A Crisis of Ideology.

Apart from the dire socio-economic consequences of the ongoing crisis the endemic contradictions of capitalism has led to a crisis of the prevailing ideology and the dust has yet to settle. As Terry Eagleton notes the tendency of market rationality runs towards the rationalist and materialist, as well as secular plurality, relativism and pragmatism. Naturally the forces of the market exert a subversive force on the metaphysical and ideological superstructure. Rather than question whether or not what we're saying meshes with what we're doing we might have to invoke the Virgin Mary at the World Bank. In the same way that Alan Greenspan took refuge as the crisis hit in the claim that it all down to human frailty, predatory instincts and so on. It is true that it was human behaviour which led to the crisis, but Greenspan resorted to this explanation only to protect the immaculate conception of free-market capitalism. The irony being that Alan Greenspan is an Objectivist dinosaur - a devotee of Ayn Rand - who buys into the virtues of selfishness.

The criminal assault on Vietnam and Indochina was a case in which there was an enormous gulf between the political justifications of the war and the grotesque details of the actions undertaken to devastate a country. It was claimed that the war was to combat and contain the spread of Communism, as the red flag was flying in North Vietnam and so the US embarked on a noble mission to fend off the tentacles of Communism - it then began bombing South Vietnam. The US had blocked every attempt at a peaceful settlement in the 1950s and installed the Diem regime in South Vietnam. As the Diem regime aroused resistance to it as it slaughtered around 70,000 people and in reaction to the resistance the Kennedy administration invaded South Vietnam. Even though he knew better Lyndon B Johnson continued with the line that "We have to stop the Communists over there [Vietnam] or we'll soon be fighting them in California." This was not enough after so many years spent bombing the country the ideological fissure was torn open with the wave of student activism.


A ideological crisis can emerge in the midst of a performative contradiction between what you're doing and how you explain those actions to yourself. To account for the gap there is a need for a new discourse complete with a theoretical understanding of the situation and the potential to establish a new orthodoxy. As the system requires new theories to justify itself and strengthen the ideological apparatus it seems to be struggling in it's desperate search for any such means of defence. The media has yet to find a narrative which could fill the void which has been opened up as political power came to the rescue of the financial colossus to which David Cameron and Barack Obama are bound almost as slaves. It was unthinkable that the banks should be allowed to collapse, it was a forced decision which no one can rightly oppose. But it seems that the system has lost it's sheath of market fundamentalism out of its own pragmatism. The utopia of the market has been stripped down for all to see, it is difficult to see how the system could ever double back on itself.

Today it is still rare to hear of the horrific details of the Vietnam War in spite of the memory of the demonstrations against it lives on. The objectives of the war will never be acknowledged in the media. The virus of independence and development in Vietnam had to be killed, and the region had to be inoculated, in order to preserve the accomplishments of the US in the Second World War. The virus might have spread to Thailand and Indonesia, then Japan might have to accommodate to an independent East Asian bloc and would no doubt become it's industrial heartland. The US aimed to maintain the Japanese empire under American control, the rise of Communism in China and Korea undermined these aims. The wars in Vietnam and Korea were fought for the same reason that the US installed Suharto in Indonesia. There are no apologies for the crimes, certainly no reparations and not even any recognition of the barbarism unleashed upon Indochina. Rather it has been swept under the rug as a noble quest which went awry and possibly an atrocity necessary in the Cold War which we will not repeat in this post-political world.

The system has lost the automatic claim to legitimacy, as Slavoj Žižek points out, the field is open in this time of crisis as the prevailing ideology has been disturbed. The limitations and perversions of the system can be seen publicly, we can see the desperate need for an alternative and we know not of an alternative. But this is not the basis for the system's legitimacy as the Thatcherites claimed. The greatest utopian belief is that the system of capitalism can go on indefinitely. Infinite growth in a world of finite resources is a fantasy even if you believe global warming is a liberal hoax cooked up to sell carbon credits to corporations and make you pay the congestion charge. There is a need for another kind of utopianism, not in the sense of the ideal society which ca never be realised but as a new space created out of the innermost urgency for survival. It is the way out we are forced to imagine by the impossibility of circumstances, which cannot be resolved within the coordinates of the possible. As Lenin said "There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen." Right now, we need to make decades to happen!

Thoughts on Adam Smith.

Capitalism and the Illth of Nations.

You may recognise this fella from the £20 note in your pocket, that's if you're British and you often carry such notes around with you, his name was Adam Smith. I recall when his mug was first put on the £20 note in 2006 there were not that many people who knew who he was. There were even some who thought he might have had something to do with John Smith, which may say something about the drinking culture of Great Britain. Adam Smith was a figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, a philosopher and an economist. The people who know him or his work are typically in the area of economics for the reason that Adam Smith is the founding father of classical economics. For some Wealth of Nations is the Bible of economic science. But Adam Smith was not just the father of economics he was also a political and moral philosopher, he worked hard to construct the Philosophy of Society, which can be divided into politics, ethics and economics.

We have The Theory of Moral Sentiments to go along with the Bible of economics, as well as lecture notes and notebooks, though he never completed his work on politics and had the incomplete drafts of it burned before he died. When it came to morality Smith is of the Aristotelian tradition, he thought that the moral judgements we make can be at harmony with our natural inclination to self-interest and the key is sympathy for others. As he was an Aristotelian the marketplace was a means to ends, the realisation of human capacities in conditions of which perfect liberty tends towards perfect equality. The work he did in economics was only a small part of his academic life and yet it is Smith's economic theories which have had the most impact on society. Almost half of his writings, especially his lectures and notebooks, were not discovered until the 1970s in a second-hand bookshop and were edited in the 1980s. So we have only recently developed an all encompassing understanding of the thought of Adam Smith.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." — Adam Smith

Adam Smith was a proponent of the free-market because he thought it would lead to conditions of perfect liberty and perfect equality. Smith was an advocate of capitalism in a humane, polite and decent conception. For him capitalism is the best system to generate growth in a country, but to accumulate wealth in general and once it has been accumulated it can spread around. Wealth is to be understood as well-being, it is not just money and this is where the Adam Smith Institute goes so wrong. Wealth is the opposite of Ruskin's idea of 'Illth' which is everything that detracts from life, it is the persecution of minorities, warfare and social stratification etc, by wealth Smith meant everything that contributes to life - equality, poetry, music and satisfaction etc. For Smith charity is an insufficient means for resolving poverty and for providing the essentials for living, here he thought self-interest was better. But he never said that the free-market should operate without state-intervention or supervision. These aspects of Smith's thought are all too often overlooked.

This might be the reason that the Founding Fathers of the US never took on board the theories of Adam Smith as compiled in Wealth of Nations even after he had written to them. The economic theories of Alexander Hamilton were a lot more popular with the Founding Fathers as embodied in his Report on Manufactures which called for: tariffs, prevention of monopolies, subsidy of important industries, among other federal regulation of commerce. In those days the aim of a prosperous and independent country like America was to maintain it's autonomy, free trade would have led to the US becoming an economic appendage of Britain. By 1791 Congress had formally endorsed Hamilton's theory, it was the basis of the economic platforms of Henry Clay, the Whig Party, and later the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln. Incidentally, the Republicans were not only abolitionists when it came to chattel slavery but also wage slavery.


For Milton Friedman, the principles of Adam Smith of every bit as valid today as they were in 1776 and we know a lot more today than Adam Smith about economics. Interestingly, Milton Friedman once said that Adam Smith was "wrong" in many details of his vision but overall he was right. Where Adam Smith was "right", according to Friedman, was in his conception of how millions of people can coordinate their activities in a way which is mutually beneficial for all of them and without a large intrusive state. Notice how this conveniently removes all of the aspects of Adam Smith which would be problematic for a right-wing libertarian. No doubt Friedman would dismiss Smith when he says "The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion." Smith supported the division of labour early in Wealth of Nations but later explained that it would lead to misery, stupidity and ignorance on a huge scale.

The Progress of History.

Adam Smith was a believer in history as progress, particularly in economic terms, that we are on the right track and human society will develop towards wealth. The trick is to be able to move all obstacles out of the way as we move forward. This is the view of history held commonly by Enlightenment thinkers. There are specific conditions that are conducive to economic progress: peace, easy taxes and tolerable administration of justice. The rest would be brought about by the natural courses of things. In other words, political stability is the key to bringing a society from the lowest barbarism to the highest opulence. Through commerce we can achieve civility and attain the bourgeois values of shopkeepers. Prosperity for Adam Smith can be measured by the standard of living enjoyed or endured by the working-class, who have a right to creative work in Smith's mind.

The Enlightenment view of history is conservative, in the same way that Richard Dawkins is conservative, as the implications are that there is no need for a radical intervention except only to secure the progress of historical change. At the same time, there is a pessimism in the work of Adam Smith as he felt the agrarian civilisation was inescapable and we would be trapped at a high-level equilibrium. In his day, China and Holland had hit it because of the fall in the rate of profit and the law of diminishing returns. Smith anticipated that every growth in prosperity and technology would feed into a growth in population. But the world could only sustain around 500 million through agriculture, which utilises a certain amount of the energy from the sun as part of production. With the development of capitalism, we have seen the population explode to 6.5 billion, we have become embedded in a system which requires 3% compound growth to perpetuate itself every year.

Capitalism, Regular not Diet.

There is a sense in which capitalism is a utopian ideal, particularly in it's untrammeled free-market conception, ironically this is quite like the communist ideal of a classless society and in both cases it appears that the idea itself seems to have a power of its own. Not only is the notion of the free-market essentially a tool to argue for greater deregulation, mass-privatisation and large tax-cuts, the features of the concept itself are ideals: perfect competition, no barriers to entry and the absolute transparency necessary for perfect information - which would require a world without advertising. Theoretically these features are what is needed for market efficiency and the kind of equilibrium dreamt up by free-market fundamentalists everywhere. But supply and demand are not static, market forces are in a constant state of change and as a result we are always in disequilibrium - e.g. there will always be some unemployment in a market system.

Not only is the vision utopian, the necessary conditions are impossible to construct without massive state-intervention in the economy, a "Big Government" is the nightmare of the average free-marketeer, and that still assumes the conditions can be achieved and maintained. A limited state is desirable because state-interference in the economy, whether it be in the form of regulation or subsidy, can constrain and influence market forces. This is why it has been argued that neoliberalism is most compatible with a liberal domestic programme. Although it can be argued that capitalism does not tend towards racism, misogyny and homophobia, the system requires racism to defend itself and it's flaws. Populist rebellions are led against positive discrimination, abortion, political correctness, unions, multiculturalism and welfare to push through a right-wing economic programme. The people are deprived of organisation while the business community is left intact and fully organised.


However, it is reductive to merely focus on free-market capitalism, as this ideal does not exist, especially in the developed world where a pure capitalist system has never existed. The systematic violation of free-market principles has been the key to economic growth and development for centuries. Today it is the "secret" of the economic dynamism we can all see in China, capitalism with Asian values which is essentially capitalism without any semblance of democracy. The fundamentalists typically deride any statist deviation from laissez-faire theory as "socialist" or "social democratic". But that would presuppose a level of welfarism and nationalisation as part of the deviation. In the 19th Century it was common for the state to exert power for the benefit of business, while it did not provide welfare for the poor. In the US there is plenty of tax-dollars to provide welfare for rich white men, but not for the poor and the vulnerable. It might be more accurate to label this kind of economic system as state-capitalist or even corporatist. We ought to look at liberalism more closely at this point.

In economic liberalism social constraints are predicated on economic freedom, whereas in political liberalism individual freedom is derived from economic constraints. But the basic assumption of capitalism, whether social democratic or neoliberal, is that there can be endless economic growth in a world of limited resources. This is precisely the reason that the Right have been in denial about climate change. Not only does this secure the world-view, holds that infinite growth and finite resources are compatible, it appeals to the elites who believe that there could be greater oil reserves under the polar ice-caps and to get to it we should let the ice-caps melt. A suicidal logic of socialised costs and privatised profits, let the world slide towards oblivion for the sake of short-term profits and short-term tax breaks. The environmental costs of capitalism are huge and it may take another energy crisis for the governments around the world to take these costs seriously and move away from fossil fuels altogether. But I won't be holding my breathe, change comes from the grass-roots.

The same distinction between really existing capitalism and the "unknown ideal" of capitalism is often drawn by right-wing intellectuals who are on the defensive. This posits the failed system, really existing capitalism, as social democratic or even socialist in order to justify a call to return to free-market principles and ultimately the rejuvenation of the system as it is. When the Crash of 2008 came around, a result of a debt-driven boom, the recession that followed led to a shift to Keynesian economic policies, e.g. bailouts, as a way of resolving the crises. But this was just an transitional phase from the recession back to market liberalism is in the works in the form of a harsh austerity on an international scale. After landing in the safety-net, provided by the tax-payer, the banks will resume lending practices and further intensify such practices whilst delving into new areas. The opening up and exploitation of new markets also "opens up" new possibilities for future crises, that could be potentially more extensive and destructive than the last. At the same time the means by which another crisis could be averted are being undermined. Predictably the end result will be another crash.

Over the platform, of tax-cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor, the Right will often hoist up a banner of "freedom". Along with words like "justice" and "democracy", "freedom" is a hurray word which can easily be emptied of all meaning and used as a cover for policies that are practically the opposite. Freedom is a slogan that appeals to everyone, no one could oppose freedom and it appeals to the rugged individualist in all of us. In other words it's a public relations wet-dream of a slogan, the kind that can rally support for any policy no matter the content. Note the Conservative Party in the UK proposed "free schools" which would be schools set up by middle-class families and private companies at the expense of state-schools and free lunches for pupils. Free for the middle-classes and the ultra-rich. Similarly the free-market and free-enterprise are often used as banners for economic policy in the US. Newt Gingrich proudly cuts spending on welfare and public education in the name of the free-market, whilst funneling the billions saved into high-tech industry.

Capitalism is not only an economic system it is ideological and its politics are an extension of its economics. The rising standards of living and significant development of the last century are often posited as a defence of capitalism. For economists, theory is supported by the fact that it works and meets particular standards, e.g. it leads to greater economic growth, but this seems insufficient upon closer inspection.  It is joined at the hip with the falsity that the system is justified by the "failure" of all other alternatives. This is the rationale behind Thatcher's famous motto "There is no alternative." This is the pragmatic tendency which runs through economics and beneath the surface lurks utilitarianism. The pursuit of the greatest aggregate happiness enters as a justification for the vast inequalities produced by the system. Along these lines the justification for capitalism is the greatest happiness overall, which will be tipped by the ecstasy of the opulent minority against the class interests of the majority. The people are best off (e.g. happy) with as much individual freedom as possible and untrammeled capitalism leads to prosperity - "private vices reap public benefits".


We could go down this road to justify Fascism, as there was a great deal of economic growth and development in Nazi Germany. Hitler was the most popular leader in German history in the 1930s because the Nazi Party carried out a social revolution, the lives of working-people improved significantly. In fact the economic miracle under Hitler was driven by state-intervention in the economy on a huge scale. The major accomplishment of the Fascists was to play to the interests of the workers and the bosses, it was effectively done by buying-off socialism and liberal capitalism. This came in the form of social services, job creation, subsidies and protection for industry. It was also done through anti-Semitism, for the rich the Jew was a communist and for the poor the Jew was a banker. The concentration camps provided a slave labour force for manufacturing companies, as well as a traffic management system which could be designed by private companies like IBM. It worked and it could have lasted if Hitler had waited until 1942 to invade Poland. Do these facts justify Fascism?

Notice the defence of capitalism on pragmatic grounds also starts to fall apart once you take into account the fact that the system requires 3% compound growth, in order to avoid collapse, every year forever. We live in a world of finite resources and the system is a infinite growth paradigm. Even without taking into account environmental degradation, which also threatens delusions of growth ad infinitum. Today the economy needs new investment opportunities for over $1.5 trillion and in 20 years it will be for over $3 trillion. Not only do the opportunities for investment need to be there, the investments need to be profitable. The lack of profitable investments in industry for the last 30 years is partly what has led to the financialisation of the economy. Money is not poured into production anymore, instead capitalists invest in assets, stock and other ways in which they can make money out of money. It is not enough to tame the system with social democratic reforms, the time has come for something a lot more radical.

Reaganomics Review.

 Voodoo Economics.

On January 20th 1981, following the disappointment of Carter's administration, the Reaganites were rushed to power on a platform that attacked "big government" as the source of America's problems. It was an easy answer to grievances of ordinary Americans going back to the early 70s. As President, Ronald Reagan implemented an economic policy that would go on to be known as "Reaganomics" which could be said to consist of four pillars: reduction in government spending, reduction in the income rates and capital gains tax, reduce government regulation of the economy and control the money supply to reduce inflation. "Reaganomics" was presented as a return to the glory days of free-market capitalism before the Great Depression and the New Deal reforms. Supposedly, President Reagan was working in accordance with the economic principles of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

The economic policies of the Reagan administration are often described in ecstatic terms, as if such policies were the edicts of a free-market papacy, but what should be noted is that capitalism in its laissez-faire variant does not exist in the US. The Reaganites did not act to bring back the mythical halcyon days of the free-market and were a radically statist administration. For instance under Reagan protectionist measures doubled and at one point were three times higher than most other industrial countries. During these years state-expenditure increased significantly - breaking post-war records - in response to calls for "re-industrialisation" and the means to accomplish this was mostly Pentagon spending. By increasing the defence budget and cutting taxes the Reaganites effectively increased subsidies to the markets, specifically to lower the costs of firms - socialising costs and privatising profits.

A pillar of "Reaganomics" was the trickle-down theory which stipulated that cuts to the top rate of income tax and corporation tax, the state can encourage investment and expansion by entrepreneurs which leads to greater job creation and keep unemployment low. In fact, the opposite happened and the cuts lead to higher unemployment, lower wages and greater inequality. The wealth was hoarded as productivity has increased by around 45% while wages for working-people stagnated. The amount of debt per household doubled from 1982 to 2008 as workers substituted the cuts to their wages with credit cards, loans and mortgages - which later led to the $8 trillion housing bubble that caused the financial crisis of 2008. The number of illegal firings increased by a factor of six, as the state failed to enforce the laws that protected workers and unions from abuse. As a result, there are on average 65,000 deaths due to work-related injuries and illnesses in the US today.
 

At the same time, corporate profits surged from the early 80s to the late 90s and by 2007 the ratio of financial assets to GDP had doubled. By 2000 the richest 1% of Americans owned 40% of stock, while the bottom 80% owned less than 10%, this is indicative of the massive increase in the gap between the rich and the poor which resulted from "Reaganomics". There is a correlation between inequality and social deprivation, in more unequal societies there is typically greater signs of social deprivation such as illiteracy, obesity, teenage pregnancies, violent crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, mental illness and depression. During the Reagan years, there was an increase in mental illness and depression among workers which later led to the anti-depressant boom of the 1990s. The rate of incarceration has increased and today over 2 million Americans are in the prison system, mostly for drug-related offences whilst drugs became stronger and cheaper than ever before.

Starve the Beast.

The richest 1% of the American population, who were paying an income tax rate of 70% had that rate chopped down to 50% and then to 28% under the Reagan administration. The Democrats were complicit in these massive tax-cuts and the increase of tax-breaks for the ultra-rich. Between 1978 and 1990 the government lost $840 billion in tax revenue whilst 1% of Americans accumulated $1 trillion. When Reagan first entered the White House the national debt was at around $700 billion, by the time he left the debt had exceeded $3 trillion. The US had become the world's leading debtor, as opposed to the world's leading creditor as it had been prior to the Reagan years. The massive tax-cuts for the wealthy enacted by Reagan to necessitate cuts in public spending at a later date, a strategy known as "starving the beast", left the state borrowing to make up for the losses in the meantime. Incidentally the projected interest burden of the debt is equal, as a proportion of GDP, to the interest of the debt incurred by Obama's "fiscal irresponsibility".

The debt was a result of "Reaganomics" specifically the "too big to fail" bailout of Continental Illinois, the doubling of protectionist barriers, the deregulation of industry which led to mass-redundancies for short-term profits and the massive increase in military spending - which is a way of discretely pouring money into high-tech industry and enriching the likes of Bill Gates. It is likely that the collapse of tax revenue, which the Reaganites were responsible for, contributed greatly to the budget deficit as the economy descended into recession. This later led to the first Bush administration to raise taxes in a pragmatic move to secure the recovery, but as a result George HW Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton - who immediately followed up the tax-rises with massive spending cuts. Of course, the savage cuts furthered the ongoing decline of the  New Deal reforms, while spending in areas such as defence increased because only social programmes that are beneficial to the poor should be slashed.

One result of the enormous deficit accrued by "starving the beast" under Reagan were the pragmatic actions undertaken by Bush I and Clinton, namely the tax hikes that helped elect Clinton and the spending cuts that followed under him. The economic policies of Bush I, Clinton and Bush II sustained and furthered the changes made by Reagan, which all together amounted to the financialisation of the economy. In short the impact of budget deficits on politics has been to stifle radical change in favour of the kind of "pragmatism" we saw under Clinton, massive public spending cuts to shrink the deficit. The same is being seen under Obama, the enormous deficit accumulated by the second Bush administration functions to constrain any progressive tendencies left in the Democratic Party. Now that Obama has renewed the Bush tax-cuts which could cost $4 trillion and no doubt continue to "starve the beast" thereby justifying even greater cuts under whoever wins in 2012. 


The impact of "Reaganomics" is a shift to neoliberalism and supply-side economics, which are inclusive of all forms of driving economic growth by pumping money into 'Big Business' but don't see the need to fund welfare provisions or public education. All the theory behind this is reliant on the assumption that markets are innately efficient and will always clear without government intervention. A consummate nonsense, as supply and demand are in nearly constant flux which means that there is always disequilibrium - e.g. unemployment. Nonetheless, you'll find this ideological sewer running beneath theories of "trickle-down" and "starve the beast" in which tax-cuts pay for themselves and cash runs downhill for some reason. This sophistry meant that conservatives no longer had to worry about cutting spending before cutting taxes, it provided an intellectual gloss to slashing taxes for the highest earners whilst cutting spending on welfare.

Revolution and Reaction.

A Rich man's Revolution.

In a nostalgic moment, John McCain once described himself as a "foot soldier" in the "Reagan Revolution". The tenure of Ronald Reagan is often described as a revolution for the Republican Party, but it should be considered part of an ongoing counter-revolution against the American working-class. Gore Vidal once said "Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid." The political discourse in the US is framed as if there is only one class, the middle-class, which involves anyone who owns a car. But the fact that there is a middle-class presupposes that there is an upper-class and a working-class. The global shift in paradigm from social democracy to neoliberalism, a counter-revolution in itself, that commenced with the changes to monetary policy made by Paul Volcker under Carter after Nixon pulled apart the Bretton-Woods system.

With the famous adept timing of the Reaganites, the US government was able to seize on the overwhelming disillusionment with government. The source of this disillusionment went back to the 1960s when the US embarked on the war in Indochina and President Kennedy was assassinated. The Democrats had made a desperate lunge to capitalise on a disillusioned electorate and pander to the radicals roused by the Vietnam war. Jimmy Carter  was put forward as a candidate for President as token to the generation of Americans who protested against Vietnam, Carter would serve one term and made some gestures to black people and the poor. But overall the Carter administration abandoned New Deal liberalism and paved the way for the Reaganites. The Reagan administration, with the Democrats in Congress, merely furthered the transition to neoliberalism. Thus, no one but reactionaries should idolise Jimmy Carter.

From 1978 to 1990 the richest 1% of the American population accumulated $1 trillion, $840 billion of which was a result of massive tax-cuts as part of an active attempt by the Reagan administration to "starve the beast" in order to justify massive cuts in public spending. In 1984 alone the tax-cuts amounted to $190 billion, the majority of which went to the wealthy, in the same year that $140 billion was cut and defence was increased by $181 billion. In the 1960s and 70s led to the share that the richest 1% held of assets collapsed dramatically to almost 20%. In the late 1970s the share of assets for the wealthiest Americans began to increase, a trajectory which was furthered throughout the 1980s and eventually peaked at around 1990 at 40%. Since this explosion can be traced back to the Carter administration, out of a partisan agenda Forbes have written off the inequality produced by "Reaganomics" as the consequence of Carter's economic policy.

In the US Budget of 1986 we can see that out of $794 billion in tax-revenue a total of $294 billion was to be spent on social security. $286 billion was spent on defence, $12 billion for foreign arms to client states and $8 billion on energy (e.g. nuclear weapons). $27 billion on benefits for war veterans and $142 billion for interest on loans on money spent to prop up the national security state. So out of the remaining $500 billion, left over once social security is taken out of the picture, $475 billion was spent on the national security state and fed the military-industrial complex. Other federal spending came to $177 billion, which would contribute to the size of the deficit. Naturally Alan Greenspan, a devotee of Ayn Rand, called for social security and medicare to be slashed in order to balance the budget. The billions poured into wars is a sacred cow no politician is willing to slaughter to avoid confronting the military-industrial complex.

During the "Reagan Revolution" it was not just a "revolution" in domestic and economic policy but in the discourse itself. The Fairness Doctrine, which was introduced in 1949 to ensure liberals and conservatives would be given a fair amount of airtime in political commentary, was repealed in 1987 and we're still living with the consequences. The rise of Rush Limbaugh and the Right would lay claim to talk radio in the 1990s. Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes injected the political debate with right-wing populism that championed the GOP through campaigns of appeals to bigotry, vilification and red-baiting. The same tools are used today, we can see them in the accusations hurled at Obama. Fox News was launched as the propaganda wing of the Republican Party as the so-called "liberal" media is complacent and sets the limits on criticism of government. The lack of meaningful discourse has hollowed out what little hope elections held for Americans.

Throughout the 1980s the Republicans succeeded in transforming the federal judiciary into a conservative institution and had filled over half of federal judgeships with right-wingers by 1991. This was a way for the Reaganites to overturn the rulings of liberal judges and harden a reactionary base along populist lines, which have had a long-term impact on the discourse particularly the attempt to appoint Robert Bork. Whether it takes fundamentalist or nationalist forms, in rulings it takes the form of supporting the death penalty, opposing affirmative action, gay rights and abortion. Following this transformation the death penalty was reinstated, the constraints over police power reduced whilst the legal protections of unions have been dismantled. Education was deemed not to be a "fundamental right" so poor people had to pay for public education. A recent ruling by Supreme Court removed the limits to how much corporations can spend on campaign donations.

30 years after Ronald Reagan came to power, the man's legacy can be clearly seen but is rarely understood for what it is. The vast gulf between the rich and the poor has led to social deprivation on a massive scale, from the way drugs have become a substitute for welfare to fear-driven politics that have led to lone-wolf terrorism and skyrocketing rates of gun crime. Again and again the GOP revives the notion that the government is the source of problems and not the solution as the economic system becomes increasingly dysfunctional and unconstrained. Millions of Americans are now superfluous, left jobless and abandoned by the government with no sufficient medical care and barely enough welfare to get by. The counter-revolution has succeeded in rolling back social democracy and pouring billions into warfare.

Really Existing Capitalism.

How the World Works?

It has been argued that the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by a failure of economic policy that there has been too much intervention and too much regulation. This is one of the genres, in terms of opinions and arguments, to emerge as an explanation of the causes of the crash of '08. The most right-wing pundits at Fox News, but also the Tea Parties and the World Bank, have been spouting this argument. The state hasn't stuck to the theory and principles of free-market capitalism and as a result the rest of us are suffering. These free-marketeers claim that if there had been less regulation and less taxation, and if there hadn't been bailouts in the past, the crisis would have never came about. Theoretically, market forces would have led to greater competition and innovation, which would have eliminated the kind of recklessness that led to this crisis.

This is in spite of the fact that the economies of the UK and the US have been financialised over the last 30 years, which was engineered mostly by the administrations of Thatcher and Reagan (but also Major and Clinton). Over the same time period the welfare state has decreased in size in both countries, the labour movement has been smashed, financial markets have been deregulated and effectively subsidised through generous tax-cuts. The state did have a role in enabling the financialisation of the economy and is partly responsible for the financial crises. But it was the internal structure of the banks which nurtured irresponsibility as part of company practice and such irresponsibility was exacerbated by the kind of market forces unleashed over the last three decades.

However it is true, as the free-marketeers claim, that capitalism does not really exist in its "pure form" in the West. The stock market may be free, due to the minor level of regulation and taxation that it is subjected to, but other areas of the economy like the labour market are not as free. Even so, the economies of the developed world are not egalitarian in terms of structure and remain explicitly capitalist. It would be more accurate to describe the economy of a country like Britain as state-capitalist, or even corporatist, as it is a mixed economy and there is still some kind of welfare state in the UK. In the UK and the US, the way the state interacts with the economy often amounts to socialising costs and privatising profits.

The closest examples we have to the free-market ideal are countries in the developing world where neoliberal reforms has been imposed undemocratically, usually through a dictatorship or a loan with strings attached by a fine institution like the IMF. Take Mali where over half of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day and the economy is "built" on agriculture, specifically cotton and cattle. Unlike American and European politicians, the Malian government actually believe in free-markets and as a result Malian beef and cotton producers cannot compete on a level playing field. As the US government subsidise cotton farmers with more funding than the Malian government spends on it's entire budget. And the EU subsidises farmers with 500 euros per cow, which is higher than Mali's GDP per capita. It would be easy to say that the US and the EU should not subsidise agriculture, but such measures are what have secured economic growth and development.

The Free-Market Utopia?

The advocates of "pure" capitalism like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises supported statism as an invaluable step towards their utopia, whether their followers like to admit it is another matter. Hayek was an admirer of General Pinochet in Chile, after all it was the 'Chicago Boys' - who were inspired by Hayek, Mises and Friedman - who advised Pinochet on economic policy. When Hayek was interviewed by El Mercurio, a pro-Pinochet rag, he stated "Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism." It was the devotion to neoliberal economics - specifically policies which consisted of anti-inflationary measures, spending cuts, privatisation and deregulation - under Pinochet that these puritanical ideologues fawned over. It didn't matter to them that these economic policies were incredibly unpopular and had to be imposed by illiberal means.

Ludwig von Mises admired Italian fascism as it "defended" private property and "saved" the European civilisation. He once wrote "It cannot be denied, that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilisation. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history." When the Austro-fascist dictator Engelbert Dollfuss began to crush the labour movement in 1934, Ludwig von Mises once again approved with glee and even worked as an economic adviser under Dollfuss. Mises went on to co-author a report with Dollfuss arguing that the the Great Depression was caused not by the free-market but by government interference.

This is the essence of free-market fundamentalism, when the boom ends in bust and we are plunged into a deep recession, it is not the markets that were responsible it was the state and those politicians who were not faithful enough to the theory. Similarly, in socialist states - really existing socialism - whenever the system failed it was communists who claimed that the failure was because we were not "pure enough". These claims were almost always followed by a "purge" of the "bourgeois tendencies" undermining the revolution and stifling socialism. We see the same claims being made at Fox News, for Glenn Beck the crash of '08 was caused by too much regulation and has been exacerbated by "socialist tendencies" in the Obama administration. The logic of this is to further perpetuate the system and further it's current trajectory.

There are no "socialist tendencies" in the US government, which is why the Treasury Department is referred to as "Government Goldman" by regulators as most of the players involved in drawing up economic policy are former bankers. The reason that Goldman Sachs emerged so well from the recession was because the Treasury Department was dominated by former Goldman employees, namely Hank Paulson et al. The American commentariat - specifically the radio-show hosts and pundits of the extreme Right - is fuelling common grievances and outrage going back over 30 years. The aim is to empower the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party. But this is nothing new, the same methods were used against Clinton with great success, and it ultimately led to the 8 year catastrophe known as the Bush Presidency.

A Society Too Big to Fail.

There has not been much talk of the "Big Society" and the "Great Ignored" lately, even though we are now living under a strange coalition that has declared itself to be "progressive" as it implements regressive policies. Though this is the fallout of the failures of New Labour, which left many disillusioned with politics. It was that government which locked us into illegal wars in the Middle East and followed the right-wing economic mantra off of a cliff. But a serious look at the problems we face as a society is well overdue. Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession has sparked an emergence of many different opinions of the situation. David Harvey recently pointed out that these different views of the financial crisis and how it came about could be summed up as five genres:

1. Human frailty, the cause of the economic crisis was the innate selfishness and greed of human nature which ran amok on Wall Street and Canary Wharf. There's nothing we can do about this, the crisis was inevitable, it was simply down to human nature.

2. Institutional failures are to blame, regulations on the financial sector were not strict enough and as a result banking spiralled out of control. We need to rethink how we regulate the financial sector on a global scale.

3. Free-market fundamentalism led to the crisis as the theories of Hayek and Friedman that emphasised a totally deregulated and privatised economic system were too utopian. We need to return to good old fashioned Keynesian economic theory to solve these problems.

4. Cultural defects are the origin of the crisis, the financial crisis was really down to Anglo-Saxon culture, the obsession Americans and Brits have with home ownership, and the ongoing crisis in Greece is really down to similar defects in the Greek character.

5. The state is at fault, it is not the solution to these problems, for it implemented too many regulations of the wrong kind that constrained market forces. The recent bailouts of the banks, not to mention the bailouts of recent decades, rewarded the irresponsible and undermined the system further. If the market had been left alone, failure would not be coddled in this way and as a result businesses would be more competitive and efficient.

The right-wing media in Britain prefers the fifth line, blaming "Big Government" and by extension Gordon Brown, as well as the first genre pinning the blame on human nature. All together these two give us market populism - attacking greedy bankers and incompetent politicians while advocating greater deregulation and lower taxes. Whereas, politicians prefer to run on the second and third lines as they provide them with some hope of staying in office. Though it would appear that the Con-Dems are running with the second and fifth arguments that we need to rethink the way we regulate banking, whilst initiating a contradictory series of spending cuts to restore fiscal responsibility to the government - "rolling back" the state in other words. Even though it was government policy, which socialised costs and privatised profits, that was the problem. The government is just the shadow of the problem, the substance remains in the financial sector and until that is changed the problem shall remain.

We should note that since the end of the Bretton-Woods system and the intervention in the UK economy by the IMF, that preceded the rise of Thatcherism in 1979, the shift from manufacturing to finance that began in the 1950s has intensified. Over the last 30 years, there has been consistent efforts by the political class to dismantle the social democratic elements of the economy which were forged during the Labour government of 1945 to 1951. This was the government that constructed the welfare state - the NHS was established, benefits were guaranteed for the elderly and workers when sick or unemployed - as well as a programme of nationalisation that brought 20% of industry, like coal-mining and gas, under democratic control. These were the days when the wealthiest British citizens paid a tax rate of over 90%.

Keynesian economists, like Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, might argue that there was greater rates of growth, employment and productivity during the social democratic era that ended in the mid 1970s. Wages increased along with productivity, peaking in the mid 60s when the workers' share of GDP was at it's highest, which was partly due to a formidable labour movement. Of course, the workers' share of GDP has been in decline since 1979 and Britain is now more unequal than it was 40 years ago. This growth in the gap between rich and poor correlates with increasing rates of social deprivation, as seen in most unequal societies, obesity, teenage pregnancy and violent crime have all risen sharply. The rise of New Labour did not resolve inequality, merely slowed it's increase, which is why wages for working-class people only increased by 45% from 1997 to 2009. Over the same time period wages for upper-class people increased by around 300%. So as a consequence, social deprivation has continued to worsen under Labour and will almost certainly continue under the Con-Dem Coalition.

Throughout the Thatcher years there was a conscious move to lure unions into strikes that led to the labour movement being weakened significantly. At the same time privatisation tore apart state industries leading to mass-unemployment and the deprivation of communities built around mining or manufacturing. The new emphasis on deregulation eventually led to the "Big Bang" of 1986 and the financialisation of the economy. As a result of these policies,  when Thatcher left office in 1990 employment in manufacturing had fallen by 30%. Wages had stagnated or gone into decline for many, all the while inequality increased. The stagnation of wages could have undermined consumption if credit cards, loans and mortgages had not been so readily available at the time. A convergence of self-interest, the wages cut by bosses are substituted with borrowed money. This is one reason that consumption has remained high over the years, despite the stagnation of income that many have experienced. 

There are no signs that this trend is going to be swayed by the current incumbents, regardless of the fact that it was this massive increase in debt per household that contributed to the financial crisis. Let alone the fact that it was a irresponsibly unregulated banking sector that was left to run amok in ways that even the American government would not permit. The reactionary series of spending cuts the Con-Dems are currently initiated are not necessary, as it is a fall in tax-revenues that created and further exacerbated the deficit. A serious shift away from finance as the heart of our economy is needed. A return to manufacturing may rejuvenate communities, that have been neglected for decades, and decrease unemployment. The measures that have virtually crippled the labour movement should be removed and greater control of the workplace by the workers could be achieved. Wages could then rise and the amount of debt per household could be cut in half.

Related Links:

Crises of Capitalism
Living in the End Times
The Meaning of David Cameron

Red Liberty - A Freedom for All.

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." - Milton Friedman
 

It is commonly believed that libertarianism and socialism are totally incompatible as the former is ideologically disposition to individualism clashes with the collectivism of the latter. The philosophy of libertarians is dedicated to small government and the freedom of the individual, whereas socialism is devoted to the democratic control of the means of production and distribution. Democracy was feared by classical liberals, and many modern day libertarians, as potentially tyrannical to the freedom of the individual - the tyranny of the majority. The democratic control, or state control, of the means of production have typically troubled libertarians who take the view of taxation as theft and the state as the enemy of freedom. Many libertarians regard freedom and equality as being in opposition, it's one or the other being a pragmatic defence of the free-market. But it could be argued that equality is not opposed to freedom and a radically egalitarian approach to freedom is possible. A major issue in relation to this is distributive justice, as it is where major differences between libertarians and socialists are drawn.


Distributive justice, as a political goal, could be described as a way of resolving political and economic injustices. However, there are competing views as to how the distribution should be accomplished along the lines of desert, merit, human rights, needs and utility. For instance, the provision of health-care by the state paid for with public money could improve the standard of living for millions of people, who may not have been able to afford sufficient health treatment in the past. But this is one view of the issue of health-care, the principle being applied in relation to distributive justice is that of needs. People need health-care and therefore it should be a priority to have universal health-care funded by taxes. Another view, is that the distribution of wealth and property should be determined according to the merit of individuals. Thus, health-care should be distributed according to the merit of individuals and not on the basis of need. This is the view typically taken by free-market libertarians.

Free-market libertarians, the ilk of Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, might argue that taxing the income of individuals to fund such a public service diminishes the freedom of the individual. As the income and wealth of most people is derived from the individual's merit and is indicative of their character and talents. Therefore, taxing the income and wealth of individuals is in effect depriving them of their desert, which they earned through sheer hard-work. This undermines the freedom of the individual as it diminishes the ability of the individual to enjoy and to flourish to the extent that their hard-work allows them to do so. Thus, some libertarians have gone as far as to claim that taxation is a form of theft. But in regards to individual rights they might argue that the version of justice, which is preoccupied with needs, is contrary to the right to private property. Because the private ownership of property could be seen as an inalienable right, libertarians have argued that distributing land and wealth is against the rights of individuals to accumulate private property.

From this point-of-view, it could be argued that the inequality that might arise in a  libertarian society would be natural as it would reflect the natural talents of individuals and the level of self-determination there is in that society. Conservatives might argue that distributive justice, of a needs-based variety, could lead to a culture of dependency amongst the lower classes which could undermine the natural hierarchy and threaten the "fabric" of communities that make up society as a whole. Whereas, socialists are focused on the idea of distributive justice as centred around needs as a way of distributing wealth and property in the long-term pursuit of an egalitarian society. It is not that libertarians and conservatives do not adhere to a kind of distributive justice, it is that their view of justice differs greatly from the needs-based formula of socialism. The idea that wealth and property should be allocated according to merit is the kind of distributive justice that libertarians and conservatives tend to believe in. In a sense, one man's justice is another woman's oppression.


 

The view that individual rights and a needs-based idea of distributive justice are incompatible seems to have some ground. Though it could be argued that this kind of distributive justice diminishes individual freedom is too simplistic. The view could be overly simplistic as it depends on the conception of freedom that we're talking about. In regards to the freedom of the individual from constraint, also known as negative liberty, taxation is an infringement on freedom as it functions as a constraint on the individual by decreasing their disposable income. But in relation to positive liberty, which is not just about the freedom from constraint and is more about enabling individuals with the capacity to act freely, it could be that individual freedom is enhanced by a needs-focused distributive justice. This is because the state provision of education and health-care empower individuals to flourish, as the obstacles of insurance payments and tuition fees are removed at the expense of a wealthy few.


The view that wealth and property should be distributed according to the merit of individuals assumes that the gap between rich and poor is a result of a natural difference between individuals. This fails to take into account the way wealth and property is often handed down from one generation to the next further perpetuating privilege and power. The ignorance of free-marketeers to inheritance and the ways wealth can be concentrated in a minority goes beyond innocent naivity. As Rand acknowledged by revelling in inequality, she viewed the poor as "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned." To Rand it was deeply immoral to show these "lice" compassion, who are feeding off of the success of the "Masters of the Universe", as selfishness is the only virtue. Inequality is justice. This merit-based variety of distributive justice that free-market libertarians adhere to is a narrow and simplistic kind of justice. The conception of liberty that they so adore and actively promote is equally narrow, as it abandons the individual with a set of choices to make and nothing but autonomy as a means to flourish.


It could be said that the free-market brand of libertarianism is liberalism for the ultra-rich, as in that kind of society they would have the greatest freedom and the least amount of "constraints" on that freedom. But for the rest of society, the "maximised" freedom for the individual would mean a life of total subservience to the most tyrannical. This is an absolute truism in regard to the "Greed is Good" variant that Ayn Rand espoused. Whereas, at the limitation of the disposable income and economic freedom of a small few, the rest of society could derive a far greater freedom that enables choices and not just permits them. The kind of individual freedom that right-wing libertarians are pursuing is only for the opulent few and is derived at the expense of the many. And the liberty which socialists and anarchists are pursuing is for all, not only as individuals but as communities as well.


Significant Links:
Two Biographies of Ayn Rand
Responsibility to the Poor
Ayn Rand Interview
Milton Friedman on Libertarianism
Ron Paul on the American power structure
Noam Chomsky on libertarian socialism

Enter the Doom Loop.

Capitalism with Asian Values.

What is commonly referred to as "Capitalism with Asian values" is essentially state-capitalism without a formal democratic system. This is the kind of system seen in China today, which is formally communist but in practice is a state-capitalist system, an authoritarian capitalism which is even more productive and dynamic than the Western liberal variety. Arguably, this was first put into practice in Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew who took Singapore from the developing world into the developed world in 30 years. Despite the fact that his years as Prime Minister ended in 1990 Lee Kuan Yew still dominates the government of Singapore at the side of his eldest son. Whereas, in China it was Deng Xiaoping, an admirer of Lee Kuan Yew, who brought about the reforms which have made China the economic powerhouse it is today. This new brand of capitalism does not necessitate democracy and is more efficient as a result. It looks as though this kind of capitalism is heading west, in Russia since the rise of the Oligarchs and in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi.

The Russian economy underwent a radical transformation in the 1990s as the old controlled economy was broken apart, the red-tape was cut up and entire industries were sold off, not long after the fall of the Soviet Union. The architects of these free-market reforms believed that the end result would be a new form of democracy, in which the market and not politics provides the people with what they want. What actually did emerge from years of economic "shock therapy" was a new elite of ruthless businessmen as millions of Russians were left in poverty. This led to economic chaos and political instability, culminating with the occupation and subsequent military assault on Parliament, Yeltsin ruled by decree and exerted state-power to pander to the wants of the Oligarchs. When Putin came to power the majority of Russians were disillusioned with democracy and wanted order above freedom, they welcomed Putin's authoritarian style of governing and nationalistic rhetoric. The corporatism that began under Yeltsin was further affirmed by Putin, except his tough approach brought some order to the economy.

It has been said that we may be in the "end game" of democracy as we know it. It may sound apocalyptic to talk in these terms, but it is sadly not an exaggeration as old threat to the political system are becoming even more threatening. Take the power of corporations, the US Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations have a right to freedom of speech and have removed all constraints that prevent "Corporate America" from contributing so much money to political campaigns. It should be noted that in the last election Barack Obama received around $730 million from "Big Business", now the funding is likely to rise and may exceed $1 billion in 2012. This is a major threat to the democratic process, as it is the increasing influence of the wealthy that diminishes the influence of the poor who cannot make such large contributions to the campaign. What is left of the American democratic process is being eroded and rendered ever more meaningless by a tacit alliance between the ultra-rich and politicians.

We have witnessed the passing of the USA Patriot act in the aftermath of 9/11, which may be a sign of things to come in the West. On the surface the widely known human rights violations by the US government are recognised as a consequence of the Patriot act. It is not widely known that the Patriot act undermines Magna Carta and by extension human rights in the West. If the depravity of torturing people on mass does not concern you, the way in which Magna Carta has been flushed down the toilet should. As the state-sanctioned kidnapping and torture of "enemy combatants" provides a pretext to infringing on the rights and freedoms of Westerners in the future. Guantanamo Bay is not the only indication of this, a far less known instance is the database that the NSA are currently building in Utah. The complex will be bigger than Washington DC and cost the American tax-payer over $2 billion to construct. The database will house all information derived from "signals intelligence" - phone calls, emails, text messages and data trails like web searches - which can then be analysed to determine which citizens are or may become "terrorists".

Beware the Boris.

This is not the only troubling development, the increasingly inhumane and racist policies on illegal immigrants may be another sign of the shift away from the liberal rhetoric about human rights and freedom. One well known instance of this is the Arizona Senate Bill 1070 which holds that anyone of Latino appearance has to carry documents proving that they are citizens of the US. If you're of Mexican descent and have lived in the US your whole life you still have to prove you are a US citizen. If the police stop you and you can't prove that you're an American you can be arrested, fined and even deported. Whites can also sue the police if they are seen not stopping a person who just happens to look hispanic. Even if such a person has a job and has lived here their entire life, if they cannot prove they are a US citizen they are not entitled to the same rights as US citizens. The immigrant population of the US are not regarded as human beings by the state, as a result so-called "immigrants" are required to show documentation to prove their citizenship just to pick up food stamps for their children. Again, a pretext for undermining the rights and freedoms of all people regardless of whether they are citizens or not.

A less well known example is the measures Silvio Berlusconi has taken to "curb" the influx of illegal immigrants from Africa into Italy. The Berlusconian measures effectively sanction the sinking of boat loads of Africans sailing illegally to the Italian Republic, the boot of Europe. An example was made of a group of fishermen who had saved illegal immigrants from drowning in the sea, each of them faced 15 years for "aiding and abetting illegal immigration". This has functioned to encourage Italian fishermen to beat away illegal immigrants with sticks and leave them to die in the sea, as fishermen responsible for this kind of behaviour do not face trial or even arrest. In 2008 Berlusconi even declared a state of emergency and deployed 4,000 troops to parts of cities "vulnerable" to illegal immigration, as of 2010 the state of emergency has yet to end. Berlusconi's sexual escapades are what the press prefer to focus on, meanwhile   illegal immigrants are being excluded from the civil order. Many in the US now believe that the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the US Constitution only apply to Americans so "foreigners" have no rights.

The way in which illegal immigrants are being deprived of rights and liberties is related to the issue of a superfluous population. The US economy became centred around finance and banking in the 1970s, manufacturing has been abandoned and millions of Americans are no longer needed in the economy.  These superfluous Americans include the 50 million people who don't have health insurance, most Latino and African-Americans also fall into this category, "illegal aliens" are also superfluous as they are mostly unskilled. In Colombia, the government deals with their superfluous population through "social cleansing" which amounts to the state-sponsored murder of impoverished Colombians who are not needed in the economy. This has also been seen in Brazil and Guatemala. But in the US, there is a more civilised way of dealing with the people who aren't needed - namely the prison system. This is the reason that over 7 million people were in prison, on probation or parole, in 2006. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world and 25% of the world's prison population are in America.

Britain has a superfluous population too, it is concentrated mostly in areas of Wales, Scotland and Northern England that once thrived in areas such as mining and manufacturing. Finance and banking are now of central importance in the economy. The right-wing media blame immigrants for the lack of work available in these unnecessary communities, but really most immigrants are part of the same unnecessary population. Sadly, it may be that the kind of regime constructed in Italy is the future of Western politics. Berlusconi's reign is characterised by cynical and obscene media spectacles, his scandalous sex-life being an example, but also a more sinister side which has kept Italy under a state of emergency for 2 years to supposedly "fend off" illegal immigrants, sexual deviants and the Mafia. Berlusconi's populism blames communists and immigrants for everything that is wrong in society. Someone like Boris Johnson could well be the British Berlusconi one day, this possibility should be deeply unsettling to us all.

Significant Links:

Living in the End Times

Democracy's End Game

The Devastating Decision

Who's in Big Brother's Database? 

No More Deaths! 

How the Oligarchs were born...