From Donald in Wonderland comes the Trump of Hearts

So, with Donald Trump just eight days away from his inauguration, what are your impressions about the American president-elect and his likely effect on us?

For me, it’s the emerging thought that we’re all going to die – and, possibly, fairly soon. But, looking to the positives, as I always do, we should at least have some laughs on the way.

Watching his first press conference as president-elect yesterday afternoon confirmed, for me at least, the sheer enormity of what the American people have done. God, they must have been angry! Though, given the choice they had, I don’t blame them.

But now we all have to live with that choice and the omens, frankly, don’t look good.

It’s not just that he’s politically inexperienced and is therefore more vulnerable to manipulation by the likes of Vladimir Putin, as well as the assortment of multi-billionaires, fossil-fuel magnates and right-wing ideologues within his own cabinet.

It’s not even that he appears to have little vision or strategy beyond that of deal-maker and the vagaries of Making America Great Again – whatever that eventually means.

It’s that he’s simply not temperamentally equipped for the task ahead. And without the temperamental qualities, he’s unlikely to learn the lessons and grow into the job, or earn the respect to keep the whole shebang going – assuming he’s not impeached or assassinated along the way.

As the press conference illustrated all too clearly, he seems to see his new wonderland as being all about him. To be fair, the event itself was stupendous entertainment; chaotic, meandering and, in places, unintentionally funny. (Displaying all those piles of business documents – what was that all about?).

So it started with him telling us that he has actually been doing something useful: working to bring jobs back to America. Be he had the manner of a child seeking adoration to ensure he received his daily allowance of sweets.

And then, as he turned to the dossier about his links with and activities in Russia, his worst trait came to the fore: everything is a personal vendetta or love affair for him.

If you’re nice to him, then you’re a great guy. But if you do anything he doesn’t like – which might include simply doing your job – then you’re the scum of the Earth and you deserve to rot in hell.

And so it was with the serried ranks of journalists seated before him – “some of whom haven’t treated me very well over the years,” said The Boy Donald, before thanking a number for not publishing or reporting on the dossier compiled by former M16 spook Christopher Steele.

Now, not reporting on the matter is an editorial decision that seeks to judge whether revealing material about your president is in the public interest, as opposed to just being of interest to the public.

Buzzfeed, CNN and others decided to publish because not only had Barack Obama and the top Congressional leaders been briefed on its contents by the CIA, but Republican John McCain thought it so serious that he passed the dossier to the FBI.

Trump roundly condemned those media outlets, and even refused to take a question from CNN’s reporter Jim Acosta because his “news organisations is terrible”, before adding: “You are fake news.”

Trump, the most thin-skinned of men, put his own personal interests before those of his public. Even Fox News presenter Shephard Smith defended Acosta and CNN’s coverage as reflecting due “journalistic standards”.

So here we are. After Barack Obama’s scandal-free eight years in the White House, Trump’s belligerence and disregard for rules was always going to come as a shock. But though his public persona has always suggested otherwise, the extent to which he is unable to de-escalate a ‘personal vendetta’ does come as a surprise. He’s a control freak; he just cannot let anything go.

Consequently, though his economic agenda, such as it is, could prove a welcome change, he has surely made too many enemies within his own country to implement them effectively – if that agenda isn’t already being hijacked by his Republican colleagues.

He has a historically-low approval rating for a president-elect and has publicly attacked members of the judiciary, the CIA and much of the media, as well as the Carrier workers union leader Chuck Jones and the cast of Hamilton. In addition, Mexicans, Hispanics, the Chinese, people with disabilities, women and climate scientists – in fact, anyone he disagrees with – are legitimate targets.

And if Steele’s dossier is accurate, then this whole affair shows how Trump’s opportunistic approach and lack of experience makes him vulnerable to manipulation. Whether it was accurate or not, Putin will, no doubt, change tack and rely on plausible deniability, happy in the knowledge that he’ll reach a deal with Trump & Co on a number of matters, such as sanctions and Arctic oil.

China, however, could easily be a much more challenging adversary – as could his own voters if he doesn’t deliver on his promise of jobs and a better standard of living.

Ultimately, Trump’s personality faces a stern test. He needs to develop more than the two modes – unctuous to the goodies and vindictive towards the baddies – that we’ve seen to date. But it seems unlikely.

In his current state, he reminds me of a modern, male equivalent of the Queen of Hearts, from Alice in Wonderland. And no one in their right mind would give her access to all those nuclear buttons.

Donald Trump: so how’s that draining-the-swamp thing going?

Listen to much of the so-called ‘alt-media’, and one could be forgiven for thinking that four-times bankrupt-come-billionaire, US President-elect Donald Trump, really is going to give the establishment what for.

While much of the corporate media is transfixed by the horrors that await, other leading commentators, notably Infowar’s Alex Jones, and Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert of Keiser Report fame, have delighted in America’s exciting new departure.

But the events since the 8 November election do little to suggest that Trump really will wield the sword of justice to cut the bankers, corporations and special interests down to size.

Instead, he intends to reduce bank regulation and let Wall Street do its thing unhindered, while offering tax cuts that will mainly benefit the wealthy.

Trump was going to drain the swamp of corruption. But, it turns out, he’s turned his inauguration into exactly the sort of money-making opportunity that cries out shady deals. After all, anyone who contributes a sum of six figures or more to his inauguration committee will have special access to the new president.

In fact, rather than representing some uprising for the common man, Trump is beginning to look like he’s more at ease among the corporate establishment than many of his predecessors.

And where Trump has talked their language – such as bringing all those factory jobs back from China and elsewhere – the process is vague. For instance, Making America Great Again involves abandoning the albeit dodgy free-trade agreements and replacing them with the results of his wheeler-dealering magic.

The problem is twofold: not only are his policy positions, such as they are, undefined, but then there’s his changeable temperament to contend with as well.

For instance, does Trump have the nouse to handle globally-interconnected issues, such as the mammoth debt China has racked up over the last decade, with the sensitivity that would avoid economic catastrophe in today’s debt-saturated world economy? Well, we’ll soon find out.

And it’s Trump’s core, blue-collar support that will likely suffer most if he gets it wrong. As Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis writes:

Trump’s plan for helping those left behind since the 1970s, to the extent that one is discernible, seems to turn on two axes: a domestic stimulus and bilateral deal-making under the threat of tariffs and quotas. But if he plays hardball with China, pushing the Chinese to revalue the renminbi and employing threats of tariffs and the like, he may well end up pricking the bubble of China’s private debt – unleashing a deluge of nasty consequences that would overwhelm any domestic stimulus he introduces.

It’s difficult to find convincing signs of that sensitivity in anything Trump has done, outside his acceptance speech comment that he would govern for all Americans. And, still, there’s the uncertainty as to what his policy pronouncements really mean.

For instance, the markets have been all excited about the prospect of Trump borrowing shedloads of money – between $1trn and $2trn – to resuscitate America’s crumbling infrastructure. Yet there are significant doubts that his ‘proposals’ really amount to the stimulus package many are hoping for.

Even the certainties about the death of Obamacare, a policy he routinely pilloried during the hustings, are no longer certain after he suggested that parts might be retained.

These outward signs of concilliation have allowed some, such as Max Keiser, to suggest Trump is really a pragmatist at heart and will abandon policies that make no long-term sense – such as ditching renewables and pulling out of all climate change initiatives and research.

Such a touching faith in Trump’s better nature is not, however, supported by his nominees for government positions, nor the post-truth universe he currently seems to inhabit – check out his fact-free comments about winning the popular vote, for instance.

Even if his own better nature does rise to the fore, the people he is surrounding himself with are framed by a narrow, right-wing agenda. Here’s Trump’s nominees so far:

• Goldman Sachs veteran Steven Mnuchin as Treasury secretary. No departure from the establishment there, then.
• Combative conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of the populist right-wing website Breitbart News, as his chief strategist.
• Straight-talking retired army veteran Lt Gen Michael Flynn, as national security adviser. During the spring, Flynn supported Trump’s proposed ban on all Muslims entering the US.
• Alabama Sen Jeff Sessions, as attorney general. Such is Sessions’ history of making racist remarks and showing contempt for civil and voting rights that even his nomination as a federal judge by Ronald Reagan was rejected by the Senate.
• Betsy DeVos, as education secretary. DeVos is a big advocate of ‘school choice’ – in which scholarships and tax incentives are offered to fund places in non-state schools. Among the many to have attacked the nomination was National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia in The Guardian, who claimed she pushes a “corporate agenda to privatise, de-professionalise and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education”.
• South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, as US ambassador to the United Nations. Earlier in the campaign, Haley was considered a possible secretary of state, but lost her chance when she criticised Trump for his failure to condemn the white supremacy movement.
• Tom Price, an advocate of privatising Medicare and ‘one-man death panel for Obamacare’, as head of Health & Human Services chief.
• Billionaire, turnaround specialist and ‘king of bankruptcy’ Wilbur Ross, as commerce secretary.
• Elaine Chao, as Trump’s transportation secretary. Despite serving as Labor Department head under George W Bush, Chao was no doubt gratified to be labelled Trump’s ‘most normal choice yet’ by vox.com.

The big position that Trump is still to announce is his nominee for State Department. However, his cordial restaurant meeting with Mitt Romney on Tuesday evening might suggest that the 2012 Republican presidential candidate has the edge over his two main competitors, Sen Bob Corker and the retired, ‘scandal-scarred’ General David Petraeus.

All in all, this looks a robust team, keen to roll back the state once again and give yet more scope to the private sector.

The problem is that, though big government may not be the answer, this most neoliberal of strategies doesn’t often work. Instead, rather than spreading the prosperity around, it has a track-record of increasing inequalities of wealth and power – and this at a time when many Americans are already on or close to the breadline.

Indeed, in its Global Wealth Report 2015, Credit Suisse said that holding just ten dollars in nett wealth would make you richer than a quarter of all Americans. Could Trump be set to attack the safety net that many rely on just to get by? It sounds like we’ll be revisiting the trickle-down effect all over again.

Reassuringly, Trump has said he won’t let Americans “die in the streets” due to poverty, homelessness or hunger. But the very real danger is surely that, beyond the far-right, many of those who voted for him could soon be much worse off than they are now.

If that comes to pass, then many Americans will feel bitterly betrayed. And, given his influence beyond US shores, they’re unlikely to be alone.

Hilary Benn’s speech was a victory of style over substance

 

Shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn made what was, by widespread consent, an extremely powerful speech in support of bombing ISIS targets in Syria to conclude the marathon Commons debate on Wednesday.

According to most parliamentarians, it was one of the great speeches of recent times, and Benn junior has been lauded by commentators across the political spectrum – particularly in the right-wing press – for his stirring efforts.

And his evocation of Labour’s internationalist traditions in support of military action against ISIS “fascism” has marked him out in some quarters as the party’s leader in waiting.

But for all his craft, the drama and his obvious betrayal of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Hilary Benn’s speech failed to answer some pretty basic questions.

Benn failed to give any idea as to what would happen after the bombing stops. He didn’t give us a clue as to what the bombing would actually achieve, other than it would hider the free movement of ISIS fighters.

He didn’t acknowledge any misjudgement in supporting Tony Blair’s ill-conceived war in Iraq – a war that created the conditions under which ISIS would eventually thrive.

If ever there is an illustration of how the British political establishment can be so mesmerised by style over substance, then this is surely it.

Of course, the right-wing press lapped it up, particularly Dan Hodges in The Daily Terrorist – sorry, Telegraph – who described Benn as not only a real Labour leader, but as a future prime minister.

Such hyperbole is par for the course: The Terrorist will take any and every opportunity to undermine Corbyn. But even some on the Left praised it as a powerful, impassioned and intellectually rigorous performance akin to Robin Cook’s speech in opposition to the Iraq war in 2003.

However, by alluding to Britain’s comparatively distant victory over fascism in Europe, instead of its recent role in the Middle East, Benn seems to be attempting to claim ownership of Labour’s democratic traditions for himself and joined the media’s routine rubbishing of Corbyn.

In doing so, the shadow foreign secretary seems to have turned his back on the political inheritance from his own father. Tony Benn believed that those who fail to understand their mistakes are fated to repeat them. It seems his son is at risk of doing just that.

In voting with David Cameron, Benn junior ignored the failure of post-war reconstruction and state-building in Iraq that created the power vacuum into which ISIS poured. Put in those terms, his talk of humanitarianism and international solidarity seems horribly naïve. It’s a backstory that damns his analysis.

No one disagrees that ISIS is a murderous blot on the face of humanity, but Hilary Benn avoided any honest reflection on how it came into being and the wider agenda of Western involvement in the Middle East.

It can easily be argued, for instance, that ISIS is a product of Western policy – and by Western, I primarily mean the US and its closest allies, such as the UK. Hilary Benn has a track record of supporting that policy from the moment he supported Blair’s war in Iraq.

Only occasionally does the West take military action where it has no underlying strategic interest. But the very strong suspicion is that the US has not bombed ISIS effectively over the last year because it was happy for an insurgency to destroy the Assad regime.

So while the West does not condone Daesh’s enforcement of sex slavery, the dumping of older, less sexually-interesting women in mass graves, or the savage murder of anyone that isn’t as mad as it is, the terror and disruption ISIS spread across Syria seemed to serve a ‘useful’ purpose.

Even after it was obvious that ISIS had taken American munitions and military equipment that its forces had left behind in Iraq, the US kept funding, training and arming the anti-Assed Free Syrian Army. But most of the money and weaponry the US has supplied it over the last year have ended up in ISIS’ hands, along with the fighters who defected.

So what is the West’s underlying purpose here? Well, the cynics among us might put it this way: which Middle Eastern nation has the largest unexploited oilfield? Answer: Iraq. Which Middle Eastern nation has the second-largest unexploited oilfield? Answer: Syria. What links these two nations, other than a common border? Answer: the West has destabilised both.

Assad is a brutal dictator – no one disputes that. But the West tends to ignore the grotesque human rights abuses of its strategic partners, a point that Robin Cook made in his resignation speech. Saudi Arabia and Israel are given a relatively free ride. In fact, Hilary Benn recently criticised the BDS movement against Israel’s theft and genocide. So much for internationalism and the fight against fascism.

So, it would appear that Hilary Benn is happy for Britain to wage yet another ill-defined, probably unending, morally-dubious war that has at its root the Western need for oil, a topic that his father was often very exercised about, and protecting the petrodollar. Western oil interests – and especially US oil interests – have long wanted a pliant Syrian government, but Assad wouldn’t play ball. Those interests are keen on reopening and constructing new oil pipelines across Syria to the Mediterranean coast. A regime change agenda has helped create the conditions that allowed ISIS to thrive, and now the citizens of Raqqa are paying the price.

ISIS must be destroyed, but Britain’s involvement as currently defined by David Cameron is unlikely to achieve this. Those who voted against the government on Wednesday are right to argue that beating ISIS must be a truly international effort that includes significant numbers on the ground from its neighbours if it is to work and be seen to be legitimate.

Until that happens, those like Hilary Benn who plant their flag on the moral high ground should be treated with suspicion. If human rights was really an issue worth fighting for, the West would be challenging the Saudis over their bombing of Yemen and their beheading of dissidents. Instead, Britain has entered another murky theatre dominated by oil and a set of warring factions that the West has helped to create. Don’t let Hilary Benn’s fine words about democratic values and internationalism persuade you otherwise.

Thanet’s mercy missionaries find Calais refugees clinging to shreds of hope

“I don’t want to stay here because they’re horrible people. They’re horrible to us. They try to make our lives difficult – as if it’s not difficult enough. You English, you’re so kind. Are all people like that in England?”

Such was the recurring message that confronted Paula Erol at the makeshift refugee camp known as The Jungle, outside Calais, earlier this month (November).

She described a camp increasingly cut off from the outside world and patrolled by riot police “dressed like Transformers”. They block access and mount dispersal operations with the apparent intention of reducing its 6,000-strong population by two thirds.

The refugees’ view of the UK couldn’t contrast more starkly. While the French police fire stun grenades, rubber bullets and water canon to contain them, what relatively little comfort they do enjoy is largely thanks to British donors.

“That’s the impression they get,” said Paula. “Someone said to me: ‘Loads of English people come over to help us and they’re really kind.’ I didn’t want to burst his bubble. ‘The people are, yes,’ I said. ‘But the politics, no.’”

Paula, from Broadstairs, was one of a collection of Thanet people who have launched appeals for food, clothing, sleeping bags, shoes and other goods over the last few months and crossed the Channel to distribute them among The Jungle’s inhabitants.

She was joined on the trip earlier this month (November) by fellow Broadstairs residents Joyce Edling and Aram Rawf, who himself escaped war-torn Iraq with thousands of other Kurdish refugees.

What they saw was a mass of people from a variety of unstable and/or impoverished, mainly African and Middle Eastern nations who now face increasing political hostility, in addition to institutional isolation, in France.

Their actions belie the fact that just a few short months ago, Thanet looked likely to become Nigel Farage’s political bridgehead for UKIP’s anti-immigration, anti-EU message.

In a journal about her visit, Joyce wrote: “The Jungle is exactly how I imagined it would be: mainly scruffy tents and tarpaulins inhabited by desperate people, trying to make the best of their situation. The rain did nothing to enhance the appearance. Indeed, we were walking ankle-deep through mud.”

Last Friday’s ISIS attack on Paris has darkened the political climate further, raising the likelihood of a backlash against the refugees, even though it was such cold-blooded brutality that drove many of them to Calais in the first place.

“It’s moving how they get on and have a life,” Paula said. “People sitting around cooking together, making coffee together, children playing. Obviously, they’re not happy there but what choice do they have?

“The general atmosphere on the camp is stoic and friendly. I said ‘morning’ to everybody I passed, whether they looked or smiled at me or not, and I always got a good response. People always responded with a smile.”

Until recently, it was possible to rock up in a van to help out and deliver donations directly to The Jungle. However, in recent months, the French authorities have restricted access to only volunteers issued with passes, and even this limited contact with the outside world is under threat.

So now, the constant stream of donations are delivered to ‘The Warehouse’, a short distance away. Its location is not widely publicised to avoid far-right groups from targeting it – both the English Defence League and Pegida have been active in Calais.

With the exception of Médecins Sans Frontières and Doctors of the World, there are no recognised non-governmental organisations (NGOs) managing the site. Instead, Paula, Joyce and Rawf arranged access with a non-profit solidarity organisation working on the ground. They were emailed details of where and when to turn up, as well as the times of the briefings at which volunteers can choose which of the day’s projects to be involved in.

But despite the lack of NGOs, what system there is seems to function well.

Aram speaks Kurdish, Arabic and Farsi, and spent his time working as an interpreter. He was so busy that, once there, his compatriots barely saw him during their stay. Meanwhile, Paula and Joyce spent their first day helping to sort donations in The Warehouse, before they participated in cleaning and other projects on the camp itself.

“We unpacked the car and shared a cup of coffee with some friendly helpers,” wrote Joyce in a journal about her experiences there. “About 20 volunteers were sorting through a colossal mountain of clothes in cartons and bin-liners. The task looked unsurmountable.

“The variety of articles was astonishing. How could people imagine that DVDs, stiletto heels and electric toothbrushes could be useful for refugees living at best in tents and at worst in the open air?

“Having said that, there was a simply amazing amount of fantastic clothing, a lot of which seemed quite new or hardly ever worn.”

The following day, Joyce and Paula reported to The Warehouse for the 9am briefing. “We stood round in a circle [for] a sort of yoga session to loosen us up,” wrote Joyce. “We are really impressed by the organisation here. No one seems to be in charge and there is no real rota as such, but somehow it all works.”

They joined around 40 volunteers for yet more sorting, among them Jeff, who had travelled to Calais all the way from San Francisco. Then it was off to help the various communities clean their area of the camp, and leave gloves, bin bags, sanitation gel and litter pickers so they can manage it themselves.

“This was our first introduction to the camp’s inhabitants,” wrote Joyce. “At one point, I heard a shout ‘Hellooooo!’ I turned round and there was such a sweet little Kurdish girl, about four years old, who then launched into helping us with great gusto. Another girl about the same age joined in. The innocence of children! They thought it was a fun game.”

Joyce said she found the work “back-breaking, even though it doesn’t involve any hard labour at all”. And Paula definitely agreed: “We were so busy that we were totally and utterly knackered by the end of each day.”

Shoes are in great demand on the camp. Many of The Jungle’s inhabitants struggle around in flip-flops or walk the unforgiving, muddy terrain with their heels sticking out of shoes that are far too small.

Said Paula: “On the Friday morning, we sorted in The Warehouse before doing the clean-up. We were advised to take a shopping list if we saw anything that people needed, and to liaise with the communities to see if there was anything they wanted us to bring back.

“We came back with a shopping list of mainly shoes – they’re desperately in need of shoes. The next day, we sorted for another hour or two and made up our shopping list and went back to give them out. We went to visit the women’s centre, because we had a big box of Lego to donate, but Saturday was ‘beauty day’. I’m a masseur, so I got nabbed and spent the rest of the day giving massages to about 14 women. That was exhausting.

“On the Sunday, we took as many shoes as we could carry into the camp, but they were quickly gone. We were surrounded by people needing shoes. We wrote down people’s names and their shoe sizes and went back to The Warehouse, did some sorting and arranged to give them out at the water tap [on the camp].

“But, of course, people saw us carrying the bags through the camp, so they followed us. When we reached the tap, not everyone had turned up, so there were maybe eight pairs of shoes left. Lots of the people who had followed us wanted shoes, but how do you decide who gets a pair?

“You look around at this sea of faces and say ‘what size are you?’ They say ‘42’ and, as you get them out, there’s eight hands all trying to grab them.

“At one point, two guys grabbed one pair tied together with their laces and they were struggling. One of them was really angry.

“At the end of it, there were plenty of people who didn’t get. At one point I said: ‘Guys, guys, if it was possible, I’d open a shoe shop for you all.’ That kind of diffused the atmosphere. Some people laughed and tempers calmed, and some people came up and said ‘you’re really kind, thank you very much’.

“It was horrible to see people reduced to scuffling over something as simple as a pair of shoes.”

Both Paula and Joyce stress that the shoe incident was rather out of keeping with the rest of their time there, during which the desire for basic human dignity was clearly in evidence.

Said Paula: “As we were coming away from the shoe debacle, a couple of guys approached Joyce and said ‘I’ve got a €500 note, can you change it for me?’ She tried to give him a €250 note, but he just refused it. He was adamant he didn’t want it. He kept saying: ‘My friend, I just want change, please.’

“I’m sure a lot of British people think they’re criminals and crooks that would stab you in the back as soon as look at you, but even when someone tried to give him €250, he did not accept it.

“There might have been some cultural thing about taking money from a woman, but I think that was just stunningly admirable. He might not have been poor – after all, many of them have sold businesses and houses, and have left good jobs, cars and the rest of it.”

As if to emphasise the point, Paula and Joyce met Abdul Rahman, a linguist and university professor in his previous, more settled life. He helped them carry the bags of shoes, and insisted on being called by his first and last name.

“That really impressed me because, in the midst of all this crap, his loss of status – his loss of everything – he was holding onto his dignity,” said Paula.

“When Joyce and I were leaving the camp, he caught up with us again and thanked us for the shoes and for doing the distribution. I said to him: ‘Do you try to get on the lorries, Abdul Rahman?’ He said yes. And, I asked, if you get to Dover, what next? He said: ‘I don’t know.’”

The UK’s tightening border controls and the calls for reprisals against ISIS from the West makes this a particularly testing time for the refugees. Trying to maintain any hope of finding a better life – currently defined as getting inside or clinging to lorries and trains long enough to cross the Channel – is proving difficult.

The French police are becoming ever more punitive, not only when they catch a refugee near the ferry port or the Channel Tunnel, but also in The Jungle itself.

Joyce described how the police caught a teenage boy near the tunnel. They confiscated his shoes, so he had to walk bare-footed back to the camp. Next time, the officers told him, they would also take his trousers.

Encouraged by the sense that Britons are a generous breed, the bulk of the refugees still doggedly cling to the hope for a lucky break – if only because there appears to be no alternative.

Said Paula: “They’re very aware that it’s getting harder to get into the UK. Some Sudanese guys we met were upbeat, but they were saying ‘yes, I want to get to the UK, but I don’t think it’s going to happen’.”

Joyce also wrote: “I never cease to be astonished at the strength of the human spirit. So many people I met are doing so much to make the most of their miserable existence in the squalor. It is moving beyond belief.

“Along with this experience is my pride at all the help and support that so many from the UK are giving – from ordinary people to churches, schools, ex-army officers and charity organisations. The enormous mountains of clothes and food, the many vans which turn up loaded every day from all parts of the UK, the commitment of so many wonderful volunteers. It made me (uncharacteristically) proud to be British.

“One of the few French people there said he was ashamed at the paucity of helpers and donations from France. No wonder the refugees tell me – often with tears in their eyes – that they love the English.”

• This article first appeared on Thanet Watch on November 19, 2015.

Current priorities

List created and updated weekly by L’Auberge + Help Calais

1. Pre-made identical food parcels. For further information, please see this list.
2. Volunteers – especially if you can stay longer than a day or two. Please complete the form for new volunteers or returning volunteers.
3. Blankets
4. Warm, four seasons sleeping bags
5. Tents (preferably four-man or larger)

• Tarpaulins

• Sleeping mats
• Firewood
• Fire extinguishers (smaller, kitchen size – powder or foam)
• Wind up or solar torches and lanterns – nothing that requires an electricity supply or batteries

• Men’s waterproof walking boots with high ankle and trainers – especially sizes 42 and 43
• Women’s boots or shoes up to size 39. No heels
• Warm, waterproof winter jackets
• Socks
• Underwear – men’s, women’s and children’s
• Goody bags of hats, gloves and scarves
• Men’s jogging bottoms or jeans, especially black, from sizes 28 to 36
• Flat pack cardboard boxes (size 60x40x32.5 or 90x60x48)
• Builders
• Building materials, including wood, nails, rope and tools

If you are taking any building materials or have building skills you’d like to put to good use, please email: calaisbuild@gmail.com.

• Pallets

 

How to organise donated goods

Try to concentrate on one or two items as a large amount of one item is much quicker and easier to distribute than a mixed load of many items.

It is very important that goods are clean, pre-sorted and clearly labelled – for instance, a box of walking boots size 44, a bag of men’s jeans size 32 or pre-packaged food parcels.

If you want to be a real star, then the best box sizes are 60x40x32.5 or 90x60x48

 

How to donate

To deliver aid to The Warehouse and/or to arrange distribution in the camp with the support of experienced volunteers, please complete this form.

If you have any questions, please email them to calaisdonations@gmail.com.

Picture: Refugees with placards stating their name and where they want to end up. That was used by CalAid, the non-profit organisation.

Marching won’t beat austerity, but a debt rebellion might

So Saturday’s anti-austerity marches in London and Glasgow were just the latest of a continuing campaign. Labour leadership hopeful Jeremy Corbyn and comedian-come-revolutionary Russell Brand addressed the assembled hordes in the capital.

Theirs is a just cause. Austerity not only disproportionately hurts the poor, but it also very rarely works during a recession. What’s more, although austerity does not always inhibit economic growth, the benefits of growth are overwhelmingly concentrated at the top where income is unequally distributed. Income inequality has been steadily growing in the UK since the mid-1980s, and so the poor and middle classes are likely to feel the pain but few of the rewards.

But their challenge is that traditional forms of protest have lost their effectiveness. As the third, 2m-strong anti-Iraq war demonstration made painfully clear in 2003, marching might foster a satisfying sense of solidarity and shared experience, but in today’s world it is little more than an expression of futile rage. Marching changes nothing.

However, by sticking to their template for public protest, the anti-austerity movement is overlooking some very potent sources of power, a point clearly demonstrated by Russell Brand’s appearance on the Keiser Report in April. The show’s host asked Brand to identify the “chink in the armour” that could be used to rein in the financial elite and its austerity agenda. His answer? “Individual direct action, collective direct action, co-operation, collectivisation and … your [Max Keiser’s] alternate currency model.” Brand might be right on all counts, but such words will hardly have the neoliberals quaking in their boots.

Like many of those opposed to the spiteful thrust of government policy, Brand is strong on outrage but relatively light on leveraging change. Few may have sympathies with the bankers, or a political establishment set on penalising the poor, but the narrative is incomplete.

Part of the challenge is that we are ruled by a political system that simply doesn’t care. Our leaders don’t care that austerity pushes the most vulnerable among us towards hunger and destitution, or that it gradually dispossesses the middle classes. They don’t care, even less admit, that austerity returned Britain to recession just as its post-crash recovery was gathering steam. And, in their heart of hearts, does anyone really believe that Saturday’s demonstrations would ever inspire a revelatory transformation for the likes of George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith? No, neither do I.

Essentially, our political and economic system is psychopathic. Britain is becoming more unequal, and elites are less likely to empathise with their victims as they become more remote. Hence change is not achievable by debate alone. Psychopathic power makes no concession without a genuine threat. It’s maximising leverage that will bring change, not halting the traffic and shouting slogans, no matter how justifiable or coherent the message.

On this front, opponents to austerity and the whole neoliberal enterprise have considerably more power than they think. There are chinks in the armour, and debt is among the most potent. Debt might not seem a particularly promising line of attack at first glance, but once the rationale is understood, the system’s vulnerability becomes clear. Indeed, the sheer scope of its power might scare even the most ardent campaigners.

By retreating from such basic issues of fairness and social control as debt, the political left has ceded much of its relevance. An honest and uncompromising debate on what debt is, where it comes from and the way our financial system has used it as a weapon of control has the potential to widen the anti-austerity campaign well beyond the usual suspects.

Put simply, this is the threat: if you owe your bank £1,000, you have a problem. Owe them £100bn and the bank has a problem. An organised debt strike is a potentially powerful form of leverage because it highlights our passive consent to an elite’s parasitic extraction of wealth. Debt cancellation also has surprisingly strong moral, historical and economic foundations. Thanks to the misleading narratives around debt, most people see it as a weapon of exclusive benefit to the banks.

Debt dominates the British economy. Taken together, government, corporate and household debts come to 252% of GDP. But while ballooning government debt is constantly highlighted as one of our great existential threats, household debt – which has more than quadrupled since the early 1990s to reach £1,390bn in 2013 – is the silently-ticking time-bomb.

Debt is central to so many people’s hopes and fears. More than any other economic concept, it commands an almost primeval moral and emotional power that encompasses everything from the desire for independence and status, to fears about missing out, of dependancy and a sense of obligation to the lender. Property reinforces that power: for many, keeping their place on the housing ladder at all costs is such an obsession that it is a form of self-imposed slavery. Yet the central power of debt is derived from commonly-held falsehoods about what money is and where it comes from.

The notes and coins in our pockets, for instance, give the impression that money is a public commodity controlled by the state for everyone’s benefit. But notes and coins only make up 3% of the money in circulation. Commercial banks create the rest out of thin air by tapping numbers into a computer when they issue loans.

The implications of this are far-reaching. To start with, the commercial banks don’t create the interest on their loans, so if the total interest bill exceeds the stock of public money in circulation – which it will if the rate exceeds 3.1% – then the banks are staking a claim on money that doesn’t exist. Interest payments are spread over time, but the money still has to be found, and this is a major driver of economic growth – which is environmentally ruinous as well as of unequal benefit – and the reliance on yet more debt. As debt-money is simply deleted when a loan is repaid, our economy is completely debt dependant.

For the banks, deriving riches from money they don’t even have is a fantastic business model that allows them to extract £192m in interest from the UK economy every single day. But for the wider economy, this is little more than an economic rent, and one that largely transfers wealth and jobs from the periphery to the centre, London’s gilded circle. This is because only 8% of the banks’ loan portfolio is invested in productive assets, thus starving the wider economy of the means to renew itself. It’s a system that helps to explain why many people depend on welfare benefits, and why austerity is so unfair.

International comparisons suggest that the larger and more overbearing a financial system, the lower a nation’s productivity and prosperity will be. Given that his is the party of capital, it should be no surprise that George Osborne has barely begun to talk about Britain’s productivity gap, let alone address how the financial sector impedes UK economic performance.

But inequality is not static. Ever-increasing inequality is a dynamic process that’s central to a debt-money system such as ours because, by definition, every pound of one person’s net wealth is matched by a pound of net debt held elsewhere. In this way, the concentration of wealth among a small elite is directly bought by distributing an equivalent debt among everyone else, a disparity continually widened by interest payments.

History shows us that unequal concentrations of wealth and debt are not static in a commodity-based money system that used gold or silver coins, for instance. Debt tends to rise beyond an economy’s ability to pay whatever money system is in place. However, debt-money systems accelerate the process. In other words, unless we wipe the slate clean from time to time, or can create an explosive period of economic growth, the misery of debt deflation and dependancy becomes inevitable.

Of course, it should be expected that any debt jubilee campaign will be immediately branded as immoral and irresponsible and likely to collapse the entire financial system. History tells a rather different story. In antiquity, not only did the debt jubilees boost economies to everyone’s benefit, but were instrumental in helping many societies survive for as long as they did.

We don’t, however, have to look that far back to see the power of debt forgiveness. Post-war Germany enjoyed an ‘economic miracle’ as a direct result of the 1953 London Debt Agreement, in which half its liabilities – including personal debts – were cancelled. Interestingly, that deal reflected an explicit acceptance that excessive debts are a debilitating economic burden for which debtors alone cannot be held responsible. Indeed, its a central tenet of capitalism that interest rates reflect the lender’s risks. Blaming only the debtor is penal and unfair. As debt cancellation also shows, it is also economically counter-productive.

But a close inspection of today’s debts highlights an even more explosive issue. Some argue that today’s household debt and credit agreements might not even satisfy the laws of contract and, specifically, the rules of consideration. To be accepted as a consideration, the stake of each party must be real, tangible and have value. Also, the commitments of both the promisor (the borrower) and the promisee (the lender) must not be ambiguous or fraudulent. The mere fact that the two reach an agreement does not itself constitute a legally-enforceable contract.

In the case Currie v Misa in 1875, consideration was defined as “some right, interest, profit or benefit accruing to one party, or some forbearance, detriment, loss or responsibility given, suffered or undertaken by the other”. In other words, the promisee accepts a forbearance in providing the promisor with a benefit or right. But if the banks aren’t actually lending anything, what exactly is their detriment or forbearance? What consideration is it that the banks are bringing to the party? Meanwhile, why do we still refer to the banks ‘lenders’ at all?

Then there’s the question of how most banks use their customers’ promises to pay. Rather than merely enjoy the interest, the banks have commonly pooled these ‘debt assets’ into securities and sell them as bonds, though the government’s Funding for Lending scheme has at least temporarily suppressed this market. However, it still raises two main issues: one concerning the bank-customer relationship and the other a potentially even greater, global economic time-bomb.

On the first, while customers might continue making mortgage repayments to their high street bank, it’s possible their repayments are actually ending up with a financial institution thousands of miles away. In fact, some banks have even taken for themselves a power of attorney so they can, on their customers’ behalf, ‘execute’ the processes necessary to securitise their debts. References to this process can sometimes be found buried away in their mortgage terms and conditions. Presumably, that’s the banks’ nod to transparency.

In addition to the lack of transparency, repackaged debt is a crucial element of the market in derivatives. The fraudulent sale by US banks of derivatives as triple-A rated securities in the sub-prime mortgage scandal was, if you remember, the spark for the 2007 credit crunch. Just three short months ago, financial regulators around the world were concerned about the apparent risks of another credit crunch hitting the bond market.

The instability of the financial markets, even without a threatened debt strike, shows just how much leverage debtors potentially have. And challenging debt is a surprisingly easy process. Under consumer credit legislation, borrowers can write to their bank to ascertain their debts’ legal status – such as who owns their promissory note. Even if their loans and mortgages are legally rock solid, simply having the conversation has the potential to unmask the deceit that gives debt its moral power.

And herein lies the real point: on a philosophical level, the economic system is simply a means by which we deliver on our promises and obligations to each other. What is notable today is that the promises and obligations increasingly go one way: from the poor and middle classes to those at the top – the elite. And all the indications are that, in today’s age of low-growth, this process will continue.

The state is one of the few means of distributing wealth downwards, though it is already more than counterbalanced by extraction of wealth upwards. Reducing the state is simply a way for the elite to deny its obligations to those below it. Many on the left might see this as a uniquely capitalist problem, but it’s actually the result of an elite’s overwhelming power.

Osborne has been described as the most political chancellor for generations, and with good reason: economics is obviously not his top priority. Instead, his agenda is about the removal and/or subordination of democratic alternatives to corporate power; to remove the state as provider and protector and deliver the British nation’s complete dependancy on corporate interests. Austerity is his primary means of achieving this. TTIP, the secretly-negotiated free-trade agreement that would shift sovereignty from nation states to multinationals, is this process writ large.

Debt is central to all these equations. While it can oil the economic wheels, debt also becomes a form of slavery, wealth extraction and social control. Indeed, it’s the rationale for the whole austerity drive; in which an elite enforces its claims on wider society regardless of the costs and misery it causes, while denying as far as possibly any countervailing claims.

Money, wealth and status are merely social constructions, and their distribution are becoming ever more focused on a small group of people, both in Britain and globally. Yet those at the top could not enjoying their envious position without the labour, spending power and consent of those below it. It may not like the fact, but the elite is in many ways as dependant on us as we are on it.

By failing to understand and explain our interconnectedness, the entire political system has remained silence on increasingly thorny issues, such as debt. By changing this, the left can re-establish its relevance. What’s more, seizing the debt nettle now may not only help to redefine the balance of power, but can help to lift an unnecessary burden of misery from millions of people. Debt is a major political opportunity for the left. Whether they’ll have the courage to take it is another matter entirely.

Peter Batt is the author of Psychopath Economics, a four-part book on belief systems, the logic of economic power and consumption, and their impact on the rise and fall of societies. Part 1 – The Bull and The Bewildered Herd – has been published via Smashwords.