Bubblehammerblog

It seems that on the eve of the release of the new U2 Limited album, No Line on the Horizon, some of the band's protesting Irish compatriots are saying that Bono and his business partners are robbing the world's poor.

When the Irish government revised its generous tax exemption scheme for artists, U2 Ltd shifted its assets to a finance company in Holland. Considerable sums are involved, the U2 Ltd wage bill alone for 2007 was £21 million, and the new album is expected to sell millions worldwide.

Aside from depriving the exchequer of a small and struggling nation of millions in revenue, the campaign group Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI), says that the U2 Ltd decision will also adversely effect the Irish government overseas aid budget.

A DDCI spokesperson said: We wanted to raise our concern that while Bono has championed the cause of fighting poverty and injustice in the impoverished world, the fact is that his band has moved part of its business to a tax shelter in the Netherlands...Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least $160 million (£142.5m) every year. This is money urgently required to bring people out of poverty.


I've heard some people say that Bono is a squit who has become a byword for inflated self-importance. I've never met him, but I can't say I like the cut of his jib. I've listened to U2 Ltd albums and seen a couple of shows, and these certainly are pompous and self-important, replete with bombast and empty posturings, and in the end bereft of any import. But that's just my view.

Ponder for a moment the vacuity of the title of the new album. I haven't heard it, but Jim Carroll, the Irish Times blogger has had a preview, this is what he says.

[It's a]blustery, burpy, over-cooked melodrama...an album to fill stadiums, newspapers, radio stations, web sites, quarterly target spreadsheets, bank balances, pension funds and investment opportunities in the tech sector.

For another account of Bono's Irish scandal see Where the Cheats Have No Shame by Harry Browne.

And you might also profitably read Irish troublemaker Eamonn McCann's piece Make Bono Pay Tax in the current Counterpunch.

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During the celebrated Gdansk shipyard dispute, the negotiations between the Solidarnosc union delegates and the shipyard management were relayed by loudspeaker from the meeting room to the crowds of shipyard workers surrounding the building. This is what's known as transparency and democracy in action. There are no good reasons why all such discussions should not be conducted in this way.

Now listen to the weasle Jack Straw, explaining his refusal to publish the minutes of ministerial discussions about the 2003 Iraq invasion.

{1}Confidentiality serves to promote thorough decision-making.

{2}There is a balance to be struck between openess and maintaining aspects of our structure of democratic government.

{3}Disclosure of the Cabinet minutes in this case jeopardises that space for thought and debate at precisely the point where it has its greatest utility.

Read them again.

Straw already sounds Prime Ministerial.

Bearing in mind that the deliberations concerned were about undertaking an act of aggression, involving widespread death and destruction, which was opposed by the majority of British and World opinion, in what way did secrecy serve thorough decision-making?

There was nothing thorough about the cabinet's Iraq war deliberations. Clearly, Blair already had the date for the invasion from the Cheney/Bush cabal, and it was going to go ahead - 'legal' or otherwise. There was no point in any discussions.

What's needed, since no Public Inquiry worth shite will ever be forthcoming from New Labour or the Tories, is an independent war crimes commission along the lines of the Sartre - Russell hearings after the Vietnam war. It would be a start.

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HERE is what Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident released from Guantanamo 2007, said about Binyam Mohamed, another British resident himself released after six years of detention and torture in Gitmo earlier this week. He is speaking about Binyam Mohamed's concern for justice,


He is so British -- I mean so British! The way he stands, the way he talks, his painstaking use of logic. He's such a gentleman. And he is knowledgeable and he stands up for his rights in a really British way. Like with S.O.P. This is something the guards have. It is called Standard Operating Procedure -- S.O.P. And the funny thing about this Standard Operating Procedure is that it changes every day. Every day you have new Standard Operating Procedure. And Binyam, he draws attention to this and insists on his entitlement to be treated the same way as the Standard Operating Procedure dictated the day before. And they hate him for this. But he's just being British.

Touching that Bisher al-Rawi should associate the British with standing up for justice and human rights, particularly given his own and Binyam's experience. I fear the perception is more a matter of style than substance. The British ruling class has been lying and plundering with a deferential smile for centuries. I watched an interview with my friend Harold Pinter last night, where he described how charming 'these people' could be at dinner parties, or with their families and friends. Then in their working lives they would be involved in the most brutal and apalling mayhem. What he was interested in, Pinter said, was observing them when they were alone. He tried to imagine Henry Kissinger sitting alone in a room on a wooden stool.

With me it's Blair. The Pipsqueak Bombadier. Here is a trully British monster. I try to imagine him standing before a war crimes commission. He's an ignorant and vaid man, who I'll concede was led up the garden path by far more devious minds, so I would be disappointed to see him shot. I submit to the forthcoming commission that Blair be exiled and confined to Sark, in perpetuity. There he might reflect on his bloody hands, and perhaps compare himself with Napoleon.

An excellent resource for the story of the British residents abandoned by our government in Guantanamo, and other sites of America's Secret Gulag, can be found at the site of British historian and journalist Andy Worthington

Rather than being proud of being British, I'm wary of so much as carrying a British passport. With some technicalities smoothed out I could get and Irish one, though my main hopes lie in Scottish or Welsh independance. There are at present only distant aspirations for Cornwall and the Isle of Man. I'll be first in the queue at the Scottish Consulate in Manchester for the new dark blue saltaire emblazoned passport, though I suspect I might be trampled in the stampede.

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This week sees the opening of The Convention on Modern Liberty which starts on Saturday in London, with other sessions following in cities all over the country. The convention will present an attempt to catalogue the liberties the public has given away, in a list compiled by the University College Law School Human Rights Programme. I'll be following the deliberations.

It has come to something when a liberal journalist like Timothy Garton Ash, writing in the Guardian on Thursday on the continuing erosion of Civil Liberties ends his column, To be honest, I still cannot quite believe this is happening in my country. It feels like a bad dream. But it is happening, and we must stop it. Now

Dream indeed. It's necessary to step back for a moment to see what has been happening here. By small but significant increments, three Labour governments, each one a more distant parody of what was once called the Labour Movement than the last, have escorted us by the oxter sleepwalking towards a surviellance state. No less than three thousand new crimes have been put on the statute books. It's precisely because there has been no significant public opposition to these steps, coupled with a reluctance to see them as incremental, that the state has been able to get away with it. Given the chance, ruling elites will always use available technologies to increase the reach of their control. When people cease to value their liberties, they can easily be persuaded to give them up.

Two recent, though perhaps forgotten, incidents come to mind.

Last summer the West Country police took it upon themselves to ban a rock concert by the band Babyshambles, on the ludicrous grounds that the performers might deliberately seek to 'wind up' the audience, leading to a situation where Public Order offences might be committed. The band's frontman, Pete Docherty, is a notable tabloid buffoon and scapegoat, and many hack hours have been deployed by the gutter press in inciting mass disapproval of the man's personal life. The police of course took this into consideration, knowing that they could do as they liked so far as Docherty and his mates were concerned. Predictably, there was no liberal outrage at the police walking all over civil liberties on such a flimsy pretext. Now the police have a precedent to ban any gathering they care to on similar grounds. State 1, People 0.

Then earlier in the year a brave soul took it into his head to walk from Lands End to John 'oGroats bollock naked. For aesthetic reasons he'd resolved to stay clear of cities and towns, and ramble only along the least travelled paths. Every now and then there was press and television coverage showing the man being arrested and bundled into a police van covered with a blanket.

I developed a great admiration for this sturdy and deeply tanned feller. He refused to wear clothes in the police cells, and as soon as the police let him go he resolutely took up his walking staff and went on his way. He simply wanted to walk the country bollock naked.

My ancestor, William Blake, had a similar disregard for clothing, and would have celebrated the naked rambler as a token of Liberty. During the Civil War years more radical brothers and sisters went naked into churches to expose the Hypocrisy of Religion. So you see we have a tradition of bollock naked dissent going back hundreds of years. In 2009 we no longer cherish it.

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Wikileaks has helpfully just made available 6,780 semi-secret reports - representing the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) over the past ten years. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency, the sober part of its brain if you like, and has a budget of over $100m a year - leading Wikileaks to claim it's offering a billion dollars' worth of free downloads. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated within the last 12 months.

The release of the documents comes, reluctantly it seems, after years of pressure on Congress, and on the CRS itself, from supporters of open government, including the Federation of American Scientists. As the Wikileaks editorial points out,

Free from meaningful public oversight of its work, the CRS, as "Congress's brain", is able to influence Congressional outcomes, even when its reports contain errors. Arguably, its institutional power over congress is second only to the parties themselves. Public oversight would reduce its ability to exercise that influence without criticism. That is why it opposes such oversight, and that is why such oversight must be established immediately.

A list of reports available can be seenHERE

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I was in Waitrose this afternoon, which for visitors who dont know, is a posh supermarket, catering for people who don't have to consider the cost when they buy their groceries. I was standing before a shelf, marvelling at the range overpriced superfluities on offer. I had in my hand a tub of Cadbury's Cocoa, priced at £1.75, and was considering the meaning of the fact that just a few days ago I'd bought an identical tub from my friend's corner shop for just £1.09. Just then I heard a raised voice beside me.

'Alright pal, hand over that bottle you've got under yer coat, or we'll av yer locked up.'

I turned to see an elderly gent, shock of unruly white hair, face the worse for drink, clutching two bottles of Vladivar vodka. He was being confronted by a small, stocky man and a smaller plump woman, both had their backs to me.

'I've never ed owt like it', slurred the old feller in his defence, bringing the Vladiver bottles closer to him.

It was clear to me in an instant that the accusers were not store detectives but members of the public, and that they were man and wife.

'Come on pal', chipped the little man, rolling his shoulders, 'Let's av that bottle, or am fetchin coppers.' His missis wagged her head.

A jolt of hatred for the man's voice pulsed through me, and I peeked at a bottle of Duchy Originals Lemon and Elderflower Cordial with a view to smashing the little twat over the head with it. I pictured the old drunk making a triumphant escape with his three bottles of vodka.

I struggle with these impulses. They have Anti Social Behavior Orders for people like me.

Soon the senior citizen was surrounded by Waitrose staff in neat green uniforms, who escorted him out of the building. The little couple followed the procession, clearly pleased with their intervention.

'Ave never ed owt like it', I heard him say convincingly as they relieved him of the bottles. I watched as he went meekly out of the automatic doors.

Half a dozen street drinkers, waiting for him patiently on the subway benches over the road, would see him come back empty handed and feel the bitter sting of defeat.

Another setback for the working class.

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I've mentioned before that I've had difficulty understanding the current phase of Capitalism. I learned little to help me from the few Economics lectures and seminars I attended at university, since, cruelly, they had been scheduled at the beginning of the working week, when I was suffering from drink and drugs hangovers. This is something I've regretted, but never put right in any systematic way.

So when I've found myself asking fundamental questions about how late Capitalism works I've only been able to come up with impressionistic answers. For example, the basic question of the source of society's wealth was formally straightforward. The Northern English city where I live used to be a major centre of heavy industry, surrounded by coal mining areas. When I was a child the whole city was blackened by the fumes from factory chimneys. Whole swathes of the city had nothing but factories and workshops. The forge hammers thumped night and day. My first job, after leaving school at 15 years old, was inevitably in a steelworks. I recall catching the bus to work for the 6am shift. It was packed with smog damp workers, smelling of cutting oil and Swarfega, hacking their lungs up and pulling on Park Drive cigarettes. (One morning, halfway to my stop, I got off the bus, having decided then and there to join the upcoming social revolution I hoped might spread from sundrenched California.) The steelworks and mines are mostly all gone now, only a few small manufacturing concerns remain.

Yet the city is incomparably wealthier. The city centre gleams with stainless steel and glass. People don't catch the bus to their jobs in factories, but drive new cars to offices and shops. New office blocks and apartment buildings appear overnight. The city skyline has bristled with cranes for the past two decades. Young people no longer start working at 15, they go to university. No one listens to half-baked talk of social revolutions.

What has troubled me is this: if nothing much seems to be produced anymore, where does this fabulous wealth come from? In a phrase I dimly remember from one of my old Economics textbooks, what makes Sammy run?

The current economic crisis has brought the question into sharper focus, and provided a partial answer. Credit. Like most people, I couldn't fail to be aware of this, but I never developed a proper grasp of how the magic worked. Clearly, the past couple of decades have witnessed an unprecedented transformation, with living standards and prosperity, for the overwhelming majority, growing as never before. It takes an effort to steady yourself so as to look back some thirty years and see the world as it was then. It was another country, populated by an entirely different people.

The political elites have proclaimed the final triumph of Capitalism, heralding a future of continual economic growth and increasing prosperity, and most people had good reason to believe it. In old-fashioned terms, what used to be called the working class, which once included a range of people from teachers and nurses to skilled industrial workers and labourers - the majority of the population - has been dissolved into a huge class of prosperous property owners, that sits in the social scale below the hyper-rich and the owners of capital. An underclass of the disadvantaged, the feckless or unlucky has emerged, but comprising perhaps no more than 10% of the population.

For myself, the routine act of taking out bin bags full of rubbish has often prompted the question, is this sustainable? This question I sometimes fleetingly ask myself arises not solely from environmental concerns. Relative to most people I have a modest income, and not much access to credit, yet the contents of the binliners I throw out bear witness to an extraordinary level of consumption. This is not a trivial observation. My eldest daughter is a nurse, and her partner has an adequately remunerative job that involves wearing a tie, yet the bin provided by the local council for the waste produced by their consumption regularly overflows, with many more binliners having to be piled up beside it. Aside from the mortgage on their house, they owe the banks about £50,000 for credit extended to buy consumer goods. This is an average family, and the situation is not by any means extraordinary. Is this sustainable?

Rummaging through the contents of these binliners reveals that most of the consumer goods come ultimately from abroad: peelings from exotic fruits and vegetables, wine bottles, empty couscous and sundried tomato boxes, grounds from Monsooned Malabar coffee, a slightly stained shirt and a pair of socks with a hole in them, spent batteries and disposable razorblades...Yours will tell the same story. From the point of a curmudgeon, most of what we consume is obviously junk, to others it's fun, part of the pervasive living to shop culture, though from an environmental perspective it's ludicrous. Environmental concerns seem to be just another lifestyle choice available to the prosperous, but does importing all this stuff make sustainable economic sense?

The government assures us that the current economic difficulties will not last long. These problems have been brought about by certain regulatory oversights, and are not systemic. There will be a few hardships as firms go out of business and people lose their jobs, but in a year or so, once credit begins to circulate again after the various stimulus packages kick in, we can get back to more spending and growth. More of the same, but better regulated. Of course, the government is bound to radiate optimism, because for markets to function effectively confidence is everything. They may well be right.

I've deliberately underplayed the environmental aspect of the issue, but my personal intuitions lead me to the suspicion that the scale of consumption we're being urged to continue indefinitely are not environmentally sustainable, and will eventually bring disaster. The fact is though that no government or mainstream political party would ever dare lay hands on the notions of permanent growth and expanding consumption, because to do so would undermine the whole basis of the economy. After decades of spectacular growth, and rising prosperity for most of the population, there is no constituency willing to listen to a message of austerity in any form.

But what if the current crisis in the economy is terminal? It would not resemble the classical Marxist model of the demise of Capitalism, which may be why what remains of the Left in Western countries seems to have been taken aback by it.

As I've mentioned, and you will have gathered, my grasp of Economics as it currently functions is impressionistic. For what seems to me a more focused analysis, and one certainly not coming from the Left, I recommend a visit to Howitends.co.uk It's not clear who's behind this site, but it offers a clearly presented and plausible account of the current crisis, and, as might be gathered from the title, one that considers it indeed systemic, and probably terminal.

It's worth reading the whole thing, but if that can't be done, then at least have a look at the Executive Summary, and The Future.

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