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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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The Biggest Jailbreak in History
By
John Maxwell
On
Tuesday, January 29, it will be exactly six months since
I established a folder on my computer titled “The Crash
of 2007”.
Tuesday January 29 will also be the 56th anniversary of
my entry into what I thought was the honourable
profession of journalism. These days many journalists
ask themselves whether what they practice is a
profession; whether what they do is honourable and even
whether it constitutes journalism.
As
disaster approaches we wonder why the global media don’t
seem to notice.
As
the so-called Thatcherite-Reaganite revolution
cartwheels its ungainly, calamitous and soul-destroying
progress towards implosion and self-destruction, many
of us are too mesmerised by the gargantuan awfulness of
it all to look at anything but the accompanying
economic and financial mayhem.
But there is lots more not so obvious.
In
Iraq at this moment, the major evidence of humanity’s
eight millennia of civilisation is being looted and sold
off to ‘investors’ who have more faith in the artefacts
of Nebuchednezzar’s peasants than in all the oil wells
of George Bush. As well they might. As we sang in the
late sixties: “Everything Crash!”
As
Field Marshal (ret’d) Rumsfeld will tell you again,
“Stuff happens!”
Move on! Get over it!
What is happening is so enormous, so transcendental that
we can no more see it than we can see the rotation of
the Earth.
But there are many people, neither prophets nor even
experts, who for a long time have been feeling in their
bones that something untoward is underway, rather as
they say cats and dogs can sense seismic disturbances
before earthquakes shake us up and destroy our cosy
domesticity and often our lives. Even people like me,
who thought they were feeling the precursor tremors, are
probably just as scared and apprehensive as anyone else.
Worse yet, while we can vividly imagine what may happen,
most people don’t get really frightened until their own
houses start to do the tango.
I’ve been watching for a long time as the invisible hand
of capitalism attempted even more daring feats of
prestidigitation; as the managers seized control from
the shareholders and the corporate system abandoned any
idea of public responsibility or accountability, as jobs
and the people in them, were ruthlessly discarded and
production was outsourced to slave societies—oops- ‘more
cost effective countries’—and the American capitalist
forgot what the trade unions had been trying to tell
them before they were emasculated: The money paid to
American workers is what fuels American production. But
the Enrons and the Exxons have never been interested.
The idea was to make as much money as possible as fast
as possible and to hell with the workers.
A
declining workforce still being paid at the equivalent
of 1975 wages could obviously not support the enormous
superstructure of speculation, competitive consumption,
greed and waste into which American capitalism has
transformed itself. If the workers couldn’t afford to
support the economy out of their wages or savings, their
masters could always borrow European or Japanese or
Chinese money to lend the workers and allow them to
borrow more, paying ever higher rates of interest,
running faster on the treadmill and losing ground, and
the whole elaborate Ponzi scheme would go on and on
until the second coming of Ayn Rand.
Multi billionaires like George Soros who spoke of
‘gangster capitalism’ and Warren Buffet, who spoke of
the unfairness of the system were ignored: perhaps they
were just envious of how fast the new Lords of the Earth
could make money and didn’t really understand modern
capitalism.
What American capitalism has accomplished would have
confounded Adam Smith and astonished even Karl Marx: it
destroyed its own working class.
For the new-rich, capitalism was a no-risk game where
governments had a duty to come to the rescue of those
involved in unfortunate accidents, like Enron or the
sub-prime mortgage debacle. Mr Alan Greenspan who keeps
Ayn Rand at his bedside, had always delivered when
necessary, despite a schoolmasterish tendency to
vaguely deplore the ‘animal spirits’ and other juvenile
delinquencies of his billionaire charges.
The problem of course, was that there were too many
balls in the air and little or no certitude about how
many capitalists could dance on the head of a peon. Ayn
Rand, from beyond the grave, advised self-love and
selfishness as the only virtues.
Margaret Thatcher did say ‘There is no such thing as
Society”—expressing the Rand philosophy even more
succinctly than Miss Rand herself. This pithy aphorism
was then swallowed by various dummies all over the
world. In the United States the explicit application of
that principle has wiped out a significant proportion of
the savings accumulated by African Americans over the
last 50 years or so. And though it is blacks who are
most critically affected, whites, Hispanics, and what is
left of the working class are all condemned to fulfill
the bizarre prediction in the gospel according to
Matthew:
“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall
have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him
shall be taken away even that he hath”. I’ve always
considered that verse to perfectly represent capitalism.
The legacy of the Thatcherite-Reaganite counter
revolution is not simply economic and social catastrophe
but structural unsustainability in every dimension
Though the Reagan/Thatchers did not believe in society
their commonplace lunacies such as the deregulation of
aviation and Reagan's firing air traffic controllers –
worked because of human altruism and the
self-sacrifice of the victimised. They privatisated
essential services—disregarding the fact that they would
be run by the same people. According to them these
people would suddenly become more efficient, since there
was a profit involved. They ignored the probability of
corruption, corner cutting, destruction of social
capital and decreases in the indices of civilised
existence.
Thatcher and Reagan were not the causes of global
warming or of any of the dire curses that attend us;
they simply made it much harder for us to act quickly
effectively and responsibly. The practical, pragmatic
guys who ‘make things happen’ too often produce
developments that depend on destroying the environment,
maximising their profits and stealing environmental
goods from the rest of us.
We’ve lost the 21 square miles of Kingston Harbour to
sewage, solid waste, to assorted manufacturers and to
the Port Authority
Do
you hear any of them offering to replace what they have
stolen?
Of
course, when the beach sand goes and when the jellyfish
swarm the beaches stinging and scaring our visitors,
guess who will be asked to find the money to fix the
problems?
The biggest jailbreak in history
Ayn Rand would have approved of Israel’s latest
initiative in Gaza. To punish the unruly Palestinians,
Israel with the approval of the West, imposed a blockade
which quickly shut down municipal services, food
supplies, and emergency rooms. As someone (not Margaret
Thatcher) once said “The prospect of being hanged
concentrates the mind wonderfully” but what if the mind
belongs to babies on a respirator who will die when the
last generator runs out of fuel?
If
Mugabe or Milosevich had done what the Israelis have
done (and not for the first time) there would have been
outraged howls from the State Department and other
chancelleries of the civilised world, condemning
barbaric, primitive inhuman behaviour. What happens to
Palestinians or Haitians is not the concern of the
cognitive elite of the world. Haitians and Palestinians
live in law-free zones where human rights should not
interfere with effective governance. And Condoleezza
Rice, George Bush and the governments of the North
Atlantic community approve of Israel’s turning Gaza
into a concentration camp. Their motive: to convince
the Palestinians that they were wrong to choose as their
government the Hamas party. The Fatah party, once led by
Yasser Arafat, was judged wanting by the Palestinians
who voted for the much more radical Hamas. Fatah, once
into hijacking planes and reviled as a terrorist
organisation, became the darling of the West after the
death of Arafat.
Hamas and Israel share the same basic prejudices. Hamas
refuses to recognise Israel’s statehood; Israel refuses
to recognise Palestinians right to their own country.
Normally the Hamas opposition is expressed as if it
meant the extermination of the Israelis. The last
Intifada was sparked by Israeli retaliation for the
assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister who
advocated exterminating the Palestinians or at the
minimum, expelling them from Palestine.
The Europeans, atoning for Hitler's attempt to
exterminate the Jews, have consistently backed the
Israeli contention that the Jews of the world deserve a
homeland and that homeland should be the territory of
Palestine (land of the Philistines/Falastin).
For the last 70 years, those Palestinians not expelled
by Israel have lived in smaller and smaller reservations
in their own homeland with Israel continuing to install
‘facts on the ground’—Israeli owned housing scheme on
Palestinian owned land.
A
map of Palestine (if the western media would print one)
would show Palestine looking rather like a chocolate
chip cookie, with Israeli settlements represented by the
chocolate chips. Palestine is essentially split into two
non-viable tribal reservations, the West Bank (of the
Jordan River) including Jerusalem and a slim sliver of
land on the Mediterranean—the Gaza Strip.
Unlike the Haitians, the Palestinians are recognised by
the United Nations as refugees in their own land and
have been so since 1948. Hamas two years ago won the
electoral loyalty of the majority of Palestinians.
Israel and her western allies decided that democracy was
fine for Gaza, but, that, as in Haiti, you can vote for
anyone you choose as long as it’s our surrogate—the
Henry Ford principle.
The Israelis try to control the Palestinians by a
variety of means, incursions by the Israeli army in
which Palestinians including children, women and other
innocents are ‘unfortunately’ killed; and by other means
such as pre-dawn runs by Israeli aircraft generating
sonic booms which terrify children and drive adults
crazy.
The Gazans retaliate by firing primitive rockets into
Israeli settlements (built on Palestinian land) and by
suicide bomb attacks—although, mercifully, there haven’t
been any for some time.
The situation is dangerous, crazy and unjust for
everybody. The latest clampdown on Gaza was forcing
people into starvation, putting children and sick people
at dangerous risk and imposing generally inhuman
punishment on the entire population for the sins of the
rocket launching radicals. The Gazans were penned into
this prison by an Israeli-built analogue of the Berlin
Wall, a 26 ft./8 meter high concrete and steel barrier.
The Hamas government of Gaza last week decided to create
its own facts, in the words of one of its leaders. Its
sappers and heavy equipment drivers knocked down the
massive wall and nearly half a million Gazans streamed
out into Egypt on the first day. For some it was their
first time out of the Gaza prison/concentration camp in
their entire lives
The difference in perceptions is vast. TIME,
Newsweek, CNN and other US media treated the
breakout as if they were reporting the annual Spring
merchandise sales in the US.
To
describe the desperate scramble of people seeking baby
food and basic necessities in Egyptian shops across the
border, TIME said: It took explosives to do what
diplomacy couldn't: allow Palestinians to go on a
shopping spree—Newsweek and CNN evaluated the incident
in terms of a public relations disaster for Israel.
That’s what we journalists call ‘the human touch’.
The Israelis say it is up to the Egyptians to restore
the wall and the prison. The Egyptians realise that
popular opinion is with the Palestinians and everybody
realises that Palestine is the main excuse for the
existence of Al Qaeda.
What with Gaza, the imminent worldwide economic collapse
and climate change, all our lives are going to become
much more interesting very soon.
Copyright©2008 John Maxwell /
jankunnu@gmail.com
posted 26 January 2008 |
