RadishBlog

The Greecey Pole: The Slippery State of Funny Money

2012-02-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

Being a radical bookseller allows one to keep interesting company. Such company has shed further light on previous developmental thoughts on the Greecey Pole having had a fascinating week: a Cafe Economique discussing Positive Money, a bit of reading around the subject finished off by a weekend at the Schumacher North Conference in Leeds.

The Greecey Pole should teach us about money - as distinct from economics. although I worry about the emphasis on growth that even the Positive Money crew espouse, they come to the incisive conclusion that, ironically, economists do not know much about how money works, or indeed, what it is. This accounts for why very clever people in charge of the economy have consistently failed in predicting future prosperity. Like us, they got suckered by the banks into thinking that money is 'real'. We now know that it is not. To those for whom this is news, I'll explain.

The banks operate a policy of fractional reserve lending. Essentially this means that the banks hold only a fraction of the money we deposit. The rest is lent out. The more that is deposited, the greater is the sum than can be lent. Now, suppose you get a loan. You will probably stick this in your account as a brief holding place from which to draw. Banks are not able to distinguish between a deposit that has been borrowed and a deposit that derives from 'real' money. It therefore uses the deposit of your loan to increase its lending capacity by whatever figure the banks' regulators allow. So if your loaned deposit is, say, £1000 and the bank is allowed to keep a tenth, it means it can lend someone else £900. This means that the banks have lent 'virtual' money; money that doesn't really exist - is keyed into a computer.

Essentially, then, banks have been given the license to create money.

It isn't rocket science to understand that this inflates what the banks see themselves as worth, and that the process is eroding away the value of money as a viable means of exchange. It has nothing to back it up. This is why banks are being given bail outs - instead of, for example, the government giving us money to spend (or save). The idea is to 'monetise' the perceived reserve. But of course this will never happen if fractional reserve lending is allowed to continue.

Okay then. So what is this to do with Greecey Pole? Well governments, ours included , borrow their money from the banks at interest. Now, remember that banks do not possess the reserves that economists think they have - they're entirely dependent on the income raised through interest payments. This sets them up to generate as many loans as they can in order to generate income. It is this behaviour that places countries and their governments in human bondage for generations.

The Bank of England, through Quantative Easing has learned that it can still effectively print money. It seems to have forgotten this and has abrogated most of this responsibility by giving it to the banks to do. Consider for a moment the economic effect of ending fractional reserve lending. The Bank of England prints the money - makes it physical and real - and gives it to the government. The government stops all borrowing. It then does not have to pay interest back to the banks.

The money saved would completely pay for the entire welfare state.

But this does not apply to Greece. Greece can't print its own money - nor can any Eurozone country. The 17 member countries depend on borrowing to regulate their economies and this comes at the cost of escalating interest charges again imposed externally by the vulturific ratings agencies.

Greece is emblematic of the whole situation in extremis. It is at the mercy of a banking system wholly focused on its own internal psychopathy. It has no interest in the human-scale devastation its demands for austerity causes and is possessed of complete indifference about whether a further funny-money load will eventually lead to societal breakdown - notwithstanding the logic that when this happens, there is no chance of payback anyway. For what is a bank for if not to lend? So desperate is the ECB to get payback assurances, it is delaying any payout on the blackmail of ensnaring ALL members of Greece's opposition parties to sign up to the terms of the bailout agreement. This ensures that Greece's democratic system is well and truly stitched up for generations to come.

This is a situation not to be borne and it is hard to see how Greece can stay in the Euro - shouldn't stay in the Euro. It is likely that Brussels will cut Greece loose when it finally realises that it will never be able to pay the funny money back. for those whose savings are in Euros (which is why so many fear the exit), surely a duel monetary system can be operated - possibly backing their savings by sterling may be something constructive Britain can do in its attempts to market itself as the saviour of the world.

But for now is it possible that we can see the emblematic nature of The Greecey Pole as a lesson to us all to end our indentured servitude to the banks? Possibly not. To do this requires a truly courageous state, properly pro-active leadership that takes on vested interests to protect the human; one that isn't willing for the population to be farmed by Diamond bankers and which will never, ever refuse the vulnerable.

As someone said at Schumacher (paraphrasing someone else)... A leader can only lead if there is a flock behind them. I am fully aware of how a banking collapse will affect us all - particularly the poor and the vulnerable the most and would most certainly not want to see this. However, it will collapse anyway - its centre cannot hold - so transitional measures for reform should happen now.

If the politicians continue to behave with the same level of inertia (though interestingly not so with NHS reform) then we probably will have no choice but to flock off and take our funny money with us.

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Where might our money 'flock off' to?

Co-op Bank (though this is slow to respond to customer requests for accounts and at present still practices fractional reserve banking).

For further reading on this subject, available from the radishwebstore see:

The Grip of Death: A Study in Modern Money, Debt Slavery and Destructive Economics by Michael Rowbotham

The Courageous State by Richard Murphy

The Future of Money by Mary Mellor

Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson

Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher

The English Secondary Education System: a study in Fascism?

2011-12-08T22:55:00.000-08:00

English teachers of a certain age will remember a book by Morton Rhue. "The Wave" is a short novelisation of a television play which told the true story of what happened in a school in California. Those dwellers in the world of Gove should read it and weep, for this seemingly inocuous little read has much to tell us about the direction of travel of our very own so-called liberal/progressive, insipiently Academy orientated education system.

"The Wave" is about a young history teacher, Ben Ross, who was frustrated at the lack of connection his students were able to make with the impact of the Third Reich. They weren't 'getting it' and couldn't see how it could have happened or indeed how the German people could have colluded in such a regime. So, being an imaginative and idealistic young teacher, he came up with a plan to personalise the classroom experience that would show the students once and for all the horrendous consequences of fascistic learning practices.

The class as a whole agreed to 'buy-in' to the experiment so that they could experience fascism first hand. His experiment entailed a strict regime of quick fire question and answer sessions delivered by a teacher (him) to whom the class gave absolute power. They stood to attention as he came in, all questions were closed, praise given to those who could and derision to those who couldn't. More rules were added and because the experiment spread like wildfire throughout the school it was named "The Wave".

It spread because initially it was a huge success. Grades improved as those who tended towards recalcitrance couldn't bear the peer pressure of not performing well. Indeed one boy, stereotypically disengaged and disenfranchised, grew in confidence and stature as the new 'structure' gave him the precious boundaries he was looking for. Soon competition was rife. Essays handed in on time, students insisting on grades the next day - Ross could hardly keep ahead of it all nor could he believe his good fortune.

Then the bullying started as students who couldn't make the grade were picked on to up their game and not let the class down in the new competitive environment. Fights broke out; liberal thinkers (represented by the school newspaper editorial team) got beaten up. Our disconnected teenager became frontrunner in the new Stasi. However the most telling issue that emerged - remember that this is a true story - is that after the initial successes the raised attainment was soon to plateau. Ross discovered that deep learning was not happening. All that mattered was the grade and the grade alone. Critical thinking was thrown to the wind, sacrificed to the altar of target.

I've been working in schools all my life and have seen the eternal pendulum of initiative and counter-initiative swing many times. The 'change agenda' drives the swing and beats the heart of leadership conferences and training courses in pursuit of the magic number picked out of the air by some Secretary of State with an opinion. Schools are hugely data rich. There are CATs tests, SATS tests (blessedly waning now), Reading Age tests, FFT data, all shouting to us what a child can and can't do. School managers are driven to raise attainment by X percentiles per term, reducing education to lesson objectives throwing wisdom to the wind in this sea of information.

This is really the point of "The Wave". Emphasis was on target and not on learning and there is a well recognised basic four-point plan for achieving targets in our secondary schools today:

Lessons need to be in several parts so that the learning is 'chunked up' - (what a marvellous sick metaphor this is!). Though this is aimed at breaking down concepts into more manageable...chunks... it also leads to grazing. Where text and figure are visited rather than properly explored.
Needs should be differentiated and data can help in this, but in Year 11 children are physically separated and cohorts often taught offsite so their disaffected behaviour doesn't 'contaminate' those willing to learn. Translate unwillingness to learn into inability to work the system and behaviour issues properly become a function of that system.
For some key students, those on the D/C borderline hot-housing has to be the order of the day. Often this will entail losing a subject - usually an arts or humanities - in order to spend more time on subjects that will make the school pass its targets. They may express a concern that a student is 'taking on too much' or 'does Jason really need Geography'. A conversation which is pure code for 'we need him to pass his maths if we are to get 55% A-C.' (By the way, Jason actually may not need Geography. He might need bricklaying or horticulture but this would divert the school from its targets too - and that's a whole other story!)
Finally in order for the kids to learn, they have to attend the school! No matter how bad the learning experience is, attendance is obviously mandatory. All schools have attendance targets too and it's cleary a fairly good idea to get the students in, but instead of making our secondary school environments places of curiosity and excitement (like many of our primary schools, for example), some decide to bully and hassle parents through letters home - and, of course, comms systems which land texts into phones as early as 6.30 in the morning.

Chasing a target doesn't improve the learning. Chasing a moving target shallows the learning even further and disengages those who yearn for exploration, depth and connection. Universities mourn the loss of basic literacy and independent learning; gnash their teeth at the spoon-feeding their students have grown to expect from their teachers. And more... mandatory targets create a huge fear of failing and by this I do not refer just to students. Exam boards, so terrified of not meeting commercial targets (yes, commercial) import droves of examiners into schools to teach cohorts exam techniques and more telling than this... we have only this week learned how the exam boards blur the lines between explication and just cheating in this inexorable race to the bottom.

There are many theories about why Germany lost the war. The most telling one is that Hitler was crass and stupid, unable to bear intellectual engagement culminating in the 'figure in action' which was his book burnings. A product of shallow learning if ever there was one. "The Wave", which demonstrates these dangers itself was banned, I believe, in Australia. One of its side-effects was that other classes that read the book attempted to replicate the damaging effects of the Wave again by pressing their teachers to help them discover for themselves if it worked.

Well Mr. Gove. It doesn't. It hasn't.

You can search for Morton Rhue's book from the Radishwebstore or by clicking on the title below:

"The Wave" by Morton Rhue.

The Greecey Pole Mark II

2011-09-14T06:53:00.001-07:00

Told you so... http://wwwradishblogger.blogspot.com/2011/06/greecey-pole.html

English Riots: just a walk in the park?

2011-08-30T02:57:00.000-07:00

I think his name was Jeff Glynn. Jeff, if you’re out there I dedicate this piece to you in thanks for the memory...

I was a naive English Literature undergraduate, straight and vanilla as one can be (secondary school educated, simple soul, late into uni) when Jeff unexpectedly came into our very... proper tutorial on Emily Bronte. Our usual lecturer was absent for some reason or other and in bounded Jeff, looking suitably disreputable and talking about how “Wuthering Heights” was about the suppression of sexual energy expressed in the imagery of the orifice.

Shocked and stunned to the core, I learned about Heathcliffe’s entries... usually through windows and (MOST shamefully) the occasional back door... violently coming to sounds of breaking glass. I...was...SCANDALISED. No way would Emily Bronte seek to corrupt her dear readers (oops, sorry for the error in form, wrong century but you get the idea).
I think I may have confronted Jeff about his interpretation. I seem to remember a self-satisfied grin, in hindsight aimed at a fairly sad, superficial, aspiring intellectual and self-righteous moron whom he had totally flabbergasted. And of course he was probably right. Heathcliffe did indeed make every one of those violent entries. I know now that Wuthering Heights was never really a mere gothic romance but also a study in abusive, co-dependent relationships. The former worked for me for a while – until I grew up to also understand that Bronte may or may not have understood the power of her symbolism but despite her claustrophobic and isolated upbringing the need to express herself was gloriously fulfilled in her creative imagination. Had it not been for Jeff, my addiction to the simplistic assertion could have resulted in lifelong crassness.

Mind you, one can take an interpretation too far. Fast forward 10 years to my second teaching job in inner-city Leeds and to a boy called Joseph. We were looking at a fairly trite poem about a walk in a park for GCE (no, not GCSE. This was in the “time before...”). I remember asking for comments and soon after was brought full circle back to Jeff. “Miss, I think this is about sex. The woman is walking down a path and is careful not to tread outside of it or she would have to deal with the ‘rough mown grass’ (see I said it was trite) and the sexual problems she may find there. The ‘rose arbour’ (I kid you not) she is going under symbolises her sexual awakening and may even be (he blushed), her vagina”.

Absolute flabbergasted silence. What to do? Clearly I had to give credence to this interpretation if nothing else to consolidate the victory he had over his classmates, being probably the first one in their experience to mention the word ‘vagina’ in class and to a teacher at that. But it was definitely a pudding well over-egged, an interpretation of a piece of mid-Victorian romantic schmaltz that bore no resemblance to anything remotely sexual and would certainly result in a disastrous fail if this was somehow horribly transmogrified into an examination response. Or was this just me? Again. Had I just never shaken off my reluctance to dig a bit deeper into my sexual psyche and so to properly engage in the symbolism of sex . In the silence that encompassed Joseph’s interpretation, I did think about this even then (such was the power of Glynn). But in the end...“No, Joseph”, I said gently. “I think this is just about a walk in the park”.

And so we fast forward another 20 years and to a country that seemingly went mad. And I’m finding myself thinking again of Jeff Glynn. We have been given another narrative to interrogate; another piece of real-life ‘text’ to interpret and contextualise. We’ve heard of people inciting riot on social media, kids strapping hammers to their legs, men getting mowed down in full public view for protecting their property. Businesses burned, flats gutted and people made homeless. The recent trouble on our streets has been interpreted in many ways. “It’s the cuts... it’s the police... it’s the consequences of deprivation” .
Although no doubt the reasons stem from a cocktail of circumstances one thing is certain: if we get it wrong... if our interpretation is too surface then we are sure to get reactions that are equally extreme, equally mindless.

Jeff, I think you should visit our estimable, Eton education Prime Minister because in the heat of everything he has managed to come up with just that. A surface and completely inadequate interpretation in the oxymoron of: “Criminality: pure and simple”. He could do with your piercing, deprecating look as you survey yet another sad, superficial, self-righteous moron and say, “No David. This is not just about a walk in the park.”

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ADDENDUM: Having written the above whilst on holiday and being so isolated am without a signal to upload it onto this Blogspot (in time for it to have any relevance) I see that I can claim some foresight. Whose crass mindlessness is it that would believe that stopping benefits and evicting innocent families because of aberrant offspring would solve anything? I suppose this is an easier question to answer: they are those who are not interested in seeking resolution but are native dwellers in that timezone known as The Age of Stupid.

Are we really plundering the planet?

2011-07-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

Its 3 in the morning. What a time to explore an epiphany. Here goes...

The answer to the question is well obviously...yes. It's not only oil that's getting harder to extract but now scarcity of rare earth metals is threatening to make our mobile phones and laptops more pricey. Bad news for green bloggers and twitterers everywhere.

But hang on. The answer to the question is also... no... based on an objection to the word 'plunder'. It bears closer scrutiny if we are to properly move on the issues in this peak everything world and by this to put into context the scale of the big ask... which is to stop 'plundering'.

The green movement like many, adopts emotive language as the best way by far to persuade lots of people to listen to a given message. Often fear is the emotion of choice and 'plundering' in this context, suggests reckless endangerment of the planet's resources in order selfishly serve the development of the human race. This against the need for the planet and its myriad other communities of creatures and organisms to continue to exist and develop in their own right albeit side by side with humans. Trouble is emotive forms can backfire as seen in the dubbed "vile eco-terrorism" of the government-backed bedtime story advert on climate change, which had the paralytic effect on some of its watchers of 'whats-the-point-in-doing-anything-if-its-going-to-happen-anyway' Or worse this reaction by a certain Barking Spider

It was after listening to Melvyn Bragg last week on radio 4 - about the Minoans - that got me thinking. The Minoans were a Bronze Age people. We had Stone Age people, we also had Iron Age people. Later there was the age of steam then the age of silicon and here we are: big-boobed and laptopped.

The point is that taking stuff is hardwired into what we are. It is what we have always done. We name our ages after minerals! (mental note, not sure that stone is a mineral) It is as useless to tell us to stop using the earth's resources as it is to train a gorilla to stop using grass stalks to get at an ant colony. No way. Not going to happen. Humans are constructors. They 'make' their ideas real through using all available resources and will continue to do so else risk being less than human.

So what's to be done?

Well there are other resources that can be 'plundered', or exploited, used, mined, utilized... Not so much earth, now, but certainly fire (the sun), air (wind power)and water. But there is one other. We have created the biggest resource of them all. Thousands of years of human development has got us to the stage when we have refined our individual and collective endeavours such that we now have another resource. Knowledge. Unlike our earth's resources, it is infinitely expandable in the sense that the more we use it the greater is its store. Moreover, we have used our knowledge to develop immediate means by which we can share it and 'know' it. Our Knowledge is evolving to understand itself and the impact of our existence and co-existence and further... it is a fully mineable thing-in-itself: a phenomenon.

Interestingly, we have to continue to plunder our mine of Knowledge in order to stop the plunder. This mining process means that we need to get even more creative; more visionary and develop further our intellectual imaginations and cognitive sensibilities. This is not the time to curb the activity of the human race. In one sense it is the time to accelerate it.

I'm trying to find the right nomenclature that sums it up but nothing scans (still too early in the morning and need to go to bed. Am posting anyway in the certain Knowledge I'll be rewriting it later).

The Age of... any (constructive) ideas?

The Greecey Pole

2011-06-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Don't do it Greece. Don't take the money. You can't afford what you've been lent already and you won't be able to afford the next lot either. It's just a way the western bankers and their political cronies have of indebting you even further so that you can privatise your services - to them... and sell off your heritage - to them!

Call it what you will - restructure, reschedule... default is the only way forward for you. Sure it will cause banking chaos, but isn't it right that the bankers should pay for the crisis they caused in the first place? Sure it will cost us in the short term - may even trigger another banking crisis as people see the writing on the wall and run on the banks you are most indebted to. It is these same banks that don't seem to have learned from their earlier lesson in macro finance so a repeat is probably the only way to consolidate their learning curve.

For you it will be really tough. But listen to your people - they don't want to see their country sold on the altar of western capitalism and phoney 'eurofamilias'. They know you have huge resources. Sun, sea, food, tourism, and willing workers. Let's face it, your situation would never be worse than Cuba when it circled the wagons after the west cut it off and, relying on its own resources, grew one of the best health services in the world and fed its people from kerbside gardens. It attracts huge revenue from hordes of admiring eco-tourists hell-bent on securing Plan B (or is it C?) for when the planet hots up (but that's for another blog, I guess).

Who would you trust now? Bankers whose only interest in your country is that accrued from the debt they are forcing upon you? Or your own people who would rather be temporarily impoverished masters of their own universe rather than slaves to broken fiscal policies dreamed up by unimaginative automatons that know only about creating the future on the bankrupt ideas of the past. I know who I'd listen to...

Travelling Hopefully on No Petrol

2011-06-12T06:00:00.000-07:00

This is a tricky one to write as my best friend and hubby is a follower of my blog so this will come as news. Yup, a secret between man and wife is about to unfold and will answer the question why, for the first hour of our journey home from a recent caravan break to Machynlleth in mid Wales, I was unable to engage in any conversation with him beyond a stressed out grunt...

Well the thing was, I had made the mistake of not making a transfer of funds from our savings account to the current account. It was a bank holiday and I only had thirty quid in cash. Usually it takes forty to fill the tank. Though being an adroit practitioner of the fine art of hypermiling (more on this later), and despite having managed the outward run on just over half a tank,(record) I wasn't confident that going back would be do-able in the same way. After all there would be the return bank holiday traffic jams...

I had a germ of an idea to present my never-used credit card at the garage but made sure I only put £30 worth of petrol in just in case it didn't work. Well, it didn't. It was instantly rejected (investigation pending), and so I parted with the precious cash... and with no prospect of any more until I could at least get to a wi-fi enabled computer.

Started the car and the petrol gauge slowly rose...to about 200th of a millimetre above the half-way mark. (Well about 2 actually) Oh my God. Well there was nothing for it - hypermiling it is. With a vengeance!

For the uninitiated, hypermiling is the art of driving in such a way as to make every drop of petrol count. Fuel economy is everything, of course, and over the past year I've saved hundreds of pounds that would have been drunk by driving. What follows is a treatise on hypermiling but with extras - stress, fear and panic that I'd have to tell hubby we were, for the next few hours, totally broke.

So on leaving the outskirts of Mach, the speedo never went above 40. Any dip in the road was followed by foot off the accelerator - doing this turns off the fuel valve to the engine and for a brief while it turns over on fumes (I expect). Being the head of a long line of traffic can be a bit of an issue (when everyone just wants to get home after the bank holiday) but you just have to stay principled.

Mal was proper chirpy. Grazing through the (Welsh) radio channels trying to find chirpy rock, chirpily making chirpy comments about chirpy subjects and asking why I wasn't being chirpy... I, on the other hand was
studiously ignoring the long queues developing behind me, with my right eye banking on a watched petrol gauge never moving. After a brow-furrowing, multi-hairpinned 60 miles I realised that said gauge had indeed hardly moved. I was on half a tank and had used only 2 millimetres of petrol!!

Onto the second leg - dual carriageway for 70+ miles... I realised this would be easier on the old tank given that a steady speed takes less petrol than bends. I was more relaxed. By this time Mal was so exhausted by being chirpy, he was now... not. Optimum speed on a dual carriageway or motorway is preferably 60. Unless of course the speed limit tells you otherwise. This carries you down the gentler slopes on these roads so you can ease the foot, and also allows you to overtake without slowing down. Where possible, on dual carriageways, don't slow down. If you do this means that you have to accelerate to overtake or navigate upward slopes and this all takes petrol.

Next leg was the last one. Motorway. Petrol gauge says "You're going great. Still only a few millimeters below half". I'm well relaxed and getting chirpy. We Found a local rock station outside of Manchester with some incredibly raunchy, deep-voiced adverts about key-cutting and we were motoring!

Then the first jam. Hypermilers loathe jams (well, everyone does I suppose). Constant stop starts are not good and waste petrol. Road works. Road behaviour studies (I kid you not) have shown that it doesn't matter what motorway lane you are in, you will make the same progress as when some lanes stop, others start and vice versa. Well, I'm sorry, but that's just wrong. The inner lane is the worst. This is because it gets jammed by outer lane traffic getting on the inside to leave at junctions. When in a jam get into the second or even third lane. It's all bad news. Twenty minutes in and the gauge is starting to drop. Still 60 miles out of Leeds and I'm wondering if the service station at Hartshead Moor has got an internet cafe.

All went well, however. Got into a reasonably steady 10-15 mile and hour lane until the road works ended then geared up for the next leg. Even navigated another traffic jam with the petrol still not quite on quarter. Then the bomb dropped. "On the way in, can we stop for a bottle of wine or a few cans?" Desperately I nodded - no problem. Won the battle of the petrol tank only to face the beast of bankruptcy/failed marriage within the next 15 minutes unless I came up with something. Which I did... "Is it alright if I just get home and check the fridge and things (like secreting the laptop to the loo and doing a quick transfer) to see what we've got in? I'll nip out and get the booze and stuff for later while you check the telly".
"Fine. Good idea."

Ta Dah!!

What a relief. Got home and still a quarter of a tank! Dear reader this means that I did the Wales run, 300 miles, on just over 8 millimeters of petrol and am still married!!

As a postscript, it was over a full week later that I visited another petrol station. Petrol tank took me to work, to the shops and even to the garden centre. I wonder... can I get to the caravan next time on just twenty quid?

Disability hard hitter: Mark Littlewood, small thinker

2011-05-11T02:22:00.000-07:00

In the BBC's You and Yours phone-in studio discussing today's Hardest Hit march was Mark Littlewood. See: http://www.hardesthit.org.uk/ The premise was "should disabled people take their fair share of the cuts just like everyone else" or words to that effect. Now you'd think that most sensible people would see the premise as gratuitously provocative given that the idea is self-evidently outrageous but it nevertheless pointed up a way of thinking about disabled people (and therefore by association all vulnerable people) which has been encouraged by the embrace of austerity.

This thinking was distilled in the black-diamond sharp articulation of Mark Littlewood. He is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs and which makes claim that he is a leading thinker on how free markets can help solve many of society's ills. This is a really interesting and philosophically dark link to explore to get an insight into an organisation with government connections.
http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/mark-littlewood-appointed-director-general-of-the-iea

Unsurprisingly, he did indeed feel that disabled people were just one more group pleading to be exempt from the cuts in this Age of Austerity. He advocated insurance mechanisms (presumably because he forgot we all pay National Insurance), charities and dependence on localism to solve the (presumably social ill) of disability.

You know, I'm not going presume advocacy on behalf of disabled people. I'm not disabled (though I do care for someone who is). I just think that the entire premise is so beyond reason; so indicative of the sort of world that Mark Littlewood wants us to be that it speaks volumes for itself... and about him.

The reason he believes what he does is perhaps because he has bought into an outdated construction of the world that believes in the objective reality of something called the economy. THE ECONOMY is out of control. But that is because we have failed in our ability to control it. Not because we have spent too much; not because bankers broke it; not even because economists have lost the plot but because we have put it so much in the centre of things that our life revolves around THE ECONOMY.

Instead we could conceive it differently. THE ECONOMY should serve the sort of national and individual life we want to live. I doubt that this sort of radical thinking will gather much momentum within the next few decades, but when commodity reliant-growth slows (as anyone who has even the faintest grasp of the law of physics knows it will) our way of life will have to be rethought and the economy will have to toe the line. We will have to make it so just as we have made the current ECONOMY. Let's hope we will eradicate its volatility, its corporate love affairs, its corrosiveness of good society.

So Mark Littlewood, I think you think small thoughts. I think you want a world driven by THE ECONOMY and you are on the gerbil-wheel of trying to make it so - why else would you be so in love with 'free markets'. Well, they aren't really about freedom are they? How can THE ECONOMY or a free market make disabled people free? No. Let's call it what it is. The greed market.

Mark. Think big.

2011-05-08T14:59:00.000-07:00

Am having a difficult week. I enjoyed the Royal Wedding and I shouldn't have because it's a drain on the public finances... Bin Laden has been killed and what do I think about it... the yes vote was a rout and I am surprised and not surprised... Radish is going to sell books online next week and is it going to be OK... Was Shakespeare really Marlowe (thanks Alistair for stirring that one up :-)... and I read that fruit bats were dying in the rainforest. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_worlds_tropical_forests_are_already_feeling_the_heat/2397/

Post Consumer World

2011-04-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

I was involved in a discussion on Facebook with another radical bookshop. It got a bit heated and I began to create a longish tract which was far too up itself for the post. Undeterred I'm putting here - to get it out of my system. Although it assumes a particular reader, its contains points I nevertheless want to express.

...the current social landscape ... has barely changed, actually, in 20 years since the rot began with Thatcher (or you could argue, the sixties when the boom began and the planners moved in to move communities out) and then deepened under Labour who totally bought into the big business gravy train. With respect, the inequities of which you speak, to me are much less of a consequence of insipient cuts than consumerism which has in itself caused much of our social justice issues in the first place. For decades. I think it is a delusion to think that consumer spending will ease these... it'll just do what it's always done: line more pockets and pay off more debt interest (which is why we have to 'grow' anyway - when debt costs 5%, we have to grow by 5% to pay it off - or rather our kids will, those future homeless, future illiterate, future prostituted). No. Enough. Sure the debt is less than it was in the war; sure its a complete lie that we have to cut to pay it off. Stop the cuts then make the banks payup; recall the tax dodging deals; close the loopholes; save the billions, then get our communities back by investing for them in a socially just infrastructure where the debt is managed, the arms are not dealt and our needs are manufactured (using green power, of course). In the meantime we need to engage and educate our kids properly and stop using the totally redundant and target driven educational formats we have now, fight like stink for the vulnerable and disaffected, oh yes, and feed the poor.

On first posts and the Green Party

2011-04-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

I've moved the Radish Blogs onto Blogspot as the template formatting was getting way too complicated. Running three blogs was also becoming a bit of a nightmare so it's just going to be the one from now on.

Radish, in the form of Meg, joined the Green Party two weeks ago. After so much posturing and pontificating about the problems of consumerism in the face of peak oil and ruined communities it has become time to tie myself once and for all to a political party that properly represents where I am at the present time. Imagine my surprise when I received a call from the Leeds Green Party to become a paper candidate! Amidst quick and panicked fantasies of suddenly becoming an elected member of Leeds City Council, I learned that paper candidature was about gauging popularity and whether it would be worth fielding a candidate in the future. I declined. Somehow I didn't think it would be right to use people's votes in this way, though on hindsight it would still be part of a legitimate process. By voting for a green candidate it will allow the greens to put more resources into getting voters what they want. Too late now. Next year perhaps.