Spend on micro-generation schemes instead of pylons, overhead power lines and underground high-voltage cabling

First published on Future Generations and Climate Change

At no stage will the debate even acknowledge that decentralised local grids may be a far better answer (Alan Simpson)

Nick Winser, who was appointed the government’s first electricity networks commissioner last year, said in his report that a huge expansion of the electricity is needed. National Grid, the FTSE 100 owner of Britain’s transmission network, has estimated that five times as much work on the network will be needed over the next seven years than was undertaken over the past three decades.

Britain will not need new oil and gas production if it incentivises micro-generation schemes. This could also obviate the need for much of the new electricity distribution infrastructure currently considered necessary (Martin Lack).

Solar, wind, storage, demand management, EVs, heat pumps, eco-efficient design, micro-grids, AI-enabled Big Data, and green hydrogen will play essential roles in a Net Zero carbon future (Jonathon Porritt, broken link from former website).

The future role of local energy ownership in the UK has been studied and a report on the subject (below) may be accessed on the Green Alliance website

Community energy projects should be valued for all the services they can bring to the grid and the wider economy. This includes carbon reduction, building local economic and energy resilience and a host of other social benefits that come from reinvesting profits locally.

Community energy has grown steadily in the UK over the past two decades. There are now around 300 projects, providing renewable energy to their communities, using the profits locally. A desire for local control over energy sources, and to address climate change, are the primary motivations for these developments.

In 2014, the British government’s community energy strategy estimated that one million homes would be powered by community energy schemes benefitting from a feed-in tariff by 2020.  Community projects were set up powering 67,000 homes.

In addition to reducing their environmental impact, residents can expect to reduce the cost of their energy bills, and build greater resilience against rising energy prices and disrupted global supply chains.

Dr Barbara Hammond, CE of the Low Carbon Hub, was in government from 2000 until 2010, heading the UK’s renewable energy programme. She supports community energy which enhances the resilience of communities as neighbourhoods come together to take control of the energy they use, through community-owned clean energy generation, joining forces to make their homes more energy efficient and sharing energy-saving advice.

Four years later the government abandoned their strategy, reducing the feed-in tariffs and later abolishing them for new installations in 2019, causing at least 66 community projects to stall or fail.

Precedents in USA and India

Tata Power which sets up industrial-scale solar projects now plans to scale up from 200 to 10,000 microgrids in India. In rural areas of the United States the vast distances mean that installing power lines, which leak power over long distances, are not viable. There have been microgrids generating power using fossil fuel-fired generators for many years, but new projects are now using more sustainable resources like solar power.

Instead of expanding or connecting to the national energy grid, some companies, municipalities, and individuals are creating miniature grids of their own that can operate independently -“microgrids” – providing options for groups that want lower energy bills, more control over where their energy comes from, or a level of reliability that the grid cannot provide (Institute for Self Reliance).

Governments are urged to support the alternatives to inefficient, costly and environmentally destructive centralised energy grids owned by vast foreign conglomerates

Continues here.

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Is this ‘civilised’ country supplying DU ammunition – a risk to human & environmental health?

Republished from Nuclear Industries

Since the March reports of the UK government’s intention to supply DU ammunition to Ukraine, the media has been silent, merely adding in June that the Biden administration is to equip tanks with to be sent to Ukraine with DU ammunition (Wall Street Journal) , Many were deeply disturbed to read Baroness Goldie’s answer to a parliamentary question:

Alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition including armour piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium. Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armoured vehicles.

The government’s own website warns that if DU enters the body, it can potentially cause damage from the inside (internal exposure) either through irradiation or by chemical action. It can enter the body by inhalation (breathing in fine dust), ingestion via the mouth, contamination of an open wound, or, on the battlefield, by the embedding of shrapnel fragments

A paper from the World Health Organization (WHO) reports: “The health effects of natural and depleted uranium are due to chemical effects and not to radiation . . . Potentially depleted uranium has both chemical and radiological toxicity with the two important target organs being the kidneys and the lungs”.

The Institute of Medicine (above) has investigated the implication of preconceptional paternal irradiation as a causal factor in childhood cancer

“. . . the data indicate that there exists a route for transgenerational transmission of factor(s) leading to genomic instability in F1 progeny from DU-exposed fathers”. (Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Health Effects Associated with Exposures During the Gulf War (2010). Though this evidence refers to laboratory research on rats it should not be dismissed; their genetic, biological and behaviour characteristics closely resemble those of humans and many symptoms of human conditions can be replicated in mice and rats. (Live Science.)

The United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and France all opposed a United Nations resolution to document depleted uranium in war – and though the Ministry of Defence disputes the risks of DU, it recommends “ongoing surveillance” for veterans with embedded DU fragments. (Read the comprehensive article in the Harvard International Review by Sydney Young, left)

Instead of resting on the statements that there is no proven causal link between the damage to health, which may be dure to other factors, any truly civilised country would honour the precautionary principle.

“This principle, widely accepted in international law and policy documents, states that you do not have to wait for absolute scientific certainty in order to take action to prevent further deterioration of the situation at hand”

(Wouter Veening, President of the Institute for Environmental Security, The Hague, in the Financial Times)

 

 

 

 

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Away with manipulative think-tanks – government stalking horses

Paraphrasing George Monbiot’s Rings of Power essay: personnel  employed by opaquely-funded thinktanks, that formulate and test the policies later adopted by government,  circulate in and out of the offices of the UK Prime Minister and US President. Their output is published or reviewed in the print media, most of which is owned by billionaires or multi-millionaires living offshore.

Michèle Flournoy, a former US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the co-founder of WestExec Advisors, described as ‘a diverse group of senior national security professionals with recent experience at the highest levels of the U.S. government’, has today published an article in the Financial Times.

It is – ostensibly – about the recent India/China confrontation, but is actually another move in what Robert Armstrong calls the US-China fight.

This cartoon replaces WestExec’s patronising cartoon of PM Modi and President Xi battling with stone-age clubs. It is taken from Jonathan Power’s FT article earlier this month:

Fanning the flames: “In principle, it is a moment that demands US leadership to convene and mobilise the region’s democracies”  

Embedded in the article are Ms Flournoy’s references to China’s rising military expenditures, its  growing assertiveness, coercive measures to enforce excessive maritime claims, expansive global infrastructure development strategy, modernised armed forces and multibillion-dollar state-directed campaign to develop (and steal) key emerging technologies. She adds:

“Its vessels have collided with foreign ships in the South China Sea (Ed, in 2014). Japan protests that its vessels re being harassed in the East China Sea. Chinese aircraft have encroached upon Taiwan, and Beijing has promulgated a new national security law for Hong Kong that seriously erodes its liberties”.

She then calls for deeper security co-operation among like-minded states, naming Japan, the US, India and Australia, urging these ‘major democracies’ and other countries who are anxious about Chinese intentions and capabilities, to treat China’s border clash with India as a clarion call and take steps to protect their common interests and values. If they do not, she continues, China will continue pushing boundaries, posing unacceptable risks to international order, ending: “In practice, however, that may have to wait for a new occupant in the White House”.

Another voice says: ‘The attack on China should stop’

Jonathan Power writes:

“The world is supposed to be pulling together to defeat the Coronavirus and to some extent it is. Earlier on Russia sent special equipment to the US and recently the US has sent some to Russia. China has aided Italy and Africa with doctors and equipment. Tiny Cuba, with its deep pool of doctors, has also helped Africa (detail here). Around the world there is a sense of “we are all in this together” and that this is a bigger problem than the ones the world has faced since World War 2.”

But President Donald Trump has suggested Chinese culpability for spreading the COVID-19, calling the virus “a Chinese virus” – and some Chinese senior officials publicly retorted.

Powers forecasts that the Coronavirus debate over who is right and who is wrong could become a watershed moment in the relationship between the US and China.

The World Health Organization has brought all the world’s countries together to discuss how to go forward now and – as Power continues – Trump’s representatives needed to say “Let’s sit down and with our best scientists discuss not who is to blame but how such diseases can be forestalled”. That is likely to bring a better result.

Power adds that despite Trump’s good-humoured meetings with Xi, “this antagonism is not a new development. There were three rounds of tariffs in 2018, and a fourth one in September last year. The most recent round targeted Chinese imports, from meat to musical instruments, with a 15% duty. He has refused to negotiate an extension of the nuclear weapons reduction agreement with Russia unless China (a relatively small nuclear power) is brought into the deal”.

Though both countries have an extreme superiority complex and think they are exceptional, unlike China, Power notes, the US has sought to prevent the emergence of a peer competitor, whether Western Europe, Russia or China, that could challenge its military dominance.

Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs agrees: “Today’s China is a remarkably responsible nation on the geopolitical and military front. Beijing is now the second-largest funder of the United Nations and its peacekeeping work. It has deployed 2,500 peacekeepers, more than all the other permanent members of the Security Council combined.

It has not gone to war since 1979. It has not used lethal military force abroad since 1988. Nor has it funded or supported proxies or armed insurgents anywhere in the world since the early 1980s. That record of non-intervention is unique among the world’s great powers”. Powers comments: “For its part, the US has attempted regime change around the world 72 times”.

If Michèle Flournoy were to study the writings of Zakaria and Power, heeding the 16^th century advice from Thomas Cranmer, to “read mark, learn and inwardly digest” – she might change course.

 

 

 

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America: jettison the Venezuelan vendetta and face the coronavirus!

As Steve Sweeney writes: Washington has come under fire (Ed: largely in the suffering regions’ media) for using the global health emergency to exert pressure on countries, including Venezuela and Iran, where it seeks regime change. Both have been targeted with increased sanctions and threats.

At least 3,003 people have died in the United States from Covid-19 and over 160,698 cases of coronavirus have been detected. CNN reports that hundreds of medical workers across the country have fallen sick and hospitals face dire shortages of protective gear: “We are slowly descending into chaos,” said a trauma physician at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital.

As infections and deaths escalate, what preoccupies the American government?

Last week the Trump administration indicted President Maduro as a drug trafficker, offering a $15m reward for his capture, despite the words of Pino Arlacchi, the former Vice Secretary of the United Nations and Former Executive Director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Arlacchi is reported to have said that the world’s main producer and consumer are Colombia and the United States and Venezuela has always been outside these main cocaine trafficking circuits, adding:

“There is no illegal drug trade between Venezuela and the United States, except in the ill fantasy of Trump and his associates. I have been dealing with the issue of drugs for 40 years and I have never encountered Venezuela”.

Yesterday, Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state (above), added further pressure on Venezuela, telling a press briefing in Washington about plans to invite President Nicolás Maduro to cede power to a new transitional government.

Speaking after this news, Jorge Arreaza, Venezuela’s foreign minister, responded: “Nicolás Maduro was elected in May 2018 for a period of six years. . . he would never betray the trust that the people have put in him twice already.”

Sweeney sees aggressive behaviour towards Venezuela, Cuba, China and Iran as attempts by Donald Trump to ‘cover his inadequacies’ fuelled by fears that Washington is losing its dominant influence on the world stage.

The Financial Times editorial has called for the US and its allies to change course and waive sanctions on Venezuela as US bid for regime change escalates. It argued that the desperate state of Venezuela merits special consideration: the spread of the coronavirus, coinciding with a crash in global oil prices, has deprived Caracas of most of its sole source of legal foreign exchange ending:

“Negotiate a humanitarian programme and focus on health as the coronavirus spreads apace in both countries”.

 

 

 

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Are Boris and Donald playing ‘The Great Game’?

A Sunday Times allegation that nine wealthy Russians have donated to Britain’s Conservative Party is leading some to suspect that disturbing evidence is being withheld at this time in order to safeguard its election prospects. Two expatriate oligarchs named, former allies of President Putin, are now British citizens. As David Slinger asks, (Gloucester Citizen, 2811.19) “Do we have a democratic right to see the reports?”

Would publication of the parliamentary report – which has passed security checks – shine a spotlight on the bankrolling of their party by disaffected millionaire Russian oligarchs?

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has – to date – refused to publish the findings – thought to present evidence of covert Russian attempts to influence the outcome of 
the referendum and 2017 general election gathered by UK intelligence.

David Fromkin (Foreign Affairs) once wrote that the history of Britain’s participation in ‘The Great Game’ (see Kipling) ‘gains interest and possible significance from the American decision in our own time to contest Russian expansion on much the same battlefield’. Despite a temporary parliamentary setback pictured above, is the ‘Game’ afoot and will America – as usual – expect British diplomatic, intelligence and military support when required?

The US government is understandably apprehensive as Russia is increasing its influence in the Middle East and has also been co-operating with China – the latest move being a partnership in a $55 billion pipeline which the WSJ sees as ‘challenging the economic and strategic clout of the U.S’.

Work on the Power of Siberia pipeline project

Richard House wonders why opposition parties haven’t made the report a major general election issue, as it is ‘potential dynamite for the whole Brexit cause’.

Foreign Policy mentions ‘pervasive reports—never quite conclusively denied by the Foreign Office—that during Johnson’s time as foreign secretary, direct oversight of MI6, the foreign intelligence service, was quietly moved out of his portfolio because of his rather startling ‘Russian connections’

If the report does cast significant doubt on the narrow referendum result to leave, Richard House adds, the whole legitimacy of Brexit would be thrown into doubt and the Tory Party would be in total meltdown.

 

 

 

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Iran: Western media misreporting the demos fomented by ‘soft power’

The BBC World Service radio this morning, Radio 4’s Broadcasting House – and other mainstream media – offered distorted reporting:

• first headlining the “iron fist” threat and repeating this several times, before acknowledging its conditionality ‘if political unrest continues’
• and failing to focus on the far larger rallies supporting the Iranian government

They stressed that the demonstrations erupted over falling living standards, but Iranian interior minister Abdolreza Rahmani-Fazli said that those people in the larger demos realised this was due to imposed sanctions – but the BBC website chose only to report his words about the consequences of damage to public property, disrupting order and breaking the law.

The USA’s use of soft power to foment unrest has been effective with many worldwide

The use of soft power was touched on in a linked site in 2015. We quote: “Hard power is exerted by financial inducements, invasion and remote killing by drone aircraft. Soft power sounds quite benign, but as Joseph Nye points out in The Future of Power (2011, left), it can be wielded for good or ill: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all possessed a great deal of soft power. He adds: “It is not necessarily better to twist minds than to twist arms”.

An illusion of a free society (‘liberating minds’) is presented and a consumerist culture cultivated. One actor in this drive is the Human Rights Foundation, whose approving Wikipedia entry emphasises its insistence on ‘economic freedom’. In Central and South America and the Middle East it has paved the way for the overthrow of regimes which would not co-operate.

Has it escalated in Iran after its threat to further ‘eliminate’ use of the dollar?

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said to Putin in November: “we can nullify US sanctions, using methods such as eliminating the dollar and replacing it with national currencies”. Forbes earlier reported that this policy would be implemented. Several countries have not fared well after ‘ditching the dollar’:

• In 2002 North Korea’s state-run Korean Trade Bank announced a ban on the use of US dollars in daily payment and settlement for its citizens and foreigners.
• In 2003 Coilin Nunan wondered: “Could one reason for the US wish for ‘regime change’ in Iraq and unprecedented European opposition to such a project be Iraq’s decision two years earlier to accept euros only as payment for its oil, instead of the customary dollars? Could America’s current focus on Iran be similarly explained?”
• In 2004 Fidel Castro decreed that the dollar would no longer be legal for commercial transactions.

It should be stressed that the soft power illusions of total normality, freedom and prosperity are a confidence trick. The unmentioned features of the USA, a country which young Iranians and others have been led by soft power to admire as ‘an ideal state of freedom’, include pollution, child abuse, violent pornography, inequality of opportunity, youth unemployment, high cost housing and military aggression.

 

 

 

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Broken Britain 7: prolonged, tragic sagas: infected blood transfusions, denial and delay, pending death

The Haemophilia Society has blown the whistle and called for an enquiry into its own failure and that of government, pharma and clinicians. More here.

Medics and politicians knew by the mid-1970s that commercially manufactured blood products from the USA were suspect. By the mid-1980s there were warnings of a similar situation in respect of HIV. Nevertheless these products continued to be imported and used – just as OP sheep dips were.

British haemophiliacs and other victims’ lives were blighted in the 1970s and 1980s by these cheap imported US blood products, harvested from inmates and drug addicts. More than 7,000 were infected and went on unknowingly to infect family

Last week in The Times, Margarette Driscoll recalls that in 2015, following the Penrose report into contaminated blood products in Scotland (which many victims denounced as a whitewash), David Cameron apologised to those who were infected by HIV and hepatitis C.

Weasel words

References to “compensation” have been changed to “payments” – to avoid admitting the liability which is already common knowledge? The sums received by victims of the contaminated blood scandal are known as ex gratia payments.

In April, as he left the Commons, the former health secretary Andy Burnham declared there had been a “criminal cover-up on an industrial scale in the NHS” over contaminated blood and called for a Hillsborough-style inquiry.

Diana Johnson, Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull North, has been campaigning on the issue since she met one of her constituents, a mild haemophiliac who was given factor VIII in 1983 to prevent excessive bleeding when he had a tooth removed in hospital. He discovered he was infected with hepatitis C in 1995, when it showed up on blood tests for an unrelated illness.

As Theresa May had set up the Hillsborough inquiry when she was home secretary, Johnson was hopeful she would do the same for contaminated blood.

May refused. Johnson requested an urgent Commons debate, which was due to be held on Tuesday. She then got the six leaders of the opposition parties — including the DUP — to sign a letter to Ms May asking for an inquiry, and this is to be set up.

Adding insult to injury? Payment to many victims of NHS blood contamination is to be cut

In March this year a scheme to pay the victims of NHS blood contamination is to be scaled back under government plans announced on Monday. Ministers believe the reforms are necessary because more people are now considered likely to develop serious health issues – and be entitled to higher payouts – pushing the programme as much as £123m over budget.

The government has proposed measures that would cut predicted costs, including limiting the availability of the higher level of financial support under the scheme

Will an enquiry compensate the victims of this NHS for the cuts?

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As Jeremy Corbyn implied: “The West should reflect on its part in prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”

It is the 50^th anniversary week of the Six-Day War of 1967 when Israel seized 1,200 square water-rich kilometres of the Golan Heights from Syria and later annexed it – though its right to this land has never been recognised by the international community.

Donald Macintyre, who lived in Jerusalem for many years and won the 2011 Next Century Foundation’s Peace Through Media Award, recalls in the Independent that fifty years ago Shlomo Gazit, head of the Israeli military intelligence’s assessment department, heard detailed reports of the destruction that morning of almost the entire Egyptian air force by Israeli jets – his 23-year-old nephew being among the few missing Israeli pilots. He then started work on a clear-sighted blueprint for the future of the territories Israel had occupied, arguing that “Israel should not humiliate its defeated enemies and their leaders.”

Jerusalem: an open city or UN headquarters?

There were then, as now, many leading Zionist Israelis who believed that occupation was a wholly wrong course. Gazit outlined plans for an independent, non-militarised Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip; the Old City of Jerusalem would become an “open city … with an international status resembling that of the Vatican”.

A British Quaker, Richard Rowntree, advocated moving the UN Headquarters from New York to Jerusalem and years later Sir Sydney Giffard, a former British Ambassador to Japan, presented the social and economic advantages to Israelis and Palestinians of moving the UN Headquarters to the vicinity of Jerusalem (Spectator link only accessible if account created). Whilst recognising difficulties and obstacles, Giffard felt that UN member states giving determined support to this project “could enable the UN to effect a transformation – both of its own and of the region’s character – of historic significance”.

But after 50 years the Palestinians, as Macintyre points out, “a resourceful and mainly well-educated population, are still imprisoned in a maze of checkpoints closures and military zones, deprived of civil and political rights and governed by martial law (denounced by Mehdi Hasan here, destruction of sewage system pictured above). And all this nearly three decades after Yasser Arafat agreed to end the conflict in return for a state on Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem – 22% of historic Palestine (Even Hamas, so long one of many excuses for not reaching a deal, last month issued its qualified support for such an outcome)”.

“The West should reflect on its part in prolonging the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”

Under this heading, Macintyre points out that the US provides Israel with over $3bn (£2.3bn) a year in military aid and the EU implements trade agreements which exempt only the most flagrant economic activity in the settlements from its provisions, leading Benjamin Netanyahu to believe he can maintain the occupation with impunity.

He summarises the potential gains of a peace agreement for Israel: “full diplomatic and economic relations with the Arab world, an end to the growing perception of Israel as an apartheid state, the reduction of costs – moral and financial – to its own citizens of using a conscript army to enforce the occupation”.

Co-existence in Iran

In several Stirrer articles, opening with this one, Richard Lutz reports on his visits to Iran – as a Jew, albeit lapsed – and Roger Cohen’s account in the New York Times is not to be missed. He – like Lutz, “treated with such consistent warmth” in Iran, says, “It’s important to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity. Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric”.

As so many civilised Israelis and Palestinians work for peace, some details recorded here, and the settlement of Neve Shalom (above) shows what is possible, Macintyre ends by saying that it is not just the Israelis and the Palestinians who should be reflecting this week on the impact of what is surely the longest occupation in modern history:

“It is time for the Western powers to reflect on their part in prolonging a conflict which will never end of its own accord”.

 

 

 

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“Our ‘noble’ cause? Dropping bombs on behalf of Al Qaeda”

This is the title of Peter Hitchens’ latest article found after hearing a reference on Radio 4.

He asks readers to:

• consider first that early on Friday morning the United States Navy launched 59 cruise missiles on behalf of Al Qaeda;
• note that the President of the United States did not even bother to pretend that he was seeking United Nations cover for what he did;.
• note next that in the same week our Prime Minister, Theresa May, made a duty visit to pay homage to the medieval despots of Saudi Arabia, who kindly buy our warplanes and bombs and are currently using them to savage effect in Yemen
• and that President Trump was playing host at the White House to the head of Egypt’s military junta, General el-Sisi, whose security forces undoubtedly massacred at least 600 protesters (probably many more) in the streets of Cairo in August 2013.
• Then mark that the pretext for this bizarre rocket attack was an unproven claim that President Assad of Syria had used poison gas.

Yes, an unproven claim. No independent western diplomat or journalist can gain access to the scene of the alleged atrocity, and what information we have is controlled by Al Nusra.

Another question from Hitchens (left): “Is the gassing of children (undoubtedly a horror) so *much* worse than the other atrocities which the USA knowingly tolerates among its clients in the Middle East, or indeed excuses as collateral damage in such places as Mosul and Ramadi?” The brutality of Sisi and the Saudis is beyond doubt. They didn’t use gas, but our leaders’ outrage at Assad’s alleged gas attack looks a little contrived if they keep such company.

What happened to the rules of evidence? Many people have written, spoken – and now acted – as if the charge was proven. Why the hurry?

Assad is currently winning his war against Islamist fanatics, with conventional weapons. He had finally got the USA to stop demanding his dismissal: “Five days before the alleged attack – five days! – America’s UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, announced: ‘Our priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out’ . . . He knows that the use of poison gas is the one thing that will make the USA intervene against him. They have said so.

“So why would he do such a thing, and throw away all his victories in a few minutes? It makes no sense of any kind”.

Hitchens points out that the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, alias the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian ‘opposition’ which we in the West have been supporting for several years . . . is the local franchise of ‘Al Qaeda’.

Al-Nusra is the Saudi-backed group which seeks the removal of Assad as leader of Syria controls the area where the alleged gas attack took place, and controls all the information coming out of that area. He describes atrocities they have committed and continues. “This is the group whose aims the USA is now supporting, and backing with cruise missiles”.

The only big difference he can see between Al Qaeda and Islamic State is that we drop bombs on Islamic State. And that therefore, in effect, we are dropping these bombs on behalf of Al-Nusra/Al Qaeda. 

Hitchens believes, “The once-wealthy and powerful West is bankrupt and increasingly at the mercy of people who have begun to demand something in return for their trade and their loans. It is all very sordid, and bodes ill for the future”. He ends:

“I would mind it less if we admitted what we were doing, rather than pretending these wretched events were some sort of noble act”.

 

 

 

 

The post truth debate: an organic farmer prompts a search

Post truth: ‘for the birds’ ?

 

With thanks to Tom Rigby (above) – known for his effective advocacy on behalf of farmers poisoned by use of government-required organophosphate sheep dips (latest reference) – who often offers worthwhile Twitter feeds. Today one led to a rare challenge to the widespread acceptance of assertions that we live in a “post-truth” world.  

He links to an article by Robert Fisk (‘always worth reading’) who bluntly asserts: “We do not live in a “post-truth” world, neither in the Middle East nor in the West – nor in Russia, for that matter. We live in a world of lies. And we always have lived in a world of lies”.

Rune Møller Stahl’s PhD fellow at University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science and Bue Rübner Hansen is a postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark explore the subject in Jacobin: a voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics and culture. 

Stahl and Hansen use the term ‘liberals’ in a way that needs further definition.

Far removed from the admirable political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality, an online search (including Wiki) offers the explanation that Liberal writers start from the belief that economic liberalism’s values — the right to private property, the valorization of self-interest, and formal freedom without material equality — best describe human nature.

To explain what happened in the United Kingdom and the United States this year these writers all agree that voters and politicians increasingly deny facts, manipulate the truth, and prefer emotion to expertise .They ask how voters could defy the warnings of so many pundits, wonks, and fact-checkers?

Almost unanimously, they answered that we live in an age characterized by post-factual politics and noted that, pushed by major media organizations like Forbes and the New York Times, “post-truth” recently became Oxford Dictionaries’ new word of the year.

Stahl and Hansen sardonically observe that the liberal media don’t seem to know how we entered this post-fact world or when the factual age, which must have preceded it, ended, asking “Was it in the 2000s, when the whole world debated imaginary weapons of mass destruction before being conned into war?”

Historical points made in Jacobin:

• In the 1990s centrist technocrats like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair ‘pioneered . . . a false progressivism that was premised on profitability and stopped short of any proposal the political center might object to, no matter how just’.
• The right-wing fringe led by Fox News, conspiracy theorists, and televangelists remained marginal until 9/11/01 threw the United States — liberal and conservative alike — into a patriotic mass hysteria that culminated in two poorly planned wars.
• But historical events started calling liberal truths into question. The 2008 financial crash revealed the failure of liberal economics. Occupy and Black Lives Matter threw light on structural problems that triangulation and managerialism not only can’t address but refuse to.

In sum, they end that it’s time to stop blaming (the current version of) fake news and realize why so many believe it: the simple reason is that the mainstream of the political class have squandered people’s trust, by not having their best interests at heart. Stahl and Hansen believe that only a democratic revival will challenge authoritarianism and liberal managerialism and combat the regressives who now run their country – and ours.