Shipbuilding

I came across this video on Youtube. The late Robert Wyatt. If there were a competition to select one Youtube video to be preserved, this would have to be shortlisted. I'm not saying it would necessarily win, but...

I Quote...

We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.

Chris Hedges
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Telling it the way it is

Having a couple of weeks off work has given me time to read the newspapers. I came across a couple of articles, quotes from which really told it the way it is right now. If the complex, economic news that is put out every day was actually discussed in a broad-minded way in the media and not simply talked about by finance insiders, people might actually stand a chance of exercising some sort of democratic control over the kind of society they live in. There are realistic alternatives to cuts in services and attacks on the living standards of ordinary people - if only the media will allow them to be discussed. Here's Greg Philo of the Glasgow Media Group, in a letter to The Guardian (19/4/12):

When we [the Glasgow Media Group] suggested a wealth tax to raise £800 billion out of the £4 trillion held by the richest in our society, to stop the cuts, we found very strong support with a YouGov poll showing 73% in favour...

...The BBC should be featuring alternative views, but its news programmes are largely a parade of vested interests. We analysed interviews on the BBC's Today programme in the period in which UK banks were part nationalised and found that 81% of the interviewees were either, "City sources", "free market economists" or "business representatives".

And here's Jean-Luc Mélenchon, French presidential candidate, recently (quoted by Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian, 7/4/12):

"Capitalist propaganda always managed to make people think the markets' interests were humanity's interests. For too long people have been made to feel that they were some kind of drain or problem for expecting free education, free healthcare or being able to stop working when they were old..."

And as Tom Robinson said, a while ago:

St Paul's Eviction

It's the Falklands Again...

So, Argentina have been making noises on the Falklands/Malvinas front again. I must say that if I were an Argentinian I'd been against my country's claim on the island just as, being British I'm against Britain's. I was amused, shortly after the Falklands War by an Argentinian guy who said "Who won the Falklands War? We got rid of the Generals as a result of it. You've still got Thatcher."

And then there's the double standards. Whenever the Falklands issue crops up, I'm reminded of Britain's connivance in the forced evacuation of Diego Garcia, recently described in an article by John Pilger:

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be "swept" and "sanitised" of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. "They knew we were inseparable from our pets," said Lizette, "When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks' exhausts. You could hear them crying."

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette's youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. ...

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by "re-classifying" the population as "floating" and to "make up the rules as we go along". Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the "deportation or forcible transfer of population" is a crime against humanity.

I Gave You My Cash

Monbiot on Wealth Creation

"What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan... The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back."

George Monbiot writing in The Guardian