Tag: owen jones

The corporate media are protecting the establishment from democracy

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By Daniel Margrain

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The fact that Theresa May was only able to cling on to power with the help of the knuckle-dragging DUP because of the gains the Tories made from the SNP in Scotland, is extremely frustrating. Had the SNP fought the election primarily on an independence platform, rather than pretending to be all things to all people, the party would have almost certainly maintained its level of support.

What this illustrates is that the strategy to fight elections on the enemy’s chosen ground, is a flawed one. Offering the electorate competent technocratic managerialism rather than principled and ideologically-based policies, is a strategy of despair as the approach of the Blairites under Milliband aptly illustrated.

Yet, disappointingly this was precisely the retrograde step suggested by Paul Mason while arguing the case on the BBC after it became clear that Theresa May would not achieve an overall parliamentary majority. “Corbyn needs to bring Labour’s ‘hard-hitters’ back into the political fold”, argued Mason. Interestingly, the journalist and economist made his comments sitting next to former Blair spin merchant, Alastair Campbell, who was also quick to suggest that Corbyn should use his success to broaden his cabinet and his policy platform in order to bring the Blairites back onboard.

Concession

This kind of concession based on the false premise it will enable Corbyn to win power, should be avoided like the plague. The election proves that the ‘unelectable’ Corbyn who at 40 per cent gained a higher proportion of the vote than his predecessors (Milliband 2015, 30%, Brown 2010, 29%, Blair 2005, 35%), can win the next election on his own terms. In a rare, honest post-election commentary, Owen Jones wrote:

“Labour is now permanently transformed. Its policy programme is unchallengeable. It is now the party’s consensus. It cannot and will not be taken away. Those who claimed it could not win the support of millions were simply wrong. No, Labour didn’t win, but from where it started, that was never going to happen. That policy programme enabled the party to achieve one of the biggest shifts in support in British history – yes, eclipsing Tony Blair’s swing in 1997…The prospect of a socialist government that can build an economy run in the interests of working people – not the cartel of vested interests who have plunged us into repeated crisis – well, that may have been a prospect many of us thought would never happen in our lifetime. It is now much closer than it has ever been.”

It’s astonishing to this writer that Mason and others apparently fail to recognise that the left is desperate for an alternative to neoliberalism which Corbyn’s policies reflect but which Blairism helps augment. Any concessions towards those who have stabbed the Labour leader in the back over the last two years will totally undermine his alternative anti-austerity vision for the country.

Those who are genuine about the need for radical change, understand how important it is to undermine the hold the Blairites have on the party, not encourage them. The huge increase in turnout and votes of the 18-24 year old demographic up (from 58% under Milliband to 72% under Corbyn) that contributed enormously towards Labour’s 30 seat gain, was predicated on a vision of the country that rejects Blairism.

Hamstrung

Had the media not been biased against Corbyn during the election campaign, had he not been hamstrung by two years of almost constant vilification from the liberal corporate media like the Guardian, and reinforced by Blairites within his own party (the kind of calculating careerist opportunists Mason alluded to), Corbyn would almost certainly have got over the finishing line.

The same media-political establishment who were relentlessly vilifying him in lock-step, now claim they all got it wrong. This is a fallback position in an attempt to obfuscate. The truth is, the media didn’t think he was ‘wrong’, rather they opposed him. As Media Lens posited:

“They were ‘wrong’ about his ability to generate support. They still think they’re right to oppose everything he stands for.”

In other words, the corporate media’s mass failure represents a structural flaw. They have virtually zero credibility. The revelation that the exit polls suggested a hung parliament, prompted Cathy Newman to tweet:

“Ok let’s be honest, until the last few weeks many of us under-estimated Jeremy Corbyn.”

This is disingenuous. The reality is rather different. As opposed to underestimating Corbyn, the truth is the media refused to give him a fair hearing because of what he represents to corporate hacks like Newman.

So-called corporate ‘journalists’ and commentators are, as comedian Dom Jolly argued,

“political PR prostitutes to a handful of billionaires with selfish agendas.”

One such political PR prostitute is Dan Hodges who in July, 2016 tweeted the immortal line:

“If Corbyn beats Owen Smith I don’t see how May doesn’t call an election next year. And that would be political armageddon for Labour.”

Agenda

From the day Corbyn was elected as Labour leader, the agenda of political PR prostitutes like Hodges, Aaranovitch, Rentoul, Cohen and McTernan, has been to get rid of him. All those who are now crying wolf are doing so, not as part of a genuine principled display of collective remorse, but as a damage-limitation exercise in order to save their careers.

Ideally, they would have preferred Corbyn to have lost badly on the premise that the existence of the status quo is better than a Corbyn win which would have engendered career uncertainty. In this sense, the Westminster commentariat’s criticisms of the Labour leader were intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Tory landslide would have given those within the Westminster bubble like Polly Toynbee and Anne Perkins the opportunity to write their Corbyn obituaries and thus create an opening through which they would effectively have been able to take back control of the Labour party and reconfigure it in their own Blairite image.

Achievement

Corbyn’s sensational electoral achievement illustrates how an increasingly informed and sophisticated public are seeing through the deceptions and lies. Consequently, the attempts by the political-media establishment to exercise their dominance over them, using the Labour party as their tool with which to achieve it, back-fired spectacularly.

Social and political historians will look back at the current period in which a mass social media, controlled by the people, overcame the corporate-media propaganda power of the state, as a watershed moment. The fake apologist tones of the liberal elite who used the pulpit of their employers to try to bring Corbyn and his supporters to their knees, are now trying to persuade the public that their supposed change of heart has nothing to do with reining in their loss of control and, by extension, the reduced revenues of their employers.

We see this, for example, in relation to the Guardian’s associate editor, Michael White, whose public back-tracking strategy on Corbyn days before the election that was intended to halt the decline in his papers readership, was as transparent as Claude Rains in the Invisible Man. This is also reflected in additional sympathetic and supportive Corbyn articles and tweets since it became clear that his pre-election poll ratings had dramatically began to improve.

It’s precisely the kind of cynical attitudes outlined, displayed by the corporate media in general towards its target audience, that creates a space for alternative social media of the likes of the Canary to flourish. The corporate press barons are rapidly losing the public’s respect in no small part due to their biased distorted reportage and crude, fake sensationalist headlines designed to demoralize and disorientate their readership. The tabloid depiction of Corbyn as a Jihadist sympathizer is an obvious case in point.

Political weapon

However, it’s a mistake to think that less overt forms of media propaganda do not also function as a political weapon by the state. As Noam Chomsky put it: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” The kinds of mutually-reinforcing propaganda in the liberal broadsheets are symptomatic of the broader decline in media performance.

Michael Savage, political editor of the Observer, for example, apparently thought nothing of tweeting the views of convicted fraudster and self-serving former MP Denis MacShane. The Blairite, MacShane and the Blairite, Savage were merely reiterating their respective anti-Corbyn views in order to implant in the public’s mind the notion that Corbyn is useless. This is also true of the wider corporate commentariat who reinforce their own prejudices which become a self-fulfilling echo-chamber. Dissenters who challenge this orthodoxy are often ridiculed, smeared or abused.

Investment

The media barons will continue to invest in traditional media propaganda only if at the end of it they can be assured they get the kinds of governments they want. The opportunistic careerist politicians and corporate journalists who operate within the Westminster bubble, know which side their bread is buttered and are only too willing to adjust their views accordingly, particularly if the corporate buck is large enough and the situation demands it.

However, the rise of Corbyn, concomitant to an increasingly politically active citizenship informed by alternative social media and a sincere and incorruptible form of politics, suggests the foundations upon which corporate greed and the establishment view of the world distorts human relations, are shaking.

It’s true the Tories are still the governing party. But their ability to shape domestic policy unhindered, premised on the existence of a corrupt media and democracy, has been greatly diminished. Theresa May is only able to cling to power by her fingertips because she is propped up by the DUP who have close links to loyalist terrorists who murdered 1,016 people between 1969-2001 and who shot someone dead in a car park in an internecine dispute during the election campaign.

The DUP are also climate change deniers, creationists, homophobes and anti-abortionists. There is only so much of this kind of DUP-Tory relationship the public, and even the media, will be willing to endure in the weeks and months ahead.

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Cajoling the Herd

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 Daniel Margrain

This herd of cattle was moved from the Shropshire Union Canal in Market Drayton

In 1938, in response to the alleged arrival to America of aliens from another planet, thousands of US citizens left their suburban homes in a state of panic and departed for the hills. An unsuspecting public did this because the authoritative and solemn tones of the radio announcer who imparted this ‘news’ was able to induce the requisite amount of fear in them.

It was only later that the people concerned had realized they had been duped. What was actually being broadcast was an adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds, and the announcer was none other than the renowned actor and film director, Orson Welles. The power of radio had convinced people to behave in an irrational manner in response to this ‘fake news’.

Almost eight decades after Welles made his fake radio broadcast, hundreds of thousands of protesters descended on Washington DC and many other cities across America and throughout the world. The stated aim of the protests was to demonstrate women’s rights in response to the revelation that Trump had boasted he had groped the genitals of a woman. But this soon morphed into a protest against Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the United States.

Censorship by omission

The issues the coverage of Trump’s alleged sexual assault raises is of course welcome. But the media coverage given to the incident which acted as the catalyst for the demonstrations also raises further questions in terms of what the media do and do not regard as a newsworthy story. Why, for example, hadn’t the media given equal coverage to the sexual depravities of Bill Clinton?

It should be noted that Hillary not only condoned Bill’s actions but has often slandered those who would dare speak out against them. The fact that the media have not managed to inculcate into the public consciousness the alleged crimes of Bill Clinton in the way they have in relation to Trump, almost certainly explains why, during Bill’s presidency and impeachment trial 20 years ago, no protests occurred.

So fake news is as much about the ability of the media to censor by omission as it is about the actual production of deliberately false information intended to deceive. In turn, it’s these distortions that provide the catalyst for the ideology of ‘post truth politics’ exemplified by the emergence of a discourse that appeals to emotion and where personal beliefs dominate. The media’s preoccupation with Trump’s seemingly sexist and misogynistic attitude to women intended to evoke an emotional response, was to be the starting point for what was to follow. The media’s anti-Trump agenda, in other words, had been cast.

Manichean logic & Red Baiting

The demonizing agenda was stepped-up a gear following the media’s relentless efforts to link Trump with Putin. With their application of Manichean logic, the intention of the political-media class is the deliberate conflation of media dissent with the notion that the dissenters uncritically support Russia and thus imply they are Trump apologists. In the establishment media’s eyes, the dissenters’ ‘crime’ is the acknowledgement that Trump’s stated aim to shift future US foreign policy from belligerence to cooperation with Russia, has validity.

The response of a corporate outlet like the Washington Post was to label anybody who proffers an alternative narrative to that pumped out by the mainstream as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The writer, Chris Hedges, who is on a list of 200 alternative websites condemned by the paper, describes the Post’s report as an “updated form of Red-Baiting.He added:

“This attack signals an open war on the independent press. Those who do not spew the official line will be increasingly demonized in corporate echo chambers such as the Post or CNN as useful idiots or fifth columnists.”

I, myself, was subject to this kind of ‘fifth-columnist’ irrational Red-Baiting on twitter earlier yesterday (Tuesday January, 31). The following tweet, for example, was in response to my factual assertion that Russia was invited by Syria to intervene in the country as a direct response to the arming, training and funding of Salfist terrorists by the US, UK, Saudi, Qatari and Turkish governments’:

: 4h4 hours ago

you sound like you might be a Trotskyist. Are you in the pay of a counter revolutionary organisation?

Paradox

As far as the political-media establishment is concerned, the Trump phenomenon represents a paradox, or as Charles Krauthammer put it, an “ideological realignment”. Trump’s non-conservative, idiosyncratic populism is the antithesis to the prevailing liberal political-media establishment orthodoxy, but is nevertheless welded to the capitalist order.

Under Obama, the media had it relatively easy because the nature of the mutual understanding between the two was understood. The snake oil salesman said the right things when required but was not particularly pro-active in policy terms unless it involved keeping the industrial-military complex ticking along by initiating wars.

Trump, on the other hand, not only says the wrong things, but has so far stuck to his word. This is very bad for the maintenance of the liberal consensus and a media elite that is used to having it’s snouts comfortably feeding from the gravy train trough on its own terms.

Public relations

This is not to suggest that the media is somehow separate from this state-corporate status quo. On the contrary, their role as public relations mediators for the state means they are intrinsic to the protection of corporate power against democratic forces. The unpredictability that arises from the ashes of Trump’s victory is akin to shaking one of those old children’s snow globe toys and waiting to see where the particles land. They have the potential to settle in a multitude of places. The strategies in response to the potential chaos unleashed by Trump, in other words, has the potential to take many forms, from that of the blinkered liberal to the revolutionary idealist and a multitude of possibilities in between.

Much to the undoubted relief of the political-media establishment, many of those who have been encouraged to take to the streets would appear to have been blinded by the media’s displacement activity which is essentially what their attacks on Trump are. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Clinton gang is pushing for war with Iran while the war criminal Jack Straw’s criticisms of Trump are clearly his attempts to steal the moral high ground. The kind of blinkered liberalism that focuses a disproportionate amount of criticism on Trump but ignores the underhand warmongering and war crimes of his opponents, is encapsulated by the following tweet:

Ashamed

To claim to feel more ashamed to be a citizen of a country represented by the actions of the latest in a long line of misogynistic presidents who followed through on a seven country visa ban policy mandate rather than the actions of his predecessor who attacked seven countries in eight years, is indicative of the propaganda power of the mass media.

The said media is currently facilitating an agenda by which the Trump ban is up for discussion, but prevents similar discussions in relation to restricting the ability of governments’ to wage wars. It is surely no coincidence that ‘feeling ashamed to be part of America for the first time in 32 years’ is related to the inability of the media to report on the numerous wars of aggression waged both overtly and covertly by successive US presidents.

The fact that the reason why Trump’s selective and temporary travel ban (not a Muslim Ban as reported) is considered to be an acceptable part of media discourse but the war machine championed by Obama and historically by numerous other presidents isn’t, is because critiques of the latter pose a potential threat to the underlying structure of media-state power.

L B C

I first heard about the ban on Maajid Nawaz’s L B C programme last Saturday morning (January 28). Unlike the other topics that have been featured on the show, a disproportionate amount of time was devoted to the Trump issue. The journalist Owen Jones who had just arrived in the UK from America was interviewed on the phone at some length by Nawaz and was given plenty of air time to promote the demonstration outside Downing Street that evening.

Meanwhile, a succession of callers phoned in to the programme, the vast majority of whom aired their disgust at the Trump policy. The calls were interspersed by a running commentary by Nawaz who repeatedly condemned Trump without referencing the fact that the seven country ban had already been put in place by Obama, or that the policy didn’t apply to British passport holding Muslim celebrities or politicians even though both were continually mentioned in a sensational way in order to illicit an emotional response from the listener.

Unlike Jones, Nawaz fell short of arguing for the banning of the planned state visit of Trump to the UK. Nevertheless, the tone throughout was one of hostility towards the visa ban policy and Trump himself. Throughout the show, Nawaz kept reminding his listeners about the growing number of signatures to the ‘Ban Trump’ on-line petition by providing them with a running commentary about the numbers who had signed up every few minutes. This was the standard approach taken throughout the media with all UK terrestrial TV news channels focusing their coverage on individuals at airports who were waiting for news of their loved ones that had been caught up in the confusion.

Meanwhile, it appeared to me that more coverage was devoted to the anti-Trump demonstrations throughout American and other cities than was given to the estimated 2 million people that thronged the streets of London protesting the decision of the UK government to go to war in Iraq. On Monday’s (January 30) the BBC Breakfast programme, a running total of signatures was displayed boldly on the screen as if it was money being raised for the Children In Need charity. All this passed for acceptable discourse in the corporate mass media.

Manipulating the public

It is an illustration of how corporations that now dominate much of the domestic and global economies recognize the need to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent, largely achieved through coordinated mass campaigns of the kind described that combine sophisticated public relations techniques. These techniques involve the filtering out of all unwanted information by censoring it and amplifying all ‘useful’ information. The former explains why, for example, very few people remember the time when Theresa May as UK Home Secretary illegally deported 50,000 foreign students which consequently failed to generate the publicity required for a mass demonstration.

Although the issue is different, exactly the same principle can be applied to the lack of publicity the media have given to demonstrations against the government’s welfare reforms including cuts to disability benefits, reduced social care budgets and the introduction of the bedroom tax.

Make no mistake, the decision of Trump to ban people from seven majority Muslim countries on the false premise that it’s a security issue when those countries not on the banned list were the ones whose citizens were responsible for the attacks on 9-11, is illiberal, immoral and plain wrong.

But it is also wrong for the media to have perpetuated the myth that it was Trump who set the policy in motion and that his critics are somehow perturbed that he is fulfilling a pre-election democratic mandate. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that many people are actually shocked when politicians actually follow through on their campaign promises. In that sense, at least – for good or bad – Trump has put down a marker for elected leaders in the future to follow.

Conclusion

The media hype surrounding the reporting of Trump’s sexual assault allegations and particularly the travel ban is disproportionate and exaggerated. Where were the reports of NATO’s flattening of the Libyan town of Sirte that killed thousands of civilians and the changing of the law last year enabling the deportation from the UK of any refugee child?

Why are a series of war criminals and war apologists seen fit to be interviewed about their disparaging views on Trump and are allowed to pass comment unchallenged? Why were the public told that Western civilisation was under threat from Islamist terrorists from the same countries who the elites are now criticising Trump from wanted to put travel restrictions on? Could it be Trump is unknowingly exposing the lie to their own propaganda?

The fact that these questions are never asked of the powerful and that a mass of well-meaning liberal protesters uncritically fall into line like a herd of cattle, is a testament to the hold the media has on great swaths of the population.

COPYRIGHT

All original material created for this site is ©Daniel Margrain. Posts may be shared, provided full attribution is given to Daniel Margrain and Road To Somewhere Else along with a link back to this site. Using any of my writing for a commercial purpose is not permitted without my express permission. Excerpts and links, including paraphrasing, may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Daniel Margrain and Road To Somewhere Else with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Unless otherwise credited, all content is the site author’s. The right of Daniel Margrain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Assange’s stitch-up is a lesson for us all

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By Daniel Margrain

Yesterday’s UN ruling (February 5) that deemed the deprivation of liberty of Julian Assange to be unlawful is a legally binding vindication of all those activists who have supported the quest of the Wikileaks founder to bring into the public domain the illegalities of Western power under the guise of democracy and freedom. Of course, establishment figures who represent the gatekeepers of the said powers, like Phillip Hammond, invariably attempt to undermine the findings of the UN body – of which the UK government is a signatory – when their conclusions fail to go in their favour and thus deny any wrongdoing on the part of the imperial powers that they represent.

On the other hand, praise will be heaped on the UN during the occasions they rule in their favour. This is, perhaps, to be expected. But what was shocking in terms of Hammond’s sheer Kafka-esque dishonesty was the extent to which he was prepared to sink in order to attempt to justify the unjustifiable at the behest of his masters in Washington. According to former UK diplomat, Craig Murray, Hammond’s lies were “utterly astonishing”. The official statement by the UK Foreign Secretary, states: “I reject the decision of this working group. It is a group made up of lay people and not lawyers. Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice. He is hiding from justice in the Ecuadorian embassy.”

Hammond’s statement belies the fact that every single one of the UN panel is an extremely distinguished lawyer. His statement was clearly made in order to undermine the UN ruling which by so doing, as Edward Snowden acknowledges, “writes a pass for every dictatorship to reject UN rulings...and hence sets a “dangerous precedent for UK/Sweden to set.” Craig Murray states that: “Countries who have ignored rulings by this UN panel are rare. No democracy has ever done so. Recent examples are Egypt and Uzbekistan. The UK is putting itself in pretty company.”

Previous rulings by the panel have gone against countries with some of the world’s worst human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar and Egypt. Recent cases where the UN has ruled in circumstances in which individuals have similarly been detained, include the Washington Post journalist, Jason Rezaian in Iran in December last year and former pro-democracy president Mohamed Nasheed last October (both subsequently released).

The contextual underpinning of the ruling vindicating Assange stems from the fact that he has never been charged with any offence. The UN findings confirm that his detention has been unlawful since his very first arrest in the United Kingdom in 2010 and that there has never been any genuine attempt by the Swedish authorities to investigate the allegations against him. For all those commentators who have been following the case closely, it has been obvious that from the outset the establishment have had it in for Assange. The rape allegations were merely the Casus Belli.

This was given credible weight early on by Naomi Wolf, a prominent American writer, feminist and social commentator, who argued that the allegations against Assange bore all the hallmarks of a set-up. This was further elaborated on by Craig Murray who thoroughly demolished the case against Assange. As John Pilger outlined, the reality is, there was no genuine judicial process in train against Assange in Sweden, a point that was advanced by Assange’s lawyers before the UK supreme court:

“The Assange case has never been primarily about allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden – where the Stockholm Chief Prosecutor, Eva Finne, dismissed the case, saying, “I don’t believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape”, and one of the women involved accused the police of fabricating evidence and “railroading” her, protesting she “did not want to accuse JA of anything” – and a second prosecutor mysteriously re-opened the case after political intervention, then stalled it.”

justice4assange.com provides some background:

Julian Assange, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, has been detained without charge in one form or another since 7 December 2010…In Sweden, Julian Assange is not charged with a crime. But in a highly unusual move, Sweden issued an Interpol Red Notice and a European Arrest Warrant, immediately after WikiLeaks began publishing a cache of 250,000 US Diplomatic Cables on 29 November 2010. Such warrants are usually issued for persons whose whereabouts are unknown. But Julian Assange’s whereabouts were known (he had given a press conference and hundreds of interviews in London). His lawyers were in communication with the prosecutor and had communicated that he was available to answer questions from the Swedish prosecutor through standard means.

Questioning people within European borders is a routine and uncomplicated process, which is standardised throughout the European Union. Sweden often uses these means to question people. In the initial ten days after 20 August 2010, the police opened the ’preliminary investigation’, it was assigned to three different prosecutors in quick succession. The penultimate prosecutor found that the case had no basis, and that there were no grounds to place Julian Assange under a criminal investigation.

The final prosecutor however, Marianne Ny, took over on 1 September 2010 and reopened the investigation. The Swedish investigation has been frozen since 2010. In November 2014, Sweden’s Svea Court of Appeal ruled that the prosecutor had failed her professional duty to progress the investigation against Julian Assange.

Given the astounding level of media misinformation, demonization, smears, deceptions and outright lies in the mainstream corporate media’s reporting of Assange, one might be under the impression that the man in question is the devil incarnate, a misogynist, who is using his work as a cover in order to avoid facing justice for the crime of rape that some commentators have seen fit to pronounce a verdict of guilty on the head of the whistle blower in advance of any hypothetical future trial. The self-appointed Witch finder General, Joan Smith of London Women against Violence, for example, was allowed to express her opinion, unchallenged, that he was guilty of the crime he has been accused of.

Much of the vitriol stems, not from the traditional right-wing of the media terrain, but rather from what many people consider to be the liberal-left of the political spectrum. Owen Jones, for example, who appears to be the latest poster boy for left wing opinion throughout the liberal media, penned, in August 2012, an article for the UK’s Independent newspaper, titled “There should be no immunity for Julian Assange from these allegations.”  But Jones’ inference that diplomatic immunity is a feature of the Assange case is, in reality, a red-herring since neither he, his supporters, legal team or anybody else outside the media bubble, have ever suggested that his case is predicated on a claim of immunity.

The lie was repeated by the Guardian’s legal expert, Joshua Rozenberg, presumably in an attempt to add a certain degree of gravitas to the claim. The truth is that all Assange has ever requested from the outset, is a guarantee from the Swedish authorities that if he agrees to travel to Sweden to answer the rape allegations made against him, he won’t be extradited to the United States. Assange’s request for this assurance from Sweden is supported by Amnesty International. However, the Swedish authorities have consistently failed to give Assange such an assurance.

Despite all this, the Sky News journalist and LBC stand-in presenter, Tim Marshall, implied that callers to his programme on February 5 who suggested that should Assange step foot outside the Ecuadorean embassy, he would ultimately be extradited to the U.S predicated on the trumped up charge of rape and subsequently be imprisoned, were mad conspiracy theorists. The incandescent, Marshall, is apparently unaware of the case of Chelsea Manning who was imprisoned for 35 years in 2013 for leaking information to WikiLeaks.

He is also seemingly unaware that, according to Edward Snowden, Assange is on a US “manhunt target list” or that the Independent revealed that both the Swedish and American governments’ have already discussed Assange’s onward extradition. If Marshall had bothered to avail himself of the views of Mats Andenas, the Norwegian chair of the UN Working Group for much of its investigation, he would have realized that the panel had to resist intense pressure from the US and UK to arrive at a decision contrary to the one they actually reached.

Marshall’s tone throughout was one of incredulity that the “liberal” Sweden would place Assange at risk of extradition to the US or for that matter that the latter under the liberal-progressive Obama, could ever preside over an administration that has imprisoned more whistle blowers than all his predecessors combined. In terms of the former (something else that Marshall is apparently oblivious to), is the subject matter of Amnesty International’s 2013 report which highlights Sweden’s damning record of extraditing people to other countries and its cooperation with the US in extraordinary renditions.

Jonathan Cook sums up just how far down the perilous road towards fascism our governments’ and their accomplices in the media are prepared to go in order to augment the interests of the powerful:

“The degraded discourse about the UN group’s decision does not just threaten Assange, but endangers vulnerable political dissidents around the world. The very fact that…[liberal media commentators]… are so ready to sacrifice these people’s rights in their bid to tar and feather Assange should be warning enough that there is even more at stake here than meets the eye.”

 

Barefoot economic values, TTIP & the democratic retreat.

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By Daniel Margrain

Equality before the law is one of the most fundamental principles underpinning justice. It is therefore an act of utter insanity to want to roll back the gains that has seen societies’ flourish as a result of the enactment of these principles and yet that’s precisely what the UK government like that of the US and 13 other EU members seem to be sleepwalking into rubber stamping.

Fifteen years ago, George Monbiot analysed the extent to which the UK government – through the dictates of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI)- had essentially become captive to the infiltration of the state by corporations’ on the national level. What is now being proposed transnationally, is essentially the capture of national sovereignty by multi-national corporations.

The Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), a procedural mechanism that allows foreign investors to sue states’ for damages in a tribunal of arbitration, have in recent years, increased in number and value. They are set to grow exponentially if the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which sets the provisions for ISDS, is allowed to go ahead as expected next year.

It will effectively mean that corporate lawyers across the EU and US will be allowed to overturn the laws of individual democratic governments’ with a view to them seeking massive compensation claims on behalf of the corporations they represent on the basis that likely “future anticipated profits” would be adversely affected.

The provisions of the draft agreement which was conducted in secret and only came to light after their contents were leaked to the media in March 2014, followed the results of a public consultation undertaken by the European Commission. Neither appears to have done anything to ally public concerns over the proposed deal which, should it end up being finalized in its current form will, as I will attempt to show below, have profound negative implications for Western democracy.

In December 2013, a coalition of over 200 environmentalists, labour unions and consumer advocacy organizations on both sides of the Atlantic sent a letter to the US federal agency responsible for trade policy, the United States Trade Representative (USTR), and European Commission demanding the ISDS be dropped from the trade talks, claiming that it was “a one-way street by which corporations can challenge government policies, but neither governments nor individuals are granted any comparable rights to hold corporations accountable”.

Clearly, the clauses in the trade agreement relating to investment protection are open to abuse, as is the undermining of national sovereignty resulting from this potential for abuse – issues that were tackled in a Guardian article by Owen Jones. Expanding on this, Martti Koskenniemi, professor of International Law, warned that the planned foreign investor protection scheme within the treaty, similar to World Bank Group‘s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), would endanger the sovereignty of the signatory states by effectively allowing for a small circle of legal experts to be given the power to usurp democratic legislative procedures and standards.

Professor Colin Crouch describes TTIP as “post-democracy in its purest form”. By this he means it represents a deficit in democratic accountability in which the structures of the state have ceded their powers to the imperatives associated with multinational capital. Post-democracy in these terms equates to the shifting of power towards corporations’ where deals are often struck in secret out of the reach of public bodies whose democratic role is to scrutinize them in the public interest.

Whenever scrutiny is removed, the burden of both economic and environmental risk relating to deals between political elites and corporate lobbies, tend to tilt towards the public sphere who pick up the pieces by way of what economists euphemistically refer to as “externalities”. Often, for example, deals involve the construction of large infrastructural vanity projects including football stadiums, Olympic villages and the like, that usually come with negative knock-on environmental, ecological, employment and economic impacts.

The London mayor Boris Johnson’s less than transparent involvement in the Olympic Stadium deal between the London Dockland Development Corporation (LDDC) and Premier League football club, West Ham United, brokered by Lady Brady, is an example of how both the political and business elites mutually benefit from these kinds of potentially environmentally and economically (for the tax payer) damaging and secret deals.

As the Blatter scandal, and more recently, Sebastian Coe’s cozy relationship with Nike and his other underhand dealings illustrate, the corporate, government and national authority ties within the high echelons of sport, are indicative of a wider corruption, albeit an informal kind that, unless you happen to be foreigner, is rarely acknowledged within the British establishment.

In such cases, corruption is normally regarded to be an activity restricted to “tin-pot” dictatorships in the developing world rather than something that has arguably become “normalized” and symptomatic of a broader societal and economic malaise conducive to political life within formal Western liberal democracies’.

With virtually every public asset being up for grabs in the era of neoliberal globalization (and hence reduced to a crude form of exchange value by the elites), means that all aspects of our existence are to be potentially ceded to the altar of profit and multilateral economic growth. This is precisely the aim of TTIP.

But of course not all values are perceived in this crude narrow sense. Employment, environmental, and even food standards protection which TTIP is set to undermine, for example, are concomitant to the public good. Within the context of a finite planet, the same cannot necessarily be said of economic growth.

Another value that cannot be measured in strictly economic terms is happiness and contentment. Can it really be said with any conviction that we, in the first world, are generally happier and more content than people in the developing world?

Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef brings some valuable insights into play within this area. Having worked for many years of his life in extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle and in urban areas of different parts of Latin America, Max-Neef recalls:

“At the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each other, and this was a short guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, having taught in Berkeley and so on. And we were looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist, you know, was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd.”

He continues:

We have reached a point in our evolution in which we know a lot. We know a hell of a lot. But we understand very little. Never in human history has there been such an accumulation of knowledge like in the last 100 years. Look how we are. What was that knowledge for? What did we do with it? And the point is that knowledge alone is not enough, that we lack understanding….”

The overriding factor that has given Max-Neef hope in the poor communities that he has lived and worked in is:

“Solidarity of people… respect for the others. Mutual aid. No greed. Greed is a value that is absent in poverty. And you would be inclined to think that there should be more there than elsewhere, you know, that greed should be of people who have nothing. No, quite the contrary. The more you have, the more greedy you become, you know. And all this crisis is the product of greed. Greed is the dominant value today in the world. And as long as that persists, well, we are done….”

According to Max-Neef, the best principles of economics are based in five postulates and one fundamental value principle:

“One, the economy is to serve the people and not the people to serve the economy.

Two, development is about people and not about objects.

Three, growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily require growth.

Four, no economy is possible in the absence of ecosystem services.

Five, the economy is a subsystem of a larger finite system, the biosphere, hence permanent growth is impossible.

And the fundamental value to sustain a new economy should be that no economic interest, under no circumstance, can be above the reverence of life.”

In developing postulate three, Max-Neef explains:

“Growth is a quantitative accumulation. Development is the liberation of creative possibilities. Every living system in nature grows up to a certain point and stops growing. You are not growing anymore, nor he nor me. But we continue developing ourselves. Otherwise we wouldn’t be dialoguing here now. So development has no limits. Growth has limits. And that is a very big thing, you know, that economists and politicians don’t understand. They are obsessed with the fetish of economic growth” [My emphasis].

Crucially:

“…In every society there is a period in which economic growth, conventionally understood or no, brings about an improvement of the quality of life. But only up to a point, the threshold point, beyond which, if there is more growth, quality of life begins to decline. And that is the situation in which we are now.”

The aim of TTIP, is the promotion of multilateral economic growth (of which the ideology of progress is seen as emblematic). Paradoxically, this corresponds to the decline in the quality of life characterized by runaway climate change and the undermining of environmental protection that this implies.

The law of diminishing returns as inferred by Max-Neef, would suggest that humanity is currently at the threshold point. It’s up to us to determine our future path and those of our children and children’s children. In order to do that we need to break with the current socioeconomic paradigm.