I apologise for not posting for a week, but I have had a lot of trouble accessing my blog. I am not particularly computer literate and my blog has not been loading, although it appears to be all right now. I was beginning to think that the forces of darkness were trying to shut me down. Anyway, despite not being able to post, there has really not been much to inspire a post. On reflection however this in itself is a cause for alarm as the turmoil, bordering on insanity, that characterises both British and American government is beginning to appear normal, we're getting used to it. I am reluctant to regularly post on the same recurring themes and do not wish to bore you with theoretical discussion of political and social concepts but some issues are too important to ignore. My concern at the moment is the dangers to democracy that are looming in both the UK and the USA.
However, in Britain the incompetence and chaos of government is beginning to show what may just be a silver lining. More and more people are beginning to question if Britain will really exit the EU. We are over a year into a two year Brexit process and the British have not even passed the preliminary stages of the negotiations. If you watch events you will be aware I am not being anti-Tory and making this up, they really are that incompetent. The Europeans are scratching their heads in disbelief at the chaos within the pigsty over Brexit. In addition, all of their stated goals, their 'red lines' are crumbling with a speed that makes your head spin. Their negotiating strategies have been stopped in their tracks because they have not even begun to understand the process they themselves initiated. If you recall, they demanded that talks began immediately on trade deals and strategies with everything else being relegated until they got what they wanted, but the Europeans have patiently explained to them that invoking Article 50 is a detailed exit strategy and that A must be completed before you begin B etc. The Tories attempted to negotiate D before even considering A,B, or C. The EU is not being awkward or intransigent they are simply telling the UK that it was they who began what is a legal process, outlined in the Articles of EU law. If the British fail to follow a process that EU negotiators are bound to follow, or seek to subvert it, then there will be no negotiations and Britain will be out of the EU in 2019 with no deal and no way back. That is the disaster I have been warning about. Exiting the EU is a democratic process, and, true to form, the Tories think that such rules and democratic processes are for other people.
In addition, our external trade agreements after Brexit are being conducted by the most dangerous lunatic in Britain, Liam Fox. This man is completely indifferent to the rule of law and the well-being of the British people. He is unfortunately a Scot. When I contemplate the venomous Mr Fox, I am reminded of the epigram by Robert Burns on Edmund Burke and find it completely applicable to the said Fox. As Burns wrote
Oft I have wonder'd that on Irish ground
No poisonous Reptile ever has been found:
Revealed the secret stands of great Nature's work:
She preserved her poison to create a Burke!
Similar chaos is reigning in the US and I find that America has her Liam Fox in the person of Paul Ryan. Whilst America is being reduced to a laughing stock by its President and the coterie of psychopaths he has appointed in his White House team, Ryan stands back and does nothing. As I am writing this the news is coming through that the Donald has fired the Mooch, a man who has come straight out of the Sopranos, although the Sopranos were both more articulate and more intelligent. Trump is processing more turnover of staff than a call centre. He is being called to bluff by North Korea, a country with about 15 times less population and square miles because the North Koreans know that the American public are more scared of their president than they are from them. Returning to Paul Ryan, I remind you, alarmed by his candidacy for the Vice Presidency in 2012, the American Catholic Church published a ringing denunciation of this man's policy programme and his philosophy. I am tempted to think that Ryan views America's chaos as an opportunity of the type Naomi Klein warned is utilised by right-wing neoliberals to implement what she termed shock doctrines.
This post is getting too long, but we, on both sides of the Atlantic should be very scared of the creeping authoritarianism inherent in both our political systems at this time. Democracy is under attack and lunatics are indeed in charge of the asylum in both our unfortunate nations. You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Monday 31 July 2017
Sunday 23 July 2017
Brexit - A Testament to the Intelligence of the British Political Class
As you will probably know, Brexit is becoming the disaster it always threatened to be. Quite fittingly, history will record that the people who are most culpable for the coming crisis are the same people who caused the first crisis and the circumstances that led to the Brexit vote in the first place. In other words, we are depending on achieving a successful outcome from people who are manifestly incapable of delivering it. Brexit is a direct result of the financial crash, and, in true British style, the people who caused that crash are the only people who have benefited from it, an incompetent and ideologically stupid political class who don't even begin to understand politics, and a financial class of the most venal and rapacious sociopaths imaginable. The political and financial elite in Britain quite genuinely have no concern for anyone other than their own enrichment and this is borne out every day by their actions. If you follow British affairs, the Grenfell Tower disaster is ample testament to the complete indifference of the political class to the plight of ordinary British citizens. However, these attitudes are displayed in every constituency in the UK every day. People question me when I tell them how the Tories have a visceral loathing of working people and what they term 'the lower orders' but they are embarrassed now because my condemnation of the Tories is on graphic display at the national level. It is even being viewed with bewilderment by the rest of the world who live with this Roger Miller type rose tinted view of the British and have difficulty with reality. The Tories are not alone, they are just the worst. Whilst the rest of us are suffering from the subsequent austerity that has lowered our standard of living and impoverished large parts of the population, the banking and financial sectors have flourished and have never had to suffer any penalties for their criminality. That is the British way, blame it all on the poor, the disadvantaged, immigrants etc. and make them pay for the crimes of the elite.
In a just society, the perpetrators of our problems would be tasked with providing the largest responsibility for their solution, but in the disaster that is Brexit, the criminals are deserting their responsibilities and getting away with it. Just this past month some of the largest banking and financial corporations have announced that they are relocating their operations out of Britain. Morgan Stanley, the Bank of America, Standard Chartered, Nomura, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have all announced their intentions of moving the headquarters of their operations out of the country. Every one of those are criminal organisations who should have been immediately nationalised in 2008 and their entire management structures jailed. That is what would have happened if Kommirat had been in power. Instead, they have recovered, largely at the expense of the British taxpayer, and are still carrying on with the criminal activities that caused the financial crash in the first place. What must be remembered is that banks just don't employ bankers, they also employ cleaners, lawyers, counter staff etc. and so although the banking personnel will be good riddance, it will hurt many others who were not party to their crimes. The British electorate in their profound political wisdom have proceeded to re-elect the main political criminals, who were just as culpable as the financiers, twice since the crash, despite all the evidence that their entire public policy programme is one large lie. It is beyond debate that the entire Brexit mentality and programme was one huge lie and was a massive demonstration of racism and hatred of foreigners. It will rank as one of the greatest programmes of deception and mendacity in history. But your average Brexiteer is like those free marketeers I was commenting on recently, impenetrable to reason and completely resistant to both facts and evidence, they are the Jehovah's Witnesses of politics.
In January 2007 before the financial crash, the pound was worth 1.5063 euros, yesterday it dropped below one euro so that we are now getting around 95 euro cents for one pound. How's that for progress and for a thriving economy outside the EU. This is the evidence of Brexit and of sound pigsty financial management. Following our actual exit from the single market it will of course deteriorate even more and the UK will be heading for bankruptcy, but, as I always say, you get what you vote for. It will take a national emergency for the UK electorate to actually get the message of what they have done and of the people they so blindly follow. I told you the day she was elected leader of the Tory party that Theresa May was thick and stupid, nobody now disputes that. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
In a just society, the perpetrators of our problems would be tasked with providing the largest responsibility for their solution, but in the disaster that is Brexit, the criminals are deserting their responsibilities and getting away with it. Just this past month some of the largest banking and financial corporations have announced that they are relocating their operations out of Britain. Morgan Stanley, the Bank of America, Standard Chartered, Nomura, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have all announced their intentions of moving the headquarters of their operations out of the country. Every one of those are criminal organisations who should have been immediately nationalised in 2008 and their entire management structures jailed. That is what would have happened if Kommirat had been in power. Instead, they have recovered, largely at the expense of the British taxpayer, and are still carrying on with the criminal activities that caused the financial crash in the first place. What must be remembered is that banks just don't employ bankers, they also employ cleaners, lawyers, counter staff etc. and so although the banking personnel will be good riddance, it will hurt many others who were not party to their crimes. The British electorate in their profound political wisdom have proceeded to re-elect the main political criminals, who were just as culpable as the financiers, twice since the crash, despite all the evidence that their entire public policy programme is one large lie. It is beyond debate that the entire Brexit mentality and programme was one huge lie and was a massive demonstration of racism and hatred of foreigners. It will rank as one of the greatest programmes of deception and mendacity in history. But your average Brexiteer is like those free marketeers I was commenting on recently, impenetrable to reason and completely resistant to both facts and evidence, they are the Jehovah's Witnesses of politics.
In January 2007 before the financial crash, the pound was worth 1.5063 euros, yesterday it dropped below one euro so that we are now getting around 95 euro cents for one pound. How's that for progress and for a thriving economy outside the EU. This is the evidence of Brexit and of sound pigsty financial management. Following our actual exit from the single market it will of course deteriorate even more and the UK will be heading for bankruptcy, but, as I always say, you get what you vote for. It will take a national emergency for the UK electorate to actually get the message of what they have done and of the people they so blindly follow. I told you the day she was elected leader of the Tory party that Theresa May was thick and stupid, nobody now disputes that. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Sunday 16 July 2017
If you are a Tory, Marx will get to heaven before you do
If you have ever attempted to reason with an evangelical Christian you will understand how it is virtually impossible to penetrate blind conviction. There is no point attempting to rationalise the irrational as such people are impenetrable. Religion embeds fail safe mechanisms into people's consciousness so that the belief system will remain intact, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is exactly the same with free marketeers, they live in an impenetrable bubble even in the face of undeniable evidence that their belief system is a fraud and has been convincingly demonstrated to be such by history. Today's modern economic system demonstrates the wisdom of Marx when he told us how a capitalist free market will gravitate to opposite poles, and, despite that he never actually said that the rich will get richer whilst the poor will get poorer, that is what it amounts to, and is being daily demonstrated. As he warned us
It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
It is a fact that in today's Britain, sixty percent of people who fall into the government's own definition of poverty are in work. It is also a fact that the top one percent of the world's population own over half the world's wealth. What on earth kind of conditions must eventually prevail before people waken up to this state of affairs and look for workable alternatives? When are supposedly intelligent people going to accept that the market has failed and indeed cannot work?
I am continually attempting to make people aware of the impossibility of a free market in the most basic terms. I ask them, how can you have a free market and taxation? That is the most basic example. A free market in labour must produce slavery, it must be what the free marketeer refers to as unfettered, and so all restrictions on an employer are fetters that must be removed and is why I have persistently warned you in this blog that a state of virtual slavery for British workers is the long-term goal of Tory policy. What history also tells us is that free markets always result in monopoly, the antithesis of a market economy. Why do you think genuine enthusiasts for free market economics desire the continual reduction in, and elimination of, taxation, or the removal of employment rights and protections. They are correct, taxation and employment rights are constraints on market activity, so if you want a free market you must get rid of them. Why do you think that the more right-wing people are the more they are opposed to the EU? The EU is certainly a capitalist organisation, but it is a managed organisation that supports the market concept, but opposes the neoliberal anti-state model. Remember how I told you previously that I coined the term anarchic fascist for the peculiarly Tory/Republican conservative that so dominates our political and economic life. These are the people for whom enough is never enough, for whom working people are simply a constant source of exploitation. They desire an anarchic free for all in economic terms, but ruthlessly utilise a centralised state system to further their aims. Mayhem freely admitted that fact when she called the recent election, she was seeking as much political power as possible to push her crazed Brexit agenda. The British media is full this morning of the story that the Chancellor of the Exchequer told a Cabinet meeting that public service workers are seriously overpaid. He reached that conclusion by taking account of their pensions, therefore if you are expecting to retire on a public sector pension scheme, you should be getting much less when you are working. That is the fevered madness that constitutes a conservative free marketeers brain. The same of course does not apply to a member of parliament, the ultimate public sector worker, or indeed the monarchy, the ultimate social security scrounger.
People who qualify for a public service pension are receiving a return on something they contributed to all of their working life, but in Tory mythology, a pension is a gift, a something-for-nothing gratuity bestowed undeservedly, it is, in their fevered minds, unearned income. You pay for a pension, it doesn't come free, but, in the Tory mentality this must be punished whilst you are still working. This post is a bit long and I apologise, but I never fail to marvel how brainwashed and simplistic the average person is when confronted with such obvious nonsense. I often ask myself if our good god-fearing Christians, who are almost all conservatives and Tory voters, never mind crazed anti-state Republicans, ever reflect on why it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven? You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.”
It is a fact that in today's Britain, sixty percent of people who fall into the government's own definition of poverty are in work. It is also a fact that the top one percent of the world's population own over half the world's wealth. What on earth kind of conditions must eventually prevail before people waken up to this state of affairs and look for workable alternatives? When are supposedly intelligent people going to accept that the market has failed and indeed cannot work?
I am continually attempting to make people aware of the impossibility of a free market in the most basic terms. I ask them, how can you have a free market and taxation? That is the most basic example. A free market in labour must produce slavery, it must be what the free marketeer refers to as unfettered, and so all restrictions on an employer are fetters that must be removed and is why I have persistently warned you in this blog that a state of virtual slavery for British workers is the long-term goal of Tory policy. What history also tells us is that free markets always result in monopoly, the antithesis of a market economy. Why do you think genuine enthusiasts for free market economics desire the continual reduction in, and elimination of, taxation, or the removal of employment rights and protections. They are correct, taxation and employment rights are constraints on market activity, so if you want a free market you must get rid of them. Why do you think that the more right-wing people are the more they are opposed to the EU? The EU is certainly a capitalist organisation, but it is a managed organisation that supports the market concept, but opposes the neoliberal anti-state model. Remember how I told you previously that I coined the term anarchic fascist for the peculiarly Tory/Republican conservative that so dominates our political and economic life. These are the people for whom enough is never enough, for whom working people are simply a constant source of exploitation. They desire an anarchic free for all in economic terms, but ruthlessly utilise a centralised state system to further their aims. Mayhem freely admitted that fact when she called the recent election, she was seeking as much political power as possible to push her crazed Brexit agenda. The British media is full this morning of the story that the Chancellor of the Exchequer told a Cabinet meeting that public service workers are seriously overpaid. He reached that conclusion by taking account of their pensions, therefore if you are expecting to retire on a public sector pension scheme, you should be getting much less when you are working. That is the fevered madness that constitutes a conservative free marketeers brain. The same of course does not apply to a member of parliament, the ultimate public sector worker, or indeed the monarchy, the ultimate social security scrounger.
People who qualify for a public service pension are receiving a return on something they contributed to all of their working life, but in Tory mythology, a pension is a gift, a something-for-nothing gratuity bestowed undeservedly, it is, in their fevered minds, unearned income. You pay for a pension, it doesn't come free, but, in the Tory mentality this must be punished whilst you are still working. This post is a bit long and I apologise, but I never fail to marvel how brainwashed and simplistic the average person is when confronted with such obvious nonsense. I often ask myself if our good god-fearing Christians, who are almost all conservatives and Tory voters, never mind crazed anti-state Republicans, ever reflect on why it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven? You have been warned
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Monday 10 July 2017
Thatcher must be defended at all costs
Two points must be made about this. The first is that her statement has not been taken out of context by people like me and the next is that she said no such thing about a community of communities. That is a lie promoted by her supporters who cringe with embarrassment at her stupidity in making such a statement and worry in case the sinister implications embodied in her statement develop ramifications for all those who have spent their lives exploiting it. As you all know, Thatcher can be genuinely described as evil. Her statement about society was given in justification for her war against a society she saw and hated, a society she was determined to destroy. The claim that she saw a community of communities is a defence of the indefensible by her supporters, and particularly from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Even if she had said that, what on earth is a community of communities but a description of a society? My Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus (2000) tells me that a community is "the people living in one locality, a group of people having cultural, religious or other characteristics in common". If that is accepted then I submit that a community of communities is society as the same dictionary describes society as "the community, the general public, the public, the world at large". These people will go to any length to avoid admitting that she was talking nonsense.
Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there is no such thing as society, was made in an interview with the Woman’s Own journalist Douglas Keay on 23rd September 1987 in 10 Downing Street. What she said was;
"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first…..But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate".
(Margaret Thatcher Foundation Website)
In response to public reaction to her interview, Downing Street issued a statement on behalf of Mrs Thatcher to the Sunday Times published 10th July 1988 which stated that
"All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society. Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people. It is people who have duties and beliefs and resolve. It is people who get things done. She prefers to think in terms of the acts of individuals and families as the real sinews of society rather than of society as an abstract concept. Her approach to society reflects her fundamental belief in personal responsibility and choice. To leave things to ‘society’ is to run away from the real decisions, practical responsibility and effective action.”
Coming from a professional politician whose entire working life was spent in the public sector and whose income and life conditions were dependent on that same public sector, such sentiments are quite astonishing, but coming from a Prime Minister they are alarming, as they have had profound consequences that have resonated throughout the United Kingdom and have formed the foundation of the economic and political crisis that the nation finds itself in today. Thatcher’s philosophical approach has been translated into public policy for over 30 years and is the ideology that produced the phone hacking scandal, the Millie Dowler affair, the financial crisis, the EU and Scottish referenda and the Grenfell Tower tragedy. The Thatcher thesis is based on three fundamental denials of social reality; a denial that the human being is essentially a social being; a denial that the institutions and structures that operate throughout our society and regulate our interactive relationships are a meaningful part of that society; and a denial that the general population accept them as such. Thatcher is arguing that people are essentially atomised individuals whose only social reality is within a family structure and who do not relate to social institutions and structures which they see as something rather abstract and distanced from their real everyday experience. She is arguing that people’s social experience does not extend beyond the families and neighbourly relationships that create types of voluntary associations. This is necessary if you propose attacking and discrediting our social structures and institutions and convincing people that they are dispensable and can be substituted by other arrangements that will perform their functions better and more efficiently. If they can be portrayed as somehow sitting outside of society and unrelated to everybody’s daily life, then they are indeed dispensable. The whole of the Thatcher project was based on destroying Britain’s public sector, promoting the neoliberal agenda of privatisation and contracting out the services and functions of the major institutions that compose society such as health, education and welfare. By attacking, discrediting them, and denying their integral social centrality you can then justify their removal as a public service and utilise their necessary functions for profit. Her project involved a transfer of wealth and power upwards to a voracious and immoral elite and reducing the standard of living of working people as far as possible in order to enhance that same elite with levels of wealth that could never be justified or spent. It was however, a total denial of social reality.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Tuesday 4 July 2017
To the educated there are alternatives
There is an ongoing debate in the UK just now about public sector pay. This has been either frozen in some sectors for the past seven years, or capped at one percent, but mostly a mixture of both. The result has been that all public sector workers have witnessed a significant drop in their incomes. Coupled with that has been the quite deliberate reduction in public sector workers as I noted in other posts. Thus, the effect is that we have less people working for significantly less pay. This has been brought to a head by the Grenfell Tower tragedy that has focused the nation's attention on the continuous pigsty policy of austerity. This policy has now been duly exposed for the inherent class warfare that the Kommirat has been telling you it is for many years, and it has got the Tories deeply worried. However, despite mounting pressure they are still publicly telling us they are committed to the austerity programme because in the Blessed Margaret's famous words, there is no alternative.
This however has nothing to do with sound economics, sound public finances, rational decision-making or any of the other shibboleths and class based excuses and justifications we are constantly bombarded with by the residents of the pigsty. It is ideological, pure and simple. Austerity is a smokescreen, an excuse to cover the transfer of wealth from the bottom upwards and to force working people to pay for the enrichment of the elite and for their criminality in causing the financial crash and its aftermath. As all of you must know, whilst working people and the poor all over the world are suffering an ever decreasing standard of living and actual poverty, the wealthy have never ceased increasing their wealth. However, free market political economy, thanks to never ceasing propaganda and the constant demonization of all those who oppose it or seek to offer alternatives, has established such a hegemony on national consciousness, there has never been a challenge or even a consideration of alternatives, except from oddballs and loonies like Doktor Kommirat, until now. Tragedies such as Grenfell Tower and recent terrorist atrocities, have exposed the results of austerity on our emergency services highlighting financial and personnel crises in all of them, leaving them increasingly unable to cope with genuine emergencies. Coupled with the results of political free market ideology that has exposed elected politicians and their respective civil service personnel at both national and local level as indifferent to and indeed hostile to, the plight of the poor and working class, a genuine backlash against the dominant order is growing in size and intensity. There is now an increasing clamour for an alternative.
It is frankly unintelligent to suggest that there is only one model of economic activity that will underpin a successful society. It is downright insanity to continue with a model that has demonstrably failed. There are absolutely no grounds for arguing that taxation cannot be varied to raise more revenue from the most wealthy in society, it has been done before, and it worked. It may not have worked in a way that you approve of, but it worked in a way that I approve of. Similarly there is no argument for maintaining artificially low taxation on business. It all comes back to my arguments on justice. No one who understands the consequences of equality will genuinely argue for it. What people desire is equity, for fairness, as opposed to everyone being treated the same. Marx's famous dictum 'from each according to their ability to each according to their needs' is clearly not a doctrine of equality, regardless of how much the right seek to propagandise it as such. It is a doctrine of equity. No-one person needs a billion pounds or dollars, no corporation needs profit margins in double figures. As Alfred Marshall wrote in 1890, we can afford to have a temporary lowering of living standards amongst the top half of the population in order that the bottom half be taken out of poverty and want. Marshall was the founder of modern neoclassical economics, professor of economics at Cambridge, he was most certainly no Marxist, although he would be labelled that by the uneducated cretins that Cambridge produces today. There are alternatives and we must embrace them. I will give you some if you want. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
This however has nothing to do with sound economics, sound public finances, rational decision-making or any of the other shibboleths and class based excuses and justifications we are constantly bombarded with by the residents of the pigsty. It is ideological, pure and simple. Austerity is a smokescreen, an excuse to cover the transfer of wealth from the bottom upwards and to force working people to pay for the enrichment of the elite and for their criminality in causing the financial crash and its aftermath. As all of you must know, whilst working people and the poor all over the world are suffering an ever decreasing standard of living and actual poverty, the wealthy have never ceased increasing their wealth. However, free market political economy, thanks to never ceasing propaganda and the constant demonization of all those who oppose it or seek to offer alternatives, has established such a hegemony on national consciousness, there has never been a challenge or even a consideration of alternatives, except from oddballs and loonies like Doktor Kommirat, until now. Tragedies such as Grenfell Tower and recent terrorist atrocities, have exposed the results of austerity on our emergency services highlighting financial and personnel crises in all of them, leaving them increasingly unable to cope with genuine emergencies. Coupled with the results of political free market ideology that has exposed elected politicians and their respective civil service personnel at both national and local level as indifferent to and indeed hostile to, the plight of the poor and working class, a genuine backlash against the dominant order is growing in size and intensity. There is now an increasing clamour for an alternative.
It is frankly unintelligent to suggest that there is only one model of economic activity that will underpin a successful society. It is downright insanity to continue with a model that has demonstrably failed. There are absolutely no grounds for arguing that taxation cannot be varied to raise more revenue from the most wealthy in society, it has been done before, and it worked. It may not have worked in a way that you approve of, but it worked in a way that I approve of. Similarly there is no argument for maintaining artificially low taxation on business. It all comes back to my arguments on justice. No one who understands the consequences of equality will genuinely argue for it. What people desire is equity, for fairness, as opposed to everyone being treated the same. Marx's famous dictum 'from each according to their ability to each according to their needs' is clearly not a doctrine of equality, regardless of how much the right seek to propagandise it as such. It is a doctrine of equity. No-one person needs a billion pounds or dollars, no corporation needs profit margins in double figures. As Alfred Marshall wrote in 1890, we can afford to have a temporary lowering of living standards amongst the top half of the population in order that the bottom half be taken out of poverty and want. Marshall was the founder of modern neoclassical economics, professor of economics at Cambridge, he was most certainly no Marxist, although he would be labelled that by the uneducated cretins that Cambridge produces today. There are alternatives and we must embrace them. I will give you some if you want. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
Monday 3 July 2017
Lex iniusta lex non est
As St Augustine tells us in the title of this blog, an unjust law is no law at all. His observation was later more famously endorsed by St Thomas Aquinas, and in his famous 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' Martin Luther King told us that;
"One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'
As with all human concepts, and in the past I have written about freedom and rights, justice is not a self-evident concept and is not at all non-problematic, and like those other concepts, is a human artefact and therefore both dynamic and relative. I would go further than Martin Luther King and say that unjust law is itself immoral. As St Augustine implies, if an unjust law is no law at all, we are under no obligation to either obey it, or even recognise it. In Britain we have a saying that possession is nine tenths of the law. What this means is that ninety percent of British law is with respect to private property. We saw an example of that last week from the Tories. As you will know, the Grenfell Tower block that was consumed by fire is in the borough of Kensington. Within Kensington there are an estimated 1,500 luxury apartments and flats lying empty, some of them for as much as ten to twenty years. They have been purchased by the wealthy global elite who have no intention of living in them, they are simply an investment. Most people with a scintilla of decency and humanity called for such property to be requisitioned for use by the survivors of the Grenfell fire, but the government refused on the grounds that it would have been a breach of the rights of the owners. Thus we have a graphic example that the rights of property in the UK are more important than the rights of human beings. If such legal provisions are not the epitome of unjust, then perhaps someone who reads this can enlighten me.
Despite the best efforts of people like Augustine and Aquinas to convince us otherwise, law does not reflect the divine, rather the reverse is the truth. Humans developed codes of conduct that are replicated in the Ten Commandments long before those commandments were written. As people are social beings, from the very first forms of human intercourse and communal living, people regulated their environment and developed codes of conduct, rules governing right and wrong, what was good for the community and what was damaging to it, for the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group. Such rules and codes used to be known as folklore, and myths developed to give authority to such codes and rules, gods were invented to satisfy the need for authoritative approval of such rules of behaviour. However, far too often such gods were invented to give authoritative approval to the unjust for the benefit of the unscrupulous. This is the character of modern government. British society is a class society, it is also a white patriarchal society, and thus a white male class domination is reflected in our legislation and throughout the entire British normative order, particularly in government. For those of you in other nations who may read this, you will have to conclude for yourselves the character of your own societies but class, gender, and race, will never be far from the surface of your own governmental and legislative arrangements.
In the UK the Grenfell Tower disaster may prove to be a seminal moment as it has brought the whole Tory austerity agenda to the forefront of people's consciousness. The cover-up has begun already and if the Tories are expert at anything it is scapegoating, deflecting the blame onto others and getting themselves off the hook. However, they are spooked at the moment and seeking to portray themselves as being at least marginally human, but justice will not be seen to be served until they are brought to book for their crimes and inhumanity. The history of British 'justice' does not fill me with any confidence that genuine justice will be served. We will watch with interest. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
"One may well ask: 'How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?' The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'
As with all human concepts, and in the past I have written about freedom and rights, justice is not a self-evident concept and is not at all non-problematic, and like those other concepts, is a human artefact and therefore both dynamic and relative. I would go further than Martin Luther King and say that unjust law is itself immoral. As St Augustine implies, if an unjust law is no law at all, we are under no obligation to either obey it, or even recognise it. In Britain we have a saying that possession is nine tenths of the law. What this means is that ninety percent of British law is with respect to private property. We saw an example of that last week from the Tories. As you will know, the Grenfell Tower block that was consumed by fire is in the borough of Kensington. Within Kensington there are an estimated 1,500 luxury apartments and flats lying empty, some of them for as much as ten to twenty years. They have been purchased by the wealthy global elite who have no intention of living in them, they are simply an investment. Most people with a scintilla of decency and humanity called for such property to be requisitioned for use by the survivors of the Grenfell fire, but the government refused on the grounds that it would have been a breach of the rights of the owners. Thus we have a graphic example that the rights of property in the UK are more important than the rights of human beings. If such legal provisions are not the epitome of unjust, then perhaps someone who reads this can enlighten me.
Despite the best efforts of people like Augustine and Aquinas to convince us otherwise, law does not reflect the divine, rather the reverse is the truth. Humans developed codes of conduct that are replicated in the Ten Commandments long before those commandments were written. As people are social beings, from the very first forms of human intercourse and communal living, people regulated their environment and developed codes of conduct, rules governing right and wrong, what was good for the community and what was damaging to it, for the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group. Such rules and codes used to be known as folklore, and myths developed to give authority to such codes and rules, gods were invented to satisfy the need for authoritative approval of such rules of behaviour. However, far too often such gods were invented to give authoritative approval to the unjust for the benefit of the unscrupulous. This is the character of modern government. British society is a class society, it is also a white patriarchal society, and thus a white male class domination is reflected in our legislation and throughout the entire British normative order, particularly in government. For those of you in other nations who may read this, you will have to conclude for yourselves the character of your own societies but class, gender, and race, will never be far from the surface of your own governmental and legislative arrangements.
In the UK the Grenfell Tower disaster may prove to be a seminal moment as it has brought the whole Tory austerity agenda to the forefront of people's consciousness. The cover-up has begun already and if the Tories are expert at anything it is scapegoating, deflecting the blame onto others and getting themselves off the hook. However, they are spooked at the moment and seeking to portray themselves as being at least marginally human, but justice will not be seen to be served until they are brought to book for their crimes and inhumanity. The history of British 'justice' does not fill me with any confidence that genuine justice will be served. We will watch with interest. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)