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Money, Debt, Tax.

Money

There needs to be a greater understanding of money within the general population: the parasitical plutocrats are taking everyone for a ride, to oblivion. In particular, an understanding that what is referred to as government borrowing has nothing in common with personal debt. A currency issuer, such as a government, has no need to acquire money from a third party. Governments can issue as much money as they require by simply crediting an account. The is obviously not true of a person who finds themselves in need of money.

The primary concern in determining the amount of money a government can create is inflation. If too much money is circulating within an economy then the price of goods and services will be pushed up, because people will seek to swap the pieces of paper for tangible assets: sellers will be inundated with offers.

The control of inflation is the primary purpose of tax. A government uses tax to destroy money that it has created. Tax is not used to pay for things. If the government didn't first create the money by spending into the economy, there would be no money to pay tax with.

In effect money is an abstract representation of the labour and resources that a government administers. This abstraction facilitates economic activity. In a well run economy there is no need to have unemployment or underused resources, because money can be created to put them to work. It is then incumbent upon the government to prevent the economy overheating by the prudent use of taxation.

Add these to your reading list.

Ann Pettifor: The Production of Money Stephanie Kelton: The Deficit Myth

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Sorry I've been a bit tardy with my posts of late. I seem to have been overwhelmed by a mysterious force. Normal activities should recommence presently. To all my loyal readers who may have been inconvenienced by this state of affairs, my sincerest apologies.

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Capitalism Is Not The Answer

Capitalism Is Not The Answer

Globally greenhouse gases have declined by as much as 8%, as a result of the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. Which is more than any other year on record. But it is a fact that, reduction in economic activity has been the only thing to have any real impact upon emissions. This is due to the direct causal link between economic growth and carbon emissions. To meet our target of keeping global temperature to well below 2.0 C, these large decreases in emissions needs to be achieved year on year. This can only be done by moving away from an economic system that is predicated upon growth: we need to dismantle the capitalist system.

We are currently destroying the environment with over consumption. There was a plan to move to green growth but this does not look possible. Current research suggests that even with highly unlikely scenarios, we still cannot live within the carrying capacity of the Earth. Even if there was the political will for high carbon taxes, and the green technologies existed in a viable form for us to move rapidly to, we would still be consuming at a rate that would destroy the planet. We need to develop economies that are geared around the development of sustainable healthy ecosystem and vibrant communities.

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Zionism is inherently racist.

Zionism is inherently racist

The conflation of Zionism with anti-Semitism is a well developed method of combating criticism of Israeli state policy and its treatment of the Palestinians. BBC Newsnight recently had a discussion in which it played its part in obfuscating the actual criticisms that are made against Zionism. As usual the Palestinian voice was absent from the discussion: two Jews were invited in to take part, one to argue taking over Palestinian land was a good thing, and one to argue it wasn't so good. Predictably, the discussion proceeded in the abstract excluding the reality of what Zionism means for the indigenous Arab population. Instead it focused primarily on whether there should be a Jewish state in principle; therefore suggesting people are against Zionism because it promotes a Jewish state, rather than a general aversion to ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism. It also elided over the fact that the Zionist project is ongoing, and that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was happening today. The discussion of Zionism being a racist endeavour therefore was never addressed, which is the actual criticism of Zionism. Instead we were asked to consider whether people who are critical of Zionism are racists.

It is clear why the reality of Israeli policy in the occupied territories needs to be excluded from any examination of Zionism: there is no doubt at all that it is a racist endeavour. As an occupying force the Israeli authorities have responsibilities under international law, which they have flouted with impunity. As a result of the Oslo Accords the West Bank was divided into three Areas, A, B and C. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, but has persisted now for nearly thirty years. Area C comprises about 60% of the West Bank's land mass, and is under exclusive Israeli control: areas A and B are disconnected islands where the Palestinian Authority operates, situated within the contiguous sea of area C. The Palestinians have been prohibited from construction or development on some 70% of Area C. The reasons given include "state lands" and "firing zones", meaning that Israel has effectively annexed some 40% of the West Bank. The Israelis prevent Palestinians from expanding and developing their communities and demolish homes where it deems planning laws have been violated. It has also taken control of the water sources in the region, restricting Palestinian access. The Israeli legal system is one sided and largely rules against Palestinians when they petition courts as a means of address. At the same time Israeli nationals are encouraged and supported in building settlements on Area C, which is Palestinian land. All of these measures are serious violations of international laws, and clearly amount to a process of settler colonialism, in which Palestinian land is stolen and its Arab population excluded while Israel develops this land for the exclusive benefit of Jews.

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The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

As a result of the pandemic, restrictions were placed on peoples right to assemble and protest. The Tory government seized upon the pandemic to further an agenda of eroding civil liberties; an agenda that has been in motion for a number of decades now. On top of this, the Tories have embarked upon the wholesale looting of the public purse, funnelling public money into the pockets of its donor's. It has also exploited the pandemic, to introduce by stealth, further privatisation of the NHS. Now that the vaccination programme has been rolled out some of the restrictions have been lifted, raising the possibility of people taking to the streets over the summer to protest the corrupt practices of this government. Within this context The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, that is currently moving through parliament, becomes a concern.

The bill poses a grave threat to the right to protest. The new legislation is designed to give the police the power to stop a demonstration if it is too inconvenient, noisy or disruptive. This of course is the very purpose of taking such action. The language used in the bill is vague which will give the police a broad leeway in interpreting when they can stop a protest. Challenging such decisions through the courts will require time and expense; while corporations will be able to exploit the legislation to have protesters moved away from their premises. It is a large piece of legislation covering a lot of topics, that would normally be introduced through a number of pieces of legislation. Instead it is being pushed through at a time when parliament is not fully functional due to the pandemic.

Even with its size it still leaves out things like gender based violence at a time when rape convictions are at an all time low, but finds space for creating offences with large prison terms for defacing statues of slavers. It will become a crime to fail to follow restrictions that a person should have known about, even if they have not been specifically warned about it. It will provide for a 10 year sentence for "intentionally or recklessly causing a public nuisance": successful protests, such as the suffragettes or civil rights movement have often resorted to civil disobedience, taking action which could be interpreted as a "public nuisance".

This comes on top of legislation that gives legal cover for any crime committed by persons engaged in the covert operations of the state, up to and including murder, rape or torture. Terrorism legislation has also been used to charge activists who were engaged in peaceful protest. Other legislation has been enacted to give legal cover to war crimes committed by UK personnel while serving abroad. We are well on our way to a police state.

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The Imprisonment for Public Protection Scandal

The Western democracies have exhibited a clear slide into authoritarianism over the past twenty years. In the UK the start of this can be traced back to the policies of New Labour. There was a clear attempt to circumvent the rules and procedures that ensured people received a fair trial while placing decisions in the hands of bureaucrats. Attempts were made to limit access to juries, extend the amount of time a person could be held without charge and various pieces of legislation were introduced that made it easier to detain people into custody; prison populations soared as a result. There was an attempt to introduce legislation that would make it easier to detain people on mental health grounds and harder for them to be released, even when it was against the advice of their doctors. One of the most damaging episodes was the introduction of Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP).

These sentences were introduced in 2005. They consisted of a tariff, a minimum sentence that the person had to serve in prison, after which it was up to the Parole Board to determine whether the person was suitable for release. They were supposedly intended for serious sexual and violent offences, to give the courts an option similar to a life sentence when dealing with the most serious crimes. They ended up being used for relatively minor offences, where people given tariffs of a few years or less were put on them. The result being that the Parole Board found it difficult to deal with the numbers.

To secure release the Parole Board needed to be convinced that the prisoner was no longer a danger to society. This in itself is problematic as it is assessing some notion of future crime: there is no way to determine what a person might do in the future and hence the concept results in inconsistent standards of justice. This was compounded by the lack of provision for the assessment procedures, and the fact that these assessment procedures had been developed in relationship to long term prisoners, so were not always suitable for people on short sentences who had committed less serious crimes. Suddenly the Parole Board were inundated with people on short tariffs who needed to be assessed. As a result prisoners found themselves stuck in a legal limbo where they were unable to secure release, even after they had served not only the minimum sentence but the maximum for the crime they had been convicted of. The arbitrary nature of the punishment would have a deleterious effect on prisoners well-being, with suicides and self-harm being prevalent among IPP prisoners. The decline in their mental health would end up working against them in Parole Board hearings. The result was that people who were given minimum sentences of a year or two spent 15 years and more in jail. On release these prisoners can be on life-long licence, where they can be recalled to prison for breaching conditions imposed by the Parole Board. These conditions can be trivial and counterproductive as they stop the person reintegrating into society.

As a result of increasing numbers of people taking action through the courts on human rights grounds, IPP sentences were abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively. As a result there are still people in prison who have served many multiples of their sentence. The result has been devastating for families who have no way of knowing when their loved ones will be home. Some women on IPP, who were given short sentences, have lost custody of their children as a result of being incarcerated for many years. These factors play a major role in reintegrating people back into society after they have become effectively institutionalised. The result being that increasing numbers of IPP prisoners who had secured release are now being recalled to prison for breaching their licence conditions.

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Rogue States.

Rogue States

In every sphere of competence and on any metric you could devise, you would have to conclude that world governance is in a parlous state. Governments have been captured by corporations such that the interests of a wealthy global elite are driving policy decisions, to the detriment of everybody else. It is becoming increasingly obvious that this can only be maintained by an erosion of civil liberties and a inexorable slide into authoritarianism. This is in no small measure due to the cast of morally debased inadequates currently populating the Senates, Dumas, and Parliaments of the world. The political class, particularly in those nominally democratic nations, have betrayed their citizenry, and corrupted their constitutions. The world has retrogressed to a time when the purpose of politics was personal advancement: the Old Corruption is back. In nowhere is this more apparent than in the states that make up the UN Security Council. These nations are meant to be the responsible states ensuring world peace and the development of good governance. In fact, the UN Security Council comprises the group of nations that are responsible for the calamitous progression to the brink of disaster that the human race is careering along. They launch wars for profit, destabilise economies to create advantage, and generally preside over a system that is destroying the global environment. All of which is motivated by nothing other than profit for this wealthy global elite. Currently this group of rogue states are actively igniting a new Cold War and with it a new arms race.

It has been well noted that there are at least two clear threats to the very existence of the human race. Climate change is probably the greater threat, in that it is clearly under way; and at a frightening pace. The response also frightening in its laxity: little more than a PR campaign, while maintaining a commitment to the fossil fuel economy. The other threat, nuclear weapons, sits lurking in the shadows. While we can be reasonably sure that even the most bellicose of hawks doesn't actually want a nuclear war, the world has come perilously close on numerous occasions. If world leadership is characterised by one trait it would be an overinflated sense of its own magnificence. The performance indicators tell a very different story, and so it is prudent to bear in mind what a miscalculation would mean: within a few short hours some of the most prominent cities on the planet would be blazing, irradiated wastelands; the survivors would be contemplating the prospect of perishing in a nuclear winter.

Numerous treaties designed to control and ultimately rid the world of nuclear weapons have lapsed, while a new round of research and development of weapons systems is well under way. This includes the development of what are referred to as "battlefield nukes". The idea being that you can produce nuclear weapons with small enough yields that they can conceivably be used without a decent into full-blown nuclear Armageddon. For many years the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) has the most prominent international weapons control treaty. It has been relatively successful in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, save for a few states who were aided by the US in acquiring them, and one who was motivated to acquire them due to threats from the US. The NPT has acted as the cornerstone of nuclear weapons containment, but is now being undermined by the behaviour of the rogue states who possess such weapons.

The treaty requires that states that possess nuclear weapons should make good faith efforts to fully disarm. Something which is being increasingly held in contempt by the nuclear armed states. The UK recently announced that it would be increasing its number of warheads. It is also in the process of modernising its weapons systems, or rather hoping that the US will modernise the system that it rents. The US started a large scale programme to modernise its nuclear weapons system a number of years ago. Perhaps more worrying is the rhetoric that is accompanying these developments, implying they could be used in situations other than defence from an adversaries nuclear attack. These threats are highly provocative to the majority of nations which signed the NPT in good faith and have abided by their commitments. The hypocrisy of it, coming from states who have launched wars on the pretext of WMD, is breathtaking.

The majority of nations on Earth do not possess nuclear weapons and are rapidly losing faith in the process to rid the world of them. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force on the 22 January 2021, which prohibits the possession and development of nuclear weapons as well as their use or threat of use. The treaty became law after a UN vote where 122 of the 197 members accepted it. Needless to say the rogue states of the Security Council have not only not signed it but actively impeded its passing, and will not be bound by its conditions. Instead they place the globe in what effectively amounts to a giant suicide vest.

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Hey Billy, where you going with that song in your hand?

To my ears it is clear that Niela Miller's song, Baby, Please Don't Go To Town, provides the original foundation of Hey Joe, what became Jimi Hendrix's début release. She taught it to her then boyfriend Billy Roberts. Billy changed the lyrics and claimed the song as his own, along with the publishing writes. And so Niela was shunted aside while the boys pocketed the cash. There has been a lot said about the origin of Hey Joe, but in the main it all revolves around the capitalist logic of who got paid. For a while Billy was parted from the spoils too, but such are the ways of the music business.

While Niela may well have deserved her share of the money, a far greater disservice was the silencing of her voice: she had something to say of far greater artistic worth than what replaced it. If the purpose of art is to render the human condition intelligible, then the removal of Niela's voice, a female voice elucidating a female perspective, was a great disservice to those who would seek to understand our world. What replaced it certainly holds a mirror up to our culture, but perhaps not in the way intended by its author.

Hey Joe has become probably the best known example of a genre of folk song known as the murder ballad. These songs are narrative accounts of murders. They would fulfil the role of informing people about events in bygone times, acting as cautionary tales. Woman are the subject matter of much of these traditional folk tales, often portrayed as patriarchal stereotypes: good girls waiting for their true love, or bad girls acting as a corrupting influence. The murder ballad would often see the good girl getting murdered for making unwise choices, perhaps by a jealous rival, or a poor choice of suitor; or the bad girl getting her just desert?

Hey Joe tells the tale of Joe murdering his woman because "she ran off with another man". What is striking about it is the matter-of-factness of the violence, there is no questioning of the legitimacy of killing someone just because they have decided to leave with another. Again we see the capitalist ideals of ownership and economic freedom, only this time taken to their logical extreme: the ownership and dominion over a human being. Through out the song there is no inquiry into motive or expressions of remorse, it is totally bereft of emotion: Joe murders his woman then scarpers to Mexico, seemingly incensed that he cannot be "free" due to the authorities wanting to get a hold of him. It's a terribly disturbing aspect of our culture, that a problem of the magnitude of violence directed at woman, can be treated in such a blasé manner. Hey Joe is basically a paean to toxic masculinity. So what about Baby, Please Don't Go To Town?

Niela's song also address infidelity. It takes on the form of a boyfriend interrogating his girlfriend, asking her about where she is going. In the opening verse the woman is quite open, even brazen, about going to a bar where she will get drunk and flirt with the men there. By verse two she is spelling it out, she is going stay with those "young Men... all to-night till tomorrow noon". But she also addresses motive: "tell ’em how my Man, he really puts me down". The song explores the idea that by crushing her confidence the Man has been the author of his own problems: she is seeking to boost her spirits making her amenable to the attention of others. The final verse addresses how this can make her vulnerable to the mores of male aggression: "one of those Boys is gonna do you in", the boyfriend warns, and he won't be around to protect her. We see the irony that women need men to protect them, from men. Billy Robert's compounds this irony by turning it into a song about the woman being murdered, ostensibly for what happened at the bar, by the man who suggested she needs protecting! This notion of woman having to be careful when going about their business is a prominent aspect of patriarchal control. The fostering of fear in woman makes them dependent, less capable of living their lives as they see fit.

As an artistic statement Niela Miller's song has a grater depth, and a more subtle exploration of human relationships. It doesn't fit into to clearly defined patriarchal sterotypes that have been used to define and limit female expression.

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#hellajuneteenth

We’re standing in solidarity with Hella Creative’s #hellajuneteenth movement and echoing their demands: Juneteenth should be declared a federally recognized holiday. Celebrating Independence Day as a day of freedom when enslaved Black men, women, and children were not legally declared free for another 85 years (with 250,000 not told until two and a half years later) white-washes the cruel legacy of our country’s greatest sin. It’s time we demand Congress step up.

We’re stepping up, too

Starting this year, Juneteenth will be recognized as an official company holiday at Tumblr. This should have been done long ago. If you’d like to see your companies do the same, check out #hellajuneteenth’s incredible resources including templates for requesting your employer recognize Juneteenth like they recognize Independence Day. There’s also a template for an out-of-office message to help spread the word and a poster business owners can print out and hang in the office. For those eager to show their support on social media, #hellajuneteenth provides a number of graphics to share and they suggest you use the #juneteenth tag with the following caption:

We’re reclaiming our time.

For years, the enslaved people gave countless hours of free labor to their owners. Since emancipation, we have been making up for that lost time. So in true solidarity with our ancestors, it’s only right that we declare this to be a day free of labor.

This is important

Sign this petition addressed to Congress. Contact your reps and encourage them to support the initiative. Your voices have led to Minneapolis pledging to disband its police department, the arrests of the police officers responsible for George Floyd’s death, the repeal of Section 50-A in NYC, and the long-overdue demolition of Confederate statues.

Keep that energy going, Tumblr. Demand Juneteenth gets federal recognition. You’re winning, so don’t stop now.

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"You're a rare and precious gal Ms Martha, with a wit and charm that captivates my heart; fierce pretty too. It's a special thing to have a friend like you: to show man his true self and affect a change in him. And for that I love you mightily".