You may have noticed nothing much has happened at this blog in the last year or so. Yhose of you who also read my other blog may have guessed why this is: Sandra’s longterm illness and sadly, her death earlier this month. What you may not know is that Sandra was not just my wife, but also my blogging partner Palau, pretty much the person who kept this blog going for the last four-five years or so, as it evolved away from being a repository of the best of leftwing blogs to something more personal yet still political. Though she was always modest about her talents, when she was on she was incredible, with a nose for interesting but under reported news, a knack for writing naturally and wittily and a keen interest in, well, everything. She loved writing about politics, could incredibly outraged, but was interested in more than just politics. One of her strengths was her lawyer background, she had a respect for the law and the British constitution that is sometimes lacking in socialist bloggers, who do tend to view the law as just another instrument for the rich to oppress the working classes, which is true as far as it goes, but she knew it was more than this and it annoyed the hell out of her to see the cavalier attitude with which New Labour especially treated it.
But it wasn’t all serious with her. She was tickled pink finding that Pimp My Crab kit a few years back for example. And she was into gardening and nature and kittens and squid. Especially squid, but other cephalopods as well. She was incredibly productive posting when she could, but her illness did rob her of a lot of energy and time to post and in the end she had to give it up long before she had to give up on life itself. She had hoped to come back to the blog, but unfortunately she couldn’t.
Similarly, fans of “nudge” tend to complain that poor people make bad decisions about money, typically by prizing cash up front above everything. To put it in econospeak, irrational discounting leads them to have extremely high liquidity preference. But liquidity is useful, and people tend to want it if they are facing a dangerously uncertain future. And typical reasons to need cash fast include things like “topping up the electricity meter”, “the kids are hungry”, “collection goons are threatening physical violence”. It’s not as if they don’t need cash on hand for very good reasons.
Nudge theory, for those not paying attention, is a theory of social conditioning currently in vogue with David Cameron’s ConDem government, vaguely leftish, cheap and supposedly offering a way to manipulate people into doing the right thing without forcing them to: libertarian paternalism. Yes, this is as condescending as it sounds and does feel vaguely uncomfortable as any theory of social control does, but Alex nailed the real wrongness there: it assumes that the people it tries to “nudge” into the right behaviour are in control of their lives and their “deviancy” is down to individual choice rather than external circumstance. It treats people as consumers choosing a lifestyle and ignores all outside forces acting on them.
The work experience programme set up by the ConDem government is a scam where large companies get free employees at the taxpayer’s expense it turns out, to the surprise of absolutely no-one. Meanwhile the people suckered into it get no experience, take the place of people who’d actually be paid to stack shelves and are threatened by the loss of their unemployment benefits if they back out. It’s like the apprentice only with the offer of a minimum wage job at the end.
But at least Europe is made safe for Goldman Sachs. The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.
Occupy Wall Street: Chaotic Good. We tried to play by the rules and got ignored. Occupy Wall Street has thrown out the rule book.
Serpents: a public service announcement by Jack Crow.
See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students.
With all the propaganda we’ve been fed about Greece’s new “austerity” government being staffed by non-ideological “technocrats,” it may come as a surprise that fascists are now considered “technocrats” to the mainstream media and Western banking interests. Then again, history shows that fascists have always been favored by the 1-percenters to deliver the austerity medicine.
Because the elected Greek government could not be trusted enough to act against it’s population’s interests, the EU has now installed a new “technocratic” government with added fascists. Poetic, really. As Ames also shows, the Greek military meanwhile is bought off with new toys: tanks and warships beause austerity doesn’t mean having to stop buying unnecessary weaponry.
It is sweet, though, that virtually every mendacious reactionary hack** given an elevated media platform to spew sophistry all over us lesser folks has a cadre of online defenders. They usually embrace some common themes: suggesting that the blogger in question is engaging in behavior beneath ver by pointing out the latest episode of bullshittery; pulling out scattershot quotations that purport to completely negate the plain reading of everything else in the article; and above all, implicitly or explicity demanding that we evaluate every work sui generis, with no consideration whatsoever of the track record of the author or vis peers. I wonder if someone has made a benefit-of-the-doubt bingo card.
You don’t just see this sort of behaviour in defence of rightwing hacks against their own hackery, but much more dangerously, also is something you see a lot of in the socalled mainstream media. Take the War on Libya for example, which when proposed was quite obviously a clusterfuck waiting to happen for those of us allowed to remember the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, but which for some reason few serious commentators were able to discuss in this context.
Remember back in 2007, when it turned out the Dutch broadcaster which put out David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals had removed all traces of evolution from the series? That at least had been done behind the BBC’s back, without their or Attenborough’s consent. Not so for Attenborough’s latest series, Frozen Planet, where the BBC allegedly has started to self censor by selling it abroad without the episode on climate change:
British viewers will see seven episodes, the last of which deals with global warming and the threat to the natural world posed by man.
However, viewers in other countries, including the United States, will only see six episodes.
The environmental programme has been relegated by the BBC to an “optional extra” alongside a behind-the-scenes documentary which foreign networks can ignore.
[...]
Over 30 networks across the world have bought the series but a third of them have rejected the choice of the additional two episodes, including the one on climate change.
[...]
Viewers in the United States, where climate change sceptics are particularly strong group, will not see the full episode.
Instead, the BBC said that Discovery, which shows the series in the US, had a “scheduling issue so only had slots for six episodes”, so “elements” of the climate change episode would be incorporated into their final show, with editorial assistance from the Corporation.
Shocking though not surprising to see such cowardice from the BBC. Money is again more important than truth.
Certain things are ubiquitous during elections, and often the most evocative of the mood are party slogans. One slogan more than any other has dominated Zambia’s 2011 elections, the PF’s ‘Don’t Kubeba!’, or ‘Don’t Tell!’. It lies at the heart of the PF’s seemingly successful campaign to negate the benefits of incumbency enjoyed by the MMD. It appeared on posters, on the lips of cadres and at rallies. Dandy Krazy’s ‘Donch Kubeba’ [J1] (with appropriate shushing dance move) has been one of the most popular tunes heard out and about during the last two months. In essence, it encouraged voters to take the chitenge, maize meal, oil, or even bribes offered by the government, even attend the rallies, but not feel they couldn’t vote against them anyway. As a way of upholding the secrecy of the ballot, and running a campaign against an opponent with resources far in excess of your own, it is a risky, but clever strategy. Indeed, the EU Observer Mission stated that unequal access to resources meant a “level playing field” was distinctly lacking during campaigning. Despite this, it appears “Dont Kubeba!” paid off.
From one point of view though, it’d work, because an quantifiable increase in the number of abortions would mean the policy wasn’t tough enough and would need to be toughened further. And round and round it goes.
I’m not being particularly cynical: that’s the way in which law ‘n’ order policy had been shaped over the past thirty years or so, in the US even more than the UK, and it shows no signs of failing to work (in the sense of losing votes, or discouraging its adherents) just as it shows no signs of actually working.
Now if we bear in mind that economic policy is increasingly a branch of law ‘n’ order policy – simply a matter of personal fault and personal failure – then we can see how little the question of rationality has to come into it. All you have to do is hit the bad guys. And if it doesn’t get results, then so much the better – hit them harder. Because we know who they are.
Both Labour and the Tories have always imported political ideas from America, but this wholesale adopting of hard right practises, following the GOP playbook of riling up the base and distracting the opposition with social issues while ramming through neoliberal policies is new, isn’t it?
As Justin argues, the beauty of pushing these sort of policies in the current political climate is that they can never fail, only be failed. If your hardline approach doesn’t work, it’s because you weren’t trying hard enough, not because the policy itself was wrong.
It began in December when the prime minister said: “All evidence suggests that it’s no use offering a range of different services to these families – the help they’re offered just falls through the cracks of their chaotic lifestyles. What works is focused, personalised support.” This fits neatly into Cameron’s big society narrative – cut government funding, let amateurs fill the gap, and clap yourself as social deprivation segues into riot. The government has already slashed Connexions, the catch-all advice centre for 13- to 19-year-olds, and abolished the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the Future Jobs Fund, which existed to find jobs for the young. The careers advice service for school-leavers, meanwhile, is now only a memory – and a website. But no matter – an army of Emma Harrisons is waiting.
Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron’s behalf. You may know her from Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed “family champions” (FCs), will enter “never-worked” families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into “working” families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. “Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs,” says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.
As insanely stupid social initiatives go, this is about average for the coalition. It seems tailor made for trousering yet more money from already existing social programmes to dodgy private firms like erm, Emma Harrison’s A4e while making sure the actual worth of the work these firms do is not easily quantifiable. Money for old rope, in other words.
Has A4e bid for the contracts the DWP is putting out, to use European Social Fund money to pay private companies to run the same scheme that you’re promoting? Are you trying to pre-empt these contracts by getting your scheme up and running first?
You have argued in the past for “super-contracts” in which a private company would run all the services in a local authority area. Is this scheme a step on the way to that?
Given your company’s record of missing targets by some distance in previous welfare-to-work contracts, why do you believe you will be any more successful with this?
