I am travelling a lot today and using my spare time to catch up on things. I have two major end-of-February deadlines impending for publishers – my book with Thomas Fazi, which will be published by Pluto Press and launched in London in late September (more details soon); and our new Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) textbook (with Randy Wray and Martin Watts) which will be published by Macmillan later in 2017. Both manuscripts have to be delivered by the end of this month. So busy busy. Today’s blog is thus a little different and considerably shorter than usual. It loses nothing in its brevity. The main text is from a friend of mine (who wishes for professional reasons to remain anonymous) but succinctly captures the anger and angst that many progressive thinkers are feeling about how things are turning out. The culmination of several decades of neo-liberalism has been an eroding of material well-being for workers, a massive financial then economic crisis, which the world is still enduring, and, then Donald Trump as President of the United States. And the progressive political voices have been largely complicit in all of this. Sure enough, they sprout about child care, gay rights, inequality, and all the rest of it, but at the core, they have embraced the neo-liberal economic lies and gone along with or even initiated and overseen fiscal austerity, privatisation, welfare cuts, deregulation – it is just, we are told, they do all that in a more moderate and fairer manner. They don’t stop for a second to think that they also have become captive to capital. Something big has to happen to stop all this. History tells us that it will. And the longer the progressive political voices remain complicit, the probability that that ‘something’ will be violent, increases.



How to create a divided society

Privilege private education over public education.

Make sure there are fewer jobs than there are job seekers – blame the job seekers for being unemployed.

Saddle tertiary students with massive debts and limited employment opportunities.

De-regulate banking so that the people who can least afford it have access to easy credit – they haven’t got stable employment and need to get ahead somehow.

Privatise public assets like airlines, rail systems, electricity, hospitals – sell them to your political donors.

Dilute the power of independent entities that monitor conduct of individuals in high office – accountability stifles creativity.

Stack the public broadcaster with industry mates – go on cooking shows because you can get away with anything if voters have seen you making pasta.

Destroy job security for a large proportion of the working population – convince them they can succeed if they are more entrepreneurial.

Undermine working conditions and awards – direct productivity gains to capital and limit real wage growth.

Make sure unskilled labour is linked to jobs that destroy the environment – keep things sweet for industry status quo and ensure there is always an army of blue collar workers ready to fight against a transition to alternative industries.

Disrupt disrupt disrupt – convince a gullible public that the robots are coming and that there is very little that they or their elected representatives can do to develop alternative labour markets.

Be a serious investigative journalist or an engineer or a consultant or a public sector manager or a politician – but don’t challenge neoliberal economic rhetoric.

Talk about deficit reduction and ‘budget repair’ without understanding how vacuous this is.

Be surprised at the outcome.

Repeat.

The Anonymous Blogger – February 7, 2017

A little music to follow

After that, I turned to music, which is a good way to feel things out without being too intellectual about it.

This is Rage Against the Machine – letting us have it full frontal.

The song – Take the Power Back (American Schools are Failing) – is off the 1992 – Rage Against the Machine – album released by Epic.

This is a hard buzz-sort-of-guitar album and this is what we should do. It matches the theme of today’s blog.

So sing along and plot some stuff:

Bring that shit in

Ugh

Yeah, the movement’s in motion with mass militant poetry

Now check this out … ugh. In the right light, study becomes insight

But the system that dissed us, teaches us to read and write

So-called facts are fraud

They want us to allege and pledge and bow down to their god

Lost the culture, the culture lost

Spun our minds and through time, ignorance has taken over

Yo, we gotta take the power back

Bam! Here’s the plan

Mother-Fuck Uncle Sam, step back I know who I am

Raise up your ear, I’ll drop the style and clear

It’s the beats and the lyrics they fear!

The rage is relentless

We need a movement with a quickness

You are the witness of change and to counteract…

We gotta take the power back We gotta take the power back

C’mon C’mon

We gotta take the power back The present curriculum, I put my fist in ’em

Eurocentric, every last one of ’em

See right through the red, white, and blue disguise

With lecture I puncture the structure of lies

Installed in our minds and attempting to hold us back

We’ve got to take it back

Cause holes in our spirit causing tears and fears

One-sided stories for years and years and years

I’m inferior

Who’s inferior

Yeah we need to check the interior

Of the system that cares about only one culture

And that, is why we gotta take the power back We gotta take the power back

C’mon C’mon

We gotta take the power back Ah yo check, we’re gonna have to break it, break it, break it down…

Awwww … Shit And like this … aah

C’mon … Yeah … Bring it back the other way … Ugh The teacher stands in front of the class

But the lesson plan he can’t recall

The student’s eyes don’t perceive the lies

Bouncing off every fucking wall

His composure is well kept

I guess he fears playing the fool

The complacent students sit

And listen to some of that bullshit that he learned in school

Europe ain’t my rope to swing on

Can’t learn a thing from it, yet we hang from it

Gotta get it, gotta get it together then

Like the motherfucking Weathermen

To expose and close the doors on those who try

To strangle and mangle the truth

Cause the circle of hatred continues unless we react We gotta take the power back

We gotta take the power back

C’mon C’mon

We gotta take the power back

And after all that, and just so I don’t start smashing stuff up all around me, I thought we could finish with a classic song from that fabulous vocal quartet – The Paragons – from Kingston, Jamaica.

This song – Only a Smile – was on their 1967 studio album On the Beach, released on the Treasure Island label.

They are now defunct given that two core members Garth ‘Tyrone’ Evans and John Holt died in 2000 and 2014, respectively. Very sad.

Here is a story about them in the Jamaica Observer (November 10, 2014) – Time heals all (Paragons) wounds.

As it said: “The Paragons … are giants of the rocksteady era”.

They were backed in the studio by Tommy McCook and The Supersonics (one of the best studio bands in Jamaica).

The message of the song reflects the era (and is pretty rough) but the recurring brass riff (from Tommy and The Supersonics) is one of those magic things in music.

I am calm again.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2017 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.