freedom, the supremacy of human reason, and a binding separation between the Church’s ethical positions, and the State. He believed in certain teachings of Jesus (but denied his divinity) that supported the golden rule seen throughout the World and not limited to Christianity; treat others as you wish to be treated. This is where the new Christian Right and the Founding Fathers part ways.

The 1950s saw a new strand of Christian thought, moulded to political agenda with the Christian Right. This took on three branches:

Anti-Communism.

Hayekian Free Market Principles.

Opposition to social liberalism; values that appeared to be incompatible with traditional Christian thought.
In short, it was a response to the massive changes economically, socially and politically taking place during the middle of the 20th Century. Science and technology were becoming ever more necessary and sophisticated. Darwinism was being taken seriously. Women were ever more liberated, working and forging careers. Immigrants from non-Christian backgrounds were arriving. Communism was supposedly threatening property and individual freedoms. The Christian Right could vastly broaden their appeal, if they aligned themselves with a political and economic view point that Government = bad, Corporations = great. Suddenly poorer people struggling to put food on their tables will vote Republican to uphold traditional Christian values, not realising that economically their neighbourhoods will be ignored, investment dried up, and any sort of Welfare help cut to within an inch of its life…. all for the benefit of a few wealthy tax cuts under the almost hilarious – if it weren’t so curiously dangerous – rhetoric of “Well, they’re wealth creators”. So, the Christian Right has a broader appeal.

This merging of Christian fundamentalism with the Right Wing can be most clearly seen with its most revered members. Billy Graham managed to link Christian dogma with anti-communism and as a result, ranks a record 41 times between 1948 and 1998 on Gallup’s poll of Most Admired Men in America. The agenda seems obvious; align Christian Right Winged thinking with the National identity; make America a Christian-Right country, and claim it has always been so. And it’s had its successes….

In 1979 Ronald Reagan appointed a man named Paul Laxalt as his campaign manager. Among the campaign team, and later the White House staff, Laxalt was known as the “First Friend” for his close relationship to the President. Laxalt, in 1979, whilst Senator for Nevada, introduced a Bill called the ‘Family Protection Act’. Note the naming of the Bill. Point three on my list above, points to opposition to social liberalism. This Bill is a prime example of that. ‘Family Protection’ is worded to suggest there is an imminent attack on YOUR family. Be afraid. Where does this attack come from? Well, according to the Bill; pretty much everywhere that isn’t fundamentally Christian. It restricted access to abortion, restricted gay rights, and offered tax incentives to stay at home moms. It is a curious paradox of the Right Wing; they claim to be anti-big government, yet enact very anti-Constitutional, anti-separation of Church and State, anti-individual rights, where ever those individual rights don’t suit their very narrow vision of what being an ‘American’ truly means; (Christian, white, rich, male).

Like the rest of the Right Wing, Christian America holds Reagan up as a great President. The perfect Christian Conservative. It seems Christian voters are happy to overlook his disastrous Presidency (truly one of the worst in history – as I have noted in a previous blog), simply because his values were Christian by nature. Reagan’s legacy was one of homelessness, selfishness, arrogance, lack of compassion or empathy, hate, Corporate greed, death, and misery. All in the name of an economic policy disastrously known as “trickle down”. History will remember both him and Thatcher as little beacons of horror and misery for the majority. That’s all.

Thankfully Laxalt’s Bill never made it past Committee stage, but the fact is that as small Christian Right pressure groups popped up during the 1960s as a way to counter the social liberalism of the day…. by the 1980s, they had members in both Houses of Congress, and very close to the President. This says three things to me about the nature of the American identity by the 1980s; people are willing to vote based on religious conviction, ignoring the economic implications of their vote. Two, most people in the US considered their faith to be of great importance. Three, those who do vote based on religious conviction, are anti-Constitutional in their belief that religion should play a part in the legislative process, and not simply be kept between the individual and their ‘God’. And Reagan was the ideal candidate to play on this anti-Constitutional religious dogmatic approach to politics. He was quite willing to break down the wall that was so brilliantly erected between Church and State some 200 years previous. In 1984, Reagan gave a speech the National Religious Broadcasters. The only President up until that point to agree to give a speech to them, in which he states:

“Let’s begin at the beginning. God is the center of our lives; the human family stands at the center of society; and our greatest hope for the future is in the faces of our children. Seven thousand Poles recently came to the christening of Maria Victoria Walesa, daughter of Danuta and Lech Walesa, to express their belief that solidarity of the family remains the foundation of freedom.”

- This irritatingly nasty little manipulative quote stands to try to define what it means to be a human being. God must be the centre of our existence. The family, can only possibly be a religious concept. To a Christian public angry at the social liberalism and apparent moral relativism born out of the 1960s, this must have sounded wondrous. It is also, of course, nonsense. The entire paragraph, utter garbage. Let us not forget that whilst Reagan stresses the importance of ‘our children’ for the future of the Nation, he was busy cutting away all social programs, oversaw the closing of schools and libraries on a huge scale, creating a legacy of child poverty that still hasn’t been fixed, ensuring that the gap between rich and poor widened beyond anyone’s expectations. This wasn’t a man who cared about humanity, or “our children”. But he believed in God, and so the public warmed to him.

In 1988 Reagan completely destroyed any trace of Enlightenment thinking that brought around the creation of the secular United States of America with his State of the Union address, in which he states:

Well now, we come to a family issue that we must have the courage to confront. Tonight, I call America — a good nation, a moral people — to charitable but realistic consideration of the terrible cost of abortion on demand. To those who say this violates a woman’s right to control of her own body — can they deny that now medical evidence confirms the unborn child is a living human being entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Let us unite as a nation and protect the unborn with legislation that would stop all federal funding for abortion — and with a human life amendment making, of course, an exception where the unborn child threatens the life of the mother. Our Judeo-Christian tradition recognizes the right of taking a life in self-defense.

And let me add here: so many of our greatest statesmen have reminded us that spiritual values alone are essential to our nation’s health and vigor. The Congress opens its proceedings each day, as does the Supreme Court, with an acknowledgment of the Supreme Being — yet we are denied the right to set aside in our schools a moment each day for those who wish to pray. I believe Congress should pass our school prayer amendment.

- Here, he completely reasserts the link between Church and State. He includes the famous phrase from the Declaration. He appears to be trying to link himself to the Founders. Suddenly political America has a “Judeo-Christian tradition”. This is a Theocratic President, not a secular, democratic, constitutional President. This is a Christian that the Founders specifically wanted to keep away from Government.

The rewriting of history to suit Christian America is a regular occurrence from the 1950s until the present day. Somehow, it has managed to convince a Nation that “One Nation, under God” was always a part of the Pledge, or that “In God We Trust” always appeared on the dollar bill. Both of which are a product of the rise of the Christian Right in the 1950s. Jefferson and Franklin would have reacted with anger at the inclusion of “One Nation, under God” on any public institution.
The rewriting of history doesn’t stop there. The Christian Right are experts at rewriting the Bible to appear to support their prejudices. As noted above, anti-social liberalism is a key ingredient in the making of the Christian Right, and this social liberalism extends to homosexuality. We see the influence of the Christian Right in the passing of the ‘Defence of Marriage Act’ – again… using ‘defence’ to hide the fact that they are slowly breaking down the barrier between Church and State, slowly eroding individual rights, replacing them with Christian theocratic ‘values’. The ‘Defence of Marriage Act’ states:

“In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”

-If this isn’t a restriction of human rights, by a bunch of homophobic anti-constitutional theocrats, I don’t know what is. This is the ultimate in Government power over individual rights. It is a restriction on ‘love’. Which on the surface, appears to be based on Biblical principles, but underneath it is clearly a case of prejudice making its way into law. I say this, because if marriage were in fact based on Biblical principles, we could all marry our sister’s as advocated in Genesis 20:1-14. Or we could, by law, have a right to take concubines as advocated in 2 Sam 5:13
and 2 Chron 11:21. Or that we’d be forced to shave our wife’s head as advocated by Deut. 21:11-13. Or a wife would be banned from offering an opinion of her own, especially in Church as advocated in I Corinthians 14:34-35. Or if a man rapes a virgin, as long as he pays, he is entitled to marry her as advocated in Deut. 22:28. Or we may take a child of a foreigner, and marry her, because by law she’d be our property, as advocated by Leviticus 25:44-46. And so it goes on. The ‘Defence of Marriage Act’ is simply a Bill of prejudice, and nothing else.

What The ‘Defence of Marriage Act’ shows is how vast the Theocratic Christian Right has managed to penetrate a Government that was built on anti-Theocratic, Enlightenment principles. Language like “Defence” and “Freedom” and “Individual” when linked to Christian-inspired changes to the law, are an attempt to provide a direct link using secular language, to the nature of the Founding documents and the people who penned it, whilst being vastly incompatible with the ideals set out by the Founding Fathers as they seek to limit the rights of anyone who doesn’t fit the narrow band of “Christian” that they attempt to perpetuate. It is within this context that it isn’t surprising that the Republican Party requires the Christian vote to be electorally successful, and so with that need comes deeply anti-constitutional, anti-freedom policies designed to placate Christian extremists with regard to abortion, homosexuality,and the teaching of evolution above creationism (I refuse to call it ‘intelligent design’).

The growth of the Christian Right seems to be a reaction to a perceived ‘threat’ to their understanding of how a moral society should work. It is true that Protestantism, as noted by Weber, set the ball rolling for the freedoms that would paradoxically come to shatter the grip that the religion had on the Country. The attempts by Reagan, and later by Presidential candidates like Santorum to make sure the wall between Church and State be forever knocked down have had their successes when trying to define the United States as a ‘Christian Nation’, but luckily the principles of the Enlightenment and the atmosphere created by the Constitution seem almost always likely to prevail, unfortunately the Christian Right will always have an incalculable affect on the nature of National identity within the very secular United States. It is the nature of a secular Constitution, a secular system of Government, contrasting with a majority Christian population.

Nevertheless, it is within the atmosphere of an almost entirely Christian Nation, in 1776, before Darwin, before Einstein attempted to provide a theory of everything, before anyone had even suggested the model for the Big Bang; that a few men came together, and questioned the prevailing notion that a society should be based on religious values. People who insisted that reason and inquiry were key to progress, and who told us all to question everything, including the existence of a God. Were they influenced by Christianity? Of course. It would have been impossible not to be. But breaking the chains that Christianity had forced upon its subjects for so long, was an act of great rebellion. To build a country around these new principles was ground breaking, and without any precedent. To them, they were not building another Christian nation. They were building something that transcended religious belief. It is something the Christian Right have attempted to destroy time and time again over the past sixty years. For my part, I am with the Founders. Religion should be kept as far away from the public sphere as notably possible.

Why I am a Marxist

What is it that makes me a Marxist? What underlying principle guides my mindset in that direction? Those are the questions I have been asking myself, and I have come to a very basic conclusion. I am not an activist, I like to think, and to try to understand and to articulate the conclusions I come to. So, what conclusions have I come to on this specific area of my min? What is it that makes me a Marxist?

It isn’t about waiting for the “revolution” to come. It isn’t about nurturing an insane idea about a conspiracy in which global power and wealth is controlled by the Bilderbergs. It isn’t about praying every night for the state to control the means of production. It isn’t about ironically displaying a Che t-shirt everywhere I go, or trying to put myself into the exact same camp as Trotsky, or Lenin, or putting a little cross on a political spectrum. It isn’t about wishful rhetoric on stalls across England, handing out Socialist Worker leaflets and declaring that Capitalism is about to fall. It isn’t about turning a blind eye to the fact that thousands of people live off state handouts, purely because they do not wish to work. It isn’t about stooping to the absurdity that the Right Wing often stoops to when it points out the Soviet Union as the failure of Marxism or points to Cuba as the evil of Socialism, because if it were, I could point to Reagan an Thatcher’s support for Pinochet and right winged murderous thugs throughout Central America as proof of the brutality of Capitalism; but i’d be wrong to do so. What makes me a Marxist in the most basic terms, is the necessity to distrust authority that bases itself purely on abstractions, in this case; wealth. Capitalism in this sense, is like religion; we are expected to submit to a higher authority, an authority that actually doesn’t really exist and is purely a construction of the time period that we inhabit. If we look at that constructed power structure from “outside” of the confines of the context of our historical position, we must laugh at the absurdity of our apparent necessity to hand our lives over to people who pay the lowest possible fee for our labour, whilst extracting and squeezing as much out of us. It is degrading, and it certainly isn’t “freedom”.

To expand a little on that, it is the sense that the very foundation of Capitalism – the owner of a business is entitled to the largest piece of the profits, because he invested capital in the first place – is a man made ideal that is loaded with flaws. I will attempt to articulate a couple of the flaws I see.

Firstly, capital by itself is pointless. Capital must fuse with labour to be worth anything. Labour without capital is not pointless. Labour can build, create, innovate, feed and save lives. Capital by itself can do nothing. Capital is a seed in a dark room on a table. Labour is the soil, the sun, and the water. Therefore, the guiding force and the most important aspect of the deal between capital and labour, is labour. If my boss leaves the workplace for a week, the place still runs just fine. If the entire workforce leaves for a week, the company will be in financial peril. That is the practical example of the notion that labour is the most important force in the productive World. Profit on the initial investment, is simply interest, created by someone else. It is not productive in itself. Buying a road and charging people to use it, or buying a house and renting it out, is not productive. Capital is not productive. The fact that it is then passed down to the children of the Capitalists – which makes the claim that Capitalism is based on individual merit, seem laughably hypocritical – suggests a class consciousness within the Capitalist classes; a desire to perpetuate their class attacking meritocratic principles in a sort of Capitalist paradox in which inter-family socialism is desirable, as long as it doesn’t spread beyond their own class.

We talk of productivity of the workforce, not of the capitalists. The labour of the man with the capital is irrelevant. He will usually monopolise some sort of administration work within the company, which need not be monopolised. Apart from that initial injection of capital, he is largely pointless. Stock market speculation and gambling is also not a productive use of capital. The inherent flaws in this system, Marx believed would eventually lead to its downfall.

It is easy for a working public to take shots at people on benefits, as it is all the media tends to talk about. We seem though to turn a blind eye to Corporate tax cuts. It is odd, because people at the top of the Corporate ladder will have used a thriving public sector – education, health service, roads – at some time in their lives which provided the framework necessary to climb the ladder to great wealth. By announcing Corporate tax cuts, the Tory Government is effectively burning the ladder up which their donors climbed to make it difficult for others to follow, destroying opportunity for the next generation, whilst at the same time ensuring that those who used the system previously, now pay as little back into it as possible. Corporate tax cuts represent a huge piece of the Welfare pie, going to the people who need it least. That, is wrong.

Secondly, Marxists recognise the key element of Capitalism is the accumulation of capital. You set out in the market place with capital, you buy labour, you sell your product or service, and you make your capital back with more in profit. All well and good, until you hit what Marx termed as a limit to capital. Capitalism doesn’t deal too well with limits. Limits can include competition, and to get around that limit, capital will buy up competition until there is very little left. It is the reason why large coffee producers can flood African markets, buy up the small family run coffee producers, and put the staff to work for pittance in factories in poor conditions, working extremely long hours. Capital needs to consolidate power. Democracy used to be a limit. Capital bought democracy when it became the norm for multinationals and the super rich to fun political parties and candidates. It is the reason why 81% of the $19,000,000 that was spent on the 2006 election from the big oil lobby, went to the Republican Party in 2006. That money was well spent it seems, given that in the run up to the Bush Administrations refusal to sign up to Kyoto – the climate change UN protocol – briefing emails were leaked from US under-secretary of state, Paula Dobriansky office before meetings which thank ExxonMobil executives “active involvement” in framing climate change policy. Which is odd, because in 2003, Exxon’s head of public affairs, Nick Thomas told a House of Lords Science Committee:

“I think we can say categorically we have not campaigned with the United States government or any other government to take any sort of position over Kyoto.”

He lied. The Bush Administrations climate policy, was dictated to them, by the most powerful and wealthiest oil companies in the US.

Democracy isn’t the only limit to be overcome. The limit in 2007/08 was 25 years worth of stagnating wages for everyone apart from the very wealthy, whose wages increased year on year in Western democracies, most notably in the UK and US. To ensure demand across the marketplace continued to thrive despite wages stagnating, Capitalism blew down this limit, by introducing a market for very very easy credit. The problem with this is that money is now entirely backed by debt and nothing else. The mortgage markets didn’t fail; Capitalism failed. This means that subprime mortgages and the securities that backed them were just products of a system that has crises after crises built into it. Don’t be fooled by the right winged rhetoric that instantly blamed and attacked the public sector and the welfare state. This sovereign debt crises is a crises of Capitalism that has been cleverly shifted away from the people who caused it (people who started off with vast amounts of capital, destroyed the system that allowed them the opportunity to make that fortune, and then left quietly with vast amounts of capital, whilst the rest of us are told we must suffer austerity) an onto the most vulnerable – those who do no have vast amounts of capital or political influence. Capitalism is amoral. Morality is not a part of Capitalism. That is why regulation is necessary.

And lastly, I am deeply suspicious of the very concept of Capitalism in regard to the individual worker. The idea being that the Capitalist advertises a job vacancy because he needs labour to fertilise his capital and gain the profit. The worker needs a job. The Capitalist buys the labour of the worker. The worker consents to allow the Capitalist to live comfortably off the back of his labour, for a very small amount of money – the lowest possible amount actually because the supply of workers is far greater than the demand for production. The worker consents to this rather odd deal, because if he doesn’t, he will starve to death. An example of this can be seen with “Family Dollar”, a chain of US discount stores. The CEO Howard Levine took home base salary of $948,654, a cash bonus of $1,894,615, stocks granted of $1,338,224, and options granted of $1,308,528. So you’d think, with wealth like that, Levine would have the human decency to pay his staff a decent wage, especially given that they are expected to work such long hours? Well, no, unsurprisingly he doesn’t treat his staff all that well. Most of the staff who are expected to work over time, are designated as “managers” at “Family Dollar“. This means that the company can get around the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, by designating the “managers” (who weren’t paid any more) as “exempt“, which meant they do not have to pay them over time. As employees struggle to cope with the horribly low pay and extremely long hours, “Family Dollar” managed to pay out $58 million in dividends in 2010. When workers have to take such awful jobs, working for horrendous bosses, simply to make ends meet, the scales are tipped firmly in the balance of the employer. The deal therefore, is not equal to start with. The Capitalist is driven by the desire to increase profits and buy a lovely new car, by using someone elses labour, to attach to his capital, and them claim some universal right over the product of that labour. The worker on the other hand is driven by survival, despite the fact that he is far more productive than the capitalist. If the business goes bust, it is more than likely that the Capitalist will have money saved, he will certainly have the experience needed to get a job in which he wont have to go long without a regular income. His workers on the other hand, having provided their old boss with the money he saved and now lives on, through their labour rather than his, will now have to either spend whatever little savings they’re likely to have on getting through a period of unemployment without starving, which could be twice as difficult if he lives in the USA and doesn’t have health insurance, and finds himself with a terrible illness.
One of the fathers of Capitalism, Turgot summed up it here:

“In all types of labour, it necessarily follows that the salary of the worker is limited to what is necessary for survival.”

In other words, when more people exist then wages are higher because the pool of labour is smaller, when less labour is needed, wages will slowly fall not because a worker is working less hard, but because a Capitalist can use the threat of starvation to insist on paying his staff less money. Capitalism posits that people are commodities.

To conclude and answer my original question; I am a Marxist because I do not believe the initial investment of capital into a business venture, provides a God-given right to claim the highest wage or the power of the business. The fact that we see this profit making right, as God-given, leads to dangerous games played by a very small amount of people who have accumulated great wealth, an it affects us all. When I sit back and really think about the current Euro zone crises, and the panic in the US over the raising of the debt ceiling, I wonder how humanity is so close to crumbling. We invented money. We invented the concepts of wealth and sovereign debt and price and wage and individual debt and stocks and we seem to think of it all as divine; untouchable; something beyond our grasp, when in actuality, it is all just one big illusion, an abstract concept, a web that we spun and eventually got stuck in. Productive people are still as numerous as they were in the 1990s, there is still the same amount of land, but there is an abundance of debt-backed money rather than savings. The difference is, productive people and land actually exist in reality, debt-backed money and capital on its own doesn’t.

That is why I am a Marxist.

Bobby Kennedy

Forty-three years ago today, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed as he campaigned at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Languishing in hindsight and speculation, I will say that I believe Bobby Kennedy would have been one of the greatest President’s the United States has ever had, had he not been cut short on the campaign trail in 1968. If he’d have lived, there may have been no President Nixon, No President Ford, and maybe even no President Reagan. If his ideas and sentiments not been crushed in the following years by a vicious right winged neoliberal elite, and less eloquent and less popular and far less charismatic liberal politicians made to sound like the ramblings of archaic socialists, the World might not have had to endure thirty years plus, of the rise of the Hayekian New Right. The spirit of the ’60s was firmly shot down in 1968.

I wanted a short blog today on RFK, and a quote that I felt summed up his political philosophy, and why he remains one of my political heroes.

“Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Perfect quote.

The Corporatocracy

In 2010 the U.S Supreme Court over turned limitations to Corporations financing political broadcasts in the U.S. They argued that to limit financing from Corporations would be an attack on their first Amendment rights. They didn’t however set how why they have defined Corporations as some kind of living organism that has political rights in the first place. It is a worrying precedent. It means all of a sudden that Corporations are like people. Only richer and more powerful, with very different interests. People tend to vote for safe jobs, better healthcare, safe products, and a decent level of funding for education. Corporations want weak labour laws, low Corporate taxes, and regulations (safe products?) as minimal as possible.

A lifeless, soulless, dead entity like a Corporation, having the rights assigned to people, is an awful step in the wrong direction. Should a Corporation like ITT have rights, in the US? ITT owned 25% of Focke-Wulf, the manufacturer of the Luftewaffe Nazi aircraft that was used to shoot down American airplanes during the war. It then won $27,000,000 in compensation after the Allied’s bombed the Focke-Wulf factory during the war. ITT also made radar and radio equipment used by the Nazis. ITT were funding the killing of Allied troops. ITT also helped to fund Pinochet’s control over Chile. One of the most evil dictators in the World. Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of ITT during the war, was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery for his service to the Country.

Exxon, whose named used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, are responsible for shipping oil to the Nazis, even after Pearl Harbour. They also contributed, through a bunch of subsidiary companies, to Himmler’s personal fund. They now have the same rights as US citizens.

Profit before people.

The 2010 ruling means that climate change takes a back seat because it isn’t in the interest of oil companies. That the 1% of scientists who dispute man made climate change will be the only ones who are listened to. American Petroleum Institute, whose members include Exxon, have began to finance mainly Republican candidates this year. Martin Durbin, API’s executive vice president for government affairs quite openly said:

“At the end of the day, our mission is trying to influence the policy debate.”

Koch Industries Inc, gave $1.79mn to candidates. 90% of those candidates were Republicans. This of course comes as President Obama proposed ending subsidies for Gas and Electric companies by 2012. Apparently those companies aren’t happy that their Welfare cheque is about to be scrapped. A Welfare cheque that adds up to over $45bn. Their Republican bitches will of course defend them. But no universal healthcare! Healthy citizens = bad. Rich oil companies = great.

Republicans in the US House of Reps voted to cut off all funding to the UN Climate Change panel, the IPCC, because according to Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri Republican:

“The IPCC is an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science, which is the last thing hard-working American taxpayers should be paying for”

The idea that it is “dubious science” is laughable. And the phrase “hard working Americans” is an empty one. Those same hard working Americans, I doubt want to see their money going to a mass of Corporate tax cuts either. Blaine Luetkemeyer’s claim of “dubious” apparently isn’t without irony, given that in 2004 he introduced a bill, based on Biblical principles, to the Missouri State Legislature, to define marriage as between a man and a woman. All for personal “freedom” as long as he gets to define what “freedom” means.

One the “dubious science” claim surrounding Climate Change, it always seems to come from Republicans. So I wondered why that could be? And then I found this. It shows Oil company contributions for 2010, and which Party – Republican or Democrat – those funds went primarily to. I think it’s pretty conclusive.

Roy Blunt, the United States Senator, from Missouri and whose campaign funds came mainly from big oil ($293,400 altogether) opposes cap and trade and supports drilling for oil on US coastlines. The League of Conservation Voters, who work to turn environmental issues into national priorities said that Blunt is:

“In his twelve years in office, Rep. Roy Blunt has taken good care of Big Oil by maintaining their costly tax breaks while continually voting against opportunities to create clean energy jobs, reduce pollution and improve fuel economy for Missourians,”

One wonders who runs the World? What a wretched democracy we all seem so proud of.

America is not the only country who laughably refer to their Corporatocracy as a Democracy. Britain is just as bad. Our Tory Government is funded heavily by the financial sector and very wealthy individuals. Apparently there is no money left to pay for the care of disabled people, or to keep arts centres open. But there is money, for a 83% tax payer owned bank to offer its CEO a £4.5mn bonus in shares, on top of his 3.2mn bonus for 2010. There is enough money to give one man, a bonus (on top of his salary) of £7.7mn. We are still an economy controlled by the Financial sector. It is not Capitalism.

The Municipal Governing Body of Greater London is the City of London Corporation. It’s main control is over the City of London financial district. There are residents whom live there, but their vote is not very important, given that the majority of the votes for that region, are given to Corporations. They are called “non-residential voters”. Corporate voters. A Corporation may appoint a number of people to cast votes on its behalf based on how many employees it has. The employees don’t get a say, the CEO gets the vote. Those who are appointed voters can vote twice. Once for their Corporation and once for their own vote. Residents of the area can only vote once. It is one big Corporatocracy. The Republicans over in the States would be proud. They’d some how manage to refer to it as “freedom” and “giving power back to people“.

Corporate regulation is essential. Corporations have one legal requirement: profit. Humans, i’d argue are motivated not just by profit, but also by compassion, loyalty, doing the right thing, the advancement of the species and survival. Corporations, by law, must ignore all that stuff if it conflicts with their ability to make profit, and that is a dangerous thing.

Today we learnt that the Tory Government’s next line of attack against its much hated public sector (which, again, remember did no wrong, and caused no problems itself) is the attack on public sector pensions, because they are unfair in relation to private sector pensions. Well, instead of forcing equal misery across the public sector to match that of the private sector, why don’t you make the private sector pay up more?

Damn right i’m a Marxist, especially in this climate of horrendous shock right winged economics.

Let’s stop referring to Corporatocracy as Democratic.
Let’s stop referring to Corporatocracy as freedom.
Let’s stop blaming government for failings, when Government is pretty much owned by the Corporate World.

The point is, Corporations do not deserve rights. They are not people. Government is supposed to work for the people, not for the very wealthy, and at the moment there is no government in the Western World that is not wholly run for the benefit of the very wealthy. It is not democracy. It is not at all what the Founders envisaged.

The Pig Society Part II

The Big Society grows ever stronger, and support grows ever wider, charity bosses and workers applaud it and sing its praises, because it is a wonderful plan that is definitely not a cover for a mass of Corporate tax cuts.

That is what delusional Conservatives believe.
Except, it’s bullshit.
The voluntary sector is being absolutely gutted of funding.
As the previous post pointed out. But to make it clear, the Guardian today featured a story of a lady named Denise Marshall. She is Director of Eaves and also the Poppy Project. These charities work with victims of domestic abuse and sex trafficking. She has dedicated her life to this cause. She has fought some pretty high powered members of the criminal underworld across Europe. Eaves provides housing and counselling for victims of abuse. They offer up to 35% savings on gas and electricity and other necessities for vulnerable women. In short, Denise Marshall is a heroine. She was recognised for this in 2008 by being given an OBE. She is one of the very few who actually deserve the honour.

Denise is now handing back the OBE, to David Cameron personally, because she has said that the extreme and needless cuts to funding for charities and organisations like Eaves, means she will no longer be able to support and fight criminal gangs who traffic women for the sex trade. She feels that she would be hypocritical and unworthy of an OBE when she can no longer protect the women she has the award for protecting.

Marshall said:

“I received the OBE in 2007 specifically for providing services to disadvantaged women. It was great to get it; it felt like recognition for the work the organisation has done.

But recently it has been keeping me awake at night. I feel like it would be dishonourable and wrong to keep it. I’m facing a future where I can’t give women who come to my organisation the services they deserve – I won’t be able to provide the services for which I got the OBE.”

“If you run a refuge where you don’t have the support staff it just becomes a production line, where you move people on as quickly as possible to meet the targets. You’re not helping women to escape the broader problems they face. They may get a bed, but no help with changing their lives and moving out of situations of danger.”

“I’ve worked in this sector for almost 30 years. I don’t want to sound melodramatic but I don’t think I have ever felt as depressed and desperate as I do now,”

How then, do the Big Society advocates justify the fact that on the same day as a true heroine feels she can no longer protect very very vulnerable women in her care, the Tories are trying to stop an EU law on the banning of naked short selling (which I shall try to explain as much as possible shortly)? The EU law, if the Tories get their way, will not affect the UK on naked short selling. Germany have banned it, the U.S have banned it, Australia have banned it, Hong Kong have banned it, Japan have banned it. We have kept it. It makes a very small elite group of speculators very rich, whilst risking money that is not theirs. How are these people protected, yet the vulnerable women like those that Denise Marshall represents have their funds slashed. The Government and its banking friends and business associates are sitting sipping champagne, whilst Rome burns. Nero would be in awe.

Short Selling (not naked short selling) is a little confusing, and utterly absurd. It has no social use. It is not to the benefit of any of us. It is dangerous and it should be banned. When you buy shares, you buy them in the hope that the price will rise and you can sell them some time in the future, to make a nice bit of money. It is all to do with how you obtain shares. You and I would buy shares. Naked short sellers borrow shares in the hope that the price will fall. So, if for instance I was to borrow 5000 shares from Broker A. I will then sell them at £1 a share, so £5000, hoping the price falls. Say the price falls by half. I now buy back all the shares, at £2500. I have netted myself a nice little £2500 and I give the 5000 shares back to the Broker A.

Naked Short Selling is different, because you don’t even borrow the shares you’re selling. You don’t have them. You’re selling a promise that you will obtain the shares that you’ve just sold, at some point in the future. You may as well walk into a bank, take all of their money, and promise to give it back at some point in the future. There is then an incentive for short sellers to wreck companies, because the share price has to fall for them to meet their promise. On a grand scale, this can lead to massive crashes.

This little practice lead necessarily to the 1997 Asian Financial Crises, that left millions in poverty. This wasn’t the fault of too much Government interference in people’s lives, or too many people on the dole. It was a direct result of unproductive short sellers and a massively deregulated financial sector.

The law looks to ban naked short selling in the EU. The UK will be trying to exempt itself from that banning.

This of course comes days after the announcement that there would be vast changes to the offshore tax laws, which mean that large and medium sized businesses who offshore their profits and then move them back to the UK, no longer have to pay the difference between the tax they paid in their tax haven and the tax they pay in the UK. They no longer have to pay any tax on profits that are made outside the country and brought back to the UK. Not only that, but they can claim expenses against tax they pay in the UK, to fund their overseas departments. That represents one of the biggest changes to Corporate tax law, and a massive shift of wealth from the poorest due to cuts, to the very wealthiest on a level far beyond anything Margaret Thatcher could have dreamed of. Suddenly the veil of an omni-benevolent Tory government is falling off, to be replaced by a face stamped with the logos of Diageo and Barclays.

On the 9th February, George Osborne told the House of Commons:

Those entrusted by us to regulate those bankers and run our economy washed their hands.
Meanwhile the rest of the country is left paying every day for their failures.
The government has to pick up the pieces.

It would seem that what Osborne believes is “picking up the pieces” entails giving away massive tax cuts, destroying the voluntary sector, and inviting the World’s naked short sellers to come and set up home in Britain.

Welcome to the Pig Society.

Labour’s new generation

BBC News: “Defence Secretary Liam Fox, what are your thoughts of the leak of this letter, today?”
Liam Fox: “As a result of the terrible legacy left to us by Labour”.

What the hell? This has to be some sort of record. Usually it takes a Tory or Lib Dem, on average, about 2 minutes before they try to defend their ridiculous ideological cuts to public services, with the words “terrible legacy left by Labour”, however the Defence Secretary today not only managed it in less than two seconds, but also managed to fit it into an answer to a question that wasn’t actually asked. That’s almost impressive. I am going to start every answer now, with “due to the terrible legacy left by Labour”, even if it isn’t warranted. “Jamie, where are the car keys?” …. “Due to the horrendous legacy left by the Labour Government, I have put the keys on next to the phone.“

It was inevitable that the Conservative Party and it’s Right Winged friends in the Media would immediately begin to paint Ed Milliband Red the moment he won the Labour Leadership race. It is true, that Ed is further to the Left than his brother, and runner up to the Leadership, David Milliband, but Ed is certainly not far left unionist old Labour. Not by a long shot. Both have claimed in interviews very recently that they consider themselves socialists, but then defined what they believed socialism to mean, and both pointed out that the job of contemporary socialists is to admit that Capitalism is a fact of life now, and try to fill in the caps that capitalism leaves open to injustice and inequality.

I am waiting to see substance in the form of policy, from the new Labour leader, if he is going to win my vote in five years time. I would rather throw myself in front of a train than vote Conservative, and after the Lib Dems gave my vote to the Tories this year, even though my vote was an anti-Tory vote……. I wont be voting Liberal Democrat every again. As I suspect, a hell of a lot of others wont be voting Lib Dem again. They are a dead party, being propped up by the Tories. But in order for Labour to win back my vote, they have to really present a progressive alternative. I do think Ed is a better choice than David. David to me, whilst more charismatic than Ed, is too much of an extension of the Blair years. He represents the centre ground far more, and whilst Ed is certainly not some sort of Leninist as the Sun seems to be suggesting; he is a little more to the Left.

Their father is the ex Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband. Having a Marxist father would drive Americans insane with rage. Luckily, we’re not mad Americans, and we think far more rationally. My own political stance is far more in tune with Miliband Snr than both of his sons. As a boy, Ralph had stood at the grave of Karl Marx, in London, with his clenched fist raised, and vowed to fight for the rights of those less fortunate. Clearly living in a Marxist household, would have had profound affects on both Milibands, whom have since developed their own opinions. I cannot imagine their dad would have voted for either of them at the leadership election.

Ed’s speech was intriguing. I quite liked this:

Every day out of power, another day when this coalition can wreak damage on our communities, another day when we cannot change our country for the better.
And let us resolve today that this will be a one-term government.

The Conservatives (as pointed out in my previous blog) are winning the propaganda war because they have shaped the political discourse away from the fact that it was the private sector that caused the economic mess, and have somehow managed to blame the entire thing, on the Labour Government. The root causes of the Financial sector meltdown, can actually be traced back in a perfectly straight line….. to the last Tory government, curiously. This new Labour party needs to provide a different understanding of the problems, and bring the discourse away from the Right.

The Tories spent the last election campaign blaming Labour for not closing the roof when the sun was shining; in other words, not saving money when times were good.

This was a nice little addition:

The old way of thinking said that public services would always be second-class. But we defied the conventional wisdom.
I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.

I had to disagree with Ed when he said:

This new generation that leads our party is humble about our past and idealistic about our future.

Firstly, both Miliband brothers had been in the previous Labour cabinet, and spent months sticking up for the way the Party was being run. Gordon Brown was the best man for the job, they both chanted constantly. My issue is, I consider myself an idealist. I was a Party of the left, to be run by thinkers and intellectuals, not the same old politicians we all despise. I don’t want a leader to simply be pandering to the popular opinion and conventional wisdom of the time. On immigration, I was a truly progressive politician who does not give in to the “I was born here don’t you know!!! Bloody pakis taking over!!” bigoted idiots, and then claim they aren’t bigots, just ordinary people worried about jobs. They are bigots. They are also only capable of responding to the conventional wisdom. The reality of migration, as I have said previously in blogs, is that it cannot be solved by closing Britain. The only way you fight immigration is firstly accepting that Britain’s colonial history has sent shockwaves through the centuries, that are still felt today throughout the Middle East and Africa. And secondly, accepting that Nation States and Capitalism are massively incompatible. And thirdly, you have to have a genuine commitment, internationally, to fight global poverty and inequality. Mexicans try for a better life by illegally crossing the border into America, because the balance of equality has tipped far away from them. Since the opening up of trade in Mexico, the Mexican class of poor has expanded, the Middle Class has contracted, and American business interests are flourishing. There are no health benefits, and no educational or societal benefits, and so the poor in Mexico are suffering. And then Americans wonder why they want to leave. They weren’t given any choice. It wasn’t a case of being freed. They have become trapped. And it is a similar story across the World. It is the root cause of mass migration. This is what needs to be conveyed to the public, if Labour want to be truly idealists and progressives.

I also liked this line, of Ed’s speech:

This generation wants to change our society so that it values community and family, not just work, because we understand there is more to life than the bottom line.

I have been waiting for a politician to point out that life is not just about what you do for work, for a very long time.

He then took a well deserved swipe at the Coalition’s debt reduction plans, with:

You see, it’s obvious really, when you cancel thousands of new school buildings at a stroke, it isn’t just bad for our kids, it’s bad for construction companies at a time when their order books are empty.
It’s not responsible, it’s irresponsible.
We must protect those on middle and low incomes. They did nothing to cause the crisis but are suffering the consequences.
I say the people who caused the crisis and can afford to do more should do more: with a higher bank levy allowing us to do more to protect the services and entitlements on which families depend.

He made a point, that struck a chord for me. Recently, my grandparents have become far less mobile. They are in the mid-80s, and they are in and out of hospital almost on a weekly basis. They cannot walk to the shop, and it’s a struggle for them to even wash their clothes. They have a new care worker, who spends most of the day washing for them, making sure they keep as mobile as they can, going to the supermarket for them, cleaning the house, cooking the food, she does absolutely everything, she’s on call at night. A real credit. People like her, are heroes in my estimation, and society should reward them. She is paid next to nothing. Miliband said:

What does it say about the values of our society, what have we become, that a banker can earn in a day what the care worker earns in a year? It is wrong.

If you’re a free market fundamentalist, it is perfectly fine that a banker or a businessman who spends most of the week playing golf, can earn in a day what a person who is actually providing a real social good, earns in a year. It is the height of human freedom apparently. If you are like me, you see something massively wrong and skewed in a system that allows that. And that is why you, like me, are not in the Conservative Party.

The Tories pointed out that Ed is only the leader now, because he received the backing from the Unions, and just how dangerous this is. They claim Ed Miliband must now be in the pockets of the Unions which apparently is a disaster. The media tends to agree. I wonder, why is it a disaster to have won the votes of the Unions, yet no one in the media bats an eyelid, at the fact that when David Cameron tried to argue the case for sudden and quick cuts, he presented a letter signed by a bunch of business leaders; one of whom was a man named Paul Walsh, owner of Diageo PLC, who according to a Guardian Report, have actively avoided tax for years. And a huge number of signitures on the list, including J Sainsbury, Philip Harris and Simon Wolfson, are all members of the Conservative Party! Why is that any different, or any better? why is a Country run in the interests of big business, based on long stressful soul destroying hours for fuck all pay, consider the height of a wondrous free society? Sir Peter Bonfield CBE, FREng, C.U.N.T of BT saw BT share price go from £14, to £5, under his control. He then left BT with over £6,000,000 whilst thousands of workers lost their jobs. Why are we listening to these people? The are the old, grey haired generation that has left my generation with no affordable homes, and a fucked climate. Thanks for that. I for one, am not going to pay attention to the old generation, for another second.

Finally, my favourite part of Ed Miliband’s speech, said like a true progressive:

Here is our generation’s paradox: the biggest ever consumers of goods and services, but a generation that yearns for the things that business cannot provide.
Strong families.
Time with your children.
Green spaces.
Community life
Love and compassion.

Overall, I have quite high hopes for this new generation of Labour. Although something tells me they aren’t going to be all that different to the last lot.

The wonder of Fox News

Fox News, and News Corp in general provide quite the amusing slant on World events. We in the UK find it an endless source of hilarity and bullshit all rolled into one. We understand that much of America actually takes Fox News seriously, which amuses us even further.

During our UK election, they announced that the result was the UK’s total rejection of Socialism. Which of course was nonsense. Our Conservative Party, whom Fox News supporter, told the electorate that they would look after and protect our single payer Health Service, making the Conservatives evil Socialists in the eyes of right winged America. Fox News also failed to point out that more people in the UK voted for Parties on the Left and Centre-Left than they did for those on the Right. So actually, it was far from a rejection of Socialism. I blogged on Fox News calling the UK election, here.

But the stupidity doesn’t surprise me. In the past two years they have labelled President Obama a Marxist, Communist, Fascist, American hating Muslim, Foreigner with terrorist sympathies who hates White people. I give it a week before they ask if he is actually a homosexual transvestite. It stinks of bitterness. A torrent of hate and bullshit. They labelled the anti-Iraq war protesters as ‘un-American’ whilst those who protested the Health Care Bill were labelled Patriots. But they assure us that they are not bias. They assure us they are in no way a rallying point for all single brain celled racists Right wingers across America.

On The Daily Show two nights ago, Jon Stewart, once again, made Fox News appear fools. For weeks Fox has been drawing weak links between the Muslim Centre near Ground Zero with funding from shady characters with Terrorist ties. The guy they point to as helping to fund the project is a man named Al-Waleed bin Talal. He is a member of the Saudi Royal Family. He has invested more than $300,000 in projects for Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principle planner of the Muslim Centre near Ground Zero. This is one of the guys that Fox refer to as a shady character. What Fox failed to point out is; Al-Waleed bin Talal owns 7% of News Corp and so owns 7% of Fox News. News Corp (Fox News) owns 9% of Al-Waleed bin Talal’s entertainment company Rotana. Al-Waleed bin Talal is part of the Carlyle Group, which has business deals with the Bin Laden family. So, by association, Jon Stewart pointed out that Fox News is funded by those linked to terrorism, if we are to use their logic. Stewart ended quite brilliantly, by saying that if “We want to stop funding terror, we must as a Nation, together………… stop watching Fox. IT’S THE ONLY WAY!!”. The stupidity of Fox is outstanding.

It is almost as ridiculous a situation, as the time that The Simpsons ran a mock Fox News on one of it’s episodes with the news ticker running along the bottom, proclaiming; “Do Democrats cause cancer? …………… Rupert Murdoch: terrific dancer……………. Study: 92% of Democrats are gay………… Bible says Jesus favoured Capital Gains cut.” Fox News took exception to this, and threatened The Simpsons with legal action. The problem is, that The Simpsons is owned by Fox. So effectively, Fox were threatening to sue Fox. Fox backed down and didn’t sue Fox for mocking Fox. Fox now has a new rule stating that The Simpsons cannot do the news ticker any more, (I promise I am not making this up) because it might confuse viewers into believing it is the real news.

I will leave you with that thought. I don’t think much more can be said. Fox News is an embarrassment all by itself, it doesn’t need those of us on the Left point it out, although it’s much fun to do.

The USA & Greece

The above, shows (if you can make out the words, i know it looks ridiculously small) that the US is not going to be the next major economic casualty, after Greece. It just isn’t going to happen.

My knowledge on economics is supremely limited. So please bare that in mind!

Even the UK, which is in a far worse position than the US, is not even slightly as bad as Greece. We here in the UK have had two quarters of positive growth. I accept that given the bail out, and fiscal stimulus package, the growth figures are ridiculously low, but we are in a period of economic recovery. It is going to take a while to see the benefit.

The Office of National Statistics report revised their original estimate for growth in the fourth quarter, to a much higher figure. We are actually in a much stronger economic position in the UK, than we first assumed. Government spending was needed to prop up the economy during recession. But, given that we are still only in recovery, I believe it’d be a massive mistake to withdraw that support as the new Conservative government plans to do shortly. In fact, i’m not entirely sure where the benefit of withdrawing support now, actually is? I accept in the future, we need to cut spending. I think though, forcing tax evading corporations to pay what they owe, should be the prime target. But cutting now, seems dangerous. Surely, when we are a growing economy, and the World itself is growing economically, that then would be a good time to cut. Not when people are struggling the most. I fear that it is just Tories being Tories. Cut spending, give people the option “Work where ever we say, or lose your home and starve to death…… and work twice as hard, for minimum wage…lower if we had our way!!! Whilst we give your boss a tax cut, so he can enjoy another game of golf a week“, and eventually the Nation’s money pot may improve, at the expense of social cohesion and morale.

Fox News today asked if it were possible, that the U.S could become Greece economically. They all answered “yes“. Scare tactics.
So I did some research, on the fundamental differences between the economy of Greece and the economy of the US.

To fill the hole in the budget, both Greece and the US need to find around 6% of GDP, according to a report by economists Auerbach and Gale. My limited understanding of economics tells me that just because that number is true for both Nations, the measures needed to fill the gap, are nothing like one another.

Greece’s budget deficit is 14% of it’s GDP. America’s is 9.3%. They are both pretty harsh figures, I accept.

National debt in the US is apparently likely to hit 140% of GDP in the next twenty years. That doesn’t take into account policy changes, technology advancements, or any other sort of externality. It does not take into account growth as a result of investment in infrastructure etc. That figure simply goes by what it would be, if twenty years from now, were the same in every way, as today.

Spending cuts, tax raises are obvious. But they do not need to be harsh as they do in Greece. Greece is in a far worse position. The US’s economy is growing, whilst Greece’s economy is shrinking. In order to protect itself from bankruptcy, by appealing to the IMF for a loan, Greece is being forced to reduce spending. Reducing spending during such a huge recession, is only likely to make that recession far worse. America is not in recession. It does not have to appeal to the IMF for a loan, it is not likely to fall back into recession any time soon. The growth will eventually provide the revenue to fill that 6% gap. When the US economy picks up, then spending cuts and higher taxation will further help the US bring down its cyclical deficit.

The US dollar is still strong. Despite growing deficit and debt levels, the US is in a prime position to deal with its problems, because the dollar will be the leading currency for many many years. America is the largest economy in the World. Greece, is the 27the largest economy in the World. And whilst China is growing, it is not in a position to catch up to, or overtake America for quite some time. Investors simply do not trust the Chinese all that much, whilst at the same time, investors flee Greece. Whilst reserve currency status is not guaranteed to last, it certainly provides protection for the US, which provides 60% of the World’s reserve currency.

Greece has to fill that gap within the next year. If they don’t, they risk pushing Greece into an even greater recession, which will inevitably lead to even greater structural deficits. Greece is in a mess. They ran up huge budget deficits during the good economic times. They inevitably ran up even larger budget deficits during the bad times. Greece’s structural deficit is horrendous. America’s, is not. The structural deficit in the USA is not perfect, true. And it is going to take some harsh measures over the next few years to help. But, the US can fill that 6% gap, over two entire decades. Greece has two years at the very most. It is also worth pointing out, that it was the Republican Party, the party of fiscal responsibility that spent away their budget surplus during the good times. And not in a positive way either. It was not Obama. America needs to simply slow down a little, not drastically cut.

America obviously has to change over the long term, whereas Greece has to change immediately. The problem America has, is its particular brand of Capitalism; irresponsible consumerism. Growth for the benefit of growth. Wall Street offering no real social good. They simply exist to fatten their pockets. Your money, placed in banks, being used in dodgy dealings, rather than productive investments. Responsible Capitalism, in which the success of a Nation is in measuring how low the inequality gap and how low the poverty rate is, rather than the accumulated riches of the very wealthy. That is the only way the entire World will escape another preventable Global recession.

Fox calls UK election!

It is 2:20am, and we in Britain are in the midst of the results of the election. It looks as if it is going to result in a hung Parliament, which may result in a Liberal Democrat/Labour coalition (hopefully). The BBC, ITV and SKY all will not call it. They keep saying it will most likely be hung, and that despite all the money that Lord Ashcroft has spent on the Conservative campaign, they are not gaining the seats they REALLY targeted, such as Tootin.

However, our crazed right winged friends over in the USA have a different story. They have called it for the Conservatives by a huge majority.
Sean Hannity on Fox News just this second said:

“It looks as if the Tories lead by David Cameron are running to victory, a clear message to the World that England is rejecting Socialism.”

It feels odd to actually be on the receiving end of Fox bullshit. We see it aimed at Obama constantly from Fox, but we in England are usually free from their nonsense. Tonight, it is new. For three reasons.

Firstly, it doesn’t “look like David Cameron is running to victory” in the slightest. In fact, given how unpopular Gordon Brown is, it must be a complete embarrasment to the Tories that they STILL aren’t able to gain a majority. Against Gordon Brown, an Arab yelling “DEATH TO THE WEST” could have won. David Cameron has taken a poll lead of 19, to 5. That isn’t “running away” with the election, to anyone else other than Fox.

Secondly, people aren’t rejecting Brown out of a hatred for Socialism. In fact, we kind of like our Socialist traditions. If the Conservatives had said “We plan to privatise the National Health Service”, they’d have lost the election quite horrendously. People are rejecting Gordon Brown because they want a change. They see Brown as the PM who presided over the worst recession in decades. They see Brown as being the PM who allowed the Banks to have a free ride, without Government regulation. So in fact, it’s lack of Socialism, lack of Government oversight, especially over immigration and the financial system, that has drove voters away. I guarantee, people did not choose to vote Conservative lightly. We in the UK, are not like the USA, we do not have this irrational love affair with the free market, we are very suspicious of the markets.

Thirdly, if the Conservatives do not gain an overall majority, it means that more people voted Labour and Lib Dem collectively, than voted Conservative. Which means more people voted for Left and Centre-left parties, than voted Right winged parties.

This election is not an outright attack on Socialism. In fact, it’s actually quite offensive to those of us on the Socialist Left to refer to the Labour Party as Socialist. They haven’t been Socialist in over a decade at the very least. A lot of voters, will not vote Labour this time, because of their abandonment of Socialist values.

Fox are actually using the UK, to scare the US. It’s fucking abhorrent that they are allowed to do that. Hannity said it will send a message to President Obama that the World does not want his brand of Socialism. That isn’t the case at all. If you ask any Brit, they will tell you they despised George Bush, they despised Sarah Palin, and they did, and still do, love Barack Obama. It would be almost unanimous support for Obama. In fact, if you ask the population of the UK, what they think of Fox, they would just laugh at you.

Back into the land of the normal people, and away from the crazed right winged American idiots, I do envisage a Hung Parliament. Oddly, because Labour are doing far far better than expected, the Tories are not doing as well as expected, and although I voted Liberal Democrat, they appear to be doing horrendously, which has shocked every media network across the UK.

Economically, i’ve always wondered why people vote Tory, especially after a crash. Individualism vs Collectivism aside, it is financial deregulation started during the 1980s, along with building society sell offs and the removal of reserve assett ratios, that lead to the banks to build an economy based on speculation. Which, caused a sort of financial time bomb. The reason it this was the case, was because of lack of oversight. Now, the Conservative principle, is to remove oversight from the markets. Surely tighter regulation on the financial sector, promotion of responsible social Capitalism, as opposed to all out economic war, further promotion of toxic gambling and failure to do anything about ending this whole obsession with consumerism to the point where even toxic bank assets are for sale (see Goldman Sachs) is the way forward?

The deficit has not been caused by excessive government spending. The deficit has been caused by an out of control financial sector, that got it’s right to be out of control, from the Conservatives. Surely you have to spend a lot when the private sector fucks up, to keep infrastructure in place and keep interest rates low, but more importantly; to keep people in their homes and jobs? Otherwise, you are throwing people onto the scrap heap. The recession of the 90s, under the previous Conservative Government saw homeless rates double, and suicide rates shot up, because of the lack of help people were getting. How is that the right way to go about recovery? I don’t care if recovery takes a little longer, as long as people’s necessities are protected. The Conservatives do not believe in those basic protections.

The Conservatives blame government spending fully for the problems. They seem incapable of accepting that the deregulated financial sector is the reason the government had to spend more in the first place.

By punishing the public sector, for the failings of the private sector, whilst simultaneously ignoring the problems in the private sector, you are simply putting a weakly tied bandage onto a system that will inevitably fuck up again in a few years time.

It amazes me that the slightly manipulated political discourse of this election has it that the “Welfare State” is the parasite of the economy. It wasn’t the Welfare State that fucked up.

By spouting about deep public service cuts, what they are essentially saying is the public should pay for the gambling debts of the City of London, which were encouraged by both the Conservatives and Labour over the past thirty years.

David Wearing a PhD researcher in Political Science at the School of Public Policy at the University College, London said quite rightly:

” What we are witnessing here is a unique form of bank robbery: the banks robbing the public of tens of billions of pounds, with our elected politicians driving the getaway car.”

I hope tonight results in a Hung Parliament, and a Lib Dem/Labour coalition. Anything to keep the Tories out.

The guinea-pig Nation

According to the Australian reporter Prue Clarke, growing poverty in Ghana has tripled the number of children who work the streets as prostitutes, over the past decade. There are now over 20,000 children living on the streets of Ghana.

The IMF likes to claim that it has given well over $160,000,000 to Ghana to help rebuild the economy of Ghana, plus an extra $1.1bn from the World Bank, and how wondrous this is. Now, whilst it is true that a minority of citizens of Ghana have benefited from the IMF liberalisation of the markets of Ghana, most have been displaced by cheap imports that have destroyed their local industry, made them jobless, and then thanks to massive cuts in social spending, they’re simply left to rot. The IMF says it’s wonderful, because growth for the sake of growth is the neoliberal way.

The IMF are a group that are rather dictatorial in their running of an economy. To them, the idea of Nation States, and their sovereignty is meaningless. To the IMF, the IMF control your country. They in affect, make sure the richer countries remain rich, and the poorer countries open up their markets for the richer countries to exploit at will.

The IMF is essentially a bank. They give loans and aid to countries that need it, but they only give that aid, if the countries in question implement right winged economic principles. The idea is “you do it our way, or fuck you“. This ideological vehicle, of course has it’s problems. Not least for Ghana, who the IMF insist they have done an excellent job with.

What they fail to point out, are the findings by Christianaid:

“In the year 2000 alone, sub-Saharan Africa lost nearly US$45 dollars per person thanks to trade liberalisation. Most trade liberalisation in Africa has been part of the conditions attached to foreign aid, loans and debt relief. This looks like a bad deal: in 2000, aid per person in sub-Saharan Africa was less than half the loss from liberalisation – only US$20. Africa is losing much more than it gains if aid comes with policy strings attached. The staggering truth is that the US$272 billion liberalisation has cost sub-Saharan Africa would have wiped clean the debt of every country in the region (estimated at US$204 billion) and still left more than enough money to pay for every child to be vaccinated and go to school.”

The government of Ghana no longer has any control over Ghana. Social policies are tied to economic policies, and the government of Ghana can only implement a social policy, if the IMF agree to it. If a Sub-Saharan African nation needs help, it has to sell it’s soul to the economic devil, for eternity. Who gave the IMF that sort of power over so many lives? I certainly didn’t vote for them? Why is this form of totalitarianism considered legitimate?

According to Waldon Bello, a senior analyst at “Focus on the Global South”, a program of Chulalongkorn University’s Social Research Institute:

“At the time of decolonization in the 1960s, Africa was not just self-sufficient in food but was actually a net food exporter, its exports averaging 1.3 million tons a year between 1966-70. Today, the continent imports 25% of its food, with almost every country being a net food importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the last three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Southern Africa, and Central Africa.

It would seem that the huge problem caused by neoliberalism on economies that just aren’t ready for it at all, is the huge increase in imports and the meagre growth or even decline of exports, which in turn leads to huge rates of unemployment, awful exploitation at the hands of Western business and the bare minimum social protection for the those affected the worst. Markets are incomplete and so the social programs that gave access to land to local farmers, and offered them a degree of protection, were suddenly taken away. People who had no idea how to work in a highly competitive global marketplace, had absolutely no chance of survival. What happens, in areas like chicken farming, which is one of Ghana’s biggest industries, is that with market liberalisation, UK and US excess chicken produce, is imported and sold ridiculously cheap in Ghana, thereby pricing the local farmers out of the markets. It is not “competition”, it is economic imperialism. Ghana is thankfully fighting against it. Unfortunately, they have been in this position once before. In 2003, the Ghanaian government passed legislation that increased import duty on poultry in an attempt to help local poultry farmers keep their livelihoods. The IMF forced them to repeal the legislation a few months later. How very undemocratic of the IMF, given that the Ghanaian government is a fairly elected government of the people. The IMF apparently consider themselves far more important than the Ghanaian people.

With this, came the liberalisation of health in Ghana. Which meant paying for healthcare. The most vulnerable people in Ghana were thus unable to gain access to healthcare. Healthcare from a specialist in Ghana after IMF liberalisation, cost people ten times the average wage of Ghanaians. Primary education, costs Ghanaians money too.

Ghana is not making anything. It’s industrial base is non-existent. According to Christianaid, Ghana’s employment in manufacturing actually fell quite horrendously after liberalisation occured. Which is why its exports are so weak. It’s farmers are forced out of the market by multinational competitors, which works only to benefit the richer nations. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development:

“The more recent evidence from liberalisation episodes in sub-Saharan Africa as well as Latin America suggest that they have often been accompanied by an increase in unemployment. ”

The IMF’s fundamental grasp on markets is interestingly weak. They forced Vietnam to liberalise it’s coffee industry in the 1980s. And it worked. Pretty well too. (In stark contrast to Senegal’s tomato production, which after IMF liberalisation, fell from 74,000 tons to just under 20,000 tons and pretty much killed off the entire trade in Senegal) Vietnam went from producing 50,000 tons, to 400,000 tons of coffee. Which, is a success. The IMF then decided that which works in one Nation, must be true for all. Neoliberalism at it’s oddest. And so it urged Uganda and Kenya to do the same in 1993. Suddenly, with increased coffee exports, the market was over supplied, and a huge economic crises occurred in the major coffee producing nations, causing the World Bank to report:

“coffee prices have declined sharply in recent years because of large increases in coffee production and exports from traditional exporters such as Brazil and new entrants such as Vietnam, Between July 1998 and June 2001, coffee export prices declined by almost 50%.”

In 2008, the World Bank, released a report, beautifully hidden away, and ignored by pretty much all major news institutions, which seems to be a subtle hint, that perhaps neoliberalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

“Structural adjustment in the 1980’s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance inputs, and cooperative organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private actors to take over these functions—reducing their costs, improving their quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. Too often, that didn’t happen. ”

IMF demand absolutely no trade restrictions from poorer Countries, whilst richer Countries like the US ensure that entry into their markets are as difficult as possible. The US high tech industry would have died horribly, many many years ago, had the Pentagon not kept it going.

Trade liberalisation in a global economy, does work. But only when it is appropriate. Countries like Malaysia explicitly ignored the IMF’s recommendations to liberalise their markets, and Malaysia succeeded. Such strong neoliberal recommendations do not work in the most developed of Nations, so attempting to implement them in the poorest, is always destined to fail. Especially given that a huge cut in import tariffs means a far smaller tax revenue for Nations like Ghana, who then cannot afford to pay their debts back. Even the US and the UK retain protectionist policies, that the IMF have strictly forbidden from the poorer Nations. It seems like the IMF is simply a vehicle for the economic imperialist ideologues who adhere to the theories of neoliberalism, to experiment on poor and struggling Nations. It has created a tyranny of an economic system. Ghana has no choice but to do what the IMF says. Ghana, is a guinea-pig.