On extremism

I will not condemn extremists.

I condemn violence. And these two get conflated so often it is worth asking ourselves why, whose interests are served by this blurring.

Those who use violence in pursuit of their political agenda are regularly labelled extreme. If only they had pursued their goals through peaceful means, we say. Yet this obscures the everyday violence of a system so “normal” that it will never be called extreme.

When multinational banks, fossil energy companies and weapons manufacturers get subsidies, tax cuts, loopholes, political access and nothing more than slaps on the wrist, while indigenous people, single parents, the disabled, elderly, unemployed get austerity, services cut, grievances ignored, working conditions eroded, civil liberties constricted, living spaces polluted, their struggles and small escapes harshly criminalised – that is violence. Holding desperate people in abysmal conditions to stoke and pander to xenophobia for political gain is violence. Suppressing the memory and ongoing legacies of colonial genocide and dispossession is violence. Foreign policy that puts the interests of elites over the upholding of international law, that mutes criticism of useful authoritarian regimes while unflinchingly supporting allied imperialism is violence. Sacrificing a stable climate for the short term profits of a small number of major shareholders is one of the most violent ideas ever conceived. It may not look like a bomb in a market, or a truck ploughing through a crowd of people, but its victims end up just as dead or wounded. The values, assumptions, institutions and practices that sustain it are violent and unjust.

But they are not considered extreme, because they are the status quo. It suits those who benefit from the ways things are to focus our condemnation elsewhere, to channel our outrage into xenophobia, victim-blaming and the relative trivialities of the latest celebrity scandal or sporting upset.

To be extremist is to stand opposed to the status quo. This can be done violently and for unjust goals, but it needn’t be. And when the status quo is itself violent and unjust, then opposing it is the only defensible option. Such opposition can take many forms, but historically, many of the most effective struggles against injustice were considered extreme by the status quo of the time. Martin Luther King Jnr was condemned as an extremist and had the resources of the white supremacist state marshalled against him. Nelson Mandela was gaoled for decades and remained classified as a terrorist by the US even while president of South Africa. Berta Cáceres, the indigenous Honduran environmental activist, was assassinated earlier this year for being an effective extremist. Universal suffrage, the forty hour week, the abolition of child labour, worker’s compensation, basic environmental regulations protecting clean air and water – all these and more were won by movements condemned at the time as extremist.

And the Galilean preacher who disturbed the violence of the Pax Romana with his revolutionary message of the last being first and the powerful brought low, who taught his followers to love their enemies yet to refuse to worship power, to see strangers as neighbours and even the wicked as loved by God, to first take the log out of our own eye, who exposed the collusion between religious, nationalist and imperialist agendas: he was the greatest extremist of all. The movement he began, if it is to remain true to his life and teaching, can never rest comfortably with a status quo where women are killed by their partners, children are forcibly made into soldiers and sex workers, debtors are crushed, whistle-blowers are punished, warmongers profit from their lies, and the habitability of the planet is in peril.

So do not condemn extremism. Condemn violence: especially violence that targets innocents, that targets those who are already suffering, that targets the most vulnerable. Condemn injustice. Condemn the ideologies and practices that uphold a violent and unjust status quo as well as the ideologies and practices of those who oppose it violently and unjustly.

Let us have more extremists: extremists for love; extremists for justice; extremists for peace; extremists for honesty. I am an extremist. Are you?

In place of a post on nuclear power

Since even before the disaster at Fukushima, I was planning a lengthy post (or series) considering the place of nuclear power amidst our climate and ecological crises. Towards this post, I now have thousands of words and scores of links (as I do on a number of other topics that are too large for me to find the time to address them with anything like the attention they deserve).

As it seems unlikely that I am going to publish these thoughts anytime in the immediate future (given other deadlines), it seemed like a waste if I did not at least point any thoughtful readers towards this discussion between George Monbiot and Theo Simon. Consisting of a somewhat lengthy email interchange over the last few months now published by George on his website, it is is far and away the best exploration that I have found of the some of the key ethical and political issues behind the nuclear debate, which can get often mired in the technical and economic aspects of the question (as important as they each are).

So consider this discussion a primer for the day when I get around to putting forward my own thoughts in public. For those who may be interested to know where I stand, I will simply say that I am deeply sympathetic to both authors. Now go and read the thread.

The problem with Rowan Williams, and other links

Ben Myers: The problem with Rowan Williams. And some opposing thoughts from Michael Bird.

AlterNet: A history of the 40 hour working week. Why less is often more. Some evidence to back up the call to spend less, earn less, work less.

The Conversation: Oh the morality - Why ethics matters in economics. "An economic system that rewards amoral self-interest creates economic instability, fractures economic insecurity, fosters concentrations of economic power, exacerbates economic inequality and violates ecological sustainability."

The Inquisitr: Corruption in the USA. Eight states given an "F" and zero receive an "A".

Chomsky: Losing the World: American Decline - Part One and Part Two - The Imperial Way: American Decline in Perspective.

Liz Jakimow: What does table fellowship have to do with global justice? Quite a lot.

BGS: Kony 1984. There have been plenty of things written about the Kony 2012 viral video. I thought this was one of the more interesting ones, highlighting the way the film relies on the pursuit of peace through war, just like in 1984.

Reuters: Reports of smoking's demise are greatly exaggerated. Reports of smokers' demise are not. While rates of smoking (and associated mortality) in the developed world are in decine, they continue to grow rapidly in the developing world: "if current trends continue, a billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century - one person every six seconds."

The (en)rich list. One hundred inspirational people "whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures". Their "net worth" is measured in Google hits, which is perhaps just as arbitrary as counting dollars.
H/T Jeremy.

BWAA: The end of greed. A resource for a five week sermon series and/or Bible study that reflects on "consuming as if God, people and the planet matter". I haven't looked in detail at the contents, but I like the outline.

1. Consuming as if God matters: Rejecting consumerism, embracing the kingdom
2. Consuming as if People matter: Rejecting greed, embracing generosity
3. Consuming as if People matter: Rejecting exploitation, embracing justice
4. Consuming as if the Planet matters: Rejecting destruction, embracing care
5. Consuming as if Animals matter: Rejecting cruelty, embracing kindness

H/T Liz.

Rupert's pollution: What does UK phone hacking have to do with Australia's carbon debate?

Two apparently very different stories have been dominating the news in the land of my birth and where I currently live.

In the UK, the News of the World phone hacking saga continues to snowball, with more revelations promised. There are now over 4,000 targets identified (including royalty, celebrities, politicians (even Prime Minister Brown), police, as well as bereaved relatives of soldiers, homocides and terrorism victim), but the story has grown much larger as it becomes clear that the real issue is the cover up. The phone hacking itself was illegal and shockingly callous, representing an abuse of society's willingness to grant journalistic freedom in the pursuit of truth (compare the Wikileaks saga, where the revelations are of much greater social significance and the methods used by the media apparently legal). But knowing that the practice was indefensible, it is becoming clear that News of the World apparently went to great lengths to prevent the full extent of the abuse from becoming public: making payments to police, seeking to pay for silence from early victims in a way that would remove evidence from police investigations, obstructing those investigations by foot dragging, destroying evidence, making misleading statements under oath and contributing substantially to a culture of fearful self-protection amongst politicians who might speak out about the problem. It is not yet clear how far up the chain of authority blame lies, but it seems fair to say that if some of the people currently denying knowledge of what was going on are speaking the truth, then they have become immensely successful while simultaneously being willfully neglectful and culpably negligent. The relative portions of blame to be assigned to journalists, editors, owners, police, politicians and the reading public are still unclear, but the problems are systemic.

It is, however, hard to deny that a hefty portion of the culture in which such abuses can occur can be traced to a situation in which a single man owns such a large chunk of the media that he can threaten political careers and so create the complicit silence in which police corruption can flourish and his underlings feel untouchable. Numerous politicians, including Cameron himself, have been emboldened by the events of the last week to admit their fear of Murdoch had lead them to silence or a soft tread.

So my hunch is that such systemic wickedness arises not so much due to the press being under-regulated, as from its being too concentrated. The crimes and wrongdoings that occurred at News of the World (and likely at other major papers) occurred not simply through lack of oversight, but because editors felt that they were in certain senses above the law, that public figures who openly questioned their modus operandi could be crushed in the court of public opinion through the very media they would be trying to shine a light upon.

Removing that dangerous sense of invincibility includes diluting the power of any one individual through diversifying media ownership. And this, of course, is where the BSkyB deal is intimately related to the whole scandal. Not only ought it be thrown out in light of the revelations of widespread illegality and contempt of the rule of law operating within News Corp, but the appropriate response ought to include the break-up of Murdoch's existing empire into smaller pieces to prevent the kinds of concentration of power that help to generate such pervasive corruption.
And to make Murdoch and News Corp pay their taxes. They are amongst the worst offenders for tax dodging. Murdoch has personally dodged hundreds of millions of pounds of taxes, possibly billions. Of course, this doesn't stop his papers offering lectures on the need for austerity measures to balance the budget.

What does this have to do with the carbon debate in Australia? While phone hacking is getting some coverage, the antipodean front pages are filled with claim and counterclaim about atmospheric chemistry and tax reform. The link is Rupert.

Murdoch's media empire spans four continents and is, by some margin, the largest news media conglomerate in the world. And from Fox News to the Australian, from The Wall Street Journal to The Daily Telegraph (the Sydney tabloid, not the UK broadsheet), Murdoch publishes a huge share of the denial, false balance and misinformation about climate change to be found in the mainstream media (as documented here, here, here and many other places). This is not to say that he only publishes denial, but many of his organisations are the worst offenders at giving equal weight to the claims of highly reputable scientific institutions and ideological think-tanks with significant funding from major fossil fuel companies. It is clear that this is often deliberate policy in order to sow confusion and thus delay and dilute effective collective action.
Murdoch is not, of course, the only wealthy individual deliberately throwing (bull)dust into the air.

This is part of the insidious effect of hyper-capitalism upon democracy. Rather than generating competition and diversity, the concentration of extreme financial wealth in the hands of the few that defines hyper-capitalism risks enabling the further conformity of politics to the interests of the ultra-wealthy. Media plurality is a necessary condition of a free society. So is the avoidance of extreme inequality.

And a postscript: stories like this give me hope. A young TV reporter with a dream career ahead of him makes an important realisation.
H/T Rod Benson.

News of the World 0; Guardian 1

Extraordinary. The world's most read (and most loathed?) English-language newspaper, in existence for 167 years, is to cease publication this Sunday after the rapidly developing events of the last couple of days. Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist tabloid News of the World has faced escalating revelations of wicked and illegal behaviour, including hacking the phones of up to four thousand people - royalty, politicians, celebrities, murder and terrorism victims and their families, soldiers killed in Afghanistan and those of their relatives - as well as interfering in police investigations, paying police for information, lying under oath and (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the rest of this list) hacking the phones of those involved in the investigations into their own misdeeds.*
*I would provide links to each of these, but it would take all day. There is extensive coverage here and just about everywhere.

Credit must go to the years of investigative work by Nick Davies at the Guardian, who kept following the story despite threats from NotW and scorn or lack of interest from many other mainstream media sources.

The fallout will continue for some time. There will be retrials, public inquiries, reform of how the media are (self-)regulated, questions about how one of the editors at the heart of the scandal ended up working for the Prime Minister, reviews in the role of police corruption and very serious questions (hopefully) about the BSkyB takeover that looked set to give Murdoch even more control over British media (and which ought to be rejected on media plurality grounds alone).
UK voters can sign a petition against the takeover and/or contact your MP.

I have no illusions that this will be the end of bad journalism, nor that Murdoch will be likely to change his ways, or lose his malign influence on the politics of too many continents. A publication like NotW doesn't get to where it was without an extensive public willing to pay good money to read gossip and slander. Those malformed desires will not disappear overnight. Other publications will quickly fill the void.

Nonetheless, perhaps this whole episode is a chance for us to stop momentarily and consider what really counts as news, and whom we trust to tell us about it.

Let us also remember that the self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude offered by the gutter tabloid press at the failings and foibles of the famous is all too easily replaced with self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude at the humiliation of that very press's flagship. So let us not rejoice at a black eye for Murdoch, but mourn for our own myopic moral vision that all too often secretly wishes to be kept in the dark.

"And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed."

- John 3.19-20 (NRSV).

Bank makes money: in other news, dog bites man

Major US bank launders billions of dollars of Mexican drug money.

That big banks generally make stratospheric profits means they are also the target of much suspicion and criticism, a fair bit of which is justified, as the above story illustrates. If you haven't already seen it, watch Inside Job. The problem is not a few bad apples, but a rotten system. Contemporary banking practices are the embodiment of hypercapitalism's myopic obsessions.

"It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God."

- Mark 10.25 (NRSV).

Democracy and plutocracy

"Plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy too long tolerated leaves democracy on the auction block, subject to the highest bidder. Socrates said to understand a thing, you must first name it. The name for what's happening to our political system is corruption - a deep, systemic corruption."

- Bill Moyers, "Shades of Howard Zinn: It's Okay If It's Impossible".

This lecture, delivered late last year at Boston University by journalist Bill Moyers, is worth reading in full if you are interested in how hypercapitalism is corrupting democracy. If you haven't watched the video I posted a few days ago, go and do that first, then read the lecture. Here's another taste:

"I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it's the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation's economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of 10 Americans was growing, too - from $17,719 to $30,941. That's a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.

"But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefited. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years. That's wage repression."

I am increasingly convinced that ecological problems cannot be separated from economic, political and spiritual ones. Unless we face the reality of the hyper-rich largely running a political system that oversees an economic model designed to extract maximum profits at whatever price in which the majority willingly participate through hope of sharing in a life of more stuff, then no amount of technological fixes will paper over the cracks we are causing in creation.

And so the corrupting influence of corporate money (both directly through campaign contributions and indirectly through the perceived necessity of bowing down to "the economy") on mainstream western media and (generally) both sides of politics in various countries means that our ecological woes are largely suppressed (unless they can be quantified in reduced profits).

I do apologise for posting repeatedly on the USA. It is not that there are no local expressions of the same phenomena in nations where I live or hold citizenship (nor significant differences), simply that the USA is a picture of the global predicament.
Image by CAC.

What is the difference?

What are the morally relevant differences between (a) unlimited, publicly unaccountable lobbying and (b) bribery? Perhaps I'm overlooking something obvious, but I'm genuinely confused.

Barriers are political, not technical

Independent: Feeding 2.4 billion more people without more land. Technically, it might be possible. But then, technically it has been possible for some time to end poverty, switch to a carbon-neutral economy and destroy all nuclear weapons. The barriers in each case are primarily political, not technical.

The Automatic Earth: In the USA, only 47% of working age adults have full-time employment.

NYT: US States on verge of bankruptcy.

NYT: Species on the move due to changing climate. There are physical limits to how far many can go.

Make Wealth History: Bribery isn't just an African problem, not least because the bribes that keep developing countries politically poisonous frequently originate from western corporations.

Bright Green Scotland: Undercover cops: political or commercial? The recent exposure of numerous UK undercover police in green activist groups has raised a host of uncomfortable but important questions about political protest, police surveillance and accountability, the ethics of espionage and the commercialisation of policing and intelligence. This article explores the latter issue.

What has WikiLeaks ever done for us?

This is a partial list covering some of the abuses of corporate and government power revealed by WikiLeaks over the last few years. Is any of this information in the public interest? Does this record indicate an exclusively anti-USA organisation? Are these revelations the work of terrorists? Would anyone prefer for the world not to have known all these abuses? During its four year history, WikiLeaks has exposed the following:

• 217 cases of UN peace-keepers being accused of sexually abusing and impregnating girls in eastern Congo.

• Trafigura, an African oil company, caused widespread illness through a toxic gas dump, and then tried to suppress this being published in the Guardian through a secret "super-injunction", in which the press cannot even report the existence of an injunction.

• US forces killed hundreds of innocent civilians at checkpoints in Iraq.

• The "secret bibles" of Scientology, normally only available to initiates for very large sums of money.

• The designation of some prisoners at Guantanamo Bay detention camp as off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which the US military had previously denied.

• Details of the corrupt rule of the Arap-Moi leadership in Kenya, who were involved in US$3 billion dollars of fraud. They were subsequently defeated at the next election.

• Sarah Palin used a private Yahoo email account to send work-related messages, in violation of public record laws.

• Corruption amongst politicians in Peru over oil contracts, which resulted in the prime minister's resignation.

• More than 15,000 civilian deaths in Iraq that had previously been concealed by the U.S. government.

• A video showing a U.S. army helicopter slaughtering Reuters journalists and Iraqi children in cold blood.

• Al-Qaeda's deadly exploitation of children in Iraq.

• Irregular activity at Kaupthing Bank in Iceland, with large sums of money being loaned to bank owners and other debts were written off, precipitating the Icelandic financial crisis, the collapse of all three Icelandic banks, the breakdown of a coalition government and the indictment of a former prime minister.

• US Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report from March 2008 detailing how to marginalise WikiLeaks.

• US soldiers used Iraqi civilians as human bomb detectors.

• Illegal government wiretapping in Canada.

• The CIA kidnapped an innocent German and tortured him for months, then attempting to stop Germany from arresting its operatives.

• The US State Department instructed its diplomats to break international treaties by gathering biometric and other personal data on senior UN figures.

• The US has pressured the UK government to break a treaty on cluster bombs by turning a blind eye to bombs stored at US bases on UK territory.

• Australian government web filtering to prevent access to child pornography and terrorist sites extended to a range of other legal sites, including Wikipedia entries, Christian sites, a tour operator and WikiLeaks itself.

• DynCorp, a US company, hired young boys to dance for Afghan police in a social context usually linked to pederasty.

• Shell's corruption and influence in the government of Nigeria.

• The US wrote Spain's proposed new copyright laws.

• US suppression of Spanish court cases involving US figures accused of torture and extradition.

• Pfizer used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout.

List partially modified and expanded from here. More information on Wikipedia.