In Times of Austerity is Art Just Middle-Class Decadence?

"For sale, £4.99 ono. One careless owner ha ha!" Photo May Ayres.

As a low-income blue-collar worker and council tenant living in Tower Hamlets who is currently watching his standard of living plummet, I fail to qualify for the title of home owning decadent wine sipping overpaid pretentious arty fetishist. I understand though that some of those living among us might fit this description, and I stand shoulder to shoulder with them on the subject of 'Old Flo'.

I believe that the decision by our local council to sell this Henry Moore sculpture in order to bolster its haemorrhaging coffers is a misguided one, and I also find myself in broader disagreement with those who say that art is a luxury the Borough can no longer afford.
Advocates for the sale of 'Old Flo' accurately note that nearly 30,000 children are living here in poverty, in one of the poorest boroughs in Britain, and that there are single bedroom apartments being occupied by six people. They also point to the dire and decrepit nature of some of the housing stock that people are compelled to live in. They are surely misguided though to imagine that the hopelessness and desperation can be eased with a one-off sale of a piece of the family silver.
London County Council purchased 'Old Flo' in 1962 for £7400, and at the time this sum was sufficient to buy three houses locally. The sale of 'Old Flo' will likely realise £20 million, and today when the average house price is £384,820, this is a sum sufficient to buy over forty houses. The work then has obviously remained a financial asset providing a strong bulwark against inflation over the years, and is something the Borough should perhaps be holding onto for the benefit of future generations. Why it is not being used as collateral to raise desperately needed low-interest loans for local enterprises is perhaps a pertinent question that people should be asking.
The sculpture was a gift at cost-price from Henry Moore, and over the years it continued to enrich the lives of many living here until it was removed for 'safe keeping'. It was local people who gave it the name 'Old Flo', and is a measure of the affection they felt for it.
It was not as some of it's critics maintain 'the arrogance of the rich' that planted a sculpture amongst poor and working people living in Tower Hamlets but the artist himself, and he made his motives very clear: hoping to make art accessible to those who would not normally consider visiting a gallery. 
Ironically, it was the very arrogance of the more 'well off', who are among those resisting the impending sale, which was responsible for its removal to a Yorkshire park in the first place. 
They successfully argued that its location on a council estate exposed it to vandalism, despite its only defacement having been from pigeon droppings. 
Another irony is that the Borough whose Council is trying to auction 'Old Flo' off is also home to the wealthiest, and many would say venal and reckless financial institutions that were responsible for the economic crises now set to dwarf the Great Depression of the 1930's.
The crimes of this family of financial institutions are gradually becoming a matter of public record, most recently in December 2012, when HSBC agreed to pay $1.9 billion to the US Treasury in a settlement that avoided criminal prosecution for allegedly laundering Mexican drug money and providing material support to Saudi terrorism. 
While there are many people living here who would take pride in being a part of a tradition of lawlessness personified by the Kray Twins, others seek inspiration in more sustaining and nurturing aspects of human existence; pursuits which are by no means confined to the wealthy.
Old Flo meanwhile serves as a reminder for many; of East London's endurance during the 1940's, and of the refuge sought on platforms of the London Underground through long nights of relentless bombing. It is a story also of people physically overcoming the resistance of an officialdom which feared the masses devolving into a species of subterranean dwelling troglodytes. 

Another installation, the statue called 'Stairway to Heaven' presently taking shape in Bethnal Green Park and funded by public subscription, also demonstrates that the Blitz is something East Londoners wish to remember. 
I can think of no better site for Old Flo's return than close to Bethnal Green Underground Station, sharing space in the park with another monument to those condemned to living and dying under the bombs.

Words Failed Us

God's Wars.

"There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice,

but I do know that art means nothing if it simply decorates the

dinner table of power which holds it hostage".

Adrienne Rich. 1929-2012.

                                                                    Detail, 'Proconsul'. Margaret Hassan and children.

 

For those who have arrived here via May Ayres' website expecting to read an account about the processes and materials that go into producing her work, then I must apologise for disappointing them.

I work as her technician but to my recollection May has never written or spoken to me about her use of oxides and clays, and so I recommend that anybody sufficiently interested in this aspect of her work contact her directly.  
She has big ideas, but only a small kiln, and so we frequently work together to assemble and join component pieces of a sculpture, grinding and shaping joints and sometimes gluing them. 
We suffered some spectacular disasters in earlier days, but we have gradually developed techniques which we are now able to adapt for each new piece of work.  
May asked me to organise the literature to accompany her Gods Wars exhibition, and so here the reader can find the foreword to her 'Ceramic Pictures' booklet that accompanies the 'War of Aggression series, in addition to the notes provided for 'God's Wars'.
They can be found by scrolling down to the oldest posts.

People arriving here via her website might be aware that the majority of her output since 2003 has focused on what Chief Justice Jackson defined at Nuremberg in 1946 as '..the supreme international crime..' the war of aggression.  
Historically, 'legitimate' war has always been undertaken as a last resort after diplomacy and negotiation have failed. The war of aggression on the other hand is described as 'pre-emptive' or 'preventive'.
The wars waged since 9/11 have used this 'pre-emptive' parlance, and getting up to speed with another commonly used deviation, we now have wars of 'humanitarian intervention', complete with 'humanitarian bombing'. 
We can only wonder whether one day, wars of 'humanitarian extermination' might even form a part of the grotesque lexicon.

Today May and I both regard this lawless war as also the strangest and most sinister conflict that our country has ever been involved in. It is described for example as a 'war on terror'; in other words a war on a noun. President Obama's war differs from President Bush's 'Global war on terror' only in its branding, now renamed 'Overseas Contingency Operations'.  
As a consequence of the criminal attack upon the US mainland in 2001, our nation now exists in a state of perpetual war, and our leaders have warned us that this war will last not just for our lifetimes, but those of our children also. 
With these realities in mind we obviously need not labour under any illusions of ever achieving 'victory', and this is merely one more word rendered archaic in the fight against our elusive enemy.

Previous US presidents Madison and Eisenhower would have each been appalled at this turn of events, and their words are clear, for whatever they are now worth. James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, warned in 1795 that war is the most dreaded enemy to public liberty, and that "..no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." One hundred and sixty years later, Dwight Eisenhower declared that "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

The very fears which Eisenhower voiced in his retirement speech in 1961, warning of the emergence of a 'military industrial complex'; where making private money and making war in the name of the state becomes a closed and self perpetuating system now seem to have come to pass.

For May and myself and many others living in Tower Hamlets today, we recognise that this war has the potential to catastrophically polarise both our own community and wider society also, and this is why we both feel compelled to speak out whenever and wherever we can, using whatever medium is available to us. 

Over the years since 2003 we have had ample opportunity for discussion and study, and we have used our time as best as we have been able. Our conclusion is that an odious attack upon an entire faith, one of the three Abrahamic faiths, has been provided with a cloak of legitimacy, and this simply should not be the case. It is an inherently evil thing and we should be asking ourselves where is it coming from? It is eerily reminiscent of the Russian Czar's pogroms against the Jews in the 1800's, and of Hitler and Stalin's civilization shattering rampage through Europe in the 1900's.

Our own conclusion is that our nation did not arrive at this present woeful condition by accident, but rather by intricate design. We consider many of the minds around us to have become corrupted by a lethal confection of public relations campaigns and psychological operations embedded within the mainstream media, indoctrination by any other name. As a consequence of this skulduggery, many among us have now abandoned any regard for civil liberties and human rights, and are seemingly comfortable even while our elected government and their allies torture, kidnap, rape, displace, starve and murder innocent people on a daily basis, all in our name. There are those among us who seem content not only to sacrifice those innocent lives that they will never have to know anything about, but even their own democracy also, all for a highly questionable cause known as 'national security'. Those of us who reject the very premise of this war today are labelled 'dissidents', and it becomes more dangerous by the day to be identified as one of these 'enemies within' seemingly now defined as anyone who still insists on thinking for themselves.

It was the famous dissident James Madison who recognised that '..war is the parent of armies', and that 'from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honours, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both.'

Madison's 'inequality of fortunes' clearly resonates with the Occupy movement today, while our 'degeneracy of morals' is nowhere more clearly charted perhaps than with the issue of torture, otherwise known as 'cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment'. The policy of lawless indefinite incarceration has rendered even Habeas Corpus itself into a deep dark pit, but few among us are as yet even aware of this reality. This is a war which has bankrupted the US and played havoc with the dollar based global economy. Former senior Vice President and Chief Economist to the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, has warned that it has already cost the US taxpayer $6000 billion dollars; borrowed money that will have to be paid back one day, a burdensome legacy that honest people will admit has now been bestowed upon our grandchildren.

During the period that separated the two onslaughts, with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 followed eighteen months later by the invasion of Iraq, growing numbers of us had begun to sit up and take account of what was going on and to question the morality, not to mention the questionable legality of launching an attack upon yet another sovereign people.  
May and myself both turned out for the huge rally in Central London on that chilly sunny February morning in 2003, to protest the attack which our nation's leaders were clearly hell bent on launching, and in every democracy across the world people went out on to the streets to take part in the largest global protest in history. The lesson which all of us who marched on that day eventually understood though, is that in this democracy where we are all free to protest, our masters are equally free to ignore us. The millions of words of rational opposition which this war has generated, the countless books and documentaries exposing the lies and the horror and cruelty, can sometimes appear to have been for little purpose, and might not have saved even a single life.

Prior to the emergence of this new dystopian landscape, May's working hours were largely spent observing and drawing what she saw around her. She sought to interpret through drawing and sculpture the enigmatic humanity of the people in her local community, including the strangers who traverse the neighbourhood daily on their way to and from a desk in the City or in Docklands. May's work today tries to remember the lives destroyed by this war, because the whispers of the dead are the voices we perhaps most need to be listening to.

Whether or no words failed us, energy failed me on the opening night of 'God's Wars'. I packed up my tools and went home and slept for twelve hours, exhausted from setting it all up and having worked to make and install the plinths for the pieces up until the minute before the doors opened. I failed to assemble 'Demonic Principals' in time, and this work didn't go on display until two days later, on the first Saturday. May stayed on that evening talking with people about her work and about the iron grip of the iron heel upon the neck of another human being. An uncomfortable reality to articulate, she was constantly in jeopardy of becoming something of a party pooper, and I suspect that she has since developed a somewhat more refined understanding of 'private' views.

Prior to opening we had many arguments about the booklet that we had commissioned. We had taken on a large debt to have a thousand copies produced, along with all of the other necessities for organising a show, and now that they were here, what to do with them? I advocated giving copies away to people on the bus and in shops, people that you meet everyday. May disagreed, so I went ahead and to the best of my knowledge none of my efforts met with any degree of success. I took as many copies as I dared along to St Paul's Cathedral, and left them in the Starbooks library of the newly emerging commonwealth of ideas. The booklet has been criticised by artists for focusing on 'politics' to the point of excluding any words about May's work itself, but this was quite intentional given today's realities.

Just prior to opening, we learned that we might have made a big mistake in printing the publicity material before talking to the administrator, who now informed us that Sundays were in fact a dead day, with some previous exhibitions failing to attract a single visitor. This was unfortunate because our publicity material was already in circulation, and it committed us to opening on Sunday, from twelve midday until 9pm, in addition to the same hours on Wednesdays and Saturdays. There was no way to reverse this error and so we had to stick to the advertised hours. Two ageing babies in the wood then, and the loneliness of the long distance invigilator lay before us, and our first days in the chilly vestibule at St John were indeed bleak ones. The hours dragged by, but they began to be punctuated by occasional visitors, some of who returned bringing others along with them. After the second week, I had May explaining to me that we needed accompanying texts because people were generally unaware of any of the history which the pieces address. Between us we produced a give-away guide to the work, four A4 pages of densely packed notes. We would wind up having difficulty in keeping pace with the demand for these, until a young man who runs a local printing business offered to continue to do the photocopying for free. Half a dozen or so dear friends steamed in to help with the invigilating also, while at the same time spreading word about the show. Between them they were responsible for bringing in scores if not hundreds of visitors, and Sundays in fact turned out to be a well attended day.

The show opened on September 1^st, and on Sunday 25^th the administrator asked us how was it all going? It was twelve noon and the numbers of people walking in were still rising. She advised us to keep a record, and on that particular Sunday we counted sixty-five visitors to the show. This actually represented something of a high point, with Sundays averaging around forty five people for the duration, which was extended by a fortnight. By this measure, and sometimes despite our own efforts, the show was something of a success. It is I hope understandably difficult for me to write about the changes that it has wrought for us, but I need to try. First and foremost we feel vindicated. The past eight years have often been lonely and at times difficult and deeply unsettling ones for both of us. For myself, one particular reality had manifested itself clearly from the very beginning of the show. May and I both share a common recognition of what we would call 'the synaptic'; the free association of the thoughts and ideas of common people. This already existing system is organic and we like and trust it, and it's good enough for us. We also trust it as an antidote to any erstwhile corporate driven publicity machine that happens to be operational at any given time. Against our own instincts then, we had decided to employ the services of a professional journalist, whose empathetic press release was entirely ignored by every mainstream publication that it was sent out to, just by way of confirming our expectations. The show was entirely ignored by art critics of all political hues, John Molyneux being the notable exception, and a review of the work of Pam (sic) Ayres was duly published under Mr Molyneaux's byline in Socialist Worker. It was also visited and favourably reviewed first by Felicity Arbuthnot, and then Victoria Brittain, both respected British journalists. Felicity Arbuthnots's article appeared on Global Research shortly after she visited, and eventually, a week before the scheduled finish date it was also published in the British daily Morning Star newspaper. Victoria Brittain's review appeared on the Cage Prisoners website.

Six weeks of exhibiting, three days or more each week, nine hours per day, twenty three days in all, were gruelling for us at times, but we drew enormous strength from visitors and helpers. I'd never seen May's work gathered together on display before, and along with many others I was more than a little shaken with the result. The work of course always sits in her studio, but normally as an unassembled jumble of pieces, and this was her first solo exhibition in twenty seven years.

So far as I am able to see, the coming years are only likely to become harder in fighting against marginalisation and isolation, and so this show served as a brief respite. The people around us, with some quite remarkable exceptions, have provided little support since May began working on this series some eight years ago now. We have been abandoned by some individuals, old friends and family members alike. The very nature of the subject matter invokes an “I don't want to know” response from the overwhelming majority, and questions such as “Why are you doing this?”, and “Don't you ever make nice things?” and “Well I wouldn’t want it in my living room!” have been what we have come to expect, the norm rather than the exception. For my part, having had years of emailing links to crucial stories about our crimes to people who 'didn’t have the time' to open them; of trying to foster an open discussion about our alarmingly similar condition as a society to that of the 'Good Germans' of the 1930's and 40's, I now feel as though I received a first class university education in those six or seven weeks, a crash course in the true humanities. Our criteria was simply to establish the work in a public viewing space, so that it might spark contemplation and conversation. For the sake of holding on to our own humanity we need to remember these people.

Obama's Oceania.

-->

“We are concerned that the United States has not announced that it is going to conduct criminal investigations into the large number of previously undisclosed civilian casualty events that are revealed by this material. “

Julian Assange.

As an Englishman I recognise that since the end of the Second World War my country has shrivelled to become but a far flung outpost of what is now another empire in decline. To my mind, Orwell's 1948 depiction of our island as 'Airstrip One' remains an adequate description today, possibly with the caveat that we might now actually enjoy a lesser designation of 'Airstrip One Hundred and One' or more.

Until quite recently it has often paid to watch currents and trends in the US as they emerge in order to catch glimpses of our own destiny. It has been a truism that whatever happens on the other side of the Atlantic Basin today is certain to impact upon us here tomorrow. This long prevailing reality is now changing somewhat.

Today the all encompassing process of globalisation has served to bring centres of private power into a more common orbit than has ever been seen before. Finance capital now wing's it's way across the globe in the blink of an eye, unfettered by national boundaries.

Trans-national corporations can be legitimately described as 'Sans-national', owing no allegiance to any nation state. Currently the people of the United States of America are witness to this new and distressing reality which applies even to the original spawning ground of the giant megaliths.

While researching material for “Mummy Made Me A Terrorist” over the Christmas period, I arrived at the conclusion that 'Fascism' and 'Nazism'' are terms which now elude any universal definition. They thus remain ripe for abuse within the emotionally charged rhetoric of the circus which now passes for political discourse. Nowhere it seems is this more evident than in the US.

In writing about our “descent into an openly fascist society” here in Britain, more than once I found myself wondering whether we might actually have surpassed this stage and morphed into full blown Neo-Nazism. There are many ominous signs that this might be the case, and it was somewhat reassuring therefore to read an article by the veteran journalist and war correspondent John Pilger published shortly afterwards, in which he offers a more optimistic prognosis. He describes our woeful “perpetual war state”, but writes that “..this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November.” He is alluding to the forthcoming US presidential elections.

During a recent discussion with a visitor to my home, I happened to make a passing reference to this journalist's outstanding work over the years, and the response was telling: “I remember John Pilger... you don't hear much of him these days do you?“

My visitor's observation was entirely correct, but sadly he is unlikely to question why this might be the case. Pilger was once a mainstream journalist of the British press, and my own awareness of much of what was happening in our world during the mid 1960's was informed by his articles written for publication in the Daily Mirror. At the time I was still attending school and living with Mum and Dad, and this mass circulation tabloid newspaper was delivered to our home each day.

Today, John Pilgers work is regarded as 'radical', 'left wing', and decidedly out there on the fringes of mainstream media; a situation which tells us much about the direction that our society and culture have taken over the years.

Last June he was scheduled to give a talk in the United States sponsored by the progressive Lannan Foundation, an organisation which serves to provide both a forum and financial support for the endangered species of investigative writers and journalists. He is no stranger to the Lannan Foundation, having enjoyed a cordial relationship with them over the years to the point of representing them at one of their awards ceremonies. In addition to his scheduled talk, Pilger was also planning to show his most recent documentary 'The War You Don't See' to US audiences.

The Lannan Foundation however, cancelled him at short notice and furthermore refused to provide any explanation. For the citizens of the United States, not only was this to be the case of a 'War You Don't See', but also of a 'A Journalist You Wont Hear'.

Had his documentary been shown to US audiences it might have provided many with their first opportunity of seeing the 'gun barrel' film footage shot from a US Apache attack helicopter over Baghdad during the 'surge' of 2007. This chilling spectacle of the cold bloodied murder of twelve people, complete with the sound recording of the crew's comments during the execution of their duties provides the film's opening sequences. The video only came to light when it was published on the WikiLeaks website.

In the absence of any clarification from the Lannan Foundation itself, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the silencing of Pilger was because in the six months leading up to June of 2011 he had emerged as an outspoken defender of WikiLeaks, and of its embattled founder Julian Assange.

It is practically impossible to overstate how monumental a year 2010 was for journalism, and it is worthwhile to recall some of the actual chronology of the WikiLeaks major contributions:

April. WikiLeaks releases 'Collateral Murder'; the Pentagon film of an Apache helicopter attack over Baghdad which left twelve dead, including two Reuters journalists.

May. US Army Private Bradley Manning is arrested on suspicion of disseminating classified material.

July. WikiLeaks publishes the Afghan War Logs.

October. WikiLeaks publishes the Iraq War Logs.

November. WikiLeaks publishes a massive trove of US diplomatic cables, which promptly becomes known as 'Cablegate'.

December. Julian Assange is arrested in London and imprisoned at the request of a Swedish prosecutor alleging sex crimes.

At the time of writing, Private Manning is facing a court-martial in the US, charged with disseminating classified information, and Julian Assange is about to be extradited to Sweden to face questioning on what appear to be highly dubious rape allegations.

A common consensus among those who have been paying attention is that once in the hands of the Swedish authorities, Assange will be promptly handed over to the United States government where he and Manning might even face trial together, charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

The prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 heralded the first time this act was ever used against a 'whistle-blower', that is to say somebody who releases hitherto secret information into the public domain with the intent of exposing criminal behaviour. Ellsberg's crime had been to publish papers made available to him during the course of his employment with the Rand Corporation. Documentation he was privy to revealed the extent to which successive US administrations had lied to Congress and the American people about the 'progress' in Vietnam.

Between the time of Ellsberg's indictment and up until Obama's inauguration there had only been two other prosecutions of whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act.

Since the Obama administration has taken office however, it has used this law to prosecute individuals in no less than six cases, and Assange and Manning will in all likelihood make numbers seven and eight. This from a president who campaigned for more transparency of government during his bid for the residency of the White House, and who described whistle-blowers as “often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government.”

The US Justice Department under Obama has even pursued two individuals which the Bush administration had previously decided not to prosecute. This alone discredits Obama's avowed policy of 'not looking back' when it comes to criminal investigations of possible war crimes committed by high ranking government officials from the previous administration. It is clear that this policy only extends to former President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and their immediate chain of command. The enormous duplicity of this current administration in Washington should therefore now stand exposed before the world.

It is not only US centres of power that are potentially threatened by the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables disclosures. The Wikileaks revelations momentarily lifted the stone on many nation states, but how their citizens responded after seeing what crawled around underneath was a very mixed bag. This then is a global phenomena, and genuine journalists everywhere have taken heart from these developments, a very dangerous state of affairs. Democracy and transparency versus secret government and its subversion of the rule of law ought to define the shape of the debate today, and in a healthy society, one in which government was truly by, for, and of the people it would do.

In Spain the cables relating to the US attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad which killed a Spanish photo journalist had “...an enormous impact. That’s really all that’s being talked about. It’s even relegated the economic crisis we’re facing to a second topic”.

In Egypt, some have suggested that revelation might even be a stepping stone to revolution. At the time of writing, the generals are still very much in charge, but following the February 2011 uprising and the ongoing struggle there, genuine democracy might yet become a reality.

The story of the kidnapping and rendition of neuroscientist Dr Aafia Siddiqui in Pakistan meanwhile serves to show how easily the interpretation of these cables might be twisted to subvert the truth. A telling example is provided in an extract from a Guardian article which tells us that Dr Siddiqui “..... was never imprisoned at the Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, the embassy cables suggest. 'Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged'.”

'Never imprisoned' there despite independent eye witness testimony to the contrary? Perhaps she was only held at Bagram for three years, or maybe only two? The possibility never even appears to have crossed the mind of this institutionally supine Guardian journalist.

It has become clear that by refusing to deal with any of the compelling evidence available at the time, and confirmed by WikiLeaks long afterwards, the mainstream media has largely rendered itself redundant as a credible source of news. Since this 'war on terror' began, it has expended enormous efforts in projecting a slew of patently false realities, and this has reduced its role to one of mere distributor for state and corporate propaganda.
The values of investigative journalism are now firmly established as the province of the 'fifth estate'; cyberspace. The distribution and sharing of information has been revolutionised, and the internet is directly challenging the comfortable co existence of traditional media and the power centres that control it. As Kevin Zeese has pointed out, “If in 1450 Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, had been prosecuted, the revolution of printing would have occurred anyway. The information revolution has progressed too far to be stopped. Information will flow, transparency will increase, and media will be democratized.” For this to mean anything though, it will require an engaged citizenry, one that has cast aside its apathy and equanimity.

From it's earliest days the potential of the printing press as a source of news was seen as a threat by the church and the state establishments, and its facilitators were pursued mercilessly. The Tudor monarchs only permitted presses in London, where they were able to control them, and at the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The first licence to print news was only granted in the early seventeenth century, and this was solely for the purpose of reporting events from abroad, not at home. Even this partial freedom only lasted for ten years, when all of the licences were revoked following protests by the Spanish authorities. Lilburne, one of the earliest advocates of press freedom, was pilloried, dragged and whipped through the streets of London before being cast into prison. Manning and Assange then are part of a long and courageous tradition, and throughout history the message from the masters has remained constant: “...resistance is futile, be aware of what we do to people who step out of line, and learn the appropriate lesson....”. This might explain why, of the two and a half million people who had access to the data that made it's way to WikiLeaks, one person alone had the courage to expose it to the light of day. 

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks' contribution towards a potential dawning of an informed public is but one, albeit crucial component in the sea change which the internet as a whole can bring about. There is no longer any excuse for ignorance about what has been taking place in our name. When the 'Collateral Murder' video footage first appeared, I tried talking to people about what it showed, and there were many who just didn't want to know. It came as a shock to discover that so many simply refused to listen, watch or think about it. I soon realised that raising the subject actually taught me much about the individual I was speaking with; about their commitment to justice and decency, and the presence (or absence) of a spine or a conscience or a heart. Their response in many ways mirrored that of the actual journalist who was embedded with the unit that committed this murder from the skies over Baghdad. Having suppressed the story at the time simply by not reporting it, he eventually went on to glibly record that it was “..one bad day in a surge that was filled with such days.” He celebrated the unit in his book 'The Good Soldiers'. We all know that the guiding principle of the Mafia, is 'omerta', the code of silence, but 'Don't inform, don't snitch' ought to be a hard rule to follow if your job is supposed to be journalism.

Six months after WikiLeaks exposed this video to the light of day, another release, this time of Pentagon war logs, showed us that the US military had killed more civilians than insurgents at checkpoints in Iraq. That they had killed people trying to surrender. That prisoner abuse did not stop after the exposure of what was going on at Abu Ghraib. That the US had given the green light to the Iraqi security forces to continue killing and torturing civilians.

One entry tells of the discovery of the body of a six year old child, dead from wounds which appeared to be bullet holes, but which turned out in fact to be drill holes

The biggest revelation of all that WikiLeaks bought to light in 2010 might yet be that when war crimes are exposed, the whistle-blowers wind up with a lynch mob chasing them down, the perpetrators walk away untroubled and unharmed, and the majority among us at home choose to look the other way.

What this says about our own sense of justice and decency, and the values of our much vaunted 'democracy' that we are so keen to export to the rest of the world is therefore best left for others to judge. We ourselves are in no condition to form any rational conclusion because one of the symptoms of our sickness is blatant self delusion. Ron Paul best sums up this malaise when he explains that “In a society where truth becomes treason, we are in big trouble.”

We should take note that the enemies of WikiLeaks included Amazon, Pay Pal, Mastercard, and Visa, among others. These are the same corporations which have traditionally been happy to trade in every commodity from books by Western dissident authors to tee shirts of Che Guerva: because they have always ultimately been in control. Karl Rove is attributed with once explaining to the author Ron Suskind that he should catch up, because he was still living in the “reality-based community”, and elaborating on this, said: "That's not the way the world really works any more. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Rove's world view is largely explained by the fact that so long as the corporations have enjoyed the monopoly on setting the narrative and also the perimeters of debate, dissent has been mostly tolerated and in many instances co opted. This is what is changing.

Recently I have had to cross over the River Thames on several occasions and I have watched the latest tall building being erected on the South bank, visible from far away in any direction, and known as the ''Shard'. Since I first caught sight of it early last summer, something about it has seemed eerily familiar. It wasn't until I viewed it from its base outside of London Bridge station though that I realised where I had seen it before.

Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Truth is Treason.

Mummy Made Me A Terrorist.

With Apologies To Stuart Christie.

"I may not agree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it."

Beatrice Hall. Voltaire's biographer.

Two recent events here in England serve as the latest milestones to appear along the route of our descent into an openly fascist society. 

At the beginning of December, the City of London Police sent to businesses described in their own literature as "key trusted partners" a briefing document entitled "Terrorism/Extremism Update". 
In addition to the ubiquitous al Qaeda, the document also lists the Columbian rebel group FARC and a terrorist group that attacked the tube network in Minsk. It also lists the Occupy London movement. 

We should be thankful to the City of London Police for highlighting the compelling need to remember that while terrorists plant bombs in public places, the Occupy movement is planting ideas in people's minds. The differences are substantial and ought not be difficult to discern. 

This attempt to demonise a movement through guilt by association might have invoked widespread derision had more people been aware of what amounts to an abuse of our common language. There might even have followed an investigation, and the censuring of the briefing's authors. 

A corner-stone of any democracy is that citizens remain at liberty to engage in peaceful organization and discourse without fear of retribution, and Occupy is providing the necessary forum, long overdue. 

Ominously, outside of this small and nascent movement, larger swathes of civil society now appear to be in danger of collapsing in upon themselves. It does not require a Nostradamus to point out that the economic depression engineered to drive down wages by some 25% to 35% will become much deeper throughout the coming year. Structural adjustment of this severity is not achieved without consequence, and there already exists an angry and brooding 'silent majority' nursing a myriad of private grievances.

Many of the owners of these grievances would claim that they are prevented from speaking out by the tyranny of 'political correctness'. Some among them even denigrate the very concept of human and civil rights, claiming them to be at the root of our present ills.

Conscientious citizens of any society however would recognize that while these rights are a vital defence against abuses by unchecked power, they are also inseparable from civic responsibilities. These responsibilities today include a commitment to working towards sustainable human development, the need to bring our perpetual wars to an end, and ultimately to work towards a world where none are too rich and none are too poor. The conscientious citizen recognises that an adequate definition of the word 'politics' is simply 'the way we live.' The continued dereliction of these responsibilities; of refusing to confront the realities of anthropogenic climate change and the escalating deployment of nuclear weaponry will likely be the harbinger of the way we all die. 

The word 'fascism' has been debated sufficient to fill a mile of bookshelves by now, and it is therefore instructive to go to the originator of the term in order to gain a clearer understanding of it. The fascist dictator Benito Mussolini described it very simply, stating that it "should more properly called 'corporatism', because it is the merger of state and corporate power." 

Interestingly, the employer of the City of London Police is itself a corporation, called the City of London, aka the City of London Corporation. Its two chief executive officers are the 'Lord Mayor of the City of London' and the 'Town Clerk of the City of London'. 

The City of London maintains its own permanent parliamentary lobbyist, called the 'Remembrancer', who sits opposite the Speaker of the House in Parliament; an arrangement which Mussolini would recognise in an instant. 
The City of London was once described by Prime Minister Clement Atlee as "... a convenient term for a collection of financial interests, able to assert itself against the Government of the country. Those who control money can pursue a policy at home and abroad contrary to that which has been decided by the people."

The Labour MP John McDonnell has more recently and succinctly described this entirely undemocratic institution as " ..the last Rotten Borough in Britain". 

A second catastrophic blow to democracy in England was the December jailing of a Birmingham bookseller found guilty of disseminating 'terrorist' tracts. His was an extensive stock of some 15,000 books, and Sayyid Qutb's 'Milestones' was one of only four that were presented as evidence at the trial. 
I first became aware of the book and it's author whilst watching the documentary 'The Power of Nightmares' made by Adam Curtis for the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2004. It is a reasonable question to ask whether any of the jury were also familiar with this film, which carries an interesting premise that remains wholly relevant today:

"In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and their authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people.

Those dreams failed, and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role which restores that power and authority.

Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say they will protect us from dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. The greatest danger of all is international terrorism."

As somebody who lives among Muslims I have long anticipated the day when the possession of radical Islamic literature becomes a criminal offence. During my time living in Whitechapel I have witnessed previous campaigns to rid public library shelves of Islamic books judged as 'dangerous' by self styled guardians of the public interest. This so called 'War on Terror' then has had a profound and yet largely unrecognised effect upon our community. 

Looking back to the historic attack on the US on 9/11, I recall a conversation with a shop keeper that evening after work. The normally effervescent wife of the young couple who owned the business was inconsolable in her distress. Her husband explained to me that people were now going to blame Muslims everywhere for the events of that day. Both he and his wife were fearful of the backlash which they saw as inevitable.
I knew this charming couple quite well, and yet had never looked upon them as Muslims, why indeed should I have? I remember feeling at the time that they were possibly over reacting.

What followed though was indeed vilification, confirming their very prescient fears of a full decade ago, and today I am left with the troubling realisation that this campaign is actually an orchestrated one.

Since that dreadful day in New York and Washington, we have also suffered our own terrorist attack, staged here in London, and just as in the US in 2001, Muslims were among the victims.

I was working as a volunteer at the Stop the War Coalition offices in King's Cross on the day that London was bombed.  As part of my duties I took the cheques from the morning's post along to the bank, and happened to notice that the young woman who dealt with customer inquiries hadn't made it into work that day. I read later in the week that Shahara Islam had been slaughtered on a train at Aldgate. 

It has since been a grim experience to watch the Muslim baiting first cultivated in the yellow press steadily percolating upwards into the supposedly more responsible newspapers. The demonisation of Islam is now met not just with the silence of the mandarins who give a nod and a wink to the crimes carried out by state and corporate power, but by the far wider reaching silence of a frightened and ill informed population. Many Muslim people living locally are also cowed into passivity. In the current prevailing climate, our Muslim brothers and sisters are understandably wary of any political activity likely to impact badly on the lives of not just themselves but of their friends and families also. Predictably then, this assault upon an entire faith is proving to be a disaster for our own community as well as for the cohesion of wider society also.

Our anti war coalition meanwhile has proven itself lamentably inadequate in addressing the issues of Islamophobia and its consequences, simply because the war movement is so powerful.

The Fahad Hashmi case in particular has served as a potent deterrent to political activism hereabouts because the offences were committed in our borough. Hashmi is presently serving a fifteen year prison sentence in the US for the crimes of allowing a friend to stay at his home here in 2004, and for having a big mouth. The realities of his case make for sobering reading today, most strikingly because this young man is obviously not a terrorist. To all intents and purposes he appears to be the very antithesis of one, namely somebody deeply committed to the principles of universal justice and the democratic process. His tutors from the universities where he studied in the US and the UK hold him in high regard. He was studying for his Masters degree in international relations at the time of his rendition to the US.

Meanwhile the Islamists among us are attacked from all sides for demonstrating their opposition to war at parades of British troops returning from Afghanistan. The response of middle class Muslims is accurately reported by Samia Rahman in the Guardian newspaper.

Once again, the lack of a broad based anti war movement is telling. Where for example are Military Families Against the Wars when the home-coming parades take place? 
The reality is that today we live in a culture that recently celebrated the coming of the 'Prince of Peace' by making a homage to its occupation forces in Afghanistan the best selling song of the Christmas season. It is not difficult to understand people's reluctance to stand up to the widespread opprobrium that any dissent would invite. 

All in all it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are witnessing the beginnings of something akin to the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany in the mid 1930's.

Adam Curtis's film showed with devastating clarity how a population can be controlled by the state using fear as a tool, and Hitler had learned this lesson well some ninety years previously.

Before his death, Nazi leader Hermann Goering was interviewed in his cell by prison psychologist Gustave Gilbert:

Goering: "Why, of course people don't want war. Why would some slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."

Gilbert: "There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the US only Congress can declare wars".

Goering: "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Those of us who have read his Fuhrer's book will be aware that Hitler attributed a large portion of the credit for Germany's defeat in the First World War to the well oiled propaganda machines of the US and the UK. He writes that next time around, Germany will be better prepared. Comparing these two contemporary First World War recruiting posters, it is easy to see his point.

                                                            

Today, as an old man, my bookshelves groan under the weight of years spent reading political and social history. December's judgement on a bookseller suggests that perhaps it might soon be prudent to consider disposing of them, because it is now impossible to determine what is deemed a terrorist publication. In my own defence of being in possession of dangerous books I would have to implicate my mother, who introduced me to libraries as a young child, and thus helped to nurture in me a love of learning and of ideas. 
Glancing along the shelves now, I wonder whether it might soon still be permissible to join Nelson Mandela on his long walk to freedom, but verboten to join Arundhati Roy walking with the comrades?

Disposing of them presents problems also. If there is terrorist material among them then I cannot risk giving them away and thus being accused of dissemination, and therefore I would need to destroy them. I shall resist though, because if takfiri jihadists and others are working to undermine liberty and democracy here in England, then we should certainly not be helping them.

Michael Perry Jan 2 2012.

The Dawn of Occupy! Madison Wisconsin.

The US has seen two distinct waves of popular protest since the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as President of the United States in January of 2009.

The first wave of indignation was born out of the predictable reaction to a person of mixed race becoming the leader of a country which had only stopped lynching Black people for sport a mere half century previously.

Widespread resentment with the election result among a particular mind set in the US was quickly harnessed by such powerful people as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers, who channelled this discontent into an ephemeral 'anti government' movement. The culmination of this was the establishment of the 'Tea Party', a reference to the original Tea Party of the mid 1770's which was a popular alliance of merchants and traders who objected to paying taxes to the British government.

Early 2009 had seen the Troubled Assets Relief Programme (TARP) put into place by the Wall Street executives that Obama had surrounded himself with upon taking office. Described at the time as a stimulus package, it soon emerged that the stimulus was exclusively for the financial institutions, and that the rest of the US economy, namely the useful, productive sector was to be allowed to continue its slide into a depression. 

During the summer recess of lawmakers in the US, congressmen and women traditionally return to their constituencies where they hold Town Hall meetings to listen to and discuss the concerns of the people they are paid by, and whom they are supposed to represent. By the summer of 2009 being a politician in the US was becoming a decidedly risky business though, with guns, including AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles being openly carried at these meetings for the first time in living memory. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch's newspaper the New York Post carried this cartoon in one of it's daily editions, linking TARP with the contemporary story of an escaped rampaging chimpanzee that had savaged a woman before being shot dead by police.

The film maker Max Blumenthall has recorded one modern day Tea Party rally for posterity, and the interviews reveal a tableaux of ill informed anger.

The success of US insurance companies and others in obstructing the kind of free or low cost universal health care available elsewhere in the developed world is common knowledge outside of the US. Inside the US though another narrative prevails, one of a 'go it alone' rugged individualism. The inevitable conclusion is that the US is a uniquely business run society, where the weak and the vulnerable are most often left to their fates, as this woman interviewed by the film maker so ably demonstrates:

Woman: My health care is great, currently I don't have a health care plan.

Blumenthal: You don't have health care?

Woman: No, but I'm fine.. I'm not worried about it.

Blumenthal: What if you get hurt?

Woman: If I get hurt? I have physicians in my family so I don't care.....

So she might have a mechanic in the family who can fix her car, but a physician?

“Oh hi Joe, listen, can you come round later and do a little work for me?

Bring your tools …..”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UASS1qFAIQ8 

As a hard working and presumably honest young citizen, Joseph Stack had concluded early in life that big business in the US is institutionally corrupt and best kept at arms length. He thus laboured to set up his own software engineering company, working 100 hour weeks, only to see his enterprise crushed by events outside of his control. These included interpretations of US tax law that continue to penalise people like himself while favouring the powerful and the wealthy. In February of 2010, Joseph Stack took his own life in a spectacularly public suicide, leaving behind his 'manifesto':

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35461747/ns/us_news-life/t/inquisition-still-alive-well-today/

While Stack's act of self immolation did not ignite the US in the same way that Mohamed Bouazizi's ignited Tunisia ten months later, there has been a steady 'slow burn' of indignation and protest spreading across the country and stemming from the same root causes that bought down the Ben Ali government. Joseph Stack's anger and despair then can hardly be described as unique.

The first organised fight back by people in the US came out of Madison Wisconsin in January 2010 following the election of Governor Scott Walker there.

On taking office Walker had immediately gone on the offensive, with his State setting a precedent for attacking the public sphere that other Governors across the US would follow should he succeed. He proposed a law, doubtless authored by the good people at ALEC, that would abolish collective bargaining rights of public workers and reduce their pay and pensions. This is an agenda which is becoming increasingly familiar to people right across the world.

During his election campaign Scott Walker had forgotten to inform the people of Wisconsin of his actual intentions upon taking office should they decide to vote for him.

After the election and the return of his memory, Governor Walker was so appalled that people were opposing his plans to eviscerate public life in Wisconsin, that he threatened to call out the National Guard to put down what were peaceful, organised, non violent civil protests carried out entirely within the law.

The people's next step following the threat of the National Guard arriving on their doorsteps can hardly have been an encouraging one for Governor Walker. Tens of thousands took to the streets in the days that followed, and the modern 'Occupy' movement in the US was born when the State Capitol building itself was taken over.

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/25/wisconsins_uprising_a_guided_tour_of

The protests swelled to exceed 100,000 in Madison alone, while over forty other towns and cities in the state also saw protests of varying dimensions. The Wisconsin police let Governor Walker down badly during this period: having exempted both theirs and the fire-fighter's union from his union busting austerity bill, they were quick to thank him by backing the demonstrators and occupiers. The Capitol police refused to evict the occupation, which lasted for over two weeks. Meanwhile the fourteen Democrats in the State Assembly travelled to Illinois and stayed away, trying to block the Bill by making the State Assembly inquorate.

No useful account of what happened in Wisconsin during this tumultuous time is complete without mention of the infamous hoax call made to Governor Walker by 'David Koch', one of the immensely wealthy Koch brothers. The caller was in fact a prankster impersonating Koch, and they spent twenty minutes on the phone discussing tactics to break the popular resistance. During their recorded conversation, 'Koch' promises Walker to help in any way “we” can, and that “we” had thought about planting trouble makers in the crowds. Walker concurs, commenting “..we thought about that..”

After the phone conversation had been broadcast on the internet, Madison police chief Noble Wray felt compelled to comment, saying "I find it very unsettling and troubling that anyone would consider creating safety risks for our citizens and law enforcement officers."

He went on to point out that this was not a case of a police chief entering the sphere of politics, but a Governor entering the sphere of public safety.

Jim Palmer, executive director of Wisconsin’s Professional Police Association added: “...our members are incensed. We’ve had law enforcement officers from all across the state come and work at these rallies and work at these events for the last two weeks, and they have been very impressed by how peaceful everyone has been. And they’ve commented that to me personally. So, for the Governor or someone on his staff to even consider doing something that could put officers or members of the public in harm’s way is extraordinarily troubling. And our members are very disturbed by it.”

The attempt to defeat the bill ultimately failed after a long struggle which ended on the floor of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Governor Walker's budget speech meanwhile had spelt out a programme of massive cuts amounting to a billion dollars from school districts and localities. In the speech he had assured mayors, heads of schools and localities that he would provide them with the 'tools to get the job done', namely the anti union legislation designed to drive down wages, pensions and working conditions.

As had been predicted, once the precedent was set then other states, namely Michigan and Idaho followed and introduced similar legislation. In Michigan we actually saw the introduction of a bill which mirrors more recent events in Italy and Greece, where an elected government is replaced by a panel of bankers. The Michigan bill gives the Governor emergency powers to fire any and all elected town representatives and replace them with a corporation, or an official from a corporation to take over a town's administration.

Much came from this struggle in the 'laboratory of democracy' though, not least the realisation of the collective power of working people, long dormant in the US. You cannot legislate against a dangerous idea, and the only weapons that the masters have at their disposal remain the traditional ones of violence and skulduggery.

http://exiledonline.com/max-blumenthal-how-israeli-occupation-forces-bahraini-monarchy-guards-trained-u-s-police-for-coordinated-crackdown-on-occupy-protests/

Pots and Kettles.

In our household of two permanent residents, one of us works as an independent artist while the other is engaged as a free tradesman. Neither of us could be described as public sector workers, other than in the broadest sense of the term.

As members of the general public though, we recognise the compelling need for broad based solidarity in these critical times, which is why we laid down our tools for the day and joined the November 30 strike. An injury to one is, after all, an injury to all.

 The outcome of this ferocious attack upon the living standards of nurses, policemen, fire-fighters, ambulance drivers, cooks, cleaners, teachers, care workers and so many others is likely to blight the landscape of our society to an irreversible degree. It will severely undermine the well being of future generations.

The 'new austerity' is the final stage of thirty years of 'free market' reforms that have led to neo-feudalism and debt peonage becoming a reality for ever increasing numbers of people in the developed world.

 It is important to understand that this is a project embraced by all mainstream political parties, whether they be New Labour or Conservative, or for that matter, Democrat or Republican.

Over these past thirty years we have seen the near destruction of 'private sector' unions in Britain, along with an escalating attack upon the public sector. What we are currently witnessing then is the settling of 'unfinished business' in the fight against organised labour.

It is precisely how unions are treated which more than anything else reveals the true nature of a government's commitment to genuine democracy anywhere in the world. Unions have a democratising impact on any society, and the historical record on this is very clear.

At last year's 2010 G20 summit in Toronto an agenda was agreed upon for dealing with the current economic crisis. The aims are to boost private demand while cutting the deficits in half by 2013. Government deficits will be slashed by reducing social 'safety net' programmes, focussing on social security and public pensions.

It is against this grim backdrop that Britain saw the largest strike in nearly a century take place last week.

 In his role as the new chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, Bernard Hogan Howe's responsibilities include the policing of demonstrations, and until last Wednesday the only available indication of his strategies had come from a recent student demonstration.

This involved deploying large numbers of police officers in a moving enclosure around the marchers, most effectively at the head. This tactic gives the police complete control of the day, with the ability to speed a march up, or to slow it down or stop it. Providing a new twist to the old adage 'to control dissent, lead it', the strategy also permits the police to direct and even divert the route in 'real time'.

As two ageing dissidents in our sixties, and with bladders that are nowadays in need of relief more frequently, we have considered taking a chamber pot along with us on our protests, but the solution of waste disposal eludes us. Having been surrounded, and thus 'detained', by officers of the law in the chilly out doors for several hours, and with feelings running high, the temptation to dispose of our waste products in the most obvious way would inevitably prove overwhelming.

With these depressing realities of pots and kettles in mind therefore, we decided to give the march a miss and instead spent the afternoon occupying the public space outside of St Paul's Cathedral.

'Occupy' was a little smaller, with people appearing to have gone off to other events that were taking place on the day. Free donated food was available in the kitchen, and the Starbooks library and welcome tent were functioning splendidly. The free newspaper continues to present a commonwealth of ideas, is a revelation to read, and ought to be more widely circulated. It is food for the soul to join this well organised and good natured gathering if only for a few hours.

                             

Met commissioner Bernard Hogan Howe also appears to be taking his inspiration from 'occupy' events occurring world wide from London England to Cairo Egypt to Oakland USA, and his force now contains officers who are undergoing training in the use of 'less lethal' baton rounds. Hogan Howe was in fact prime minister Cameron's second choice as replacement for Paul Stephenson, who quit following the Murdoch hacking scandal. Our prime minister was denied the 'zero tolerance' expert in riot control from the US whom he had planned to fill the vacancy. Cameron's desires fell foul of a law requiring that the chief commissioner must be a native of the UK

 Meanwhile deputy commissioner Tim Godwin is reportedly giving up his job to go and work for 'Accenture', which according to it's website is a 'global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 236,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries.  Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments.  The company generated net revenues of US$25.5 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2011. '

Accenture then actually helps governments to become 'high performance' ones, the evidence of which is there for us all to see right across the globe.

 So far as current US deficits go, they have an interesting history: ex-treasury secretary Paul O'Neill is on record for having tried to warn vice president Richard Cheney in November of 2002 that growing budget deficits were expected to exceed $500 billion for the current fiscal year alone, and posed a threat to the US economy. Cheney was dismissive: "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said, and continued: "We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due." Cheney sacked his treasury secretary the following month. O'Neill had also raised objections to a new round of tax cuts for the wealthy, and said the president rejected his plan to confront corporate crime after a long line of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd."

The US budget deficit now stands at $1.3 trillion, a figure that has remained magically static since the last high performing US government left office.

In Europe, last week's sale of German bonds was disastrous, with only half being sold, and some pundits are now predicting that the break up of the European economic union is merely a matter of time.

We have also watched as the lie that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability has continued on it's way to becoming common currency. This follows the recent publication of another IAEA report, and thus the door to outright war on Iran has been opened. http://antiwar.com/radio/2011/11/22/seymour-hersh-6/

 The attack on Iraq and the destruction that followed have taught us nothing it seems.

Looking at the presidential material currently being offered to the people of the US, it is apparent that the candidates are supremely unqualified to oversee what will inevitably escalate into a regional conflagration or worse. We can trust however that the good people at Accenture will be on hand to make up for any short falls. This then is what our 'democracy' currently looks like.