Archive for the ‘Independent’ Category
The “alt-left” – what my Independent article left out
My preferred title was “Confessions of a 1990s alt-leftist”
After Donald Trump condemned the role of the “alt-left” at Charlottesville, a flurry of articles appeared claiming “there’s no such thing as the alt-left” – that it’s a “myth” created by the right and/or “centrist liberals” to discredit the left.
That’s the opening sentence of my Independent article. My intention for that article was to point out some errors – historical and semantic – behind claims that “alt-left” is a recently-invented bogus label. I wouldn’t normally have bothered going to the length of writing an article about this, but everything I read – from the Washington Post to influential bloggers such as Glenn Greenwald – seemed to be telling me that it was wrong and bad to use the “alt-left” label. Here’s a typical example of what I mean, from Jill Stein, the US Green Party presidential nominee:
My article, as it turned out, contained only the historical point (origins and development of “alt-left”/”alt-right” usage). My related argument about semantic confusion was left out – so I’ll expand on that a bit here. For illustrative purposes I had included the above Jill Stein quote, contrasted with the following statement from Cynthia McKinney – a previous US Green Party nominee for president. (The editor at the Independent didn’t want me to include these quotes, unfortunately).
McKinney’s statement preceded Trump’s “alt-left” remark; Stein’s came after it – so these examples provided a striking “before and after” contrast, in terms of semantic usage. Stein’s statement (and the many others that echoed it in newspaper columns, political commentary websites, prominent social media accounts, etc) communicated the following logic:
1. ‘All uses of “alt-left” are pejorative/scurrilous.’
2. ‘All uses of “alt-left” are devoid of validity.’
3. ‘Ergo, you shouldn’t use the term “alt-left”.’
This doesn’t strike me as an accurate – or useful – mapping of the semantic territory, to say the least. The McKinney quote provided a recent example of non-pejorative use, and I provided others which go back to the 1990s. Furthermore, many uses of both “alt-left” and “alt-right” seem, to me, both pejorative and valid (again, I provided examples in my article).
Consider the possibility that the over-reaction over the “alt-left” label, although triggered by Trump’s use of the term, has little to do with any implied “equivalence” between “alt-left” and “Nazi”. I don’t imagine that figures such as Stein and Greenwald are really worried about being mistaken for white supremacists. I think their reaction possibly owes more to the valid uses of “alt-left” as a pejorative label for some of the views they express.
Wikileaks (ie Julian Assange), Greenwald, Stein and many others (loosely self-identified as “left” in some sense) are often criticised for reinforcing the talking points of Trump through framing, emphasis and selection of examples. This criticism seems important to me given the huge audience that these commentators reach through social media. Their particular anti-liberal/anti-Dem framing, which is often (as I mention in my article) combined with “establishment conspiracy”-type memes common to the so-called “alt-right” (as epitomised by Breitbart and Infowars) should, to my mind, be highlighted, given its prominence and media influence. “Alt-left” seems a valid descriptive label for this purpose.
Moral outrage on tap
W A R N I N G :
Repeated dosage of Moral Outrage
may turn you conservative.
July 31, 2014 – Individuals have been doing “sickening”, “disgusting” things since… well, at least since the beginning of recorded history. And if we accept that it’s important to ruminate on the terrible acts of strangers, then there’s an endless supply to choose from. We can be 24-Hour Outraged People. It’s our moral obligation.
You may laugh at that reductio, but have you looked at “quality” newspaper comment pages or popular web forums recently? Moral outrage has become such a ready, familiar mode of cognition – and expression – that it functions like a sort of currency, particularly in online social “transactions”.
Unfortunately, moral outrage – like fear – tends to activate authoritarian conceptual frames while it inhibits empathy. Empathy precludes the perception of a human being as a “monster”, “animal”, “sub-human scum”, etc. That much seems obvious. But perhaps it’s less obvious that headlines which repeatedly refer to human beings only by the crimes of which they’re convicted (or merely accused) – eg “The Predator”, “The Welfare Cheat”, “The Racist” – will tend to inhibit, in a broader way, the experience of “empathy” on which progressive morality (and, generally, “liberal” politics) is based. Empathy is towards other people (including, but not limited to, victims). Moral outrage is exclusively concentrated on what seems “lower” than human.
There was a time – not long ago – when newspapers such as the News of the World got a lot of mileage from “paedo” hysteria. Chris Morris’s Channel 4 comedy, Brass Eye (full video here), satirised this “coverage” hilariously, capturing all its absurdity and hypocrisy. And then, of course, the Daily Mail (and others – including government ministers) turned their outrage on Morris and Channel 4. How dare they joke about such a serious subject?
Channel 4, and other commentators in the more “liberal” areas of the press, rightly shrugged, sighed, and effectively said: “You idiots, can’t you see that it’s satire, and that it’s satirising media coverage, and in particular the type of reaction we’re getting from you right now”.
July 19, 2001
Chris Morris, the satirist who tricked politicians into railing against a fake drug “cake”, has caused controversy again by duping celebrities into endorsing two fabricated anti-paedophilia campaigns for his latest TV series.
A furious Phil Collins last night said he was taking legal advice after having been filmed with a T-shirt bearing the words “Nonce Sense” while giving “advice” to children. […]
The programme, clearly designed to satirise the hysteria surrounding the issue last year, was due to be shown earlier in the month.
I wonder if the Guardian and Channel 4 would take the same progressive view towards such satire in today’s climate (post- Jimmy Savile type scandals, etc). Given some of the Guardian’s recent attacks on the satiric humour of The Onion, the creator of Family Guy, Reginald D. Hunter’s ironic use of the “N” word, etc, I’m not too confident they would.
Certain types of moral outrage – like fearmongering – should probably be viewed as a media virus, or a special type of contrived “news” frame. Repeated often, and widely (a bit of moral outrage with breakfast every morning), they strengthen the neural connections on which this mode of cognition are based. Of course, in the “liberal” press it’s (mostly) directed at different things than in the rightwing tabloids. But the logic of the currently fashionable “zero tolerance” type framing applies to both, together with a tendency to demonise individuals (as opposed to simply condemning the crime/”crime”).
Why do these tendencies reinforce conservative moral systems? Because they’re based on conservative (authoritarian, so-called “strict father”) premises such as tolerance-as-weakness, character weakness as direct cause of immorality, etc. These moral premises may be unspoken (and unconscious), but they directly oppose the progressive morality of tolerance-as-virtue, compassion/empathy as ‘integral’ with systemic causation, etc.
I’ve previously written about the Luis Suarez saga(s), and how media outrage appeared (to put it mildly) disproportionate to the actions of one individual. The Guardian was probably the worst in terms of sheer volume of moral outrage (exceeding the tabloids in this regard). The emotion released apparently so warped the perceptions of some journalists, that they routinely got the facts wrong (one senior sports reporter for The Independent admitted to me, by email, that he had indeed made some erroneous, and fairly serious, accusations – these were never corrected in the newspaper).
Another recent (slightly less emotive) case concerned a magazine “report” that Steve Coogan had been dismissively critical of Angelina Jolie’s humanitarian campaigning. This “story” was soon republished by others (eg The Independent) and, by the churnalism process, became this claim: “STEVE Coogan claims Angelina Jolie’s efforts to help refugees and rid wars of rape is ‘off-putting’.” An army of tweeters then expressed their moral outrage at Coogan. Felicity Morse, the Independent’s social media editor (whose tweets I mostly enjoy), tweeted the following to her 15,000 followers:
The implication was that Coogan “hates” those who “try to end rape in war”. A serious, reputation-damaging suggestion. As it turned out, the report was completely wrong – Coogan’s remarks weren’t directed at Jolie at all. To me, the problem was not so much that the report was later confirmed to be wrong, but that you could see beforehand that the claims didn’t logically follow from the quotes attributed to Coogan. (I had gently warned Felicity about this immediately after her tweet – to no avail. Moral outrage has its own logic, its own course to run).
The Independent later amended its article, but only enough to save face. The headline (which now reads: Steve Coogan appears to brand Angelina Jolie’s humanitarian efforts ‘off-putting’…) is still misleading, since the whole premise on which the story was based has evaporated.
There are many more cases. In fact, they now seem a daily occurrence. What used to be a regular staple of the worse tabloid rags now appears to be a large part of what fills space in supposedly progressive newspapers such as the Guardian and Independent (particularly on their websites, where space is unlimited). In the latter cases, the issues referenced (eg anti-racism, anti-sexism) may be progressive, unlike in the tabloids. But the underlying moral framing of outrage looks the same – the Trojan horse of ‘zero tolerance’ and the conservative logic of essences and moral ‘character’.
Note: I hope I don’t alienate any of my readers with the above. I often feel morally outraged at events, both distant and close to me – it’s not something I demean. My purpose has been to focus on one particular ‘framing’ aspect of moral outrage – something that, to my knowledge, nobody else has focused on.
Letters to the editor
Oct 16, 2013 – Over a decade ago, I’d sometimes send letters to newspapers – to see if they’d publish my weird, naive opinions. Surprisingly, they often did. Occasionally, one of my letters would be printed by two newspapers on the same day – as when the Times and Independent published something I wrote about Tony Blair in 2005 (see below).
Even The Sun published a few of my letters – probably out of shock that a Sun reader could actually manage to string a few sentences together. (Of course, I’m not a Sun reader – I just sent letters out to all the newspapers. The first I heard of The Sun publishing my letter was when I received a £15 “prize” from them for it. Jackpot!).
(I pretty much stopped writing to the media when everybody started doing it – as a result of campaigning websites which encouraged a sort of template approach. It got too crowded and rote).
Here are a few examples of my letters which were published…
Dear Editor,
This country is much wealthier than in the 1970s, when most students paid nothing for their education. The “funding crisis” in higher education is created not by lack of funds, but by a dubious political ideology.
(The Sun, 28/1/2003)
Dear Editor,
The way this government talks about work reminds me of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes One free”) Nazi concentration camp entrance sign. Hitler provided full employment. Prison workshops have full employment. Coercion can always create full employment. What happened to leisure? We’ve seen incredible advances in labour-saving technology over the last 30 years, yet working hours have risen during this period. And now government ministers want to promote a “work first” culture. Are they insane?
(Read out on BBC Radio 4 ‘PM’ news, 5/7/2001)
Dear Editor
Re: Flu Epidemic – Last year’s Government clamp-down on “sick-note culture” was regrettable. Taking time off sick is increasingly seen as a bad career move, with the result that everyone in the office catches flu. My advice: prevention is better than cure, so call in sick before you get ill. (The Guardian, 12/1/2000)
Dear Editor,
Gordon Brown says full employment is achievable. Problem is, half of UK jobs produce no “real wealth”, no resources or services useful to human life. These pointless jobs (many in financial services) have no effect except to move money around in databases, benefiting the rich. It used to be called usury. People actually burn up fossil fuels travelling to these pointless jobs. (The Independent, 16/3/2001)
Dear Editor,
On average, fewer than 10 children are killed each year by strangers in England and Wales, according to government figures. Road accidents, however, kill or seriously injure several thousand children every year. The media obsession with paedophiles distorts perceptions of risks to children. (The Sun, 26/7/2000)
Dear Editor,
The way politicians talk, you’d think welfare fraud and juvenile delinquency were the two greatest threats to civilisation. Being young and unemployed*, I feel more threatened by politicians.
(News Of the World, 10/12/2000 –- *the bit about being “young and unemployed” wasn’t 100% true)
Dear Editor,
The government has overlooked an obvious way to tackle road congestion: give employers financial incentives to allow staff to work from home. If only 10% of office staff worked one day a week at home, we’d notice a significant reduction in road traffic (and pollution).
(Printed in the Independent & Daily Express, 18/12/2002)
Dear Editor,
Tony Blair dismissed the Lancet report on Iraqi deaths. He also dismissed the LSE report on ID-card costs. He now dismisses the Chatham House report linking the London bombings to the Iraq war. Is it rational behaviour to simply dismiss everything that contradicts one’s worldview?
(Printed in the Times & Independent, 20/7/2005)
Alternative economic framing
Oct 11, 2011 – Newspapers mostly reflect “conventional” economics, whose textbooks describe variations on the “classical” market economic model, and little else. (Some of the more risqué texts might devote a page to Marxism, but that’s the only alternative we’re supposed to consider). Economics is framed as capitalism vs socialism. (Cognitively speaking, there’s a “good” reason for this limiting dichotomy – but I’ll save that for a future piece).
John Lanchester, in his excellent economics primer, Whoops!, argues that the global financial collapse stems from the perceived victory of an ideology (“capitalism”): “That climate was one of unchallenged victory for the capitalist system, a clear ideological hegemony of a type which never existed before: it was the first moment when capitalism was unthreatened as the world’s dominant political-economic system.”
So, a dichotomy framed as a battle with a clear winner. The financial sector, given “free reign” (as well as “free rein”), became more powerful than ever. This is illustrated by Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist:
“From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent”. *
The financial sector rules – like “a class of priests and magicians”** – by instilling incomprehension and awe (even “experts” apparently can’t agree on many of the basics). In this milieu it’s safer for journalists to use conventional “accepted” economic frames – there’s less risk of exposing one’s ignorance. Alternative economic views/proposals thus receive little coverage.
There’s an abundance of economic ideas which fall outside orthodox framing. The main difficulty is ploughing through them to find the ones which seem neither “crackpot” nor scary. Here are a few of my favourites…
Universal Basic Income (UBI)
A Basic Income is an income paid to all individuals, without work requirement or means test (which is what places it far outside conventional economic “wisdom”). People are free – but not obliged – to top it up with income from other sources, eg self-employment or jobs. Over the last two centuries this idea has been independently proposed under a variety of names – Citizen’s Income, Universal Benefit, State Bonus, Social Credit and National Dividend.
Several ways have been suggested to fund a Basic Income. Nobel prize-winning economist James Meade proposed a social dividend funded from the return on publicly owned productive assets. Some economists think that funding should come from redistributive income taxation or a tax on land. These ideas aren’t new – as far back as 1796, Thomas Paine favoured a state-provided universal income to compensate for the inequitable division of land, which he saw as belonging to everyone.
The Basic Income concept makes good bait to dangle in economic conversations. The uninitiated, taking the bait, will argue that it would remove the incentive to work, and nurture an “idle underclass”. In fact, compared to the existing welfare system, Basic Income provides a strong financial incentive for creative and productive activity (some recent research lends empirical support to this). With Basic Income it’s more financially rewarding to move from unemployment into a job – because you keep your Basic Income payments, whereas you would lose your dole. Many common types of work – eg low-paid casual, part-time or self-employed work – increase your disposable income under a Basic Income scheme, whereas the income from such work is subtracted from your dole under the current system. Many worthwhile activities – adult education, voluntary work, starting a business, etc – are penalised or even criminalised under the current welfare system, because they interfere with the condition of “continuous availability for work.” Most wealth-creating activity begins modestly, perhaps not generating enough for a person to survive on at first. Basic Income nurtures such activity, whereas the welfare system aborts it.
Guaranteed Income
Guaranteed Income is sometimes confused with Basic Income, but the important difference is that it uses a means test. Every individual is guaranteed a minimum income (set above the poverty level) – if your income falls below this level, you automatically get a top-up from the government, but as your personal income increases, the amount of top-up decreases. Guaranteed Income, like Basic Income, is not conditional upon work.
Several variations of Guaranteed Income have been proposed, the most well-known being Robert Theobald’s 1964 scheme for “Basic Economic Security”. Theobald was concerned about the effect of technology and increasing automation – he thought it was time to dissolve the traditional link between income and work, since most work would eventually be automated. By 1968, 1,200 economists (including John Kenneth Galbraith) called on Congress to introduce such a system. A Guaranteed Income in fact almost made it into legislation, under a proposal put forward by – wait for it – Richard Nixon. A book was written about it in 1973, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who was appointed to Nixon’s White House Staff as Counselor to the President for Urban Affairs). His book was titled: The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (1973).
Negative Income Tax
One variation on Guaranteed Income is the Negative Income Tax, which would provide government top-ups, via the tax system, to those below a certain income level. It should be pointed out to those who see this as a “soft” leftist idea, that Negative Income Tax was proposed by one Milton Friedman. In many ways, we’re outside the right/left framing dichotomy here. Friedman’s apparent intention was to create a system that costs less than the current welfare system (but which also avoids the degrading nature of welfare).
Willingness to Work?
Many so-called “guaranteed minimum income” schemes restrict entitlement, among the unemployed, to those “willing to work” – a condition similar to that of current welfare systems. The Belgian political theorist Philippe Van Parijs argues that when we assess willingness-to-work, we should make the distinction between pointless, dead-end jobs and useful, fulfilling or “stepping stone” jobs – and that the best people to make this distinction are the ones doing the jobs. This is in stark contrast to conventional economic framing, in which all market-created jobs are viewed as “good” and “worthwhile” – by definition.
Zero-interest Currency
A different type of non-coercive redistribution of wealth comes from the old Individualist (as opposed to Collectivist) Anarchist approach of allowing free trade to drive down the cost of “borrowing” money. This idea originated with early anarchists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Josiah Warren and Benjamin Tucker.
Free trade is supposed to drive down prices through open competition, but according to Proudhon, Warren and Tucker there is a fundamental flaw in the existing system: a lack of competition in the issuance of currency. The current legally enforced money-issuing monopoly (eg the Bank of England or the Federal Reserve) keeps interest at an artificially high level – if free competition were allowed in the creation and distribution of alternative currencies, the cost of credit could in theory fall to a rate well below 1% (the cost of administering the credit; true interest would be zero).
Ironically, this appears to be “true” free-market economics taken to its logical conclusions. The anarchists claimed that zero-interest currency would eventually remove all forms of usury, including “profit”, from economic transactions. Adam Smith’s principle of “labour being the true measure of price” would thus come into effect through free competition driving out all usurious components of price. Workers would be fully compensated for their work at last, and not a Marxist or Collectivist in sight.
Rusting bank notes – Stamp Scrip
“I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx”
— John Maynard Keynes
In 1891 an Argentinian businessman and economist named Silvio Gesell went one step further than the Individualist Anarchists by proposing a system of negative-interest currency. The most well-known form of this currency was “stamp scrip”, which required a stamp to be affixed to the back of a money note each month, to revalidate it.
Gesell believed that money is fine as a medium of exchange, but that it tends to be used as an instrument of power, capable of dominating and distorting the market. For example, money can be hoarded – temporarily withheld from the market for speculative purposes – without exposing its holder to losses. Real material goods, on the other hand, can’t be hoarded without significant costs – either in the natural deterioration of the goods, or in the cost of storage.
In order to encourage the natural circulation of wealth instead of speculative hoarding, Gesell proposed “rusting bank notes” (a metaphor for negative-interest money), to bring about an “organic reform” of the monetary system. With money behaving more like real material wealth, the distortions in the system caused by hoarding and other forms of usury would be removed. This, he argued, would result in people receiving the full proceeds of their own labour, and would enable large sections of the population to quit wage slavery and work in an autonomous manner in private and co-operative enterprises.
A successful experiment with Gesell’s theories took place in the Austrian town of Wörgl in 1932, during the depression. Wörgl effectively ran out of money, so the mayor of the town printed his own. The resulting currency, Wörgl stamp scrip, was designed to automatically earn negative interest. Each month its holders had to pay a stamp fee of 1% of the value of the note, so people spent the money as fast as possible. This resulted in a huge increase in “real wealth” – new houses, a new water system, repaved streets, a new bridge, a ski jump, etc. But when hundreds of other Austrian towns came up with plans to copy the successful Wörgl scheme, the central bank panicked because of the threat to its monopoly. It soon became illegal to issue alternative currency in Austria.
The Digital Economy
Apart from the possibility of alternative electronic currencies, the “digital economy” hasn’t delivered much of revolutionary economic impact (except in the sense of concentrating wealth more “efficiently”). The first electronic money-trading system was opened by Reuters in 1973, shortly after the dismantling of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system (which regulated international currencies). From earliest records up until then, 90% of capital transactions had involved the “real economy”, ie trade and investment, with only 10% being speculation. By 1995 a staggering reversal had taken place – trade and investment accounted for only 5% of capital transfers, with 95% being short-term speculation.
Electronic trading networks have developed a virtual economy in which most of the money is made not through actual investment, but through transacting in a sort of abstract wealth. For example, huge profits have been made from rumours about indirect effects of future transactions – but the future transactions don’t necessarily have to happen for the profits to be made. Massive profits have been made from currency speculation, conjured up by supercomputers which transact fast enough to exploit microfluctuations in exchange rates.
Very little of this virtual-economy profiteering produces anything of value in the sense of “real wealth” – ie things of real value to human lives. Short-term financial speculation tends to create economies of high profit, low investment and low wages – in other words, it’s detrimental to the lives of most people. We have some strange notions about the respectability of certain types of income. When poor people receive modest welfare payments, they’re labelled “spongers”, but when speculators bleed vast sums from the digital economy, without producing anything of value, we congratulate them on their skill.
The Tobin Tax
James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist, foresaw the detrimental effects of escalating currency speculation during the 1970s. He proposed a small tax on foreign currency transactions that would put “sand in the wheels” of international speculative finance, and thus help to prevent instability in the global financial system. It would also generate a vast amount of revenue.
This idea has resurfaced as an Internet phenomenon, the Robin Hood Tax.
Final thought to ponder (on Guaranteed Income)
“A system that is less expensive than welfare and also less debasing to the poor, it seems to me, should not be objectionable to anybody but hardcore sadists.”
— Robert Anton Wilson
* Quoted in Whoops! by John Lanchester. Johnson’s figures are for USA.
** Description of financial sector as “class of priests and magicians” is from Whoops! by John Lanchester
*** Much of the above article is adapted from a piece I had published in the Idler magazine, Winter 2002
Banks get £46bn hand-out
Trillion-pound bail-out not enough?
Sept 8, 2011 – This story didn’t make the front pages. The big banks continue to get massive hand-outs. According to a New Economics Foundation report, the ‘Big Five’ UK banks received £46bn in subsidies in 2010 – equivalent to getting £1,840 from every household in Britain.
This is an ongoing ‘too-big-to-fail’ subsidy, which the banks get on top of the trillion-pound bail-out. The Robin Hood Tax campaign, which helped fund the report, said taxpayer subsidies are sustaining ‘casino-banking’.
“Too big to fail”? “Casino-banking”? In the moral accounting metaphor of many conservatives, banks (and other big businesses) are apparently still seen as deserving – you don’t often see headlines about corporate welfare “SCROUNGERS”. Why deserving? Pre-conceptualised according to the long-entrenched iconography/framing of the heroic, hard-working, self-reliant, successful “wealth creator” (includes newspaper proprietors). Er… self-reliant?
N E W S • F R A M E S • • • • • 