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Saturday, 12 October 2013

NOT SO LATEST NEWS : A SERIOUS TOUCH OF THE NASTIES

My first version of this LATEST NEWS post was irretrievably lost a week back when I inadvertently tapped the Ctrl button on my keyboard then something else. The screen went blank and in desperation I punched in Ctrl S for save instead of Ctrl Z to bring back what I’d lost. Result, an evening of anguish then the calming advice of my wife to learn how to use the computer properly! Now, a few days later I feel a determination to reproduce what I’d written in the hope that my comments on recent news stories might interest my readers.

Last week’s news was dominated by what to my mind were three important events. Firstly the Tory Party Conference and the stated intention of Chancellor George Osborne, supported by his boss David Cameron, to deprive young people or anyone else unemployed for two years or more of welfare benefits unless they engaged in paid or unpaid work, or daily attended a benefits office for long periods of time or else began a course of study or training. Secondly the Red baiting/ anti-Semitic smearing of Ralph Miliband as THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN by the Daily Mail and by implication an attack on his son, leader of Britain’s Labour Party or RED ED as he was described. Finally the partial collapse of Government in the United States because of the refusal of the Republican Party in Congress to support President Obama’s proposal to give free Healthcare to countless millions of America’s poorest people unless he supported their demand to cut the taxes of the country’s richest people. This impasse over the funding of the Federal Budget has led to almost a million people being laid off work.

THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE :  DEPRIVING THE NEEDY

To those Tories who recently attended their annual Party Conference most unemployed young people are work shy. This is a euphemism for being lazy, idle, or boozed up to their eyeballs. Their remedy for this is to force them into work by denying them unemployment or any other state benefit if they’ve been out of a job for two years or more and the same goes for anyone else in that category. The unemployed, they maintain, simply don’t want to work and for this endless self-righteous litany drum up support from the gutter press, most of the population of Essex and the rest of the south of England’s lower middle class.

Irrespective of the cold hard fact that most jobs for young people are atrociously paid and their labour exploited with the so called Minimum Wage little more than a joke, most unemployed youth come from poor or deprived backgrounds. They are among the neediest people in our society. Those from wealthier families don’t have that problem. They either go straight into University after leaving school or spend a year ‘travelling’ or else like David Cameron or Nick Clegg have family friends or connections able to start them off in a well-paid ‘internship’. Something that actually means doing a bit of walking around and learning for a serious month’s wage. That’s the reality of it for them after they leave public school and come out of a jolly at Oxford! For most poorer kids however having no job is something more than the price they pay for their background and the lack of opportunity that goes with it. Both are disadvantaged enough but it’s the general economic situation they face that’s the real problem.

For the current Coalition Government, cutting state benefit is part of the much wider aspiration of running down and dismantling the Welfare State. This is not simply a matter of reducing welfare benefits to a minimum but also breaking up and privatizing the National Health Service along with most other State controlled institutions such as the Royal Mail Service and perhaps ultimately the Police. From the time that Gordon Brown and his Labour Government removed regulation and control from the activities of the financial services sector, men in suits in the City of London went through golden days playing the roulette wheel of dodgy investment. Guided by little more than ignorance and greed they happily went gambling on a daily basis using money that didn’t belong to them for dodgy investments, earning million pound bonuses in what was essentially a collective culture of swindling. With a helping hand from friends operating funds of one kind or another they took money from everyone’s savings and chucked it all on the wheel of change hoping that tomorrow would never end.

Well it did. The revolving swindle went on for half a decade till the banks and other financial institutions were empty of everyone’s money. The loss somehow had to be paid. First worthless money was printed. A bit like bunging up the hole in the Titanic copies of the Daily Mail!  It just wasn’t good enough. With an economy that during the Thatcher years had substituted traditional forms of wealth creation such as industrial production and exports to one relying on earnings from financial services such as moneylending, when the collapse came there was nothing available to help fill the hole. Something had to be done and the rich weren’t coughing up their tiaras. One gaggle of politicians went, another was elected. Looking around the Tories and their Lib-Dem dancing partners saw a Welfare State purposefully designed to help the poor and the needy along with millions of public sector workers whose pay they controlled! Never mind that they perform a crucial role in the economy as health workers and teachers, their earnings could be frozen.

Now to resolve the crisis! First Government would freeze the salaries of those already among the lowest paid. Secondly banks and other institutions would minimize the interest paid on deposits, mainly belonging to those who’d worked hard and saved money for their retirement. Finally the Welfare State funds paid to the unemployed the poor and the needy would be cut to the bone or done away with altogether.

Throughout their conference the Conservatives adopted as their resounding catchphrase, hardworking families. A typical piece of Tory impudence when one considers the countless hardworking families they failed to mention... Those now earning nothing from their savings and whose pensions from years of loyal hard work are being daily eroded by circumstances they never created. Far worse however is the matter of what may best be described as plain thieving. No more unemployment benefit for those who have been without work for two years or more unless they meet stated conditions. Consider this. Many unemployed people may have previously worked for three, five, ten, even twenty years or more and during this time had National Insurance Contributions deducted from their pay. The National Insurance Contribution was purposefully set up as an essential part of the Welfare State. It was established as a fund that would mitigate against poverty and destitution, helping people who’d lost their jobs or had none through no fault of their own. Working men and women paid into this fund weekly and monthly while they were employed.

MOST HAVE PAID INTO IT FOR MANY YEARS. IT IS THEIR MONEY. IT BELONGS TO THEM. NOT TO GOVERNMENTS TO GIVE TO BANKS.

When George Osborne told his fellow Conservatives at Conference that unemployed people would be denied this benefit unless they met specific conditions, he was stating his intention to take money that didn’t belong to him from those who’d contributed for their own personal protection at a time when they might need it most. Together with the financial thieving that went on under Labour, this seems like another form  of thieving to me. No wonder that the corpulent faces of so many delegates lit up with joy! That the Tory Conference resounded with cheering. Nothing more that these people enjoy than the thought of punishment! Punishing the poor! Punishing the needy! Punishing young people for not having jobs that simply aren’t there! Forcing them to work in demeaning conditions for  long hours and poor pay.

The Conservative Party Conference however was important, especially for any young person new to politics. In the week before, at the Labour Party Conference, you could listen to what people who worked in the public services like the NHS or Primary School Teaching had to say. You could see from their faces how much they enjoyed their work caring for the sick and the old and caring for children. How much it meant to them. You could sense their community spirit. Feel the warmth in their words. See the plain ordinary decency that lit their faces. Ordinary working people caring for others… Low paid, wages frozen, but doing their best… Then by contrast the well fed, well suited Tories. Cheering at every attack on the public services, every criticism made about feckless youth, every attack on the unemployed, the lazy, the idle. Those refusing to work! Hard corpulent faces. Unfriendly to everything and anyone except themselves. If you contrasted both sets of faces you’d know what kind of people they were. And if you believe in decency, fair play and justice you’d know where your sympathies lay and whose side you were on.

THE DAILY MAIL : UP TO THEIR OLD NASTY WAYS

The Daily Mail is the second most widely read daily newspaper in the country. This has to say something but what? Essentially it is and always has been the newspaper of the urban and suburban lower middle class, a broad social group comprised mainly of self-employed tradesmen and market traders, small shopkeepers and businessmen along with a multitude of pen pushers working at various levels in commerce or the financial services sector. They certainly don’t think of themselves as working class but economically and culturally they haven’t yet attained middle class values.

Karl Marx, certainly no friend of the newspaper they read, once described them as passively rotting social scum trapped between labour and capital. In this he might have been right. They are people who have elevated themselves from the working class and certainly don’t want to go back to what they once were. Furthermore they see themselves as an entirely different species of being to what remains of the industrial working class. However they are most definitely not capitalists, whether large scale industrial or commercial entrepreneurs. They might aspire to being such but they’re not and stand in envious relationship to them.

As a relatively newly emerged social class that is neither Labour or Capitalist they are particularly vulnerable, as is any new species of being, to the vicissitudes of life. Thus their position and status within ever changing economic circumstances is uncertain. If they are tradesmen for example, loss of trade or diminution of the value of their skills from immigrant labour. If they are shopkeepers, concerns about local competition or any loss of purchasing power of their customers. If they are part of the clerical flotsam that makes up the services sector, loss of employment through technological innovation. All in all their raised economic and social status out of the working class makes them permanently vulnerable. Makes them feel permanently insecure. Indeed their generalised psychological condition may be said to be governed by an almost permanent anxiety, a fear that they might soon not be where and what they are now. Forced to give up the new values they’ve acquired and return to the dark commonality they rose out of. Their emotions and fears, conditioned by insecurity and governed by anxiety about one thing or another is what the Daily Mail speaks to. Loss of the value of pensions and savings, loss of everything they’ve accumulated and the challenge from things that are new are all grist to the Daily Mail mill.

It’s the home from home of the lower middle class. A sanctuary for their trembling nervy sentiment and rightly so. It has been at the forefront of each and every anxiety, running first rate news stories and campaigns on their behalf. Its journalism is clear, forthright and populist. In turbulent economic times playing to every nuance of uncertainty, worry and doubt. It is emotionally and politically at one with its disturbed fearful readership as much as the Sun is to cultural sterility of its working class-underclass followers where literal communication is reduced to the lowest common denominator. These people have Rupert Murdoch, the Daily Mail has Lord Rothermere and along with him a powerful political intent and direction.      

To counter instability, emotional turmoil and doubt, the fundamental psychological need of the lower middle class is above all reassurance. A permanent soothing balm for their anxieties. An ongoing assurance that in the face of uncertainty someone understands their craving for security in the face of change. Their need for order in the face of chaos that might undermine their position and status. With its hostility to trades unions and strikes, socialism and sharp social change, and with its attitudes to immigrants and immigration, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail politically speaks to this need. In the eyes of the lower middle class these things represent a threat to stability, to the way society is ordered in which they have their recognised though insecure place. Their marginality indeed has its counter in a necessity for order. With soothing subliminal themes such as these this is the tune hummed by the Daily Mail since its inception. The Tories can lovingly belch Land of Hope and Glory but that’s their patriotic certainty of class rule. The Daily Mail’s offering comes from a far more dangerous ground and meets a far more fragile and dangerous need.

Order in the face of change… reassurance in the face of anxiety… calm in the face of fear… A firm political hand against instability and social upheaval. The Daily Mail and the former Lord Rothermere had been there before with their support for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party during the 1930’s. Despite being fully aware of the destruction of democracy in Germany, the persecution of socialists, trades unionists and Jews, and the concentration camps that had been set up for torture and murder, the newspaper went along with it all, never once drawing back from its adulation for Der Fuehrer and his SS thugs who promised Germany order and stability during uncertain times. Reassurance in the face of anxiety! The paper and its owner admired him for that, never mind the brutality and torture, the degradation and murder.

It is from within this setting of the Daily Mail’s history and the socio-psychological roots of its readership that I am now able to address its recent grossly offensive Red-baiting, Jew-baiting attack on Ed Miliband’s father which has disturbed so many people. Ralph Miliband, now deceased, came to Britain from Belgium as a Jewish youth escaping Nazi persecution. He fought for Britain during the Second World War in the Royal Navy and participated in the D Day Landings. Later he became a Marxist academic and ultimately a professor at the London School of Economics who was vociferous and active for many socialist causes including taking a stance against the Vietnam War. It was all harmless enough. A revolutionary he certainly wasn’t, being frequently condemned by those much farther on the left for being a traitor. His son Ed rejected his father’s Marxism, was much more at home being a social democrat and became leader of the Labour Party on that basis. That’s about it. The man the Mail smeared with the Red label by association with his father is about as revolutionary as a cheese sandwich.

So what was it that got under their editor’s skin? You really don’t need to look far. A week before, in his leader’s speech at the Labour Party Conference, he condemned the attack on people’s standard of living by the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition, pointed out that endlessly rising energy prices were partly responsible and promised the British people that a Labour Government, if elected in 2015, would freeze energy prices for twenty months. It was this promise that made the Mail see red. I mean start seeing Reds everywhere! Even for something as soft as wanting to control energy prices the man was viewed as a red hot radical. A Jewish Marxist like his father!

Time for them to get to work. Blacken the father, blacken the son. Stir up immigrant-alien communist Jew hatred. What they did was to almost perfectly reproduce the smears of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, a vicious Jew hating, Red-baiting nasty and one of his favorites. Goebbels himself couldn’t have done it any better. First the banner headline, THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN. Underneath the story that Ralph Miliband was a young Jewish refugee from Belgium to Britain and a Marxist who attacked Britain on every occasion. Alongside were photos of him and his grave. No mention of the fact that he’d loyally served in the Navy and fought for Britain during the War. Instead, the supposition conveyed was that he was ungrateful for being given refuge as an immigrant and disloyal to the country that gave it to him because he’d often been critical of it later. Added together it was a poisonous mixture of disloyalty and ingratitude. A disloyal, ungrateful, troublemaking communist Jew. A slur used by anti-Semites for as long as Jewish history remembers, and particularly by the Daily Mail’s favorites, the Nazis of the 1930s. Disloyal, ungrateful Jewish immigrant, Red Ralph Miliband and his lefty radical son, Red Ed leading the Labour Party! The smearing of the son included in the price of smearing his deceased father.

You’ve got a nerve, you damned dirty Daily Mail, attacking a dead immigrant Jew for disloyalty when you were kissing Hitler’s arse and loving every filthy thing his Nazis did during the 1930s. Who was disloyal then, the young Jew who fought for Britain against the Nazis or your smelly gutter-press rag? Maybe you wouldn’t have reverted to type if Ed hadn’t promised to freeze energy prices, but then blaming people for things they’ve never done is part of your stock in trade, much like using the forged Zinoviev letter to blacken the name of the Labour Party many years back. The paper’s a nasty anti-Semitic rag and shame on any Jews who work for it, selling themselves for a shilling so its owners can say it’s not anti-Jewish at all.

Okay, the Jew-baiting and communist smearing accepted, there’s another part of the paper’s attack that needs consideration, this being what the paper’s readers are likely to think? The lower middle class, hard pressed economically, may have noticed that despite the Red Ed, Jew story, the man promised to freeze their energy prices given the chance. Well their own paper’s been going on about rising energy prices long enough and why the Coalition Government is doing nothing about it! In short, what will its readers make of it all? Ed Miliband making a promise like that is much to their favour so will they go for the smear or do the decent thing and brush off the dirt?

WHAT THE HELL IS IT WITH YOU AMERICA?

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of America? Could it be 9/11, someone playing a guitar or maybe some film or other? Perhaps some great or heroic event like Neil Armstrong being the first man to step on the Moon. Alternatively it could be the assassination of President Kennedy. The last, fifty years back, is as likely to be the case as any of the others, if only because of what we receive through the media is an almost daily diet of gun crime. Think America and immediately some major shooting incident comes to mind. It could be killings on a University campus or in a high school. Maybe even a church. It doesn’t matter where, only that it happens on a regular basis. Indeed, live firearms  practice in public by a wide variety of angry disenchanted crazies seems to have become an acceptable part of the American news story to the rest of the world. Think America and it’s another group of kids being shot somewhere. A busload of innocents here, a high school and its teachers shot there. It’s either that quite frankly or America doing some bombing. Attacking some country or other with cruise missiles.

What is it with you America? If you’re not shooting and killing each other it’s bombs… so when we think about you it’s no longer beefburgers, baseball or hot dogs that come to mind anymore but the fact that you seem to like killing each other or dropping bombs on people you don’t know in countries most of you have never yet heard of. Furthermore, when you plan on doing the bombing you expect other nations you call friendly to drop whatever they’re up to, lock and load and join you doing it likewise! Well sorry to disappoint you and all but speaking as one of your English chums we need to talk among ourselves first over here before getting involved in some killing.

It was in this common sense manner that David Cameron, led by other British Parliamentarians who only too well remember being stampeded into joining you in a war against Iraq, decided to recall Parliament and vote on the issue. And much to everyone’s surprise, because what are old friends for but lend a hand in any bombing, the British said NO, we don’t want to get involved militarily overseas anymore and besides, we’ve come to the conclusion that you’ve got far bigger problems at home you need to sort out before joining up with Islamic extremists and terrorists and start bashing the hell out of Syria.

The main problem you have, as everyone can see, is that your Government is not governing most of the country anymore. A large part of it has been shut down for almost two weeks because of a disagreement between President Obama and Congress over how to fund the next spending budget. A Democrat President has proposed a plan that would give countless millions of Americans free health care. Something they’ve never had before. Republican opponents in the House of Representatives, led by an arch conservative wing known as the Tea Party (mostly made up of semi-lunatic backwoodsmen from the Southern States) who speak mainly for wealthy Americans, are refusing to fund such a plan unless the President cuts taxes for the rich. Hence there’s an impasse that simply won’t go away and looks like permanently paralyzing the world’s largest economy.

America’s running a budget deficit of some 14 trillion dollars. Something almost impossible to make up. A black hole in the economy funded mainly by China and Saudi Arabia. A nation in hock to countries like these is worrying enough but when it’s in hock to a handful of reactionaries who think that giving free health care to millions of their fellow citizens is communist, and are supported in their view by large sections of American society, the serious social divisions that have always existed are opening up with a vengeance. Frustration and anger are increasingly spilling out all over the place. A psychologically disturbed mentality which on an individual basis is only too often some kind of rage resulting from a sense of injustice or perhaps something trivial or small, has led to people stockpiling guns and using them to kill their fellow citizens, classmates or teachers. It’s a particular problem in a nation whose constitution allows its citizens to bear arms. Carry loaded weapons that is. It is this, combined with their anger or sense of injustice whether right or wrong, that facilitates a deadly journey into a killing spree, something light years away from any lawful intention that people should protect themselves. The result as we all see is simply plain murder.

Yet this so called right of self-protection has no greater support than that coming from the political reactionaries of the Tea Party wing of American Republicanism. It’s a kind of carte blanche given to emotionally disturbed people to go out kill their fellow citizens and it’s these self-same politicians who refuse to sanction free medical care for their fellow Americans.

Federal Government being held to ransom by a handful of political crazies… The peace and security of America held to ransom by the crazies it arms with guns… The health and welfare of its citizens held to ransom by people straight out of the political backwoods who think their President’s a communist because he wants to help the nation’s poor instead of spoon-feeding the already rich?

Think about shootings when you think of America? When I began writing this post last week I just happened to turn on the television and learn that a woman with a child in her car had been chased and shot dead by police for ramming her vehicle into the gates of the White House where the President lives. We’ll now never know why she did it. Was it prompted by rage over Obama’s healthcare plan and the political impasse? The police didn’t need to shoot her dead but they did. Bang, bang, bang! As though it’s a normal and acceptable part of life in America. Well now we all see that it surely is!

American society needs to sort out its psychological problems. Acquire new, altogether more human values, a sense of common decency, community spirit and justice rather than endless self-seeking and greed. Religious people might actually wonder what kind of God it is in whom you trust that allows you to see most of your people without healthcare, without decent food and without protection from those who feel a need to take out their anger on others by using guns. I’m making the point, even though I’m not a religious person myself. America, the most important thing you need to sort out is whether you’re decent and humane enough as a nation to give the majority of your people free medical care. When you’re able to do that then you’ll also get rid of the guns. And all the killing that you’ve become notorious for will eventually cease.

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