Re-Wild at Heart

Whilst capitalism eats itself, radical re-imaginings are dared.

Deep Throat, the FT and the Grauniad

In his obit of Mark Felt, FT 20^th December, Jurek Martin concludes with this:

“He escaped implication in Watergate for years but Mr Felt did encounter legal problems of his own. After leaving the agency which he joined in 1942, he was convicted in 1981 for unauthorised FBI break-ins at homes of alleged radicals in the 1970, but was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. He then retired to California.”

The Guardian, that noble little bast...ion of liberal values, didn't see fit to tell its readers this, at least in the paper version I saw. There is something in the online version here.

It's something I've noticed- the FT actually is MORE willing to talk about state power, and to give extreme left artists etc a fair hearing, than the Guardian. Can I prove this? No, I haven't had the time or the patience to do a comparative analysis, a la Herman and Chomsky. Someday mabe...

Other comparison- I watched Silence of the Lambs at the cinema in Australia and on video in the US. In the latter, somebody had edited out this bit

Jack Crawford: I remember you from my seminar at UVA. You grilled me pretty hard, as I recall, on the bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years. I gave you an A.
Clarice Starling: A-minus, Sir.

This sort of censorship is not uncommon. And the bigger picture is that movies “critical” of the US military get no co-operation from said military. The classic, but trivial, example is the “Gene Hackman goes mad” cold-war thriller Crimson Tide...

PS The break-ins that Jurek Martin mentions were part of a programme that went all the way up to murder...)

PPS See also Cril Payne's "Deep Cover", for an extraordinary account of an undercover agent virtually stranded by the uncertainty around the Hoover succession.

Democracy in action (again)

Review of Lobster 56

Robin Ramsay has been producing the twice-yearly Lobster for a very long time, and he is very very good at it. Lobster has been beavering away at the meeting place of the Secret State, the "Special Relationship" and "para-politics generally diligently and intelligently.

The format is always the same- an A4 journal, roughly 50 pages. Seven or eight meaty lead articles on a variety of themes, with footnotes to keep you searching. There's various snippets of information that you've either never spotted, or saw and simply didn't realise the context. This is something Lobster is good at- re-arranging the pieces we get in the mainstream media into a more plausible/coherent narrative. [That said, Lobster writers seem scrupulous in separating what they can prove from what they merely suppose. They're alive to the siren-call of making (up) the facts fit the theory.]

There's a series of judicious book reviews too, again mostly on themes around economics, politics, the secret state. Ramsay and his fellow reviewers will shower praise, but also get the boot stuck in where necessary.

This latest Lobster is of the same exemplary standard.
Scott Newton opens accounts with "Harold Wilson, the Bank of England and the Cecil King 'coup' of May 1968.
Simon Matthews has an excellent piece on Ken Livingstone, full of interesting titbits. I for one had never grasped the obvious point that-

"... the Labour Party is overwhelmingly oritenated around an axis of Scotland + Wales + the North and has a low tolerance level for London (something that Herbert Morrison- a completely centre-right figure- found out in his attemptst ot become Labour Party leader between 1935 and 1955)....

"The low regard that the Labour Party has for London has also extended to doing little about its own structures and apparatus in the area when it is threatened by the ultra-left... perhaps it expects nothing better from the Metropolis. Note that it only took actoin against Militant when Militant threatened Liverpool and had two MPs elected- neither for London seats. Note also the number of prominent individuals who have tiptoed away from any involvement in London politics for calmer pastures elsewhere: Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Charles Clarke, both Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper. The disinterest [sic] the Labour Party shows in its own structures and organsiation in the capital city of the country it seeks to govern is striking."

Colin Challen MP (head of the All-Party Group on Climate Change) has a long thorough piece on the Bush family dynasty.

The highlight for environmentally-focussed activists in this issue will be Philip Conford's "The politics of the organic movement." It really is- like Lobster- first-rate.

"The position of this "younger" generation is more clearly paradoxical in another respect though. Those who went off to escape the system and live self-sufficiently found that they could not survive unless they were able to sell what they grew. It is not too cyncial to suggest that one major reason for the assault launched on the old guard at the Soil Association was a desire to increase the market for organic produce; and so the radicals, who had imagined they were dropping out of the system, soon found themselves back in it again and, in effect, trying to change it from the inside. Some voices were doubtful about, or downright opposed to, cosying up to supermarkets and government bureaucracy, but they were ignored by those who felt that 'the market' could, through the power of the consumer, ensure that increased demand for organic goods led to increased acreage being cultivated organically rather than industrially. At one time the call was for '20 per cent by 2000', but this proved impossibly optimistic."

A subscription is 8 pounds for a year. Cheques payable to "Lobster"
214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull Hu5 3JB

Fourth World Review reviewed. (Issue 148)

Another Fourth World Review has found its welcome way to my door. It's another good issue, and before I (critically) review its contents, I want to point out just how much “invisible” work is embedded in these sorts of publications. I've put together a few, and have some inkling of just how hard the editor is working in chasing contributors, proofing, layout, printing etc.

Kirkpatrick Sale, the American thinker on technology and grass-roots politics, has a dismissive piece on Obama. He's probably right, but we live in extraordinary times, and I think that on a couple of issues at least, Obama has a few tricks up his sleeve, and is anyway opening a rhetorical/political space that could and should be filled by the right kind of people and ideas.

Nafeez Ahmed has a good piece on finance capital, peak oil and the growth imperative of capitalism-

“Experts like petroleum geologist Colin Campbell, who worked for companies like Shell, BP, Esso and Texaco confirm we are probably now on what is known as the 'undulating plateau'.
The plateau begins when peak oil induces massive price shocks contributing to economic recession. The recession in turn reduces consumption, lessening the strain on resources and precipitating a collapse in fuel prices. Lower prices create new space for renewed consumption and economic recovery. This 'undulating plateau' is a period of major price fluctuation, which could last from 5 to 10 years before oil capacity limits are permanently breached and we arrive at the era of irreversibly scarce oil supplies and high prices.”

This chimes very much with recent news reports in the Financial Times of alternative energy projects that were all systems go getting put on hold because of plummeting oil prices. Even the commentators have spotted it; see Gideon Rachman from the Financial Times, 23rd December-

"So my fifth choice for 2008 is the rise and fall of the oil price- up to more than $147 a barrel in July and then down to just above $40 now. In the first half of the year, with the oil price soaring, all the talk was of resource scarcity, the growing clout of sovereign wealth funds and the rising power of the world's energy producers. With a fall of $100 in the oil price, oi-rich governments suddenly look as shaky as a Wall Street bank. The Russians and Chinese are- along with the rest of the world- relearning one of the basic lessons of Marxism. Economics drives politics. That is a lesson likely to be driven home with even more force in 2009."

Herve Kempf and Peter Preston look at journalism- the invisibility of the poor and the necessity of the local- respectively.

Paul Buchanan, a Somerset County Councillor, gives his advice on how to bring change “to the Town Hall, District Council and County or Unitary Authority.”

Peter North, in an article that really needed more space to fully explore the issues, distinguishes between localism and autarky.

Tom Barker, associate editor of 4WR has a good piece on “the Ecology of Economics”. As he says-

"In ecological parlance, as a system interconnected on a vast scale, and dominated by international commerce that reaches into every locality, industrial society appears to be entering an unstable point in development called omega that precedes general ecosystem collapse.
The term omega describes the crisis point in a pattern of ecosystem dynamics known as the adaptive cycle, in which ecoystem resilience (against collapse from perturbations) undergoes periodic changes as it matures. As the most intelligent species on the planety (honestly!), if we care to look we can recognise this and potentially do something about it before it happens, but presently economic policy is in the hands of the market. Accordingly, we are being swept along by events in the same way as any other dumb organism."

The journal closes out with a bunch of letters, book reviews, observations and “fourth world news.”

All this for three quid- a bargain!

The journal's problems are the problems of “the movement” more widely. I suspect it's not getting “out of the ghetto”. The gender imbalance is pretty marked (that's NOT to accuse anyone of misogyny). I don't think it is examining some of its assumptions hard enough (small is beautiful, but also probably a bit more problematic than you'd know from this). I don't think it is always engaging sufficiently with its critics- there's nothing in the issues I've seen about the debates between Rob Hopkins and Trapeze, for example.

You can subscribe- and I have- by sending a cheque payable to Fourth World Transition

FWR, 96 Gayton House, Knapp Road, London E3 4BY

lipo-Diesel

Who needs Jonathan Swift when we have Californian plastic surgeons?
I wish I'd thought of that.

Coitus Interruptus

The pope fails the grasp the actual reasons behind the impending ecological debacle - preferring to characterise it as a vast gay conspiracy.


The great stain that is Clarkson continues with his "aren't I controversial" wankery by pretending that only petrol can save the world from ...petrol

The Police drum up business where they can

The Uk's public buildings emit more CO2 than Kenya.

I hope you all have a happy Yule, or whatever else it is that you may be celebrating.
Be of good cheer