Over here in the UK, George Monbiot is a prominent - even, dare I say, celebrated (in some circles; denigrated in others) - liberal, who writes excellent books (like 'Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain', presciently in 2000; and predecessing both John Perkins's 'Confessions Of An Economic Hit Man' (2004) and Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine' (2007))* and besides having a website (www.monbiot.com), also writes a weekly column in the Guardian daily national newspaper (the required reading in this country for all sandal wearers and tree huggers). In his column for this week he took on and roundly lambasted the subject, again in the headlines, of PFIs, or Private Finance Initiatives; the way that governments - both Labour and the Conservatives in this county - move construction costs off their books and onto private industries, who make a bundle on long-term building contracts that cost far more than it would have cost the government to borrow the money for the projects up-front. It has been a scam of eye-watering and blood pressure-increasing proportions, and has been a pet peeve of his for yonks (as they say in this country).** His closing lament, after trying to make a case for the public refusing to pay what he tried to deem an 'odious debt' (a term which has legal restrictions on its application) was: "Now I see corporations squatting like great cuckoos on our public services, while officials pour the money that should have been spent on nurses and teachers into their widening bills. Yes, I'm bitter. Yes, I'm clutching at straws. Have you got a better idea?"
My response to his column, and closing query:
"Indeed, George. And Seumas Milne's column of the 18th; and...and...
"What to do?
"Nothing but the total release of the money system as it has developed will do.
"Note that I didn't say anything about 'overthrow'.
"Just let it go. Having learned our lessons. And that's how we enter a new era, of life on Earth. Just waiting for us to wake up to it.
"Before too much more damage is done, by people who have lost sight of the real purpose of what we call money, and confused means with ends."
First, to clarify a reference: Seumas Milne, another chardonnay-drinking columnist in the Guardian, wrote a piece, published on the 18th inst., also bashing the corporate world's takeover of public institutions in the country. Headed 'The corporate grip on public life is a threat to democracy', it opened:
"The onward march of corporate power is a long established fact of British life. We've become familiar with the relentless privatisation of public assets and services, the creeping colonisation of Whitehall, [ie, government departments/ministries] and the revolving doors that see politicians, lobbyists, executives and civil servants swap places and exchange contracts with bewildering speed.***
"But the Guardian's revelation [that week] that fast food and drinks companies such as McDonald's, PepsiCo, Unilever and Diego have now been asked by ministers to draw up public health policy shows the corporate takeover of politics has reached a new level. This isn't an issue of government consulting business. We're talking about the same vested interests that have fuelled the obesity and alcohol abuse crises as good as dictating terms at the heart of government."
After pointing out that they will try to deregulate their industries as part of their takeover agenda, and how the health secretary had already signaled that he was "happy to oblige in what amounts to a surrender of the public realm,' he went on:
"It would be almost comical were it not so dangerously destructive. But so accustomed have we become to the advance of private profit-making into every sphere of society, it's easy to miss the acceleration of privatisation now being overseen by the Cameron administration. Across government, the crisis of the private sector is being used to launch a renewed assault on the public sector, covering everything from Royal Mail to vast expanses of public woodland..."
Ah yes; the 'crisis'. Which brings me to an earlier column by Monbiot, wherein he fingers precisely the strategy involved in this takeover programme, of democracy by corporatism, aka fat cats, aka fascism. Headed 'For the Tories, this is not a financial crisis, but a long-awaited opportunity' (the Guardian, 19 October), the column in print form highlighted one of his comments in particular: "In a classic example of 'disaster capitalism', the cuts are being used to reshape the economy in the interests of business". In the article, he points out the role of the "extreme neoliberals at the University of Chicago" - under free-market guru Milton Friedman - not only in applying their economic prescription in Chile after the military coup there in 1973, but how they were working hand in glove with the CIA in order to 'make it happen'.
A phrase which also brings to mind the 9/11 'crisis', which opened the door for the Bush administration to make legislative moves to destroy the people's rights under the nascent imposition of Martial Law, in putting America on a legalistically-opportune war footing. It comes from the 'conspiracy theory' discussion on what role, precisely, did the Bush administration play in the unfolding of that atrocity - that 'new Pearl Harbor' that the Neocons had already posited as being needed for Americans to be spooked into spending more on defense spending than they already were (as a key engine for the economy, doncha know). One school of thought has been identified by the acronym MIHOP - ie, 'Make it Happen On Purpose'; and another perspective is branded as LIHOP - ie, 'Let It Happen On Purpose'.
I won't go into the 9/11 affair in detail here; this is just to point out the role of Crisis in giving the PTB the Opportunity they need to further their ends. And that, rather than just waiting for a Crisis to give them that Opportunity, they can quite possibly be going out to Make It Happen.
The same as the subprime mortgage fiasco of the financial industry's doing. To set up a Crisis, in order to capitalize on it - figuratively and literally. (The latter, in getting the taxpayers to cover your risks. Sweet.)
Monbiot, on the Chilean affair, when Friedman visited and encouraged General Pinochet to go even further, and faster, than he was (because you have to strike while the iron is hot, or you lose the momentum of your objective and agenda):
"The result was a massive increase in unemployment and the near-eradication of the middle class. But the very rich became much richer, and the corporations, scarcely taxed, deregulated and fattened on privatised assets, became much more powerful."
- in the creation of the 20:80 society that the PTB want, and have envisioned for years; 20% of the populace being very well paid for their services to the system, and the 80% rest being 'useless eaters'. Not to eat up too much of the capital in welfare services; so those need to be cut back before the ordure hits the fan in earnest...
All of this, as if this were the whole point of an economy - of money itself: to enrich an elite. Not to share and provide goods and services. And why would you, if you don't do unto others as you would do to yourself - if you don't look at others AS yourself??
On the next page over from Monbiot's 19 October article there was a column by one Bethany McLean (co-author of 'The Smartest Guys in the Room: an Expose of the Enron Scandal') on the subject of the home repossession scam going in the States. Headed 'It's one law for murderers, another law for homebuyers', she details the disconnect between the legal standards applied to the lenders ("paperwork has been tossed into the garbage, affadavits have ben forged and the seizure and sale of homes hasn't been documented correctly. The mortgages themselves may even have been sold without proper transfer of the physical documents that show who actually owns the loans...") and those applied to the shmucks. Early on in the article she points out: "The importance of the letter of the law explains why corporations try to dot every 'i' and cross every 't' in their dealings with each other. if the transaction goes sour and the two parties end up in court, judges don't look kindly on missing or forged documentation, whatever the merits of the case. Even more, the importance of following the proper procedures under the law also explains why convicted murderers or apprehended felons go free because of tiny violations in the way their cases were handled, even when it's crystal clear that they're guilty. So why are homebuyers subject to a different standard?"
Because, Bethany, they were used as patsies, to achieve a desired outcome. And so are simply expendable, with no real rights. Do cattle have rights?...
This is all why I said, and say again: Let it go. Even if a critical mass of people 'got' that the system is corrupt, and about as near to being beyond redemption as it could possibly get, that's not enough of an answer at this point. At this historical point, we can see - for those who have eyes to see - that the system itself is fundamentally flawed, in proving how lost you can get, without a vision. Without the vision; of what life is all about. For if we got that, we would realise that we don't need the training wheels of interest-bearing money on the one hand and fractional-reserve banking on the other to provide each other with goods and services - the real point of the exercise (NOT for the very rich to become much richer). All you need is a motive. The profit motive is one; and it is proving to have deadly consequences. There is another. I submit that all we humans need, in order to provide each other with goods and services, and the best reflection of our individual ingenuity, is - as I have said, and shared, before - to do so out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning.
This, of course, requires us to awaken - truly awaken - to the fact that there is Plan in and Purpose to 'the universe' - to the life experience. And more. That the life experience itself is, essentially, an illusion.
A stage, on which we play parts. And keep swapping them around, In order to learn from the experience; in order, in turn, to grow. Evolve, spiritually.
I read people like Monbiot, and Milne, and others - on both sides of the economic-political aisle; the dialectic we are engaged in, to come out to a higher stage, of Synthesis - and I think:
People, people. You don't get it yet. With your nose too close to the scene, you're not seeing that: You are - we all are - playing parts. That's all that the life experience is: theatre. In order to play different parts at different times, and gain awareness in the process; from the experience. To grow in consciousness. And now it's time to enter the stage on another level; one more in keeping with our present enviro-spiritual evolution and circumstances.
It's time, in short, to wake up. We have major work to do, with a greater degree of awareness than we have engaged in - as a collective - heretofore.
Let's be about it.
And stop this role-playing that is hurting so many people.
That is hurting you. In essence. As part of the Whole.
---
* and David Cromwell's 'Private Planet: Corporate Plunder And the Fight Back' (2001); but not before 'The Global Trap: Globalization And the Assault on Prosperity and Democracy' by Hans-Peter Martin & Harald Schumann (1997) or Kenichi Ohmae's 'The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies' (1995). Not to mention David C. Korten's seminal 'When Corporations Rule the World' (also 1995). Just to name the good ones that I have personally come across.
** Have I made it abundantly clear yet where I am currently domiciled in my life? I really don't want the PTB to have to hunt for me with too much difficulty, when they start going around trying to silence the too-strident opposition to their best-laid plans for the planet. Yoo hoo. Over here. Up here, in Scotland. Keeping a weather eye on you from my cave. And that's 'weather' also as in whether to start calling you the names that you deserve to be called - like despicable, and so forth - but biting my tongue, because I know, as you, apparently, don't, that, on a fundamental level, I am you; and vice versa. And I really don't see the value of calling myself names. So I'll keep it clean. For as long as I can. Being human; at this stage of our mutual evolution, at least.
*** I almost typed 'swapped bodily fluids' there, wilh my mind caught up with the subject and level of intimacy that Milne was describing between the government and crony capitalism'. The reader will forgive me, I'm sure; and understand.
**** The article, incidentally, was not just about this move by the fast food and drinks industries to feather their beds in government; it also covered such other profit- and propaganda-promising fields as education. Milne went on:
"International takeover has also been the fate of John Bauer, the largest private free school provider in Sweden, which was bought out by a Danish venture capital firm. Whether many parents in Britain actually want their children's schools controlled by private equity or military service companies, over which they have no control and which might go bust or be taken over and run from abroad, seems pretty doubtful..."
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