Parasitocracy

Yup, an aristocracy of parasites. George Monbiot points out the latest in the painful saga of the economically insane: notably CEO's of major financial institutions. Mr. Monbiot:

Matt Ridley used to make his living partly by writing state-bashing columns in the Daily Telegraph. The government, he complained, is “a self-seeking flea on the backs of the more productive people of this world … governments do not run countries, they parasitise them.”(1) Taxes, bail-outs, regulations, subsidies, intervention of any kind, he argued, are an unwarranted restraint on market freedom.
Then he became chairman of Northern Rock, where he was able to put his free market principles into practice. Under his chairmanship, the bank pursued what the Treasury select committee later described as a “high-risk, reckless business strategy”(2). It was able to do so because the government agency which oversees the banks “systematically failed in its regulatory duty”(3).
On 16th August 2007, Dr Ridley rang an agent of the detested state to explore the possibility of a bail-out. The self-seeking fleas agreed to his request, and in September the government opened a support facility for the floundering bank. The taxpayer eventually bailed out Northern Rock to the tune of £27bn.
When news of the crisis leaked, it caused the first run on a bank in this country since 1878. The parasitic state had to intervene a second time: the run was halted only when the government guaranteed the depositors’ money.

And now Matt Ridley has written a book. As expected, it indulges in the same magical thinking that got Northern Rock into trouble in the first place. Evil governments, terrible parasitic bureaucrats, crippling regualtion all come in for the usual bollocking.  As usual, the remedy is more of what failed the last time. Not only should these idiots not be allowed near levers of economic power, clearly they shouldn't be allowed near a cup of coffee. this belief that their ideology must be correct, must actually justify what they do and who they are, that they cannot give it up without a complete mental breakdown. Like cultists at the end of the world; when it doesn't arrive, you double down.
To let Mr. Monbiot finish up:

It is only from the safety of the regulated economy, in which governments pick up the pieces when business screws up, that people like Dr Ridley can pursue their magical thinking. Had the state he despises not bailed out his bank and rescued its depositors’ money, his head would probably be on a pike by now. Instead we see it on our television screens, instructing us to apply his irrational optimism more widely. And no one has yet been rude enough to use the word discredited.

One Step Closer

George Monbiot, from his website

One of the principals of democracy is that all persons are equal before the law. That this is not so is pretty much self-evident, does not need me listing case after case as proof, and is one of the major failings of our system. But we're getting one step closer, at least in the UK.
Public intellectual and professional gadfly George Monbiot has set up a bounty fund to further the attempt to bring former UK PM Tony Blair to account in front of the International Criminal Court at the Hague. He also wrote a piece September 3rd about how the philosophical and societal support for different types of justice for different people is beginning to crack apart. An excellent article, and well worth reading more than this excerpt:

For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.
When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.
The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.
That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair's cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: "self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case." Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.

After Capitalism

In the vein of becoming the change we want to see in the world, The Guardian is hosting a forum called "After Capitalism."
In the following animation, George Monbiot takes on something of what we mean by "capitalism" and what a different future might hold.

Mr. Monbiot has taken the time to post the text of the video.

To answer the question of what the world will look like after capitalism, we first have to decide what we mean by capitalism. If it means a system that arises from lending money at interest, then there will be no “after capitalism”. Even when usury was banned on pain of execution or excommunication, it continued, so powerful was the profit drive. While executing bankers has much to commend it, it’s likely to be ineffective. Lesser measures would produce even poorer results.
If on the other hand capitalism means something like the current dispensation, which allows a few people to seize much of the wealth generated by everyone, which blocks social mobility, which re-engineers the political system to serve the economic elite, then, yes, there’s a lot we can do about it.
For the past 200 years, men and women have fought stoicly for political democracy. Now we should fight for economic democracy. The natural wealth of the world, its land, its soils, its crops, minerals, water, forests, fish, is limited. The wealth arising from its use and multiplied through all the complex layers of the modern economy, is also limited, bounded ultimately, as the subprime mortgage crisis showed us, by the real value of assets in the physical world. Just as it was wrong for monarchs and aristocrats to concentrate so much political power in their hands, so it is wrong that billionaires and corporations should be permitted to seize so much of the common treasury of humankind: the wealth arising from the use of a finite planet.