Divine Injustice
Alternatives to Political Systems, Society — by George Monbiot February 1, 2012
Drone warfare can be used to thwart democratic movements, anywhere.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
The ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews or the Christians, invested their gods with human failings. Divine judgement, they believed, was neither flawless nor dispassionate; it was warped by lust, vengeance and self-interest. In the hands of Zeus, the thunderbolt was both an instrument of justice and a weapon of jealousy and revenge(1).
Comments (3)Imaginary Friends
Comedy Break, Global Warming/Climate Change, Society — by George Monbiot January 30, 2012
The weather forecasters used by the Daily Mail and other papers don’t appear to exist.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
The talented line-up of weather forecasters at ‘Positive Weather Solutions’
Click for larger view
Earlier this month, I questioned the credentials of the alternative weather forecasters being used by the Daily Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Sun. I suggested that their qualifications were inadequate, their methods inscrutable and their results unreliable. I highlighted the work of two of these companies: Exacta Weather and Positive Weather Solutions (PWS).
Now the story has become more interesting: do the people from Positive Weather Solutions, making its forecasts and quoted in news articles, exist?
Comments (0)The Sacrificial Caste
People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot January 18, 2012
In this and other nations, there are groups of children who can be abused with impunity.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Texas is a largely-Christian state that appears to believe in neither forgiveness nor redemption. Last week the Guardian revealed the extent to which it has criminalised its children(1). Police now patrol the schools, arresting and charging pupils as young as six for breaches of discipline.
Among the villainies for which they have been apprehended are throwing paper aeroplanes, using perfume in class, cheeking the teacher, wearing the wrong clothes and arriving late for school. A 12 year-old boy with attention deficit disorder was imprisoned for turning over a desk; six years later, he’s still inside. Children convicted of these enormities – 300,000 such tickets were issued by Texas police in 2010 – acquire a criminal record. This makes them ineligible for federal aid at university and for much subsequent employment.
Yet most of them have committed no recognised crime. As one of the judges who hears their cases explained to the Guardian, “if any adult did it it’s not going to be a violation.”(2)
Comments (3)Polar Opposites
Global Warming/Climate Change, Society — by George Monbiot January 4, 2012
How weather forecasts became a political issue.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
“Brrr-ace yourselves! Britain to shiver in -20°C in WEEKS as councils stockpile extra grit”(1). So the Mail on Sunday warned us in October. Blizzards, snowdrifts, locusts with the faces of men and the teeth of lions: we would become, it cheerfully assured us, prey to every nightmare nature could devise.
Last week the story flipped. “December has sprung! Spring blooms arrive early and autumn blossom lingers… so what happened to our winter?”(2) I scoured the text but could find no mention that the Mail had forecast the polar opposite.
Comments (2)How Freedom Became Tyranny
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot December 24, 2011
Rightwing libertarians have turned “freedom” into an excuse for greed and exploitation.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?
Comments (7)No Bail-Out for the Planet
Consumerism, Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot December 20, 2011
Why is it so easy to save the banks, but so hard to save the biosphere?
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.
Lord Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises by several more multiples.
Comments (3)Unmasking the Press
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot December 14, 2011
The corporate newspapers are the elite’s enforcers, misrepresenting the sources of oppression.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Have we ever been so badly served by the press? We face multiple crises – economic, environmental, democratic – but most newspapers represent them neither clearly nor fairly. The industry which should reveal and expose instead tries to contain and baffle, to foil questions and shut down dissent.
The men who own the corporate press are fighting a class war, seeking, even now, to defend the 1% to which they belong against its challengers. But, because they control much of the conversation, we seldom see it in these terms. Our press reframes the major issues so effectively that it often recruits its readers to mobilise against their own interests.
Comments (1)Slash and Burn Capitalism
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot December 7, 2011
Now the government intends to strip away protection from our most treasured places
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
What sort of a world would George Osborne like to live in? I imagine him fantasising about the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Unprotected workers, assigned their places in a fixed social system, crawl over toxic waste dumps, while the upper castes, though rendered sterile by unregulated pollution, live without fear of democracy, trade unions or the minimum wage.
The Republic of Gideon began to take shape on Tuesday, when the Chancellor launched a full-spectrum assault on both workers and the environment. In his autumn statement, he curtailed public sector pay and, once again, hammered the tax credits and benefits upon which the poorest people depend. At the same time he gave away £250 million in yet another bail-out for big business: in this case the UK’s most polluting industries. Read Damian Carrington’s withering exposure of this exercise in crony capitalism, and you will rage and gnash your teeth.
Comments (1)Big Farmer
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot November 30, 2011
The poorest taxpayers are subsidising the richest people in Europe: and this spending will remain uncut until at least 2020.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
What would you do with £245? Would you a. use it to buy food for the next five weeks?, b. put it towards a family holiday?, c. use it to double your annual savings?, or d. give it to the Duke of Westminster?
Let me make the case for option d. This year he was plunged into relative poverty. Relative, that is, to the three parvenus who have displaced him from the top of the UK rich list(1). (Admittedly he’s not so badly off in absolute terms: the value of his properties rose last year, to £7bn). He’s the highest ranked of the British-born people on the list, and we surely have a patriotic duty to keep him there. And he’s a splendid example of British enterprise, being enterprising enough to have inherited his land and income from his father.
Well there must be a reason, mustn’t there? Why else would households be paying this money – equivalent to five weeks’ average spending on food and almost their average annual savings (£296)(2) – to some of the richest men and women in the UK? Why else would this 21st Century tithe, this back-to-front Robin Hood tax, be levied?
Comments (1)The Self-Attribution Fallacy
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot November 12, 2011
Intelligence? Talent? No, the ultra-rich got to where they are through luck and brutality.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
Comments (4)It’s the Rich Wot Gets the Pleasure
Consumerism, Population, Society — by George Monbiot October 28, 2011
Population is much less of a problem than consumption. No wonder the rich are obsessed by it.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
It must rank among the most remarkable events in recent human history. In just 60 years the global average number of children each woman bears has fallen from 6 to 2.5. This is an astonishing triumph for women’s empowerment, and whatever your position on population growth might be, it is something we should celebrate.
But this decline in fertility, according to the report the United Nations published yesterday, is not the end of the story. It has now raised its estimate of global population growth. Rather than peaking at about 9 billion in the middle of this century, the UN says that human numbers will reach some 10 billion by 2100, and continue growing beyond that point.
Comments (4)Sucking Out Our Brains Through Our Eyes
Consumerism, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot October 25, 2011
Advertising trashes our happiness and trashes the planet. And my income depends on it.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
We think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them. But somehow the sector which stitches this system of hypercapitalism together gets overlooked. That seems strange when you consider how pervasive it is. In fact you can probably see it right now. It is everywhere, yet we see without seeing, without understanding the role that it plays in our lives.
I am talking about the industry whose output frames this column and pays for it: advertising. For obvious reasons, it is seldom confronted by either the newspapers or the broadcasters.
Comments (3)Show Me The Money
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot October 18, 2011
We have a democratic right to know who is funding public advocacy.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Since the late 19th Century, the very rich have been paying people to demand less government. The work of Herbert Spencer, for example, was sponsored by Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison(1). Spencer believed that society changed according to evolutionary laws. Humans were evolving towards perfection, but this process was inhibited by interference from the state. By protecting people from the consequences of their own actions (or their own bad luck), it stopped the winnowing process which would otherwise result in the survival of the fittest.
Social security, publicly-funded education, compulsory vaccination, laws enforcing safety at work all interrupted social evolution. But a self-regulated free market would swiftly ensure that those who were best-adapted would survive and triumph. It’s not hard to see why the millionaires loved him. They saw themselves as winners of the evolutionary race, taking their rightful place at the pinnacle of the social order. Any attempt to limit their freedoms would prevent society from achieving perfection.
Comments (3)Roads to Ruin
Consumerism, Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change, Society, peak oil — by George Monbiot October 13, 2011
A new road-building programme will drain money from essential services.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
The money has run out, or so we keep being told. There are no funds left for any but essential projects: the frontline services and the capital spending which cannot be deferred. Councils in particular are desperate for cash: so desperate that they are having to cut everything from libraries to residential care homes, Sure Start centres to Citizens’ Advice Bureaux. Every month they have to make horrible decisions whose consequences will damage people’s lives.
So why are these same cash-strapped councils now intending, alongside central government, to spend £897m on new roads, some of which were first proposed decades ago, but which were deemed unnecessary even when cash was abundant? And why is the government minded to approve this spending?
Comments (0)Sounding the Deeps
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Financial Management, People Systems, Society, peak oil — by George Monbiot October 11, 2011
If this analysis is correct, a Great Depression is all but inevitable.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
I stumbled out into the autumn sunshine, figures ricocheting around in my head, still trying to absorb what I had heard. I felt as if I had just attended a funeral: a funeral at which all of us got buried. I cannot claim to have understood everything in the lecture: Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theory and the 41-line differential equation were approximately 15.8 metres over my head(1). But the points I grasped were clear enough. We’re stuffed: stuffed to a degree that scarcely anyone yet appreciates.
