The posts here are based on an assumption that those reading it have reasonable familiarity with Kant’s ideas.

We will look at how Kant’s political ideas contradict the essence of his critical project as established by his critiques. It will be shown that his political theory is itself inadequate against the forceful ideas of the critiques that made him renowned (though their philosophical notoriety for some has not diminished). His political theory will be shown to be discredited by his moral philosophy which offers an alternate mode of political thinking and practice that is not only useful to radical political theorizing, but feasible for our times.

The three critiques of Kant are: The first critique, The Critique of Pure Reason (CR); the second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason (CP); and the third critique, The Critique of Judgement (CJ).

Before getting down to the heavy duty stuff, let me relate a joke from years ago. A man goes to a New Age dentist for treatment after strong recommendation by his friends as to the doctor's efficacy. As the dentist examines him he is told that he needs to have a tooth extracted. The dentist then puts on some soothing music, gets the aromatherapy scents going and begins to give the man techniques to calm his mind down. But the man asks with some concern whether he would perhaps need to be administered a local anesthetic, to which the dentist replies: “Here we practise transcendental medication…”

It is not easy trying to summarise the Kantian project but essentially Kant was intent on showing that philosophy could provide the way to asking the right questions and getting acceptable responses by avoiding the extremes of dogmatism and the problems it brings, as well as skepticism and what ensues from that. We can have cognition and knowledge of things that can be determined as objective and we can yet maintain belief in God, freedom and immortality. The way to examining our knowledge would be to see how the mind, from a philosophical perspective,  processes sense data and cognizes what is presented to it, while avoiding being stuck in a certain kind of metaphysical speculation which would not be valid. Central to this is Kant’s distinction between analytic, synthetic and synthetic a priori ideas that set the stage for metaphysical discourse proper which would be the basis for creating scientific knowledge, or knowledge which we can claim to be certain.

But all this would be a lead up to the crux of his thinking that rests on his moral philosophy which helps seal his originality as a thinker. So what Kant is trying to do with the first critique (CR) is provide a means of showing that we can have certainty in our knowledge and build from it. But he draws some important distinctions that have bedeviled many till today; he says that the ideas of the world we draw in through the senses and cognize in our minds do not allow us to claim that we thereby have knowledge proper of the actual world as it is in itself. In other words, the so-called actual world can be thought of but we cannot say we know it in itself for in order to say we know the world as-it-is-in-itself (noumenon) we must suppose that which needs to be proven: That what we know is actually what the world is truly like in its essence/Reality.  In fact, all we can be certain of in this context is the representation we have of the world and the ideas we generate from that. So our processing of data from the world and our understanding of it through our mental processes is but a representation of the actual world/noumenon. We can have knowledge but not of the world in itself nor directly know the noumenon.

This does not mean, for Kant, our ideas of the world only exist purely in the mind. The ideas are an objective representation of the world, but the important point he is making is that we cannot have ideas of the world in-itself per se without our mental processes creating the object/s in it by the discursive workings of our mind. So whatever we say we know about the world is shaped prior to our projected knowledge of it, for there is an automatic mental processing of sense data which pre-arranges perception etc. of the world we experience. The discursive workings of the mind, inevitably structure things in a way that can be understood through order and logic, and drawing conclusions from them; this is a distinct way in which our reason operates.

This discursive processing is always at work as it is the nature of the mind to do this, and since this processing happens prior to the world being presented to ourselves via the senses (intuition), it is said that the sense data of the world are processed automatically by us a priori. The processing and object-creating capability of our minds, operate through our mental schemata and categories which present the world and its objects the way we then claim to know them.

The objects and knowledge we gain after being a priori processed through our schemata are termed transcendental and we can now say we know these particular ideas as facts and can rely on them to build our web of knowledge. Analytical thinking clarifies this process of thought by assisting to define concepts related to transcendental objects. For those who want to make a serious study of Kant’s ideas and tackle the first critique head on, it will be useful to go through his Logic (i.e., the Jasche Logic) which helps clear the way through some of the thornier aspects of the CR. So while the analytic process pares away to make distinct concepts, the synthetic process adds to make distinct objects. But the two processes are synthesized in creating transcendental ideas. The building of ideas/knowledge based on synthetic a priori or transcendental ideas involve transcendental logic that allow for the kind of hypotheses formulated in science and axioms in mathematics.

So as Kant says (emphases are his): “I call all knowledge transcendental which deals not so much with objects as with our manner of knowing objects insofar as this manner is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy.” (CR B25)

What is radical (as in going to the root of the matter) about Kant’s ideas when closely examined and thought through is that he is making quite clear in the critiques that we are projecting the world from ourselves given the way we are ‘hardwired,’ so to speak. Together with the inputs from the world, we project and create our reality and we alone, and as a group of people, are responsible for the world we create. Therefore, the transcendental philosophy is a liberating set of ideas that prevents humans from blaming other forces such as divine interference in creating our problems. We have the moral drives, ability as expressed by our free will and so responsibility in interpreting and creating the world we live in.

The Kantian idea of human freedom is a crucial notion that will be developed as we go along. We may have some sense of the world based on our speculative/theoretical reason, which is our transcendental projection of it, but we can only give some form of meaning to it and to our lives when we understand it with the practical reason which comes from a moral base. So this makes it all the more strange when we look at Kant’s political ideas as to how he confuses and contradicts his transcendental political ideas and that of his moral ones governed by practical reason.

It must be stated, that when we say we know the reality about metaphysical concepts like God, freedom and immortality of the soul through our theoretical reason we are not making transcendental deductions but are now implying knowledge of such matters by basing them on assumed direct knowledge of the noumenon; we thereby make transcendent claims: These are invalid inferences for Kant. We cannot claim to know about transcendent ‘objects’ like God as the noumenon is not knowable to us directly other than claiming, in this instance, that we only have a transcendental idea of God (not direct knowledge of God). If we claim we know God, the soul and freedom in-themselves then we make transcendent claims and indulge in mysticism. God or freedom cannot be proven through speculative reason. There can be a transcendental idea of them that allows us to talk about what we think ‘freedom’ means, but some form of idea/ knowledge of them in-themselves can be arrived at only via practical reason. Both practical and theoretical reason are expressions of pure reason. But freedom is only known/understood as a direct expression of practical reason grounded on morality.  

Kant’s basic political ideas revolve around a republicanism which he thinks allows for civil society and constitutions that provide the kind of restrictions to people who would otherwise be lawless and given to wildness. As people are not meant to live in abandon, they need limits to provide discipline and order to allow them to grow and prosper as human and social beings. What happens is that Kant then tries to fit this in a forced manner into his moral philosophy to show why his political ideas are good for people at all times. But it will be apparent that Kant shifts from making transcendental to arguably transcendent claims with his political ideas which do not fit and, instead, violate his moral philosophy.

Just as Kant claims that confusing transcendental claims with those of transcendence (the transcendent) in  CR are a subreption (making invalid inferences), he does the same here in making invalid inferences between transcendental claims and moral ones and worse, he slips into trascendent claims in the process. His transcendentalism slides into transcendence and the subreption is complete when he bundles them as expressions of practical reason.

It must be clear though that subreption occurs because morality is hegemonised by Kant’s political ideas and his Rightism/legalism. But as will be explored, Kant’s philosophical redemption on this score happens when we examine the fusion of morality and political ideals not as the hegemonisation of the latter by the former, but by practical reason being the driving force of pure reason and, thereby, the defining factor of how speculative political theory should be formed when fully aligned to Kant’s philosophical project.

We begin with a look at what he says in “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective” (all italics in quotes throughout are Kant’s): “Thus a society in which freedom under external laws is connected to the highest possible degree with irresistible power, that is, a perfectly just civil constitution, must be the highest goal of nature for the human species…” (8:22) This implies that in order for there to be meaningful life for man, he must rely on that which is external to him but which he is a part of and something he helps create, that is, the State and what comes with it. Kant wants the State to have great power and use it to compel people to behave themselves.

Kant starts to really warm up on his ideas of Statism when we get to Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (PP) in which his vaunted republican constitution will guarantee peace everlasting because – the ( ) are Kant’s and the [ ] are the editor’s --

…the agreement of citizens is required to decide whether or not one ought to wage war, then nothing is more natural than that they would consider very carefully whether to enter into such a terrible game, since they would have to resolve to bring the hardships of war upon themselves (which would include: themselves fighting, paying the costs of the war from their own possessions, meagerly repairing the ravages that war leaves behind, and, finally, on top of all such malady, assuming a burden of debt that embitters the peace and will never be repaid [due to imminent, constantly impending wars]). By contrast, in the case of a constitution where the subject is not a citizen of the state, that is, in one which is not republican, declaring war is the easiest thing in the world, because the head of state is not a fellow citizen, but rather the owner of the state, and hence forfeits nothing of his feasts, hunts, summer residences, court festivals, and such things due to the war. The head of state can decide to wage war for insignificant reasons as a kind of game for amusement and can, for the sake of decency, indifferently leave its justification up to his diplomatic corps, which always stands ready for such tasks. (PP 8:351)

Reading this from our context we wonder if Kant is from another planet (he was broadminded enough to believe in extraterrestrial life); but to be fair he did not live through the twentieth century. Yet it is apparent that virtually all he says above about the good that comes from a so-called republican constitution has been violated to the letter and what is worse, when we have a system many tout as ‘democracy’, the egregious flaunting of what Kant purports should not happen in such an instance – with its civil constitution and even ‘separation of powers’ – is enacted as global criminality in its highest form.

Not only do we have war upon war in our time, but the debt burden is so great in, say, the US of A that most may never know what the phenomenal current debt actually is. The debt in this case is not just from war upon other states, but war upon its own people through vicious economic policies. And just extend Kant’s words to the national banquets, hunting trips, Camp David, Air Force One and countless perks that go to so-called elected characters like the Bushes, Clintons and even Obama, never mind the unelected characters of the world and their corps of diplomatic liars, and you begin to believe that the whole lot of them are from another planet.

What is happening is that Kant is confusing the transcendental idea of his Statism with what he thinks is the good that results from it, thereby making a subreption. However, Kant’s naivete and invalid inferences in his political thinking do not detract from the force of his formidable intellect and the fact (to those who clearly grasp his thought in the critiques) that he will always be regarded as one of the greatest of thinkers.

To avoid having to live in situations where calm seemingly prevails as under a Carthaginian peace, Kant proposes a federation of states as opposed to a world government which would be far more restrictive. And so,

One cannot conceive of international right as a right to war (since this would be a presumptive right to determine what is right, not according to universally valid external laws that restrict the freedom of every individual, but rather by means of violence, according to one-sided maxims); one would have to mean by it that it is perfectly just that people who are so disposed to annihilate each other and thereby find perpetual peace in the vast grave that covers all the horrors of violence together with their perpetrators. As concerns the relations among states, according to reason there can be no other way for them to emerge from the lawless condition, which contains only war, than for them to relinquish, just as do individual human beings, their wild (lawless) freedom, to accustom themselves to public binding laws, and to thereby form a state of peoples (civitas gentium), which, continually expanding, would ultimately comprise all of the peoples of the world. But…they do not, according to their conception of international right, want the positive idea of a world republic at all…only the negative surrogate of a lasting and continually expanding federation that prevents war [that] can curb the inclination to hostility and defiance of the law, though there is the constant threat of its breaking loose again. (PP 8:357)

Again it is Kant’s naivete that strikes us here but to be fair, he would not witness the ultra violent shenanigans of the twentieth century. Even the UN has not been successful from keeping the world free from incessant conflict and we need only witness the rogue state acts of unilateral state aggression by America to witness states which violate happily any attempt at keeping the peace anywhere.

But what is also noteworthy is Kant’s concept of the state not only as an international entity but the idea that instead of the state as an expression of Statism, we can have a ‘state of peoples’: Which can be viewed as a transnational community of people that operates according to its own principles as representative of individuals per se with a group identity of its own; and this idea in itself seems contrary to the war mongering attitude of so-called nation states as such.

Kant also insists that it is this tendency for private interests (whether in the form of individuals, groups or expressed by states) to hold sway over public good which also needs to be curtailed by laws. So laws of the State are needed to contain the extravagant behaviour of individuals and the State as such. Yet, with these concepts, Kant is setting himself up to contradict the essence of his own philosophy. Kant injures his own good philosophical name only to be saved repeatedly by the insight of his ideas from the critiques.   

In any case, Kant was quite aware of the issue of politics and morality. For he says,

Morality in itself belongs to the practical sphere, in the objective sense, as the totality of the unconditionally commanding laws according to which we ought to act. It is therefore obviously inconsistent, after having acknowledged the authority of this concept of duty, to want to say that one cannot carry out one’s moral duties. For if this were so, the concept of duty would altogether disappear from the realm of morality…Therefore there can be no dispute between politics as the applied doctrine of right and morality as a theoretical doctrine of right…unless one were to regard morality as a universal doctrine of prudence, that is, to regard it as a theory of maxims according to which one selects the most effective means to attain ends to one’s own advantage, that is, to deny that morality exists at all. (PP 8:370)

Not only is Kant simplistic but he resorts to question begging. He now claims that because there must be duty with the concept of morality, that politics as a means of acting out what is right must therefore be rationalized by morality. Not only does politics always seem to be moral according to Kant’s assertion, but he thinks that anything different from his claims are a sign of a doctrine of self serving interests, expedience or prudence. So what is morality and what is politics is answered with obfuscation and unhelpful circularity. He then in the next paragraphs provides contradictory statements which only show that politics is indeed prudence in the form of self interest in that State violence is necessary to ensure order as relying on stability and good sense to come about based on people’s good intentions derived from morality is not realistic (in other words better to be prudent, safe than sorry, etc and personal morality is a fantasy).

We see as moral politicians perhaps those like Lincoln and Robert Kennedy (or good men who tend to be killed for their efforts). And then we have the other ‘moralists’ such as the Bushes, Tony Blair, and neo-conservatives in all their guises. But, it gets bizarre --

The moral politician will make the following into a basic principle: if a flaw that could not have been foreseen is found in the constitution of the state or in its relations with other nations, then it is a duty…for heads of state, to focus on remedying it as soon as possible and bringing it into compliance with natural right…even if this should require sacrifices of their egoism…A state can govern itself in a republican manner, even if it still possesses a despotic ruling power according to its present constitution… [and] Even if the impetuosity of a revolution provoked by a bad constitution were to bring about a more lawful one illegitimately it should no longer be deemed permissible to return people to the previous constitution, even though under the old constitution any person who had violently or maliciously participated in that revolution would have rightly been subject to the punishment accorded rebels. (PP 8:372)

Kant’s pipe dream comes alive when he believes that there are such ‘moral politicians’ who can remedy what is wrong and make it right for all: Sure, there are Lincolns and RFKs but they don’t last long. He is convinced that his definition of republican constitutionalism and Rightism will save the day, because people -- including rulers -- will for some hallucinogenic reason simply abide by that.

Kant is also convinced that right should be might, and vice versa, and despotism can work with republicanism (proven by nation states today), and that revolutions to make things better should not see punishment for rebels since the new state of affairs take priority over the old one; that is, the current constitution no matter what form it takes, should take precedence over everything else. So apart from his obsession on the validity of his (constitutional) republicanism by virtue of his definition of it, there is the underlying worship of force and authority in Kant’s political thinking.

In the end, might is right, right is might, that which is legal is right, so etc. -- that is the disturbing basic assumption of Kant’s politics; and he extends and merges that with mystical obedience to be given to those who hold authoritative posts and have titles.

And yet again, he begs the issue by not explaining what he means by having a revolution bring about a “a more lawful” constitution. What exactly is a “bad constitution”? The revolution is “illegitimate” even if it goes against a despotic system. But the question at the heart of the matter would be: Are there good reasons for partaking in revolution, and if so, what are they (apart from opposing despotism). In fact, why are there rebellions and revolutions at all? And why should any people abide under unendurable conditions just because there is a so-called constitution? Just having a legal framework does not mean the laws of a state, or a constitution, are thereby just and humane.

We shall see that Kant does not favour revolutions if he can help it and any form of perceived order is better than none. So we take a look at an important though not as well known late work of Kant entitled “One the old saw: That may be right in theory but it won’t work in practice” (TP).

Kant is trying here to not only defend his moral philosophy but show that it is workable in tandem with his political ideas. He begins with some instructive comments on key principles from his moral philosophy,

…the sole end of the Creator is neither the morality of man alone nor happiness alone; instead, it is the highest good possible in the world: the union and concordance of the two…[the] concept of duty need not be based upon any particular end, but that…it introduced another end for the human will: namely, to strive as best he can for the highest good that is possible in the world (universal happiness linked to and in accordance with the purest morality in the world as a whole). (TP 8:279)   

Kant then follows this section with a detailed note explaining the intricacies of how the highest good of all is not in itself a goal but that which forms a basis for a process that aims towards producing what is good for everyone emanating from moral grounds. This quest for doing what is right and the constraints working with this in mind provide the limiting and framing factors that guide people toward some form of moral discipline. The ideas of duty, morality and the highest good of all are at the centre of Kant’s thinking and will be looked at closer.

But let us go back to Kant’s political ideas which he develops to their disturbing end in the rest of TP.  He continues (Kant’s italics in all quotes throughout),

This is what we call the civil state; and in that state the innate right of everyone is the same…entitling him to compel all others to observe the bounds within which their use of their freedom is compatible with mine. Since a man’s birth is not an action of his and thus does not bring upon him unequal legal status, nor subject him to any coercive laws other than those which he…shares with all the rest, there can be no member of the community, no fellow subject, who is innately privileged over another. (TP 8:293)      

Kant’s apparent respect for equality is something that is developed elsewhere with cogency but here is out of place as he demonstrates shortly why the rulers of men and those who play the role of legislators are above their fellow human beings; they are given mythical powers (usually because they use sheer force) of the State, and have an elevated status with pomp and circumstance due to their birth and position. Needless to say, this tends to undermine Kant’s attempt at equality for all.

Interestingly, Kant then brings in some pre-Marxian analysis,

We may disregard the question how one man can have rightly come to own more land than his own hands can put to use (for acquisition by armed conquest is not original acquisition), and how so many who otherwise would have been capable of acquiring permanent property happen to be reduced to serving that landowner for their livelihood. In any event it would conflict with the previous principle, equality, if the large landowning class were so privileged by law that either its descendants would always remain large landowners…or that in case of such division none but members of a certain, arbitrarily chosen class could acquire any part of the estates. (TP 8:296)

Kant next expands his idea of a civil constitution and why people should be bound by it;

It is rather a mere idea of reason, albeit one with indubitable practical reality, obligating every lawmaker to frame his laws so that they might have come from the united will of an entire people, and to regard any subject who would be a citizen as if he had joined in voting for such a will. For this is the touchstone of the legitimacy of all public law. If a law is so framed that all the people could not possibly give it their consent – as…a law granting the hereditary privilege of master status to a certain class of subjects—the law is unjust; but if it is at all possible that a people might agree on it, then the people’s duty is to look upon the law as just, even assuming that their present situation or the tenor of their present way of thinking were such that, if consulted, they would probably refuse to agree. (TP 8:297)

Here Kant’s concepts of the State, civil constitution and political representation come into further relief. He develops the idea of what he thinks the general will and social contract is and emanating from that, he formulates synthetic a priori ideas on how people should operate under such circumstances. As he extrapolates his ideas he provides every possible justification for the status quo.

In many so-called democracies there are numerous unjust laws, as Kant calls them, which give master status to a privileged class of subjects like big banks, corporations and members of the government (and wealthy individuals). What is Air Force One and all the security that goes with it? What good are security services of the world that look after the elite and their families while throwing away tax payers’ money? What is the legal mumbo-jumbo that allows corporations and banks to be treated as persons – how can they possibly be persons? Why are the actual persons hiding behind the front of these non-human and inhuman entities allowed to disingenuously avoid legal accountability for their harm to people, society and the environment?

To say that if it might be possible for people to ‘agree’ on something to render a law just is not quite right as Kant himself shows in his moral philosophy. There is no social-legal agreement alone that can decide what is just, for such notions like that of right/wrong and justice come from within each person working towards the highest good of all; and that will inherently be against anything that smacks of injustice. Justness of laws are not determined from a compact by people agreeing to any law imposed on them by the authorities, that is, an external source. If the compact is made after the fact of a moral consensus between people who believe something is right so as to be worthy of happiness and for the highest good of all, then it is a different matter. But that too will inevitably go against the grain of agreeing on the justness of a law that is imposed by structures from without.

And not only does Kant place lawmakers above the law, they are paradoxically allowed to provide laws, in effect, which support moral decay in a society through lax legislation and abet any entity that makes money irrespective of the harm it does. To add insult to injury, he states that even if there were grounds for remonstrating against such nonsensical and harmful laws we should still obey them.

It is important to note that Kant confuses the positivist aspect of his ideas in the form a synthetic a priori political and legal theory, with the normative aspect of what one should do (thanks to his subreption on this issue). This will be clearer in the context of his practical philosophy which reveals the inherent tension in Kant’s political ideas when held in contrast to his moral ones.

If diplomats are said to be honest men sent abroad to lie for their countries, Kant seems to allow for philosophers being a group of honest and smart folk made to rationalize what is wrong and decidedly bad for people.

Kant further expatiates his political ideas:

If a people were to judge that a certain actual legislation will with the utmost probability deprive them of their happiness – what can such people do? Should they not resist? The answer can be only: they can do nothing but obey. For the question is not what happiness the subject may expect from the establishment of a community or from its administration. Rather, the issue is first of all the legal order which is thereby to be secured for all. This is the supreme principle from which all maxims concerning a community must start, and which is not limited by any other principle. Regarding happiness no universally valid principle of legislation can be given. For both the circumstances of the time and the highly contradictory and constantly changing delusions in which each man seeks his happiness…render all fixed principles impossible and unfit by themselves to serve as principles of legislation…but the common weal to be considered first of all is precisely that legal constitution which secures the freedom of everyone by means of laws, leaving him to pursue his happiness by whichever way seems best to him as long as he does not infringe upon that universal freedom under the law and thus upon the rights of other fellow subjects. (TP 8:298) 

Kant here subscribes to the view that you may possibly please all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time (the ruling and aristocratic class perhaps), but never all of the people all of the time. Happiness is so elusive and arbitrary that the only way to secure good for anyone or everyone is through obedience of State laws. The maxim that Statism is supreme for Kant shows that in the interests of all, everyone should bow down in unmitigated obeisance to the law; that is, no one can do what makes them happy, nor even worthy of happiness. They must obey for the sake of societal stability. So automatons are the order of the day.

However, what is important is the mythology that has been handed down to our time on constitutional and civil law, and government: That laws are for the good of all and our best interests are served by obeying them irrespective as to which class of people act as overlords over others; and if you question this and seek to rebel, then you deserve empathy but are breaking the rules of the system. Unfortunately, Kant’s obsession with rules in his philosophy does not do him good here, for instead of ascertaining reliable grounds for knowledge as the critiques deal with, he also thinks you can have certainty and thereby stability in a political system by unquestioningly obeying rules as well.

Kant takes to a new high, or low, when he delves so deeply into his politics that he is in danger of being labeled a supporter of dictators:

…but there can be no error of judgment when he [lawmaker] asks himself whether or not the law is in accord with the legal principle. For here he possesses that infallible yardstick (and a priori at that) – the idea of the original contract. (He need not wait for experience, as he must in following the principle of happiness, to instruct him first about the suitability of his means). Just as long as it is not self-contradictory to assume that all the people consent to such a law, however distasteful they may find it, the law is in accord with justice. But if public law is in accord with justice, if it is unimpeachable, irreprehensible from the point of view of the right, it carries with it the authority to coerce and, conversely, a ban on any active resistance to the lawmaker’s will. In other words, the power in the state that lends effect to the law is irresistible, and there is no legally existing community that does not have such power to crush all inner resistance, since this resistance would be following a maxim whose general application would destroy all civil constitutions in which alone men can have rights. (TP 8:299)

Here Kant has produced a circular process of self justification of the legal = right = might = legal = right etc. such that there is nothing that can be done wrong when done in the name of the State or law. However, he takes things to a another level when he adds infallibility as a yardstick in that any a priori concept such as apparently that of an original contract. This is where Kant finally fetishizes his a priori notion and transcendental ideas. He has produced a transcendentalism which teeters and falls into transcendence.

However, it does seem self-contradictory to claim that all the people would consent to laws that are particularly distasteful precisely because they would be deemed unjust for many anyway; and a la Kant, we could say that a priori all people do not bow down to injustice as it is their nature to gravitate toward justice and so some will go against such injustice. And to boot, at an empirical level, evidence can be found to support such a priori thinking: That’s why, for instance, people rebel and foment revolutions – no mystery here.

But Kant is in need of an excuse to justify a vicious circular argument that sanctions the crushing of all rebellions or any attempt at revolution simply because he thinks Statism is the biggest blessing for human beings.

Kant then goes on to openly support tyranny;

It follows that any resistance to the supreme lawmaking power, any incitement of dissatisfied subjects to action, any uprising that bursts into rebellion—that all this is the worst, most punishable crime in a community. For it shatters the community’s foundations. And this ban is absolute, so unconditional that even though that supreme power or its agent, the head of state, may have broken the original contract, even though in the subject’s eyes he may have forfeited the right to legislate by empowering the government to rule tyrannically by sheer violence, even then the subject is allowed no resistance, no violent counteraction. The reason is that once a civil constitution exists, a people no longer have the right to judge how the constitution ought to be administered. For suppose they had such a right and their judgment ran counter to that of the actual head of state: who is to decide which side is right? Neither one can act as a judge in his own case. To decide between the head and the people there would have to be a head above the head—which is self-contradictory…The one who is in control of the supreme administration of public justice…is precisely the head of state…And no one in the community can thus have a right to contest that control of his. (TP 8:299-300)

Once again, Kant produces the vicious circularity expressed in another variation of law + right + might = Statism (and vice versa); it is something that cannot be questioned. Because it cannot be questioned and is always right, the head must be above everyone else and no matter what -- even if the regime is the worst you can imagine -- we should surrender reasonableness to logic so as to avoid contradiction more than anything else. The logic Kant uses here is a transcendental logic within this framework of his synthetic a priori political ideas of justifying dictatorship. Disturbingly, it seems for Kant that human worth can never surpass the need to be crushed righteously and legally by authority since what would life be about without the State? Kant produces a genuine reductio ad absurdum with his political ideas.

Kant continues about the social contract and why it should be obeyed like an ‘iron law’;

If one had asked…what is right—and the principles of this are a priori certain and cannot be bungled by any empiricist—the idea of the social contract would retain its unimpeachable prestige…solely as the rational principle for judging any public lawful constitution as such. And one would see that until a general will exists, the people possess no right at all to coerce their ruler, since it is only through him that they can legally coerce. Yet, once that general will exists, there can be no popular coercion of the ruler, because then the people themselves would be the supreme ruler. Consequently, the people never have any right of coercion…against the head of state. (TP 8:302)

So here even when the deformed idea of a social contract is brought in as the supposed idea representing the general will of the people, the calculus of Statism reigns supreme; no matter what the mediating concept is, ‘social contract’ or ‘general will’, you cannot be above the supreme ruler for you are but a nonentity meant to be fodder for ideas like ‘general will’ -- but in actuality merely justifying the master-slave paradigm.  

In the interests of being complete, Kant furnishes more ideas on the State,

The rule is, rather, always to prefer that passive state to the perilous position of seeking a better one, a position to which Hippocrates’ advice to physicians applies…decision is difficult, experiment perilous. All constitutions of sufficiently long standing, whatever their flaws and for all their differences, yield the same result: one is content with the constitution one lives under. (TP 8:306)   

This is quite strange coming from the man who enacted a so-called Copernican revolution in philosophy and challenged the status quo of dogmatism and empiricism, only to give the most reactionary advice that makes no evolution for humanity possible. How life itself could progress in such self-defeating devolutionary Statism beggars belief.

The price of all necessities keep rising…And no peace lasts long enough for peacetime savings to match the cost of the next war, a complaint for which the invention of national debts is an ingenious but ultimately self-destructive nostrum. As a result, impotence must finally accomplish what good will ought to have done but did not: the organization of every state’s internal affairs so that the decisive voice on whether or not to wage war is not that of the head of state—whom the war costs actually nothing—but that of the people, who pay for it…For the people are hardly likely to plunge themselves into penury—which never touches the head of state—out of sheer lust of expansion or because of supposed purely verbal insults. And so their descendants will not be burdened with debts they have not brought on themselves; they too—due not to any love for them, but only to the self-love of each era—will be able to progress toward an ever better condition, even in a moral sense… (TP 8:311).       

Not only do we see the relevance of war and indebtedness right till today where generations have to pay for what others created due to greed and craving for conquest, but the disease of debt is passed onto each succeeding generation. Kant again starts to make the normative shift from his politics to his practical philosophy and talks morality.

Kant now admits that if the people act from moral grounds and good will then they would take the war mongering rulers to task because, and this is crucial: It is practical reason and the moral drive that leads to a form of empowerment. And it is this that is the centerpiece of what comes next.

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The second critique, CP, is in essence the central work which both the first and third critiques are anchored on. If it was not for the issue of morality, it can be arguably said that Kant would not have produced the critiques as we know them for a crucial purpose of his project was to show that we can indeed have meaningful notions of the good and act that out, without being accused of metaphysical speculation or rendered impotent through scepticism. And importantly, we do not need the dogmatism of religious zealots to inform us of what is the right thing to do; our practical reason takes care of that and it is a driving force in defining us as humans.

This second part looks at how practical reason shapes Kant’s moral constructivism and is the basis of his political constructivism which runs counter to his political theory. In other words, Kant’s political reason is that which is morally driven.   

The moral basis of things

Just as Kant was adamant on providing certainty in knowledge in CR through his transcendental philosophy, he was determined to  provide reliable grounds for doing the right thing in the form of the categorical imperative, for instance. But it is not the categorical imperative as much as the moral force itself that helps create one’s reality which is at the heart of CP; it is also what underwrites the egalitarian and empowering principles of Kant's philosophical project. These ideas salvage Kant’s reputation from the harshness of his political thinking to provide, through extrapolation, what can be called his political reason.  

Early on in the CP Kant says,

In practical philosophy, which has to do only with the grounds of determination of the will, the principles which a man makes for himself are not laws by which he is inexorably bound, because reason, in practice, has to do with a subject and especially with his faculty of desire…The practical rule is always a product of reason, because it prescribes action as a means to an effect which is its purpose...It is a rule characterized by an “ought” which expresses the objective necessitation of the act and indicates that, if reason completely determined the will, the action would without exception take place according to the rule. (CP 20)    

What Kant is saying is that the will is influenced by practical reason and that is the same as free will reflective of human freedom. Man is not bound by a law by which he now must follow no matter what, but has the choice to do what is right from his own reason and if he does so it will be for the highest good of all as a duty. The moral choice comes from within and is not imposed from without: This is crucial in Kant.

Kant tries to clarify this a little later -- “But for reason to give law it is required that reason need presuppose only itself, because the rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without any contingent subjective conditions which differentiate one rational being from another.” (CP 21) Here Kant implies that there is no personal point of view or subjectivist perspective in producing a moral imperative for oneself. For a moral imperative is validated through practical reason which exists in each person, and that in turn is based on a moral grounding of each individual from which those imperatives and practical reason emanate; and in this way the imperatives can be regarded as universal: So we can expect that others can have similar moral imperatives and that they can understand where our own comes from. This is not an imposition of an external law or an internal one, but an imperative based on our free will which we make into a duty for ourselves without any desire for external rewards or recognition.  

We further learn from Kant,

It would be better to maintain that there are no practical laws, which must have an objective and not just subjective necessity and which must be known a priori by reason instead of by experience, no matter how empirically universal. Even the rules of uniform phenomena are denominated natural laws (for example, mechanical laws) only if we really can understand them a priori…Only in the case of subjective practical principles is it expressly made a condition that not objective but subjective conditions of choice must underlie them, and hence that they must be represented always as mere maxims and never as practical laws. (CP 27)        

Kant hearkens to the first critique on how laws are generated based on synthetic a priori conceptions and why this does not apply to moral imperatives. The ideas of the former are constitutive and regulative, whereas the latter are directive/directing in how to act. The moral imperative is not a law in that it has a way of getting agreement on its validity because it has empirical backing or can be accepted as a theoretical construct. Its force comes from its subjective-universal applicability which does not qualify it as some universal law, but rather as a maxim which one uses that can be accepted by others on a subjective-universal ground that applies to everyone. When that is used as the basis for a shared moral imperative then its force is guaranteed in a way by it not having a determinate end like the happiness of the individual or mankind. Rather the moral imperative is to ensure that we are worthy of happiness: This is what gives it objectivity from the subjective-universal ground of the will. This is central to a lot that follows and is one of Kant’s great insights.

We then reach one of the central ideas in Kant, on the links between freedom, the will and morality (Kant’s italics in all quotes):

The question now is whether our knowledge of the unconditionally practical takes its inception from freedom or from the practical law. It cannot start from freedom, for this we can neither know immediately, since our first concept of it is negative, nor infer from experience, since experience reveals only the law of appearances and consequently the mechanism of nature, the direct opposite of freedom. It is therefore the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious as soon as we construct maxims for the will, which first presents itself to us; and, since reason exhibits it as a ground of determination which is completely independent of and not to be outweighed by any sensuous condition, it is the moral law which leads directly to the concept of freedom. (CP 30).   

To Kant our knowledge of freedom comes from the practical law or moral law. We cannot understand this from the world of appearances but from the exercise of our will and freedom to choose against what the sensuous or natural world’s restrictions pose on us. For instance, the physical restrictions of the world and dangers it can bring, together with a sense of limitation that one has to struggle to survive, goes against the grain of the moral law which can make us choose -- as an act of will – freedom; or that which opposes self-interestedness (and sometimes, even survival).

Kant develops this idea further by saying that the (moral) will is pure will as there is no precedence for it in the realm of the phenomenal world as understood by natural law. It is one of a kind and can be understood as grounded on morality itself. The moral law seems to operate like a natural law but does not have the same result in that it is not a reflection of phenomena happening in the world and rationalizing causes for it. Yet, the moral law operates on the basis of generating a system of law like the natural one but is actually in the form of a maxim that a person can follow.

Therefore, it is at least not impossible to conceive of a law that alone serves the purpose of the subjective form of principles and yet is a ground of determination by virtue of the objective form of a law in general. The consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason, since one cannot ferret it out from antecedent data of reason, such as the consciousness of freedom…and since it forces itself upon us as a synthetic proposition a priori based on no pure or empirical intuition. It would be analytic if the freedom of the will were presupposed, but for this, as a positive concept, an intellectual intuition would be needed, and here we cannot assume it…

Pure reason alone is practical of itself, and it gives (to man) a universal law, which we call the moral law. (CP 31)

Kant is looking for a certain ground from which to launch the moral law and he finds it in pure reason. From this we can have certainty and communicate it to others and aim to create moral solutions to situations because we have not only the common practical grounds of reason itself, but we can project this in the form of a universal law in general (the awareness of which when generated in this manner is a fact of reason). But moral laws are not universal laws like natural ones; though they have universality due to their form which is similar to natural ones. Kant is interested in finding how we can provide certainty to moral ideas and have a basis for commonality in expressing them by showing the subjective-objective content-form they have; this also allows for universality and acceptability among peoples.

Furthermore, the idea of heteronomy (relying on something external to us) is opposed to autonomy (relying on something within us), and the latter is a distinctive feature in the expression of free will. This is an important idea that will provide the basis for further examining and recuperating from the damaging impact of Kant’s political ideas. Our man further says,

The autonomy of the will is the sole principle of all moral laws and of the duties conforming to them; heteronomy of choice…not only does not establish any obligation but is opposed to the principle of obligation and to the morality of the will.

The sole principle of morality consists in independence from all material of the law…and in the accompanying determination of choice by the mere form of giving universal law which a maxim must be capable of having. That independence…is freedom in the negative sense, while this intrinsic legislation of pure and thus practical reason is freedom in the positive sense. Therefore, the moral law expresses nothing else than the autonomy of pure practical reason, i.e., freedom. This autonomy of freedom is itself the formal condition of all maxims, under which alone they can all agree with the supreme practical law. (CP 33-34)       

Free will and the ability to choose is the idea behind moral laws and the duties it brings and it is centred within us; this makes us autonomous beings. Relying on something external to guide us and give us meaning and direction is to lose autonomy and provides a way out of moral responsibility and the obligation it brings.

The object of the moral law is the desire to do something, but we must not be a slave to that or be obsessed with an end goal to determine what is the right thing to do as it must be done as a universal principle as opposed to an end goal everyone is legislated to follow. The format of a law for our maxims shows us that it is universal and independent, but the positive aspect of our freedom comes from the obligation we give ourselves to do what is right irrespective of the impact on our comfort zones. This is what makes us free individuals, that is, the ability to break free from what constrains us. 

Then the lines that dive deeper into Kant’s idea on the connection between the supersensuous noumenon and the phenonmenal world:

The sensuous nature of rational beings in general is their existence under empirically conditioned laws, and therefore…heteronomy. The supersensuous nature of the same beings…is their existence according to laws which are independent of all empirical conditions and which therefore belong to the autonomy of pure reason. And since the laws…are practical laws, supersensuous nature…is nothing else than nature under the autonomy of the pure practical reason. The law of this autonomy is the moral law, and it, therefore, is the fundamental law of supersensuous nature and of a pure world of the understanding, whose counterpart must exist in the world of sense without interfering with the laws of the latter… (CP 43)    

Kant merges the idea of the laws of phenomena that come from reason which explain the conditional world we live in as experienced empirically with that of the seemingly unconditional world of the noumenon, as grasped and given intelligibility by practical reason. Only the latter can give an understanding of the noumenal world which natural laws cannot; and the natural world can be understood better via the underlying moral laws of practical reason which are an expression of our autonomy. The world of seeming dependence on empirical changes is underpinned by the unchanging world of freedom and morality which are direct aspects of the noumenon. Therefore, Kant’s vision of the world and the universe is a moral one.

This central idea in Kant’s thinking is further developed:

For, in fact, the moral law ideally transfers us into a nature in which reason would bring forth the highest good were it accompanied by sufficient physical capacities; and it determines our will to confer on the sensuous world the form of a system of rational beings. The least attention to ourself shows that this Idea really stands as a model for the determination of our will. (CP 43)   

It seems that Kant is saying that we can shape the world we live in, and therefore create our destiny, via expressing our freedom as moral beings for the highest good of all and this could be supported by the physical world under the right conditions. This reality which can be manifested as a moral expression of ourselves is a noumenal expression translating itself into phenomenal expression. This implies that with force of the moral law we can co-create the world we live in. It is not that we end up changing the so-called law of gravity as such, but that we change the world in a way that positively reflects our stewardship of life and the environment of the planet, through creating and sustaining the appropriate socio-economic structures.

Kant goes on to develop another of the central themes of his philosophy which forms the basis for his moral constructivism: It is not the idea of good and evil that is the datum for the moral law but the latter that provides the source for such notions. And he goes on to expand on this,

This remark, which refers only to the method of the deepest moral investigations, is important. It explains once and for all the reasons which occasion all the confusions of philosophers concerning the supreme principle of morals…Whether they placed this object of pleasure, which was to deliver the supreme concept of good, in happiness, or in perfection, in moral feeling, or in the will of God – their fundamental principle was always heteronomy, and they came inevitably to empirical conditions for a moral law. (CP 64)

Kant points out that to place the source of the highest good and the joy it may bring in a source external to oneself inevitably results in surrendering our freedom to an external law, condition or force. Heteronomy involves empirical evidence and natural law explanations to ascertain the good it generates for a person. This would be a subreption. The moral law is not only a priori and has no basis in the natural world nor metaphysical speculation, but it comes from within and thereby signals our autonomy and guarantees the certitude of the moral drive.

The moral law is the ground from which the highest good commences. It may seem circular but there is hardly a way out for Kant on this score in that the drive and source of the highest good is itself, so it is directing in nature but not directed towards a specific goal as that would be the way the natural laws would work which are empirically/verification oriented and thereby heteronomous. (CP 109-110)

These central Kantian ideas take fuller form when expanded into how the practical will avoids the dual dilemma of empiricism and mysticism; this is also what Kant was avoiding when he wrote the CR. When the motivation and goal of our actions are our comfort and happiness instead of doing what is right, then we are guilty of seeking validation for our acts in the form of empiricism; this would fit utilitarian doctrines and is heteronomous. This would also entail seeking a reward in doing something to gain satisfaction rather than an inner motivation that would reflect one’s conscience.

Similarly, to do something based on ‘God’s will’ is not only to make metaphysical assumptions according to Kant, but to dive into mysticism/the transcendent and thus rely on divine edict’s outside of oneself; this too is to indulge in heteronomy. Our agency, free will and autonomy is denied unless we rely on our moral judgement and our capacity for this based on our will and practical reason: This is the building block for our empowerment. We are “indeed legislative members of a moral realm which is possible through freedom and which is presented to us as an object of respect by practical reason.” (CP 82) Our will towards the highest good helps us co-create a moral realm as the expression of our freedom as autonomous beings.

Yet, Kant makes the point that it is empiricism that is more worrying than the mystical. It is looking for results that can be measured to secure one’s justification for doing something that is a greater distraction for our moral disposition. He says “that empiricism is far more dangerous than all mystical enthusiasm” (CP 71) as its apparent immediacy is always a compelling factor. We are normally trapped within the exigencies of physical issues that tend to cloud the need to rely on moral judgement. This is why Kant’s political ideas contradict what his moral thought gives us (which is the ground of his critical philosophy) -- that expediency and its empirical seduction cannot triumph over the moral will of one’s conscience which is our supreme human trait.

A core aspect of Kant’s practical reason would resonate with some revolutionary activists:

It follows of itself that, in the order of ends, man (and every rational being) is an end in himself, i.e., he is never to be used merely as a means for someone (even for God) without at the same time being himself an end, and that humanity in our person must itself be holy to us, and it is only on account of this and in agreement with this that anything can be called holy. (CP 131-132)  

This is the kind of spiritual force that is usually found simmering at the heart of revolutionary thought where morality, purpose and action fuse into a whole without external incentive other than the drive for self realization for the highest good of all. True, sometimes this is mired in the goal of ridding a country of a dictatorship or oppressive regime, and that may seem heteronomous. But an unadulterated revolutionary motivation would see that no man is a commodity, and that each person is a free and autonomous being beyond measurement: For our essence is spiritual and thereby Immeasurable.

A brief survey of the three critiques reveals that the first one looks at theoretical or speculative reason, what it is, and how we create knowledge. The CR looks at how we claim certainty in knowledge rather than explain what it is we exactly know. The CP looks at the free will, freedom, practical reason and their moral grounding. This in turn gives us autonomy and provides certainty in our moral claims and actions. The third critique (CJ), which is not looked at here, is about how we communicate in relation to nature, beauty, the sublime and art. It allows us to make claims about what is beautiful which though it may be subjective, still allows us to expect universal understanding from others on this. The CJ also examines issues related to the moral dimension which is the essence of Kant’s thinking.

The CR shows that we project what we know and that much of the world is understood by us a priori from the way human consciousness is ‘wired’ or ‘designed’. The CR sets the base for practical reason which goes on to show in CP, that we co-create moral realms through not only categorical imperatives but that the moral dimension is what makes the world intelligible to us: It fuses the noumenal basis of reason into understanding things in a holistic and coherent manner. So we project our moral creations and that shapes our world. This is Kant’s projection of empowerment and egalitarianism of each individual as they express themselves as free agents who can decide their destiny.

The fact of reason makes us aware of the intrinsic connection, or different side of the same coin aspect, of speculative reason and practical reason. And when we look at what is termed here Kant’s political reason we are looking at another dimension of Kant’s ideas that is, however, in contradistinction to his political thinking. Political reason expresses itself via synthetic a priori political theorizing that appropriately and effectively replaces and projects a viable set of political ideas for Kant.

Earlier it was mentioned that Kant’s subreption occurred when he made moral claims from his political ones, and the combined fetishized notions of them slipped into transcendentalism and transcendence: Because the moral drive has been hegemonised by the political one of expedience and Rightism/legalism. And republicanism, constitutionalism, and Rightism/legalism are treated as transcendent goals or Ideals to be realized and used to justify a reactionary status quo. We understand political reason to be underwritten by moral drives and practical reason (which also underpin pure reason and thereby theoretical/speculative reason).

Thus, political theories would be fused with moral drives as an expression of the moral ground. They are not hegemonised by morality but made intelligible solely by morality just as the workings and resultant products of reason itself are intelligible due to its practical essence.

Therefore, political reason gives proper and cogent expression to Kant’s political philosophy. It is also fused with practical reason -- which is what ultimately anchors his critiques and overall philosophical project. In other words, the accurate way to understand Kant’s political ideas is to apply them as moral constructs.

The material for Kant’s political theory would also be synthetic a priori in that there are notions of democracy, general will, social contract, equality, public good etc which are a priori constructs. These are then formulated into theories which would support ideas of republicanism (as various shades of democracy), authoritarianism, totalitarianism, socialism, anarchism, and all that would be termed radical political thinking. When we try to work this out empirically it is called politics and academically, political science. So another way to put it is that Kant’s political reason is the expression of a synthetic a priori projection of theoretical constructs aligned with the moral drive.

We could say that pure reason has the dimensions of practical reason (that underlies it), theoretical/speculative reason, and political reason. The latter can be expressed as theoretical constructs, and itself is an expression of practical reason and of the moral essence grounding it.

It can also be said that Kant’s republicanism, legalism, Right-ism and constitutionalism, as well as his fixation with a hierarchical system of government is a product of his theorizing which he attempts to verify with examples from his time and experience. These are manifestations of transcendental thinking which are used to explain and rationalize politics, traditional societal structures and forms of control. That Kant’s political ideas are reactionary in the extreme and even harsh in many aspects can only be speculatively said to be the result of his bourgeois attitudes and existence, and from biographical information that in his later years he conformed to authority; though this may have also been his way of showing that he was a good citizen of his land.

The problem starts when he takes his political theorizing to logical extremes, wherein the transcendental logic used to draw conclusions in a linear fashion finally produces puerile statements as seen where whatever good he attempts to rationalize through stability leads to despotism. Legal or constitutional despotism is still despotism; these are subtleties lost on the later Kant whose sharpness of mind is blunted by a form of worship of authority, and fetishized logicism.

It becomes problematic and painfully embarrassing when Kant facilely tries to combine his profound moral thinking with the effrontery of his politics. But we now can see the contradiction is severe for his entire moral philosophy is at odds with his political theory in that it is the former which is an expression of the spiritual in man, and the assertion of his freedom in contrast to being a driveling and sniveling slave to authority.

We need to extrapolate Kant’s ideas and see that the proper application of his practical reason to political reason can add to clarity in the form of the concept of practical political reason. Hence, we grasp the emphasis that the intelligibility granted to political reason comes from the moral dimension espoused as practical political reason (PPR). Through the term PPR it is easier to see that it is our moral grounding that determines our political thinking and thereby our political theories and actions. This means we have political theories that are projected from the morally grounded ideas of freedom, justice, egalitarianism, and wealth sharing and distribution for the highest good of all. So PPR would take us away from Kant’s reactionary bombast and towards uncharted territories in that it is an expression of our creative powers to meet challenges and forge the society we want.

Kant’s moral constructivism would include John Rawls’s notion of it, but it is developed here as people co-creating their own moral realm and society. As moral agents we create a moral realm, or world, made intelligible and free from the constraints that may be imposed by the phenomenal world; but also recognizing the pragmatic need to adapt to its physical constructs. Yet, the phenomenal world can also be influenced and shaped by the moral co-creation of human beings, as societal structures and phenomena can be changed to reflect moral consciousness.

Therefore, through each person via categorical imperatives and the exercise of their autonomy and free will grounded in morality we co-create a just and fair society that allows for the betterment of all and the highest realization of human potential. This is hardly utopia but what can be created when PPR is in force. It is just that we have not really given this a proper go yet.

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Kant’s political heteronomy

Based on the political ideas of republicanism, legalism and constitutionalism grounded on reactionary defence of the status quo, it is hard to see even superficially how Kant’s thinking here could bring forth autonomy. In fact, his entire political edifice rests on not only obedience to laws but of unquestioning acceptance of them. It makes a mockery of his critical philosophy. His political ideas are heteronomous in that they insist that people need external force, constructs and guidance in behaving themselves and doing what is right, and this can be further detected through Kant’s insistence that:

• There is a hierarchy that must be obeyed
• Without laws man is uncontrollable and cannot regulate or discipline himself at all
• That humans cannot be trusted to rely on morality and need external coercion to be good
• The contradictory but convenient conflation of obedience to laws made by man and duty to moral laws that supposedly come from within, and so the supervenience of external laws over internal imperatives  
• That only heads of state and the state apparatus can dictate what is best for everyone
• That only legislators and members of the state apparatus know what is best for everyone
• That strict linearity of logical extremism is the answer to the world’s problems
• Statism and the fetishization of its laws lead to a kind of transcendentalism that transmutes into transcendence and thereby mysticism
• Even unjust social contracts must be obeyed for the sake of obeying statist constricting notions which substitute inner motivation for external compulsion, such that everyone is forced into agreeing; it is a matter of expedience and what keeps one’s head intact instead of removal by Statism and Authority
• There can be no form of resistance or rebellion even if it is morally driven as all must be subject to obeisance to statist imposition of laws
• That ideas of a social contract are a priori and therefore a good thing as implicitly all such ideas are
• A fatalistic approach is needed and one accepts one’s lot in life, and injustice and tyranny are justified by a set of legal documents

Even the form of a law, as Kant explains in CP, provides a restraining influence on moral drives which are best expressed as maxims that are generated from the moral grounds of the free will of each person. So laws as such are heteronomous and do not encourage moral growth and progress due to their inherently stifling/restrictive nature.

Interestingly, in the CR the natural laws produced via synthetic a priori speculation help give the basis for knowledge and making epistemic claims about the world. However, this approach is anathema for practical reason which seeks discipline from moral expression of the individual that can be harnessed as an imperative force for societal co-creation by people. The heteronomous nature of laws is what distinguishes it from practical reason and its moral constructs.    

The political autonomy of Kant is fused, of course, with his moral imperatives. Practical reason, the essence of pure reason, expresses itself in what we ought to do to be worthy of happiness as we avoid expediency and self serving interests at the expense of others. So anyone acting from reason as such would do so with moral interests in mind. Thus, based on the earlier discussion, Kant’s political autonomy would maintain that:

• Citizens and those representing them would do what is concomitant with the moral drive
• All members of a state or society would act on the moral imperatives and maxims that guide them irrespective of consequences (would be congruent to highest good of all)
• Doing what is right and not what is expedient is an act of freedom and the expression of our free will as autonomous beings
• The essence of humanity is freedom and this means freeing oneself from constraining constructs and laws that are inevitably heteronomous
• In order to be free we will live in a manner that keeps us in balance and as far as possible unshackled from heteronomous limitations
• To act reasonably and be as free as possible from the physical limitations of the phenomenal world, as well as make our lives intelligible, we must act morally always
• Yet the physical world can be changed to suit our moral force if we all act together as representatives of the supersensuous source of things, or noumena, which further expresses itself through free will and its moral grounding 
• We will all act and create what are the right, just and compassionate socio-economic-political structures as they are an expression of our moral centre as rational beings, and this is how moral imperatives imprint themselves on our co-created world
• We create what is for the highest good of all and this emanates from the moral centre of the universe which is also anchored within us (just as we are centred within it)
• What we believe from our free will to be right and for the highest good of everyone should be the societal and economic processes we must abide by and develop
• We are moral legislators of our world and we decide what is best for ourselves and our society from that which comes from our moral consciousness
• We are therefore empowered beings who do not and should not rely on external laws and incentives to divert us from expressing ourselves as members of an empowered society and world
• Human beings are an end in themselves and are of spiritual import that makes us and our moral expression beyond measure; we are indeed Immeasurable
• Fear must not be a stumbling block in realizing the human (noumenal/supersensuous) ideal of realistically living out our moral expressions through better lives and a better world for all

All this entails radical theorizing which tells us that from the root cause of what makes us humans grounded in morality, we would eschew those political institutions and their representatives, politicos, the State and its apparatus misaligned to the moral ground; these are but the epitome of restriction and heteronomy. As Kant says in the CP quote above, heteronomy is “…opposed to the principle of obligation and to the morality of the will” and so anything that is forced on us relieves us of any duty or obligation to it, as it is against morality itself. For we should only obey what we believe to be right for the highest good of all, and these are maxims taken without compromise and are an undiluted expression of the supersensuous in its moral grounding in the world.

To continue with the old paradigm that survives today in its form of feudalism-capitalism is the high end of heteronomy in our world. It needs to be resisted and dismantled as the direct expression of our autonomy. And our autonomy is the source of radical thinking and the ideas that coalesce from it – that is, the imperatives and maxims that manifest through PPR to create the forms, processes and models of distributive justice that are congruent to our moral centre as human beings.

So where does all this leave us? If we extrapolate Kant’s political constructivism we would see that defying reactionary tendencies, as well as authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorships, fascism and feudalism (and the capitalism linked to it) are the basics his PPR would entail. It would also, as a positive thesis, evoke ideas of egalitarianism, sense of justice and fairness, compassion, rectitude, selfless service; speaking, standing and acting out one’s truth and showing moral courage in the face of adversity, danger and death. Kantian PPR would, therefore, fit with radical political theorizing.

All this would be a synthetic a priori extension and creation of Kant’s PPR via his practical political constructivism, or Kantian political constructivism/Kantian constructivism.

It seems that political theories and ideas that would appear a natural fit generated from Kantian constructivism would be socialism, communism and its variants (e.g. Marxism-Leninism), anarchism and various other combinations emanating from the creative energies of people transfused with practical reason. Thus, it can be said accurately that the political trend and constructivism that would naturally evolve from Kantian ideas would be those that could be broadly defined as that of a social economy. It is about empowered people and communities.

A social economy would thereby have characteristics that would include communities based on egalitarian principles which promote empowerment of the individual and the group. There would be active citizen participation in policy creation of a society or community. Representatives elected, where deemed necessary, would be indeed representatives of people and not politicians (whose participation in politics is usually a career option). What would be needed is PPR expressed in the formulation of Green and people friendly solutions and policies that do not need Statism and its repressive representatives, apparatus and laws. A social economy would diverge from all forms of heteronomy and abide by autonomy.

The obvious objection is how could an empowered society be possible, when man leads a Hobbesian life of nastiness. Well, heteronomy has been the perennial so-called solution that has been tried in all its extreme forms and the results have been catastrophic: It is a wonder we still exits as a species. It is a greater wonder that the planet hasn’t died on us. The alternative is to try and develop autonomy as far as is humanly possible. It can be tried in a transition phase from the current restrictive paradigm of heteronomous Statism and the corruption it brings, where everyone is either rewarded/bought through money or the threat of punishment.

This idea of radical empowerment and that we can create the world of our choice is shown in these words of Kant as mentioned earlier, that we can “…confer on the sensuous world the form of a system of rational beings. The least attention to ourself shows that this Idea really stands as a model for the determination of our will.” And so as rational beings we would strive for a moral society and this would be the ideal and the model we would naturally work towards in that we do not have the goal of a specific society which then may place ideological (heteronomous) restrictions on what we need to do.

Instead, we work towards our social economy and moral realm in the way that it will be what it is meant to be so as to make us worthy of happiness in serving the highest good of all life and the planet. This would then be an assertion of our autonomy and free will grounded on morality that is a defining characteristic of being human. This we achieve through PPR and the political constructivism it entails.

An example would be Marx and Engels's idea of Communism. They call it a goal but it is actually an open ended ideal which is the receptacle of our wishes for the highest good of all. To attempt to define it not only makes it sound utopian, but sets it as a goal to work towards and that makes it heteronomous. That is why, aiming for a specific goal can be damaging to the process in which we strive to attain it. What happens is that we insist on empirical validity in the forms of fixed measurements and specific structures/outcomes to be in place (that becomes the goal in itself) to prove realization of the goal; and people and resources become a means to an end. We sneak in utilitarianism even without intending to.

This does not imply that no form of measurement be used at all within the process of things, as it would be impractical and a block to moving forward. But it does imply that having an end goal that in itself must be measurable and used as the specific set of parameters to decide that the said goal has been achieved, is heteronomous and ultimately self-defeating; and it is damaging to moral evolution and autonomous expression along the way.

It is no wonder that the quest for creating a so-called ‘Communist state’ (a self-contradictory notion) has ended up in disaster. It is also not surprising that Marx and Engels, among others, could never with much clarity describe their exact vision of Communism as it is not meant to be a specific entity to be realized. Rather, it is a term that can be used to describe the use of PPR and Kantian constructivism as an expression of autonomy to do what is right by people in co-creating what is for the highest good of all. It is a never ending process of growth and evolution. The only end goal is to keep doing what is for the highest good of all; it is, therefore, practical reason in action (or PPR in this case) – for it is directing/directive in nature and not constitutive or regulative.

Due to the constructivist nature of this process of PPR, the ground activities of people based on moral imperatives, will feed up into the form of formulating workable socio-economic- political principles that are evolving; and that will ensure the ideas adopted are suitable for people to use so as to realize in the most pragmatic manner that which is for the highest good of all. Therefore, the entire process is grounded in what can be achieved and parameters are stretched as the moral drive shapes the way we choose to lead our lives in the world. This process of ground up adjustment of principles to be used to enact our co-created social economy would be called reflective equilibrium by Rawls. And this would apply to Kantian constructivism as well. 

So the co-created moral realm and society of Kantian constructivism demands nothing less than trying to create a realistic utopia and thereby work towards viable and feasible results. This is nothing to do with some ‘do-gooder’ altruism but rather taking the road rarely travelled, and finding our way forward as a species in an attempt to create a new earth. We will need to not only have collaboration between ourselves and various communities, but with other states-in-transition that work towards trans-communal cooperation and assistance.

This transnational group or community of people is akin to Kant’s transcendental idea of a ‘state of peoples’ mentioned earlier. Such a transnational community in its coagulating form will be the driving force of a state-in-transition. The latter is an evolutionary process that will see it move into the dismantling as such, or ‘vanishing/withering away’, of the state and its apparatus; the obverse of which would be the firming up of transnational communities as a social group unit of peoples. This would form the bedrock of radical political ideas some of which we can better appreciate in our moment in history, as they are manifested via the shifting tectonics of change occurring in the Middle East, Europe and as evinced by the Occupy movement in the US.

And Kant, at the prime of his life and mental prowess, would have demanded nothing less -- but possibly much more.

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Wishing one and all a good 2012.

Below is another draft fragment of an unfinished project from last year which is posted here as it may stimulate ideas for others.

“…everything is rich – in other words, everything that is commensurate with the universe. I insist on the fact that, to freedom of mind, the search for a solution is an exuberance, a superfluity; this gives it an incomparable force. To solve political problems becomes difficult for those who allow anxiety alone to pose them. It is necessary for anxiety to pose them. But their solution demands at a certain point the removal of this anxiety.”  -- The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille

There is something wrong with the world. We have apparently reached a point of great technological advancement where we can harness nuclear energy, and use it and all other scientific breakthroughs to innovate various ways to kill life through conflict and daily living; we can travel the air and outer space; we can land on the moon and send probes out into deep space; we can communicate with one another instantly and conduct economic transactions just as fast. We call ourselves modern and claim to be advanced.

   Yet:

• we rely almost entirely on fossil fuels that are limited and pollute the environment
• we cannot eradicate terminal and serious illnesses
• there is world wide poverty and hunger
• we cannot obviate the impact of natural disasters
• we believe what we see on TV and the mainstream media
• we allow ‘experts’, institutions and those in authority to sway our emotions and common sense easily
• we believe with certainty that science is truth and vice versa
• we buy into the claim that money is what life is about (for without it life is apparently impossible in the modern, sophisticated world guided by smart people)
• we admire celebrities and want to be like them (sic)
• we believe in a binary type of logic of either true or false and a restrictive idea of analysis which means you must agree to a form of linear thinking or you are plain unrealistic
• we somehow believe that there are higher truths, emotions and explanations beyond what we tend to believe but somehow prefer to be guided often by materialism
• we can see through the shenanigans of hoodwinkers if we just stay alert and watch our backs but continue in a thinking mode of global and societal indoctrination that continues to allows us to be bamboozled anyway
• we think big banks, big corporations and big government and ideology is somehow a good thing
• we think that living in fear and anxiety is normal (this last one is instrumental in resulting in most of what is listed above)
• we think those who do not live in fear and anxiety are abnormal, and we say things are the way they are and nothing can be done about them

   And the list does go on.

   But everything is energy. Science seems to think that too. Spirituality has been blasting that about for eons. We believe in the exuberance and irrepressible energy of the universe and can see its effects everywhere, but for some reason think that we have to live in limitation. Abundance is the natural state of affairs of everything, but we are stuck in a mindset of lack and grappling for resources.

   The universe is teeming with life. Just look at the earth (and all those microbes from outer space etc). You can have a plot of land untended for awhile and it sprouts weeds. You have some crack in the cement of buildings and you will have some life form crawling out of it. A thimbleful of soil has parallel cosmoses and worlds circulating in it.

   If harnessed properly, you can tap into magnetic energy for vehicle levitation and movement. You can tap into hydro, solar and wind energy. You can place turbines in the sea to use tidal energy. There is incredible energy all around us without which we wouldn’t be able to exist not to mention have a stable environment to sit and read a book without things flying all over or crumbling into dust every few minutes. Something is going on here bigger than we can imagine, but we take for granted and then accept limited ideas and theories in science and economics and views of media pundits as the limiting factors of ‘reality’.

   We confuse what is complicated with what is complex. We think complicated means Truth. But we find it difficult to accept that Truth can be simple yet complex. Complication is what leads to trouble. However, complexity cannot be avoided though actual realities can be quite simple.

Most of what is here is based on the ideas from the two remarkable volumes by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (D&G) called Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: collectively given the subtitle Capitalism and Schizophrenia (quotations are from the University of Minnesota Press translated editions).

   A good way to give an idea of what is in store with D&G is to look at Foucault’s memorable preface to Anti-Oedipus. The man rightly points out that “Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics…How does one keep from being fascist…How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour?...one might say Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.”

   In fact, D&G have provided a moral work, and are trying, without much success, to veer it away from the spiritual to the humanist dimension as well.

   Foucault adds (bold and italics mine):

 This art of living counter to forms of fascism, whether already present or impending,carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
•  Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
•  Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality…that possess revolutionary force.
• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
• Do not become enamored of power.   

…The book often leads one to believe it is all fun and games, when something essential is taking place, something of extreme seriousness: the tracking down of all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives.

Everything is energy. It is remarkable that we believe in most things scientific but fail to grasp that everything, the seen and unseen, the material that we take for real is nothing but energy. We are energy. Our thoughts, words and actions are energy. Emotions are nothing but energy: it can be defined as e-motion or energy-in-motion. Everything we do is energy. The universe and the world operates through the transference, transmission and use of energy.

   What this means is that every aspect of our daily life, real or imagined, spiritual or secular, pleasant or otherwise is just energy. The life force running through all of us is, just that, force=energy. Our society, government and economy are manifestations of energy. The way we work and live is about the circulation of energy. Rather than incorrectly looking at ourselves and our world and way of life as something static, we must see it as flux, energy in action.

   What prevents us from seeing this clearly is the inability to control emotions and the blockage provided by the ego. So rather than see ourselves in the third dimensional linear form of people who grow from children to adults and then die, we have to see ourselves as beings of energy forever in flux, driven by wants and needs. In this sense, it would be suitable to describe life forms or life as we know it (or ourselves) as desiring machines: as D&G would express it.

   The ego is the filter that processes and also blocks the energy momentum. It can do so through misunderstanding itself, the energy flows and the way energy is transferred. Part of our misconstruction of the world as energy is due to the theories and indoctrination of the self that we have undergone. We believe that there is a fixed ego or ‘I’, that it is of primary importance above all else, that it is shaped by its environment, that it is a living entity and can be harmed, and that it is linked to mythical concepts like the Oedipal complex (and many others).

   We have come to see ourselves stuck and driven merely by libidinal drives that must mean a restricted number of things, but all of which seem to lead to energy formations beyond ego. There is no doubt that mishandled human or libidinal energy leads to grief, but does it also lead to good? Must every aspect of the libidinal drive be trapped in negativity, guilt and as some would like to call it, ‘sin’?

   D&G are ambiguous about a lot of things, as it is their manner of expression and also because in some way they imitate Nietzsche’s way of doing philosophy which can seem potentially inconsistent, contradictory and often deliberately set at an offensive angle to the way society is at any given time. This leads to difficulty at times in trying to make out what exactly is meant but as all three would point out, trying to specify meaning is part of the problem we and our world have gotten into.

   D&G would say: ‘Why do we always have to insist that everything must actually mean something which then begs the issue as to what interpretation itself means and which form of interpretation should seek precedence over another (why on earth should there be precedence on interpretation anyway?).’ This would imply some form of hierarchical control being put in place to make people think and accept things one way rather than look and, more importantly, live life in as humanly a manner as possible – these are the incipient fascisms we must veer away from which we have failed to do time after time.

   The triangular and pyramidal patriarchal structure of interpretation of the world as represented by the Oedipal complex, among many others, pushes us to an unnecessarily and silly restrictive way of living. It is more a convenient mode of trying to limit entropy (which humans think they can do being primarily ego driven that is the basis for all control mania), and it is perpetuated by society and its elements of control (basically society as we know it abetted diligently by the mass media).

   Being driven to get what we want and need relentlessly is what makes us desiring machines. This is not to preclude any free will but that we are part of the flow of desire which we have invested in and used to shape a libidinal world, society and economy. But the fact that we get mired in fascist tendencies, incessant work, economic exploitation and political manipulation is not merely because it is imposed on us, but that we actually desire what comes to us.

   This is important: we may be desiring machines but we are not automatons devoid of choice. We do ask for what usually comes our way; we get what we rightly deserve. This again does not mean that there are no other desiring forces at work making things difficult for us, but that we often combine our libidinal energy with those forces and so create the world we are trapped/live in.   

   The term libidinal economy (LE) is used in such a variety of ways that is not easy to determine what it means at any one time. But it could be used to refer to an organic desire that is underwritten by our drives, wants, needs and attachments that can be seen as a system applied to various aspects of our life such as the economy or society; and in this sense it is a desiring machine.

   A desiring machine (DM) as used by D&G is an abstract machine and is imprecise in usage. One suspects that precision is not always what the two aim at for it may imply binding yourself down to something that must be defended at all costs through the ages: the kind of ideologies and strictures that the two are fighting against.

   So a DM would refer to a person (as an inchoate form, rather than ‘individual’) or object or system that is an agglomeration of desires/wants/needs or place holder for libidinal drives. It gives some form to that which is an energy flux. When we individualize this flux we call it ‘I’, ‘he’ or ‘she’ thereby investing it with an ego and the separateness that this entails. This is the start of wanting to assert control over things and being made into a unit that is subject to control.

When we take the energy of desiring machines into form of a human being we coalesce the basis of the human personality, or body without organs (BwO). Upon this form of human energy we have the transcription of codes of other energy forms that shape and influence us. This social energy field of ourselves is the socius. The latter has encodings from other energy flows and influences which are described as deterritorialized codings which are now encoded on the socius that in turn impinge upon us as BwOs.

   We are thus driven by wants and needs that develop and shape us into different forms or fields of energy depending on how various codes are activated. The societal energy codings and social transcriptions that are activated in us are like genetic codes and make us what we are as people and a society. Take a look at how D&G discuss things and try to unravel its essence (p33, Anti-Oedipus):

Capitalism does not confront the situation from the outside, since it experiences it as the very fabric of its existence, as both its primary determinant and its fundamental raw material, its form and its function, and deliberately perpetuates it, in all its violence, with all the powers at its command. Its sovereign production and repression can be achieved in no other way. Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labour in the form of the ‘free worker’. Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?

   There is a lot going on here. For starters, codings which release a certain energy push people in a certain direction. For instance, a society that activates its circuitry via money-capital is one that has its ethos shaped by money creation, its perceived value and its exchange function. That entire society and most of its people will think and live according to the dictates and issues surrounding the use of money. Everything will be shaped by it.

   Similarly, the idea of the ‘worker as a free agent’ or the basic component of labour will be seen as a decoded flow on society (or a code that has been activated) and will shape lives according to that pattern. These are essentially individual thought and societal thought patterns that make a society what it is. So a society will be living along the lines of a work cycle and schedule around which daily existence operates and is influenced deeply by. 

   So according to D&G this is how capitalism plays itself out within this context. Capitalism in itself has no codings but is a synthesis in a way of both the money-capital and labour/‘free worker’ codings which it in turn unleashes on the socius the money-capital energy with a vengeance as the idea of labour is intrinsically tied to that of money-capital (production). This process of unleashing the money code further leads to a decoding/deterritorial activity that denudes the socius into the basic form of the human energy template or BwO (body without organs). The socius that is acting as the BwO is not the actual BwO and the person gets confusing signals that the worn out/denuded or deterritorialized socius is who they are in essence.

   In this sense, capitalism produces a form of schizophrenia. The person is split between realizing themselves as capitalist being and social form and as a human energy or essence. This tension and strain between an authentic self (BwO) and what is projected and falsified as ourselves (our capitalist/money circuited social beings) is in a way the source of so much of our mental, emotional and spiritual anxiety and imbalance that also manifests itself as physical ailments and all that is unhealthy in our lives and our world.

   What does this mean in concrete terms? Take an ordinary guy, Joe, who is middle class and takes on a part-time job as well to help make ends meet. His wife also works part-time when she can managing their two kids at the same time. His whole life and how he relates to his family and work is relegated to operating within the capitalist codes prefigured by money circuitry.

   So other than romance, his motivations to marry (or not) and have a family would include:

a.       cost of marriage and having a family

b.      cost of owning a home and paying off mortgage

c.       basic cost of having child/children (food and clothing)

d.      medical for kids when required

e.       schooling costs for kids

f.       entertainment costs for family

g.      in-laws and extended family related costs

h.      income taxes and hidden taxes that weaken income earned (e.g. inflation)

i.        cost of hi-tech gizmos which kids yearn for these days/miscellaneous stuff    

This money circuitry determines how people relate to each other, as it is also factored in some cases for pre-nuptials and divorces and all the costs those entail. The social cycle of a human being is hardly that of a ‘free agent’ but a labour unit conditioned from birth to death by money circuitry. When you die there are still taxes and other costs that may have to be settled. You are not a free person as such, but a type of ‘flexed out digit’ within the money circuit.

   This in turn inscribes on the socius or social form of Joe his ‘reality’ as he lives it. This so completely overwhelms him and his life that he comes to believe that all there is to himself and his world is the socius or his socially money circuited form. When his entire work life, daily grind decisions and tattered conscience becomes the substitute for his human energy essence, he lives his life as if his socius is his BwO.

   It is the tension between his human essence as BwO and his socius that produces so much of the suffering and dysfunctional nature of his life. The capitalist circuitry creates his schizophrenia in this sense. He has to choose between buying a toy his child really wants, and his budget; a school his child should go to and his budget; the medical attention his family needs and his budget; an outing with his friends and his budget. Every thing the normal person does is influenced largely by his budgetary constraints.

   This in turn impinges on the essence of who he truly is which tends to resonate with spiritual aspects of himself. Here D&G are schizoid themselves for they reach for a solution beyond three dimensions yet are quick to keep them within materialist limitations: they want to have their cake, eat it and insist that they did not try to eat it.

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Dear Friends

Have set up a site for ideas from thinkers, philosophers and activists on a post-capitalist world.

It is at: Philosophers for change

Peace be with you

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For the small group of readers of this blog, in case you may've been wondering, this has been a year of personal tragedy. Notwithstanding, I am grateful for the difficult but important spiritual lessons arising from this. This has also stopped in its tracks a project begun sometime last year which was meant to culminate in a book of sorts.

Rather than confine into obscurity some of the interviews that came about for this project, I've decided to put them here. This is an unfinished and perhaps never ending project. But I thank all those who gave me their time and shared their views: and to you all I do apologise that your effort is not being given a larger audience.

The people interviewed are at least a year or so older now.

Below is the draft preface I had in mind of which an extract is posted.

A few years ago when visiting and staying with friends in Vancouver, Canada, I underwent an epiphany. I remember looking at the lovely view of English Bay, the mountains and downtown Vancouver all in one sweep from a penthouse view of a friend. As I was planning my day and the walk I would take across Granville Bridge to the downtown area and further on to visit some second hand bookshops, I recalled that if I were to traverse even further down I would be at the East End.

Part of the East End, which is next to Tinseltown cinema multiplex and Chinatown, was a very different side of the city. There not only will you find poverty but drug addicts shooting up openly in alleys in daylight. I remember once even seeing inert bodies lying in the middle of unclean streets which would over qualify for an archetypical movie setting for seediness. Police cars would drive by oblivious of the junkies and those peddling their addictive wares. The cops would not even stop to take a closer look at the bodies lying still in some streets to see if they had any life left in them.

I asked my friends what they thought of the remarkable contrast of the wonderful city and beautiful country they lived in with the inexplicable mess in the East Side -- this included mentioning to them the drug related violence in other parts of the city.

Most of the time my friends would give the answer that the reasons why this deplorable state existed was due to poverty in some instances and ‘wrong choices’ as the obverse side of ‘freedom’ in their land. Corruption among officials was also quoted as a perennial problem which also haunts so many other societies.

But let me give some more context to all this.

In 2006, I had dropped out of the System in the sense that I was not fully employed and had to live on a tight budget. This was not my first experience of such living but I did not realize that the economic hardship the world is facing was going to see so many others placed not only involuntarily in my position, but living on an even tighter budget.

In 2006 and 2007 I was on an extended meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery in British Columbia, Canada. After the retreats I continued my stay there with friends before returning home to Singapore. The retreats were in a forested area where we lived off the grid but comfortable enough for most lay people to be able to adjust to. You did have to be sensitive to not frightening the lovely deers around the area and be cautious about running into bears, grizzlies too. I remember running into a couple of large grizzlies and standing perfectly still while recalling all the spiritual teachings I knew to stay calm as I was all alone on an afternoon walk in the woods. But on seeing a human, it was the grizzlies who turned tail and ran (they can really run, don't be fooled by the size).

Minutes later, I found empty bullet shells along the pathway I was on: some hunters must have been busy doing great PR work for humanity.

Later in 2007, I visited Sri Lanka when Colombo was in a near state of emergency with the then ongoing ethnic violence holding the island in its grip. With all the soldiers and armaments around in a quasi siege like atmosphere, I understood clearly why much of Nature has suffered at the hands of mankind. At that time I was also staying at a Buddhist monastery but was not on a retreat as such. I was taken to view a meditation centre that was being built in a beautiful hilly tea growing area and which I was supposed to live at as a coordinator of retreats in the near future.

This unfortunately did not work out in part due to funding problems for the meditation centre that delayed its construction and other issues that cropped up of a more bureaucratic nature that proved to be one obstacle too many. It is still being constructed.

Then in late 2008, I was on my third extended retreat this time in England. After the retreat I stayed with some family members who were residing in the suburbs of London. During the period of 2008 and 2009, due to certain experiences and some books that fell into my hands, I was propelled towards  many things including the project that has now led me to write these words.

...Some of the books that launched me towards my current project included Karl Marx’s Das Capital, Friedrich Engel’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, The Jungle (the unexpurgated version) by Upton Sinclair, Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries (and his other major works), James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South, and William T. Vollmann’s Poor People to name the ones that come easily to mind.

...We have to see the people around us as our sisters and brothers and understand that we are all part of the collective consciousness of the planet. This means that no one who is underprivileged or living in poverty, even if it seems that they do so out of the choices they have made, should be left alone to bear the consequences and not receive any help.

We are truly indeed one another’s keepers and we should come up with new ideas to issue in a new paradigm of creating and measuring growth and move away from the browbeaten capitalist mode of competition at all cost, and greed over human dignity. We need to centre within our beings care for the planet, our environment, all living species and, above all, place the highest value on human beings over grasping for money.

The voices represented here are based on interviews with some people whom I know and those whom I do not. In many instances, I have let the people speak for themselves and that will be their way of directly communicating with you. They are speaking, in some cases, with much more thought put in than they would in a casual interview by someone who is just performing a journalistic function.

Not all those interviewed were comfortable in communicating entirely in English, but they managed what they could and I re-checked with them what they said before writing it up as quickly as possible on the same day I spoke to them from my usually verbatim notes.

Three basic questions were asked of all I interviewed and spoke to:

What is your idea of being poor?

What is your idea of abundance?

Why are people poor/What is poverty?

...Those who were not comfortable in English mainly responded to the last questions and as the dialogue went on I clarified what they said and they responded in their own way to the first two questions as well.

I had not read Studs Terkel when I thought of this project and began it, but was pleasantly surprised and impressed by the wonderful work he did as I started to read (among others while finishing my project) -- Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, and Working (people talking about their work).

The biggest influence on me probably came from sections of Marx’s Das Capital: Volume One, and the books by Engels, Mayhew, Orwell and London. I had studied formally philosophy and political theory as an undergraduate and over the years kept up with my reading. In graduate school I was steeped in literary theory and aesthetics. But only in recent times did I re-read many works I had studied and then some as the scales finally fell from my eyes.

The second part of this book looks at possible economic models that can be used for firms or enterprises of all sizes. There needs to be a move away from the way most businesses are run. In particular, we need to move away from how mega corporations are run with their obsession in serving profits and shareholders at the expense of the rest of the planet.

The time has come for this to change radically.

And so,

Madam Sawami (Aged 64, road sweeper, unable to retain her job after reaching 65. She has since been looking for work and I have no idea if she has been successful):

"I can work only now till 67 years old. So three more years. I want to be by myself. I want independence. My children and I, problems, cannot get along. I have my own problems don’t want to hear what their problems with their husband or wife. Then I must hear their wife’s problems also.

I want flat of my own, single room. I ask the HDB (Housing Development Board, Singapore) to help me and they say – you can wait, we have to help plenty people with no house living now on the beach. You have problem, they also have problem. What kind of help, this? Why can’t government help me? I have done nothing wrong, but government can’t help me in this, just to get a single room flat for myself.

What I earn, only $1000 one month…so I can pay installment say less than $100 a month, but please don’t take away $500 a month from me for a single room flat.

As long as I can work, help myself, have enough to eat, I am happy -- no one else will help, so I must help myself.

Now, I am alone. My children all forget what I do for them when young all, now see, I am on my own.

Can you help me with my house problem, I don’t know who [to] ask…HDB don’t want to help."

Mr Lam (Aged 62, food stall holder at a small hawker centre from which he rented his stall. The stall closed down as it was bought over by someone who has since set up a snazzy restaurant. No idea if he has since found another place to sell food):

"I come from a poor family. Many children, I am one of the eldest. My parents had a small stationery shop, and we managed, all of us. Now, my wife and me work at this food stall. We are not rich, if I can earn say $1,500 month I am happy, it is enough. We manage.

People who are rich -- say they earn $4,500 to $5,000 or much more…are they happy? Money is one thing, happiness something else. As the eldest in my family and myself, we had to be the bread winners to help my parents and sisters and brothers.

My family have the old Chinese thinking, the older ones sacrifice education all to support the younger ones. So my education highest – secondary 2…what to do. My English not so good, but I learn on my own by using English language tapes when I was 30 years old. I worked many things, like taxi driver and clerk in office. I also try to improve my English by speaking to those with good English, environment important to learn and practice language.

Because of my and my older brothers sacrifice, my younger sisters and brothers well educated. One of my brothers just retired as a teacher, he went to university. My daughter also is fine, she is working.

English is very important, the main business language. I think the government policy is correct, importance for English and own language or second language. Must balance with language for your own culture. But English is important. Now people can learn Japanese and French in school. Other languages very important. My younger sister learn Japanese at a language school and now she works in a Japanese company.

We were poor, but what is important is good family, happiness and health. Don’t always think of money, money, money! This rich people what happiness they have? If you are rich and happy, good for you. But most of them not like that. Everyday worry, cannot sleep, always thinking about how the business good, can make it, can make more money…all the problems of business…no peace of mind. So what if you have so much money?

Some people become poor because they don’t know how to save. They spend all the time, they want nice house, car, everything. Then when employment difficult, cannot get job, how? Cannot pay installments, become financial problems. You look at the young, they only want to have good time, spend, sports car, but never think of future, no savings. Then one day, if they cannot find work, what to do?

Some become poor because they gamble, throw away money. They think they will always be young or healthy and have a job. They don’t save. Gamble, then they lose all the money, so what to do?

The future cannot tell, cannot predict, better not to waste money and think no problems one day.

Also, I think sometimes people are poor, like in many very poor countries…because of karma. Their past life, many, many years ago, something they did, now they have to pay back. Hopefully after this life, it will be better for them.

Rich people should be generous, help the poor with donations, charity, not just here but help them in other countries also. What for keep all the money and don’t share? You cannot take with you when you leave [die], so why keep and don’t want to give?

The rich cannot enjoy life sometimes, they are so busy, so busy with time and making money. No time for family, loved ones, children…what kind of life? Even those who are top people like government, the ministers, no privacy? What kind of family life can they have, always their time is for someone else…their time and appointments all planned for them…what kind of freedom do they have?

I think I have enough, if I retire now still can survive. One of my customers who is rich and live in expensive condominium. He is 70 years old, and his wife is paralysed waist down and is in a wheelchair. He has two sons, both rich. None of them have time for him and his wife…they call on the mobile phone to find out…but too busy making money. They don’t care about their parents. So what for all this money?

When this old man tell me the story, he cry, the tears in his face as he tell me what his children are like. He and the wife are so lonely."

Ruwan (Aged 29, foreign worker, caregiver from Sri Lanka. Due to workplace exploitation and problems he returned home and his current situation is not known):

"People are poor because they sometimes are lazy. Not always because others at fault. They sometimes don’t know how to manage life. They throw money away and waste on things like drinking and women. Sometimes it is government’s fault why people poor. Government also don’t manage properly the country then whole country can be poor.

But to me, man is poor because it is own fault. Son from a poor family can actually do well if he studies hard in school and all, but also rich man’s son doesn’t do well because he is lazy and doesn’t want to work hard. What is important is the effort you want to have in things.

Sometimes religion can help explain all this. Like in Buddhism we are told life is dukkha, lot of suffering. So also karma is also responsible for our life. But during time of Buddha we are told there was lot of evil in world. Also people have different belief like worshipping the stone and water and all. But today, to me, also the same. When we pray to the statue we are praying to a stone or we belief in luck and things.

People the same even today from Buddha’s time till now. Now also we worship trees, water and earth. But this is not always a bad thing, sometimes this because we show respect for all around us. Nothing wrong with that. We are just grateful. Just as children who respect to parents or we show respect to our rice and food and drinking water, like in Sri Lanka, it is just a good habit.

Also, we can choose what we do, so not always karma to blame. We can choose to good or evil, we are responsible for choosing, so we are responsible also our life.

Money is important but it is not the most important. I think most important is happiness. If you’re not happy what for money? Most important is happiness to enjoy life but not waste time, meaning spend time to be happy with family and friends. That is what is important.

Nowadays when people supposed to smarter than animals, actually no difference. They are same. So much killing people do, they are not so clever. Why must there be so much killing?

In Singapore, people think money is number one. Everything is about money. People here are well to do, lot of money, money needed for everything here but parents no time for children. They put their time in money not the children. Main thing here is material things.

Children here always with maid, no parents spending time with them. So just as parents put children in nurseries because they no time for them, now children also put parents in nursing home because they also no time for them…all busy earning money.

Millionaire is not happy. He has worries like who will steal his money and property. Who can he trust? Will he loose all he have. Cannot sleep, no peace of mind. Poor man can sleep, if he has just enough for family he is okay…he doesn’t have so much problems and worry. No worry about who is going to rob him.

I see that in Singapore, it is like a car. Everything supposed to work well, very efficient, like car put in petrol make sure engine working then all is fine. But people here have no life. They are not happy, they have no time for family and friends.

My working place is a nursing home. Next to me is a child nursery. So I can see everyday what happens. They parents come and put the child in the nursery. Kids crying when hungry for mothers milk, but they get other milk not from humans. The cow is their mother because that is the only milk they get.

So I notice, parents come and put children in nursery then when children grow up they put parents in nursing home. I see and understand this for I experience this everyday. Singapore clients of my nursing home say what to do, they have to work to earn living and no choice but to put parents in home. They say in Singapore without money you cannot live, nothing you can do.

The parents have no time for children, and one day the children also no time for parents.'

"What does being poor mean? I think if your parents cannot provide for you, then you’re poor. If you’re grown up and cannot provide for yourself, or don’t want to, then it is because you’re lazy – so again you’re poor. If you don’t want to be poor, then you must be hardworking and provide for yourself.

A lot depends on your capability and that also depends on your education level. If you grow up without much education then you are stuck with a low paying job. No education, no high paying job. Or you just have a mediocre job.

My education is ‘O’ Levels and I am trying to upgrade myself. You must upgrade and work for it, otherwise you only can blame yourself. I have two jobs, in the day time I help out here at the coffee stall next to this market. Evening time I work as a retail supervisor at a supermarket. That is the only way I can save and have enough.

With what I can earn I provide for my parents and am saving to get married and try to own my own home. Actually in Singapore you can get jobs, that’s not the problem. It is the need for money always. The cost of housing here is high. In the long run, your property is your investment, but to try to own one – maybe 30-40 years to pay the loan to just own your roof over your head. Then the interest for the loan will kill you. Trying to settle down here is hard. You have to remember you have to feed your family.

Religion to me helps in providing knowledge about the world and your life, I mean, it’s up to each person whether they want to follow what the religion says. But you must help yourself first. If you’re lazy and don’t want to help yourself, why should God help you? You help yourself, then God will help.

I think there are people who want to help those who are poor, but also a lot of wayang [Malay word implying 'theatrics'] taking place, making a big show trying to attract attention to themselves, like the charities here – the big ones – they make a big show. Also groups or companies, like that who donate want attention only just advertise themselves and promote themselves. If you’re genuine you just give, if you give don’t make a big show and all the publicity. They just want brand recognition.

I think if we have problems in Singapore, realistically speaking, most people won’t help each other. I read a lot of books on World War Two, you see what human nature is like, here or anywhere else. People tend to be selfish, they rather not help others. Focus on the individual only.

In this world you need money. To me if you have no money then you have no happiness. Money needed for everything. It can’t be avoided. The coffee and tea cups I clean up on these tables, you can drink from what is left over from them if you don’t want to pay for it. But then, someone already had to pay for it before you can drink the remainder in the glasses. Again, you need money to have anything.

In the end you must help yourself, you must be hard working and that also depends on your health. We need self responsibility in everything.

My father’s advice to me is bear your own suffering but don’t let others suffer because of you.'

Sam (Aged 63, barber):

"I have been barber since 1966. People are poor because sometimes they don’t want to work hard. You have choice, you can try and do your best or just give up. Work enough so that you at least have enough to eat. Some people are lazy, but they think they can get high paying job and also easy job. Younger generation now, some just don’t want to work, many don’t want to be barbers.

Some who are poor now actually only want to enjoy life, they spend money on woman and throw away money. No savings for rainy day. If I earn say $50 one day and spend $10 or $20 that day, the rest I save. Must save for old age. Don’t rely on government for everything, government here helps but in the end, you must help yourself.

Some younger ones today, no ambition, they see their father is a postman they follow him, don’t want to try and go beyond. They should study hard and upgrade and move up a little, but don’t want. In Singapore, if you cannot study well, hard to get good job. Here you must try to enter university then at least can earn $3 000-5 000 a month otherwise, how?

In Singapore you must pay for everything. Here there’s no large land area where you can have rice or things, if you cannot earn money then how to survive here? Government helps but again they cannot just give welfare always, we must also help our self. How else to pay for your food, housing and all.

To me health is important. No health you cannot work to earn money. You have money and no health, what for? No point. If you have health, not much money, still okay, can work.

One thing government here helps old people, at least the health and hospital care, they give some assistance to the aged. That’s a good thing.

Also we must respect all religions. Must have tolerance, and we must respect one another and not disturb each others belief. Again in Singapore, people do show tolerance of different religions. We should treat all people fairly, like our brothers, all are our family.

[At this point an Indonesia lady who is a foreign worker here and a friend of Sam’s family and came to visit them asked in Bahasa what the interview was about. She then added her views stating that in Indonesia and in Singapore only the poor help one another. She claimed the rich drive by and look down on the poor and blame the poor for what they are, not understanding that sometimes they can help. She then departed and the interview continued with Sam.]

Yes, I think all is a matter of attitude. Sometimes the rich here don’t want to help. They see poor people as different and separate from them. Must change the attitude. You find that people who have little to give are the ones who want to give, not always those who have plenty. We need more responsibility and kindness in our society. Not enough of it. [He used the Malay term timbang-rasa which means 'sympathy']

Have seen people in accidents and hardly the rich ones stop to help, the ordinary people seem to help mainly. But you must help, we must support each other.

Must be humble, not proud. That’s why I try to make my customers happy. I listen to them and do my best and try to provide service. In the work place must be professional, never mind what kind of work, must be the best, do your best. Younger people the attitude is different, they show they are unhappy and don’t know how to treat customers. That’s why I say, attitude is most important.

Also can’t blame God for everything. We have free choice, God gives us intelligence as humans so must think first, must think before doing things. Singapore now has some floods but actually in this case no point blaming government because it is act of God. But also there are poor people no homes have to stay on the beach. This is also wake up call for government to do more for those people who need some help.

I worry about bringing gambling into Singapore like casinos. People become greedy and try cheat and nothing good can happen from this. You know, I have one customer who works in the security of one of the casinos. He told me that in one day they catch usually 30 people – 30 people, you know – for cheating or trying to cheat. Foreigners and Singaporeans.

People do anything sometimes for money."

Anon. (Aged24, university student who has since graduated):

"1. What is your idea of poverty?

Poverty is entirely thought based for me as with everything else. I can be materially rich, but very very poor inside if I'm stingy, greedy, unhappy, etc. Likewise, I can be poor materially, but if my thoughts are calm and I can find happiness -> I'm rich. And sooner rather than later, my world will change to represent that abundance.

2. What is your idea of abundance?

Abundance is also a mindset to me. First in the mind then in matter. It is an attitude of gratitude, etc, etc, etc. That leads to a wonderful life affirming philosophy regardless of the pain that life can bring. Pain is necessary but that does not mean suffering is.

3. Why are people poor/why is there poverty?

This is very complex. I cannot understand sometimes why there is suffering and such debilitating poverty in Africa, South America or even in Singapore with the cardboard mattress 'uncles and aunties' [references to elderly people]. As in life can really be a very very painful sad experience for many people.

Some of poverty is created because of institutions which destroy our birthright to abundance and freedom and prevent information from being made public (that would eventually release our reliance on many things), but also some poverty is individual, just individual laziness, over reliance on governmental subsidies/or external care/support from children/parents, and leeching off of others' work. It's a human problem at the end of the day. And we do create the institutions that are reflective of our human flaws. Until we evolve out of our ugliness, poverty and suffering will continue to exist in this world."

Anon. (Aged 58, hotelier, now retired):

“1. What is your idea of poverty? Poverty in my eyes, is when someone does not have a roof over his/her or their head, hardly a job, no utilities whatsoever like electricity and water, unable to have access to decent medical facilities, barely have one meal a day, unable to send their children to school etc.

2. What is your idea of abundance?

Lavish and luxurious living, wastage and use of spending in a vulgar fashion; what I mean is - there is no harm in being rich and able to afford every materialistic need that is considered essential in such an instance. But to waste on lavish parties unnecessarily, (again, not my business) but it is sad to see such living, when the less fortunate can benefit from some of these monies. Perception of "Abundance" could be seen in different ways. In my life, I would pray for good health, and perhaps, my life may seem in abundance to some or of those less fortunate than myself. Abundance is where one does not need to crave for anything else, or have any more wants in life, e.g. a healthy bank account balance, travel frequently with enough expense money, good medical benefits, own luxury vehicles, homes which is evident in most cities in any country. There is so much more that could be added on to what is my idea of abundance.

3. Why are people poor/why is there poverty?

Could be born poor, lazy with no vision or ambition to improve this situation? See how people beg on the streets, when they could easily work in a house as a housemaid, houseboy etc. Just do any kind of work rather than beg!

(I have been a hotelier for 30 years, besides being a sister, sister-in-law, housewife, mother, grandmother, and being a citizen of a country which has an average standard of living...worked hard to do what may be seen as abundance in the eyes of some).”

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Francis X. (Aged 46, lawyer)

"My response is as follows:

1. A lack of quality moments in life (moments of connection, gratitude, love and joy - especially when being of service).

2. Plenty of quality moments.

3. Being spiritually lost; out of touch with their hearts and the inner guide/voice of God. People are struck by poverty when they deny their heart and lose their way to themselves. One sure sign of this is boredom. So one ends up being poor in the midst of material plenty."

Also a student & practitioner of Ayurveda (Science of the Spirit) and Anthroposophy (Spiritual Science) since early 1990s. And full-time Volunteer for Nature since 1994."

"My idea of Poverty :

There are two kinds of Poverty. ONE is the obvious poverty of not having the basics of living.

The Basics (traditionally) are: Food, Shelter and Clothing.

In today’s urban societies, I would define the basics as having --

a) Enough money to buy raw food that one can prepare oneself at home for breakfast and dinner. And sufficient money to buy oneself a meal at a hawker centre. Also sufficient money for public transport (bus, mass rapid transport).

b) A place to live that is the equivalent in comfort to a 2 room HDB (Housing Development Board) flat for one to two persons and a 3 room HDB for a family.

c) Clothing: I think that even the poorest among us now have more clothes than they need. However, in temperate countries where temperatures plunge in winter, the poor do not have sufficient warm clothing – especially if they cannot afford heating or are living on the streets.

Every one, in any society, deserves to have their basic needs met.

TWO – The second type of Poverty (which is much more commonplace in ruthlessly capitalistic meritocratic societies like Singapore) is what I would call a ‘Poverty MINDSET’.

This is a mindset that believes that one never has enough. If one owns a 5 room HDB, then one aspires to own a private condominium with swimming pool . For the condo dweller, he/she aspires to upgrade to a bungalow in an ‘exclusive’ district or to own two condos etc etc…

People with ‘poverty mindsets’ are continuously envying others and striving to have more money; to have bigger, better, fancier, more exclusive cars, homes, club memberships, credit cards, jewellery etc.

Their children have to be smarter, go to more exclusive kindergartens/schools/colleges etc…they aspire to holiday in far-away exclusive resorts…

Such people are morally and spiritually bankrupt…and they gravitate like sheep to evangelical religious leaders who preach what is now called ‘Prosperity Gospel’ ….so SAD!

The award-winning movie – Singapore Dreaming captures the collective ‘yearnings’ of 90+% of Singaporeans, all caught in this ‘poverty mindtrap’ .

My Idea of Abundance –

Ah, abundance is Contentment with one’s lot in life…

One may be materially ‘poor’ by the standards of those with a ‘poverty mindset', but the person who is at Peace with himself/herself, who finds purpose and fulfillment in what he/she does everyday, who has little material ‘desires’ and has many friends (and no enemies) and has a big happy family and who is thankful and feels Blessed by the Universe (or God) …that person lives a life of ‘abundance.’

* I have far less than my peers who are all graduates and retired much later than I. (I own no house, no car) as I became economically ‘unproductive' since 1994 when I went to live in Darwin [Australia] with my husband Richard. I was in my late 40s. However, I feel blessed with abundance (good health since I turned vegetarian in 1995/96 and started daily qigong, and now Homa Therapy) and have just applied to live in Malaysia [where she sometimes resides], building an eco-cottage in Tanjung Sutera family resort and creating an eco food garden there and putting in eco technologies. I am putting my money into leasing land and buying seeds and planting and teaching all to 'Balik Kampung' for natural drug-free health and happiness.

Why are People Poor?/Why is there Poverty?

If you ask the PAP (People's Action Party) government they will assert that the ‘poor’ in Singapore are only a handful and public assistance is there to help them. I totally disagree as there are many (I do not know the numbers, various NGO aid agencies may be able to help, I have lost touch although I was the founding vice chairperson of The Breadline Group in 1976 when I was a journalist – but I know from the current chairperson that the numbers of poor, sick, destitute applying for Breadline group ‘financial aid’ in addition to public assistance is on the up and up).

Morever, since I returned to live in Singapore (after my Australian husband unexpectedly passed away in 2004) and decided that for various reasons: a) going green & walking my talk b) I would have to return to ‘work’ to support my ‘car’,

I have been using buses, MRT and taxis and talk to people in buses and taxi drivers.

I learned for example from Aida, a Malay woman whom I started a conversation with on a bus, that she is a toilet cleaner. I was so surprised that this slim, neatly dressed woman who spoke such good English should be cleaning toilets (for a police station).

“I thought you were a librarian," I said. Curious, I asked her age and she answered, “Well I am 50+”

“But what did you do when you were younger," I asked.

“Well, I was a salesgirl for a cosmetic company,” and she shared that she used to earn “$1,300/-+ in those days, 30 years ago which was big money to a young single girl” but Aida now earns $700.

So, with an ever-growing younger and better educated workforce, plus the continuous ‘flooding-in’ of foreign workers (who can afford to the lower pay because their other living expenses are met by their employer, even if they have to cramp four to a room) the Aidas of our society, with their families to feed, will just get poorer and poorer.

Take the case of the poor Malay man who was crushed to death by the boom of the tree-pruning truck just a week ago. His death revealed that this 50 year-old Singaporean was earning only about $300/- a month and supporting a wife and four young men/boys (one on dialysis, another in hospital for depression and a third a slow learner). IF this poor man had not died, would we have known of the family’s plight ?

He and Aida would just be mere negligible statistics in our GDP or GNP records.

Now, why is there a rampant Poverty Mindset in Singapore, even among those who, by the homes they live in, cars they drive should be happily enjoying a comfortable middle-class lifestyle?

This is because in a Consumer-driven, competitively ruthless Capitalist society that we have become over the past 30 years. People at all levels feel driven (almost a mass neurosis, amounting to hysteria when their child can’t get into a particular school) to have more and more and more of everything – to buy and buy, to spend and spend, to show and show-off….

The Core Values that are being promoted: Greed is Good, it makes us competitive (better than our neighbour next door, better than our neighbouring countries), a shallow consumer-driven culture of Eating and Shopping only reveals how pathetic a society we have become…how impoverished we have become in the things that really matter – and that is a life well and truly lived not for Self and narrow nationalistic bounderies but seeing All as ONE on Mother Earth, one with all…..the animals, plants, insects, even minerals."

Jayne Tang (In her 30s, dancer):

"1. What is your idea of poverty?

• My idea of poverty is when one is constantly in fear of --"Not Having Enough"....no matter how much they have or being blessed with.

• Do not live consciously enough to be feeling blessed and being in joy of WHAT IS...e.g. Addicted to making money for the wrong reasons.

• Afraid of tossing out old ideas, stuff, things, concepts, belief systems or things or even people/loved ones that were non-supportive anymore....(so mostly become a hoarder of life...with anything they can find or be attached to....always fearing of loosing something to someone or situation/circumstances...).

• Afraid of success...cannot handle the pressure/challenges of what Successes will take...(as success brings chaos and changes...)

  2.  What is your idea of abundance?

• Knowing with deep trust that we are always being provided and blessed no-matter-what the situation of our life looks like....

• Living life without guilt and regrets...and feeling the fullness of what life can give us...

• Every situation, person, things or circumstances is/are, a gift /opportunity to transform our life for higher growth & expansion...in manifesting abundance emotionally, mentally and physically....

• Feeling blessed with most things in our life and staying in joyfulness as much as possible no matter what...that's abundance!! Cause it is all there is...it's how our perspectives of seeing in things with light & colour of abundance...like the Beautiful Sky that gives us protection from the Sun, the Trees that gives us shade...the River that flows to irrigate plants and animals to drink from it...

• Good peers, friends and associates that care for us and are always there for us, when we need them...

• Above all else, we all have abundance within us...like love, joy, peace and blissfulness....

1. Why are people poor/why is there poverty?

• Because we are afraid of deserving and being WHO WE REALLY ARE, in-terms of receiving the best of best, could be the old conditioning of our poverty consciousness from many many many generations, where our Great GrandParents/GrandParents/Parents are afraid of "Not Having Enough" or "Success"...

• It is our subconscious mind that is fearful of handling great wealth, success, great health, beauty...that we are all conditioned to take a hard way/suffering methods to achieve and receive...so we spin in a circle of poverty.

• It's our individual or collective fear that if one gets rich, another will be poor...so we rather stick to being poor mentally and that no one gets rich at all (have self sabotage all the time, in pulling ourselves down, so that we don't have to shine through or be brilliant as who we really are meant to be as in 'bigger' or wealthier, it's the FEAR OF SUCCESS that is keeping people poor...therefore there is poverty. It's also a reflection of a big part of us that we are still wanting poverty as a comfort zone in this world...or a very familiar space that has been around for eons. Whereas wealth & richness is unfamiliar and causes discomfort.)...or the deep jealousy of the rich, that the poor rather stay poor. (There are many root causes to the poverty mentality, but mainly the FEAR OF SUCCESS is the biggest culprit).

• Then of course, there is the other side of the story, where the Rich also keep taking advantage of the poor where they have less power to counter-react in time & space...so there is an enormous amount of imbalance or 'victimisation' of the poor where the resentment builds up over time and blows up into violence or warfare. Then the injustice comes also where the poor will keep justifying their poverty situation and calling up for help."

Ong Wooi-Hsen (Aged 43, lecturer):

"1. What is your idea of poverty?

Most people might look at this strictly from the material plane only and I believe that for some, it might be a real bread and butter issue or what Don William's might call 'the rising costs of getting by'. It is however interesting to note from two previous reports in The Straits Times in separate articles over the past three years or so when the 'happiness index' of peoples of the world is measured. It appears that North East Thailand and Bhutan have the happiest people in the world. I suspect that their isolation and the fact that they have less access to the modern material culture saves them (to some extent) the 'unlimited wants' of the modern economic man.

I'd like to extend the definition of 'poverty' to include any resource that limits a person's development in his community. Outside of spirituality in the religious context, this could include values like 'diligence', 'responsibility', 'respect', 'love' etc. Poverty could also be in the lack of skills that will disenable a person to perform effectively as a contributing member of his community.

2. What is your idea of abundance?

Abundance to me means the wealth of resouces available to an individual as he lives his life. It does not merely refer to the material wealth that some are born with or acquire. This is because material possessions and the need to acquire them is closely related to our needs and wants. Hunters and gatherers have traditionally been called 'the original affluent societies' as all the means to their access for their needs are available around them with each adult tribal member being quite self-sufficient in acquiring his needs. During times of famine, tribes break up into smaller teams or even individually to forage over larger areas to enhance the carrying capacity of the land.

The modern economic man is a victim of the division of labour in a largely artificial built-up environment. Our survival is much dependent now on school certificates, the ability to make money in a good job to enjoy the creature comforts and products created by another group of people. It is a potentially risky situation as we cannot find or manufacture these products on our own. Any breakdown in the system means the deprivation of access to that product which is deemed increasingly not a want but a need (e.g. electrionic goods).

3. Why are people poor/why is there poverty? At the strictly material level, this is the result of an unfavourable distribution of resources. Many rich nations would rather destroy their bountiful output (to keep prices competitive) than to send over the extra agricultural output to poorer nations. This makes good economic sense but it means others will be deprived and they will starve to death. There are theories that suggest that for survival of the species, we should not help the starving millions. They are just not meant to survive. Helping them survive means making a local problem become a regional and global one.

Another school of thought (backed by some formulae) suggests pessimistically that the carryiing capacity of the earth was exceeded in 1985 which means that we are living on borrowed time (as a species).

At the non-material level, poverty is a perceived notion. Henry Thoreau's experience at Walden suggests that man can subsist on quite minimal resources. While I am not promoting the extreme experience of Thoreau, I believe that Toffler's 'throw-away society' is very much a way of life for most people living in an urban environment. We can certainly consume less and generate less waste.

Sometimes, we live in poverty because we get caught up in the material culture. Sadly, we often forget that we have a choice between having a $500 wallet with $5 inside and having a $5 wallet with $500 inside. It is our human condition that we must examine our lives and acquire skills and values that will contribute in some way to meaning in our lives. Otherwise, we remain trapped in our material as well as non-material prison.

Personally, I live well. I have almost everything that I want and I continue to upgrade my life in material and non-material ways. I am mindful not to generate waste. I recycle and make use of what other people throw away (quite tastefully, I've been told). More affluent peers have asked how I manage in real surprise and I am lost for an answer. I have always thought that I was almost thriving in this urban jungle. I speak with everyone (rich or poor, powerful or desperate) as everyone has their story like I have mine. I work hard to acquire skills to be an effective contributing member of my community. As a gardener, I understand delayed gratification in that it takes time to enjoy the fruits of my labour. In reality, even if fruiting escapes me, the journey would have been worth it. If I ever lose it all, I'll just start again. I have eighty years (God willing) to leave a legacy. I hope God grants me the wisdom towards action or inaction in my quest to leave an impactful legacy in this existence.

I write this not with arrogance but with a quiet understanding in my larger definition of wealth or poverty in relation to the human condition. I have been blessed and I am ever grateful for God's grace. That sums up for me that 'gratefulness' remains one of mankind's most underrated virtues."

Debby Ng (Aged 28, photojournalist):

"Poverty exists when people feel disempowered. I believe it is a state of mind. That notion may seem disillusioned and naive, but consider this: I met a girl (let's call her Sabina) in Nepal who had dropped out of school because her family could no longer afford it. She was the oldest amongst her three siblings, which meant that her two siblings would not have been able to go to school as well. Her father was an alcoholic, despite being the most educated in her family - he graduated from college. Her mother worked desperately as a janitor to keep things together, but things were falling apart. They didn't own a home. They were one family amongst millions in Nepal who were grappling with life.

Then, providence. Sabina's situation was picked up by a social worker working with a foundation that offered scholarships to underprivileged women. After an assessment, Sabina was accepted as a recipient of the scholarship. She was put into a school, but that wasn't it. Staff at the foundation didn't just give Sabina a scholarship, they became her mentors. They encouraged her to work hard, instilled belief in herself, nurtured her being and her soul, thus empowering her. Just as her world was falling apart, Sabina suddenly had hope. Quantitatively, she was by all definition, "in poverty", but qualitatively, she was enabled and empowered. She could once again, dream of a future. A future was possible, although the present was pathetic.

With her empowerment, Sabina brought her education home, educating her illiterate mom, and teaching her to read and write. She taught her sisters too. She also taught her educated father, encouraged him to give up alcoholism and work to support the family. Eight years on, the family that was about to live off the streets, now own a two story apartment in the outskirts of Kathmandu, renting out the lower level for income. Sabina is a nurse, her sister teaches at an elementary school, and her mother works as an administrator at a school. If you quantified their collective income, they might still be considered to be living in poverty on many scales, but to the family, they have achieved more than they ever dreamed of. They are not rich. They can't afford luxuries. They still have to be thrifty. But they are happy, they are at peace, and they can afford to dream.

I have met many families in Nepal with similar and perhaps, even more desperate stories.

Abundance is a simple concept to me. It is simply having more than you need. Take all the things you need to survive, anything more than that, is an abundance. Most people then, live in abundance. If we could perceive that, perhaps there would be less suffering. We need to want what we have. Whether tangible, or intangible.

Poverty or the state of being poor comes into being when an individual is convicted of this due either to internal or external affirmations - "I am poor", "You are poor". Which equates to, "I am powerless/hopeless", "You are powerless/hopeless". Many are born into poverty, and are told that they are poor and powerless. They can either accept and internalise that, or resist and challenge that. I have met girls like Sabina who have challenged that, but I've also met some who, despite being presented with the same opportunity as Sabina, have chosen to accept the opposite - that they are poor and will remain so. "There is no use for people like us to go to school. We will always be poor." We can point all the fingers we want - that the government is responsible, that the colonial masters are responsible, that irresponsible Western companies are responsible... go back far enough, and some germ gets blamed for splitting in two.

On the other end of the scale, I know a man who despite living in a above-average sized house in a large and prosperous city who believes he is poor, though his assets would not reflect the same. He can never have enough. When he has a family car, he wants a luxury car. He buys it on credit. He pays for expensive European holidays on credit. The list is endless. By appearances, this man is not living in poverty. But through living on credit, he thrives in a life he cannot afford. He has amassed a great deal of debt and cannot cope with paying them because he wants more still. I've heard him say "I am a poor man" but if he sold his house, he'd no longer be one. This man's situation has become so dire that he saves on meals to afford his holidays. He refuses to sell his house, because he feels that in doing so, his perception of "poverty" is manifested, as if a smaller house is evidence that he has indeed become poor. So he holds on to his credit line, and becomes poorer and poorer. We may know several people in similar situations, though in varying degrees. Where does his belief come from? Perhaps he was so indoctrinated by peers or parents when he was young; that symbols of success are attached to these material items and anything less is evidence of failure. He too probably perceives people in a "lesser situation" than himself to be "poor" and probably has a prejudice, which is why he would rather suffer this way then be associated with that demographic.

We have heard stories of many unique people who have risen from the poorest and most unlikely of situations, to become successful. Most of the time, we hear these stories and shrug them off. We say that "they were lucky", or "that's just one story, it won't happen to me." But some say, "if he or she can do it, why can't I?" Some of us are disempowered. Some of us are more empowered. Many of us are empowered, but fail to employ our powers. We indulge in selfish endeavours. We do not participate in the life of others because we feel disempowered to them. "I am just one person, what difference can I make?" Too many people believe that. But every once in awhile, someone steps up to the challenge, and lives a life that is engaged and of service.

Poverty is relative. In Western societies like Australia, the USA and New Zealand, people in poverty have a bed and a car. In Africa, they have no meals and no clothing. In Singapore, they have a one room apartment with no electricity. It exists because we are disconnected, and it will disappear when we become involved. But as populations increase, and resources become depleted, there is less or no incentive to become involved. Remaining disconnected is convenient and most of us are guilty of it. Paradoxically, as situations become increasingly dire, we will be forced to once again become involved.

The residents of Easter Island, were disconnected, and as a result, their civilization collapsed. Nations that have for so many years kept their borders closed to outsiders are opening up, connecting. Connecting creates opportunity, but can be dangerous if you do not have a firm clasp on your end of the tether.

We can wax lyrical about all of this. Some arguments will be better than others. So lets get out then, and start making some meaningful connections."

Ping Lau (Aged 43, free lance sculptor residing in the US):

"1. What is your idea of poverty?

Of course, not being able to afford basic necessities such as food, housing, an education, etc. but being 'culturally impoverished' would be my idea of poverty too. Was it some Persian poet who wrote; I forget who it was that, "If you are down to your last two pennies, buy bread with one and hyacinths with the other to feed your soul", or something to that effect. Not being able to attend opera, symphonies, art exhibitions, take walks in beautiful parks or grow a lovely garden 'to feed the soul' would be just as dreadful, if not worse to me as not being able to afford groceries.

2. What is your idea of abundance?

State funding for the arts and support for artists. When we can afford art for art's sake and creativity is able to soar without artists having to worry about earning enough for their next meal. When myself as a painter and sculptor will no longer have to work on little kitschy items for quick sales just to survive.

3. Why is there poverty?

Law of the jungle? I think it will always persist as there will always be those good at acquiring wealth, and the others whose talents lie elsewhere...like artists. Perhaps we actually need poverty around so that humanity doesn't get too soft and flabby in the long run.

My personal observation each time I return to Singapore is that the contrast between Singapore and the US grows ever more pronounced.

Without meaning any offense to American sensibility; honestly, stepping off the plane into Singapore from National Airport in Washington,D.C. is like moving from the 20^th century to the 21st and from a third world country to the first world. While the US now appears steeped in poverty with an increasingly run-down infrastructure, soaring unemployment, beggars at road corners, frequent power outages, lack of basic services, lack of health care, etc., and a general air of decline and decay...Singapore flaunts ever-growing affluence -- slick, modern, squeaky clean public places, amazing new building projects, growth and abundance everywhere. I wonder if Americans are generally aware that they are now the 'new poor' lagging behind countries they tended to consider 'less developed'.

A down-side (for visitors from the US) to all this growth is how expensive a travel destination Singapore has become. I had come with the happy expectation of finding good bargains like in previous years but, alas, prices are now beyond what I would expect to pay in the US and even food and transport costs appear to have increased. Returning to live in Singapore and maintaining a similar lifestyle would also now be a sheer impossibility for a middle income earner from the US. Home and car prices in Singapore are unbelievable and beyond prohibitive!

The economic crisis in the US has affected all aspects of life and the art scene has suffered most severely. Funding and support for the arts has been the first thing to be be cut, being regarded as 'non-essential' for survival. It's extremely unfortunate that this is the case because the arts are the repository of our culture and perhaps ultimately, our humanity. I think our ancestors became sapient man the moment symbolic thought appeared and he was able to draw an animal figure on a cave wall. Diminishing the role of art in our lives is a sad and serious loss indeed."

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Keith Wiltshire (Aged 76, retired teacher who taught in Malaysia, the United Kingdom & Singapore; resides in Bristol, UK):

"Poverty. Insufficiency of any or all of these: food, clothing, housing, health, companionship.

Abundance. Adequate amounts of all of the above.

Why is there poverty? Lack of imagination by the wealthy. SELFISHNESS (Refusal to love your global neighbour as yourself) and the sad fact that as the planet is depleted by the wealthy who are the major cause of global warming it will be the poor who suffer most from the collapse of systems which now seems inevitable.

[Just remembered: Keith had taught me English literature at an elite junior college which academically had an intensively competitive environment. Before I left he autographed a text he taught, Gulliver's Travels, and in it drew his Oxford college crest and his own motto beneath -- labore nihil delectat ("to do nothing delights me"). I still have that copy of Swift somewhere.

And from a group email sent out by him] --

Our Garden

I have been stimulated to write this to all of you by Sanjay Perera's questionnaire about poverty & affluence [abundance] - & the undeniable fact that although our income is too low to have to pay Income Tax, we are nevertheless affluent.

It has become a custom for us to hold a garden party at midsummer (which is also our wedding anniversary) so for those who have not yet attended such an event I intend to describe our back garden, where a good deal of our time is spent.

It faces due south, is about 100 yards long & 30 wide. There are two plum trees, one yellow, one red, which are as old as the house (and us), situated near the border fence, one half-way along, the other overshadowing the patio which is just outside the French windows of the house. In the centre is a magnolia tree which we have just reduced to its size when we moved in ten years ago, thus allowing more light into the garden. I have recently dug 3 new beds formerly under its (admittedly beautiful) shade.

Our garden philosophy is that anything can grow wherever it wishes unless there is a good reason why it should not - there are therefore plenty of buttercups & daisies sprinkled over the grassy area immediately beyond the patio with flowers springing up among the vegetables & various Spring flowers (daffodils, primulas, violets) under what remains of the magnolia. There are also still 2 bay trees, & 2 apple trees (one cookers, one eaters) & a sprawling tree at the end of the garden just before the laurel hedge which separates us from the 1970s houses which were erected just beyond the line of the original Roman Road from the port of Abonae (at the bottom of the hill) & Bath.

There are easily movable chairs & benches and grassy paths between the vegetable beds which are sometimes guarded, as at present by four-foot tall foxgloves with streams of tiny florets (blue, white, purple, pink) inhabited by honey-bees which are having a revival this year after years of decline in the country. The pink of camelia bushes is now over - as are the magnolia & weigelia (3 more sizable bushes), & the peonies. (There are many other colourful flowers here & there but only the Head Gardener knows the names & how to spell them!)

We have 4 compost bins into which we tip our grass cuttings, kitchen waste etc. for worms to turn into magnificent soil improver after a few months. These are all along the western edge of the garden & between them, clinging to the fence are blackberry bushes. In the middle of the southern sector of the garden are soft fruits: gooseberries, raspberries, redcurrants, loganberries (all of which are also represented in our store cupboard full of jam jars filled by Pauline last year - as well as a few remaining in our freezer). You will have gathered that, as far as possible we try to feed ourselves but are somewhat handicapped by our inability to grow rice or bananas, though we do have plenty of potato & cabbage beds & rows of beans, peas, garlic scattered among the nigella (blue flowers known colloquially as 'love in the mist").

This year's party is for the local Green Party to reflect on their election results (we only have one MP - but the Labour Party started with one, and we held our City Council seat with a different candidate). Many people told me that they would like to vote Green but would have to vote LibDem [Liberal Democrat] to keep the Tories out - so much for tactical voting!

P.S. Further reading: The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry a Kentucky farmer & poet; also this poem by Louis Macneice written just before the 2nd World War started:

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying.

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden.”

“...Minot is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer – who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer's life – that I know. He does nothing with haste and drudgery, but as if he loved it. He makes the most of his labor, and takes infinite satisfaction in every part of it. He is not looking for a sale of his crops or any pecuniary profit, but he is paid by the constant satisfaction which his labor yields him. He has not too much land to trouble him, -- too much work to do...but simply to amuse himself and live. He cares not so much to raise a large crop as to do his work well. He knows every pin and every nail in his barn. If another linter is to be floored, he lets no hired man rob him of that amusement, but he goes slowly to the woods and, at his leisure, selects a pitch pine tree, cuts it, and hauls it or gets it hauled to the mill; and so he knows the history of his barn floor.”

“To Fair Haven Pond by boat, the moon four-fifths full, not a cloud in the sky: paddling all the way. In the middle of the pond we tried the echo. As we paddled down the stream with our backs to the moon, we saw the reflection of every wood and hill on both sides distinctly. These answering reflections – shadow to substance – impress the voyager with a sense of harmony and symmetry, as when you fold a blotted paper and produce a regular figure, -- a dualism which nature loves. What you commonly see is but half. Home at ten.”

[After first click on video, click it second time at link "Watch on Youtube". For those who have the patience: try at some stage to find a quiet time, close your eyes, and focus on just listening to the audio of the video.]

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This is because while we had two world wars, we then followed them by a cold war and the idea of a mutually assured destruction which was supposed to ensure the peace. Is it any wonder that one of the hit comics to come out from the 1950s was Mad with its farcical mascot Alfred E. Neuman and the incessant intrigues of “Spy vs. Spy” an espionage spoof.

From the quasi-serious and stylish early Bond films to the movies becoming caricatures of themselves in the 80s, and in the epitome of the cold war which culminated in a sense with the farce/slapstick of Austin Powers: you knew something bizarre was afoot in the mass psyche.

Ultimately, the whole idea of a nuclear sword of Damocles masquerading as an ‘umbrella’ meant to keep the peace (sic), was meant by the controllers of our world to initiate planet earth into an armed camp scenario. The manifesto of the 20^th century is clearly the perverse obverse side to the Orwellian axiom 'war is peace', where peace would also mean war in some form.

We also had the revolutions of the 1960s which resulted in a kind of change that descended into drugs, riots and assassinations throughout the world of various leaders. The global stage was fast becoming a multifarious drama aptly expressed by Polonius as “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral” and whatnot.

But we took it some steps further. War is peace and peace is war. We started to wage peaceful war and have war within the ambit of peace. We started blind material obsession, profit mongering and a death-wish driven consumerism (in the background, like music from the Doors, were many so-called low intensity conflicts of which Vietnam was a highly intense one).

We used the knowledge gained from biological and chemical warfare from world wars to start poisoning one another. Logically, it meant we ended up using stuff like DDT in pesticides and called it progress: what was used to kill other humans in battle zones seeped into the food chain and destroyed not only various life forms and upset the ecological balance, but also had a nefarious effect on people. Yes, malaria and other diseases need control but do we have to harm ourselves as well?

In the name of science and progress, we have the mash up of big capital with scientific endeavour and academic research, and we discover that scientifically – regular and extensive use of synthetic chemicals in our food (and continued mass use of pesticides) are good and profitable. Any attempts to criticize any of this is a sign of unscientific irrationality. We learn that smoking doesn't necessarily cause cancer, and radiation from electrical equipment, hand phones and worse, microwave ovens, are not only profitable with the correct perspective but anyone against it lives in the dark ages.

But what takes the fruit cake is our belief that the vacuous ideology of Democracy is the ultimate goal of civilization. The West will even go to war to not only defend but spread it like a virus. This is where we come to the point in the 21^st century where we go beyond Marx's dictum and have evolved our history inexorably into slapstick.

Make no mistake, slapstick is appropriately defined as that which involves “exaggerated violence and activities which exceed the boundaries of common sense”. If that isn’t a defining characteristic of the world, nothing is.

Despite all the fuss over elections in so-called democracies, the millions spent on advertising and marketing, media commentaries, stump speeches, and all sorts of promises, are people really better off?

The reason is that despite the rhetoric of politicos the world is governed, not by politicians (though they may think they are in charge), but by vested interests that actually determine to a large extent (for the worse) how things go. We mean here the international banking cartel and their families and children in the form of mega corporations and defence industries world wide: most born out of wedlock.

All these not only operate in the dark, with as much lack of transparency as possible and have produced and proliferated a scientific-technological dark age. These efforts are abetted by our ignorance and unwillingness to face up to many truths about the world. Science, tainted by self serving ego and big money is sadly the willing handmaiden of corruption in its many forms.

This is the high end dark age where we have reached the point of no return and must find our way back into the light. And it is going to be a struggle. Why would the dark age perpetrators make it easy for anyone to escape their clutches? This is still not the funny part, but here it comes.

With each successive 'democratically' elected government you have the same situation which is unemployment, deep emotional imbalance in homes and the work force, divisiveness and resentment expressed through high-tech means, the rich getting richer (though some get their hands duly burnt) and the poor spreading everywhere. Even to be middle class now is to be poor in some way. Global currencies are generally running on empty and the US dollar is a joke (trying not to use 'farce' too often).

No one government dares to challenge and upset the banking and corporate cartel because they are either hostages to them or are party to their intrigues (sometimes a combination). How many governments dare to tell banks and corporations to get their act together, enforce discipline and ensure transparency in their activities unequivocally? Until laws are changed to make banking and corporate institutions accountable to governments and the public, they will never serve the interest of the people.

Marx was wrong in that it was not the spectre of communism that was haunting the world as it was already possessed by the dark forces of capitalism. And as in the case of most exorcisms, it isn’t secular stuff that is going to rid the world of incubi that have impregnated the world with the money changers’ teachings of neo-classical economics, greed, constant sense of lack, mindless competition, and fear mongering. Sometimes a war or two are thrown in at bargain prices.

Despite pomp and circumstance of political office as in that of the President of the United Corporations of America (USA), for instance, you see in action those who are impotent to effect any real change. Whatever change that is enacted must result in confrontation with the money changers and then who cares what your title/post is? You can talk and shout all you want in congress and parliament, but you know bloody well who runs things around here.

Don’t be fooled by the ‘human nature’ argument. Sure, the inability of humans to govern their emotions has resulted in their having to elect others to govern them; the inability of humans to have self control has resulted in their surrendering their moral conscience to institutional religion and corporations. We even have to surrender our sense of ethics to nebulous and harmful notions of ‘corporate social conscience’ (here farce turns into slapstick) and thinking that what causes harm to humans and the planet can actually do good to one and all.

It’s like killing all that’s good in one part of the world and then going to some corner and planting a fruit tree, which in turn gets killed etc, and there will be no amount of fertile earth left to make reparations for the ambition of the money changers.

We can travel into outer space and get involved in the pornographic details of nano technology but are unable to create sustainable, healthy, ethical and abundance sharing enterprises (guess why?).

There is something wrong on Earth.

We have reached such a point of pathology that we can listen to the mainstream media with all its amorality and immorality as stories flit from heinous crimes and acts of brutal violence, to royal weddings and scores of football games. We have become so desensitized that we can discuss the destruction of a human being’s life or reputation and with aplomb switch to the weather and what stocks to invest in.

Here comes more farce-slapstick, where you don’t know whether your tears come from laughter: we can even use scripture to deviously say, ah, but there will always be the poor. Must we deprive others of a good time as there will always be those in dire straits. Come on and think of all the money that is splashed around, what? This is scientifically proven by economics as ‘Growth’.

There is no reason for us not to celebrate and be happy. It always helps to smile and show kindness to people around you as that tends to generate a similar response. But in public life there must always be a sense of balance, decency and morality to know that you can’t throw state money on banquets when your citizens are going through difficult times. Some call this is disgraceful, most call it democracy.

Is it any wonder then that no matter who you vote for, things are the same? Unless things actually become worse as is happening now and as it will continue. Some resolution must be in the offing as this state of international debt and swindle is obviously reaching critical mass.

Instead of clinging on to worn out and failed ideas like democracy, which hide the grip of the money changers of the world, we need to look at new ways and ideas of empowering citizens. Democratic practices in the use of elections and ensuring a broad representation of citizens in decision making will be a necessity. This will tend to provide the ethical leavening necessary to raise some sort of system that serves people and life in general. It might even reduce wars.

The changes needed to initiate most of the positive aspects indicated here involve not changes in the poorer countries, though it helps. The world changes and bringing about a just, fair, and ethical grounding to local and international affairs starts with the democracies. They are the source of so much of the world's trouble. Once the democracies change, the world will follow suit. If the people in democracies do not push for change through citizen activism and new ideas on governance and economic practice, then things are going to get a lot rougher.

And this would also require visionary and moral leaders, and those who are not afraid of the money changers. None at present seem to exist that any of us are aware of in a manifest manner. We need leaders who realize that there’s more to life than protecting one’s bank balance. We need citizens who realize that they have to stand up for what is right and that they need to let go of fear and stop allowing themselves to be kept in perpetual thralldom by the money changers.

Which also means that if you fear adversity, you will fear change. No one wants unnecessary hardship but unless we speak up and act now, difficulties can only mount.

The solutions to many of these problems are spiritual ones which involve not only acting from conscience, but understanding that there is divine purpose to everything. That when faith, compassion, common sense, forgiveness and daring are mixed judiciously, the people of the world will finally be able to chase the money changers out of the temple once and for all.

But it starts from chasing out fear from the temple of our hearts.

We are fast approaching the event horizon in history where we will have to create and adopt a new way of living that safely takes us into the time and space of post-capitalism and post-democracy.

To end, I must mention a joke from many years ago about how in the Soviet Union scientists managed to revive the embalmed Lenin (this is actually miraculous as the man’s brain and all his organs have been removed as part of the preservation process).

There on the table, was a note: ‘We must begin again!’

We have to put aside all preconceptions and ideologies and, most of all fear, and open ourselves to the truth we have always known within but have refused to acknowledge, that indeed – we must begin again.

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For instance, take Buddhism. In many ways, as it is taught today and as it is followed in many monasteries: there is a focus on meditational techniques, the doctrinal understanding of the teachings and the moral principles espoused in them. This is necessary.

But what is seen little of in many places of institutional religion and spirituality around the world are teaching emphases and being living examples, by those who proclaim them, of compassion and unconditional love; and while we’re at it, gratitude as well.

Which comes back to what did the Buddha do first thing upon attaining Enlightenment? We are told that the Master stood in front of the pipal tree under which he attained Realization, and gazed at it for seven days and seven nights without moving as an act of gratitude.

True, he had developed supernormal powers by then, but there were many things he could have done like, well, look for food or something (which is what most of us would think of doing). But he just stood there radiating love, compassion and gratitude.

But, why a tree? Because it is a living thing. Because it was the shelter. Because it is harmless and provides a service to all life around, including for humans who know how to synergize with rather than desecrate it. Because, and this may be contrary to the view of orthodox Buddhism: it is a gift from God (yes, the Creator, the Universal, All That There Is, etc).

Again this may be shocking to some, but the Buddha never denied the existence of God nor the existence of a soul: what he did say is that it's of little use to pontificate about such matters when you should focus on actions leading to your salvation.

The Buddhist idea of anatta is a complex one. It is actually non-ego but tends to be interpreted as non-Self or no-soul. It was a revolutionary concept in the context of the time as it meant that the person you think you are is an illusion, in that the desires and projections that come from the ego generated by the senses are the cause of dissatisfaction in life. It certainly predates anything that psychoanalysis and our so-called ‘scientific’ pathological studies may provide today.

One of the reasons for veering away from traditional philosophical questions on the origin of the universe and God in Buddhism was because India at the time was full of all kinds of spiritual teachers and quacks and metaphysical speculation was the in-thing.

The focus in Buddhism is on practising the teachings and less on philosophical debate. But like today, while we talk a lot about doing good, we don’t always follow it with action. Despite its talk of renunciation of many things, Buddhism is about action. You walk the talk.

Sometimes you stand in your truth by acquiring stillness and radiating gratitude to a tree. If we can’t even show gratitude to the natural world around us, can we genuinely show gratitude to people and loved ones? Or are our relations tainted by conditions: we state loudly ‘through sickness and in health’ (but mean through a ‘healthy’ bank balance too, better if it is a fat one).

Some of us know what fair weather friends are like. They are there when the going is good, there are even more of them (some of whom you never knew were your friends) when the going gets better. 

As good old Dr Samuel Johnson says: “Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then.”

How true.

Just look at the world around us to see the happy effect of this kind of indoctrination and ideology.

When the Buddha was abandoned by those who knew him as in the spiritual seekers who were his band of brothers, he had only himself and the tree. In coming to his full Awakening and realizing the Unconditioned termed Nirvana, he sets an example for the ages through demonstrating Unconditional love and gratitude to a tree.

After this act of gratitude, the first group of people the Buddha searches out to impart his teaching of love and freedom from birth and death is the band of seekers who left him. Why does the Buddha seek them out?

Because there is no discrimination against those who may have left him and if you have compassion and gratitude to all, then you have that to each person without conditions. He is also grateful for the experiences of adversity. This is something people don’t get as we tend to look at many difficulties as terrible suffering and want to run away from them only to end up sometimes in even worse conditions.

The point is not to be a sado-masochist but see in the difficulties, the challenges and lessons for growth (not the GDP, $$$ kind) as human beings evolving back to Godhead. That without the adversity and ‘abandonment’ it would be difficult to see who you truly are. As you have identified your ego self by those around you without sometimes the slightest discernment. We can be quite self conscious of what others think of us. You see yourself as represented through the eyes of others full of their own ego.

But on your own with the right spiritual balance, you can discover the Oneness of all life. You can tap into the eternal light of All That Is and there is only light and energy, as even our lame and ego driven scientific theories claim. And energy can be transformed.

If energy is devoid of fear, harm and greed, it can transform you and the world. The lesson from the natural world can also come in the form of how uncomplaining a tree, plant or animal is when left on its own within its habitat. The tree does not complain whatever the weather is, it does not react violently when it is cut down or stripped of its branches, it does not show anger when careless people carve their names on it, nor does it discriminate as to who can take the fruit from its boughs.

This is reflected in Buddhism in which we are told to let go of many things; let go of ego, fear, greed, anger, hatred, unbridled desires, intoxication and anything that is of harm to you or life. By doing so you allow yourself to be filled with love, compassion, peace and happiness – abundance enters your life, and there is indeed a lot to be grateful for.

As you can find in Matthew these words of wisdom (6:25-34):

    ²⁵"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

²⁶"Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? ²⁸And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

³¹"So do not worry, saying, `What shall we eat?' or `What shall we drink?' or `What shall we wear?' ³²For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. ³³But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

The words speak for themselves.

Read them carefully over a period of time. Think over them. Read them again, and yet again, and then once more.

Observe and see if there is not, over time, truth in them. If you do what you’re supposed to do caring for the world and people and life around you, you will be taken care of. The world and everything in it will turn out well. This can be practiced in daily life within the family, workplace, and society.

The earth is a demanding school for learning through adversity. Through the greatest challenges come the greatest learning and advancement and peace. And the greatest rewards. There will always be enough, you need to know how to draw from it, and that requires a paradigm shift; but all these shifts are spiritual in nature.

If you ground your energies in gratitude to the world and the miracle of life around you there will be in time a joy, peace and freedom that comes from it that cannot be measured in any form. In that moment of being here now, where you are, and not wanting to be anywhere else you see the grace of the divine flowing through you, and slowly but surely you understand why you are here and that everything will be well. When you learn such lessons, don’t be surprised to see a shooting star one night that tells you’ve been given a star for a lesson recently learnt.

But usually, the immediate response from a world of incessant handphone buzzing, stock markets, advertising and media mania, and inveterate i-padding is -- why can’t the results happen now, since you tried to be ‘good’ for one day. But the lesson is only learnt and bears fruit through patience, which the Buddha rightly proclaims is the highest austerity.

The ego wants everything now, but God tells you, all in good time. We still haven’t got it yet, but we are not in control of the universe. However, on this planet given for our learning, the results of our choices from free will are coming back to show us where we stray. If that is still unapparent, then witness the turmoil of the weather and the world. This is a time of cleansing.

Through making the right choices and doing the right thing, a balance will be regained, but until then you can prepare for much upheaval globally in every sense of the word and in each aspect of your life.

Our conscious thoughts are creating our reality. The more we live and believe in lack and the need to beggar someone else to get ‘ahead’ or sustain ourselves, the more difficult things will be till we learn from them.

There is the famous question that also underlies quantum physics as once raised by Berkeley on the impact of consciousness on what happens in the world that comes in the form: does a tree actually fall in the woods unless you are there to listen or perceive that it is so.

You may ask so what does such thinking have to do with the very real problems of the unrest in Egypt and what may take place elsewhere?

Well, sometimes the sound of one hand clapping comes from extreme satori. It is the sound and knowledge you get that the tree really is falling when it comes crashing down on your head.

There is a lesson in that somewhere.

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as many prepare for the festivities of the coming Christmas and New Year days, a little reminder of some age old stuff that bears looking at time and again. It is like the well worn Xmas stocking -- you hang it up and hope somehow something gets in there that you like.

As we review the year we are still told that if 'Greed is not so good', then it's also not so bad. But somehow, most people seem to focus on what is good and heartwarming during the festive year end season. It is a time of giving and gratitude and Christmas sales and a busy time for the advertising and marketing industry.

After all, if 'goodness' can sell, why not? What isn't for sale anyway.

Many a person has mentioned why one needs to be 'realistic' and accept that what is spiritual is for the idealists who think what cannot be seen is real. These are the very same 'realists' who believe that there are such things as 'market forces' (invisible to the mind but can be seen through movement of stock indices and people being thrown out of work due to creating a leaner and certainly meaner work force).

Together with the commercially viable 'magic' of Christmas, you have the magical invocations of the 'free market', 'structural unemployment', and increasing 'productivity'. Yet while the workers who create that 'productivity' are 'structurally' eliminated from the 'work force', the fatcat CEOs and the like are busy planning their own bonuses.

The 'productivity' of the top, lean, mean ultracompetitive managers is shown by throwing out people from work thereby testifying to their everlasting adherence to the neo-occultist force of the 'market'. Their 'productivity' is measured through revenue 'turnover', share 'value' (through a laughably valueless US dollar), and one's golf handicap. 

Someone I know who is a CEO of a company in a conglomerate tells me how the deputy to his Group CEO is busy politicking to help bring down the boss so that the deputy can take over. 'Productivity', old chap, 'productivity'.

And while some of us look out at the world and are greatful for what we have, there are many who would look in and wonder why there is an absence of charity to all.

For the Christians among you, especially those who claim to be true believers, it should be with great understanding that you read these well known words:

"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?" -- Matthew 16:26

But many among those who claim religiosity would also say, well good ole Matt was speaking at the time when there were no stocks and mega corporations to run. Life was simpler then. There was no SUV to maintain nor high priced condominium to covet.

They say with a straight face, that there was no real use for accountants to cook, well 'balance', the books and so forth. Those were less complicated times; you could actually believe in God and miracles, this is the twenty first century and, the usual stuff...science and technology is the new spiritualism and economists the high priests of our way of life (or 'freedom, democracy, individual rights', and all that).

Then with some hesitation, let us re-read these also unoriginal lines (compared to the 'new' things the mainstream media bombards us with everyday) --

"For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’
   “Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink?  When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’" -- Matthew 25:35-40

All well and good, but later man, first the handphone beckons and will ask for Help when I really need it, right now...it's bonus time, shopping, a little relaxing. At the end of the day someone wins and someone has to lose. That's life.

Meanwhile, back in Gotham City... the United Corporations of America (a.k.a USA) continues its military adventurism abroad, and we have the strange variation of the Monroe Doctrine coming back to bite itself in the hindmost. It increasingly seems apparent that what happens in America's own backyard, that is within itself, should be of concern to Washington, D.C. (Detective Comics).

And there is that other old fashioned line that goes, 'Charity begins at home'.

So perhaps, while everyone would like to think all is well in the world as long as it's basically still OK with themselves, then please take a closer look (especially for those wanting to emulate the United Corporations of America) at what is really taking place in a country that still has the potential for greatness:

Of course, to the smart science-technocrats of today, this is old hat: even as they lay on their death beds one day contemplating that if death is a constant in the third dimensional world of change and conditioning, and that if apparently there may be eleven dimensions to the universe and parallel realities and that it is theoretically possible to do time-travel -- then are there other dimensions of deathlessness and Freedom?

Good question.

On a less sentimental note for the hard core realists out there, a message/song from the one and only; and, by the way, have a good Xmas, New Year, etc -- you know the drill.

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In other words, whatever a person’s ideological bent the work world or labour today has the characteristics in many ways of what could be found in a concentration camp.

Exaggerated you say, as you quickly whip out your iPhone to set up the next appointment and worry about getting a three month annual bonus or worse, whether your mollycoddling of your superiors will allow you a larger cubicle and perhaps your own office space; never mind those who are not sure what Skype is and are waiting to load the next lorry with rocks from a quarry wondering how long they can do this past 40 years of age: and so many of us continue in this vein of wage slavery until death finally makes us part from it all. So we hope.

But there is more to all of the above than meets the eye.

[However, it needs be clear that this post is meant mainly for those who are familiar with the issues in it. It is also meant for those who may be familiar with most of the earlier posts on this site. For those who are, for want of better expression, reading stuff like this for the first time, it is understandable if you find much here that stretches your credulity. Even for those who have thought through some of the ideas here, there may be some resistance to what is discussed. But if readers are impelled from here to start doing their own research and finding out for themselves the truths about the world we live in, then writing this post has been worthwhile.]

Most of the references in this post are made to a ground breaking book entitled The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp by Wolfgang Sofsky, (English translation, 1999). When I first read this original book over 10 years ago, what overwhelmed me was not so much its courage and tremendous insights but the almost nauseating content due to its subject matter. It is well written and not exploitative at all as it is basically an academic (but highly readable) work. Yet despite the restrained disgust expressed by Sofsky and his clinical description and analysis of what took place in the concentration camps (CCs), one needs an intellectually strong stomach to endure reading it from beginning to end.

Needless to say, you cannot breeze through such a book as if a bestselling novel. I read it bit by bit with some trepidation of what else I would have to learn about human history. A lot of what I read -- I resisted -- and so didn’t quite absorb the ideas first time around. The book needed a second read but I did not have the strength to do so then. Ten years later and quite recently, I forced myself to read it again. It was still tough to go through but I was better prepared; and suddenly something clicked about what it said and the world we live in.

Also, we live in a world well versed with Abu Ghraib and its nefarious activities. Things like that prepare you better for reading through the horrors of the Nazi regime. Which brings me to one of the key ideas in this post: in a post-September 11 we-are-all surrounded-by-terrorists world, the need to re-visit the past to let it shed light on the present is not just a necessity, it is a duty.

I repeat – a duty.

If you have any doubt as to what happened at Abu Ghraib and what it stood for, read Philip Zimbardo’s fairly recent The Lucifer Efffect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil which is not only well researched and documented but clearly, brilliantly, and honestly written yet just as hard to read as Sofsky’s work (due to the subject matter).

The use of doublespeak by those who choose to enslave us and spread darkness as much as possible is legion. But few can have the watermark of irony and terror revealed by the choice use of words in the Nazi concentration camps’ motto “Work shall set you free” and that of the CIA’s “the truth shall set you free”.

One thing is certain, if Conrad wrote his magnificent The Heart of Darkness today, the last words of Kurtz would not be “the horror, the horror’, but “the terror, the terror” and in that he would be much closer in vision to the grand and unsettling work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Yet, we can take it as self evident that what man turns into darkness he can return back to the light.

The basic points that Sofsky raises in The Order of Terror, revolves around the organized, bureaucratized and, in a sense, industrialized nature of the CCs. That they were created and managed not just by those who were pathological but those who in most instances were intent on running as efficient a machinery of torture and death as possible.

It is no secret that prototype IBM computer systems, or business machines, were used in cataloguing and managing the data of the internees and victims of the camps. They would have been used to manage the data of the staff and officers of the camps as well. This point is not raised by Sofksy but it is mentioned to highlight the well thought through organized structure the CCs were operating under: and that is a point Sofsky is at pains to make.

We can only wonder at this stage what computer systems and machines were used for similar purposes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- though it can be imagined Apple users pointing one way and others saying, ‘Don’t look at me’. But no one can ever say that their products in data management are not tinged with blood. And most of us thought that the work of Terror was often an ad hoc thing – it isn’t. I don’t mean the crazies who go about blowing up things for a lark or a supposed Cause, I mean a systematic and systemic use of planning and calculation to unleash Terror on all of us.

In other words – organized Terror.

With all that is organized, the time factor of things cannot be ignored. So unsurprisingly, one of the things that Sofsky looks at is the manipulation of time at the CCs. In a section that deals with the management of time in the camps and its effect on prisoners, he writes (italics and bold mine):

“Social time is an objective, imposed standard time of organization, but power can arbitrarily expand, slow down, or accelerate it. Camp time was more than the external compulsion characteristic of all social time. Camp power permeated inner time-consciousness, sundering all the internal band that laces together memory, expectation, and hope. Absolute power far surpasses the familiar forms of organized temporal control. It is not satisfied simply with synchronization and coordination of events. It destroys the continuity of inner time and severs the ties between past and future, locking people into an eternal present. Far from being satisfied with controlling human bodies, it seizes hold of biographical time and the motions of the mind.” (p73 Sofsky)

Who would believe that what applies to a Nazi CC is consonant with what takes place in the working world for so many people. The situation of time being controlled in a work place scenario and countless others involving organizations, reflects power play. There may be issues of respect and hierarchy involved which may be reasonable, but the focus here and elsewhere is to what is unreasonable and a matter of imposing oneself on another as part of a power play that involves denigrating someone or a group of people or entire societies and even countries. This is also known as the zero-sum game of those who overtly or insidiously subscribe to an absolute power paradigm.

Again, while statements will be made from hereon about how people are treated under the jackboots of corporations and other controllers, please bear in mind that it is with empathy towards those of us who are reasonable and responsible members of society rather than just malingerers.

So, take the example of a job interview in many cases. The prospective employee is made to wait sometimes for quite a bit of time, before being brought before the august interview panel to whom must be shown all due deference (and more). The interviewee has to consciously ensure, unless it’s one of those jobs that want someone with an attitude, that they kowtow towards those who may deign to employ them and help them have access to a bread basket.

From the start of how the time is controlled at an interview, what is made apparent is the relation of control being imposed. The relationship is unequal in which those who choose to see you make it quite clear that they are doing you the favour…and when they let you go for whatever reasons (profit margin, need to maintain fat bonuses for greedy top executives, etc) it should not be forgotten that after all, it was not what you contributed to the firm that matters, but your tacit recognition from the start that you are a being that was afforded employment assistance/opportunity; so who do you think you are when you are disposed of like a spent object from your firm? Get real.

Before more is said on this, look at a sample of what else is quote worthy from that section on time (italics and bold mine):

“Planning is one of the tools of social power…Schedules mark beginning points, end points, phases, transitions, linear sequences or cyclic returns…The fuller the schedule, the less time that remains for unplanned incidents, deviations, the wasting of time. The more dense the temporal grid, the more intensive the use of time. Planning determines the smallest moment; it knows only maximum rapidity, precision, effectiveness. Schedules guarantee effectiveness and provide a criterion for its monitoring. In its factorylike organizational form, the camp resembles other disciplinary institutions that gain stability by regimenting everyday temporal sequences.

But absolute power has only a limited interest in a rigid institutionalization of time. It regularly departs from the standardized time tracks it has instituted. As in any formal system, the regulation of time is an effective technology of power;…[but] Terror alternates between planning and disorder; between regulation and assault…By reserving for itself the choice of deviations and special times, power secures its rule over time. The temporal law of absolute power is not calculability, but the free variation of tempo, the shift between duration and abrupt suddenness, hectic rush and waiting, rest and shock.” (p73-4 Sofsky)

The reason for this is because the employment and economic structure of the world is quite often one that is pyramidal in shape with an emphasis on a master-slave relationship. With computers, world wide communications and so-called globalization we have employers squeezing all arteries and veins of a person at any time of the day 365 ¼ days a year to make them serve the god-like corporation or boss man; or, to assuage their petty egos aspiring for some display of absolute power.

Your time is not your own. Once you sign the Faustian pact with your boss man you’ve in effect sold your soul to them, and they make you pay for it over and above what they pay you. In fact, soon you will have to try and be like them to rise up the ranks of the boss men and women so that you can exercise similar master-slave paradigm roles/ functions over the other lower beings in the food chain.

How many people actually live in fear of what they say and do at the work place? Is it a work place or a CC? What is in place in microcosm is an Order of Terror. Countless times in various work scenarios, I have been told by people/colleagues how if they do this or that (usually that which is reasonable) and worse, do what is right or a matter of principle, they’re putting their ‘livelihood on the line’; other memorable phrases include ‘putting my head on the block’, ‘taking a real risk’ (as opposed to just a ‘risk’), ‘exposing my back’, ‘this could be It for me’, ‘they will hang me out to dry’ or ‘I’ll be out on the streets’ (many of which make nice titles for songs, the latter phrase in particular would make a good chorus these days).

Does this really sound like a workplace, never mind a healthy and pleasant work environment? It sounds like…exactly, ‘Sieg heil’ boss man.

Before proceeding further, we need to be clear about some terms. If the word ‘terrorist’ is used, it would refer to the usual villains who take people hostage, blow up things and have a pathological tenacity in causing harm to others. But the term ‘Terror’ (with the capital ‘T’) signifies a higher order of rapscallions who are using brutal and often subtle and sophisticated means of control, and fear instilling methods over people; in that context those who perpetuate such Terror are Terrorists. They consciously, or otherwise, engender the Order of Terror.

Yet when the terrorists operate purposively or subconsciously as part of Terror, then they too are part of the network of the higher order Terrorists.

The Order of Terror, unless it appears as part of a quoted text, will be represented throughout as OT.

The groundbreaking work by the late Studs Terkel, especially his books Hard Times and Working, makes it quite clear that work/labour in most cases is a form of violence. It is a daily and unremitting violence inflicted on us just as we, unfortunately, inflict it on others. In many cases, we can see that the terms ‘work’ and ‘labour’ that refer to employment are usually references to the arduous nature and terrors of the workplace. Never mind the politicking and backstabbing, the exploitation and abuse that are never ending undercurrents of the workflow; just the work effort involved daily when it is continuous and relentless, irrespective of whether it is not so physical or literally back breaking, is enough to wear out the strongest amongst us.

The violence of labour is not just the act of producing something tangible or intangible. The violence also comes in the form of the physical, mental and emotional stress it can unleash on the individual engaged in almost any form of work including what they impose on others as they try to manage their loads and stay afloat – sadly in many cases at the expense of others. Violence in labour seems in-built in the way we do things: we are led to believe it is a systemic nature of the beast called humanity and that its nature is one that is indeed brutish, nasty and short lived in good will.

“The camp invented numerous senseless tasks that had only one purpose: to drain and emaciate individuals, to grind them down. Absolute power strips labour of its purposive structure, expanding it endlessly. It has no interest in products or results. It is oriented to the process of working itself, to the duration of the suffering. It transforms hard effort and strain into a deadly pressure for annihilation. The social relation of power overlays the objective relation of labour, shaping it almost totally. Violence is not a means of labour; labour is means of violence. The prisoners did not belong to a slave class of outsiders. They were part of the class of the expendable and superfluous, the wretched and lost.” (p 172, Sofsky)

While it would appear often times that showing up or speaking up against the boss man is a variation of cocking-a-snook against power, the offence to the boss man usually lies at a deeper level which is the perceived antagonistic stance of the sniveling subordinate towards the boss man’s sense of absolute power.

In concrete terms what does this mean. It would include:

1. Instilling the sense of who is boss man or woman. This is not so much to maintain a semblance of stability in an organization with some kind of meaningful hierarchy, but just the obverse of absolute power. In an unobvious manner this could include a formal way of addressing someone. Some boss men are informal, but many want to see some form of humility if not subservience shown to them

2. Knowing that you should not argue with someone not because they have conclusively shown why your idea was idiotic or not as effective as theirs, but because the boss man shouldn’t be contradicted (especially in front of others). This involves the secret and not-so-secret meetings among the lesser human staff after the main meetings with the boss men; this is to clarify what the hell exactly boss man or woman wanted (absolute power usually reflects shrewd manipulative thuggery as opposed to actual natural intelligence and common sense). Not a good idea to disagree with boss man, especially in front of others, because it can be seen as a railing against absolute power (in case your mother didn’t tell you…)

3. Whatever is produced may have value, as in a safety feature for a car, but the act of the labour itself in its mechanized and industrialized form is devoid of value as it is devoid of human sincerity in it: it is an act of sheer manufacturing and fabrication. Once someone in an assembly line has become robotic and is ‘producing’ in a meaningless manner, they have been subjugated by the work flow and the boss men supervisors into a situation, as Sofksy says, of one that “overlays the objective relation of labour, shaping it almost totally” (a line that would have made Marx and Engels proud). So there may be an object produced through labour, but labour itself is ultimately valueless as it is mindlessly performed by a labour automaton exemplifying a power relationship of control and fear between worker and boss man and the work flow itself

4. Each time a person leads an overtly ‘productive’ life, through what is described in preceding paragraphs, they are a showcase for labour as violence. Take the teaching profession, where countless tasks of apparent quality control, mind numbing meetings (for the sake of holding them as a work plan for a boss man/ individual staff member/department who have a matrix of objectives that must be ticked in a box using Adobe Acrobat to show that you’re actually working). The filling of class time with dingbat activities for the sake of giving a sense of conforming to the rules of the boss man or work matrix, even if the class proper/lesson of the day is over. The constant electronic and paper form filling as part of the pretence of achieving work objectives; falsifying and exaggerating management, professional or instructional goals so as to justify one’s teaching record; mollycoddling students to ingratiate them into getting good feedback scores which shows how popular an instructor you are; assiduously providing grade inflation to pass as many as possible or make sure that there is a failure or two to fit into some form of ‘bell curve’ – euphemistically known as ‘moderation’. All this is endemic, with the necessary adjustments, to most modern forms of work these days.

5. What doesn’t seem apparent is that violence is being done to us and we are doing similar violence to ourselves and others too. In this process we become “expendable and superfluous, the wretched and lost” wherein we now have to endure spiritual distress over and above everything else. Even for the agnostics and atheists amongst us, the moment we forgo a moral and ethical dimension to our working world and our daily lives, we have begun the downward plunge into spiritual degradation. How many do we know whose health has been ruined by their work and work environment. This applies to not just those whose labour is potentially dangerous like the construction industry, but just being a check out girl at the supermarket, a food stall holder, an office executive or a telephone operator. All this adds to the stress that comes from the use and abuse of power (with intimations of absolute power) including what is transferred back by, let’s say, customers (who reflect back to others their own daily labour and spiritual trauma). So in numerous cases of such daily violence and unpleasantness, people end up succumbing to debilitating illnesses

6. How many have even died from the stress and unhealthiness of the work environment and the type of work they do. I have known people and ex-colleagues who contracted cancer from the anguish, angst, pent up rage and frustration of their daily grind (compounded by other personal issues). But the greater part of our lives is our work world and the serious illness that we procure in this way is largely a sign of our spiritual dysfunction. We have become separated from all that is meaningful, valuable, holy, humane and decent in our daily lives that make up the essence of each human being. No economy that claims to be robust is healthy when its workforce is unhealthy and undergoing torments of the kind we normally associate with the nether regions of the spiritual world.

The wretched of the earth are not just the obvious ones who have been exploited and treated as chattel throughout the ages, these wretched ones are in many cases those of us who look ourselves in the mirror while fine tuning the make up or straightening that new fangled polka dotted tie.

The working men and women of the world are in many instances reduced to the walking dead. Sofsky tells that many of the inmates of the camps were reduced to nothing more than living corpses known as Muselmanner (bold and italics mine):

“It was no accident that the Muselmanner [‘walking/waking dead’] were reminiscent of the “living dead”. They were only shadows of their former selves. Their actions had sunk below the animal minimum for survival. They hardly heard or saw anything, and reacted only when shouted at or prodded. When action is extinguished, life implodes, contracting to mere existence. In action, people mark a beginning to some sequence, show who they are, express themselves, communicate to and with others. Action is the medium of identity and sociality. A person robbed of action is a nonentity, a no one...Like the pile of corpses, the Muselmanner document the total triumph of power over the human being. Although still nominally alive, they are nameless hulks...The Muselmanner is the central figure in the tableau of mass dying – a death by hunger, murder of the soul, abandonment; dead while still living.” (p199-200, Sofsky)

These are telling lines about our daily struggle to survive. Ask anyone who is living at subsistence level and just managing their loans and children’s education among a host of other things and it will be described as the struggle to survive. During difficult economic times as we are living in now many are just barely scraping by, if at all, and one has to wonder whether this is what being a human being is about.

Ask ‘how’s it going’ to those in the US which is supposed to have a rising class of poverty where one in seven people are poor. A country that despite the better inclinations of many of its citizens is busy going into further national indebtedness and still trying to play ‘soldier-soldier’ in some parts of the world. It is almost as if a nation that promoted democracy and freedom has been hijacked by those intent on using it for their own purposes to control the world as much as possible, and run everything including the host body (America) this ghastly virus (the controllers) has inhabited into the ground leaving the world itself as a monument to the living dead.

So many of us just do not have the time to think through many things, nor sit down and have a decent, or intelligent, conversation with anyone about the issues of the day that in effect determine our lives. We have abrogated our abilities as human beings to fulfill our potential by surrendering such important things to others, be it the government (who has some responsibility to cover this gap for people) or ‘intellectuals’ (usually those with a string of academic degrees), neither of whom can be relied on solely without a check and engagement from the populace.

The common, and understandable, excuse most of us give about barely speaking up and taking part in the life of our communities, society and country is that we don’t have the time; how can we have the time when apart from personal and family issues we have to earn our daily bread with our faces forced into the grind stone? Our heads are sometimes so close to the ground eking out a living that we can become hostile to suggestions to look up and see what is being done to us, or be completely dismissive of alternatives and deliberately place ourselves in ignorance mode, rather than face what is truly happening around us.

True, some of us may be just lazy and not want to take the extra effort to confront what’s wrong in our world, but usually we ‘don’t have the time’, and how can we when we have – or rather allowed – our faces to be forced squarely into the trough and made to sound grunts of complaints or surrender to this-is-how-it-is scenario, and be just grateful to continue to see what we can find in the trough.

And how convenient this situation has been, is and will continue to be, and how much it would facilitate their attempts at control, for those who seek to dominate people and keep them at the base of a pyramid as they continue to exploit everyone by staying on top of it all.

Then there is the constant apprehension of workplace reprisal for doing what is ‘wrong’. Sofsky tellingly writes (bold and italics mine):

“Terrorstraffe (terror punishment)…Punishment is the final link in a chain of situations strung together via the social mechanism of sanction. This chain begins with a threat that forces the actors to decide among alternative paths for action: if they do what is demanded they incur no penalty; if they violate the required norm, they trigger a sanction in response…Absolute power operates in a quite different manner. It creates a “jungle of punishable offenses,” a condition of constant punishability, in which even obedience is no guarantee for avoiding sanctions, and power can intervene at will...To compound matters, many prohibitions had been kept nebulous so that supervisors could arbitrarily define what was an infraction. This absolute power to define the situation used another method: it made demands that could not possibly be met, extending the perimeters of threat to the point that behaviour in accordance with the prescribed norms was sheer impossibility.” (p215, Sofsky)

Most us would resonate with the accuracy of the words here on the use of fear tactics to ensure dominance over others in the workplace. In many contracts there are clauses that stipulate how things can be adjusted in terms of hours required, scope of work, where you are transferred to and how much responsibility can be piled upon you in a manner that is almost always in favour of the employer; and if it is ever in favour of John or Jane Doe there will be some way to circumvent that and insist that you sell your humanity to the corporation/employer for whatever pittance they pay you (pittance because your soul is priceless but there would be those who disagree).

If the boss man decides to promote you, he will. If he doesn’t want to, he will find some reason to justify it. You are entirely at the mercy of the boss men and they intend that you see it that way despite the pretence otherwise. Someone I know who has been with an organization for some years has been criticized for not doing enough or broadening the scope of his responsibilities and range of his work despite the boundaries he pushed, and the quality of his work. On the other hand, when he does well within the demands of the boss men/women (and the boundaries they create) he is criticized for having done things like a ‘well-oiled machine’ and not having messed up enough in his performance which would have shown that he was taking ‘risks’ and going beyond the comfort zone of his basic work load: you’re damned whichever way you look at it.

In case it’s still unclear, absolute power is essentially to try and have the ability to control you body, mind and soul…and destroy you one way or another if controllers so desire.

In fact, the bizarre world of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle is far from strange considering that it is a reflection of our everyday world. It is recorded that when Kafka read drafts, or parts of the works mentioned, to his friends/co-workers (if I recall rightly) they burst out laughing knowing full well that it was also a satirical take on the bureaucratic world they existed in (as can be applied to almost any workplace).

A ridiculous bureaucracy with silly, contradictory and outright outrageous ‘rules’ and ‘decrees’ in many workplaces is but part of a system meant to exercise control over people. It is an attempt to reduce entropy through the misguided notion of many dictators and wannabes that they are in charge of the universe. That they can stop change and evolution of a person or a group of people as that change would render them, the controllers, obsolete. Then what would happen? Meaning, what would happen to them. If they can't have livelihoods as controllers, they would then have to starve as most exploiters rely on someone else’s efforts and lifeblood to survive on. They suck up the energies of others.

This type of blood-sucking bureaucratic system is a parallel to that which pervaded the CC as Sofsky clearly points out.

It becomes clearer what Sofsky is trying to say: that not only was the whole CC idea carefully planned and executed as best as possible with bureaucratic ‘efficiency’, but that in order to systematically control, put fear into and organize mass torture and extermination, you need some form of bureaucratic control. The OT demands that there is a systematic structure of control, surveillance, monitoring and fear mongering and anxiety spreading everywhere that can be instituted and codified such that not only can you boss people around as atrociously as possible, but you dehumanize them and destroy whatever authenticity, decency or resistance they can possibly offer. This is the kind of Terror that becomes even more difficult to spot because you are indoctrinated and socialized into it from birth (some people call it being ‘normal’ or ‘the-way-things-are’).

It also becomes even harder to shake off this indoctrinated worldview of fear and need to appease controllers when the other nutcake (higher order synthesis of nut cases and fruit cakes) terrorists are busy blowing us and themselves up as part of their dramatic-statement pyrotechnics: the hyping of which allows many mainstream journalists to make a ‘living’ (through our dying).

If all this is still called ‘normal’, granted that it can be called ‘the-way-things are’, then we need to know what is the difference between this and being the living dead. George Romero’s Living Dead, day or night, is a tame reference to the world we call ‘normal’. We have been socialized into being workplace zombies, social Muselmanner, and decidedly non-vegan type consumers of our fellow beings to ‘survive’ in the world. In fact, that is what the so-called vision of a capitalistic driven world strives for: consumerism of the worst order. We consume everything, including the planet, ourselves and one another apparently to create ‘growth’; but all the while we are enacting acts of violence through our ‘productive’ activities that ensure a tragedy without the catharsis.

More importantly, we have been programmed and propagandized by most social strictures and structures with the abetment from much of the world’s mainstream media that engenders the undiscerning conformist mentality of ‘be-like-us’ through manufactured consent: where no one can defy being a zombie or show signs of being contrary to the Living Dead lifestyle (cell phone, obsession with TV, excessive social networking site usage, following the corporate diktats of advertising/marketing, etc).

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The world has been fixated for decades in using GDP (gross domestic product) as measurement of economic growth thereby replacing all humane and spiritual values as a means of providing balance to what not only genuine growth is, but whether in the process we are leading even vaguely meaningful lives. The tendency to focus exclusively on the misguided notion of ‘productivity’ at all costs has led to the kind of ‘growth’ that is not only destructive all round but ruinous to our health as human beings.

Sofsky goes on to write about the extermination process of the CCs (bold and italics mine):

“A death factory is a work organization whose purpose is the annihilation of large numbers of human beings…Mass annihilation was organized on the basis of a division of labour. The process was integrated into a kind of assembly line, its stations coordinated in temporal sequence. Killing was mechanized by the installation of stationary gas chambers, into which hundreds of persons were lured and then poisoned by carbon monoxide or hydrocyanic acid fumes. The death factory was an apparatus that functioned smoothly, virtually trouble-free, working at a high capacity and speed. A death train arrived at the ramp in the morning; by the afternoon, the bodies had been burned, and the clothing brought to the storerooms.” (p259, Sofsky)

No doubt, ‘productivity’ can be applied to the above. No doubt efficiency and high volume of results are showcased by the quote. But to even ask at what ‘price’ belies the horror of what Sofsky’s words describe. Yet we have bought into this system where whatever the human, environmental and spiritual cost, there is the need to mindlessly churn out stuff to keep GDP ‘growth’ going. Never mind the non-monetary cost, anything that doesn’t add to the mechanized numerical increase of monetary measurement is just an externality (economists love this term). The human being and the whole world is an externality: so you have the dangerously ridiculous situation of mindless ‘production’ and ‘growth’ while destroying the planet and its life forms that sustain that ‘growth’ apparently for the good of the human species.

Therefore, many economists would be aptly represented as dangerous bozos.

Normally people who think like the above are clinically diagnosed with various mental issues, but up to now, we give them titles, degrees, Nobel prizes and call them ‘experts’, ‘leaders’ and ‘captains’ of industry. And so the term GDP, in honour of such illustrious ones, will be used here as gDp which signifies gross Destructive product as a more accurate way to depict their fantasy of 'growth'. [For more details on new ways of measuring growth and the blatant harmful nature of GDP as it transforms into gDp, please see the earlier posts at this site.]

While some of us struggle to bring across the facts to help the rest of the world to come to an understanding as to why GDP = gDp, a likely scenario that will develop increasingly is one where GDP as a measurement will be clung onto while different ways of measuring progress like the GPI, or Genuine Progress Indicator, may be used in tandem with it to provide ballast. But either the GPI or something similar will finally have to replace the GDP/gDp as a growth measure.

In the end, the way we destroy the natural world, its ecosystems and our selves with gDp is parallel to the death factories where we are in effect using the misguided notions of neoclassical economics meshed with fear and anxiety promoted by the controllers of the world to forge a world of Terror: maintain a system of production that creates inequality throughout the globe through exploitation of human and natural resources resulting eventually in a culling of the global population as a way of limiting population growth and further competition for resources.

The 20^th century has seen the ultimate attempt by the OT to assert its control over all of us by excessive mechanization and dehumanization of the entire planet (bold and italics). As Sofsky says:

“Along with the state monopoly on violence, rational bureaucracy, and organized work, modernity has also given rise to sites of discipline, surveillance, and conditioning. Modernity has confined human beings for life and trained them to be obedient, docile subjects. The manufacturing plant, industrial factory, and administrative office are the centres of bookkeeping and bureaucratic filing, economic exploitation and political rule. However, the military barracks, prison, penal colony, hospital, workhouse, and insane asylum – these total institutions are the laboratories of power. Here, far from the scrutiny of public surveillance, a special agenda is pursued: the transformation of human beings by other human beings…But in the concentration camp, no one was supposed to be healed, educated, or trained to obedience. Absolute power makes use of the technology of the disciplines, liberates them from their aims, and transforms them into instruments of terror. Its systematic nature is based on this transfer of the disciplines of control, on the coerced unification of action, its Gleichschaltung [“forcible coordination” or reorganizing all social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy]; on minute, total surveillance and control.” (p277, Sofsky)

Again look at how our daily schedules and our entire lives have had all sequence of time come under fitting into the murderous Procustean bed of the work flow. Virtually every aspect and time frame of our existence has been absorbed and forced into the “forcible coordination” of survival, attending to material needs, and fear and trembling not only about our future and that of our loved ones, but the saturation of violence and mistrust bred across the world (played up to a scatological degree by the mass media).

Before examining how the OT has tried to control all of us, we need to look closer at what the ideology of control they have been carefully and successfully pulling across the globe. This may sound difficult to accept at first, but careful thought and researching and the willingness to suspend preconditioned thought will help give a different perspective to the world we are living in.

The ideology that the promoters of Terror have used to spread the gospel of hate, prejudice, destruction and domination is known to us today as ‘democracy’, not Democracy as we have a theoretical or intuitive understanding of, but ‘democracy’ as spread by major proponents of this ideology. This is why it is hard to spot and come to grips with it because it is like the most insidious of viruses – it masks itself as that which is ‘helpful’ to the individual/society but is in effect the start of a destructive consumption of life.

First, try this exercise: spend some time thinking of what you think genuine freedom and Democracy is for an individual and for a society, a nation, and the rest of the world. Write it down irrespective of whether it sounds ‘utopian’. Be honest about it as it is a private exercise. Compare what you have written (take your time with this) to what you will read further on. [Stop reading this post here, and try this exercise. After thinking through what you’ve written, then continue reading on. But, yes, I already here the objection: ‘who has the time….?’]

Below are some aspects of what ‘democracy’ as an ideology, masquerading as Democracy as a political philosophy or idea, has tried to do so as to enslave us:

1. Follow the ‘American’ way unconditionally according to the diktats of, for instance, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld regime (you can look at this in the context of almost any US administration in living memory with arguably the exception of Kennedy’s). Bear in mind that both Bushes have openly declared that they have “hate” in their “hearts” towards their so-called ‘enemies’. This is a matter of public record, check it up. This was used at least in relation to North Korea and its nutty (no, not the lovely Thelonious Monk piece) leader. We would normally link those who call themselves ‘leaders’ and voice out hate openly for others as leaders of another sort, but certainly not of Democracy

2. This means: unimpeded access by the US and its so-called allies to (this is not in reference to the people of the countries but the network of controllers who secretly run the country, government, business, media, pharmaceuticals, etc) all countries and economies throughout the globe for what suits their own interests

3. Meaning: unimpeded access by the controlling cabal in the ‘US’ (what we term ‘America’ today is anything but America) to all natural resources of all kinds whether it is oil (which requires control of Middle East oil supplies) or any natural resource to promote ‘growth’ and GDP (gDp) at the expense of all life and human welfare

4. The ‘American’ way means a one superpower world and all those aligned to it who have as is possible complete corporate, financial, media control of the world. This is sometimes achieved through utilizing corruption and subversion of other governments elsewhere – especially those that resist the ‘American’ way openly – with the use of US fiat currency (which is worthless like any currency that is not backed by precious metals) as the dominant means of economic and political control, followed by black operations and military force. Interesting thing: if you listen to US military officers who speak their mind freely, they’ll mention that they get themselves and their men in ‘trouble spots’ largely due to the CIA’s shenanigans in various states, and their bamboozling politicians, economic bigwigs and defense department bureaucrats in US of A

5. The manipulation and control of world bodies like the UN, WTO (World Trade Organization) and World Bank which serves as a means to hold to ransom, debt, bondage and merciless exploitation people and resources of poorer states by the controllers who have ensconced themselves by hijacking a great nation like America with their viral ideology of ‘democracy’

6. Promotion of wars and the armament industry as a means of fuelling gDp and ensuring some form of global dominance. The best way is to keep the world divided through constant conflict as witnessed from wars throughout the third world and the criminal war in Vietnam which almost sent that state back into the stone age; never mind the wars with Iraq, Afghanistan and prodding of North Korea into a striptease nuclear brinksmanship

7. The need to curtail civil liberties in America which championed Democracy but has been usurped by the cabal as it spreads the ideology of ‘democracy’ via buying over politicians, corporate control of the media, suppression of anything in the media that nationally promotes spiritual learning, thinking and questioning the role of military might and imperialism or material obsession, and spread of capitalist ideology (and gDp)

8. Promote the idea that freedom means excessive and destructive individualism at the expense of everyone and everything else

9. Final solution to destroy the remnants of Democratic America’s civil liberties: creation of the Orwellian situation of permanent war, where spreading war is called spreading ‘peace’, the mind-numbing-soul-destroying promotion of double speak in spreading falsehood, false flag operations by the CIA that subverts many states and national interests by spreading ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ there as opposed to Democracy

10. To consolidate this in a one superpower world, you need to manufacture a massive attack on your soil: September 11^th, 2001. Create a tragic and horrific incident in which ‘two planes’ caused three high rise modern towers to collapse in a meltdown and in which, against all laws of probability, remnants of passport or identification papers were found among the wreckage belonging to the ‘hijackers’ (!)

11. Manipulation and aggravation of a permanent state of war between the Muslim states and others (all of whom also have the their fair share of fruitcase – one step above nutcake -- terrorists) as part of promoting the grander scheme of Terror

12. Further acts of terror within the US (remember those random sniper shootings of civilians post- 9-11?) to cause permanent state of siege that could possibly lead to a suspension of all civil liberties as well as the US Constitution; there is also the convenient establishment of CCs – yes, concentration camps – for US citizens (or any other ‘undesirables’) under the auspices of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency): a search on the Net will provide visual evidence of these camps

First, reactions might be -- well this all very imaginative and not really new and things are not that bad. Really? Why is there a constant state of anxiety and terror being spread conveniently all over the world…where does all the funding come from. How convenient it is, that the state of ‘terror’ we have been put in has led to the rise of constant and heightened surveillance (understandable in some cases) of public spaces. It’s even worse for some private spaces. Paranoia is the order of the day. The Panopticon of observation keeps everyone on a macro and micro level under duress. The constant fear and anxiety spread at airports and modes of travel, and the work place fear of sabotage is very much like the war and fear mongering mentality spread through the time of WWII and most of the Cold War.

This is a most useful way of getting people mistrustful and fearful of one another and strangers. Not that there are no genuine security concerns etc. But the Terror being spread from 9-11 has been an attempt to drag humanity back to a state of wartime tension. Moreover, every surveillance camera is a reminder that things are not right and that people are not right and that the world is not right. The world and humanity may not be perfect as we well know, but there is a difference between that and being made to live under “forcible coordination” that it can never be otherwise. That is what the controllers want.

This state of tension if you like, then also encourages the other crazies to go about their business of terror. The media collaborates with them by highlighting their activities thereby ensuring that the best way to get a megaphone and ‘buy’ media time is to commit atrocities. Note: good and well being don’t often get much air time, but acts of violence and that which flirts with the prurient not only get air time, they get prime time advertising to boost it all.

Again, where does the money come from to keep supporting these groups of ‘terror’ and even terror. There are bigger players who want to keep terror groups up and running, their activities being media highlights right up to this moment and thrust upon people as part of “forcible coordination”. Terror, with its unchecked and unregulated international banking cartels and arrangements, and its abilities to print fiat currency money or debt currency as via the US Federal Reserve Bank, has ample resources to fund its pet projects.

Ask yourself, how is it that a state like North Korea which has been repeatedly stated to be bankrupt and has its population living in precarious conditions still manage to have access and maintenance of nuclear weapons coupled with haphazard saber rattling announcements. Who are the groups that are sustaining the North Koreans and keeping them from total collapse so that they can conveniently add to the potential destabilization of North East Asia and keep the world in nuclear angst ?

How is it that despite the global financial crisis, spiraling debt of the US, the never ending wars, and the rising unemployment world wide, the world financial system is still tottering but not collapsing yet: how is it being maintained, propped up and kept alive when it too seems to be turning into one of the living dead? If the global scene is not somehow manipulated and controlled by major players this system would have collapsed well before now, but it is still being controlled and puppeteered as it has always been.

Look past the curtain of current economic theory’s mumbo jumbo and see the controllers grappling over the levers behind the curtain of illusion drawn across the world from the land of Oz.

The New Slavery

On a macro scale the stage has been set to keep the world and all of us in debt through a debt based economy of fiat currencies, interest rates and squeezing every drop of labour from us till we drop dead. But on a micro scale, Terror must still be spread to dovetail with the global template of “forcible coordination” that major players are implementing through international institutions and power play.

As Sofsky unrelentingly continues (bold and italics mine):

“For its (modern terror) purposes, the small-time tormenter suffices: the conscientious bookkeeper, the mediocre official, the zealous doctor, the young, slightly anxious female factory worker. In order to spread fear and terror, all the personnel had to do was to apply the rules that had been set down. This orderly foundation of camp routine provided the soil conducive to the development of those behavioural patterns that spring from the tradition of quasi-military movements: esprit de corps, camaraderie, personal allegiance, the mentality of the emergency situation, corruption, and the lust for the kill.” (p278, Sofsky)

That last line sums up ‘American’ domestic and foreign policy for many a year and, unfortunately, much of the world has followed suit or allowed the virus from that kind of ‘democracy’ to spread to them.

What cannot be denied as well is the Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare of petty tyrants who impose meaningless rules and regulations to wield (absolute) power as best they can largely because the social and national atmosphere most people operate in permeates the same unto them. This system of bureaucratic control is spread on the macro level in turn by the controllers and serial invokers of ‘democracy’ who claim to be saving the world by using things like the UN, WTO, World Bank etc.

Total control by the cabal (controllers) and denizens of Terror require it to be practiced throughout all of society without exception as far as it is possible. It is part of the strategy of spreading “forcible coordination” globally. The best way is to instill a sense of fear and loathing in each layer of society, but primarily through the work place as it is the inevitable arena where we try to sustain ourselves.

To do this the cabalists of controllers need the Grand Poobahs and Great Panjandrums to exercise the diktats of control. And so Sofsky continues with (italics and bold mine):

“Without the supervisors, sentries, and administrative officials, the accomplices and accessories from the ranks of the inmates, camp terror would have been impossible. The face of modern systemic terror is not stamped by the all powerful and inviolable master, but by the unbridled actions of the sedulous servants of power. It is an inconspicuous face, quite mean and shabby, without the grimace of wild frenzy, the ecstasies of brutality, the passions of sovereignty...The triumph relished by the auxiliary was the laughter of the accomplices, the mortal anguish of the victims, the bottom line on the balance sheet of death.” (p278-9, Sofsky)

So absolute control is spread by the cabalists via set ups international and national, which is seen through by trickle down (and forced) indoctrination abetted by the mass media. The message transmitted daily and unremittingly is that people are not powerful and that the individual is not an empowered being.

The little Hitlers and Napoleans at the micro level of the work place go around determining control and spreading the gospel of the cabal through punitive sanctions and the constant threat of throwing one out of employment, or stymieing progress/promotion. We are born into the world and don’t know any better as we are imbibed with received deception (not wisdom) of control and subservience to the dark ideas of the cabal which we take as normal and the way of the world. [Under no circumstances is it being claimed that people do not choose wrong and evil themselves and that only the cabal/controllers are responsible for everything, but to qualify statements each time with this would be tedious and add to the meandering of an already lengthy post].

We learn further from Sofsky (bold and italics mine):

“Absolute power transforms deterrence into terror, terror into horror. It shapes space, time, work, and society into instrumentalities of itself, plunging its victims into the abyss of helpless anxiety. The destructive power of terror extends into the furthest corners of sociality, the deep structures of human subjectivity. It destroys not only by violence, but by starvation and misery, humiliation and murder of the soul. It is sheer destruction, pure and unadulterated…Terror concludes every struggle. It gets the job done. The reciprocity characteristic of all social power is shattered.” (p279, Sofsky)

Again on a micro level, just take a look at going from one place of employment to the next. The nihilistic philosophy of the cabalists to control, dehumanize, humiliate and disempower people pervades through almost everything. From every situation of authority (real or imagined) there is often an attempt to assert some aspect of absolute power; this is an ego based energy that seeks to use the pyramid structure of a disenfranchising hierarchy of control. Do as you are told, the boss man is always right, and we the cabal and its nether children of control can throw you out on the streets and let you starve unless you serve us as the slaves that you are.

The human power of reciprocity and responsibility towards one another through a web of connection with all life and compassion needed to give balance to the world, our societies and our lives is constantly crushed through the deleterious stamping of the OT imprimatur usually in the form of material and largely monetary (valueless fiat currencies) ‘rewards’ for selling and destroying your soul and those of others. These are the bargain basement prices of all the hells imaginable: save your skin, not your soul, by abetting the physical and spiritual destruction of others and life on the planet via the promotion of mindless monetary growth and as much as possible for sensual gratification. Reciprocity is made negative through the encouragement of an ‘eye for an eye’ way of the world, not one of mutual aid, support and nurturing to create cooperation and collaboration among people and countries.

We continue to chillingly learn (bold and italics mine):

“Terror separates labour from all production value and any moral rules. It intensifies compulsion and exploitation to the pitch of destruction; it transposes production into ravagement. The teleology of human labour is extinguished. The productive meaning of work, self-preservation of the species, is transformed into its opposite. Nowhere is human labour so directly linked with death as in the concentration camp. Here work does not secure life, it devastates it. This political economy of waste cannot be comprehended by following the principle of calculation and value enhancement. Absolute power overcomes the laws of production. It increases not wealth, but misery.” (p280, Sofsky)

Shocking as it may seem, the above is an apt description of our daily lives especially our so-called working lives. The entire economic and financial system that has been imposed on us by the cabal, and those sometimes quite unwittingly carrying out the worldview of the controllers, is one of mindless accumulation of wealth through making many things that are not needed and that have an in-built obsolescence in them; this in turn continues the destructive cycle of pure monetary ‘growth’ while destroying the planet, robbing it of life and natural resources and steadily allowing for the fear and anxiety based destruction of ourselves and our social relations. A political economy of waste.

We are usually alienated from what we do and the apparently productive processes we are involved in. So many times have employees deliberately gotten back or ‘sabotaged’ the system and the boss man by wasting time at work through idleness and Net surfing, and consuming office materiel and expenses for personal use and benefit. This is usually an act of rebellion and resentment for being pushed around and doing something we dislike and even hate but consider necessary to sustain our material needs. What is productive about this set up or the commodities that arise from it? A political economy of waste.

From the wasteful system of built in obsolescence and greed of the capitalist ideology to its mindless accumulation of money as a means of remuneration and definition of meaning to existence; and with the cat and mouse game between employer and employees who try every once in a while to monkey wrench the work place, we have a fine system of wastage and negativity. Yet another facet of a political economy of waste.

To maintain control over us, there is a need for a system of destructive sustenance that sees to it that (bold and italics mine):

“Society is permeated by the informers and accomplices of terror; the victims are driven to a life-and-death struggle for space, shoes, and bread. Although a good many examples of elementary solidarity have come to light, the extent of social indifference, mutual repulsion, and animosity in the camps was staggering. The dissociative strength of camp power shatters the basic rules of social intercourse, fundamental trust in the continued existence of the social world, the prospect of assistance, the certainties of social action, the continuity of time…The camp hurls human beings back into a primal state of nature: the struggle of all against all…The concentration camp is the modern facility of isolating and destroying the “dispensable”. The superfluous are searched out everywhere, seized, confined behind barbed wire, starved, murdered.” (p280-1, Sofsky)

What is supported throughout most societies and certainly in the economic framework of the cabal is the ‘state of nature’ scenario of ‘survival of the fittest’ and everyone struggling to stay alive through brandishing tooth and claw. We have fooled ourselves into buying into the so-called ‘free market’ myth (which is just a not-so-secret secret society code for greed, selfishness, monopoly, destructive ethos, etc as explored in an earlier blog entitled There is No Such Thing as a Free Market, which has laughably been seen as a sign of ‘freedom’.

Yet you cannot be free if you are a slave to unethical/immoral behaviour that often belies ‘market’ forces, a slave to pure monetary gain at the expense of everything else, and a slave to blind sensual drives while throwing any spiritual force within a human being off course.

And in case the message still hasn’t gotten through we are reminded that (bold and italics mine):

“Absolute power sunders the physical unity of the person, devastates spirit and soul, destroys the ability to act, drains all vitality. Prior to industrialized mass murder, it carries out a transmutation of human nature. The transformation of human beings into materiel and the fabrication of the Muselmanner, the waking dead, are its greatest triumphs. In sharp contrast with all earlier forms of power, absolute terror creates nothing. Its work is totally negative, a project of obliteration without a trace. It realizes its freedom in the complete and total annihilation of the human being.” (p281, Sofsky)

Through a system of control through the mass media, economic and financial institutions, the cabal has sought to keep us at each others’ throats through the perpetuation of fear and loathing, anxiety and obsession with destructive individual ‘rights’ which do not involve the reciprocation of duties to respect and honour the rights of others; it’s all about ‘I-me-mine’ as the advertising/marketing world keep reminding us (the destruction of reciprocity).

1. Use a feudal hierarchical pyramidal structure of top-down control

2. Institute capitalism as the primary economic model which leads to a system of senseless accumulation of wealth and material products maintained by the use of the media to promote consumerism and obedience to the fetishized ‘market forces’ established by the cabal’s global financial and political institutions

3. All ‘value’ is measured in terms of valueless fiat currency which is printed at whim to finance never ending wars and the creation of eternal debt

4. Keep the world and its peoples in a state of perpetual debt and wage slavery as they cannot rely on their spiritual values and ideas to build economic strength but must rely on ego and fear based energies of impending starvation from reprisals to their physical beings if they resist the cabalists structures (micro and macro)

5. Keep people busy with meaningless work, jobs and employment to just earn money to survive; keep them in debt-bondage and obsessed with sensual indulgence so that they are unable to turn away from the debilitating effects of the idiot-box-and-devices (TV and mobile phones); and turn them away from reading, thinking, and sharing intelligent ideas with one another. Counter serious examination of the state of the world and citizen participation in local, political, or any other sensible activity by a system of disenfranchisement

6. This system of disempowerment is boosted by ego driven cynicism of so-called social commentators as well as the worship of celebrities and mania over the frailties of their personal lives, and attempts to get the rest of us to be more concerned about who earns the most in business and Hollywood. In other words keep us distracted from improving and empowering ourselves through surrendering our attention to nut-cakey-fruity-case flakes and other such media-attention-grabbers

7. Obsession with material goods through the constant promotion of the latest fashion products and accelerate built-in used obsolescence in almost anything (example, computers) and mobile phones which require us to seek constant upgrading (and confuse that as ‘upgrading’ ourselves)

8. Derail us from thinking about why we are here and what is the purpose of life. Ensure that the mainstream media doesn’t focus on spiritual matters but things that engender hatred and negativity through the playing up of violence, war and dysfunctional behaviour. Constant prattling on the ‘weaknesses’ of human nature and never the strength of unity, reciprocity and challenging of absolute power and corporate controllers, that is, the media’s complicity with the agenda of the cabal to ensure that human beings are kept in a state of the living dead while thinking that the lives they are leading are supposedly ‘normal’

9. The constant disruption of time and sequencing of events in our lives due to the stress and anxiety created by the negative media reports and work place demands, coupled with personal/family ones, keeps us in a state of limbo and hectic behaviour that fits perfectly with the ‘forcible coordination’ of the controllers

But to ensure that control can be permanent and the market of global control has been cornered through a one superpower world, the cabal needs to institute a takeover by re-creating what the Nazi’s did in 1933 and 1938 (looked at in more detail below). The need to exercise absolute power by the cabal through the use of terror to establish once and for all OT. We are still living in the shadow of the near successful attempt of using the 9-11 attacks on New York to suspend all civil liberties, and eventually establish openly the FEMA CCs as a step to turning the US into a launching pad for more war, and a base for quickly consolidating and spreading world wide the ineluctable OT. For those who think what they are reading now is fanciful, be patient…it won’t be too long from your reading these words that even more stunning revelations will take place.

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There are no genuine democratic countries in the world today. ‘America’ has been hijacked by the cabalists and ‘democracy’ there is like a deadly virus they hope to spread everywhere. It is hard to determine when, in a long time, in human history there existed any genuine Democracy. The ‘democracy’ of today is but a sham in which people are enslaved to serving the diktats of OT. The cabalists have come close to winning their game, but they will not as many of us have started to awaken to their activities.

The cabal’s 9-11 attacks on America was a replay of creating similar conditions that allowed the Nazi’s an excuse to push for fascist control of Germany. The cabal ambitiously combined the 1933 burning of the Reichstag (German parliament) and the 1938 Kristallnacht in an attempt to assert control over the world’s sole superpower to initiate their agenda of an old world order of domination (typically these bozos call it a ‘new’ world order -- it’s the virus hiding itself in doublespeak).

Do some research on America’s so-called Patriot Act instigated conveniently by the 9- 11 ‘terror’/Terrror attacks, and what the Nazi’s initiated in those fateful years of the 1930s. The papers of the day in Germany described the attack on the Reichstag as a “most monstrous act of terrorism”. The fire was blamed on Communists whom the Nazi’s wanted to counter so as to gain a parliamentary majority and thereby start their plans for fascist domination of Germany. So the official account of the Reichstag burning played along the terrorist lines to stoke up fear among Germans and send them into the arms of the Nazis (italics mine):

“The burning of the Reichstag was intended to be the signal for a bloody uprising and civil war. Large-scale pillaging in Berlin was planned.... It has been determined that ... throughout Germany acts of terrorism were to begin against prominent individuals, against private property, against the lives and safety of the peaceful population, and general civil war was to be unleashed....” (this and the German newspaper quote above are from the Wikipedia)

Hitler, who was just made chancellor weeks before the fire, managed to coerce through the Reichstag Fire Decree which effectively curbed most civil liberties of the Weimar constitution, and the preamble of the act stated that (bold and italics mine):

“On the basis of Article 48 paragraph 2 of the Constitution of the German Reich, the following is ordered in defense against Communist state-endangering acts of violence:

Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom [habeas corpus], freedom of opinion, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” (taken from Wikipedia)

Does this have a familiar ring in post- 9-11 ‘America’?

But this was the tip of the iceberg: what Hitler and his hooligans were aiming for was to get their Enabling Act through which would allow him and his chief thugs to make dictatorial laws without the approval of the Reichstag, thereby establishing a fascist state.

With the Enabling Act passed, Hitler would be given the control that developed into his dictatorial powers as he could do what he wanted through decrees that bypassed the Reichstag nor his having to discuss anything with other political players.

The 9-11 attacks were not a terror attack but a Terror attack by OT. It was hoped that this act of high treason would start the effective move of America away from civil liberties and the total undermining of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights (whatever is already left of it). This would place the cabalists in control of the world’s sole superpower and to do as they pleased anywhere. The FEMA CCs which thrive on the term ‘emergency’ -- which was what the Nazis also used to justify their tyrannical takeover of Germany -- is the logical extension of the cabal’s attempt to control things thereby giving them the leeway to target those they would prefer to get rid off/contain (including masses of people who could protest the eradication of their civil liberties).

Then there was the Kristallnacht of 1938. With the murder of a German diplomat in Paris that year by a Jewish youth (as reprisal to the over night expulsion by Hitler of thousands of Polish born Jews from Germany), the Nazis instigated a nation wide anti-Jewish pogrom. Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked and destroyed in the thousands which not only resulted in deaths but the start of mass deportation of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ to CCs. The ‘Night of Broken Glass’ was the staged vendetta of the Nazis against their opponents. It was also the first steps towards all the horrors associated with the Nazis and terrors of the CCs.

The transfer of people to CCs and the systematic mass destruction of human beings was all part of an organized wave of terror that merged with “forcible coordination’ as part of the overall concept of Terror.

This ideology of Terror is precisely what the cabalists of today also want to enhance throughout the world. Create the materiel you need for the material world and force a planned obsolescence of culling people so that the ‘wealth’ of plunder that comes from war and from the formulation of so-called lebensraum (Nazi thought is very much alive today) ensuring economic/political incursions into the sovereignty of other states for one group which results in the death/slavery of another. Zero-sum all the way.

So the current cabalists in a fit of ambition and, what to them must appear as use of the imagination, decided to combine the Reichstag burning and Kristallnacht through pulling off the 9-11 Terror attack. They launched perhaps the mother of all false flag operations in recent times to blame the destruction of the twin towers in New York on terror groups (who would form the kernel of the ‘enemy’s’ identity, that is anyone who is Muslim); this was the Reichstage fire aspect of things except that the cabal’s work that September day was far more violent.

The cabal ambitiously used 9-11 as a Kristallnacht too and (since Americans were also killed in the attacks) as a platform for reprisal against not just certain targets in the Muslim world (the nutcake Saddam being a prime example), but to initiate instability world wide through the move into Afghanistan and raising the general ire of Christians and Muslims around the world who saw this more as an extension of the old drawn out drama from the Crusades of yesteryear.

All this was dissonant music to cabal’s ear as spreading instability and creating a scenario of divide and conquer kept all of us even closer to the ground with faces shoved into the troughs of not only daily survival, but now fear, anxiety, loathing and anger against one another. Yet the cabalists wanted to go the whole hog this time, so they ‘imaginatively’ tried to go for the CC idea of their revived Nazi ideology by raising ethnic/religious issues within America.

Not long after 9-11 the Bush appointed Peter Kirsanow head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights nicely stated that “if there’s another terrorist attack and if it’s from a certain ethnic community or certain ethnicities that the terrorists are from, you can forget about civil rights in this country.”

Kirsanow eloquently added that if there was yet another attack, there could possibly be internment camps (CCs) such as those built to hold Japanese Americans in World War II. But the man was on a roll, so he had to continue with, “Not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops, more profiling…There will be a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights.” Hell, yeah. (Quote taken from: here)

I ask you, not so bloody minded gentle reader, would a democracy (forget Democracy) have created CCs for its Japanese American citizens many of whom were just decent patriotic folk anyway?

Then just in case you thought this was all just a…coincidence with 1930s Germany, please bear in mind that there were deportations of Muslims, seizures and interrogations of American Muslims by the FBI, as well as thousands of American Muslims being told that their jobs in the US, particularly within the civil service couldn’t be guaranteed now that we know conclusively (it would appear) that it was a bunch of Muslims who did 9-11.

All this frenzied activity sounds a trifle, uhm,…terroristic upon ordinary people, won’t you say?

To think that some outstanding universities and institutes of learning exist in America – but wait, Germany had even more to offer like Beethoven, Goethe, Kant, Marx (ah, the fella was Jewish) – yet, all decent and rational thought was suspended in subservience to “forcible coordination”.

But let us not underestimate the cabalists; if you’re visionary you go all the way, so the cads came up with plans for a subsidiary of Halliburton KBR to be given a US$385 million contract by the (Right Honourable) Department of Homeland Security to build detention centres in America. These centres might be used for illegal immigrants, to house victims of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, or perhaps those who start protesting against the cabal if ever their plans were seen through (part of this could stem from riots breaking out due to the collapse of the cabalist capitalist economy).

So the whole idea of the CCs apart from taking care of ‘undesirables’ was to also boost the gDp by increasing expenditure on camps which would go to companies run by the cabal (yup, them Halliburton guys are it). This attitude of cannibalization and going into any part of the world using force or threats and getting whatever materiel needed to expand gDp, and to exercise control and spread ‘American democracy’ or “forcible coordination” is truly the bedrock of much ‘American’ foreign and trade policy today.

This is the zero-sum winner take all and death-and-damnation-to-all-else attitude that is also the skull and bones foundation on which all feudal and capitalist systems are based. The whole idea of such an approach is to ensure that humans see their existence as nothing more that an animated pile of dust that returns to the ashes that issues forth from crematoriums.

Our entire economic edifice is built on such a system at the moment that fits in with the cabal’s way of thinking. Just go through all the quotes from Sofsky mentioned here and you will see that the Terror promoted in the camps, and the sense of constant surveillance and control, fear and anxiety that such a system promotes is the extension of what the Nazis did in the 1930s to establish their OT.

Right till today, through political, economic and social control with the triumph of the will of materialism the cabal hoped to destroy anything of a spiritual nature in humans by creating their ultimate goal: the world as a concentration camp writ large. But they are not going to be able to do it as we have started to finally wise up.

It is almost a scenario out of H.P. Lovecraft where the cabal are like beings from another planet unleashing everything that we know is inhuman and inhumane, as they turn our world upside down. And it is no surprise that the Nazi idea of a ‘master race’, and many other practices and symbols used by them, have occult roots. Do some research to see how they used dark forces that seem to be the underlying template of Nazi ideology.

And in case there are still those who are recalcitrant in their beliefs that ‘America’ is a democracy and that there is Democracy on planet earth, please remind yourself about what took place at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo camps, and ponder if that is reflective of democracy. Whatever the excuses or rationalizations, the horrors of CCs worldwide throughout history may project many things, but they are not representations of Democracy. If you say that such instances cannot be helped because of the way things are, the response is: precisely, there is no democracy or Democracy today, and we have not in living memory have had any actual experience of it.

Delusional Democracy

What we call ‘democracy’ today is nothing close to any idea, much less an ideal, of Democracy that a decent person would like to see in the world. How can there be Democracy in a world that is at war with itself, under the constant threat of ‘terror’, real and imagined, and the sway of Terror (real, not imagined). We are stuck in a world where people are burdened by debt and meaningless work cycles of ‘productivity’ that seem to get us nowhere (for the vast majority) within an economic system of greed, exploitation and total non-sustainability. How can a world scenario like this ever give rise to Democracy?

What of the current system in so-called western ‘democracies’? By and large that system is represented by the image above this section. We have less developed countries (yes, they are responsible for their own problems too) which have been consistently exploited and kept in debt by inequality and coercion as represented by most world bodies of which the WTO and World Bank are prime examples. The commodities from poorer states are made through cheap and mercilessly exploited labour to support a silly and self indulgent lifestyle of people too busy to consider the morality of their actions, usually spending their leisure welded to their TVs and engaged in other mind and soul numbing activities like shopping for what you don’t need (but told is necessary by advertising and marketing), and voting in people who are beholden to big business and banking cartels.

Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech at the White House had the iconic reference to the military-industrial complex that is behind ‘America’. But some research will show that Eisenhower had wanted to mention Congress too, which would have been the devastatingly accurate statement that ‘democratic America’ was beholden to a military-industrial-congressional complex, and so it is (the US Federal Reserve was the missing link in the chain).

Kennedy famously talked about the secret government and the reprehensible idea of government by secrecy. He had plans to stop the US involvement in the burgeoning conflict in Vietnam as well as introduce a hard currency backed by precious metals (contra the useless fiat money of the US Fed) which were to be called US Treasury notes. These hard currency notes were conveniently recalled from circulation soon after JFK’s murder. It is no surprise, in retrospect, that he was eliminated before he could do further harm to the ‘democratic’ interests controlling ‘America’.

It is also no secret that Kennedy said after the CIA's Bay of Pigs fiasco that he would "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds". There was no love lost between him and the cabal.

The entire structure of the state in so many ‘democracies’ is designed to protect those who run the corporate, financial, and war mongering apparatuses to keep the so-called voters mind-numbed through fear/anxiety saturation using unending world wide conflicts, the daily grind of work and constant debt/mortgage through an economic flow that promotes crazed credit expansion through borrowing beyond what you can pay. This entire rotten and crumbling ‘golden calf’ is supported gleefully by the media so that it can also sustain itself and the fluff work of not reporting the actual state of affairs of the world.

Sure, this is part of the actual state of affairs of the world: ‘a bomb has gone off in…”, “China has recalled its envoy from…”, “the newest strain of the H1N1 virus has led to the WHO asking…”. The second half of the news may include: “Tiger Woods says he’s sorry…again…”, “Stephen Hawking has decided that God doesn’t exist…”, “Is the hair of XYZ celebrity for real…?”

What you don’t hear, because it would throw the present disgraceful and immoral morass of a world economic system into its widely deserved grave, is “Steps to reconfigure the entire world banking systems are being unveiled, experts finally get off their a**e* to discuss how…”, “More and more Americans and people all over the world are demanding a reinvestigation as to whether the September 11^th attacks were a false flag operation – coming up after the break…other examples of possible false flag operations by major governments of the world…”, and how a couple strive to survive in these times through forming a cooperative with their close friends.

There can be more human interest stories that show how people overcome adversity or how the human spirit shines through normal daily activities, but the main items always play into the cabal’s hands to keep the world hostage to a self created drama of violence and mayhem. Of course, disasters must be covered and people given advisories etc about trouble spots, but the entire mainstream media is mostly aping and competing with one another to see who can be the most bloody minded in its reporting: and this poppycock reporting is given the misnomer journalism (this offers serious competition as to who are the real bozos).

More people, including those who are asserting their discernment again in the US, have come to realize that most of the characters they vote into political office are serving interests other than that of the people. So many politicians in the sole superpower on earth tend to openly support the cabalists monstrous structure of deceit, greed, exploitation and violence.

There is pain of adjustment to the eyes as the newly freed prisoner turns his focus to the world outside of the cave and sees an incredible vista filled with the light of the sun and the objects as they are rather than their shadows. He rushes back to tell his fellow prisoners about this, and they of course think he is bonkers, and start to regard his claims as a threat to their comfort zone engendered by the slavery to the puppet masters casting shadows on the wall. Sometimes the prisoners are so incensed by the ‘nonsense’ of the guy who came back to help free them that they would rather kill him than face the truth about the false world they live in.

It is not that difficult to think of some spiritual and other leaders who have been murdered because they tried to do the same. The cabalists are the shadow masters who operate away from light and transparency; they thrive with cloaks and daggers. So many of us are still prisoners in the cave. But we can still make the journey out together with courage and effort and with the help of those who have slipped out of the cave – thinking through their ideas like those of Plato and Kant; heeding the examples like that of Gandhi, Mandela and Mother Theresa of Calcutta; and observing the leadership of some like the Brothers Kennedy.

We have to leave the shadow play behind on the wall of illusion and take on the difficult task and challenge of breaking free from what is considered ‘normalcy’. Our very survival and that of the planet rests on our forcing ourselves away from the delusional images we are coerced to watch on the wall of the cave (think mainstream media) glorifying fears, anxiety, violence and excessive self indulgence.

We have been force fed a homogenized genetically modified murderous diet to convince us that the world we live in is one of despair and that we are mainly material and negative beings who need control and who only can end up as a handful of dust. But this is where the cabal has seriously miscalculated. Because when the human species starts to wake up, it cannot be stopped, and we can all -- if we work collectively on this -- make it up the slope from the innards of the cave: back into the light from which all life originates.

We have to throw away preconceptions and what we’ve been indoctrinated with from birth through most of our adulthood – that we are not spiritual beings and that material needs can never be met if we prioritize our lives by giving equal weight to our material and spiritual needs. Let each person decide for themselves who reads this what being a spiritual being means for them, and see if by extension some of the points raised below includes what is needed to provide for our material well being and spiritual growth thereby creating a balanced and sustainable world in which war, poverty and the slave-type labour of our working world imbued with “forcible coordination” can be finally eradicated.

We would be looking to achieve:

1. Move away from the largely capitalist driven mind set that growth = gDp which means mainly a monetary measurement for what is economic growth. With the premise that we are spiritual beings first who happen to have physical bodies that need support, we then need a measurement of growth that reflects this as part of our well being. We take the quality of life into serious consideration, not just the quantitative aspect of things. Some of these ideas have been explored in earlier posts at this site

2. That all living things should be respected including the Earth which is clearly a living entity. The Earth is alive because no life can be supported, nor would evolution occur, if the planet is but a large pile of dust. Life comes from life, not death-like inert matter despite the bizarre ideas of those who claim to be scientists (who are in fact promoters of occult beliefs that there are mysterious forces floating out there like ‘gravity’ that just happen to conveniently arrange themselves into ‘natural laws’). If the Earth is a living entity, then we must have a measurement of growth that respects this and includes this notion of protecting and enhancing its eco-systems thereby ensuring the survival of our own economic and social eco-systems, through ethical, responsible and sustainable living and production

3. This means channeling resources away from war and destruction (contra the aim of the cabalists) into positive ideas and green technology to forge a new way of energy creation, productive activities, and commodity exchange throughout the planet among different communities/societies/states. Some resources will be kept for security needs but if war can be lessened and the cabalists taken to task, peace can takeover the planet

4. End the idea of separation through language, religion and race and see the Oneness of all life. Whatever we do bear in mind the golden rule of doing unto others what we want others to do unto us: this implies a system of shared responsibility, tolerance, understanding, mutual support, help and respect – in a word, reciprocity

5. Reciprocity would entail a just and fair economic and political system which will lead us closer to the citizen empowerment that can help form the base and driving force that will help us not only recreate what Democracy means, but help us to try and finally realize a democratic system of citizen involvement, responsibility and consultation in local and national governance

6. Not to be sidetracked by the confusion that rights mean rabid individualism at all cost. All rights imply the duties of respecting the rights of everyone, that is, rights operate within the context of our duties to one another. For unless we have a duty towards others, or reciprocity, how on earth do we have a right to anything since nobody has a duty to respect the rights we claim for ourselves

7. Recognize the fact that we are co-creators of our world and reality. That every invention and commodity we bring out should reflect this for the betterment and highest good of all

8. A system of smaller and manageable businesses and economic enterprises that reflect a community base form (which can cross borders and will not be multi-nationals but multi-communals). No shareholders except those who are of the businesses and these entities, as far as possible, should be owned by all who are of the enterprise and have a transparent system of profit sharing that ensures growth (in a manageable way) and sustainability of the enterprise and all who work for it. Profit will be a term that will belong to the past where a win-lose scenario is envisaged. We are going here for a win-win situation at all times as far as is possible and one of sustainability

9. The complete reinvention and rejuvenation of the world financial and banking scene with community banks taking a leading role. This would work in tandem with the return to hard currency backed by gold and precious metals for all countries thereby giving real value for money

10. That money is seen as a resource that can be re-cycled back as donations and trusts after the death of mega wealthy individuals (e.g., Warren Buffet, Bill Gates who have decided so) to help the underprivileged and raise environmental consciousness

11. Have healthy competition that involves cooperation and collaboration among all towards support for all life as far as possible as the underlying principle of growth, not the destructive kind of competition that hinges on mindless profitability and unbridled exploitation, or zero-sum situations

12. The realization that the world is abundant in what it has to offer us if we channel our learning, science, technology and natural intelligence, not to mention common sense, to come up with ways to produce what we need to support us best we can while giving back to the Earth and maintaining the natural balance of its diverse and miraculous ecosystems

13. That we see ourselves mainly as caretakers of the Earth and caregivers to one another so that our education system starts with these premises and builds societal, regional, international and global responsibility towards one another. So we start with the initial conditions of education with the children outside of ‘the cave’ and get them used to the light soonest – they don’t need to be taught the shadow play we were stuck with but the way of light which is working with one another so that we all gain and benefit

14. A new and responsible media that highlights what is positive, what works for the well being of all and what brings us forward boldly into the new paradigm of getting things right. The so-called bad news will still be there, but balance it for what it is…the aberration in a world that is growing up and maturing into civility. This takes the sting away from those who remain from the cabal who may want to re-assert the old destructive ways

15. That the practice of calming and breathing exercises, meditation and connection to nature be a common aspect of life in schools and the work places. This would be the start of increasing trust, goodwill and even high work output among people. With fair and decent remuneration all round (as opposed to furthering excess and indecently high salaries), the daily work world can be transformed into one that a person can look forward and contribute to willingly and purposively

16. A work/economic paradigm that is successful as it is even joyful because what is being provided and created is for the benefit and highest good of all involved and the world at large

17. Understand and respect the sanctity of all life

Naturally, the nay-sayers will claim that this is not possible in many instances because of the ‘way things are’ (a motto of the cabal) and ‘human nature’ (the cynical view of which the cabal hopes will continue). If that is the case, then these people who claim this are supporters of a dismal determinism where there is clearly no free will; in which case they are already and always will be slaves even if they pretend they are not.

If there is free will, then we can choose. But the fact that we can indeed choose and have ideas of what is good and what isn’t, and that many of us see spiritual dimensions to things, is sign enough of a greater power at work than the limited and childish human ego. We need to start to learn to let go of our limitations and blinkers of controls that have been placed upon us, to create the new paradigm and history of the Earth.

The question then arises so what else can we do now to hasten the positive changes and get rid of the ungodly yoke of the cabal? Perhaps three basic things may be useful here: first, see the economic collapse that is upon us as a good sign and actively find ways to enhance new economic models that are green and people friendly, as mentioned above.

Next, do all we can (this applies to those of us who are not US citizens but affected by the cabal’s ‘American’ policies) to encourage Barack Obama to get going with the arrest of the cabalists behind 9-11 (email the guy, he needs to know that people everywhere are behind him: link). This is the thin end of the wedge that will bring about either simultaneously, or consecutively, the eradication of the US Federal Reserve which is the stronghold of the cabal and its worthless fiat money, as well as the bringing to justice of the key cabalists for Terror against humanity. This will get the ball rolling and the cabal’s operations will start to shut down and operatives throughout the world will be rounded up by various other governments and forces within them (not all are under control by the cabalists) who are waiting for the signal from ole Barry.

If it still isn’t clear, let me for the hell of it just say: we are all in this together, big time.

Finally, we all need to just commit acts of gratuitous kindness, decency, compassion and just plain civility in all situations at all times as is humanly possible. This above all is the start of the People of the world uniting and coming together as a gathering of light that will dispel the cabal’s Terror forever. There can be, if we create it, governments of the People, by the People, and for the People and the Planet that can never perish.

Also, the obvious should still be stated that this post is not the answer to all our problems; we are also creating solutions as we go along and react to events; rather, it is an energetic transfer to the ether and collective consciousness in support of other co-creators who want to see a new and blessed world for us and the next generation to live in.

To those who see how real and how much within our grasp most of the ideas here are that will allow us to create our own destiny, to those who have the courage to turn away from despair and see that there is Divine grace in all life and within ourselves to get rid of the cabal’s influence and create cities of light in a world of light, and for those who have decided that being human is a compliment to what is good in the universe, I can only say with the utmost gratitude:

Thank you for taking back your power.

And peace be with you.

[Many thanks for the creative work to all the artists whose pictures, graphics and videos are presented here and on this site]

End of Poverty interview

Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’

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Dear All

Yet again, another letter to the press and this time to highlight the need to go beyond the economically unsustainable and socially damaging system that is usually sealed by the manufactured consent between the mainstream media and corporate interests.

The idea of profit sharing has been explored in previous posts here but it needs repeating as an idea that works (just do a search on the Net to find out more), and there is the constant need to remind ourselves to treat one another with common human decency.

“…There are two root issues that need to be looked at if any reasonable solution is to be found to the perpetual problem of low wages and hiring foreign workers instead of locals for such jobs like those of a cleaner.

The first is the mindset change needed in moving away from the pyramid structure of many businesses, especially of large corporations.

As long as what may be perceived as low-level work is placed at the bottom of the rung in a business, wages will follow suit.

But as…[pointed] out, what will happen indeed when we run out of people to clean up after us?

Instead of a pyramid, a web of interconnection should be envisioned for businesses in which everyone - management or non-managerial staff - has a role to play.

A cooperative approach can be taken, moving away from that of accumulating profits above all else.

Have a fair wage where all in a firm share in the profits made, with ratios of sharing in earnings established depending on the contribution an employee makes to the firm.

This beats relying on "market forces", which are a means for companies to offer staff as little as possible while squeezing the maximum from them.

The other issue is ensuring that all in a firm are treated equally, with due respect. There is excessive focus on the salaries of CEOs, instead of what are economically sustainable and ethical workplace scenarios.

Talk to the people who sweep our roads and those who clear our garbage daily and you'll realize they are human beings with dreams of their own.

Giving proper societal and economic recognition to all may help realign our viewpoint on what workplace dignity is about.

It is not always about the money.”

It is time for discernment, thinking and starting to see the interconnectedness of all life. It is time for us to wake up, get real and finally start to grow up.   

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Some interesting and timely extracts from Stud Terkel’s famous book Working where various people were interviewed in the early '70s on what they thought about their work.

Till today, being ethical in daily life seems difficult to ground into ‘reality’.

Nick Lindsay (Carpenter/Poet)

[page 520]

“…It seems like the vast comedy of things when a Yankee come and got us to build their H-bomb, part of the fine comedy that she should come and give us the first living wage since the War of Northern Aggression – for this.

In Bloomington, Indiana, I saw a lot of women make their living making bombs. They had a grand picnic when they built the millionth bomb. Bombs they’re dropping on people. And the students came to demonstrate against the bombs. Maybe these women see no sense in what they’re doing but they see their wages in what they’re doing…

…Work’s quite a territory. Real work and fake work. There’s fake work, which is the prostitution. There is the magic of payday, though. You’ll say, ‘Well, if you get paid for your work, is that prostitution?’ No indeed. But how are you gonna prove it’s not? A real struggle there. Real work, fake work, and prostitution. The magic of payday. The groceries now heaped on the table and the new-crop wine and store-bought shirts. That’s what it says, yes.”

Nora Watson (Editor)

[pages 523-24]

“A guy was in the office next to mine. He’s sixty-two and he’s done. He came to the Institution in the forties. He saw the scene and said: ‘Yes, I’ll play drone to you. I’ll do all the piddly things you want. I won’t upset the apple cart by suggesting anything else.’ With a change of regimes in our department, somebody came across him and said, ‘Gee, he hasn’t contributed anything here. His mind is set in old attitudes. So we’ll throw him out.’ They fired him unceremoniously, with no pension, no severance pay, no nothing. Just out on your ear, sixty-two. He gets back zero from having invested so many years playing the game.

The drone has his nose to the content of the job. The politicker has his nose to the style. And the politicker is what I think our society values. The politicker, when it’s apparent he’s a winner, is helped. Everyone who has a stake in being on the side of the winner gives him a boost. The minute, I finally realized the way to exist at the Institution – for the short time I’ll be here – was not to break my back but to use it for my own ends, I was a winner.

…When you ask most people who they are, they define themselves by their jobs. ‘I’m a doctor.’ ‘I’m a radio announcer.’ ‘I’m a carpenter.’ If somebody asks me, I say, ‘I’m Nora Watson.’ At certain points in time I do things for a living. Right now I’m working for the Institution. But not for long. I’d be lying to you if I told you I wasn’t scared.

I have few options. Given the market. I’m going to take the best job I can find. I really tried to play the game by the rules, and I think it’s a hundred percent unadulterated bullshit. So I’m not likely to go back downtown and say, ‘Here I am. I’m very good, hire me.’

You recognize yourself as a marginal person. As a person who can give only minimal assent to anything that is going on in this society: ‘I’m glad electricity works.’ That’s about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. (Laughs.) Because that’s death. That’s really where death is.”

Walter Lundquist (Industrial Designer)

[Pages 525-27]

“…I wanted to be at the drawing board, creative, doing something I believed in. But I became a pimp. I didn’t start drinking until I was thirty…I found I could out drink any of my clients. They got drunk I didn’t. What an absurd way to live! To make money because you could booze it up and cater to someone else’s frailty. His need for a boot licker’s comradeship, listening to his cheap jokes at some expensive bar. I got work alright, but it made me sick. I couldn’t stand it.

We had a client who was providing additives to meats and food preparations. My job was to make it into a trade publication ad. I'm sitting at these meetings with the president of the company and the sales manager. We’re out to provide a service to the meat packers so they can cheat government analysts who are going to inspect the sausages. They don’t see it as cheating. I say, ‘Why are we doing this ad for mustard?’ They say, ‘Mustard acts as a binder.’ It holds together the globules of fat the client is putting in. So we make a living selling mustard because the guy wants to put fat instead of meat protein in there. So the public's being cheated and these sons of bitches are out there playing golf…

…The turning point in my life was the death of my father. It was a funny thing. Here you’re watching a beautiful guy with white hair lying in his bed, dying of a heart attack. You hear him ramble and wander and talk about his life: ‘I was never anything. I didn’t do a job even in raising my children. I didn’t mean anything…’ You watch death. Then you say, ‘Wait a minute. What’s going on with him is going to hit me. What am I doing between now and my death? If you take actuarial tables of insurance companies, I’m running on borrowed time.’ You begin to assess yourself and that’s a shock. I didn’t come up smelling like a rose. ‘Am I going to go on forever being a goddamn pimp? What’s the alternative? Is there another way of earning a living?’

…At this moment I have a job on the drawing board that’s pretty good. This one client has some degree of conscience. It’s an ecology poster for children, given away as a premium. It’s a beautiful thing to hang on the wall, acquainting a child with the cycle of life.

…I’m struggling to survive. I’m running out of funds. I may have to pimp again for survival’s sake. But I’ll not give up the sane work. I’m scurrying about. If it doesn’t work, I may do somewhat what young people do and drop out. I’ll stop existing in society. I’ll work on a road crew. I’ll cut lumber of whatever the hell it’ll be. But I’ll never again play the full-time lying dishonest role I’ve done most of my life.

Once you wake up the human animal you can’t put it back to sleep again.”

In the twenty first century, so far, not much has changed since Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (read the uncensored original edition).

And now, for a little burst of freedom:

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Folks

With the dramatic rise in global awareness of what large corporations and the people behind them are doing to the world and its life forms, more people are asking for drastic measures to be taken against them.

Some of these can be identified in the post and the clip at the end of it, entitled “Nationalize BP”.

Yet it is difficult to deny that in wanting some form of justice, it is easy to get swayed with emotion and ask for extreme measures as well. For instance, asking for capital punishment (no matter how appealing this may appear to some) for those who have wreaked havoc across the globe due to greed and mismanagement may not be the best approach to solve problems.

Recently, a letter of mine to the mainstream media looked at this aspect of things in reaction to the bandying about of the ultimate sanction for reckless driving on roads.

This is an excerpt from it:

“But this does not mean that extending the reach of the hangman's rope for every tragic occasion when there is loss of life, even when negligence is involved, is the way to go.

Would it then be necessary to have capital punishment for when things go awry during medical procedures, sports or military activities, group outings, or in situations where someone offers help only to have things end tragically?

And what about situations involving businesses whose products cause death through negligence: why should they not be subject to capital punishment? Should we also call for the death penalty for the many disastrous and irresponsible things done by large corporations, as in the case of [the] BP Gulf spill? Should the chief executive officer, board of directors or shareholders be held accountable with such severity?

Surely, the statistics gathered for death due to negligence arising from greed and incompetence would register in the thousands.

We need to be judicious in punishments and exercise greater emotional control in difficult situations than merely calling for state-sanctioned executions.”

Which brings us to another question -- what do you do when confronted at long last with undeniable evidence that harm has been deliberately inflicted on people over and above the assumed cause of 'greed and incompetence'.

Putting aside the tendency of some to disregard ‘conspiracy' theories and those who see everything as a ‘conspiracy’, it is not unusual to see many groups all over the planet working together often behind the scenes.

Just think of the international banking cartel for starters.

This could help explain what happens beneath the surface of what is perceived in society and represented (or misrepresented) by the mainstream media (much of which is under corporate control anyway) as 'news'.

I recall a friend and former colleague in the media who said: "But you can't always tell the truth". And the contradistinction of that with the delicate irony of the CIA's "the truth shall set you free" under the guise of cloak and dagger, of course.

Meanwhile, what happens on the surface of society has all sorts of ‘sociological’ or other kinds of explanation for it. Bear in mind all these 'explanations' are just another form of theory to explain away something.

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote an interesting piece late in life called On the old saw: that may be right in theory but it won’t work in practice. Kant’s focus was on moral theory and naturally, those who criticize it inevitably use some theory of their own. Of course, Kant’s work is much more than what appears on the surface as he brilliantly defends his view of moral philosophy which most of his critics were not always able to effectively bring down as much as they wanted to.

So, there are those who will give random or so-called ‘historical’ and ‘economic’ reasons for what happens in the world such as the causes of war and various economic crises etc. This is not to say that there are no valid historical perspectives nor economic forces that underly what happens in the world.

But it doesn’t take too much of a stretch of the imagination to see that wars have a way of occurring and ending in manners that sometimes belie whatever reasons we cook up for them. The convenience of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and totalitarianism and their coincidental situation between World Wars I and II can be given as many interpretations as what many others may give as to what exactly is the ‘law of gravity’. These are unfinished scenarios and explanations that are to date anything but conclusive.

For one to say, together with thousands of others, that the truth about the inside job for the September 11, 2001 attacks will be out sooner than later, is not to say anything new at all. There is no credible explanation, except for those who indulge in wishful thinking, as to how three towers collapsed when supposedly two were struck by aircraft.

Nor would those who pretend that we are all alone in the universe and that there has been no contact with extraterrestrial civilizations because, well, 'I haven’t exactly seen one and anyone can imagine stuff'.

Yet curiously, the words "but we can't always tell the truth" and the ironic take on "the truth shall set you free" may almost be transposed from A Midsummer Night's Dream if only it caused as much delight in our subconscious as a Shakespearean comedy.

As for extraterrestrial life, Kant too believed in such a possibility ("I should not hesitate to stake all on the truth of the proposition ... that, at least, some one of the planets, which we see, is inhabited."). Instead of setting it far out in the galaxy he thought it possible closer to home.

The explanation for being alone in the universe is yet another theory that sometimes goes 'if were not alone, why haven’t they landed yet?'

But interestingly enough, a lot of us have even more radical beliefs than what has been written above, in the sense of going to the root cause of things: some of us actually believe in God.

Think about what that really implies.

For those who say what’s surprising about belief in God, one would venture to say that they haven’t had a genuine spiritual experience. But again, for those who claim they have had a spiritual experience, ask them why they then think others have not had other experiences that may prove to them conclusively what some others would prefer to be in denial of.

Many of us show daily just how alive Orwell’s dictum is, that all of us are entitled to our pet explanations but some theories are more equal than others (well, a variation of Orwell). Usually, we mean our own explanations are the accurate ones.

But it will be interesting to see the faces of those who have been vociferously denying many things when the truth of so much finally comes to light and hits the fan. And the question is: to what extent will it be possible to hold back a populace that may be screaming for blood in the name of ‘justice’ real or imagined.

Let me explain: the Nuremberg trials in Germany were a world wide catharsis if you like. The great Mandela’s truth and reconciliation approach kept South Africa together during its post-apartheid phase.

Can people learn to bring in punishment that’s judicious and, shocking as it may seem, even learn forgiveness on a mass scale big time, when the truth about many things corporation-political wise come out for what they are at long last.

Or after all our sophisticated theories, can we only see the enactment of 'an eye for an eye' as the sum total of human wisdom?

That part of our human experience has yet to be written and we will each be actively creating that reality even as we observe it purportedly on the sidelines. Each of our thoughts is a vote for a certain outcome,

And somehow we will have to make it such that the truth does set us free.

Below are two clips from the Zapruder film on the tragic assassination of JFK.

Watch carefully the driver of the car (secret service man), pull out a modified gun and shoot JFK in the head with an exploding bullet, put it back in his coat and hit the accelerator. Don't look at Kennedy, watch the driver.

This is the slow motion clip, and watch at the 49-56 second frames:

We will soon learn the truth of Hamlet's words to his closest friend:

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

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Paul Krugman

Ben Bernanke

Friends

YET again it has become apparent, through the words of Professor Paul Krugman, that the so-called Nobel prize for economics is tantamount to a crime against humanity.

In his latest hallucinogenic reverie entitled “Debunking the Austerity Myths”, Mr Krugman provides a stilted but psychedelic explanation as to why throwing money at things is the way forward in resolving the world economic debacle. The essence of the ideas being put forward are that attempts at fiscal discipline are fanciful and that pumping in as much financial liquidity into an economy is the way to jump start things.

These ideas are part of the jaded and proven-to-be-catastrophic neo-classical economic ideas that have led us to the mess we are all in. No amount of juggling and unholy incantations from current economic theory with its sleazy manipulating of interest rates, taxes and government expenditure is going to give us any form of genuine recovery.

The point is that in a system that is stacked against the good of the planet, welfare of all forms of life and well being of any decent human being, whatever money that is strewn around -- even with best of intentions -- inevitably ends up in the hands of those who have been controlling the economic and behind-the-scenes levers in the first place.

The rest of us are always at the short end of a very sharp stick that is now finally being redirected to chasing out the money changers from our societies: or at least, one prays.

It is really quite clear that we have to sit some of these professors down, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, and force them to watch a clip of Lady Gaga repeatedly explaining:

“Dear Bozos,

If you play a game of Monopoly* and expect to win and survive that game as it is played by its rules, then inevitably no matter what technique you use the only way to win the game is by bankrupting everyone else and being the sole monopolist on the game board. The entire purpose of the game is to wipe out the 'competition' and beggar your fellow human beings. It is designed to finally end once you own everything and have impoverished everyone else, so that there's no one left to play the game.

Similarly, when you extend this to society at large what happens is you tend to outsource your work for pittance -- and/or pay other workers you bring in much lower wages -- to sell your products at higher profit margins to....ah, we forget, you consumers are out of money so we need to increase credit/loans and get money siphoned into the system again otherwise we will not be able to repeat the whole cycle of crushing you back into poverty. Rock on.”

In the end, what Mr Krugman wants is what President Franklin Roosevelt succumbed to after introducing his New Deal measures to fight the Great Depression. It seems that getting involved in World War II was a good way to churn money about as massive spending is required when a country gears up for global military involvement.

Professorio Krugman doesn’t ask how exactly did America and so much of the world today get into the current economic rut in the first place. Perhaps excessive use of military involvement as an economic strategy to boost expenditure, and the use of fiat currencies that can be printed freely by governments have a lot to answer for.

It is no surprise that both Britain and the US want to exit from trouble spots their militaries are embroiled in, and that President Obama has cannily remarked that the world cannot depend on America buying everything up from their economies because it is time for fiscal discipline.

Be assured, sooner than later we will all return to a new gold standard which not only gives genuine value to a state’s currency but automatically results in fiscal discipline and, unsurprisingly, less military adventurism all round.

A close examination of ordinary people’s comments on how they survived the Depression in the US points to Roosevelt’s social security policies, the social resilience of the people, and to the fact that some people had enough savings for rainy days that turned into floods.

What most countries should do is not to take a populist approach of having a lax social security savings scheme while encouraging governmental spending binges. Nor should there be a regimen of zero interest rates to the point you just give away money and hope all will be well. This is precisely the kind of thing that will have disastrous consequences with significant devaluation of the currency, or inflation, that would leave many of us with a shredded safety net and money that is so utterly worthless since you cannot even recycle it as paper to write notes on.

Fiscal discipline and a new way of doing things among ourselves as in helping one another through difficult times, is the way forward. Some of these ideas for a new paradigm are explored in many of the earlier posts on this site.

Following the advice of Mr Krugman, who does not admit to the World War II spending scenario that is the underlying narrative of his rhetoric against so-called austerity measures, is like asking those on trial at Nuremberg to explain their point of view.

But World War II was their point of view. And some of us have had enough of that.

* Wikipedia states that “Monopoly is a redesign of an earlier game "The Landlord's Game" first published by political activist Elizabeth Magie. The purpose of that game was to teach people how monopolies end up bankrupting the many whilst giving extraordinary wealth to one or few individuals.”

“ ‘Whether it can be altered or not, whether it’s right or wrong landlordism is one of the causes of poverty…Poverty is not caused by men or women getting married, it’s caused by machinery; it’s not caused by “over-production”; it’s not caused by drink or laziness; and it’s not caused by “over population”. It’s caused by Private Monopoly. That is the present system. They have monopolised everything that it is possible to monopolise; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolised the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air – or of the money to buy it – even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessities of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think so and say so. Even as you think at present that it’s right for a few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you say: “It is Their Land,” “It’s Their Water,” “It’s Their Coal,” “It’s Their Iron,” so you would say “It’s Their Air,” “These are Their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?” [And even while he is doing this the air monopolist will be preaching sermons on the Brotherhood of Man; he will be dispensing advice on “Christian Duty” in the Sunday] magazines; he will give utterance to numerous more or less moral maxims for the guidance of the young. And meantime, all around, people will be dying for want of some air that he will have bottled up in his gasometers. And when your are all dragging out a miserable existence, gasping for breath or dying for want of air, if one of your number suggest smashing a hole in the side of one of the gasometers, you will all fall upon him in the name of law and order, and after doing your best to tear him limb from limb, you’ll drag him, covered with blood, in triumph to the nearest Police Station and deliver him up to “justice” in the hope of being given a few half-pounds of air for your trouble.’ ”

Owen opened his dinner basket and took from it two slices of bread, but as these were not sufficient, he requested that anyone who had some…give it to him.

‘These pieces of bread represent the raw materials which exist naturally in and on the earth for the use of mankind; they were not made by any human being, but were created by the Great Spirit for the benefit and sustenance of all, the same as were the air and the light of the sun.’…

‘Now…I am a capitalist; or…I represent the landlord and capitalist class…all these raw materials belong to me…the only thing that matters now is the admitted fact that all the raw materials which are necessary for the production of the necessaries of life are now the property of the Landlord and Capitalist class. I am that class…’

…‘Now you three represent the Working Class: you have nothing – and for my part, although I have all these raw materials, they are of no use to me – what I need is – the things that can be made out of these raw materials by Work: but as I am too lazy to work myself, I have invented the Money Trick to make you work for me. But first…These three knives represent – all the machinery of production; the factories, tools, railways, and so forth, without which the necessaries of life cannot be produced in abundance. And these three coins…represent my Money Capital.’

…Owen proceeded to cut up one of the slices of bread into a number of little square blocks.

‘These represent the things which are produced by labour, aided by machinery, from the raw materials. We will suppose that three of these blocks represent – a week’s work. We will suppose that a week’s work is worth – one pound: and we will suppose that each of these ha’pennies is a sovereign.

…‘You say you are all in need of employment, and as I am the kind-hearted capitalist class I am going to invest all my money in various industries, so as to give you Plenty of Work. I shall pay each of you one pound per week, and a week’s work is – you must each produce three of these square blocks. For doing this work you will each receive your wages; the money will be your own, to do as you like with, and the things you produce will of course be mine, to do as I like with. You will each take one of these machines and as soon as you have done a week’s work, you shall have your money.’

The Working Class accordingly set to work, and the capitalist class sat down and watched them. As soon as they had finished, they passed nine little blocks to Owen, who placed them on a piece of paper by his side and paid the workers their wages.

‘These blocks represent the necessaries of life. You can’t live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you will have to buy them from me: my price for these blocks is – one pound each.’

As the working class were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink, or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind Capitalist’s terms. They each bought back and at once consumed one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks, and so the net result of the week’s work was that the kind capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of the things produced by the labour of the others, and reckoning of the squares at their market valued of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital, for he still possessed the three pounds in money and in addition four pounds worth of goods. As for the working classes…having each consumed the pound’s worth of necessaries they had bought with their wages, they were again in precisely the same condition when they started work – they had nothing.

After a while…the kind-hearted capitalist, just having sold a pound’s worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools – the Machinery of Production – the knives – away from them, and informed them that as owing to Over Production all his store-houses were glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works.

…‘I’ve paid you your wages, and provided you with Plenty of Work for a long time past. I have no more work for you at present…[and the necessaries of life?]

…‘I shall be very pleased to sell you some.’

…‘Well, you can’t expect me to give you my goods for nothing! You didn’t work for me for nothing, you know. I paid you for your work and you should have saved something: you should have been thrifty like me. Look how I have got on by being thrifty!”

…and then the three unemployed started to abuse the kind-hearted Capitalist, demanding that he should give them some of the necessaries of life that he had piled up in his warehouses, or to be allowed to work and produce some more for their own needs; and even threatened to take some of the things by force if he did not comply with their demands. But the kind-hearted Capitalist told them not to be insolent, and spoke to them about honesty, and said if they were not careful he would have their faces battered in for them by the police, or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs…

‘Of course…if it were not for foreign competition I should be able to sell these things that you have made, and then I should be able to give you Plenty of Work again: but until I have sold them to somebody or other, or until I have used them myself, you will have to remain idle.’ ”

[At the end of all this the listeners all sing “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and ask the kind hearted Capitalist if they can elect him to Parliament – or Congress, etc]

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ONLY last week, Australia lost its Prime Minister -- Kevin Rudd -- to a corporate coup.

His removal by a corporate cabal within his Labour party was not a sign of democracy at work but a victory for big corporate interests.

Mr Rudd's removal and the installing of his deputy as his successor came about when he insisted on his promised 'super' mining tax on Australia's mining industry. As elections are due in Australia soon, the tax which raised a ruckus within the ranks of large corporate interests led to a claim within the Labour party that they may not do well in the forthcoming polls given the negative press being spread by the mining giants.

Then just as you thought you knew how to spell 'democracy', it hit you like a ton of collapsing stock indices that it should actually be spelt as 'corporatocracy'. Who would have guessed?

Whatever his manifest faults, Mr Rudd did the right thing in taking on the mining industry by imposing a 40 per cent “super profits” tax. But it is clear that billionaires finally influence who becomes Australia’s PM (in fact, almost anywhere else) as the first thing the new incumbent has done is to start panicked renegotiations with mining leviathans over the tax.

None of this has to do with the welfare of the Australian people but assuaging the forces of big business and their profit margins.

Much of the revenue from the mining tax could have gone to setting up cleaner alternative sources of energy and be of other use for the Australian people; but what has happened is that the government has cowered under threats by miners to cut off further investments which has been interpreted as lost job opportunities for Australians.

Yet it is mainly overseas markets that seem to benefit from Australian mining activities while citizens face inflationary pressure and a tighter labour market. It is a pity governments in democracies seem largely beholden not to their people but to billionaires, boards of directors and profit maximizing shareholders.

The events in Australia are another in a series of revelations that people in all democracies should take note: democratically elected representatives almost always have to mollycoddle and kowtow to corporate behemoths like BP and BHP rather than stand firmly for the interests of the people.

Probably every major democracy in the world has many of its politicians tucked away within the money filled pockets of big business.

We need to rent the veil of illusion from our eyes and see that what is termed democracy by major countries is essentially government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.

The interview below was done by the inimitable Studs Terkel and was first published in 1970 as part of a collection of unforgettable conversations with those who had some experience or understanding of the Great Depression. The excerpt below is from an interview with Texas Congressman Wright Patman who when the interview was made was into his 21^st term, and was also Chariman of the House Banking and Currency Committee.

This extract is from pages 282-286, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, by Studs Terkel:

“IN THE LATE TWENTIES, the farmers were in distress because all the money went to Wall Street. They were using it up there, manipulating…Less than two hundred men are controlling everything – the fixing of interest, bonds, everything. Members of Congress just don’t step on the toes of these bankers.

That’s why in May, 1929, I introduced the first bill to pay three and half million World War I veterans cash money, direct from the United States Treasury. It took from then till 1936 for these veterans to be paid -- $1,015 each, on the average. They were in such distress, we had to agree on bond payments. They wanted to rob ‘em on interest rates.

…When the poor came to town, they were troublemakers…They step on the grass they are put into jail for stepping on the grass.

…The marchers were good, law-abiding citizens. They built these lodgings down here from waste paper and boxes and things…Those buildings were burnt down by the army, the military, under the direction of Mr. MacArthur and Mr. Eisenhower. Mr MacArthur was strutting down the street like it was a big parade.

The next morning, after driving them out, using tear gas, you’d see little babies and mothers on the side of the road…There was never such a horrible thing happen on earth as that. They killed some of the veterans. They all ought to have been charged with murder.

…Andrew Mellon [Treasury Secretary from 1921-32] was opposed to any payment. He said it would unbalance the budget. They always talked that way…That’s what led me to go after him. I’m against a few people taking advantage of privilege, using it for their own selfishness and punishing other folks.

…January 6, 1932, I rose to impeach Andrew W. Mellon for high crimes and misdemeanors. The Republicans were so shocked and confused, they didn’t stop me…I spoke of conflict of interests. He owned banks, stocks and everything else, and here he was heading the Treasury. It was made a violation a hundred years ago for a Secretary of the Treasury to even own a Government bond.

They voted to refer the proposition to the Judiciary Committee. I sat on one side of the long table by myself and Mr. Mellon and his twelve lawyers sat on the opposite side. The most high-priced lawyers in the United States, the best money could buy. I had a rough time for a couple of weeks.

…At the end of the two weeks, it was Mr. Mellon’s turn to be on the witness stand. The committee recessed until one thirty that afternoon. Well, about twelve-thirty, the papers came out with huge headlines: “Mellon Resigns, Appointed To The Court of St. James” [made ambassador to Britain]. Some members of the committee wanted to impeach him anyway…But the argument was made: Why take up time? He’s not only out of office, he’s out of the country. So they just let it go. They destroyed all the papers.

…Stolen from my office. They robbed my office time and time again…I tried to get the officers around here to do something about it, couldn’t get them to do it.

The security officers around Washington. The Treasury has some. Also the White House and the FBI type people…

…About every three or four elections, they’d lower the boom on me. They could see I was givin’ ‘em trouble on their city-slicking deals. I pictured them as money changers and was after them with sharp sticks...The big business fellas didn’t need me. They got their own paid people around here. They threw plenty of money around and begin to get very popular.

We have two governments in Washington: one run by the elected people – which is a minor part – and one run by the moneyed interests, which control everything.

…It was the big ones closing in on the little ones for the kill. At one time, they thought they’d get a dictatorship here. General Smedley Butler was picked out to be the leader. He was gonna be their man on the white horse. They were gonna close in and take this country over. And they came darn near doing it. They just picked the wrong man*. They’ll get this country in that position again if they can.

…A dictatorship could spring up here over night, if this country got so bad. If another Depression came, we’d have a revolution. People wouldn’t take it any more. They have more knowledge. The big ones, they’d be looking for somebody that’d have the power to just kill people, if they didn’t agree. When John Doe begins to get up, they’d just go down and shoot him…

[Terkel asks: What were your relations with Roosevelt during the Depression?]

I liked him very much. There was an air of optimism. When he got in – getting the fat cats out, getting the money changers out…

[Terkel asks: Do you have the feeling that you’ve been pretty well kept out of the news these past thirty years or so….?]

Why, certainly. I should have been chairman of this committee twenty-five years ago. But they kept me off on account of that fight for the veterans. They knew I knew too much of the money business. They didn’t want a man like that.

Oh, I made news when I authored the Full Employment Bill. They called me a Communist, a Socialist and everything else. But we got the bill through. They all now recognize it as a good bill.

When I get kind of low, I’d think about a verse I learned at one time, when everybody was fighting me. It went something like this:

He has no enemies, you say,

My friend, the boast is poor.

He who hath mingled in the fray

Of duty that the brave endure

Must have foes.

If he has none,

Small is the work he has done.

He has hit no traitor on the hip,

Has cast no cup from perjured lip,

Has never turned the wrong to right,

He’s been a coward in the fight.

I’d often repeat that, you know. (Laughs)

POSTSCRIPT: “I live near the Water Gate Inn, but I’m not in that fat cat area (Laughs). They pay a half million dollars for condominiums down there. Of course, they have to pay ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year just to keep the corridors clean. From my apartment, I can see where the Cabinet lives. (Laughs)”

*In his autobiography, John L. Spivak, a journalist, recounts his investigation of the matter. During his visit to Butler’s home, the General…“an extraordinary man, described ‘what was tantamount to a plot to seize the Government, by force, if necessary.’ ” In 1935, “Butler, on a national radio hookup, denounced the Congressional Committee for suppressing parts of his testimony, involving the names of important men.

Roger Baldwin, who did not look with friendly eyes on communists because they denied free speech and free press, issued a statement as Director of the American Civil Liberties Union: “The Congressional Committee investigating un-American activities has just reported that the fascist plot to seize the government…was proved; yet not a single participant will be prosecuted under the plain language of the federal conspiracy act making this a high crime. Imagine the action if such a plot were discovered among Communists!”

“Which is, of course, only to emphasize the nature of our government as representative of the interests of the controllers of property. Violence, even to the seizure of government, is excusable on the part of those whose lofty motive is to preserve the profit system…” From A Man In His Time, by John L. Spivak, pp. 329-30.

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Dear Friends

The pieces below speak for themselves. Soccer is no longer, as football's world governing body FIfa likes to claim, a game to unite the world but one in which profiteerers of the world unite. The whole game today with the multibillions going between clubs, players, the media, the advertising industry and the profit mongering manipulators behind the scenes, are only part of why there is so much economic difficulty facing us today.

For those who think World Cup 2010 is just a way to relax and unwind, please bear in mind the human cost of such an attitude. We cannot make things better for us nor anyone else if we do not see ourselves as our sisters' and brothers' keepers.

'The sound of vuvuzelas cut through the air in Durban on June 16 -- but for one large group there was little to celebrate. Amid cries of phansi ngama-fat cats, phansi (down with fat cats, down) and a sea of banners proclaiming the government cared only for the rich, civil rights organisations took to the streets protesting against poor service delivery and the World Cup.

Abahlali Base Mjondolo, KwaZulu-Natal Subsistence Fisher's Forum, Clairwood Social Forum and about 17 other organisations gathered for what they dubbed an "anti-Thiefa" protest march which started at Dinizulu Park and ended at City Hall yesterday.

"The R40 billion the government has spent on the World Cup could have comfortably housed three million homeless South Africans", said Alice Thomson of the Durban Social Forum. "Soccer will not make a better life for all -- it will only make the rich richer and the poor poorer," Thomson said.

This week, Thomson was arrested for distributing anti-FIFA pamphlets at the Fifa Fan Fest in Durban.

Bongani Mthembu, of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, said that the decision to hold the protest on Youth Day was deliberate. "Youth Day is an opportunity for us as the youth to air our grievances and raise our concerns. We can show the foreigners here the truth about what's happening behind the World Cup", he said.

Chairman of KZN Subsistence Fisher's Forum Essop Mohamed said: "Some people were 'tired of falling by the wayside'. We are marching against oppression."

"They let FIFA come here and do what they want, but they won't let us fish", he said, referring to a city ruling to bar fishing in certain areas along the beachfront.

Said Shamitha Naidoo, community chairwoman in Pinetown of Abahlali Base Mjondolo: "We need to show them (tourists) what's happening. How will these poor people benefit from the World Cup?"

Protester Kirubavathi Pillay, 68, was also angry at what she said was the inability of the eThekwini Municipality to deliver adequate services. "No one worries about us. We can't manage without some help from the government," Pillay said. "They are not fighting for us. We must fight for us", added Jaysh Ramphul, another marcher.'

(Kamcilla Pillay, Daily News, Durban)

MEMORANDUM OF GRIEVANCES

DATE: June 16, 2010

TO: KZN Premier Zweli Mkhize, Durban Mayor Obed Mlaba, Deputy Mayor Logie Naidoo and Durban City Manager Michael Sutcliffe

RE: Grievances about World Cup 2010 management

We are the citizenry of Durban. Our organisations have long registered grievances about the way the city is being run. In recent months, we have found that many of our problems are worsening, especially because of the way the World Cup has been implemented by FIFA, its corporate partners, politicians and bureaucrats.

While in principle we do not oppose Durban hosting seven World Cup games, we are very opposed to many decisions made by FIFA and city, provincial and national officials. The problems we record below require urgent attention and immediate remedial action.

Economic burden

• Whereas Durban’s 70 000-seater Moses Mabhida Stadium cost taxpayers R3.1 billion; the cost escalation for Mabhida rose from an initial R1.8 billion; and redirecting most of this spending could have erased the majority of the vast backlogs Durban faces, of housing, water/sanitation, electricity, clinics, schools and roads;

• Mabhida’s next-door neighbour is Absa Stadium, home of Sharks rugby, which seats 52 000 and which could easily have been extended

(considering that Durban municipality will knock out 15 000 seats from Mabhida after July);

• the companies and individuals that have profited most from Mabhida’s construction include multinational corporations and those responsible for notorious municipal disasters, such as bus privatiser Remant Alton and Point development failure Dolphin Whispers, along with at least one fake Black Economic Empowerment front company;

• the import bill for Mabhida appears unreasonable, as reflected in breakdowns of Mabhida’s Sky Car due to imported German cables held up for repair by the Icelandic volcano, and in imported German tents erected next to Mabhida by an imported German marquee construction crew;

• the soaring foreign and domestic debt we are now suffering because of World Cup expenses will cause untold problems for the SA economy in years to come; FIFA is not subject to South African taxes; FIFA is also allowed to ignore SA exchange control regulations; and the FIFA profit estimate is more than R25 billion;

Corruption and state failure

•    whereas this kind of extreme waste and crony capitalism typifies the relationship of FIFA to host governments; bribery and corruption have been associated with FIFA’s operations (as documented in lawsuits in Zug and New York); bribes have been predicted (by England’s former World Cup bid manager) that would distort play by some of the leading teams coming to South Africa; and corruption whistle-blowing in Mpumalanga Province led to several suspicious deaths, reportedly by organised hit squads;

•    Durban’s own recent corruption in the construction of low-cost housing by Zikhulise Cleaning, Maintenance and Transport became a national scandal; Durban housing official Nigel Gumede and City Manager Mike Sutcliffe rejected the findings of the National Home Builders’ Registration Council report which shows extensive wrongdoing – one third of houses in Umlazi requiring reconstruction - in a R300 million contract begun in December 2006; politically-connected Zikhulise owners Shauwn and S’bu Mpisane have a notoriously luxurious lifestyle with a car fleet worth a reported R100 million;

•    Durban’s Council and ward committee system has become a form of top-down political control; Council does not take our voices upwards; the democratic gains that were won in 1994 are also our victories, but have been taken from us;

•    the September 2009 attack on the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) movement, its leaders and well known members, their family members and its offices in the Kennedy Road settlement apparently received the backing of the local ruling party and government structures; many AbM members cannot go back to Kennedy Road; and several of the Kennedy Road 13 are being imprisoned interminably without bail or being charged;

•    the Durban council has made clear its intent to demolish the Early Morning Market at Warwick Junction in favour of a shopping mall; the Early Morning Market is one of the surviving monuments of the indentured Indian labourers; and hundreds of jobs – as well as affordable edibles – for poor people are at stake;

•    Durban fisherfolk have witnessed rich people fishing off expensive boats and yachts unhindered while working-class subsistence fishermen suffer police harassment and arrests; fishermen have recently been denied access to New Pier, the South Pier, the Bluff military base and the quayside shore (Gunter Gulley, Yacht Mole, Lucky Dip); and there is worsening sea-water pollution – rubbish, oil and chemicals in the harbour – and apparently no environmental precautions being taken;

•    Durban’s hundreds of thousands of immigrants are under sustained attack; the May 2008 xenophobic attacks demonstrated a failed municipal state which by August washed its hands of ongoing xenophobia crisis and by November used police brutality to displace desperate refugees; Lesotho migrant workers are protesting the revocation of the ‘six month’ system of border concessions; there remain inadequate support systems and preventative measures against another xenophobia attack; and immigrants continue to face oppression in their dealings with the South African government and police;

Workers, the poor and communities under attack

•    whereas this country is rich because of the theft of our land and because of our work in the farms, mines, factories, kitchens and laundries of the rich; and that wealth is therefore also our wealth;

•    the working class and poor of Durban are under severe pressure because of the world and SA economic crises, which have not yet lifted for us, costing the country more than a million lost jobs and leaving Durban badly exposed in sectors like shipping, clothing and textiles; poor and working people are being pushed out of any meaningful access to citizenship; recent government statistics prove the urban poor are becoming poorer; and we are being forced off land and out of our cities;

•    too many of us who have formal water and electricity connections have not been able to afford the fast-rising costs of these services and face disconnection; the promise of housing has been downgraded to forced removal to a transit camp more like prisons than homes; housing that has been built exists in human dumping grounds far outside of the cities and far from work, schools, clinics and libraries; and there is a new, heavy-handed, privatised municipal debt collection strategy that is wrecking state-community relationships;

•    poor flat dwellers have suffered from unaffordable and exploitative rents; and the poor have been forced to sign exploitative rental agreements under duress and threat of eviction;

•    farm dwellers have suffered the impoundment of cattle, demolition of homes, denial of the right to bury loved ones, denial of basic service and brutality (and sometimes murder) at the hands of some farmers; and a biased justice system which has systematically undermined farm dwellers;

•    outsourcing of casualised labour has become a full-fledged crisis, as witnessed in the revolt by Stallion Security workers who were exploited at Moses Mabhida and four other stadiums to the extent of protesting in the face of police stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets; crises caused by Durban’s labour brokers include the ports – partly responsible for a recent three-week strike by transport workers – and the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where underpaid workers (less than R1000 take-home pay for UKZN cleaners) are suffering;

World Cup’s pro-rich bias

•    whereas while the rich have benefited from the World Cup, the poor have not; the Zakumi doll mascot and other memorabilia were made in China not South Africa; Durban’s informal street traders have been displaced and barred from selling in the vicinity of stadiums; and Durban fisherfolk have been evicted from the city’s main North Beach and South Beach piers;

•    township soccer facilities were meant to be created and maintained with state subsidies but have not been; and street kids were brutally displaced from central Durban in advance of the World Cup; according to former chief executive  of the South African Premier Soccer League Trevor Phillips; “Durban has two football teams which attract crowds of only a few thousand. It would have been more sensible to have built smaller stadiums nearer the football-loving heartlands and used the surplus funds to have constructed training facilities in the townships”;

•    FIFA’s tourist initiatives are based on what it calls ‘luxurious ambiance’ not working-class hospitality; promises of 450 000 international visitors for the World Cup were high overestimates; and many jobs in the tourism sector were shed when the overestimates became apparent;

Public transport

•    whereas many in Durban continue to be dependent upon private automobiles (with resulting adverse impacts on climate change); there has been a sharp decline in Durban’s public transport compared to other South African cities which have begun investing in the Bus Rapid Transit system; a government web-site (www.sa2010.gov.za) promised benefits for the host cities of the 2010 FIFA World Cup Soccer including “a fast, comfortable and low cost urban transport system … for central business districts but also in townships”;

•    Durban officials have implemented air-conditioned “People Mover” buses with security guards at every stop, running every 15 minutes from 06h00 until 23h00, but only in the city centre and along the beachfront, mostly for the benefit of tourists; there is still terribly inadequate public transport in both the townships and suburbs, and many areas are currently unserviced, and others have an infrequent and unreliable service with no bus timetables available;

Environment

•    whereas the ‘greenwashing’ of the World Cup includes incorrect claims by Durban officials that the CO2 permanently emitted in the vast cement construction plus increased air travel can be ‘offset’ by planting trees (which themselves are only a temporary, fragile container of CO2 because they emit the same carbon when they die and biodegrade); officials brag about ‘carbon credits’ from burning methane from rubbish dumps in a World Bank Clean Development Mechanism project (even though such ‘emissions trading’ is a dangerous distraction from fighting climate change), and the poorest people of Durban will suffer the most from climate change;

•    there is no sense in constructing new coal-fired plants (such as Medupi) and nuclear generators so as to give further electricity subsidies to vast multinational corporations such as BHP Billiton (which receives the world’s cheapest power); 100% renewable energy is a pre-requisite to avert global climate disruptions; the refusal to phase out coal, oil and gas also causes military conflicts, magnifying social and environmental injustice; and governments; corporations such as BP continue to support and finance fossil fuel exploration, extraction and activities that worsen global warming such as forest degradation and destruction on a massive scale, while dedicating only token sums to renewable energy, and leaving areas like South Durban with some of the world’s worst air pollution due to oil refining;

•    global climate disruptions – extreme weather events, droughts, floods, increased disease, scarce water - are already disproportionately felt by small island states, coastal peoples, indigenous peoples, local communities, fisherfolk, women, youth, poor people, elderly and marginalised communities;

Our rights of expression

•    whereas according to the bid proposal and subsequent contracts with the South African government, FIFA was given full indemnity “against all proceedings, claims and related costs (including professional adviser fees) which may be incurred or suffered by or threatened by others;” and in addition, “Police officers and other peace officials will be provided to enforce the protection of the marketing rights, broadcast rights, marks and other intellectual property rights of FIFA an its commercial partners” – as witnessed in the ridiculous arrest of Dutch women whose only crime was to wear an orange dress to Soccer City for the Holland-Denmark game;

•    our own leading journalists are stifled from reporting on FIFA’s wrongdoing because of a required pledge not to throw the organisation into ‘disrepute’ as a prerequisite for accreditation, as witnessed by the refusal of the national broadcaster to show the documentary film Fahrenheit 2010 made partly in Durban;

•    the murder of three young men in Phoenix earlier this month is yet more evidence of local police brutality, as was the excessive force – stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets - used to subdue non-violent Stallion Security workers protesting at Moses Mabhida Stadium on Monday, June 14;

We therefore demand

• adequate compensation to Durban ratepayers and national taxpayers for the windfall profits made by construction of unnecessary stadiums such as Moses Mabhida, investigations into extreme cost escalations, and a renewed commitment for a fiscal boost to remove South Africa’s vast backlogs of housing, water/sanitation, electricity, clinics, schools and roads;

• immediate imposition of taxation and exchange controls on multinational and local corporations associated with the World Cup, on grounds that contracts entered into with FIFA are legally Odious;

•    investigations into bribery and corruption associated with FIFA contracts and World Cup construction in Durban and especially in Mpumalanga Province, and full criminal investigations into Durban’s own recent corruption scandals;

•    a thorough overhaul of Durban’s Council and ward committee system so as to introduce genuine democracy and popular participation;

•    a commission of inquiry into events associated with the jailing of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Kennedy Road 13, their unconditional release, and the right-of-return of AbM to Kennedy Road;

•    the end of municipal harassment of traders, especially in the Early Morning Market at Warwick Junction, and subsidies that would permit it to become an historic monument, having just marked the market’s centenary;

•    the end of municipal harassment of Durban fisherfolk, the imposition of more reasonable fishing license fees, and a recommitment to cleaning the harbour and beaches of pollution of all sorts;

•    a renewed commitment to combating the scourge of xenophobia;

•    a redistribution of the society’s income and wealth so that South Africa is no longer the world’s most unequal major economy, an end to the municipal debt collection strategy and other systems that worsen inequality, and increases in free basic water and electricity allotments financed through a luxury consumption tax on those who use too much;

•    an end to exploitative rental and housing arrangements, to oppression of rural people and to injustice against farm dwellers;

•    a ban on labour broking, as has long been promised by the ruling party;

•    a dramatic increase in township soccer and sports facilities;

•    follow-through on the promise of “a fast, comfortable and low cost urban transport system … for central business districts but also in townships” and an expansion of “People Mover” buses across metro eThekwini;

•    an end to new coal-fired plants and nuclear generators so as to save the environment from certain destruction, stringent monitoring of air and water quality and public access to the findings, strict law enforcement against polluters and littering, a commitment to proper maintenance of all Durban’s green areas in a cohesive, sensitive, responsible and inclusive manner for the benefit of the environment and the people of Durban not just the city elite, dedication to the eradication and control of alien species with a view to permanent job creation, and strict enforcement of city bylaws by Metro Police to prevent urban decay, slum development and the resultant health hazards and environmental degradation;

•    a retraction of indemnity to FIFA and end to the order prohibiting journalists from throwing FIFA into ‘disrepute’ as a prerequisite for accreditation;

•    an end to police brutality, proper policing of all neighbourhoods, and redirection of policing resources spent on FIFA to all citizens;

•    an end to the arrogant, authoritarian, exclusive, insensitive, parochial decision-making processes undertaken by the Ethekwini Municipality throughout all areas of its jurisdiction.

When considering the speed and lavishness with which services were delivered for the 2010 World Cup, we have no doubt the above demands can be met timeously and professionally.

(Taken from http://links.org.au/node/1747)

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