Gorgeous?
I have long admired Shami Chakrabati. Mainly because of her determined, intelligent and reasoned support for human rights but also because she’s short, dark and gorgeous. So when I heard her speak on Any Questions on Friday I felt my opinions were being well represented. Even on the subject of the NHS, where she admitted was a layman, she made some good points.
Then Simon Jenkins, chairman of the National Trust, said that he thought that health services in the world which appeared to work best are those where the county council pays but delivery is handled by private companies and he highlighted Scandinavia as exponents of this style of health care. Ms. Chakrabati then had a hissy fit and derided the idea that “rare cancers” and “heart surgery” should be handed by “parish councils”. Amazing! Ms. Chakrabati, of whom I expect intelligent and honest debate, had drifted off into the tactics of New Labour and was deriding an argument that had not been made.
In a democracy it is right that there is debate over ownership of industry and public services but what I find objectionable about “the left” is their automatic assumption that they have the moral high ground. They don’t. It is perfectly moral to argue that private companies are, overall, more competent than large state run organisations. Any debate should be over technical aspects such as quality of delivery and costs.
I am old enough to remember the monolithic nationalised industries which were the norm in the 60s and 70s and I well recall their arrogant disregard for their customers. I dislike the hyper-commercialism of the 21st century but would not welcome a return to the days when public services were run for the benefit of their workers and British Leyland thought that innovation meant square steering wheels.
The lesson here is that, while Ms. Chakrabati is an absolute heroine on the topic of human rights, we should resist the urge to idealise her. Idealising leaders must be some kind of natural human drive as we tend to do it quite a lot. These days pop stars seem to gain most from this phenomena though why we should consider that singers are any more intelligent or moral than the rest of us I don’t know. I remember seeing Madonna in a documentary and was gob smacked by the shallow drivel which she spouted. (Telling her father she couldn’t tone down her act because it would be “….compromising my artistic integrity….” – Yeh, OK, just zip yourself up and sing your song ay love!.)
Like many people I was impressed by Barack Obama when he became president. His speeches seem moral and reasoned. However, one of his first acts, on gaining office, was to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and declare that Jerusalem should remain the undivided capital of Israel handing the Israelis a victory and betraying the Palestinians without even understanding what he had done. One might also wonder why the President thought his first action should be to address AIPAC at all. To be fair to him I think this was probably an honest mistake on his part but it does show once again that our leaders have feet of clay.
Men are not Gods and should not be worshiped. Some opinions of some leaders will concur with our own, but many will not.
Bob Dylan said it best: “Don’t follow leaders”. What a guy, he’s my hero….D’oh!!!
Art Photography
Boston Tea Party Revived by the Hoodwinked
Tags: banks, Barack Obama, Boston Tea Party, Business, corporate greed, Democratic supermajority, Great Depression, Halliburton, Massachusetts, Ponzi scheme, tax dollars, Tea Bag Movement, teabagger, unemployment, United States Senate, unregulated business
tea party
The following is an article from our Massachusetts corespondent.
Much has been made in the international press about the recent vote in the state of Massachusetts that killed the Democratic supermajority in the United States Senate. It certainly was a big story. As a Massachusetts resident, I can tell you that I’ve never seen my polling station so crowded. And this is just one year after Democrat Barack Obama swept in with huge popular support in my state. What happened?
To answer that, I must strive to impress upon you the impatience of the American people. Having been saved from the brink of a second Great Depression by our government, they are nevertheless unwilling to sit tight until the economy completes its recovery. They are looking for someone to be mad at and government is a convenient scapegoat.
With unemployment levels appearing to be entrenched at 10%, and underemployment a chronic reality, people are finding it harder to pay their bills and the anger they feel over their fall from fortune has them latching onto something to fight. Remember the Boston Tea Party? I thought you might. Well, there are many here in the U.S. who will put forth the misguided proposition that we have again fallen under the thumb of a monarchy that no longer represents them. Perhaps you have heard of a new phenomenon called the “Tea Bag Movement” that has formed to protest government spending and taxation. What the initiates of this movement fail to recognize is that government is not the root of their problems.
I believe that public outrage over this issue is woefully misplaced. Pulling back the veil, one discovers that the teabagger uprising originated as carefully constructed campaign for an agenda that in fact cares nothing about the middle class. This campaign has been funded by big business interests that have learned how to direct public anger at government rather than where I believe it should truly be focused, which is the unprecedented, gross abuses of power from certain segments of our unregulated business sector. This business sector, with tools like Roger Ailes and his conservative media empire, has become expert at targeting primal human instincts that are easy to exploit. They’ve been able to deflect from the truth and support this deflection with an around the clock cycle of talking heads targeting public the anger. The more they snarl and scream that government is the problem, the more they inflame their underinformed troops. What they won’t report is that the downturn in the economy was not caused by government spending but by unprecedented and unchecked corporate greed.
As the owner of two businesses that exist to make money, I believe in capitalism. But, there has been too much power concentrated into too few corporations in the past decade, and this has led to a downward spiral in the standard of living for the middle and working class. Business is the entity that cuts jobs when it consolidates with other businesses. Business is the entity that continually ships our jobs overseas. Business is the entity that rewards incompetent management with obscene bonuses. Business is the entity in the form of military contractors like Halliburton that squanders our tax dollars in the most corrupt way imaginable with zero accountability for the tax payer to scrutinize. Banks took advantage of us, gleefully, until their ponzi scheme was exposed and fell apart. Our government then had no choice but to grit its teeth and bail the banks out because not doing so would have thrown us into another Great Depression. It looks like we’ve avoided that fate. Unemployment is still a problem, but unemployment is a lagging economic indicator. It’s always the last thing to recover.
In the meantime, life does not stand still. And I believe that government does its best to provide the essentials in an imperfect world with multiple stakeholders and multiple priorities. As imperfect as it may be, government exists to serve people over profit. It’s designed to provide checks and balances. What I call upon government to do is to take that charge seriously. It must address the problem of business consolidations, unchecked power and the nefarious ease in shaping public opinion that has resulted.
- Talking Bollocks, Massachusetts
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