Category: USA

1968 and all that

There’s a perverse pleasure in wading through reviews of books and articles on subjects I know nothing about and may never encounter again. On occasion something hits home. One example: Terry Eagleton in the special Cheltenham Festival Times Literary Supplement edition, on everyone’s favourite subject, post-structuralism:

‘In its curious blend of scepticism and euphoria post-structuralism is a form of libertarian pessimism – one which dreams of a world free from the constraints of norms and institutions, but which is not so incorrigibly naïve as to believe it could ever come about.’  

I could dine out on that one!

‘The revolutionary elan of 1968’ was followed by ‘the disenchanted mood of its political aftermath’. I remember 1968. Too well.

It’s a pattern oft-repeated. More recently we’ve had the frustrations of the Obama years, when ‘yes we can’ didn’t quite happen. (Maybe it never will.) The aftermath of the 1989 and the fall of the Wall. Occupy and the now empty squares of New York and London. Above all the Arab Spring, and its brutal aftermath.

But we won’t and can’t let our optimism die. I’m one of millions now and forever who believe in social justice, opportunity, capability, compassion. We rejoice when we see progress, we’re despondent when we see it pushed back. But we don’t despair.

We don’t of course always agree with each other. Do we work with the system, or oppose it – and by what means? The divide between global and anti-global perspectives is vast. Many (not all) proponents of big government and small government have the same end in view but believe in radically different ways of getting there.

I supported and support Obama, always believed Occupy wasn’t sustainable … Bernie Sanders I admire, Corbyn I don’t. We will bicker and insult and traduce the motives of others, while still aspiring to the same humanity.

And we will undermine each others’ efforts. Refuse to vote for Hillary. Battle it out for the soul and machinery of the Labour Party. And if we’re not careful – and we haven’t been of course – let another party in, a party which doesn’t define compassion and social justice quite as we do… which puts up barriers rather than engage with the world. Abandons institutions rather than seeks to reform them. Follows the populist piper, who advocates easy solutions, and plays to prejudice.

There are many good reasons for retiring to a monastery or a country cottage or sitting room and TV, and disengaging – and yet we hang in there. If we keep open minds, listen to each other, avoid scorn and hubris, remember that we’re ultimately on the same side – then we might just make progress.

‘The normal parameters’

“I am endorsing Hillary. And all her lies and all her empty promises. I am endorsing Hillary. The second worst thing that could happen to this country. But she’s way behind in second place, you know? She’s wrong about absolutely everything – but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

We enjoyed PJ O’Rourke at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. Serious, yes, but with a sense of the absurd which gets to the heart of things. There’s no-one else like him. (He’s a great fan on Jon Stewart, on the other side of the political spectrum.)

Who else is out there beyond Trump, beyond the normal parameters? A serious party game – where protagonists just might come to blows.

Thinking of the UK.

Farage, or farrago, as my spellcheck would have it, of course: he like Trump claims to be within boundaries. He’s fooled a good few people. But closet racism, and recent support for Trump, place him firmly outside.

Corbyn, with his past support for elective dictatorships like the Chavez regime, and backing from trade unions who muddle the pursuit of workers’ rights with political agendas from another era – likewise.

Sections of the Tory party, the libertarian Davies and Fox wing, are on the parameter edge, and should never ever be near positions of powers, let alone dictating.

O’Rourke takes inspiration from Hayek, and avows a small government, minimal intervention agenda. That’s firmly within. We’ve been battling in the UK and USA between big and small government for decades – and that’s the way debate should be.

*

Read on for O’Rourke on Brexit.

He recounted interviews he did for an American public radio programme: he’d set out to understand why Brits voted for Brexit. He quoted a ‘financier’ who argued that the euro and probably the EU was going down the tube sooner rather than later, so best get out now. (To which the obvious reply is – we’ll be hit amidships anyway, and immeasurably better to be in there, influencing proceedings.)

And a more cogent argument – this is no longer the country we grew up in. The older generation’s lament. It isn’t the same country of course, and it’s the same for every generation. The sanity of representative democracy normally allows us trade-offs between young and old, and we move forward, an erratic progress maybe, but progress nonetheless. But not when you chuck a referendum into the mix.

Not a point that O’Rourke made, but a US presidential election has some of the characteristics of a referendum, in the sense of the media blitz and the half-truths, and this time the blatant untruths. But running in parallel are the Congressional elections. There’s balance in the US political system (which sure as hell isn’t perfect!), which brings politics back closer to the centre, where both sides have their say, and policy evolves out of a rough consensus – policies and programmes balancing out over time.

(At least, there was a balance, before Tea Party, and Cruz, and acolytes, and now Trump, came along.)

But referendums on their own – overriding representative, parliamentary democracy… that’s another story.

‘Normal parameters.’ Depart too far, allow prejudice and ideology to take centre stage, and the damage could be irreparable.

 

Singin’ the blues

I’ve long been a fan of Melanie, ever since I first heard her sing Ruby Tuesday back in the early 70s – way better than the original Stones version, which – thought I could never say this about Jagger – seems lacklustre by comparison.

I’ve been singing one of two old blues numbers at a local pub, on Open Mic evenings, and it’s been fun, and I’ve enjoyed it, and I hope – I think – one or two locals have too. Helps if you get everyone singing along with something like Mojo (‘I got my mojo workin’) and an old Son House field holler, John the Revelator. (I saw Son House once, in Hammersmith, with the wonderfully named Sleepy John Estes, and that was a few decades ago!)

However, I see that Melanie on her brand-new album, Ragamuffin, has a song with the following lines:

I can’t take no more, there ain’t no use /Can’t keep on doin’ what it is you think I do /And the words that I’ve been listening to /Are as honest as a white man sounds when he sings the blues /I know we’re through

‘… as honest as a white man sounds when he sings the blues’

Well, I guess I know what she means.

I sure ain’t no Hoochie Coochie Man (Muddy Waters) – I’ve not had much success ‘making pretty women jump and shout’ … I’ve never been part of a team building railroads (Linin’ track, not very romantic, as sung by Leadbelly) … I’ve largely kept my mojo to myself (Muddy again)… and I wouldn’t want the hurt and I don’t think I’ve ever reached that place which Howlin Wolf sings about in Smokestack Lightnin…

Whoa-oh, tell me, baby,/Where did you stay last night?/Why don’t ya hear me cryin’?

So, if I ever sing the blues to you, be very wary. I’m white and if Melanie’s right I may just not be quite as honest as you think!

Mind you, there’s a difference between blues and the old R&B – rhythm and blues. R&B -you’re out there in the world, doing your stuff. It’s urban, urgent, driven, assertive. That’s Mojo, that’s Hoochie Coochie Man. You’d know where you stand with that kind of guy.

Smokestack Lightnin is the bridge between the old blues, which carry the hurt of ages, the hurt of slavery and subjugation, the blues of the old South, the cotton fields – and R&B. Howlin Wolf sings a hurt that’s palpable, tears him, and the singer, apart.

The old blues – From four till late/I was wringin’ my hands and cryin (Robert Johnson) – has no resolution. The hurt won’t go away. In Smokestack Lightnin I don’t know about the hurt, that doesn’t go away – but the girl, come the last verse she’s out, and scorned. He’s found himself again.

And the white man – he’s simply not been there – he can’t understand the depth of those emotions. They come from somewhere else, where he simply hasn’t been. He may try as I do to sing the blues. I leave it to you to decide if you trust him…

 

 

Zenpolitics, and the world, six years on

It’s not a bad idea in these tortured times to remind myself why I began this blog. ‘What is zenpolitics,’ I asked. My answer? ‘Taking the trash and hyperbole out of politics and trying to look at people and issues in a way that’s detached from emotion and as they really are.’

Six years now since I wrote that, and it’s even harder now. The Brexit campaign has focused all the uncertainty in British politics but instead of providing resolution has brought animosity, and potential chaos. Politics should always be about gradual not sudden change – not a thought everyone shares, I appreciate – it’s a subject for another time, another post.

But now we have an elephant in the room, as someone said. We are all obsessed and divided and old-style political discussion has gone out of the window. A good thing?

Referenda do damage, they polarise, the original subject of debate gets lost in hyperbole, in distortions, it too readily becomes a protest vote. They’re prey to propaganda, to manipulation. Referenda were a distant and unlikely possibility six years ago. Now they are subverting the parliamentary democracy which gives a forum for rational – and emotional – debate, which falls prey to all sorts of issues and irregularities, but nonetheless gives a sane and measured and balanced way forward.

In the US it’s no better, and potentially worse. US presidential elections reflect a traditional divide, they have a slow almost two-year (if not a four-year!) build up, and they are multi-issue. But this time it’s a protest vote, whipped up on the one side by special interests with vast amounts of advertising spend at their disposal, now turned on its head by Donald Trump, and on the other side by an equally disillusioned younger and streetwise population – both sides equally out of step with Washington politics. In the US and the UK vast numbers of people no longer feel a part of the traditional democratic process.

Behind all this are the challenges of globalisation and new technologies – the decline of traditional industries, a switch from a unified and organised and socially cohesive labour force to a fragmented and lower-paid workforce engaged in lower-paid service industries, influenced and exacerbated by massive trade imbalances with China – resulting in a growing divide between those who benefit from these changes, usually educated and skilled, and those who do not.

And out of this we have alienation, discontent – and, given a forum, we have protest. And we have the blind (and Tory economic policy under Osborne has to fit under that heading) who fail to see the

impact of that alienation, and how it has to be directly addressed. And the manipulators, who turn it to their own purposes – anti-immigrant sentiment, or neo-liberal economic agendas.

Blind – we’ve all been blind. Back to my original zenpolitics aspiration – ‘trying to look at people and politics… the way they really are’. More than ever that has to be the aspiration. And it’s now, with so much emotion and obsession, that much harder.

All the while, the other big issues haven’t gone away – the refugee crisis, Syria, IS. Population movements in Africa, where the population explosion is hitting hardest. Russia and Ukraine. China and the South China Sea. And suddenly, almost but not quite out of the blue, we have Turkey, an attempted coup, and a profoundly foolish but populist regime which will lead Turkey further down the road to either chaos or autocracy.

And here in the UK – we now obsess with Brexit, where the very best outcome will be that we achieve something close to our existing economic performance, and the worst – better not to contemplate.

There are bigger issues, much bigger issues, out there, and we have turned foolishly inward.

I wanted with zenpolitics to take the emotional out of politics. But we need emotion at times to drive the engagement we need to have to put our own world, here in the UK, back on to a saner track.

But above all we need to, and I repeat, ‘see things as they really are’. In a world of fractured and misleading debate that is a mighty challenge.

Chilcot – hard truths and hypocrisy

There’s a strange and mysterious beauty to hindsight. It doesn’t ask questions, it reassures, it puts old thoughts out of mind and puts in new thoughts that we know we’ve thought all along. We know the mind is playing tricks, but if we don’t ask too many questions of ourselves, then who cares.

Hindsight has been at work this week in reactions to Chilcot. Last Thursday’s Times leader is a prime example. The Times supported the invasion – but no mea culpa. That’s my focus in the first part of this post.

But anger is justified. We should never have invaded back in 2003. Millions of us were strongly opposed at the time, and events bore out out arguments. And the consequences of that invasion have been terrible beyond belief.

But first, hindsight.

All those legions who supported the second Iraq war are now so sure it was wrong, and they’re happy to claim that they were misled. Had they had the evidence on WMD in front of them that Tony Blair had, they wouldn’t have reached the conclusions he did. Or would they? The evidence was widely debated and argued over at the time, as we well remember.

They also forget the context on the time, just two years after 9/11, and the uncertainties, and the fear of al-Qaida, and the scant knowledge of how it worked and how it might operate in future.

Action after the event to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan seemed to have worked so action before the event, pre-emptive action, in Iraq made good sense. Britain and the USA working together – many people were strongly in favour, and it was great to know that Bush and Blair got on, and that Blair did have influence. And if we’d held back from supporting Bush and the Americans – wouldn’t they go ahead anyway?

So I’m pretty scornful how much of the sanctimonious response we’re getting now.

That said –  I was bitterly opposed to the second Iraq War. The existence of WMD to my mind wasn’t well-established, there was still work for Hans Blix to do, we knew well that Saddam Hussein liked playing games (a strategy which ultimately proved his undoing). There was also the absurd attempt to establish links between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, when Saddam’s regime had been rigidly secularist, and that was indeed the nature of the Baath socialism which he and the Assad regime in Syria espoused. Saddam’s regime was an unpalatable and unrecognised ally in keeping al Qaida at bay.

The neo-con agenda that Blair bought into had little interest in local knowledge, the provision of which had always long been a key part of the role of our diplomats and embassies around the world. The way the deep divisions between Shia and Sunni could tear the country apart came as a profound surprise to the American and British after 2003. It should not have done.

(I don’t believe by the way the Blair was a liar, in any sense. That kind of accusation that doesn’t help.)

For me, there was one further powerful factor which influenced my opposition to the war. We’d seen what happened in the Balkans. The controlling hand of Marshall Tito had been removed and Yugoslavia split into different nations, different language groups, different religions, and different histories – at a deep level, different identities. And demagogues kindled and fed the fire and we know what happened then. And many of us could see it happening again after the 2003 invasion. And, of course, it did.

Finally – there’s the argument that sometimes we simply have to act. The dangers of not acting are simply too great. The legal arguments may not be clear, and the outcome uncertain, but the imperatives behind action are too strong. Was 2003 such a time? Not to my mind. Rather the 2003 invasion belongs in the same category as the 1956 Suez crisis, precipitate rather than fully considered action. We’ve seen the same in military engagements throughout history. Rarely do they work out as you expect, and very often they work out the opposite.

And the bloodshed and violence can be extraordinary.

 

 

 

 

China shock

A digression – an important digression – into trade policy. Maybe a little heavy-going, but important!

*

Apropos my comments in my last post on de-industrialisation, there’s an interesting article in the current (July) edition of Prospect, by the FT’s economics leader writer, Martin Sandhu.

Has the cause of growing inequality in the rich world since circa 1980 been caused by globalisation or technological change? In Sandhu’s words, by the late 1990s ‘… the economics profession settled on the consensus that technology more than trade was to blame. Then China joined the World Trade Organisation.’

He quotes Autor, Dorn and Hanson’s paper, ‘China Shock’, and highlights their conclusion that ‘Chinese competition had localised but substantial negative and long-lasting effects on the places particularly exposed to it’. ‘On one estimate more than half of [US] factory job losses can be attributed to the China effect.’

’… the imbalanced effect of trade liberalisation can only be corrected if the losers are compensated out of the overall gain – but more redistribution and greater public goods are not on the cards in Trump’s deck.’

Of course technology is also a key factor, so too the shift of power away from labour to capital – not least, the decline of trade unions.  Benefits have also been hit hard – even more in the USA than the UK.

‘It is no surprise that that people feeling powerless and alone in the face of their demotion yearn to regain control – to ‘take their country back’. That is what Trump promises them.’

So too the UK. ‘The same dream of regaining control …fuels the growth of socially-conservative nativist right-wing parties in Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia and central Europe.’ Some of the same grievances have been picked up by Bernie Sanders as well as Trump. (We have nothing directly comparable in the UK.)

But whereas Trump talks of putting up trade barriers the Brexit message has been all about lowering barriers with the rest of the world , ‘to escape the walls of Fortress Europe’ – a rigorous free trade message. (Both the USA and UK insurgencies are of course agreed on immigration.)

Also bear in mind that economic theory ‘predicts that the effect of low-skilled immigration is the same as freer trade with countries that have a lot of low-skilled labour’. Put another way, freer trade (especially negotiated from a position of lesser rather than greater advantage post-Brexit) will hit hardest those areas already suffering.

(Some will course want to rubbish economic theory. That’s the mood of the moment.)

The impact of Chinese imports on British industry, and the resultant job losses, has been far far greater than the impact of immigration. And yet it’s immigration on which the Leave campaign has focused.

And the impact of free trade? Now that we’re escaping from an EU that’s perceived to be the over-regulated and slow-moving ?

‘…Brexit will not lead to a bonfire of the regulations, but a redoubled effort to harmonise rules – that’s what trade openness increasingly means.’

There’s an obvious and striking irony here – we put behind us the EU and harmonisation, and negotiations over TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), and we find that we’re faced with just the same issues when we seek to negotiate free trade deals around the world. But without the clout the EU gives us.

More than ever it’s apparent that immigration for the Leave campaign has been a target of convenience. The issues we face as a country with regard to our future prosperity are of a very different order. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t pay heed to the specific impacts of immigration, but our future lies in facing up to the global context in which we operate, and in which we will be, post-Brexit, less equipped to operate.

And our response as a country to those who feel excluded and resentful will involve strategies which simply aren’t part of the Leave agenda. That’s the absurdity of the situation in which we find ourselves.

 

Obama and the big wide world

I gave President Obama my endorsement in my last blog – for which he’ll no doubt be grateful.

But, at the hard end of politics, has he disappointed the ‘yes we can!’ generation? The world we have to admit isn’t a happier place after over seven years of the Obama presidency. Can he be held responsible?

There are still inmates at Guantanamo, the Middle East is in greater turmoil than ever, we have a resurgent Putin, a more autocratic, less tolerant China under Xi Jinping. The euphoria after the end of the Cold War is a distant dream. (I’m avoiding here the subject of US domestic politics, more convoluted and intriguing than ever.)

Countering the arguments that a more assertive American policy could have contained Putin and Xi Jinping, it’s abundantly clear that threats of NATO intervention wouldn’t have stopped Putin, and Han Chinese momentum cannot and will not be contained by Western stick-waving.

The Middle East. America has been much criticised in the USA and elsewhere for not being more involved, for not wielding a cudgel. The USA and the West, it’s claimed, have lost influence. And, yes, there’s the Libyan invasion aftermath, and the red line that Assad is deemed to have crossed in Syria. It was rash ever to lay down that line.

On the other hand, the Arab Spring, enthusiastically supported in the West, and its aftermath have shown how little understanding Western politicians, and indeed press and pundits, have of Middle Eastern politics on the ground – of individual countries, factions religion and otherwise, what moves and motivates individual citizens.

Obama and the rest of us were carried along by all the euphoria. But Obama had at least recognised three years before that the USA could neither continue in Iraq and Afghanistan as it had done under George Bush, nor get involved in any overtly military way in Syria. The actions of the USA, UK and France over the last century have been a main cause of the Middle East’s problems (seeking causation is I admit a risky business, but on the one word ‘oil’ hinges much of the story), and a continuing attempt to impose solutions cannot be the way forward.

Some kind of equilibrium in the Middle East will only be achieved by allowing conflicts to find their own more local resolutions. Holding back has taken much more courage than renewed military intervention would have done.

I’m well aware of the impact that Putin has had in Syria in recent months. But that cannot change the main argument. The USA, and Europe, has no choice but to work with Putin, whatever old-style neo-con and new-fangled bludgeoning interventionists might argue. IS is a different matter, a vile and inhuman organisation, with which no-one can negotiate, and which can have no place in a peace settlement in Syria – which Assad must have. And I’m not going to attempt here any appraisal of clone attacks on Taliban targets in Pakistan: that would be taking us into a whole additional area of future modes of warfare, and their morality and implications for the rest of the world.

Obama cannot claim any headline agreements or extraordinary successes in his foreign policy. But he has established in direction of traffic, and that could – should – be much more important than any short-term gains.

Given the malfunctioning Congress and the pretty vile right-wing press Obama has faced throughout he has remained remarkably cool, good-natured, level-headed. I hope the future will put up a few of like calibre. Sadly none are showing their faces just at the moment. It would be intriguing to consider if there could be candidates in any other country – the French economy minister Emmanuel Macron, for example. But that’s for another time and place.

Obama and the U.K.

In a world beset with fanciful notions of power and influence, Obama stands out as a voice of sanity. I love the fact that he went to the Globe to listen to extracts from Hamlet this morning (400 years to the day since Shakespeare’s death), and later on in an address to young people in London urged them to ‘reject pessimism and cynicism’ and ‘know that progress is possible and problems can be solved’. ‘Yes, we can’ for the next generation of voters.

There’s his welcome intervention in the EU debate, making clear the USA view that UK has and will have much greater influence as part of the EU, rather than outside. And pointing out that for the USA a trade deal with the UK wouldn’t be a priority – would come ‘at the back of the queue’. Waverers in the Brexit debate take note.

We’ve had as a response, ‘irrelevant’, from Liam Fox, ‘talking down Britain’ from Nigel Farage (Farage and I don’t live in the same country), and references to Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry from Boris Johnson. To think that a fool such as Boris has aspirations to be prime minister of this country.

‘Take a longer, more optimistic view of history.’ That’s also from Obama’s speech this morning. I’m tired in the context of the EU debate of hearing about a disfunctioning country, and a disfunctioning institution over in Brussels, linked to an extraordinarily optimistic vision of a golden age that lies around the corner, or up in the sky, outside the EU.

(Malfunctions are addressed by imagination and time and hard grind – not by magic pills.)

Aristophanes in his play The Birds positioned Cloud Cuckoo Land up in the sky, a kingdom of the birds between earth and the gods, and that’s roughly where the Brexit campaigners would leave us.

Staying with Ancient Greece, there’s a creature in Greek mythology known as a chimaera, an assemblage of the parts of other animals, ‘a monstrous, fire-breathing hybrid creature’ (Wikipedia). It usually had the head of a lion, and the head of a goat sticking out of its back, and a tail of a snake ending in another head. I can’t resist imagining Boris as the lion, head and shaggy mane, and Nigel as the goat. Who might be worthy of the tail?

Answers, please, on a postcard.

Obama chops Trump down

Lovely to see – to hear – Obama chopping Trump down. Being president is not about a being a talk show host, about marketing, about publicity, it’s about making difficult decisions, and some are unpopular, some will hurt people, and being well-briefed in your dealings with other world leaders – they too have ‘their own crowds back home’. That last point I especially liked – you, Donald, are not alone in this world.

There’s a piece in the Economist on American conservative talk radio, hosted by the semi-crazed (Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck) who somehow in the rarefied air of the prairies don’t just to get a hearing but strike a few big chords – or a few bum notes. If bum notes are all you hear, would you recognise a chord?

Does it give joy to Trump to be supported by such people – how much of a conscious game is he playing with them – feeding them pap?

Ted Cruz is no better, but while you feel that for Trump it is a big game, and a big ego, for Ted Cruz it is deadly, evangelically serious. He also feeds the talk shows with great material. The trouble is – he believes it all, and he can express himself with a degree of coherence. And he is so sure he’s right that compromise and balance, which is what the American constitution requires, gets shown the door. And America becomes ungovernable, as it halfway is now.

What also bugs me is Cruz’s call on the Bible, and Jesus, to support him. He sure as hell – almost literally – wouldn’t get close to the pearly gates. America has always been too good – the prairies again – at creating its own religions.

Only one small pleasure in all this – a little bit of humour – Fox News almost the good guys. They do at least have a small idea that politics is about governing – and governing, as John Kasich the best of the Republican contenders has made clear, is a serious matter, about results and balanced budgets and not public platforms.

The UK is – to use totally the wrong expression – a different ballgame. But we also have the same populist right-wing nonsense to deal with and it’s big in the media – thank God we’re spared talk shows. But we do, sadly, have the Mail.

Obama mentions that one aspect of government is looking out for the underdog – ‘standing up for people who are vulnerable and don’t have some powerful political constituency’. And that is the ultimate litmus test of any politics.

To quote Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom, which I’ve done before:

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed/ For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse/ An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe/ An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

What money can’t buy

‘Everything has a price.’ How far do we take that maxim? The American experience is a warning to us innocent Europeans.

Consider Harvard professor and Reith lecturer Michael Sandel’s book, What Money Can’t Buy, where he explores how everything (almost) is monetised in today’s world, and especially so in the USA. How far should markets invade ‘family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and the way we contend with the prospect of death’?

Take, for example (American examples, but a warning to the rest of us) buying insurance on other people’s lives, so that you profit when they die, or advertising in schools, directly to children, burgers and sweets, and more, heedless of health risks. Money rules, so that if you’re poor you miss out – no level-playing field.

We devalue what we monetise, we devalue education, devalue sport, when ‘sky boxes’ (high-priced seats at stadiums) separate the affluent from the ordinary supporter (once rich and poor pitched into together in baseball crowds), devalue public service when police cars carry ads, and the fire service put ads on fire hydrants …

‘In 1983, US companies spent $100 million advertising to children. In 2005′ they spent $16.8 billion.’ Education in Sandel’s mind, and mine, is to encourage critical reflection, advertising is to recruit consumers. Two radically different functions, which we keep rigorously apart in the UK. Though advertising creeps in in many other places, many other ways

The USA is a warning regarding where ‘market triumphalism’, as Sandel calls it, can take us, at a time ‘when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance’. That’s a subject in itself.

And value spreads right up the chain. In the UK as in the USA. We monetise elections – he who pays the most dominates the news and bludgeons opinion. Many would limit government action and expenditure because it functions to interfere with a pure economic process – there is no sentimentality here. The only compassion lies in economic value: as the most efficient system it’s the most compassionate.

Ultimately I wonder if we’ve might we put a value on God. We put a high value on self, and all the possessions that define our identity, and the next step would be a God who we identify with our self and aspirations. The American Bible Belt already goes a long way in that direction.

Remember indulgences, paying to offset the wages of sin, and building chantry chapels and paying for others to pray for your soul.

Everything, but everything, can be priced.