Welcome to the Orwellian Nightmare and Worse

 Tribune 10 January 2014


Anniversaries are the base for many a column, and surely 30 years after 1984, the world’s most memorable dystopia is a solid foundation for this one. Orwell derived many of the ideas for Nineteen Eighty-Four from his observations of wartime London and the geopolitics of the Second World War. This year is also the 70th anniversary of 1944, a turning point of war which provided fodder for many of the essays of Tribune’s most illustrious literary contributor. There were unlikely to be any memory holes in Tribune’s office, but he certainly saw the equivalent in the BBC where he worked, and while Tribune could not run to a canteen, the Beeb’s seems to have “inspired” him with the colour (grey) for the Ministry of Truth’s equivalent, as did the University of London’s brutalist Senate Tower looming over Bloomsbury in which he located the Ministry.
Orwell saw how prototype technologies could be applied to tyranny. The ominous potential of helicopters was later demonstrated in places such as Chile, Vietnam and Afghanistan. In many parts of the world, drones drop their bomb loads with enough frequency of inaccuracy to be almost random, like the rockets that hit Airstrip One – and Orwell’s wartime London. He noted that newspapers did not report the V1 hits then. If alive now, he might notice that their contemporary equivalents go almost as unreported in the country that sends them.
The ubiquity of remote cameras and concealed microphones on the British streetscape has now been surpassed by the National Security Agency and its British comrades in scrutiny, whose surveillance exceeds the most fevered dreams of the Thought Police. And Fox News, with its braying 24 hours of hate, makes Big Brother’s two-minute hate sessions as inconsequential as quinquennial party political broadcasts.
It was perhaps a singular omission on Orwell’s part to miss water boarding from the repertoire of Room 101, but then maybe it was illiteracy on the part of the American torturers that they had not read Orwell and so missed out on the rat thing. But one supposes that setting dogs to lunge at named prisoners is almost as ghoulishly imaginative.
However, a successful dystopia conveys an atmosphere, a pervasive miasma of discomfort and fear, rather than a technological blueprint for the future, and none does as well as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sadly, it is that aspect which Orwell got so right.
It has now become almost thoughtcrime to voice the self-evident truths that between the end of the Second World War and the advent of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher gave the West in general and even the United States the highest rate of economic growth and general prosperity in history. Although far from perfect, governmental involvement in economic planning, engineered equalisation of earnings, the rich paying proportionately more taxes, public provision of social goods, culture, health, education, even power and transport. Now, across the West, mesmerised elites ignore the results of this massive real time experiment, in which redistributive policies led to increasing prosperity for the majority for a quarter of a century.
That was when refugees from the McCarthy purges could come to Britain and continue to work and write, and a little later Harold Wilson could keep Britain out of the Vietnam War. Now the draft dodgers and witch hunt victims would probably be lucky to be extradited back to the US, but equally likely to be “renditioned” to torturers in regimes until recently expedient allies but now tyrants whom, of course, we now have always opposed.
Since Tony Blair went into Iraq in pursuit of an abstraction – international terrorism that was not there, and ignored the popular vote for an end to Thatcherism, the state of Airstrip One makes one almost long for the halcyon days of the 1960s. That Labour victory was a huge opportunity to exorcise the immiserating ghosts of Gradgrind from our political discourse.
It would have Orwell coughing and spluttering in his English churchyard to see how his dystopia has come so close to realisation, while the society that he critically supported at its inception with the Labour victory has, in retrospect, become almost utopian.
Happy 1984 + 30.

The Curse of Canonization

 pub 8 December, Huffington Post.

When Nelson "Madiba" Mandela came to New York the first time we met, he exuded charisma combined with a rare modesty. He chuckled when I told him that he was responsible for my current career path, since a group of us were suspended and expelled from Liverpool University for occupying the Senate House in protest against the university's investments in South Africa. It was indeed edifying to be, in no matter how small a way, a comrade in arms of such a palpably heroic figure.
However, my skin crawled as I listened to the portentous yet vacuous platitudes that surrounded the announcement of his death. Once dead and canonized, our heroes' real lives fly out the window. Neither the media nor the public have time for feet of clay at the opposite end from the shimmering halo round the head. This cartoonish "goodies and baddies" view of the world is an understandable human foible, but it does become creepy when politicians and other public figures try to usurp the benign energy of those whom they would have had reviled, imprisoned, or even killed while they were alive.
British politicians revered Gandhi, after fighting his struggle for independence and locking him up. People speak unctuously of his passive resistance without mentioning that it was the British government, not least the equally revered Winston Churchill, whom he was resisting, who interned him during the war against fascism.
In the U.S. those who fought most bitterly against the socialist, anti-Vietnam subversive strike leader Martin Luther King once had nightmares but now, wow, they too have a dream. They even overlook King's philandering, just as they tend to forget that we know about his affairs because the genuinely reptilianly evil Edgar J Hoover was on his case.
Mandela's eulogies and epitaphs highlight what an awful curse it is to be canonized! You give your life for a cause, and then find your life distorted, rewritten and usurped to support people and causes that you reviled.
He was a charismatic, charming, humble, inclusive and forgiving leader who was prepared to embrace the former enemy and bring peace and progress. But forgiveness should not be confused with forgetfulness. He might even have been somewhat too forgiving of the behavior of his friends Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi at home. But gratitude is a virtue no less than courage, and being locked up for decades and oppressed for a lifetime surely enhances ones appreciation of those who supported you. It could equally incline you to doubt the moral authority of regimes like Washington's that puts you on a terrorism watch list.
Landing in Washington at an airport named after Ronald Reagan could easily make anyone question the good faith of a country that canonizes the president who crashed the economy, unwound the New Deal, traded with Iran to back the Contras and backed the Apartheid regime to the hilt.
The media eulogized the saintly Mandela, and imbued him retrospectively with an absolute commitment to non-violence, but it could not be farther from the truth. The Liberation leader did indeed advocate respect for the results of elections -- once the oppressed had been enfranchised, but he was actually the leader of an armed resistance group whose mandate was to force those elections upon the minority. Mandela's commitment to the Palestinians, like that of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is rarely mentioned by the usual suspects because they cannily appreciate that any mud they throw at such towering figures is more likely to splash back at them, and more likely to bring attention to his views. All those commentators intoning platitudes about Nelson Mandela would be the first to join the ritual stoning of and casting out as "anti-Israel" any African American politician who had the temerity to support international law in the Middle East.
In that sense, Saint Madiba was indeed anti-Israel, and perhaps one reason that no one called him on it is that in doing so it might have brought up issues which are considered best buried. Mandela knew that Israel broke international sanctions on Apartheid, was the main conduit for laundering and cutting blood diamonds from South Africa and armed the regime there -- right up to an including nuclear weaponry.
Mandela was a giant of a statesman, whose passing leaves us with pigmies at the helm of most countries. But when someone dies after giving a lifetime to humanity, we should at least pay them the respect of addressing what they said, even if we disagree with them.

 

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Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776 by Williams, Ian published by Nation Books Hardcover

The Alms Trade: Charities, Past, Present and Future
by Ian Williams

 

 

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Stating the Case.

Speculator Column, IR magazine

  4 Jun 2013 Ian Williams

Finding chinks in the armor of the Iron Lady’s legacy 

Margaret Thatcher’s death in April revived discussion of state ownership of industries. The New York Times always described Mrs T as ‘the prime minister who privatized the loss-making state industries’. In reality, she was careful to sell only those that were very profitable, otherwise her friends in the City would not have been so eager to snap them up.

That well-known Bolshevik Winston Churchill nationalized BP, which was making untold millions for the Treasury by the time Mrs T sold it. The utilities that were privatized were no more efficient after the event than before, and usually inflicted much higher charges on their captive customers.

The same management teams that had led the state enterprises kept their desks but tended to pay themselves much more, despite mediocre results. In the modern version of shareholder capitalism, they escaped the political scrutiny of both parliament and citizenry and swapped it for the benign insouciance of money managers.

It’s true that in some countries state industries were channels of patronage and corruption, but the industries Thatcher sold were not among them. They did have strong unions, but for most of the post-war period those unions co-operated in productivity measures and closures, as well as huge reductions in employees. Industries like British Rail lost three quarters of their workers under state control, and these workers tended to be low paid anyway, as governments used them to hold down pay rates and allegedly control inflation.

If the British state industries had a fault, it was not inherent in their form of ownership, but rather that the permanent government of Treasury civil servants starved them of investment, and thus productivity, in order to reduce the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR). The PSBR was, and is, an irrelevant shibboleth, as if there were no difference between borrowing to finance investment and selling bonds to finance day-to-day government operations. Indeed, that was one of the stated reasons for privatizing British Telecom: bringing the antiquated telephone network up to date would have needed huge amounts of public investment.

Thanks to Mrs T, in the 1980s, competing parallel universes to the left and the right called for the nationalization of strategic industries, or liberating business from the ‘tyranny of the state’. Both were, and are, utterly detached from reality, as indeed is much of the discussion now.

In the real world, the governments of countries like Singapore, Norway or other oil states now hold huge stakes in British and American industry, without any diminution of business efficiency. Wall Street travels to work on the public-owned MTA and PATH trains and, in between glasses of Champagne, drinks water supplied by New York City. The Street lacked enthusiasm to invest in a 50-year water tunnel building program, but it is not reticent in its acceptance of Uncle Sam’s cash in times of crisis, as long as it comes untrammeled by ownership and control.

Back in Britain, one of Mrs T’s successes was the privatization of the Trustee Savings Bank, until the courts ruled it was owned by its clients, not the government. The proceeds of the sale to Lloyds had to be returned to those clients.

But these models can be Procrustean. If a state enterprise makes money it is either sold or milked to make it fit the privatizers’ paradigm. Now that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are making money for the US Treasury, we can be sure calls to sell them will follow – and soon. The US Postal Service (USPS) made money until ideological Congressmen forced it to prefund its employee health plans for 75 years, to pave the way for privatization.

One potential beneficiary of USPS dismemberment would be DHL – owned by the state-owned German Postal Service! There may be a rationale here, but it got lost in the mail somewhere.

Driving Performance

- a conservative conspiracy in Detroit
My latest "Speculator Column" from
Investor Relations magazine

The New Year is not just a time for making Resolutions on the lines "Aggh, I'll never mix rum and champagne again." It is also a time to look back so that we can inform our future through the lessons of the past.

As the old year shuffled off two of the free market's biggest proponents resurfaced when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher praised her recently dead chum Augusto Pinochet, self appointed President of Chile.

These two were of course the grand panjandrums of privatization, Pinochet famously privatized the Chilean pension system and Thatcher, in the oft-repeated erroneous words of the New York Times, "privatized the loss making state industries."
But Pinochet's military and police resolutely refused to have their own pension schemes privatized, which, since they were running the country which could have been taken as a wink and nudge by the wise. And most of the state owned industries that Thatcher sold were making huge profits, which is why everyone was so eager to buy them. In those days, BP, originally nationalized by that firebrand socialist Winston Churchill, not only made big money for the British Treasury, it did so without blowing up Texas and leaking on Alaska.

The afterlives of the biggest projects of Thatcher and Pinochet also returned for a quick haunt at the end of the year.

First, the New York Times had an editorial warning that the Chile's pension schemes were facing disaster, because half or more of them could not promise their prospective pensioners even the minimum living standards.

Across the Atlantic, the UK's staunchly conservative Daily Telegraph lamented how business investment in Britain was at risk because of the poor state of British utilities: electricity, gas, telephone and water connections were inefficient, businessmen complained. The Telegraph did not mention that these were the first industries that Mrs T had privatized, nor that they were now celebrating their first quarter century of profit-taking lack of infrastructural investment.

But she was never the free market ideologue that was claimed. Rather she was a ruthless and accomplished politician who was trying to lock in her party's victory. By selling deeply discounted shares in state industries to consumers, and selling off municipal housing to its tenants, she raised a pot of capital that let her hold off on tax increases-and, she hoped, created a whole constituency of anti-socialist working class voters.

Selling off the state industries was a move to break the power of the unions, because, not only were they a source of opposition, which she never took kindly to, but because they bankrolled the Labour Party, which she wanted to cripple.

Of course, in the US, the strongest unions in the private sector are the autoworkers, who fund the Democrats. One can only speculate, but is it possible that long term GOP coddling of the big three in Detroit has a similar agenda inspired by Thatcher's example?

By giving huge tax breaks to Detroit to build gas-guzzling SUV's, they have been locked immovably into heavy capital investment in truck-beds that have all the commercial future of a dinosaur squinting at a plummeting meteor. Any analyst can see where fuel prices were going, but Congress has held back on any stringent MPG restrictions. Foreign car makers, where the unions do not have a stranglehold, are coming into the US and making smaller, more efficient and sellable vehicles.

Could the misguiding coddling of Detroit be intended to lead to the US auto industry to auto destruct, taking with it the UAW funding for the Democrats?

Not for reproduction without permission from Cross Border Publications