Fair Trade? Only If You're Rich....

More political ranting, I'm afraid!

Y'know, a lot of people believe in 'conspiracy theories'. Many sound totally absurd: 'Shape-shifting lizards', the 'Illuminate', the Anti-Christ bringing together the "One World Government", even the 'Bildeberg Group'. They know something is terribly wrong, but they can't quite put their fingers on what is actually wrong. They just know there's a conspiracy. Each try to explain it in a way that suits their passions. And each get publicly ridiculed and bamboozled. What's wrong is Capitalism. More precisely; the corporate dollar.

Neoliberal Americans are the force behind all that's wrong with the world! Upset their apple-cart and you face the full force of American aggression, whether you're friend or foe! They don't like "American Interests" being disturbed, even if the country 'disturbing' their interests faces bankruptcy! Starving millions across the world are of little concern to these corporate monsters who value cash more than human life.

The banking crisis baffled us all. I blamed Thatcher for deregulating the financial sector and allowing these greedy imbeciles free reign over the economy. In many ways I was right to be concerned. Ever since her tenure, we've lost our manufacturing base, we've lost our nationalised industries, we're losing our Royal Mail service and our NHS to private ownership. And, more importantly, we're losing our sense of social pride! Communities have been desecrated, families split, and constant media pressures to divide the whole of society by creating tensions that were only mildly worrying. Young blaming the old, old blaming the young, Muslims portrayed as potential terrorists, unemployed portrayed as 'benefit scroungers', pensioners, infirm and ill seen as an unnecessary 'burden'. We're all ready to kill someone for the mess we're in! But the mess we're in was created purely by greed. British and American greed.

It seems this problem has persisted for more than a hundred years and was started with the first flushes of industrial globalisation. Tax evasion and avoidance. (Apparently, there's a difference: Evasion is illegal, avoidance is legal!) The rich - and especially, but not limited to, the American rich - have found ways of avoiding tax in any country on the globe simply by claiming that they've paid their taxes elsewhere! It seems strange to me but, apparently, the best country in the world for tax avoidance (and evasion) purposes is not the Cayman Islands, or Switzerland, or the Channel Islands - its Britain! The City of London is THE place to offload your tax burden. We have such complex webs of deceit around the globe that we can attract money from global corporate giants, the USA, Russia, and any other criminal leviathan or country that wishes to hide huge sums of money from the prying eyes of governments who might have the audacity to claim some legitimate revenues from their ill-gotten gains! The City of London possesses its own internal governing body and appears to be above the law of ANY land! The "square mile" boasts an historical claim to this 'honour' dating back to William the Conqueror, apparently. Rather like the Vatican, it can claim an independence from the government yet influence government policy as it so desires. From private and shadow banking systems, the City has accrued a massive US$5.5 trillion! Untouchable!

As private banks suck in monies from all and sundry, they lend money which isn't really there. Then they discover that money is moved in great swathes, at a constant and rapid rate, and isn't available when governments actually need it! So WE all fill the gaps with "austerity" measures to ensure the country stays afloat. But it was never our problem in the first place! The IMF, OECD and other global financial "police" just shrug their shoulders and claim any 'internal' problem lies with the over-stretched mortgage borrowers and credit-card holders who are to blame. Rubbish!

Who was it said: "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"? We need to wake up.

Politics... I Wanted To Avoid!!

I had hoped not to go too far into my personal politics when writing this blog. I thought it was controversial enough to talk about atheism! I was going to try to reflect life from my perspective only, basing it on personal experiences, and avoiding my general views on politics. However....

I am left-wing. In fact, during the seventies I was a card-carrying Marxist. But from the eighties, and from Maggie Thatcher's hatchet job of the country's assetts, I gradually gave up the fight. As did many other unionists and left-wing radicals. We were beaten. There were just too many right-wing rich people with a lot of money and power. And, for a while, it did seem as though most of us were doing pretty well out of these radical, neo-liberal policies. My father, another left-winger, actually bought shares in 'British Gas', as a nest-egg for the future. I bought a house! The 'Right-To-Buy' programme seemed to offer a chance of some upward social mobilty. Then it all went tits up! My dad had to sell his shares, I had to remortgage and the interest rates sky-rocketed. From boom to bust in six years! We struggled through and have managed - just about - to hold on to our property and get through the first of these "recessions". Then again in the nineties, another "recession". And now - yep! - another "recession"! And now we're struggling even more. The confidence trick has been revealed.

Working-classes can only afford to buy houses IF there is work. If work disappears, there's no money to pay the mortgage-lender back. So your house can be repossessed and a new owner, buying it at a discount, can add it to his/her porfolio and rent it out! The initial reasoning behind the 'Right-To-Buy' scheme was to prevent working men and women from striking. It's easier to negotiate rent arrears than a missed mortgage payment, or two! Following this scheme was a series of legisltaive attacks on unions. Now, unions suffer more legislative controls in Britain than anywhere else in the world! Some of them infringe Human Rights Laws!

So we've entered another "recession". Many people are losing their homes because of lack of work, or a decent living wage. Most people in poverty in this country are NOT benefit "scroungers" but people IN WORK!!

So what's going on? Workers losing their homes? Their cars? (Sometimes their only means of transport to and from their place of work!) They're having to pay for medical care, dental care, eye care, and ambulance call-outs? In BRITAIN? The birthplace of the "cradle-to-grave" NHS care system? "Too costly" says this unelected government. What?

Here's the lie I hated the most - "We're in this together!" How that rankles me! The richest in this country have incerased their wealth by more than £78 billion pounds!! INCREASED their wealth - in a "recession"! Notice I keep placing the word "recession" in quotes? That's because there IS NO RECESSION!! There never was, nor has there ever been one! All that word means is that the rich elite want to find more ways of screwing you and me!! Cameron and Clegg (both determined liars!) spelt out the "fact" that we had "Maxed out our credit card" as a nation! What? What credit card? The banks that had payed off a load of wasters and drained the coffers then began to collapse. Here's a funny thing - "we", or should I say "the government", shored-up the banks with several billion pounds of "borrowed" money. Where did they borrow this money from? The very banks that had "colapsed"! They "owe" us the money we "borrowed" from them! How does that work?!

Now we're determined to get people "back into work". The infirm and disabled. The so-called benefit "scroungers". WHAT WORK? Housing benefit cut from the most vulnerable in our society. The "bedroom tax"! They're screwing you and me.

I've finished my rant for today - but there will be more!!

What Goes On In Those Heads?

I've been reading some serious verbal diarrhoea lately! Some people  have heads full of nonsense and believe it all to make perfect sense! I believe the term is cognitive dissonance. Holding two, or more, opposing views and (somehow) reconciling the differences. People who hold religious views argue that atheists have been 'brainwashed' by science which is "obviously the work of the Devil!" This apparent deception doesn't allow us access to the "truth" of the existence of 'God'. No! All that's happened is the acquisition of information that our brains have evolved to make sense of has shown overwhelmingly that facts speak louder than fantasy.

I, and many others, have stated that the only reason for a belief in an omnipotent deity, in this day and age, is to reassure them that they are going to live forever. Christians and Muslims alike (in many ways!), all hold the nonsensical belief that they have 'souls' that are eternal. And even more weirdly that these souls are the exact copies of themselves as people! What? Forget all the arguments about creationism verses evolution, or of morals verses religious values, or of history verses the Bible/Q'uran, or whatever, that's all hedgerow and scrub. The belief in an everlasting life is all that matters.

I'm going to recreate a thought experiment I've used elsewhere to try and dispel the idea of "eternity".

First a test of your visual imagination:

Imagine a room so dark you cannot see your hand in front of your face. I mean so black and devoid of light you can almost feel it. Now imagine that the only light you can see is a single tiny drop of luminous paint on the end of a needle. Nothing else. The rest of the space around you could be as vast as you need it to be. It could be twice the size of an aircraft hangar where sound doesn't reverbarate, but the only light source, the only thing you see, is that one miniscule drop of luminous paint. Try to keep that image.

Now, imagine yourself "dead" in the "spiritual" sense. That is; your "soul" has passed on through this Earthly veil. Whilst you're whistling hymns and telling god how wonderful he is, you come across a human brain. You remember that someone, somewhere told you that a brain consists of up to one hundred billion neurons. So you decide to count them! How long would it take you? I'm not going to be too accurate here, but my guess is around three thousand, two hundred years plus! But that doesn't matter because you now have "eternity". Now let's say that in each single cell you discover a brand new idea. One never before been used, or mentioned in life. You might think to yourself; 'I wonder if that's a good, or bad idea?' So you try these ideas out. One by one. You might even combine some to make even newer thoughts and ideas. Some may take a few seconds, some may take weeks, but you persevere. A conservative guess at a time-scale to achieve this small task might be ten million years, given that you're dealing with potentially one hundred billion plus new ideas! How many generations of new souls would be coming to heaven, I wonder? Around three hundred thousand at a rough guess! (Hope there's room in heaven!) Can you imagine how much you'd know? Everything there is to know! Knowledge must end. So now you can go off somewhere into infinite space and create your own universe. Within it, you can create your own planet that supports life and have these unfortunates worship you! You can make your own hell for those who "deny" you and you can curse them for their "sin of ignorance"! Hey - that means you would soon know as much as god! It might even mean that you have the time to become god! How wonderful! You could make universes just like this one over and over and over again. Each one taking four billion years or so to mature. You could make millions of them. Trillions of years could pass and think of all those souls you'd have to worship you. 

Lets return to the image I set you earlier. One tiny speck of luminous paint in a blackened room. Even after you've learned everything "god" knows, and built and destroyed trillions of universes, that dim speck of light has done nothing to brighten up "eternity"! It never gets filled. It is endless and by its very nature; pointless! Now if that single speck of light represents all the time its taken you to become god, how much smaller must it be to represent your life-span? 

Eternity makes this life pointless! I mean, what can we possibly learn in the short spell we have on this planet that we can't learn in eternity? If all god/allah (or whoever) wants is for us to worship him, why doesn't he allow us to do that in eternity? I'm sure, given an eternity, I could learn to love anything!

The only eternity there REALLY is is death. Once you're dead you never return! So make what you can of this life. It's all we've got.

Interesting Perspective….

I’ve just finished reading the elaborately titled “The Death of Sigmund Freud, Fascism, Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Fundamentalism” by Mark Edmundson. (Published by Bloomsbury, 2007)

I’m a great admirer of Freud as my friends know, so this was a Christmas gift from one of them. I loved it! (Thanks again, Debbie!) Which is unusual given that I’m not a huge fan of the usual American take on Freudian theory. Mr Edmundson surprised me and I wholly apologise for my (to date) avoidance of your work.

Freud was a committed atheist and had a dim view of America following his visit in 1909. He was quoted once as stating that; “The country is full of savages!” a comment he never fully elaborated on. But given the things he said in the ensuing years, it has become clear that his views reflected the American pursuit of the ‘almighty dollar’. According to Mr Edmundson, Freud accused the colonists of suffering from an illness he termed ‘dollaria’

This is just an aside. The real issue is the rise of Christian fundamentalism particularly in the USA. The concept of the book guides us to a short analysis as to the reasons behind this dangerous trend. Edmundson traces Freud’s escape from Vienna in 1938 as Hitler begins his quest for world domination beginning with the annexing of Austria with Germany. Freud analyses the populace who are welcoming the führer with such gusto and determines that the rise of such tyrants as he, was both predictable and very human. He describes the inner turmoil that drives human anxieties to reach a boiling point when the need for some kind of certainty has to manifest itself in order to express and externalise those anxieties and in so doing dispelling the threat of internal chaos. At that time in history there was none more certain than Adolf Hitler. Germany had lost a war, were deceived by the Treaty of Versailles, and were in the deepest throes of economic depression. A most uncertain of times for the German people.

As for the rest of the story I recommend you read Mark Edmundson’s book.

What was interesting for me is the idea that we are now living in uncertain times and have not really evolved emotionally to cope with this uncertainty. My views on the genesis of religious thought does not counter Freud’s views on the unconscious processes that manifest themselves with conscious outbursts of magical thinking! The prenatal, developing mind, with no point of reference, is only aware of certainty. Uncertainty only becomes perceptible at birth! A trauma that can only be filled with fear – the most basic human emotion.

Unconscious phantasy is unlabelled, uncategorised emotional memory. If those early fears can be wiped out, then (the delusion of) certainty can return.

Basically, the delusion of certainty means; if I don’t need to think for myself, I’m happiest! Fundamentalism takes away the need for reflection. Someone else can take the responsibility for my actions. “I vas just obeying orders!” Or, “I’m doing God’s work!” Same thing, really!