Covert Actions and Hidden Purposes

There have been some alarming allegations over the past few years about collusion or corruption between separate organisations, in situations were a status quo is threatened. Such concerted efforts make accountability difficult and pose a real threat to legitimate opposition.

For instance there were the allegations, based on information gathered by freedom of information requests, of coordinated action between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and major banks against the peaceful protest movement Occupy (Wolf, 2012). Such coordinated action between organisations that are supposed to represent competitive businesses, along with regulatory or security entities, is a pretty scary proposition.

But it isn't surprising.

Even organisations in direct competition within a given society maintain a shared vested interest in the continuation of that society's status quo. But such actions are unlikely to be popular, prompting covert actions through third parties, aliases and front groups that make it difficult to scrutinize actions, ideas and the consequences of interacting with them.

The Guardian's recent revelations about the Catholic Church's secret use of 'Mussolini's millions' to construct a lucrative property empire certainly fits the bill (Benhamou et al, 2013). The raising of funds by private enterprise for religious or ideological organisations is hardly new, but when done covertly is certainly disconcerting.

So to are the efforts of conservatives in the UK to advocate withdrawal from the EU. On the surface they present 'arcane debates' about identity and sovereignty. Yet once you get beyond the anti-european sentiment and nationalism, there lies a determination to repatriate controls over labour laws - plans that have been described as less than progressive (Syal, 2013). But attempts to weaken protections for workers aught not to be surprising, given that attempts have already been made to eliminate unfair dismissal (Landau & Snowden, 2011) and set-up a shares-for-rights scheme (Hurley, 2012).

Furthermore, the UK's journalism crisis seems at risk of being used as cover for the dangerous pursuit of press regulation (O'Carroll, 2013). The Leveson enquiry, and the resulting report, produced a recommendation that an independent regulator be set up to monitor the press (Sabbagh & O'Carroll, 2012). The very real fear is that such a recommendation might turn into a political attempt to humble the press and an opportunity for politicians to take action against some of their most effective of political opponents.

Time and again, vested interests defend the status quo by acting in concert, acting covertly or acting to achieve certain ends under the guise of others. The methods are there to be uncovered. The aim is the defeat of opposition to the established status quo. The question is, why?

It is easy to cling to the notions of human frailty and selfishness - powerful people, corrupted by power, attempting to prevent the diluting of that power. But is it all that simple?

The British Labour Party has governed Britain at numerous times during the 20th Century and yet always left the establishment intact - even reinforced the centralising of power. Labour leader of the late 1950s Hugh Gaitskell (Bogdanor, 1983) put it:

'We, as middle-class socialists, have got to have a profound humility. Though it's a funny way of putting it, we've got to know that we lead them because they can't do it without us, with our abilities, and yet we must feel humble to working people.'

Simply put, not all those who support the establishment, or various forms of central or controlling authority do so for selfish reasons. Instead, some see that control as the means to enact positive changes. However, as David Marquand (Bogdanor, 1983) points out about Gaitskell's colleague Anthony Crosland:

'Crosland took the traditional structure of the British state for granted, and failed to see that the centralist, elitist logic underlying it was incompatible with his own libertarian and egalitarian values.'

Progressives need not engage in the condescensions and contradictions of defending a status quo purely for the power it offers. When there is so much happening -  when movements like Occupy rally to organise the first responders to crises and draw attention to gross inequalities; when organisations like Kiva organise successful micro-financing projects to tackle world poverty; when journalists working within a free press uncover and expose the crimes of other journalists, politicians and the police - when all of these things are happening, progressives aught to be aware that alternative ways exist to make a difference.

'Legislation will never be able to do as much good for society, as corruption did against it. You can remain a strong government on the seats of Parliaments, but outside its enclosure, you are without any moral authority on the masses.'    - Louis-Joseph Papineau.

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References:
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+ Naomi Wolf's 'Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy'; in The Guardian; 29 December 2012.

+ Jessica Benhamou, David Leigh & Jean Francois Tanda's 'How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini's millions'; in The Guardian; 21 January 2013.

+ Rajeev Syal's 'TUC boss: Cameron will seize your EU employment rights to weaken them'; in The Guardian; 28 January 2013.

+ Philip Landau & Graham Snowdon's 'Employment law: what the changes could mean in the workplace'; in The Guardian; 23 November 2011.

+ James Hurley's 'George Osborne’s shares for rights scheme "helps no one"'; in The Telegraph; 15 October 2012.

+ Lisa O'Carroll's 'Hacked Off in row with government over regulation document'; in The Guardian; 16 January 2013.

+ Dan Sabbagh & Lisa O'Carroll's 'Leveson report calls for new press law'; in The Guardian; 29 November 2012.

+ Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Death Penalty Debate in India

In December anger erupted in India after the public rape and beating of a woman by several assailants. She later died, despite receiving treatment for her injuries (Jones, 2012). Since then, there have been massive, and spreading, protests demanding a drastic change in attitudes towards women and in the legal response to the crimes against them (Burke, 2013).

However there have also been calls, in response to the attack, for use of the death penalty (Burke, 2012).

Amnesty International has issued a calm response that warns against 'cruel and unusual punishment', like the death penalty, to guard against the risk of perpetuating a 'cycle of violence' (Guruswamy, 2013). The Director of Amnesty International in India, Ananth Guruswamy, stressed that:

'There is no evidence to suggest that the threat of execution works as a special deterrent. This is reflected in a clear global trend moving towards the abolition of the death penalty. Today, 140 countries in the world have abolished executions in law or practice.'

Furthermore, not only does the death penalty merely meet violence with violence and fail as a deterrent, but it is also a dangerously final response. In Britain, where capital punishment has recently resurfaced as an issue, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop (2011) addressed some of the arguments on BBC's Question Time:

'For 50 years Private Eye has, pretty much in most issues, exposed a miscarriage of justice and a lot of them have been murders. Over the years these cases have been found to be entirely wrong and the men convicted... have been found innocent. So, we would have killed those people.'

If we are to get beyond violence and aggression we cannot be consumed by it. We cannot keep meeting violence and aggression with wrath and vengeance. Those responses fail to solve the ultimate problems and are illogical - and rising above it is something Mark Pagel (2012) has described as humanity's 'inexorable' advancement in our increasing ability to cooperate:

'Cooperation can normally win out over endless cycles of betrayal and revenge, because there's always a sort of seduction of competition and killing your enemy - because then you get to occupy those lands - but you have to live with the fear of that enemy trying to kill you. And so it seems to be an inexorable part of our history that cooperation has had greater returns than competition.' 

If we are to avoid the death spiral that 'an eye for an eye' logically invites - rejecting revenge even in the face of horrific crimes such as that committed in India - we must find more complex ways to address the core problems and not just the symptoms. These kinds of questions have begun to be asked of our cultures in India (Hundal, 2013). Now the rest of the world has to follow suit.

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References:
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For some statistics on and analysis of the death penalty, see:
- DPIC: 'Facts about Deterrence and the Death Penalty'.
- ACLU: 'The Case Against the Death Penalty'; 11 December 2012.
- Amnesty International: 'Death Penalty'; 10 October 2012.

+ Cass Jones' 'Indian victim of gang rape dies in hospital in Singapore'; in The Guardian; 28 December 2012.

+ Jason Burke's 'Rape Protests spread beyond India'; in The Guardian; 4 January 2013.

+ Jason Burke's 'Indian gang-rape victim's family calls for attackers to be hanged'; in The Guardian; 31 December 2012.

+ Ananth Guruswamy's 'Indian rape debate: Why death penalty is no solution'; on livewire.amnesty.org; 3 January 2013.

+ Ian Hislop on BBC's Question Time; 22 September 2011.

+ Mark Pagel's 'Wired for Culture: The natural history of human cooperation'; (Quote at 11:01); March 2012.

+ Sunny Hundal's 'India's bitter culture of rape and violence'; in The Guardian; 3 January 2013.

The Fiscal Cliff: One Small Battle in a Larger War

In time, the stand-off over the US Government fiscal cliff may well go down as just one part of an ongoing struggle between reforming social democrats and pro-business deregulators over the role of government. Just one small battle in a larger war.

The fiscal cliff itself served as the date for automatic cuts and tax hikes to set in, should a better proposal not arrive on the table (BBC, 2013). Carving out such a proposal became necessary when the economic problems began to pile-up: propelled by slow growth, and made dangerous by the unwillingness or inability of the United States Congress to raise its debt ceiling (the cap on government borrowing set by Congress) to cover the subsequently rising deficit.

The deal to solve these worries, if 'solve' is in fact the right term (Moore, 2013), saw the main winners appear to be the wealthy (but not the super rich) earning up to $400,000 a year who won't see a major tax rise. Meanwhile a number of major issues such as defence spending were postponed (Daley, 2013).

And these are far from the first postponements. The fiscal cliff itself is the result of an inability to settle the disconnect between what the federal government is expected to provide and what its citizens are willing and able to raise in revenue. This conflict between revenue and expectation was been brought to a head by the US Government approaching and hitting the debt ceiling - which means no more borrowing to make up for short falls in revenue.

With taxes despised and borrowing capped, the public sector seems to be hemmed in - with far less scope for 'innovative fundraising' than their private sector fellows. It is interesting that while the private sector makes a habit of turning limitations into barriers that it then 'circumvents or transcends'  (Harvey, 2010), the public sector is not afforded the same opportunities.

This creates real difficulties when a central bank racks sufficiently massive debts, such as many nations have in bailing out big banks and big business. A large part of the massive weight of debt upon the US Federal Government has been the cost of efforts to stimulate the economy through quantitative easing: the investment, from the public chest, large amounts of capital into private enterprises in order to stimulate lending and employment (FactCheck, 2012). Yet, despite absorbing government handouts with little change to paucity of lending and high unemployment that act as anchors slowing growth, it is not the private but the public sector that is once more taking a hammering over it.

Responding to these issues isn't made easier by decision making processes that appear to be broken. Which is where the fiscal cliff debate fits into the larger conflict. How much should people, through their democratic institutions, seek to interfere in the market place? A lack of interference by government has led to a US economy much more 'dynamic' than its European counterpart - more quick to react to market changes with bigger money to be made - yet it comes at the cost of the greater stability offered by European social market economies.

As the 2012 US Presidential Election showed, people want the security offered by public sector involvement in the provision of essential services like healthcare and welfare. The debate people want to hear is how we make it fair, how we make it affordable, and what we have to make choices between with our finite budgets.

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References:
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+ BBC's 'Q&A: The US fiscal cliff'; 2 January 2013.

+ Heidi Moore's 'Congress's manufactured non-solution to its manufactured fiscal cliff crisis'; in The Guardian; 1 January 2013.

+ FactCheck's 'Obama’s Deficit Dodge'; 28 September 2012.

+David Harvey's 'Crises in Capitalism'; RSA Animate; 28 June 2010.

Empathy is not Impossible

A new year brings with it new movies, amongst which is the based-on-a-true-story disaster film The Impossible. The tale follows a family (written as Spanish but changed to English) struggling through the 2004 Indian Ocean Disasters, and has been praised for its 'emotional realism' (Young, 2012). However, the film is more than a little problematic. These disasters affected the lives of billions of people across a wide area of the planet, of many and varied cultures and ethnicities - yet the trailers have all shown a film starring one white family.

In the trailers, the much lauded emotion of the story is certainly palpable. So too is a beautiful and epically simple premise of love and devotion that drives the actions of the protagonists. But the trailer, screened before The Hobbit in some cinemas, raised a serious question: why, in the face of these terrible events, did the filmmakers feel it necessary for a predominantly white audience to have a family of white protagonists in order to empathise? Or a Spanish family for a Spanish audience, as was originally intended?

For comparison, Tolkien's stories in middle earth use his grounded and familiar Hobbits as a gateway to a world were creatures of myth, song and legend 'have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the sun'. Do we really need the aid of the same sort of narrative devices in order to empathise with other people, as Tolkien felt we needed to empathise with his mythical world?

It seems that, far too much, what people do is confused with the limit of what they can do. But there are plenty of reasons to believe (Rifkin, 2010) that people are not that limited - that our capacity for empathy is far greater than that. But when we treat people so firmly within the limits of their knowledge, all we are doing is reinforcing those limits.

In 2006, the then Senator, Mr Barack Obama spoke about an 'empathy deficit' (Honigsbaum, 2013). Mr Obama implored the graduates of Northwestern University to put empathy at the centre of their growth as they strive to become adults. To challenge themselves to step outside of safe and selfish aims, not only for others but for themselves - that 'cultivating empathy, challenging yourself' and 'persevering in the face of adversity' are what forges an adult from a child.

But to achieve those high aims we must be willing to take the risk of putting the unfamiliar in front of people and trusting them cope - because fencing people in with narrow presumptions about what they are capable of empathising with does nothing to help overcome that empathy deficit. Instead, it risks isolating us from the plight of others, and the realisations key to our own development.

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References:
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+ Deborah Young's 'The Impossible: Toronto Review'; in The Hollywood Reporter; 10 September 2012.

+ 'White Male Lead'; on TvTropes.

+ Jeremy Rifkin's 'The Empathic Civilisation'; on RSA Animate; 6 May 2010.

+ 'Obama Challenges Grads to Cultivate Empathy'; Northwestern University, 2006.

+ Mark Honigsbaum's 'Barack Obama and the "empathy deficit"'; in The Guardian; 4 January 2013.