There is a New Berlin Wall and it's called The Euro

"The whole of the Mediterranean now finds itself in the wrong currency, and yet virtually nobody in the political arena has the courage to stand up and say that. I feel that the continent is now divided from north to south. There is a new Berlin Wall and it's called the euro."

I find myself surprised to report that these incisive and insightful words were uttered recently before the European Parliament by none other than Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's far-right Euroskeptic party, UKIP - though I'm not sure the label 'far-right' is really appropriate any more. For in the charged political climate of today's Europe, it is perhaps an indication of just how acrimonious and divisive the politics of the eurozone have become - how irrational, fanatical, and hegemonic the policies of certain of its members - that Farage comes off sounding like the Voice of Reason. The eurozone seems to be in the grip of an economic neo-fascism far more extreme than anything UKIP could drum up.

I now officially count myself among the Euro-skeptics - not just with regard to currency union (that was the case before) but with regard to the EU project as a whole. I am not going to fault the UK or anyone for wanting to hold a referendum on EU membership in the future. All the worst fears about the EU, so far mostly peddled in the tabloid press - about surrendering national sovereignty and decision-making to faceless technocrats in Brussels, and EU politicians unaccountable to the people over whom they exercise enormous power - have been fully confirmed. And even worse - it would be bad enough if we were simply ruled by technocrats and bureaucrats in Brussels, but that would suggest at least a commitment to rational, data-driven policies. This is far worse. The latest rumblings over the Greek debt in Brussels - deal or no deal - suggest a political union driven by an irrational, sadistic, vindictive, fanatical and divisive neo-fascist politics of domination and hegemony, a conspiracy against the public, a conspiracy against democratic politics, led by politicians who are prepared to punish voters in a member country for their choice of government, for demanding rational economic policy, for making choices that their EU overlords dislike.



Economist Tim Worstall, writing in Forbes (hardly a lefty political rag), is more-less in line with Krugman, Stiglitz, and any number of award-winning economists: "It’s very difficult indeed to design plans for Greece that are actually worse than the one the European Union is trying to impose upon that benighted country. Decades of enforced poverty in order to maintain a currency (and possibly even a political order) that the country should never have embraced, should never have been allowed into, just isn’t one of those things that would win you a gold star in your high school economics class. Everyone from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman, with a few insignificant bag carriers like myself bringing up the rear, has been screaming that the problem is the euro and while that remains so will the problem...However, amazingly, the German finance ministry seems to have managed to come up with a plan that is even worse...As has been pointed out, those who don’t [study history] are doomed to repeat it."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times calls the Eurogroup's demands "madness...This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept…" And while Chancellor Merkel is harping on about trust, Krugman insists - "Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?...In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line...even a complete Greek capitulation would be a dead end...The European project — a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it."

Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel-winning economist, also insists that the real problem is Germany, which has benefited greatly under the euro. While he believes the eurozone should stay together, he notes that most economists (including himself) hold that "the best solution for Europe, if it's going to break up, is for Germany to leave. The mark would raise, the German economy would be dampened...and Germany would find out just how much it needs the euro to stay together...and possibly be more willing to help out the countries that are struggling...There's a whole set of an unfinished economic agenda which most economists agree on, except Germany doesn't."

"If Greece leaves," Stiglitz adds, "I think Greece will actually do better...There will be a period of adjustment. But Greece will start to grow."

Even on this side of the Atlantic, Wolfgang Munchau, associate editor of the Financial Times and former co-editor of FT Deutschland, writes that Greece's creditors "have destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union...In doing so they reverted to the nationalist European power struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. They demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order...This brings us back to a more toxic version of the old exchange-rate mechanism of the 1990s that left countries trapped in a system run primarily for the benefit of Germany, which led to the exit of the English pound and the temporary departure of the Italian lira. What was left was a coalition of countries willing to adjust their economies to Germany’s. Britain had to leave because it was not...Once you strip the eurozone of any ambitions for a political and economic union, it changes into a utilitarian project in which member states will coldly weigh the benefits and costs, just as Britain is currently assessing the relative advantages or disadvantages of EU membership. In such a system, someone, somewhere, will want to leave sometime. And the strong political commitment to save it will no longer be there either."

In fact, I have yet to read a credible, independent expert opinion that has anything positive to say about Greece's creditors and their role in this debacle. One financial analyst, Marc Ostwald of ADM Investor Services, claimed the latest deal offered by the creditors was worse than the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that crushed Weimar Germany with debt and paved the way for the second world war. The creditors, he added, seem to be trying “to completely destroy Greece”.



Even Jeffrey Sachs, one of the infamous 'shock doctors' much-maligned by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine (he is in fact credited with having coined the term 'economic shock therapy'), has effectively cast his lot with Syriza, writing that "Europe’s demands – ostensibly aimed at ensuring that Greece can service its foreign debt – are petulant, naive, and fundamentally self-destructive. In rejecting them, the Greeks are not playing games; they are trying to stay alive...The Greek government is right to have drawn the line. It has a responsibility to its citizens. The real choice, after all, lies not with Greece, but with Europe."

Already in the lead-up to Syriza's election several months ago, Sachs wrote: "The leftwing party Syriza is no anomaly; it is telling the financial and political truth in the runup to Sunday’s elections, however unpleasant that may be to politicians in Berlin and Brussels."

What is becoming increasingly clear, given the near-consensus of eminent international economists - Nobel laureates and esteemed economic thinkers all - on the utter fallacy of the Eurozone creditors' position, and the correctness of Syriza's demands, is that Syriza is really not very radical at all. As Slavoj Zizek put it in a recent article in New Statesman, "if one looks closely at the proposals offered by Syriza, one cannot help noticing that they were once part of the standard moderate social-democratic agenda (in Sweden of the 1960s, the programme of the government was much more radical). It is a sad sign of our times that today you have to belong to a 'radical' left to advocate these same measures..." The label 'radical left', as I've said before, only has meaning in a charged political context where the 'centre' has become the technocratic neo-fascism currently gripping the imaginations of many eurozone leaders. If Syriza are radical, it is only as radically rational pragmatists.

In light of all this, the account given in a recent interview by Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, of the past few months of negotiations, makes a lot of sense:

...[T]he inside information one gets...to have your worst fears confirmed...To have “the powers that be” speak to you directly, and it be as you feared – the situation was worse than you imagined! the complete lack of any democratic scruples, on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe’s democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically...To have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say "You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway."

It’s not that it didn’t go down well – it’s that there was point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments. Point blank...You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on – to make sure it’s logically coherent – and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken.

Schäuble was consistent throughout. His view was "I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything..." So at that point I had to get up and say "Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries," and there was no answer.

My constant proposal to the Troika was very simple: let us agree on three or four important reforms that we agree upon, like the tax system, like VAT, and let’s implement them immediately. And you relax the restrictions on liqiuidity from the ECB. You want a comprehensive agreement – let’s carry on negotiating – and in the meantime let us introduce these reforms in parliament by agreement between us and you...And they said "No, no, no, this has to be a comprehensive review. Nothing will be implemented if you dare introduce any legislation. It will be considered unilateral action inimical to the process of reaching an agreement." And then of course a few months later they would leak to the media that we had not reformed the country and that we were wasting time! And so... [chuckles] we were set up, in a sense, in an important sense.



The palpable hysteria with which European elites met Syriza's mere election a few months ago, with talk of markets tumbling and predictions of general mayhem, is reminiscent of C.P. Cavafy's famous poem, 'Waiting for the Barbarians', in which he describes a 'civilized' society in decline, preparing for an imminent invasion by barbarians who never, in the end, turn up - and ends with these lines:

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

The eurogroup's disappointment with and consequent resentment of Syriza amounts precisely to this - Syriza are the barbarians who never materialized, who turned out to be in fact the rational, pragmatic and moderate antidote to the irrational, German-led neo-fascist economic extremism driving the poorer European economies into debt servitude - Syriza made them look bad, simply put. Syriza as extremist barbarians would have been 'a kind of solution' - they would have justified harsh measures, in the eyes of creditors. When Chancellor Merkel talks about 'trust', this is probably what she is getting at, or where these sentiments come from. As some commentators have pointed out, the Germans have shown themselves to be less trustworthy than anyone - but they are nonetheless fanatically, obsessively, hysterically convinced that behind these rational, pragmatic moderates in Syriza, the barbarians still lurk, in wait.



What is also clear is that, even if Syriza has lost the political battle - for now - it has clearly won the rational argument. The forces of Reason and Rational Economic Policy are clearly on its side. And the development of science, even economic science, isn't subject to socio-political fluctuations, market movements, and special interests quite as much as the political field is.

During negotiations in Brussels yesterday, it emerged that one of the creditors' demands (specifically a German idea), as a condition of the Greek bailout, was to transfer 50 billion euros of 'valuable Greek assets' as collateral to a shady Luxembourg-based 'Institution for Growth'. This entity, as later reported, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of German KfW, chaired by none other than Germany's finance minister Wolfgang Schauble. Quite apart from the cronyism and conflicts of interest - this, dear reader, is tantamount to me giving you a loan to help you repay your debts, but in return demanding that you, say, sign over the mortgage on your house to me as collateral - which in the long run makes you poorer, as you are giving up an asset that will appreciate in value, and less likely to be able to repay your debts, including your debts to me. This is just another example of how fantastically stupid the austerity regime imposed on Greece for the past 5 years has been, and goes a long way in explaining why economists around the world are railing against it. Even if this idea was watered down in the latest form of the agreement - the assets now will be transferred to an entity based in Athens - the principle is the same: the Greek government is somehow expected to achieve major budget surpluses while at the same time making itself poorer in the long run (by selling off assets), and growing the economy, and repaying its debts, and making those debts more sustainable.



As for the cronyism and conflicts of interest in the suggested version of the plan, we should remember that Schauble, Germany's finance minister and chief EU moralizer in the Greece debt crisis, resigned from office as party chairman back in 2000 due to his role at the centre of a massive corruption scandal in Germany involving illegal campaign financing and "a labyrinthine network of secret slush funds fed by millions of Deutsche marks in undeclared - and therefore illegal - campaign contributions." Schauble, by his own admission "personally ran the slush-fund system during his 25 years as party chairman...At first the chairman insisted that he had only briefly met Karlheinz Schreiber, the fugitive weapons dealer who regularly handed bags of cash to CDU officials. Then last month Schauble was forced to admit that he had personally accepted a 100,000 Deutsche mark donation from Schreiber - in cash."

Well, I guess that makes it kind of easy to stay solvent and lecture others about financial responsibility, when you get regularly handed personal 'donations' of millions in cash by dodgy weapons dealers on the run from the law. And then, to have the cheek to talk about 'trust'…With this in mind, I suspect that Schauble hates Syriza so much precisely because they have no links to previous Greek governments, to the corrupt political elites with whom he did deals in the past and who, like him, had a penchant for failing to declare moneys (received or spent), which ultimately led to their demise, and the demise of the Greek economy once Wall Street imploded. Schauble, in other words, prefers to deal with corrupt neo-fascist stooges like himself. With his wheelchair and irrational intransigence that leads to disaster, he actually seems a great fit for the role of latent Nazi Dr Strangelove, director of weapons research and development in Kubrick's epic film - a man willing to risk everything, including the fate of the world, for the sake of his own misguided intellectual obsessions...



In the Guardian's reporting on the talks in Brussels last night, there was mention that the Eurogroup, among other things, wants "rigorous review of collective bargaining" - as if collective bargaining rights and unions caused the financial crisis, not corrupt banks propped up by the same corrupt politicians who are now trying to get rid of Greece's first non-corrupt government in at least a decade. Nice try. This clearly has nothing to do with constructive, rational economic policy. In negotiations described by one senior EU official as an "exercise in extensive mental waterboarding" of the Greeks (for those unaware this is a form of torture favoured by CIA interrogators), the new terms reached "are much stiffer than those imposed by the creditors over the past five years." This, said the senior official, was payback for the emphatic no to the creditors’ terms delivered in the Greek referendum last week. “He was warned a yes vote would get better terms, that a no vote would be much harder,” said the senior official.

Greece, in other words, is being collectively punished for voting 'no' in the referendum. Quite literally - punished. This really is terrorism, as former Greek finance minister Varoufakis put it. According to the BBC's Paul Mason, "in Greece large numbers of people – on all sides of politics – believe the Europeans are trying to force the elected government to resign before a deal is concluded." I'd say that's been pretty clear for a while now.

So here's hoping that the Greeks will have the courage to resist, and perhaps take the plunge out of the euro zone themselves. There are some signs of fierce opposition to the latest deal from within Syriza itself, not least the President of Parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, who delivered these blistering words to Greek legislators yesterday:

After the Second World War, Germany enjoyed the greatest remission of debt [in history], so as to allow it to get back on track. This was done with the generous partnership of Greece...And yet Germany is behaving as if history and the Greek people owe a debt to her, as if she expects to receive a historic payback for her own atrocities…

The artificial and deliberate creation of conditions of humanitarian disaster so as to keep the people and the government in conditions of suffocation and under the threat of a chaotic bankruptcy constitutes a direct violation of all international human rights protection treaties, including the Charter of the United Nations, the European treaties, and even the statutes of the International Criminal Court. Blackmail is not legal. And those who create conditions that eliminate freedom of the will may not speak of "options." The lenders are blackmailing the government. They are acting fraudulently, since they have known since 2010 that this debt is unsustainable. They are acting consciously, since their statements anticipate the need for humanitarian aid in Greece. Humanitarian assistance for what? For an unexpected and inadvertent natural disaster? Is it an unpredictable earthquake, flooding, a fire?

No.

Humanitarian aid [would be required] because of their conscious and calculated choice to deprive the people of the means of survival, closing the tap of liquidity in retaliation for the democratic choice of the government and the parliament to call a referendum and to turn to the people to decide their own future...

NO to blackmail

NO to ultimatums

NO to the Memoranda of servitude

NO to the repayment of a debt they did not create and that is not attributable to them

NO to new measures of impoverishment and exhaustion

. . .

It is important to keep reminding ourselves in all this that the global financial crisis that started in 2007-08, and which reverberates to this day in Greece, at its root has nothing to do with 'lazy Greeks' or the welfare state (as Paul Krugman pointed out many times) or poor people living beyond their means, and very little to do with Greece - it is the direct result of catastrophic incompetence, greed and corruption among top executives in the biggest banks in the richest country in the world - the United States - who were bailed out unconditionally with funds many times greater than the money merely funneled through Greece (and back to foreign banks in the form of loan payments). Some of the reasons why Greece is suffering to this day:

• In a global financial crisis, the weakest economies are hit hardest (especially in a common currency zone, which goes back to the argument why Greece should never have joined the euro);
• Years of mismanagement by previous Greek governments (i.e. hiding their debts), made up of the same corrupt politicians favoured and propped-up for years by equally corrupt foreign (mainly French and German) banks, and today supported by corrupt Eurozone and Troika officials who want to get rid of Syriza; they were effectively hiding structural weaknesses in the Greek economy which were exposed when global financial markets slid into recession;
• Failure by Troika and Eurozone officials to acknowledge their failures and follow rational economic policy in relation to Greece, making the crisis there far worse through austerity measures that led to record unemployment levels and even deeper recession since 2010…

As one commentator notes in the Washington Post, "This latest melodrama playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe."

I would even go so far as to say, we have here an entire currency union run by a cabal of incompetent, sadistic, fanatical neo-fascist buffoons and stooges - instead of obsessing about cutting Greek pensions, these people should be pensioned off and locked up in a care home somewhere where their senile babble will be muffled behind sound-proof doors instead of shaping policies that affect millions of people.




I have coined a new word: Oxi-mandias. In reference to the Greek 'Oxi' in the referendum, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' - this is the impending fate of the European project, so long as it remains in the hands of its current fanatical, irrational, neo-fascist architects:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Or, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The "tide in the affairs of men" does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: "Too late."

When asked about the Versailles analogy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded: “I never make historical comparisons.”

How ironic, cynical, and loaded a statement for a German head of state to make. As Louis Armstrong 'Satchmo' put it, "Denial ain't nothin' but a river in Egypt." And indeed, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If Karl Marx is to be believed - that history repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce" - this one could well end in tragedy. A Greek, or Greco-German tragedy, no less.

Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Only 'Slightly Fundamentally Wrong'

In the wake of the Boston bombings this summer, it is worth remembering that such massacres, and even worse, are a regular occurrence in places like Iraq or Syria. The Syrian rebels themselves drove the point home, expressing condolences to the Boston victims through a touching banner displayed at a protest in the city of Kafranbel:



A group of Bostonians replied with their own banner:



The beauty of these reciprocal gestures is that despite the apparent incongruity, neither minimizes the other's tragedy. They contextualize one another in a way that transcends the global political game that their respective governments are involved in, authentically approaching a kind of collective intersubjectivity. To paraphrase C.G. Jung, the closer together the individuals, the weaker the state, and vice versa. This works across national boundaries, too. True communal/collective spirit is not and should never be about negating the individual, but on the contrary - it is about making the collective, and each individual within it, stronger. Individualism, as commonly understood in the sense of 'each man for himself' - weakens and alienates us, isolating and exposing each individual to the whims of state authority.

This Syria-Boston exchange of solidarity is not an isolated instance, either - during the Egyptian protests against Mubarak, while the people of Wisconsin were in the streets protesting against Governor Walker's all-out assault on unions, there were reports of Egyptian protesters holding signs in solidarity with Wisconsin. And it is not far-fetched to imagine that the domino effect that may have played a role in the 'Arab Spring' uprisings goes well beyond the Arab world, as discontent with governments worldwide grows and protest movements are spawned, from Spain to Greece to Turkey, Brazil, Israel, just to name a few of the bigger ones.

Vladimir Putin may be a total crony proto-fascist, but it's always amusing to see crony politicians/states calling out one another over each other's doublespeak. In particular, this: “I was always appalled when our western partners and the western media called the terrorist, who did bloody crimes in our country, ‘insurgents’, and almost never ‘terrorists’,” Putin explained, in reference to the fact that Russian authorities had alerted US authorities to Tamerlan Tsarnaev's activities and links to fundamentalist groups, long before the Boston bombings.

This reminds me of the film 'Good Kurd, Bad Kurd' - which explores the baffling incongruity of the Kurds in Turkey being on the CIA list of terrorist organizations (Turkey is a NATO ally), while the Iraqi Kurds are 'freedom fighters', even though they are both part of the same national liberation movement and fighting for the same thing.

It would be trite to criticize the US media for devoting more coverage to a tragedy closer to home - however another incongruity is worth noting. On the heels of the Boston bombings, two days later in fact, an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, claimed far more casualties - at least 15 killed and more than 160 injured, with more than 150 buildings damaged or destroyed - registering as a 2.2 richter scale tremor.



According to an article in the Guardian, this is largely attributable to austerity cuts to agencies such as OSHA as part of the right's war on 'big government'. Greater reliance on self-reporting following the de-funding of government enforcement is "just one more part of a cycle that began in this country with the collapse of collective bargaining, an institution that at one point created workplace safety committees, which took the place of both expansive state regulation and whistleblowing as a means of securing safe places to work...It's no coincidence that many of the worst such incidents occur in states affected by both austerity cuts and low or declining union membership."

Indeed, OSHA had not made a site visit to the West, Texas plant since 1985, despite occasional complaints.



And yet - industrial accidents in remote, rural areas are just not sexy stuff, like terrorism. You can't make spy stories or exciting terrorist-hunting flicks like Zero Dark Thirty out of that.

So the US government pours billions of taxpayer dollars into spying on the entire world and fighting a 'terrorist' threat that, according to the FBI's own statistics, claims less lives globally every year - 12,533 in 2011, virtually none in the US - than there are gun homicides in the United States alone. (14,612 in 2011)

The threat from terrorism was never particularly significant in comparative terms, even if you take an anomaly year like 2001, and factor in the deaths on September 11. The total number of deaths from terrorism in the United States, from 1980 to 2001, including September 11? 2,993. In 2007, the highest year on record since 2001? 15,732 deaths from terrorism globally, of which only 33 Americans, 21 of those in Iraq. Tom Diaz, until recently a senior analyst at the Violence Policy Center, gives similar figures: "In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide; in that same year, in America alone, 31,672 people lost their lives in gun-related deaths." That's a global rate of 0.23 per 100,000 population for 2007 (or 0.00023%), and 0.19 per 100,000 population for 2010.(0.00019%)

By contrast, here are some interesting bullet points:

• According to OSHA, there were 4,609 fatal industrial accidents in the USA in 2011 - an improvement compared to 20 years ago, but a slight increase on 2009.  That's a rate of 1.4 per 100,000 population, about 6 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, according to the FBI's 2007 figures, and 139 times greater than the rate of Americans killed by terrorists, worldwide.
• Over 30,000 Americans die in motor vehicle accidents each year. That's 9.6 per 100,000 population, about 48 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism, and 900 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism every year.
• According to a Harvard study, over 44,789 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. That's 14.4 per 100,000 population, about 60 times greater than the global rate of deaths from terrorism. That's also an annual rate about 15 times greater than the number of Americans killed by terrorism in 2001 (the year of September 11), and 1,357 times greater than the number of American deaths from terrorism in 2007, the highest year on record since 2001. Let me rephrase that, just to make sure it sinks in - Americans die from lack of health insurance, every year, at a rate about one thousand three hundred and fifty-seven times greater than the rate at which they are killed by terrorists, worldwide. Talk about death panels.
• In summary, far more Americans die every year from any one of these causes than have died from terrorism in the 33 years since 1980. In the case of annual healthcare-related deaths, based on the Harvard study figures, about 10 times more Americans die from lack of healthcare - every year - than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the last 30+ years - according to FBI figures.

Driving a car or working in heavy industrial labour jobs in America - or for that matter, just being here, especially without health insurance - poses far greater risks than global terrorism, from a purely statistical point of view.



And it's not as if all the military/intelligence spending is what's keeping anyone safe from terrorism - on the contrary, the highest annual death toll from terrorism on record since 2001, as I mentioned, is 2007, which saw the most intense fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. These are wars started by the US, the latter as we know on completely false pretenses, and moreover fueled by an official and secret US policy of 'divide and conquer' - courtesy of one Colonel Steele, a veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America in the 1980s who was sent to Iraq precisely for the purpose of organizing paramilitary Shia militias and uniformed death squads, along with interrogation/torture centers, inciting sectarian violence. (explored in a BBC documentary, James Steele: America's Mystery Man in Iraq)  Of the 100,000+ killed in the Iraq war, at least 30,000 - according to leaked documents included in the Wikileaks Iraq war logs - were innocent civilians killed by US troops. In other words, US troops have murdered at least 6 or 7 times more innocent men, women and children in Iraq than the number of Americans killed by terrorists in the 30+ years from 1980 to today, including those killed on September 11, 2001. The United States government may still be, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."



Furthermore, deaths from terrorism worldwide, comparatively insignificant as they were to begin with, have declined since Bush left office, and since the 'war on terror' ceased to be as much of a policy priority. Which is a good reminder of Foucault's dictum on how law enforcement breeds its own monsters, where a given 'vice' - [insert "terror" or "drugs"] - "may have been designated as the evil to be eliminated, but the extraordinary effort that went into the task that was bound to fail leads one to suspect that what was demanded of it was to persevere, to proliferate to the limits of the visible and the invisible, rather than to disappear for good. Always relying on this support, power advanced, multiplied its relays and its effects, while its target expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace." (The Will to Knowledge, 42) In much the same way as Wall Street bankers are said to turn to Karl Marx for instructive tips on the functioning of the capitalist economy, this passage from Foucault easily sounds like a page from Colonel Steele's field manual.



The vast state surveillance apparatus devoted to fighting terrorism (or drugs, for that matter) is basically a bunch of grown-up kids with technology and guns living out their sick, violent fantasies, snooping on the whole world, and leaving it to the rest of us to solve the world's real problems, including the ones they create.

A quick browse through my notes on Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a good reminder that neoliberal economic policies will kill far more of us than global terrorism. They already have. Far more people die every year from the combined effects of hunger, treatable diseases, industrial accidents, pollution, malnutrition, mismanaged natural disasters, etc - or from any one of these causes - than from terrorism. In other words, from the effects of deregulation, post-colonial economic imperialism, austerity cuts, the hypocritical enforcement of patent regimes on pharmaceuticals in the developing world (see my Medicine, Ethics and Law paper on the left), and so forth. Not to mention state-sponsored violence - war, terrorism, drone strikes - which in the case of Iraq, basically comes down to one big, disastrous experiment in neoliberal/neoconservative free marketeer nation-building, given what we know of the motivations that drove the Straussian Milton-Friedmanite Chicago School devotees in the Bush administration.



So while more billions are being poured into fighting 'global terrorism' with its relatively negligible casualties worldwide, and military aid to corrupt third-world regimes, a single industrial accident this summer, the last in a series of similar accidents - the building collapse in Bangladesh - killed more than 230 sweatshop workers and left hundreds trapped under the rubble. Gotta keep those cheap goods comin'. As reported in the Guardian:

'...police ordered an evacuation of the building after deep cracks became visible in the walls, officials said. But factories based there ignored the order and kept more than 2,000 people working.

Dilara Begum, a garment worker who survived the accident, said supervisors had told them to return to work on Wednesday, saying the building had been inspected and declared safe. 

"We didn't want to go in but the supervisors threatened to dock pay if we didn't return to work."

More recently, another Guardian article reported on the deaths of dozens of Nepalese migrant workers due to brutal labour conditions in Qatar, where employers routinely confiscate workers' passports and hold back wages to keep labourers from running away. Thirty Nepalese recently took shelter in their embassy to escape working conditions:

"The overall picture is of one of the richest nations exploiting one of the poorest to get ready for the world's most popular sporting tournament."



This might, I suppose, sound ironic to someone still labouring under the illusion that wealth in capitalist societies is accumulated through hard work rather than theft, lies, luck, and plunder. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the exploitation of migrants in Qatar is not news - this has been going on for years. The difference is that the World Cup preparations have drawn the world's attention to it, and perhaps exacerbated the situation somewhat.

In a recent episode of the Colbert Report, featuring Thomas Herndon, the UMass grad student who discovered the infamous 'spreadsheet error' in Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt's highly influential pro-austerity paper (incidentally, Herndon did his undergraduate study at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where I live), Stephen Colbert eloquently and cheekily summed up the twisted logic of austerity: "we need to keep cutting the government budget, and keep laying people off until those people get jobs."


And the schtick goes on: "an academic paper by Harvard economists Rogoff and Reinhart, that fiscal conservatives worldwide used to argue for austerity, was recently refuted by a UMass grad student just because it had a few simple spreadsheet errors, and a couple of little staggering omissions, that made it slightly fundamentally wrong."

That's right. Only slightly fundamentally wrong. We don't need to worry about getting the numbers right - about the industrial accidents, gun homicides, car accidents, lack of access to healthcare, the economic stupidity of suicidal austerity cuts, corporate welfare, bank bailouts, foreclosures, exporting of jobs overseas, deregulation, drones, disaster response, starvation, malnutrition, foreign wars, state-sponsored violence, torture - as long as the borders are secure and we're safe from terrorists.



                           *         *         *

G20 and the rise of disciplinary power: the bankruptcy of justice

The Guardian has posted stories of mistreatment of civilians by police during the G20 protest, along with a version of the video (above) showing the police assault Ian Tomlinson, who later suffered a heart attack, as he was making his way home. The Guardian edit of the original video (the first one to surface, shot by a bystander) includes a slow-motion replay and action highlights.

This, along with the thousands of other such stories that go unreported with every protest because they do not result in deaths (take the use of harassment legislation to curb protests, discussed in an earlier post), is a good index of the rise of disciplinary power in contemporary Western society.



The fact that no major riots or anti-police actions have broken out is a measure of the effectiveness of that power, even when it exceeds its bounds. (Think of the Rodney King riots in LA) An individual officer may get reprimanded; but the overall effect is a success, the message hit home. Just as the rhetoric of freedom and democratic values in the age of the 'war on terror' and the 'clash of civilizations' has heated up, the police on this side of the fence are getting more brutal. (Incidentally, an item in the Readings section of this month's issue of Harper's details a lawsuit filed by the family of a 12-year-old black girl in Texas who in 2006 was brutally beaten by police officers on her parents' lawn for resisting arrest on charges of being a prostitute. The family "eventually learned that the dispatch call the officers were responding to reported three white female prostitutes soliciting men half a block from the family’s home.")



This split in Power theorized by Foucault - between the conventional form it takes in the West in the sovereign legal right, and its modern form in disciplinary power, is perhaps more real than ever. Even when police actions are questioned, they are not questioned on the basis of right, but on the logic of necessity - i.e. was it reasonable under the circumstances, were security measures that led to this shooting or that beating necessary in view of the threats, etc (who gets to measure such things?).

Even when rights are infringed (think of the De Menezes shooting), this is irrelevant so long as the measures taken are deemed to have been necessary, and the innocent casualty becomes simply the victim of an 'unfortunate accident'. Rights only come into play to cover up the bare bones of disiplinary mechanics.



In other words, disciplinary power is questioned only on its own terms, on the logic of necessity. The only question that can be asked of it is: 'is it necessary to take such measures in order to produce the desired effects/goals?' One is not allowed to question the effects/goals themselves, or their justification. One is not allowed to suggest that a particular measure is illegitimate because it may or is bound to infringe on a particular political/natural/legal right.

Yet it is clear that the real 'necessity' behind the techniques of discipline is not security from terrorism or from particular threats - this can never be achieved one hundred percent as proto-fascist security barons would believe - but the disciplining of the population, the deployment of techniques of discipline and 'normalization' without popular or democratic oversight. It is no surprise that the recent crackdown on supposed Pakistani terrorists using student visas came on the heels of the police brutality at the G20 protest - the timing was no doubt arranged to downplay police brutality and conflate the threat of 'terror' with the threat of the protesters - something which New Labour politicians have attempted to do explicitly, making statements that liken anti-globalization protesters to Bin Laden, etc. It was just oh-so-convenient that Bob Quick misplaced a memo and they had to crack down early.



With each new crackdown and ensuing security measures, i.e. no bottled water, taking off one's shoes at airports, one lighter per passenger (what is it that can be done with one but not with two?) - the 'terrorists' try something else because, of course, they won't try bottled liquid explosives or shoe explosives again; and the possibilities are endless when one is willing to give one's own life up in the process. Yet the retrospectively enacted measures stay in place, however useless they are in the long run, after the fact; because their ultimate target is the population at large; and their aim is teaching discipline and obedience to authority, regulating and corralling the mass of ordinary citizens, teaching them to execute commands without asking questions. We're all in the army now.



No doubt there will soon be new restrictions on student visas and entry clearances, allegedly for security but in reality with a view to organizing a 'reasonable racism' or 'reasonable xenophobia', to borrow a formulation used by Slavoj Zizek in recent lectures.



It is notable that in the torture debate of recent years, even those liberals who maintained their principled opposition to torture for the most part found it necessary to assert that anyway, the intelligence obtained by torture is unreliable, that people will say anything you want them to under torture. It is insufficient, in other words, to assert that torture is unethical, that 'we are becoming like them', that it infringes the legal or natural rights of suspects, etc. One must always also engage the technical point; one must question disciplinary power on its own terms, on the issue of necessity and efficiency.

And the power of disciplinary mechanics is ultimately the only real power, or as Foucault put it, the 'mode in which power is actually exercised...power at the point of its application to bodies' ; as opposed to vague or abstract notions of sovereignty and autonomy and democracy and legal right. Disciplinary power constrains and subordinates any recourse to legal action or legal right, rather than being constrained by it.

It is this same power that is at the bottom of the financial meltdown and the ongoing recession, in the form of economic disciplinary power. The goal of neoliberal economics from Milton Friedman onwards has been nothing less than to wrest economics from the domain of political sovereignty and right, and bring it fully within the scope of discipline, within disciplinary power. Disciplinary power, as Foucault shows in his analyses of various social domains (prisons, hospitals, schools, etc) is constituted by what he calls the 'medicalization' of knowledge: this is where the notion of economic 'shock therapy' fits in neatly - a term that Naomi Klein in her critique of neoliberal economics did not coin but borrowed from Milton Friedman, the neoliberal shock doctor in person. (at a time when, of course, 'shock therapy' was still believed to be valid medical science; nonetheless, it is a good example of self-incriminating statements, however unwittingly made)



And it is through the 'medicalization' - one could say de-politicization - of economic knowledge that the neoliberal 'shock doctors' were able to take key economic decisions regarding deregulation of markets and other economic reforms outside the political and democratic sphere, and into the scientific/technical sphere. There is no room in the edifices of modern government to question economic policy, because economic policy has become a matter of science, of mechanical necessity, of technical knowledge - not political decision. We are meant to take it on faith that state assets, utilities, schools, prisons and the like must be privatized or turn to private sources of funding, that taxes must be lowered, that credit interest rates must be set to suit the banks, that there just isn't enough money to cover the cost of social security and other benefits even as taxes are being lowered for the benefit of the super-rich or when - even during a once-in-a-century recession - billions are given away in a massive 'benefits package' to banks, and so forth. What should be political decisions take the form of unconditional demands, mechanical necessities.

The only good answer to this is to say, as Martin Luther King did in the march on Washington, that "we refuse to believe that the Bank of Justice is bankrupt." We must cash our cheque. Our demands too must be unconditional.




This is a point where it is no longer even that the ends justify the means - in the Machiavellian schema one still has to justify the ends, promote a 'just' end. In the sinister logic of neoliberal capitalism, the ends are taken to be self-evidently just and fully identified with the means chosen. The relation between ends and means cannot be questioned, since it is the mechanical result of 'economic science'.

Two articles also in this month's issue of Harper's provide the most incisive critique I have yet seen of the current economic crisis and its roots in several key moments of deregulation of the US economy over the past several decades - in particular, the deregulation of interest rates and wages.

INFINITE DEBT: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy details how the elimination of the right to form unions in key sectors of the economy and the subsequent union-busting led to an effective pay freeze - no real increase in the minimum or average wages over 40 years, even as the economy grew - driving millions of people into levels of debt unfathomable to their parents; this, coupled with the constitutional legalization of usury - i.e. unlimited credit card interest rates - promising supernormal profit margins, drove all the capital out of manufacturing (a strong union sector but with lower profit margins) into banking and finance, lining up the key elements to ignite the crisis. This is what ensured the decline of Detroit and the rise of Wall Street since the mid-1980s.

Usury country: Welcome to the birthplace of payday lending is a more documentary account of an industry that, with its beginnings in the state of Tennessee, has effectively come into being as an industry and exploded across the USA since the early 1990s. Payday lending - as in dodgy businesses that lend people an advance on their monthly salary at six-figure annual interest rates when they can't pay the bills (no kidding) is rightly referred to by the author as a modern-day form of sharecropping. Or in Foucauldian terminology, another one of those techniques of disciplinary mechanics.

Philosophy Football: The Political Economy of UEFA and the Future of Democracy

The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, an anthology of country-themed essays published in anticipation of Germany 2006 with the goal of promoting to the American public the game known everywhere else in the world as football, featured an afterword by lefty fellow traveler Franklin Foer (brother of Jonathan Safran) in which the author made one bold assertion regarding the form of political organization most likely to produce a world cup victory: social democracy. Social democracy, Foer calculates, performs better than either fascism, communism, military junta, liberal democracy, or any other political system - and this on account of the fact that it achieves the ideal balance between team spirit and individual valour.



Taken in a relative rather than an absolute sense, countries with left-leaning, pro-welfare-state governments, win the most cups. And indeed, Foer's prediction bore fruit at the time - Italy, the eventual winners in 2006, had just ousted Berlusconi and elected Prodi. Again, without commenting on the real assets (or lack thereof) of Prodi's leadership, we are talking in relative terms - a left wind blew, a communitarian sentiment came over the Italian people, and they won the cup.



Fast forward 2 years to Euro 2008: the same team, with Berlusconi back at the helm of the Italian nation, is performing dismally. After a catastrophic loss to the Dutch, they barely scraped by with a draw against Romania; their now very slim chance of advancing to the next round hangs on the hope of trouncing none other than one-time world champions France who, with Sarkozy in office, have performed just as dismally. The reigning world champions, Germany, having elected Angela Merkel after a decade-long and steady decline to the right, have fared only slightly better. And the unquestionably best performances so far? Portugal, Croatia, Netherlands, and Spain. Two of these, Portugal and Spain, represent the only remaining left-wing governments in the European Union, however compromised (remember, relative terms).



Sweden too, with Bosnian-born Ibrahimovic, is doing well, so the game with Spain should be interesting; though the current government may not be exemplary, it nevertheless has a deeply embedded and institutionalized social democracy. Croatia, though still led by the nationalist HDZ, has a left-wing president (Mesic), and has even seen the HDZ themselves take a decisively more moderate tone compared to the Tudjman years. Netherlands, although still led by a coalition government, has clearly taken a turn to the left - the current government, the 4th Balkenende coalition, formed as a result of the 2006 election in which the Socialist Party made the greatest gains against the centre-right's decline in popularity, now includes the Labour Party. The Socialists themselves were excluded from the coalition, but nevertheless have substantially increased their share of seats in parliament. And let's remember, folks, that this is after all the first country to de facto legalize marijuana...Simply put, the relative tilt favours the left - the Netherlands, even with a slight shift in the direction of social democracy, have trounced France and Italy (4-1 and 3-0!) who have both taken decisive turns to the right with Sarkozy and Berlusconi, respectively.



Sadly, few people have caught on, or more nations would be clamouring for social democracy as fervently as they do for the world cup. Social democracy has not 'arrived' yet, in the sense that - if anyone recalls the famous 'Philosophy Football' Monty Python sketch - the global collective consciousness still has not grasped the object of the game - to kick the ball away from the centre and into the opponent's goal. Victory would undoubtedly be ours if we only applied ourselves to it, given how vastly the underprivileged of the world outnumber the privileged. The game, in other words, has still not truly begun, and social democracy has still not found its Archimedes to shout 'Eureka!' and run for the ball. Marx only gets us as far as comprehending the line rules and shouting 'offside!' while the capitalists get away with murder.

Money Doesn't Talk, It Swears

The future is worrying - and this in real, not football terms. This week, University College London (where I work) is hosting the China Research Festival, part of China Now, a nationwide (UK) festival of Chinese culture, to "reveal the dynamic heart of modern China."



Harmless, no? May be, until one has actually read some of the promotional material and done a bit of contextual thinking about the long term. Contemporary China, as Naomi Klein recounts in The Shock Doctrine, is perhaps the most successful implementation of Chicago School economic doctrine anywhere in the world. The brutally repressed Tiennamen Square protests in 1989 were in favour of democracy, but they were not, as many mainstream western media would have us believe, against the 'old guard' of Chinese communism and the status quo; they were directed, rather, at precisely the free market reforms of Deng Xiaoping which reduced millions of people to poverty overnight and fundamentally restructured the Chinese economy, creating fertile ground for exploitation, Free Trade Zones beyond the reach of unions and labour regulations, and turning China into the world's working class - playing Labour to the west's Capital, as Zizek put it.



Universities, once sanctuaries and hotbeds of radicalism and resistance to state power, are now being transformed into a key component not only of state power, but of trans-national governmentality, here playing a critical role in a shell game of cross-promotion between governments, corporations, and research institutions to construct one hefty global capitalist empire. The bloody legacy of repression, killing and torture on which it is built - from Tiennamen square to the pillaging of Russian democracy, Chile, Bolivia, etc - is safely tucked away in the past. One promotional banner in the North Cloisters at UCL is emblazoned with a quote from Deng Xiaoping touting the compatibility of communism and the capitalist free market. Sure, I thought, so long as you kill and jail the opposition, and make sure that you take only the worst of both worlds - authoritarian Stalinist repression (the 'Pinochet option' as Naomi Klein describes China's 'transition to democracy') and rampant, unchecked sweatshop exploitation in an unregulated free market at the mercy of the whims of corporate greed.



The betrayal by the Communist elite in China is the very same betrayal carried out by Solidarnosc in Poland - the difference being that the Poles, through the democratic process, were able to halt the free market reforms half-way. And given that much of this was done in China (as in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere) with the strong financial and political backing of western governments and international monetary institutions (IMF, World Bank) who had no qualms about directly opposing the democractic process and putting their bucks behind brutal repression and torture while at the same time touting the unpopular reforms as a 'transition to democracy', it may well be time to take seriously Zizek's remark in a recent lecture that China - capitalism without democracy - is the future. Instead of social democracy we will have capitalist autocracy.



Many of the changes implemented throughout UCL in the past couple of years to bring departments in line with the university's new 'corporate identity', from proto-fascist design guidelines, the outsourcing of an ever greater number of services and functions such as catering, the moving of books from one end of the library to another (done by a supposedly 'library specialist' moving company who left the shelf sequence in a tragic mess) to the Orwellian doublespeak about 'excellence' (theme of the library staff conference this week), certainly point in this direction. Not to mention the fact that the main, if not only motive for the reshuffle in the library is to situate the Law collection in the Donaldson room, the lovely palatial hall just under the UCL dome which until recently housed Art, Philosophy, and Economics, among others - in a bid to attract investment from top City law firms. So what is UCL doing pandering to and promoting China? Well when money talks...



Or as Bob Dylan put it, 'money doesn't talk, it swears.'

Praxis and Prognosis: Notes on Zizek Lecture Tuesday, Biopolitics, and the New Fascisms in the News

Some notes and ideas, new directions, junctures, commentary...

Mr Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture Tuesday at the BIH (Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) - 'Kouchner in Lampedusa, or The Two Faces of Humanitarianism'. One is humanitarianism 'proper' (if one may call it that) which, in the guise of Bernard Kouchner (the chosen target of the lecture, precisely because he is meant to be a 'true' humanitarian, unlike American neocons and British Blairites) is telling us that 'we' should prepare for war with Iran; the other, Žižek claims, is exemplified by the bringing to trial in an Italian court in Lampedusa of a crew of African fishermen - their crime, rescuing a group of African refugees from certain death on the high seas. We should read these two events together, Žižek tells us - 'the "we" who should prepare for humanitarian war is the same "we" who enjoins us to let the helpless refugees drown.'

Is there not another way to 'read' these two events together though - not as the 'two faces of humanitarianism', but as two perfectly consistent sides of the coin of the biopolitical or 'biopower' - what Agamben, following Foucault, refers to as biopolitics and thanatopolitics, respectively. On one hand, the ancient sovereign power of the state as the power over life and death, the power 'to make die and let live' (thus concerning life only indirectly, as abstention from killing, what Isaiah Berlin might call 'negative freedom') which in our time, in the modern liberal-capitalist ('humanitarian') state, is progressively transformed into the inverse formula - the power to make live and let die ('positive' freedom)... "now death instead becomes the moment in which the individual eludes all power, falling back on himself and somehow bending back on what is most private in him."(Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: the witness and the archive, p 83) There are moments when, however, this modern biopolitics paradoxically coincides with thanatopolitics.' This is a result of the necessity felt by biopower to 'fragment the biological domain whose care power had undertaken' by the 'opposition and hierarchy of races, the qualification of certain races as good...' Racism, in other words, which allows biopower to reintroduce "a principle of war into the system of 'making live'". Is not the radically different treatment of Turkish and Iraqi Kurds by the West (the former being on the CIA's list of 'terrorist organizations'), despite their common goals and nearly identical methods with respect to their nation states, the best example of this, and of the cold, technical absurdity behind it? Or, take for example the difference in 'humanitarian' terms in the value of the life of a European, an Iraqi, and a Congolese - the latter being the worst off, given the West's 'humanitarian' indifference to the perishing of 4 million human beings there, and its obssessive concern with places like Iraq and Afghanistan. An even better (or more disturbing and directly indicative) example came to us in the news just yesterday, with DNA biologist and Nobel Prize winner James Watson's scandalous declaration that Africans are genetically less intelligent than Europeans. (The Independent article) Notably, he even explained the difference in IQ levels between black Africans and African Americans (!) in evolutionary terms. The real tragedy, however, isn't that some racist old white fart had the guts to say this publicly, or even that he happens to be a Nobel Prize winner. The real tragedy is how this is processed in the media - that it becomes an acceptable topic for debate - no harm in talking about it, right? And what's more, on BBC's 'The Moral Maze' last night, someone - I don't believe it was Watson himself (the webstream is unavailable from the website 'due to unforeseen circumstances'...hm...) - defended at least the 'validity' of research comparing IQ levels between different races on account of the poverty and instability plaguing the African continent, for instance - a 'humanitarian' crisis, to put it in those terms - and that this might help us explain why - why the poverty, the fighting. And that is not yet the real tragedy. The real tragedy is that in response to this, no one - not even the host of the programme - made even a passing suggestion as to the fact that Europeans may have had something to do with not only the immediate problems afflicting Africa, but even with IQ levels - for instance, the fact that not so long ago, in the 1930s, during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (a decade ago, if not still, Africa's poorest country), the newly-established colonists executed - shot, point blank - an entire generation of Ethiopian schoolteachers, intellectuals, professors, etc; anyone with high IQ, in other words. Or the fact that, around the same time, or in the two or three decades preceding, the native population of the Belgian Congo was reduced to about one-quarter of its size. How long does it take, and what does it take, for a continent to recover from such ravages? Mind you, there was no Marshall Plan for Africa. Nice way to go - you whack someone on the head with a sledgehammer and then give them an IQ test. Conclusion: genetically stupid. It just proves that Nobel Prize winning scientists, radio announcers and public intellectuals are no better than football managers - the game is rigged.

Biopolitics - Thanatopolitics. What we are witnessing is precisely the transformation of biopolitics according to Foucault's pattern, its intersection with thanatopolitics, the stabilizing of a 'caesura of a biological type inside a domain that defines itself precisely as biological'. But most disturbing of all perhaps is where the intersection and integration of these two powers may lead, on a historical reading - "In Hitler's Germany, an unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live intersects with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincides immediately with thanatopolitics."

I don't think I am being paranoid here. Take PM Brown's new 'Business Council for Britain' as reported in Tuesday's Guardian ("Brown gets down to business with his captains of industry") - is this not a decisive step towards fascist 'corporatism'? The council, which will 'advise the government on business issues' and whose advice will be 'private', excludes from its membership representatives of small businesses, or the Federation of Small Businesses - on the ground that 'self-made tycoons such as Sir Alan and Sir Richard would have an affinity with the interests of small entrepreneurs." The FSB replied, naturally, that many small business owners have no interest in growing into large 'Virgin-like empires.' But the Mind of Capital does not concern itself with such contradictions - everyone wants to grow big, naturally, whether we admit it or not. And just to quell our fears, we are told that the council "'is not a lobby group, like the CBI..."It is more of a thinktank of senior business leaders to advise ministers about policy issues. This body is designed to have a long-term dialogue with the government and to shape its policy."' Great. Phew - what a relief. So long as it's not another lobby group...

So we have another indication that the democratic electorate is becoming increasingly superfluous - that the conduit for expressing choice is increasingly becoming the market, and our role reduced from citizens and voters to consumers. The inclusion of Richard Branson is especially moving - the very one who spoke of his project as transmitting to the consumer a 'set of values' through the product, exemplary of what Naomi Klein describes as the shift in modern corporate culture from producing 'things' to producing 'images' or 'brands' - described by one corporate mogul as 'helping corporations find their soul' - coupled with the consequent rise of outsourcing and the decline of manufacturing in the developed world. Elsewhere I have argued that this process situates the modern corporation in what Foucault (in Discipline and Punish) calls the carceral archipelago, the network of institutions - schools, prisons, hospitals - that, by instilling a 'soul' in the subject (a 'set of values'), "transports the penitentiary technique from the prison to the entire social body". And just to drive the point home and quell any signs of protest we are reminded of China's 10% growth rate and blasted with a massive photo (Guardian article) of a superbly futuristic Shanghai.


Biopower

Which brings us to another topic of Žižek's lecture on Tuesday - that Chinese capitalism, rather than being an 'oriental perversion', is the wave of the future - capitalism without democracy, in other words. I did raise the point that the culprit may be the state itself - that analogous to Marx's vision of the modern corporation without the 'increasingly superfluous' owners as a socialism within capitalism, the modern state, without the increasingly superfluous electorate (think of the dropping turnout rates, for instance) can be reduced to the effect of a capitalist corporation enveloping whatever political programme it claims to represent. Now, I don't want to sound like an anarchist or libertarian: Žižek also mentioned Naomi Klein and her new book on 'Shock capitalism', and incidentally I am just reading her article in this month's Harper's which arrived yesterday, where the idea is re-tooled as 'disaster capitalism'; and since in the immediate present context one has to take sides, I will qualify all my anti-state comments by saying that in the struggle against privatization and for preserving the public sector and the welfare state, I am for the public sector and the welfare state, even if it is a losing battle. What worries me, however, and what I don't think enough attention is being paid to (even by the likes of Žižek and Klein) is that even this battle - for the state, for state power, for the 'public' sector - has to be fought and is being fought outside the state, and has to be organized from out side as such - through trade unions and other (perhaps new, or supplementary, and more intensive) forms of social organizing - through our power (if we have any) as 'consumers'...That we have to (among other things) put pressure on government in all its forms through channels other than the ballot vote...



Klein's 'distaster capitalism' (in the Harper's article) also brings up the issue of 'racialization', here in the context of security and disaster relief, connecting seamlessly with the notion of biopower and thanatopolitics. From Iraq to Hurricane Katrina (and one could now add the recent fires in California, perhaps, although it looks like things aren't quite so bad over there - yet), the theme behind the various forms of outsourcing of government functions is: those who can pay, get relief - in the form of security, disaster assistance, and so on. (Just as an aside, after Hurricane Katrina, FEMA - the diaster relief agency - had to hire a private contractor to perform the function of awarding contracts to contractors. Hey, these people even have a sense of humour.)

In the article Klein cites a report published last year by the Council on Foreign Relations (and peopled by corporate moguls) which in arguing for privatization of emergency relief states, "...the compassionate federal impulse to provide emergency assistance to the victims of disasters affects the market's approach to managing exposure to risk...if people know the government will come to the rescue, they have no incentive to pay for protection."

Well, that's it folks, we're screwed. I think it's time to pack our bags and look for another planet.