Archive for category Politics
Rot at the heart of the system
An open letter:
Dear Sir/Madam,
It may have escaped your notice, as it had mine, that when the British
government throws its influence into defending “The City of London”,
they are actually defending a quasi-autonomous/autonomous offshore tax
haven which happens to be geographically situated in the heart of
London. The “City of London” has its own mayor, police force, and is
not directly accountable nor subservient to the British Parliament or Queen – having arrived at, and sustained ever since, a murky
independence with the Norman Invaders in the 11th Century.
The “City of London” is regarded as the second largest offshore tax
haven in the world (see Treasure Islands by Nicholas Shaxson), sitting
at the center of a web which extends from taxhavens/secrecy
jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the British Virgin
Islands, Monserrat, filtering dirty money into the inner ring of “Crown
Dependency” tax havens/secrecy jurisdictions such as Jersey, before it
is funelled into the “City of London”. All these places are
“quasi-indepdendent” – being firmly under the control of the ruling
elite in the U.K. when it matters, but not in the eyes of the law -
allowing them to escape regulation and inspection.
Consider this for a moment in the context of yesterday’s quote by John
Major (an ex-British Prime Minister) :
Major said: “The proposal at the moment for a financial transaction tax
is a heat-seeking missile proposed in continental Europe aimed at the
“City of London”. If there were such a tax about 80%, 85% of the yield
would come from the City of London.
“Now it is not surprising that the British are upset, if we were
proposing [taxes] on luxuries like wine I dare say some of our
continental partners would think we were being rather unfair to them.
Well that’s the position for us. We can’t accept a financial transaction
tax. I don’t think we will have to, but the proposal adds to
Euroscepticism and yet in many ways it’s a paper tiger.”
Assuming that Mr Major’s figures are accurate, 80 to 85% of the
financial transactions within the E.U. which are currently conducted
occur within the “City of London”.
That is an enormous concentration of money, and power. The suggestion of
Merkel, based on the American idea of a Tobin tax, is to apply a tax of
0.1% to share transactions, and 0.01% to derivatives – to dampen
speculators being to easily able to herd and concentrate monetary flows
into attacks on currencies, nations and corporations.
Why is Mr Major then neatly steps into a shameful analogy to keep the
common man hating the euro, proposing to tax luxuries like wine (kick
the French).
Think about this for just one moment. Isn’t wine already taxed? Yes,
at the French 5.5% reduced VAT rate. Furthermore, when French wine is
sold in the U.K., that transaction is taxed at 20% by the U.K.
government. All transactions in Europe fall under Value Added Tax (VAT),
but financial transactions do not. Why are financial transactions not
taxed? Do they really add no Value?
Mr Major is, however, right in one sense when he refers to financial
transactions as a luxury – they certainly do not belong to majority.
These transactions are managed and profited from by a tiny elite. Their
profits are generally not taxed anywhere in the world, as tax
havens/secrecy jurisdictions allow them to operate outside national
control, in a world where there is (still) no global taxation body.
Secrecy jurisdictions and financial transactions are increasingly used
in a criminal manner, not just for gambling, but bullying and mugging
weaker players (national or corporate) for their assets and profits
through tricks like transfer pricing, leveraged buyouts, blowing asset
bubbles, and currency speculation to name but a few – so why are Prime
Minister Cameroon and Prime Minister Major leaping to the defense of the
“City of London” – when it does not pay tax to the U.K. and operates as
a quasi-autonomous, unaccountable nation inside a nation?
I am not in a position to know, but I can guess:
1) Exposure. It seems unlikely to me, were this tax phased in by
Europe, that the “City of London” would end up paying any tax
whatsoever, as (like Jersey) it is not strictly speaking a part of
Europe. The U.K. signed its agreements, but the “City of London” is
something else, more murky and ill defined. Europe is a “Rechtsstaat” – a
group of States governed explicitly by a publically accessible law. The
U.K. cannot co-exist with such a system – where the U.K. culture of law
is deliberately ambiguous, non-codified, and free to be manipulated by
those with the power to do so, as freely as they like. Furthermore,
there are very, very few people in the U.K. who understand what a Crown
Dependency is, or what the “City of London” is in relation to the rest
of the country. It is kept that way very deliberately. I do not believe
I have ever read an article in any British newspaper, or seen a program
on any British television channel which has ever discussed or analysed
this critical structure at the heart of our capital city. To have its murky underbelly exposed would do great harm to the U.K. in Europe, to its legitimacy before its own people, and also display the source of its power to the world.
2) Class. The class system is alive and kicking in the U.K. 70% of UK land is owned by 1% of the population (Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1139145). The largest private landowner is the Duke of Buccleach with 270,000 acres – his family descend from a Norman invader Hugh de Gras Veneur who seized land in Cheshire after 1066.
Where do the sons and daughters of the elite go to earn their money after their
private education? The “City of London” drives a very sensible deal. It
will make/keep the Scions of the elite wealthy, living in the standard
to which they are accustomed, with intellectually unchallenging work
(which does, however, also maintain the social fabric of the elite
through its constant network of social interaction) and multi-million
pound bonuses.
3) Influence. As the “official” British Empire collapsed, the “City of
London” managed both to maintain and extend the financial influence that
empire had brought it. This is the other side of the bargain. For the
British Government to protect the “City of London”, will they not be
receiving in return, a limited ability to rent that influence for their
own purposes?
4) Corruption. “In 2009 the OECD published a detailed study examining
so-called regulatory capture, where government regulators are taken over
by sectional interests like Banks. ‘We found there was a huge number of
connections of people who had gone through the revolving door to the
banks and back again, with alarming speed’ said David Miller, who led
the research. ‘The biggest banks had the most concentrated connections,
and the countries that had the biggest connections were the UK, the US
and Switzerland’” (Treasure Islands – Shaxton). What does this mean in
practice? “When the government launched an inquiry in 2008 into the
financial crisis, every single one of the team’s twenty-one members had
a background in financial services : four were from the City Corporation
itself (“City of London”) including the lord mayor and two former lord
mayors. The review was led by Sir Winfried Bischoff, a former Citigroup
chairman” (Treasure Islands – Shaxton). This level of influence is
abnormal, even in terms of U.K. history – reflecting the wane in the
nation’s power, and rise in the power of the “City of London”. This is
an inherently, deeply, undemocratic and corrupt relationship.
Please do more to highlight what is going on behind the scenes. At the
very least, carefully and fully review “Treasure Islands” by Nicholas
Shaxson (www.amazon.co.uk/Treasure-Islands-Havens-Stole-World/dp/1847921108/). This is an issue which affects us all.
Kindest Regards,
Benjamin Senior
Flexible Meritocratic Education
Talents should be encouraged, and given room to grow – but how to achieve this in a fair way given the different strengths people (children and adults) have?
One option I’ve never heard of having been explored might be genuine “centers of excellence” with a small number of handpicked teachers, and resources for the top flight teaching of the Arts, Sports, Maths, Economics, History, Geography, Science, Literature and so on. The twist would be that class sizes may never go about 20, that each lesson type is half a day to a day long, and critically, that only the very best students *in that specific ability* from the surrounding 50km school intake area are chosen.
This might mean that some children only attend one class per week, while others potentially commute there every day.
Pro Nuclear vs Pro Renewable
A quick note :
The main arguments in the UK Press/public for nuclear and against renewable :
1) It can’t be done because wind/solar are sporadic resources
2) Nuclear is safe and the only option to reduce dependency on coal / oil
3) Basing on renewables means that the poor people of the world will suffer because they won’t have enough energy not being allowed to build nuclear power stations.
Living in Germany I’m very proud of their decision to tackle the “Power Transformation” – but it’s not wishy washy thinking here.
They aimed at 12% renewables by 2011 (which British commentators also said was a fantasy) and are currently at 17%.
They see the same problems with renewables must be solved everywhere (storage and transmission) which can make them market leaders if they solve them – they are not afraid of problems and have the intellectual and industrial means to solve them.
Nuclear is not safe. In just a few dozen years we have had a wide spectrum of severe accidents, of which doubtless many have been hushed up given that the global regulator is paid for and stocked from within the ranks of the nuclear industry. The consequences of the “unexpected”, the enormous cleanup costs, not to mention the horrendous problem of cleaning up the waste, are simply so severe that it is worth searching for alternatives.
As for the laughable ideas about damning people to poverty – pure hypocracy and ignorance : Manhattan and City of London, the two largest offshore centers for money laundering and coruption in the world. For every dollar “given” to Africa, 10 are taken out. The discrepency between our basic needs and what makes us fulfilled as human beings… it’s possible to go on for hours.
The Game Is Rigged
1% of the U.S. population now own 40% of its wealth. It is worse in the U.K.
The point comes where the intelligent, motivated by greed to join the elite and life of luxury, realise they cannot because they are not allowed.
Eventually, they realise that those who are privileged are not inherently better people – although it that belief is part of their signature – who deserve their privilege.
In these periods increasingly large numbers of intelligent, aware, articulate people towards the most capable end of the human spectrum are forced by circumstance to mix with the masses of who otherwise just accept reality as they find it.
Either those potential reformers are crushed – at the expense of the growth of society as a whole – or revolution is formented.
The better solution is for the powerful to have enough foresight to self-regulate.
They do self-regulate in the sense that every now and again a success story is advertised, a rags-to-riches fable, or even institutionalised in Lotteries and the like… but the mega-trend is inescapable. We are returning to a more primitive feudalism.
The State We’re In
Offshore : Removal of corporate taxation and regulation – the creation of wealth castles – buying of the legislature : Treasure Islands
Routing Kafkaesque Gagging of the press and parliamentary reporting : http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Guardian_still_under_secret_toxic_waste_gag/
The outsourcing of Goverment to private multinationals (see offshore) : (various, list)
The deliberate production and aggressive marketing of low quality, dangerous, addictive food for maximum profit, again isolated from the law by successful lobbying. Marketing includes capture of state resources (schools, prisons) and the active undermining of competitors (e.g. SupersizeMe)
The “leader of the free world” using automated warfare to protect its interest in third world countries, whilst running a series of gulags across the world holding and torturing people for information and to spread terror.
Massive Corporate corruption and inaccountability in the the extraction, transport and use of raw materials (including agriculture) leading to massive ecological and social problems.
How Grants turn to Fees, and what it really means
Over twenty years, university education has been opened up from a meritocracy (where a small percentage of the most intelligent young people who score highest in nation-wide testing have their education funded in the long term interests of the country) to an unsustainable approach where the majority of those who leave college with any grade were able to go to university and get a grant, so that loans could be introduced, followed by american style tuition fees so that we are now back to a pre-war setup where university education is opened up without any risk to the (stupid or intelligent) sons and daughters of the wealthy, amongst whom are the less wealthy but ambitious who will take the financial risk of major loans but afterwards feel they owe nothing to society, and give little back.
Why Street View is a dangerous invasion of privacy
I just realised one very good reason why it’s not such a good idea.
Occasionally I get freelancers asking to work for me, from around the world.
What are they worth? What should I pay them? If I were a hard nosed business man I’d say their value is whatever I can get away with paying them.
The first step is for the potential freelancer to sign an NDA with their address, this is standard practice… only it occurred to me today to look up a few addresses in StreetView.
You get an immediate perspective (whether accurate or not is another question, but I’m guessing its accurate enough) about the person’s socio-economic background from looking at the car in the driveway, the type/state of their accomodation, and the condition of their neighbourhood.
Given that all freelancers try to elevate their position and status to command a decent wage, this can be a really major stab in the back for the image that a freelancer is trying to project.
The insight I just gained into a couple of people puts me in a position to negotiate the hell out of their hourly rate. I won’t, but it’s fantasy to think that others wouldn’t.
This information “leak” puts employees at a considerable negotiating disadvantage, which they aren’t even aware of. Very bad, Google. Very bad, politicians, for letting this happen.
The Perils of Nuclear Power
An interesting post from the Guardian.co.uk :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/apr/11/nuclear-apologists-radiation
Soon after the Fukushima accident last month, I stated publicly that anuclear event of this size and catastrophic potential could present a medical problem of very large dimensions. Events have proven this observation to be true despite the nuclear industry’s campaign about the “minimal” health effects of so-called low-level radiation. That billions of its dollars are at stake if the Fukushima event causes the “nuclear renaissance” to slow down appears to be evident from the industry’s attacks on its critics, even in the face of an unresolved and escalating disaster at the reactor complex at Fukushima.
Proponents of nuclear power – including George Monbiot, who has had a mysterious road-to-Damascus conversion to its supposedly benign effects – accuse me and others who call attention to the potential serious medical consequences of the accident of “cherry-picking” data and overstating the health effects of radiation from the radioactive fuel in the destroyed reactors and their cooling pools. Yet by reassuring the public that things aren’t too bad, Monbiot and others at best misinform, and at worst misrepresent or distort, the scientific evidence of the harmful effects of radiation exposure – and they play a predictable shoot-the-messenger game in the process.
To wit:
1) Mr Monbiot, who is a journalist not a scientist, appears unaware of the difference between external and internal radiation
Let me educate him.
The former is what populations were exposed to when the atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945; their profound and on-going medical effects are well documented. [1]
Internal radiation, on the other hand, emanates from radioactive elements which enter the body by inhalation, ingestion, or skin absorption. Hazardous radionuclides such as iodine-131, caesium 137, and other isotopes currently being released in the sea and air around Fukushima bio-concentrate at each step of various food chains (for example into algae, crustaceans, small fish, bigger fish, then humans; or soil, grass, cow’s meat and milk, then humans). [2] After they enter the body, these elements – called internal emitters – migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, where they continuously irradiate small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years, can induce uncontrolled cell replication – that is, cancer. Further, many of the nuclides remain radioactive in the environment for generations, and ultimately will cause increased incidences of cancer and genetic diseases over time.
The grave effects of internal emitters are of the most profound concern at Fukushima. It is inaccurate and misleading to use the term “acceptable levels of external radiation” in assessing internal radiation exposures. To do so, as Monbiot has done, is to propagate inaccuracies and to mislead the public worldwide (not to mention other journalists) who are seeking the truth about radiation’s hazards.
2) Nuclear industry proponents often assert that low doses of radiation (eg below 100mSV) produce no ill effects and are therefore safe. But , as the US National Academy of Sciences BEIR VII report has concluded, no dose of radiation is safe, however small, including background radiation; exposure is cumulative and adds to an individual’s risk of developing cancer.
3) Now let’s turn to Chernobyl. Various seemingly reputable groups have issued differing reports on the morbidity and mortalities resulting from the 1986 radiation catastrophe. The World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2005 issued a report attributing only 43 human deaths directly to the Chernobyl disaster and estimating an additional 4,000 fatal cancers. In contrast, the 2009 report, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment”, published by the New York Academy of Sciences, comes to a very different conclusion. The three scientist authors – Alexey V Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and Alexey V Nesterenko – provide in its pages a translated synthesis and compilation of hundreds of scientific articles on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster that have appeared in Slavic language publications over the past 20 years. They estimate the number of deaths attributable to the Chernobyl meltdown at about 980,000.
Monbiot dismisses the report as worthless, but to do so – to ignore and denigrate an entire body of literature, collectively hundreds of studies that provide evidence of large and significant impacts on human health and the environment – is arrogant and irresponsible. Scientists can and should argue over such things, for example, as confidence intervals around individual estimates (which signal the reliability of estimates), but to consign out of hand the entire report into a metaphorical dustbin is shameful.
Further, as Prof Dimitro Godzinsky, of the Ukranian National Academy of Sciences, states in his introduction to the report: “Against this background of such persuasive data some defenders of atomic energylook specious as they deny the obvious negative effects of radiation upon populations. In fact, their reactions include almost complete refusal to fund medical and biological studies, even liquidating government bodies that were in charge of the ‘affairs of Chernobyl’. Under pressure from the nuclear lobby, officials have also diverted scientific personnel away from studying the problems caused by Chernobyl.”
4) Monbiot expresses surprise that a UN-affiliated body such as WHOmight be under the influence of the nuclear power industry, causing its reporting on nuclear power matters to be biased. And yet that is precisely the case.
In the early days of nuclear power, WHO issued forthright statements on radiation risks such as its 1956 warning: “Genetic heritage is the most precious property for human beings. It determines the lives of our progeny, health and harmonious development of future generations. As experts, we affirm that the health of future generations is threatened by increasing development of the atomic industry and sources of radiation … We also believe that new mutations that occur in humans are harmful to them and their offspring.”
After 1959, WHO made no more statements on health and radioactivity. What happened? On 28 May 1959, at the 12th World Health Assembly, WHO drew up an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); clause 12.40 of this agreement says: “Whenever either organisation [the WHO or the IAEA] proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organisation has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement.” In other words, the WHO grants the right of prior approval over any research it might undertake or report on to the IAEA – a group that many people, including journalists, think is a neutral watchdog, but which is, in fact, an advocate for the nuclear power industry. The IAEA’s founding papers state: “The agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity through the world.”
Monbiot appears ignorant about the WHO’s subjugation to the IAEA, yet this is widely known within the scientific radiation community. But it is clearly not the only matter on which he is ignorant after his apparent three-day perusal of the vast body of scientific information on radiation and radioactivity. As we have seen, he and other nuclear industry apologists sow confusion about radiation risks, and, in my view, in much the same way that the tobacco industry did in previous decades about the risks of smoking. Despite their claims, it is they, not the “anti-nuclear movement” who are “misleading the world about the impacts of radiation on human health.”
• Helen Caldicott is president of the Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear-Free Planet and the author of Nuclear Power is Not the Answer
[1] See, for example, WJ Schull, Effects of Atomic Radiation: A Half-Century of Studies from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (New York: Wiley-Lis, 1995) and DE Thompson, K Mabuchi, E Ron, M Soda, M Tokunaga, S Ochikubo, S Sugimoto, T Ikeda, M Terasaki, S Izumi et al. “Cancer incidence in atomic bomb survivors, Part I: Solid tumors, 1958-1987″ in Radiat Res 137:S17-S67 (1994).
[2] This process is called bioaccumulation and comes in two subtypes as well, bioconcentration and biomagnification. For more information see: J.U. Clark and V.A. McFarland, Assessing Bioaccumulation in Aquatic Organisms Exposed to Contaminated Sediments, Miscellaneous Paper D-91-2 (1991), Environmental Laboratory, Waterways Experiment Station, Vicksburg, MS and H.A. Vanderplog, D.C. Parzyck, W.H. Wilcox, J.R. Kercher, and S.V. Kaye, Bioaccumulation Factors for Radionuclides in Freshwater Biota, ORNL-5002 (1975), Environmental Sciences Division Publication, Number 783, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN.
Art, Religion, Wellbeing and Experience
Art = a guided experience – to empathically relive or experience something intended by the artist : whether to relive a chilly morning landscape, or the freedom/joy the artist felt covering themselves in paint and rolling around on a large sheet of paper.
Religion = the art of guiding people to particular moral, emotional and spiritual experiences. Hardly a surprise that the main motor for this is artistic, in the form of storytelling/myth, religious painting, and of course, music.
In Religion we witness the power of art when combined with repetition, i.e. the power of behavioural training. Repeat something often enough and the experience/memory becomes persistent enough that it can be easily recalled and used to compare and contrast against other experiences.
Defining experiences, and making them repeatable, brings structure to life. It directs your energy (by limiting what you do and how you do it) and enables larger, cohesive social groups (who implicitly agree on the basics of what is acceptable in their shared experience). It is not the case that any experience has an impenetrable boundary, that it floats freely distant from any other experience or interpretation – all experiences are by necessity (neurologically) linked to the same structures that enable us to experience life itself. Therefore it is hardly surprising that people do feel a very strong need to define “what belongs” and “what doesn’t” based on small differences, because ultimately all experiences are linked.
How might this be used in a modern context? Socially, the thought leaders are in a place where they are more aware of relativism in values, and the arbitrary nature of our indoctrination, than ever before. As this dissolves our social norms (by making it acceptable for individuals to define their own life experiences, and recruit others to come with them) it generates enormous uncertainty, and destroys many of the basic social assumptions which people either do need, or believe they need.
This is where Active Politics is called for, to find new social structures which can work and which are sustainable. To reassess whether any shared beliefs/assumptions must be held sacred and immutable (by means of force and imprisonment) and if so, what they are.
The current system evolves piecemeal (as individual occurances within an abstract anti-repressive liberal framework falsify existing social or legal constraints as repressive), but one of the largest catastrophic collisions which this will not defuse can be seen between the followers of religion (as preservers of the local society group identity) and the followers of science (as the pioneers of the individual identity).
Biologically, it seems that (as Maslow pointed out) we need a bit of both. The group is our foundation, but without individual fulfillment, the human suffers under tyranny and in misery.
It is possible, given our knowledge of psychology, sociology, and the anthropology of religious and artistic practice, to assemble structures on a scientific basis which rapidly train/indoctrinate people into particular experiences. In an open society they would be free to choose, and to leave, to experiment with the alternative experiences – as they increasingly are now.
In that sense, this is nothing new, but I am interested in whether it would be possible to establish a bridge between the sciences and religion, which removes the inaccuracy of myth and dogma, but recreates the essential positive elements of *religious experience* which serve to make life both tolerable and enjoyable, within a scientific context.
In this sense, the scientific context simply means moving people on towards a current understanding of the world. However, it also means a context where *nothing* is regarded as absolute truth, where dogma should be actively resisted as one of its central tenants. It is also a context in which we should *not* loose the spiritual, and social experiences which make life wonderful. Partly these have been lost in the enlightenment, made subservient to the three pillars of economic, scientific and bureaucratic power – perhaps because (being embedded in the religious paradigm) it was not possible to extract the dogma from the underlying experience and recognise how important it is.
Too much technology is not healthy
One day a week should be a day off. No cars other than emergency services, telephone charges increased by a factor of 100, internet bandwidth throttled to a 28k modem. It’s the only way for make sure people remember they also live in a physical world surrounded by neighbours. That this sounds like extremist nonsense shows just how far we’ve fallen into a world of technology where it feels like the events around us belong to a tv show rather than to the visceral reality in which we exist. The empire of mankind is corrupting its own mind.
See : http://failblog.org/2010/11/18/epic-fail-photos-crowd-reactions-fail/