The Rusty Wire Service

Speaking Truth to Power

2012-02-22T21:53:00.001Z

Marie Colvin

“Journalists covering combat shoulder great responsibilitiesand face difficult choices. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price.”

When war correspondent Marie Colvin made these remarks; addressingan audience at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London back in November, 2010,she was speaking as the seasoned veteran of global conflict.
Since losing herleft eye to shrapnel from a Sri Lankan army hand grenade in 2001, her black eyepatch bore stark testimony to the courage of her convictions.
It may have lent her a swashbuckling demeanour but it's clear she questioned constantly her motives and judgment in pursuit of the news: "We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?" she asked of her listeners in St Bride's, as they remembered and paid tribute to the courage of their fallen journalistic comrades.

On 22 February 2012 in the Syrian city of Homs, Marie Colvindied as she had lived, shining the light of truth into the kind of dark cornersthat most of us don’t even visit in our worst nightmares. On that day alone, at least 80 people died in the ancient Syrian city at the hands of their country's own armed forces.

It is not my place towrite a detailed obituary; there are others better equipped than I for such anonerous task. I write only as a humble reporter,mourning the passing of a great and peerless practitioner of my trade.

Colvin, and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed duringshelling by Syrian forces loyal to increasingly beleaguered President Assad. Accordingto The Telegraph, Colvin, working for the Sunday Times, was the only journalist from a British newspaper inHoms.

RemiOchlik

The makeshift media centre, where Colvin and other foreigncorrespondents had been sheltering, was in the city’s Baba Amr district whichhas been the focus of repeated shelling since the besieging of the city inearly February.

The day before (Tuesday 21 February), Syrian citizen journalistRami al-Sayed was also killed in Homs. His fearless video footage of theongoing popular uprising has been used by networks all over the world.

At least two other members of the international press were alsowounded in the attack according to reports from local activists. One was namedas British freelance photographer Paul Conroy, who worked with Ms Colvin, andEdith Bouvier of the French newspaper, Le Figaro.

Since the besieging of Homs on 04 February, there has beengrowing concern among journalists in the city that Assad’s forces are locking onto their satellite phone signals and then targeting the buildings that source the signals.

This suspicion is corroborated by Abu Abdu al-Homsi, a spokesmanfor the Syrian Revolutionary Council, an opposition group, in Homs, whichmaintains that phone lines into the city had been cut by the Syrian Army whowere also bombing any buildings where they detected mobile phone signals.

Colvin didn’t pull her punches in Syria any more than she hadin East Timor or Sri Lanka or Kabul or any other cauldron of conflict that washer ‘shop-floor’. In Homs she made no bones about the fact that the Assad’stroops are committing crimes against humanity: “the Syrian army is simplyshelling a city of cold, starving civilians,” she said.

Among her last stories was one filed for the BBC, and it is typical of her work; dispassionate,accurate reportage, yet brimming with empathy and compassion for the innocent victimsof conflict.

At a time when the integrity of the journalist’s trade hasbeen sullied by dishonesty, criminality and corruption; when venal, banal celebrityand prurience are judged to be reason enough to risk the hard-won and hardfought for reputation of the fourth estate, Colvin’s example shines like abeacon.

Rami al-Sayed

Marie Colvin, Remi Ochlik and Rami al-Sayed, remind us whatit really means to be a reporter; what it means to stand up, to speak truth topower, whatever the cost.

And let’s not forget that while we mourn the passingof a true heroine of our time, the people of Syria continue to sufferdreadfully. I never met Marie Colvin but I’m pretty damn sure that rather thaneulogising her, she’d want us not to lose sight of the suffering of the innocents.

The last word however goes to Colvin herself, again speaking from the spiritual home of printing and journalism, St Bride'sChurch just off Fleet Street in The City:

“In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and Twitters, we areon constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially thesame – someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get thatinformation without going to places where people are being shot at, and othersare shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity tobelieve that enough people be they government, military or the man on thestreet, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or theTV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.”

Marie Colvin, born January 12 1956, died February 22 2012

This article also appears in Sabotage Times

ACTA: Journalism under threat?

2012-02-21T19:56:00.003Z

As the EU rushes to pass a law allowinggovernment searches of smartphones and laptops for copyrighted items, protestsare breaking out across Europe.

Protesters are worried about the passing ofa law to prevent data sharing couched in terms so broad it could put anyone whoshares a chicken soup recipe in jail.

In summary, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) creates a newinternational organization, run by the

and copyright holdingcorporations, to demand trials for anyone anywhere in the world believed to besharing corporate-owned information.

Signatory governments can use taxpayers’money to create departments that scrutinize the online activity of individualsand small businesses through ISPs, catch them at borders and make them paythousands.

Existinginternational IP law (TRIPS), passed in 1994, led to few convictions of ISPsallowing piracy as it was designed to be flexible, allowing for individualcountry laws. Varying definitions of rapidly evolving online activity madeenforcement patchy from country to country. (Wikipedia: TRIPS)

The more extensive ACTA, written by UScongressional members with film industry campaign funding (such as Senator Howard Berman),was passed by the UScongress in 2007.

Over a five year period, US legislators authoringthe international version of the treaty negotiated with Japan, the European Commission, and Switzerland.

They consulted megabucks US media industries including pharmaceuticals,software and movie industry associations in the US, such as Motion PictureAssociation of America. (Knowledge Ecology International: 2009).

President George W. Bush’s administrationpushed it in an unalterable form onto trade partner nations in the attempt tomake it enforceable worldwide.

Hoodwinkingthe public

The authors’ intent to mislead the publicabout the nature of the agreement is evident in their calling it “Anti-Counterfeiting”.

The dictionary definition of‘counterfeiting’ is selling a fake version as if it were the real thing,usually with the intention to deceive.

Not only does the treaty not refer solelyto organizations deceptively selling fakes, but in the main it targets the freesharing of copies, containing clauses like ‘the pirate bay killer clause’.

The treaty doesn’t even mention currencyfraud like most other counterfeit-targeting agreements.

As late as 2009, members of press,government, civil liberties, internet and consumer advocacy groups issuedstandard legal requests to European, Australian, and US governments to find outwhat was in the treaty, and received curt denials from their respectivegovernments.

The UK’sDepartment for Innovation and Skills denied a Freedom of Information Request by British researcher Peter Brett in 2009, saying it was for the public’s own goodthat it didn’t know the names of officials debating the treaty or its contents, so that itcould not prevent it from passing.

“[…]We consider that there is greater public interest [in nondisclosure] as we believe that disclosure at this stage of the negotiationswould be likely to prejudice the outcome.”

The negotiating parties finally releasedthe full text in April, 2010, two years after it was leaked by Wikileaks,leading some to suggest lawmakers intended to keep it a secret so the publiccould not intelligently protest the line items.

After the EC passed the treaty on January26, 2012, EC Commissioner for Trade Karl De Gucht urged members of the EuropeanParliament’s Committee on International Trade to ignore emails received fromthe public during ratification.

“This is not thetime to jump precipitously to a conclusion simply on the basis of the number ofemails or received in response to organized attacks to websites, such as yourown, notwithstanding the amount of media attention such action attracts,” saidDe Gucht.

Media blackout

Media attention to the issue is relativelyrecent in the EU, and this is not solely attributable to the lack of primarydocuments.

A spate of articles showed up in UK papers atthe beginning in February 2012, but this was after the treaty was a done dealfor 22 EU countries.

Considering publishers have vested interestsin winning back their profits from non-profit sites, library sites and blogs,the lack of media coverage is no surprise.

Perhaps this is why the British newspaper The Guardian published just one articlementioning “Anti-CounterfeitingTrade Agreement”, in all of 2011 apart from in aninterview with Julian Assange.

It had an average of about two articles per year on the topic during the threeprevious years when public debate would have been effective. TheTimes’ website had even less.

The Guardian Media Group’s association, theEuropean Publishers' Council, published this statement in support of ACTA:

"Failure to ratify ACTA would alsojeopardise the future of secure copyright protection at EU level just at themoment when the European Commission is about to review the copyright directive.”

On the website of the well-known US newspaper,the New York Times, the phrase “Anti-CounterfeitingTrade Agreement” has only two hits during this period.

The Media’s attention to ACTA has thus farfocused on its prevention of production of generic HIV-inhibiting drugs incountries where HIV is rampant, although this is a continuation of TRIPSdebates.

It has recently expanded coverage of protestsby ‘youths’ wearing ‘grinning,moustachioed Guy Fawkes masks that have become a symbol of the hacker group Anonymous’. (The Guardian, 2012)

ACTA’s impact on the media itself hasn't warranted the same scrutiny.

Creatingan online corporatocracy

If copyrighted text enforcement is rolledout across the internet, the average American could face $4.5bn of liabilityper year for crimes such as sending emails with a reply function. (InfringementNation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap, 2011)

This will inevitably impact on whatjournalists write online, especially on journalists who rely on non-profitinformation sources such as blogging to connect with non-corporate voices.

Wikilieaks, a non-profit site publishingsecret government and corporate documents exposing misconduct for use asjournalistic source material, says its existence threatened: “[the treaty] isdesigned to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized informationexchange on the internet.”

“This clause would also negatively affecttransparency and primary source journalism sites such as Wikileaks.”

If non-profit sites, bloggers, journalists, and mainstream publications are notonly deprived of primary texts owned by corporations, but are afraid of usingthem because their owners have the systems to enforce copyrights, then they maybe forced to rely more heavily on corporate press releases. Received informationwould also be harder to verify or corroborate.

Eliminating unpaid use of patented trademarks,images, video, sound and text would also have wide-ranging deterrent effects inthe sphere of the fine arts.

Artists who have, since the 1950s, usedtrademarks in art such as Richard Hamilton, AndyWarhol, Banksy and Tracey Emin, or used collages of copyrighted video, image,and sound, to reflect on our corporatocracy, would similarly face moreprosecutions.

In 2002, Joshua Kaufman and Marcia Auberger wrote that corporations had begun preventingartists from exhibiting trademarked work with Cease and Desist Orders.

The ordersrequired corporations to substantiate, however flimsily, the legal claim thatthe exhibition-going public, in buying art, was being deceived into thinking itwas buying the real thing, or that it saw artists as representing the corporations.

Thisdeterred some artists, who wound up being too scared to show up in court and defendthemselves.

At theleast, ACTA would effectively prevent such artists from displaying work online.

As for the recordlabels, ACTA won’t be able to stop internet distribution of pirated music, saysSaul Klein, a venture capitalist with Index Ventures.

"It'sputting a finger in the dyke. It won't change the macro trend, which is thatthere's an abundance of information. Copyright owners need to find new ways togenerate income from their product,” says Klein.

“The fact is, themusic industry is in rude health - more people than ever before are going toconcerts, making it, listening to it. It's the labels that are screwed. Theartists and managers are making money. The labels aren't.”

Improvingthe US’swaning international pull

The treaty specifically targets thetransfer of information to ‘developing’ economies, such as industrial patentsfor cars and electronics that have played a part in their rapid levels ofeconomic growth.

Lobbying from associations like theFederation of German Industries (BDI) seeks to use ACTA to prevent industrialdesign theft and competition by such countries.

Leaders in BRIC nations have recognized thecolonialist hi-jinks of “keeping the rich rich and the poor poor” and respondedaccordingly.

The treaty’s supporters took it to the Hokkaido G8 summit in 2008.G8 countries said they supported it but refused to adopt it, saying the G8 wasnot the appropriate international organisation.

G8 member and emerging economy Russia did not participate in theACTA meetings. (Intellectual PropertyWatch 2008)

Jordan

and United Arab Emirates, once members of the group ofcountries party to ACTA, dropped out of debates in 2009.

Former ACTA signatory Mexico withdrewin 2010.

In the present-day EU ratification, some ofthe strongest opposition is coming from countries with emerging economies: Poland was thefirst country refusing to sign it, followed by a slew of other Central EasternEuropean countries.

Nevertheless, the proposal specifies a planto force such nations to adopt the legal regime. (Wikileaks, 2008)

In the plan, ACTA’s text is locked andcountries are invited to sign the pact, but this invitation will be more like acommand coming from trade partners it can’t survive without, says non-proftgroup IP Justice.

There’s noguarantee that this will return profits to rich countries in economicrecession: Blocking piracy could mean people the world-over have only less accessto pirated goods and technology, instead of buying more.

In the study Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, socialscientist Joe Karaganis found workers developingcountries such as Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexicoand

Bolivia

,simply cannot afford to pay for media on their salaries.

Under TRIPS IPlaw, developing countries were allowed extra timeto implement the applicable changes to their national laws, in two tiers oftransition based upon their level development, and with allowances forextensions. (Wikibooks, 2011)

However, ACTA willunleash the pro-corporate dogs for seizure of patented products and vaccines atports, regardless of a country’s development level.

Like tradeembargoes, this scenario will negatively impact the lives of the millions ofpeople in developing countries for whom “progress is plagiarism”.

Hair of the Dogma: Why Atheists are Dangerous Fundamentalists

2012-02-19T14:13:00.000Z

I’m always suspicious of anyone who professes an absolutephilosophy.

If you tell me that God exists with absolute certainty thenI’m afraid I have to question your dogma. But on the other hand, if you tell meyou believe in the existence of a benign higher power, I respect your right tobelieve in such, particularly if it gives you hope and optimism.

By the same token, if you sit there and tell me that it is amatter of absolute fact that God (whoever she might be) doesn’t exist, then frankly,you are every bit as much of a donkey as any Alabama Creationist or hatred-incitingImam.

Usually, our secular bredrin who unyieldingly profess atheism,rely on science to show us how absurd it is to believe in the existence of asupreme deity.

In their efforts to ridicule faith which they usually conflate with organised religion, theseadvocates of the scientific approach usually pick soft targets such as the aforementionedcreationists or reliquaries such as the Turin Shroud which can be forensically discountedby dinosaur fossils and carbon dating.

However, I was recently struck by how poorly science servesus in terms of offering a grand unifying theory of life, the universe andeverything (or even simple empirical certainty for that matter).

While I don’t propose to offer a treatise on Relativity andquantum mechanics (a task for which I would be sorely ill-equipped), I can’thelp wondering nevertheless about the absurdity of some of the ideas we arebeing asked to contemplate in the name of physics.

Let’s look at the idiosyncratic improbability of singularitiesfor openers; why is the concept of infinite mass occupying precisely no space whatsoever at thecentre of a black hole any less implausible than believing in the existence of aman who looked like Che Guevara turning water into wine 2000 years ago?

It would appear that the Physics community has been havingsomething of a crisis for quite some time now and it’s down to the fact that –try as they might – physicists cannot reconcile the world of the quantum (iethe infinitesimally tiny) with the realm of the gargantuan which is governed bythe gravity and relativity. The rules governingboth seem to break down when presented with black holes and as a consequence,science came up with the idea of singularities.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, a singularity makes about asmuch sense as counting the angels dancing on the head of a pin but still thisis taken as a preferable explanation to that of the more mystically inclinedamong us.

The high-profile exponents of atheism, the Christopher Hitchensand Richard Dawkins of this world, are every bit as dogmatic in defence oftheir belief system (which generally turns out to be dispassionate and ruthlessly Darwinian) as any Catholic theologian.

As a rhetorical emotive sop to their followers, these peoplenever tire of reminding us that many of the world’s ills have been propagated byorganised religion. This is true; child abuse and its cover-up in the RomanChurch, fundamentalist Protestant intolerance and many wars and crusades, rightup to the present day, have their roots in the application and misapplicationof principles derived from organised religion.

While these things are undoubtedly evil (in the old schoolsense of the word), the dominant secular philosophy of our age – capitalism –is responsible for much greater and more enduring inequality and suffering. Thefreedoms professed by Dawkins and Hitchens have been used to create a globalinequity that leaves a tiny minority controlling the vast majority of wealth.

Taking for a moment the devil’s advocate approach: organisedreligion comes with a lot of baggage but I can’t believe for a second that thesecular philosophy of capital would offer mass education in the way that it wasgiven by Christianity. Would capitalism have nurtured knowledge for the massesin the same way as Islam or Judaism if the cost benefit analysis didn’t pan out?

When Christopher Hitchens joined the choir invisible, howquickly his liberal mourners forgot his support for the wars in Iraq andAfghanistan. His secular 'canonisation' was a hypocritical volte face that theHitler Youth Pope would be proud of.

But to conclude, I would return to the start and adopt arational and secular approach. The existence of God has never been a matter ofscience, it has always been a matter of faith. Faith is not rational, norshould it be. It is not governed by the laws of physics (which are themselves apparentlylargely a matter of faith).

‘God’ is not an empirical entity; therefore trying todisprove her existence shows such a fundamental lack of understanding of thenature of deity that it is, of itself, a dangerous and ignorant business oftendriven more by dogma, personal enmity and disillusionment than by rationalphilosophical inquiry.

‘I don’t know what God is but I know it doesn’t exist...’ It’shardly the enlightened way forward is it?

You’ll Always Find Us Out to Lunch

2012-02-16T19:20:00.000Z

Westminster

I wish I could muster a greater sense of opprobrium andindignation at the news that we, the put-upon tax-payers of this disunitedkingdom, are subsidising the meals of our elected representatives to the tuneof £5.8m per annum.

I don’t even give a weeping fig for the £370,000 bill forhiring trees for Portcullis House (or as the Daily Mirror helpfully pointedout: the equivalent of “the salary of 21 soldiers or 18 midwives – or £438,250including VAT”)

The denizens of Westminster Village are riding us like donkeys? It’shardly a ‘hold-the-front-page’ revelationnow is it? Where I come from, there’s an old adage that springs to mind attimes like this; evincing a complete lack of surprise at the bad behaviour of aperson or a class of people: What would you expect from a pig but a grunt?

There are, however, a couple of aspects of this story that dogive some pause for thought at least. On 6 February, notorious Westminsterblogger (and London-Irish trouble-maker) Guido Fawkes posted an article drawingattention to the use of Portcullis House’s members’ restaurant by lobbyist (andcurrent girlfriend of Chris Huhne) Carina Trimingham.

The former Energy Secretary Mr Huhne is currently havingissues of his own, having been under police investigation for more than sevenmonths now. Huhne and his former wifeappeared together in the dock at Westminster Magistrate’s Court on Thursday 16 February,accused of perverting the course of justice. (Both were remanded onunconditional bail and ordered to attend Southwark crown court on 2 March.)

Carina Trimingham

But returning to Huhne’s present paramour Ms Trimingham; GuidoFawkes asks (not without some justification) what “a lobbyist is doing havingunmitigated access to Parliament”? She may have a spouse’s pass but that does littleto allay my fears, particularly when one observes the ease with which sheexploits her privileged position in order to further her career, boasting of her ‘excellent contacts amongst the Liberal Democrats’ in a job application.

This unholy nexus of politicians and lobbyists encouragescynics like me to view the Westminster regime of privilege and back-scratchingas another area (like the Metropolitan Police/News International circle-jerk) wherestandards in public life are blatantly flouted while ostensibly observing therules. Fawkes also helpfully points outthat “after two terms in the House, former MPs are entitled to a pass, meaningthey can get access to the bars and restaurants and continue to live theirsubsidised life.”

It’s the sense of entitlement that is perhaps most odious. I wouldnever begrudge our elected representatives the right to subsidised food anymorethan I would resent it in an NHS canteen; they are after all, public servants. Buthow often do we hear nurses or soldiers moaning that the food they are served,largely at public expense, is “literally uneatable”? The Tory ‘member’ (and Iuse the term advisedly) for Tewkesbury, Laurence Robertson certainly feels that hedeserves better at least (why, I'm not sure).

I don’t know about you but if I’m getting rib-eye steak with béarnaise sauce and hand-cut chips for £7.80, I’m not going to moan about it. When I hear about fat, self-serving clusterfuckscarping on because the catering staff hasn’t arranged their chips in a tower, Ican feel my blood pressure spiralling and I have visions of bitch-slapping the whiningoxygen-thieves in question till my fingers go numb.

It’s also probably worth remembering that our elected representatives, by and large, do nothing more than rubber-stamp legislation that has alreadybeen drawn up by our friends in Brussels. All that really happens in the ‘Motherof Parliaments’ is that European law is translated into English and promulgatedwith minor changes.

In other words, ourelected representatives are, to all intents and purposes, nothing more than provincialbureaucrats. What little latitude there is for deviation from EU Directives, isgenerally applied for the benefit of big business and well-financed pressuregroups in the Westminster lobby.

We may have some idea of how much the subsidising of Westminster's restaurants costs, but the price we pay for this is something elseentirely and it’s called the democratic deficit.

This article also appears in Sabotage Times

Funny old game

2012-02-16T13:31:00.000Z

Barnes and the Banana: we've come
a long way since these days...haven't we?

The so-called beautiful game has been having a torrid oldtime of it over the past few weeks.

The festering sore of racism continues to dog football andthe unedifying behaviour of Liverpool’s Suarez in the recent cup tie withManchester United and the club’s subsequent failure to display anythingapproaching joined up thinking on the matter is bringing into serious disreputeone of the great European club sides.

Liverpool seems happy enough to make an example of bigots onthe terrace but the club seems rather less surefooted when it comes to thecensure of its multi-million pound mary-boys and their unreconstructed views onrace relations. As for Chelsea’s John Terry...

But just in case you thought this was just an issue on theterraces or in the dressing room, the shame of the game’s establishment isfurther evidenced by the paucity of black managers in the Premiership. Blackfootballers are apparently good enough to be demographically over-representedin the playing ranks but it would appear that they lack the ability to read thegame strategically or to man-manage. (Don’t even get me started on the Asian players – that’sright, what Asian players?)

And let’s not forget BBC commentator Alan Hansen’spronouncements on ‘coloured’ players. Jesus H Christ, when did we go back to1970s South African terminology to describe black footballers? And still everySaturday and Sunday, this intellectually challenged fuckwit graces the Match ofthe Day sofa with the same sense of smug entitlement that is almost a trademarkof the BBC.

Rangers fans in their natural habitat

Racism is sadly only one of the fatal structural flaws ofthe game here in the UK. Tottenham Hotspur’s manager (and current favourite forthe poison chalice that is ‘Eng-er-land’ manager) Harry Redknapp has justbeaten the rap on a tax evasion charge associated with his period at Pompey’shelm. (Having covered British ‘justice’ down the years, in the form of theBirmingham Six and the Guildford Four, I have of course every confidence theright decision was reached in this case...)

But it’s not all bad news (at least if you’re a Celtic fanor a member of global financial advisory and investment banking firm, Duff& Phelps). Rangers – who have beendocked 10 points by the Scottish Premier League and currently sit 14 pointsbehind Celtic – are awaiting the verdict of a tax tribunal which could see themowing the taxman as much as £75m.

Earlier this week Paul Clark and David Whitehouse, of Duffand Phelps, said: “We can report we have made very good progress within thefirst 24 hours of being appointed administrators over Rangers Football Club.”

What can it all mean? Will we never again hear the heart-warmingstrains of ‘The Billy Boys’ echoing around the Ibrox? It would surely be a realshame if they were never again to be up to their knees in Fenian blood (asopposed to just being up to their necks in debt). But apparently, "supporters can be reassuredthat Rangers will continue as a football club and we hope to reach a stage assoon as possible where the Club can emerge from administration."

The fallout from Rangers’ demise may yet be far-reaching. Globalmanagement consulting firm AT Kearney are playing Cassandra here. EmmanuelHembert, one its principals posits that "this dramatic development with Rangershighlights the fact that the beautiful game may be on the verge of a systemiccrisis."

Certainly, football in the UK has all the hallmarks of abubble on the point of bursting. The recent January transfer window seems toconfirm this as spending was down and even for the majority of big clubs itseems cash is available in only limited proportion.

"Inthe A.T. Kearney EU Football Sustainability Study conducted in 2010, we warned of the similaritiesbetween football and banking asking whether football was too popular to fail.The financial woes of Rangers seem to confirm they mirror in many ways," saidHembert. "The question is now: isRangers the Lehman Brothers of football?"

When 2000AD was the future

2012-02-05T01:03:00.000Z

It was heartening to read today that veteran sci-fi comicbook 2000AD was celebrating its 35th birthday party at a sold-out SFX Weekenderin Prestatyn.

For a few fleeting seconds, I was right back in the 1970s,watching a TV ad (on a black and white set) for an exciting new comic book. Itcost eight of your Earth pence, came with a free ‘Space Spinner’ and promisedit would be ‘in orbit every Monday’.

Like the sudden warmth of remembrance for a long-forgotten old friend, I had happened on a piece of the future from way back in my past. (Vividmemory as ‘Future Shock’ or perhaps ‘á la recherche de l’avenir perdue’.)

In February 1977 when 2000AD was launched, the year sounded everso modern and far off in the glittering 21^st century. Before 2000AD’s launch, comic books for me had meant Beano,The Beezer, Warlord or Action.

Naturally, I was a member of Desperate Dan PieEaters Club, not to mention being a fully-paid up and Lord PeterFlint-certified Secret Agent in Warlord’s fan club. My only real deviation fromthis diet of World War Two derring do and 1950s schoolboy japery were the veryoccasional Marvel or DC comics brought by relatives returning from America. Inthose pre-Star Wars days, I can promise you that County Mayo was much moreCowboys and Indian than little green men.

But seductive novelty aside, sci-fi also seemed much lessproblematic as a comic book genre. Without getting too political about it, sci-fioffered the perfect escape from the Troubles. The Victor, Warlord, Battle andBullet were all fine and dandy but even as a youngster, I had begun to questionthe ideological disconnect between the clear-cut heroism of the British soldiersin these WWII comics and the contradictory ambivalence and indifference shown to the ones that were beingshot at on the streets and lanes of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland.

Sci-fi offered no such dilemmas or difficult reconciliations.In 2000AD, the flawed present could be reduced to back story for an excitingfuture. In the early strip Flesh for example, the plot revolved aroundTrans-time, a free-booting company sent its operatives back in time to harvestdinosaur meat for a starving dystopian future world, by-passing the presententirely in favour of traffic between a prehistoric past and a dark voraciousfuture.

This comic book seemed to offer a future that was often decisivelysevered from our present by the finality of nuclear Armageddon; anall-pervading preoccupation of the 70s and 80s. That Cold War fixation could alsooffer a more ‘near future’ style of narrative such as the strip Invasion! whichpitted tough London lorry driver turned guerrilla fighter Bill Savage against thinly-veiledSoviet ciphers ‘the Volgans’ in their invasion of the United Kingdom in aputative 1999.

I was hooked from the start but it was a character that madehis debut in the second issue (that’s ‘Prog 2’ to the initiated) who has earneda place in the All Time Pantheon of Comic Heroes.

Judge Dredd, a figure as archetypal as Superman (Nietzsche’sor DC’s), is probably 2000AD’s most identifiable character. He is big enough toshare headline billing with Batman (Judgement on Gotham); he has already beengiven the Hollywood treatment once with Sly Stallone taking the old stony facerole. The Mega-City lawman is now readyonce again for his close up; the latest adaptation – scripted by Alex (28 Days Later) Garland – is pencilled in for release in September of this year.

But as early 2000AD readers, in that first year and a half, wefollowed Dredd through the mean streets of Mega City One as he battled robotrevolts and then, in a fatal fratricidal showdown, he dispatched his own clonedbrother Rico. Then it was off to the moon for a brief posting where he cleanedup Luna-1. But it was the first Cursed Earth story that really saw Dredd growin stature. Those storylines (from Prog 61 – 85) represented the first epiccycle in the Dredd mythos.

Following Dredd’s serialised exploits as his mission ofmercy took on him on a journey across the apocalyptic American wildernessbetween the two Mega Cities was the acme of cliffhanging anticipation; a weekseemed like an eternity to wait between instalments.

I have such vividrecollection of daydreaming and doodling away many an hour between ‘Progs’ speculating earnestly about how Dredd might escapethe clutches of Satanus, the GM T-Rex. Or in that fantastic Death Valley showdown, facedwith General Blood ‘n’Guts and the robotic Legion of the Damned, how would Dreddand his dwindling band of misfit comrades escape certain death in their Alamo-stylelast stand?

If we stray from warm recollection and briefly foray into objectiveartistic assessment; this publication was, in its time, home to some of the UK’stop comic artists and writers. Pat Mills, the man who started it all, wasalready a veteran of Battle and Action before he created 2000AD. (For anin-depth interview with Mills see the Sabotage Times.).

Alan Moore also earned a living at 2000AD before going on topen the masterpieces Watchmen and V for Vendetta which, it could be argued, transcendgenre and have earned the right to be considered classics however you shapeyour canon of literature . Other notable alumni of IPC Tower include Neil (Sandman)Gaiman, Grant (Arkham Asylum) Morrison and Brian Bolland (widely considered to bethe definitive Dredd artist).

One of the most satisfying aspects of reading 2000AD was thewhole shared universe idea. It was possible over time to link Flesh with JudgeDredd through the dinosaur Satanus; the futuristic games of games of Aeroballand Inferno could also be connected to Dreddthrough the Harlem Heroes’ John ‘Giant’ Clay. These and many other links and spin-offs gave the2000AD multi-verse an immensely satisfying depth of dimension. And let’s notforget that the venerable editor Tharg was never afraid to take a chance on along-shot.

Funnily enough, one of my early 2000AD favourites isn’treally a sci-fi strip. The Fiends of the Eastern Front was actually a Second WorldWar vampire story. The unlikely protagonist was a Wehrmacht soldier whodiscovered that some of his Romanian allies were vampires. Later in the war, afterRomania changed sides, the German soldier was the only one who knew theirsecret.

With its constant knowing nods to popular culture, Isometimes feel that 2000AD’s imagined future gave my ilk the rudiments of a futuristfolklore; a hard-edged mythology forged in a post-punk crucible and liberated from the obligations of historical narrative.

I’m happy to report that my top memories from 1977 were readingmy first copy of 2000AD, followed by my First Holy Communion.

"When the soul of a man is born in this country there arenets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality,language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."

James Joyce.

Sláinte 2000AD

Quo Vadis Britannia?

2012-01-31T21:27:00.000Z

In this, her Diamond Jubilee year presiding over ‘The Firm’,Mrs Windsor is faced with the prospect of her beloved Scotland actively starting to question its role in a future United Kingdom.

The 700^th anniversary of the Bruce’s victory atBannockburn beckons in 2014 and the leader of the Scottish National Party AlexSalmond rightly recognises this as a fitting time to conduct a referendum onhis country’s future.

The UK’s flaccid excuse for a Prime Minister David Cameron respondedby telling Salmond that it is for Westminster to determine whether or not areferendum is held on the issue and that furthermore, it is for Westminster todecide what form of wording any such referendum would take.

Naturally, this butters no parsnips with Salmond whocheerfully points out that that the majority reached by the SNP at the lastelection is all the mandate he needs to go to the Scottish people.

Arguments about the economics of Scottish independence arenot conclusive. The English would have us believe that that they have beendutifully paying for Scotland and supporting this deadbeat nation out of someof noble devotion to the 1707 Act of Union. But that’s not really true is it?According to the New Statesman; “The SNP argues that, if you take into accountoil revenues, Scotland is a net contributor to the UK economy. There isprecedent for a state or region keeping its oil revenues.”

Headline economic figures suggest that Scotland might makeheavy weather of independence. Unemployment in Scotland currently stands at 8.1%;already higher than the UK’s rate of 7.8%. In 2010, according to Halifax, houseprices rose in every part of Britain except Scotland, where they fell by 2.9% comparedto an overall increase of 2.7%.

One of Salmond’s key policies to counter economic stagnationnorth of the border is in the form of lower corporation tax. He has said,"Scotland's government believes very strongly that, with measures such aslow competitive tax, we can match or even exceed" the achievements inIreland. (That would presumably be the achievements of Ireland before we revertedto being euro-basket cases, only made to look good because of class clowns likeGreece.)

The fact that Salmond suggests an independent Scotland wouldstill use Sterling has been seized on by English commentators as evidence ofmuddled thinking on what independence actually means. But to be fair, that isan argument that cuts both ways as the SNP have shown.

Many independent countries’ currencies are either pegged toa stronger currency or they are, like many European nations, part of a commoncurrency. That peculiarly English conflation of currency and sovereigntyprobably offers a very telling insight about the Anglo-saxon perception of their state; it’s all about the money.

Then there is defence. In the event of Scotland getting thedecree nisi, what would happen to the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine base in Faslane? The SNP has said it would want the UK's nuclear weapons removed fromScotland altogether if it broke from the union. The SNP also says anindependent government in Edinburgh would want its own Scottish Defence Force.

The English are, so far, maintaining their characteristicsang froid. It was reported in the defence press today that “the government hasmade no plans for alternative locations for the UK's nuclear deterrentsubmarines should Scotland vote to leave the United Kingdom, defence ministerPeter Luff has said.” The likelihood is an arrangement similar to that enteredinto by the Irish Free State for the so-called Treaty Ports.

The Irish experience of extricating itself from the yoke ofEmpire is one that the Scots Nationalists have watched closely and the lessonsto be learned across that narrow treacherous sound have always been in bothdirections. Since before the days of Edward the Bruce’s arrival in Ireland, thetwo sides of Dalriada have each looked to the other in their struggle forindependence; sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly.

The Irish politicalblog Slugger O’Toole is exercised by the machinations and shenanigans afoot atHolyrood and Irish nationalists (and republicans) have as much of a stake inwhat’s happening over the Sea of Moyle (that’s the North Channel to my Britishbredrin) as their unionist and loyalist counterparts.

Irish Nationalism has been here before and the island hasthe scars to prove it. Ireland has anniversaries of its own forthcoming withthe centenary of the state’s own bloody inception to be commemorated in2016. We’ve already forded thatfirst crucial hurdle of history. We’ve learned to our cost the trajectory of anindependence movement; tracing that parabola from its cultural beginningsthrough to its robust and costly conclusion (a conclusion that has sadly neverproved conclusive).

What the English have never understood about the Irish, theScots or the Welsh is that ultimately, community and culture matter more to us thanmoney or class. Perhaps the most amusing aspect of Scotland’s seeminglyinexorable march towards independence is the pantomime of incomprehension beingdisplayed by the English: "Why oh why," ask our Anglo-Saxon brethren, "do our friendsthe Scots want to leave the UK?...After all we’ve done for them?" I guess if you have to be told, then maybe you don’t deserve to have a United Kingdom in the first place.

Parasites...

2012-01-30T01:43:00.001Z

Apparently, we live in a society beset by a plague ofscroungers.

We’ve all heard about them (or at least read about them in theDaily Hate, excuse me, Mail). We’re regularly told that they’re the real reasonthe Irish and British economies are on their knees. Oh yes, everywhere you turn, there they are; out sky-diving and doing heavy-lifting when they’re supposed to be off on the sick.

Disappointingly, the scroungers who are scamming billions byplaying casino games with people’s pensions are not the ones our media is holdingup to scrutiny; it’s so much easier after all to point the finger further downthe foodchain (apart that is from soft, bald, pink paragon of banking opprobrium Stephen Hester of RBS).

Now, if we could only find a way of generating money for ourfriends in the private sector while at the same time making an example of theseworkshy fraudsters (or cutting the safety net out from under an alreadymarginalised section of society; depending on your point of view), then we’dhave a win-win situation.

And that indeed is what we have in caring, sharing Cameron’sBig British Society. A private company called Atos Healthcare – which wasfounded as a subsidiary of public sector private parasite Atos Origin in 2007 –has been responsible for throwing sick people off benefits since 2005.

In November 2011, it was awarded a three-year extension onthis contract which is apparently worth £300m. (That’s just what it’s costingthe taxpayer; we don’t what price society will be paying as yet.)

Atos: they'll stamp out
this sort of everyday occurrence

Atos Healthcare is one of those organisations that justdidn’t exist before ‘free market’ fuckwittery started gaining traction in Whitehall.‘Internal markets’, ‘stakeholders’, ‘clients’ and ‘delivery’, we are familiar by now with the banal Birtian jargon.

The upshot of that was the idea that we ought to beoutsourcing and privatising every possible aspect of government. This resultedin numerous aspects of a citizen’s life, hitherto overseen directly by government,now being subcontracted out (often to well-connected friends in the privatesector who’d be advantageously placed to capitalise on such intimateknowledge of policy changes).

One might of course surmise that this whole process reallytook off under Tony Blair’s anodyne New Labour and almost embodies thatproject’s bland corporate ideology of intellectual dishonesty about theefficiency of the markets, but in truth, it’s been around a lot longer thanthat.

Atos Healthcare’s client list includes corporate bodies likeRoyal Mail, The Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions(DWP). Atos (formerly Atos Origin), the parent company is quoted on the Parisstock exchange and it is presided over by a predominately French board ofdirectors.

Atos Healthcare here in the UK is presided over by ratherless stellar executives than board members of Carrefour and Reckitt &Colman. It’s also clear from news reports that the ‘canteen culture’ at thisUK-based operation is less than complimentary of its ‘customers’ (corporatedouble-speak for the people whose lives they are seeking to ruin/empower).

The Commons Select Committee on Work and Pensions is already familiar with the Atos modus operandi.

In an article byKathleen Hall on 17 August 2011 in Computer Weekly, it was reported that Atosemployees were to be investigated over Facebook remarks about disabilitybenefit applicants who were being referred to as ‘parasitic wankers’.

But then coupled with this clearly unsympathetic corporateculture, Atos Healthcare’s employees have shown themselves to be adept atgetting our learned friends involved when members of the public speak outagainst the hardship caused by their operatives’ conduct.

Also in August 2011, it was reported in the Morning Starthat Atos Healthcare was “threatening legal action against a disabled man whoset up a website collecting people's experiences of ‘fit for work’ assessments.”

While I never set out to collect the experiences of people’sfit for work assessments, I have nevertheless come across a case study among myown personal friends which I could only describe as shocking and I feltcompelled to publish it as an illustration of what is wrong with the systemthat we are being asked to condone.

Fred (not his real name) is a former British soldier, havingserved with the Royal Green Jackets from 1988 to 1990. Upon leaving the army, Fred retrained as a plastererand he lived with his girlfriend, raising a son in Southeast London. Fred, in his day,was a top quality plasterer; the type of quality English tradesman that isincreasingly hard to find (because bosses in this country would rather hirecheap now than invest in the future through apprenticeships).

Everything was going well for Fred until he started tocomplain of chronic back pain. This was initially ignored by his GP buteventually Fred did get referred and was subsequently rushed into hospital tohave a 11 inch tumour removed from the base of his spine.

So serious were the ramifications of this operation thatFred was informed by his doctors that he would neverwalk again, even if the removal of the tumour was a complete success. The likelihoodof more intimate problems such as prolonged impotence and/or incontinence were onlyby the bye for Fred.

Being the kind of fighter that he is, Fred saw this as a challengeand he was determined to walk post-op. And he worked very hard to that endfollowing the spinal operation; confounding the expectations of his carers.

Fred’s tenacity post op caused some problems for him; hebegan to suffer from trophic ulcers on his feet but he remained resolute in hisattempts to push forward his recovery from the life-changing surgery.

When he attended an Atos assessment last year, he arrived atthe examination centre on crutches and wearing an adult nappy (he was indeedincontinent and not much up for sexual activity either at that point).

In spite of ample and clear evidence of infirmity anddespite the existence of incontrovertible documentary evidence of both theseriousness of his surgery and the raft of long-term medical issues post-op;Fred was somehow still determined fit to work and therefore referred to his localjob centre to sign on for JSA (Jobseekers Allowance) rather than receive employment support allowance.

Naturally, when Fred started turning up at the Job centre oncrutches, he was promptly informed that he couldn’t be signed on as he was –you guessed it – unfit for work.

During this time, Fred’s health continued to deteriorate. He managed nevertheless to appeal thedecision and I began to make inquiries on Fred's behalf, first contacting the Department ofWork and Pensions (DWP) to ascertain the exact nature of brief that had been given toAtos.

Here is an excerpt ofa request I made to the DWP some weeks ago following a long phone call with oneof their press officers; “I'd really like to get an idea of the methodstatement given by Atos Healthcare in pursuit of its contractual brief. I'dalso love to speak to someone from Atos who might be able to clarify theirpractices and perhaps explain how they reached the decision they did in thecase of the individual I described to you (former serviceman, spinal tumouretc).”

I also wondered whether I might be able “to establish howmany individuals are successful in their appeals of fitness to work decisions.It would also be very helpful if I could get an idea of how much the averageappeal costs.” To date, I have had no response from the DWP to my most cordialand solicitous requests for information.

I have also attempted (with the same amount of success, itmust be admitted), to contact Atos Healthcare. My requests didn’t differsubstantially; I told them it would be “very helpful if I could get an idea ofhow much each assessment costs and then how much the average appeal costs,” seeingas we the taxpayers ultimately foot the bill for this subcontracted work.

I haven’t heard back from either Atos or the DWP and thegreater likelihood is that I will not hear from them. But efforts are beingmade to remedy this situation in the form of a freedom of information request.

In the meantime, Fred was hospitalised as his medicalsupport improved. His welfare payment status was also retored to DLA. Fred isnow in receipt of better care for his condition and he himself is coming toterms with the fact that he will never work again as a plasterer; thelikelihood of retraining or educational opportunities is slim at best and Fredis facing the dawning reality that he may never work again.

For a man who’s dedication to graft was such that he would stillbe trying to work with a plasterer’s hawk in one hand and his colostomy bag inthe other, the truth of a life out of work is not a prospect to be embracedwith much hope but Fred’s a lemonade from lemons kind of bloke and he’ll find away.

Note to DWP: Frank Gallagher
is a fictitious character

Fred’s story could have been very different however. Beforehe was hospitalised, he was quite literally at death’s door. Mostdistressingly, he’d lost a lot of his fighting spirit; that fiery light ofdefiance was flickering and faltering. Atos was able to determine that Fred was fitfor work despite all evidence to the contrary and several weeks elapsed beforethe situation was rectified.

How many people are not as lucky as Fred? How many peopledoes Atos subject to this kind of treatment on a daily basis? Having attended acouple of similar assessments with friends, I remain amazed that the opinion ofsomeone who is not a doctor can trump the assessment of GPs, consultants and araft of healthcare professionals. I also continue to be concerned by the oftenonerous nature of interviews faced by what are, in the vast majority of cases, themost vulnerable members of our society.

For more on this subject check out Tony Greenstein's blog

Forty years on: I gcuimhne Domhnach na Fola. Doire, 30 Eanair 1972

2012-01-29T20:41:00.000Z

John (Jackie) Duddy (17). Shot in the chest in the car park of Rossville flats

Patrick Joseph Doherty (31). Shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety in the forecourt of Rossville flats.

Bernard McGuigan (41). Shot in the back of the head when he went to help Patrick Doherty. He had been waving a white handkerchief at the soldiers to indicate his peaceful intentions.

Hugh Pious Gilmour (17). Shot through his right elbow, the bullet then entering his chest as he ran from the paratroopers on Rossville Street.

Kevin McElhinney (17). Shot from behind while attempting to crawl to safety at the front entrance of the Rossville Flats. Two witnesses stated McElhinney was unarmed.

Michael Gerald Kelly (17). Shot in the stomach while standing near the rubble barricade in front of Rossville Flats.

John Pius Young (17). Shot in the head while standing at the rubble barricade. Two witnesses stated Young was unarmed.

William Noel Nash (19). Shot in the chest near the barricade. Witnesses stated Nash was unarmed and going to the aid of another when killed.

Michael M. McDaid (20). Shot in the face at the barricade as he was walking away from the paratroopers. The trajectory of the bullet indicated he could have been killed by soldiers positioned on the Derry Walls.

James Joseph Wray (22). Wounded then shot again at close range while lying on the ground. Witnesses who were not called to the Widgery Tribunal stated that Wray was calling out to say that he could not move his legs before he was shot the second time.

Gerald Donaghy (17). Shot in the stomach while attempting to run to safety between Glenfada Park and Abbey Park. Donaghy was brought to a nearby house by bystanders where he was examined by a doctor. A later police photograph of Donaghy's corpse showed nail bombs in his pockets.

Gerald (James) McKinney (34). Shot just after Gerald Donaghy. Witnesses stated that McKinney had been running behind Donaghy, and he stopped and held up his arms, shouting "Don't shoot! Don't shoot!", when he saw Donaghy fall. He was then shot in the chest.

William Anthony McKinney (27). Shot from behind as he attempted to aid Gerald McKinney (no relation). He had left cover to try to help Gerald.

John Johnston (59). Shot in the leg and left shoulder on William Street 15 minutes before the rest of the shooting started. Johnston was not on the march, but on his way to visit a friend in Glenfada Park. He died 4½ months later; his death has been attributed to the injuries he received on the day.

‘The content of their character...’

2012-01-15T18:10:00.002Z

Today is the actual birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Hadhe lived, the good doctor would have been 83 years old. Tomorrow (16 January), it will be officially celebrated as a US holiday.

It’s not for me to speculate on what he would make of theworld under POTUS Obama but I’d like to think he’d have continued to be the eloquentand fearless spokesman of the dispossessed that he had been for much of hislife.

Hereis Dr King in his own words, on August 28, 1963 in Washington DC.

There have been many songs written about Dr Martin LutherKing Jr, most notably by Stevie Wonder ('Happy Birthday') and U2’s 'Pride (inthe name of love)', both fine pieces of music in their own right but 'Strings of Life' is the tune that came out top in the Rusty Wire Poll of MLK tunes:

Happy Birthday Dr King.

The Geopolitics of Economic Decline

2012-01-14T12:16:00.002Z

The most worrying corollary of the Great Depression of the20^th century was the dramatic deterioration in global relations occasionedby extreme nationalism. This chauvinism flowed directly from the parlous stateof the world economy in the 1930s and of course led to the outbreak of theSecond World War.

The ‘Great Depressionof the 21^st century’ is only a couple of years old but already, thewarning signs are manifest. Here in theUK, a weak Prime Minister, bowing to pressure from his own party’s right-wingEurosceptic rump, has set the country on a collision course with the EU.

To anyone with half an eye on domestic affairs in Britain,the tortured antics of Westminster’s finest over Europe should come as nosurprise. The Conservative Party has in the past almost destroyed itself overthe European question and will doubtless do so again.

Britain in a GlobalWorld: Options for a New Beginning discusses the relationship between theUK and the EU; the authors Mark Baimbridge, Philip B Whyman and Brian Burkitt investigate how,since 1961, when the UK first applied for membership, the issue of Europe hasbeen at the forefront of political and economic debate.

Thebook aims to challenge that idea that full membership is presumed to be“inevitable”. In place of this presumption the book proposes the argument thatit could be in Britain’s long-term interest to develop global policy options.The book also highlights the perceived benefits of being able to move outsideof the constraints of EU membership policy.

Alternativesto membership of the European Union are mooted, including the nuclear option ofUK withdrawal from the EU. This, the authors maintain, would allow the UK todevelop relationships on a global scale and distance itself from the EU.

Aless drastic option is also presented, in which the UK seeks to create an‘Associated European Area’, this organisation would allow member states to makedistinctive choices about how much integration to a European supranationalcollaboration they wish.

It isargued that this would be advantageous for the UK as it could select themembership and secure access to the internal EU market, in theory creating theworld’s largest and most comprehensive multinational trading area.

Theauthors challenge the orthodoxy that calls for further EU integration arguingthat the differences between the EU and the UK have been underestimated and aremore pronounced than ever before.

Throughoutthis work, UK Sovereignty is consistently highlighted and its maintenance isseen as central to national participation in the European project. The limits of integration are studied particularlyin the context of the onus placed on UK taxpayers by the EU. One aspect of thisargument is that innovative tax returns that could potentially have broadsocial and political benefits are unable to make headway due to the EUconstraints.

Theunderlying message of the book seems to be that the UK would benefit fromtaking a step away from the EU and seek to develop further relationships andeconomic ties with Asia and South America.

So asBritain continues to come to terms with its century-old economic and politicaldecline, another world power’s stock continues to rise almost inexorably. The20^th century may well have been dubbed ‘The American Century’ butthe 21^st almost certainly belongs to the Chinese.

WorldBank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin's new book, Demystifying the Chinese Economy highlights his country's 30 yearsof transition and tracks the economy's remarkable economic development. He showshow the country declined from its zenith prior to the 18th century; how it begin its transformative economicprograms in late 1978, and “how the path from poverty and backwardness toextraordinary growth was forged.”

Theheadline figures certainly paint a picture of a burgeoning tiger economy. China'saverage annual growth rate of GDP exceeded 9% over the 30-year period from1979. At that early stage in the reform process, the People’s Republic wasinward-looking and its trade as a percentage GDP was only 9.5%. Now China isthe world’s largest exporter and the third largest importer, with tradecontributing around 70% of GDP. Over 30 years, more than 600 million peoplewere pulled out of poverty.

In a work that occasionally borders on the hagiographical, Lin asks the question ‘whydidn’t other transition economies perform equally well?’ “China distinguisheditself by adopting a pragmatic, gradual, dual-track approach,” according toLin. “On the one hand, the government continued to provide transitoryprotection to the non-viable firms in the priority sectors, and on the otherhand, it liberalised private enterprises and allowed joint-ventures’ entry tolabour-intensive sectors -- areas in which China had comparative advantage, butwere repressed before. In this way, China achieved stability and dynamic growthsimultaneously.”

Lin also explores China's role in “stabilising and drivingthe world economy, a dynamic of global importance given weakness in the Euro-Zone,a slump in worldwide demand, and high joblessness in advanced countries”.

What both these publications (Baimbridge et al on Europe and Lin on China)share is a sense of the subject country’s destiny being solely in the hands ofthat country’s economic and political elite. In either case, this is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Britain outside the European context is not the greattrading nation of 18^th and 19^th century any more than China’s new role as theworkshop of the world is immune from a fall-off in demand for its produceoccasioned by the decline of the ‘Old World’.

So while the Eurosceptics of Westminster would have usbelieve that the nation’s problems would be solved by our withdrawal from theEU, the reality is rather more prosaic.

By the same token, Lin’s portrayal of China as a‘stabilising influence on the world economy is rather at odds with the highlydestabilising effects of cheap money generated by China’s trade surplus on theworld money markets in the early 21^st century.

This article was commissioned and written for Investment Week

The Catechism of Corporate Cliché (With sincere apologies to Myles na gCopaleen)

2012-01-08T22:29:00.001Z

cat·e·chism/ˈkatəˌkizəm/: Noun: 1. A summary of the principles of Christianreligion in the form of questions and answers, used for the instruction ofChristians.

2. A series of fixedquestions, answers, or precepts used for instruction in other situations.

As a matter of observational truism, which direction should proceedingsideally be going?

Forward

How does one characterise the slight change in a paradigm’s position?

It shifts

When testing the metaphorically vehicular veracity of aproposition, which component must be kicked?

The tyres

As a matter of corporate orthodoxy, where are employeesexhorted to think with regards to the box?

Outside it.

When thinking outside the box, what colour is the sky?

Blue

If expectations are neither great nor met, how are theytreated?

They are managed

When managing the expectations of employees with nopromotional prospects, which items of a dead man’s wardrobe are offered bymanagers in impotent consolation?

His shoes

When agreement has been reached on an issue and successfullymanaged to the meeting agenda, to which level are discussions normally taken?

The next one

Down which putative thoroughfare should the can of collegiate procrastination bekicked?

The road

As an obfuscatory alternative to kicking it down theroad, where else could said can be dispatched?

Into the long grass

When engaging in blue-sky thinking, which direction does onedrill to reach the heart of a concept?

Down

Which carboniferous visage typically characterises theinterface between idea and implementation?

The coal face

What happens to concepts at a meeting when they are overtakenby more attractive ideas?

They are parked

When everyone is on the same page, which piece of churchmusic is in general evidence?

The same hymn sheet

As a matter of observational truism, at what point duringthe day are most arguments summed up?

The end

Groundhog Day or a 'New Paradigm'?

2012-01-06T19:03:00.000Z

‘Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result…’

The great physicist Albert Einstein is credited with the above quotation which is perhaps as apposite a starting point as any for the lemming –like conduct of the markets since first we started chronicling their behaviour. From Dutch tulips to South Sea Bubbles to buying on the margins in the 1920s, the history of the markets is an all too predictable narrative of dramatic crashes, punctuated by periods of fear, greed and denial.

But if we’re looking for market-appropriate aphorisms, perhaps we should also be looking to the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who warned us that if ‘we forget the past then we lose both eyes’.

In their recent publication Economists' Hubris - The Case Of Risk Management, Shahin Shojai, global head of strategic research at Capco and George Feiger, CEO of Contango Caoital Advisors, highlight that ‘madness’ and ‘blindness’ through their analysis of risk management in the run-up to the most recent crash (the one future historians will probably describe as the Great Depression of the 21st Century).

Welfare line: 1930s...

From the outset, the authors highlight the shortcomings of academics and practitioners in the field of risk management and financial engineering. “Financial economists have focused on things that they can ‘quantify’ rather than on things that actually matter”, is one of their more astute observations.

Their prognosis is not encouraging: “the tools that are currently at the disposal of the world's major global financial institutions are not adequate to help them prevent such crisis in the future and that the current structure of these institutions makes it literally impossible to avoid the kind of failures that we have witnessed”.

The authors highlight the CDO (collateralised debt obligations) markets as a key problem, and in particular, assign blame to those that rate them. The problem, as they see it, is that initial fallacy of believing “that complex financial assets, such as CDO's or other scrutinized assets, could be accurately valued using scientific methods.”

Welfare line: 2010s...

The hypothesis of the efficient market is also called into serious question. “The sad fact is that academic finance has failed in its efforts to even provide valuation models that can price simple assets, such as equities, with any degree of accuracy. Expecting these models to perform any better for highly complex instruments is nothing more than wishful thinking”.

So if we cannot reasonably expect an efficient of valuation of assets in the markets, it would appear that there is little hope of efficacious risk management. “For centuries, valuation bubbles funded by excess credit creation have occurred in all economies for which we have decent records. Why do investors not simply recognise these and ‘trade them away,’ as the efficient markets hypothesis would imply? It is not so easy, because while the bubbles are ‘obvious,’ when they will bust is not”.

This is the eternal game of chicken that the markets insist on playing and this is the endlessly replayed scenario that we are subjected as economists and traders tell us mathematical and technological advances have led us to a new paradigm.

Of course the term ‘paradigm shift’ has entered the derisory jargon of the markets by now and its credibility is frankly frayed.

The shortcomings of Value -at-Risk (VaR) is central to their arguments. “The reality of the situation is that VaR, and all other risk management methodologies, are relying on data that is backward looking, is incomplete, and fails to account for the important events that financial institutions really need to look out for”.

But VaR aside, there are major structural issues with the global financial system that make risk management a near impossibility. “Because of the silo structures many firms will find that they have assets that are highly correlated with other but sitting in different silos”. They finally conclude that “during the downturn the firm might find itself significantly more exposed than it thought and not as capitalized as necessary”.

So while Shojai and Feiger lay out the unappetising prospect of an economic ‘Groundhog day’ scenario, playing itself out endlessly, Richard Heinberg in his latest work The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality, posits that “economic growth as we have known it is over and done with”. This view is the glass-half empty perspective on paradigm shifts.

In the run-up to the Lehmans Brothers watershed, we were being told constantly by bullishly inept economists, bankers and politicians that we had broken free of the old boom and bust cycle. Apparently we have and Heinberg identifies the ‘new normal’ as stalled never-to-recover economic growth. He investigates likely future scenarios but also proposes various solutions – some of them radical and unfashionable.

Perhaps the most interesting of Heinberg’s proposed solutions to our current woes is a massive global negotiated default on debt. He characterises this as “modified debt jubilee where – similar to proposals to address the Greek debt crisis - all individuals debts and assets are immediately subject to a universal ‘haircut’. Moving the decimal point by one place sees savings (or pension pots) of £100,000 become £10,000; while debts (or mortgages) of £250,000 become £25,000.” He does admit that this radical “re-set” policy would be hugely “controversial, confounding… and painful”.

Heinberg believes that the “economy of the future will necessarily be steady-state, not requiring constant growth. It will be based on the use of renewable resources harvested at a slower rate than that of natural replenishment; and on that use of nonrenewable resources at declining rates, with metals minerals recycled and re-used wherever possible.”

He believes that there are three primary factors that stand firmly in the way of further economic growth. The first being the depletion of important resources including fossil fuels and minerals. Secondly. the proliferation of negative environmental impacts arising from both the extraction and use of resource and finally, “financial disruptions due to the inability of our existing monetary, banking, and investment systems to adjust to both resource scarcity and soaring environmental costs — and their inability to service the enormous piles of government and private debt that have been generated over the past couple of decades.”

He goes on to study many different cases in which the contracting availability of natural resources is creating uncertain futures for many rapidly expanding economies. China is the subject of many of these studies and he warns that “if growth sputters, this infrastructure overbuild will be a dead weight on the Chinese government”.

He continued; “the property bubble is likely to be China’s biggest short-term problem, and it could have knock-on effects on the nation’s banking systems. The bubble could start to deflate as soon as next year, or the year after that.”

Heinberg also tellingly considers the psychological approaches that we have developed towards consumption. He believes that we are addicted to shopping; “At this point, an “addicted” person is compelled to use the substance not to get high, but just to feel normal – since one’s own body is producing little or no endogenous dopamine response”.

Working from this psychological construct, he argues that “the solution to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint.” But he believe that the depletion of natural resources will not be enough to prompt change; he thinks “revolution will be driven by crisis”.

Heinberg raises some hugely important issues and brings together a myriad of disciplines from economics, psychology, philosophy and geopolitics to arrive at his sobering new paradigm of low-growth. But is this necessarily uncharted territory? After all, a flat-lining world of consumer addicts, sabre-rattling regimes fighting over diminishing resources and spiralling debt doesn’t feel particularly new to this reviewer.

Perhaps we should conclude with another quotation, this time from the great Islamic historian of the medieval period Ibn Khaldun, who reminds us that the past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.

This article was commissioned and written for Investment Week

2011: The Year the Mask Slipped

2011-12-31T18:28:00.003Z

What a year it’s been...

Right out of the traps, 2011 was a humdinger which ever way youslice and dice it. For The Rusty Wire Service, this was a year of slipping masks. All over the world, that fragile veneerof legitimacy that props up regimes from the Pacific Rim to the Arctic Circlewas being called into question like never before.

And this wasn’t just a phenomenon affecting tin-pot juntasor entrenched despots; to be fair, more than a couple of them found themselvesdeposed and some are even still alive to tell the tale. (you know who you are,Mr ex-President Laurent Gbagbo of Côte D’Ivoire).

The supposedly stable and ostensibly respectableadministrations of the Old World found themselves under increasing pressure asthey bowed to the demands of high finance and put the squeeze on their citizensfrom the bottom up.

Consequently, this year saw protest and unrest spreading itscontagion into the rich and safe European Home countries. And let’s not forget the good old US; wherethe Occupy Movement had its origins. At this stage, whether the Americans likeit or not, they are now part of the Old World. The American Century ended in1999, we’ve already been in the Tiger Century for over a decade and we’ve stillnot quite woken up to it.

Economically, 2011 wasa car-wreck from the get-go. And the knock-on effects for western society arelikely to be felt and remembered for generations to come, but that is perhapsassuming that we are over the worst of this Great Depression 2.0. A very good newspapermanonce told me: ‘never assume, because it can make an ass of u and me...’

Of course, when youlook back a little further on the rising tide of bad news that was 2010: thebenefits of 20-20 hindsight make much of this last year’s timeline seem rather predictable;at least insofar as these things ever are.

When 2010 ended, few people really foresaw how theself-immolation of a humble and poverty-stricken fruit vendor in Tunisia would somehowform part of a narrative that in December 2011, takes us on a bloodstained roadDamascus.

Mohamed Bouazizi, after sustained humiliation at the handsof local police in his native Sidi Bouzid, set himself alight in front of thetown’s municipal building after failing to get his grievances heard in midDecember 2010. His act of protest cemented a revolt that would ultimately endPresident Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's 23-year-rule.

By the time he diedon 04 January 2011, the proud young fruit vendor’s act of protest was alreadysparking demonstrations and opposition to regimes across the Arab and NorthAfrican World.

Egypt’s foment started in January and the second act ofthis drama is currently unfolding. Mubarak was indeed ousted but it was onlyever going to be a matter of time before Egyptians returned to Cairo’s TahrirSquare to demand that the same army restore power to civilian authority. All across the Middle East, regimes facedserious opposition from a regional populace no longer able to feed themselves andtheir families.

The Syrian people continue to put their lives on the line tostand in opposition to Assad’s regime and Inchallah, they will prevail thisyear. President Assad has been welcomed and cultivated by successive Westernleaders, who’ve generally taken the old ‘he’sa son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’ attitude to his dynasticpretensions. A predictable Syria is after all crucial to the Europeandiplomatic game of middle-eastern power-broking.

But while the mask of authority was slipping badly in theMiddle-east and North Africa, 2011 saw the Old World’s socio-economic model experiencingthe kind of severe difficulties that might yet prove deeply structural. The legitimacy of governments across Europe isbeing called into serious question.

There have been market-led regime changes this year inIreland, Greece and Spain as well as the toppling of absurd Italian premierBerlusconi. Civil unrest in England this year reached levels not seensince....well not since the Tories were last in power in the early 80’s as itgoes.

The Greek populace remain mutinous and suspicious of theirgovernment as do the French and the Spaniards. Britain’s ever-widening wealthgap however continues to mark her out as a favourite prospect for continuedcivil disorder in 2012. The Occupy Movement’s September inception was a harvesttime reminder to the capitalist classes that you reap what you sow.

Russia is, perhaps for the first time since the early 1990s,starting to look a little uncertain. The bitter Moscow winter hasn’t deterredits hardy citizenry uniting in a spirit of comradeship against their blatantlycorrupt ruling oligarchs.

Here’s what we thought this time last year when we weresifting through the entrails: “Without even trying to be alarmist, Britain iscertainly a lot closer to widespread unrest than most people are prepared tocountenance. The evidence is clear: student anger is still unresolved; a deepand festering resentment lingers against the merchant class who have continuedto profit throughout this debacle; another huge swathe of the respectable poorare about to dip below the poverty line as interest rate and VAT rises beckon;and one that hasn’t really made anyone’s list: the practical collapse of theUK’s biggest export market (ie Ireland).”

Of course we didn’t see the Libyan situation developing.This was probably due in no small part to the conduct of the British government.

Throughout their dealings with the Gadaffi regime over thecourse of both the recent Labour and Coalition administrations, there was very littlereason to believe that the regime was anything less than rock steady and therewas little to give a contrary impression in the reporting of the mainstreammedia.

The involvement of UK armed forces as part of some NATOinitiative dressed up as a humanitarian measure, became a source of someconcern to those of us who wondered about the wisdom of another costly militaryadventure at a time when we were closing libraries and firing care staff.

The doubters have been proved wrong as sanity of the marketprevails. Even if ‘Democracy’ doesn’t succeed in vast, tribal Libya; as long asthe oil ports are kept open for business and the ruling regime owes the west afavour for its NATO dig-out; a prolonged civil war might actually prove a realgeopolitical bonus.

That notwithstanding, some of our more vague 2011predictions did indeed prove prescient; somuch so that many of last year’s fingers in the wind remain in this year's ‘watch thisspace’ section: “Expect that Iran-baiting will continue in the west and Iranwill doubtless continue to provide expertise and materiel to Islamic militantsengaged in their jihad against the decadent western powers,” is what we saidlast year. Given that some people are wondering whether or not we are alreadyat war with Iran, this is a story that will run and run.

We couldn’t have predicted the death of the Dear Leader ofthe Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but that still doesn’t make lastyear’s assessment any less appropriate for the coming year: “the reallyworrying thing about North Korea is that, even after 60 years, it still has thesame lethal potential to drag the US and China into a shooting war that it hadin 1950...”

And of course we should spare a thought for all those Kim Jong Il impersonators who will find themselves out of work now that the DearLeader has gone to join the May day parade in the sky.

Nor could we have predicted the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami in March; so let’s hope that this year, we wrongly predict 2012 as theyear the Mayans were right. I’m bettingthe farm on this not being the year that Yellowstone’s super-volcano takes the halfthe Northern Hemisphere with it in a super-eruption.

And of course, let’s not forget Africa. Again, shamefully,our sentiments this year can be neatly summed up in last year’s aspiration: “Africais sadly likely to remain as a disgracefully ignored stain on the conscience ofthe western world which is now sharing continental exploitation rights with theburgeoning Chinese.”

Go n'eirigh an t'ádh libh go léir an bhliain seo chugainn...

(Best of luck to you all this coming year)

Dialann Deoraí *

2011-12-24T22:37:00.003Z

It's one of my most evocative memories of childhood Christmas Eve: the candles in the porch windows of every house on the way to Midnight mass.

It is perhaps a hangover from a more Catholic Ireland but its significance was transformed by the Presidency of Mary Robinson.

While the Church's certainties have long been eaten away, the inevitability of the boat and plane remain: poignant and ubiquitous; as if the Septic Tiger never happened.

When she put a candle in the kitchen window at Áras an Uachtaráin, it was to remind the rest of the country of its diaspora; those who wouldn't be home for Christmas; those for whom it was their first in a foreign field; for those who never came home but never forgot.

Now, perhaps more than at any time since Mary Robinson first mooted it, the candle in the window should be a reminder to those at home of those who've gone.

Nollaig Shona dhíobh go léir.

*'Dialann Deoraí': Gaelic: 'The diary of an exile'

Can the Brits ever be really rational about Europe?

2011-12-14T22:57:00.001Z

Let me see if I’ve got this right. David Cameron exercisedhis veto in Europe in order to allow The City of London to escape the same taxregime as the rest of Europe...

That would presumably be the same poorly regulated UKfinancial sector that, along with Wall Street, is largely responsible for thefirst Great Depression of the 21st century.

This, my friends is the reason why David Cameron gambledwith Britain’s international reputation: for the sake of bankers whose venalconduct and naked greed has wiped out the wealth and security of ordinaryworking people from Jarrow to Jakarta.

OK, apart from freedom of movement for people, goods andservices, an improved Europe-wide infrastructure, a predictable and dependablemarket for food and several generations of continent-wide stability andsocio-economic development. Apart from that, what has the EU ever done for us?

The Eurosceptic right would have you believe that Cameron isan English hero of Churchillian stature. His was apparently a principled standagainst the ever-encroaching hegemony of Brussels with its straight bananas and infernal kilograms.

Yes indeed, if that Europe had its way we’d have no poundsat all; sterling or imperial, miles would be swapped for kilometres and our very sausages could lose the name just because of some of EU rubbish about meatcontent (‘seasoned sawdust was goodenough for my old granddad and he fought the Germans..twice, died of woodworm...’).

But in all the Little England bleating, something is beinglost in the British approach to Europe. Sure, the UK is one of the netcontributors to the EU budget but what seems rarely to be taken into account isthe actual benefit in terms of trade that comes from being a member of the EU.The ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’ does very well out of its European neighbours.

Let’s put it this way, eight out of the UK’s top ten tradingpartners are in the EU and if it all goes really cunty-booby in the Eurozone,then the contagion won’t be long jumping the Channel. And the way things areshaping up that could still turn out to be sooner rather than later.

Let’s be honest, Europe really is in a right old two and eight. In Ireland there has been some debate about ditching Nama (the IrishNational Asset Management Agency) in a fast sell-off; it’s that oldscabby-plaster philosophy innit?

This however is more akin to lancing a big boil full of pusand bankers. Nama, to those beyond theHibernian Heimat (better start getting used to the German names...), seemedlike a good idea at the time; put all the toxic stuff in one place till we figure out wtf to dowith all €75bn of it.

(It was therefore with bemused, exasperated resignation thatI read recently in the Irish Times that Nama, de facto owner of Irish ghostestates from Bruff to Muff, was buying into London’s premier White Elephant,Battersea Power Station...)

But while the UK tries to sit pretty and the Euroscepticsget to crow ‘I told you so’, it’s pretty clear that there are quite a fewproblems under the hood of the Great British Economy.

When the European Banking Authority pronounced that, as aresult of findings from their most recent stress tests, banks in the Eurozonewould need to raise a further €114.7bn in capitalisation; there was littlesurprise that UK banks successfully passed the 9% capitalisation threshold.What did surprise people was that big hitters from Germany like Deutsche Bankand Commerzbank were among those singled out by the EBA as needing to raisemore capital.

What was hidden in the detail however were a severalsobering truths for UK plc as another festive season begins. According to The Telegraph, itself sourcing a Deloitte report commissioned by Nama: “Britishbanks, despite beginning their disposal programmes much earlier than theirContinental European peers, still have by far the biggest pool of toxic assets.Deloitte estimates the size of the non-core and non-performing assets held onthe balance sheets of UK banks at £460bn, more than the combined total forIreland, Spain and Italy.”

So if the Euro crashes, those UK banks (which have provedsuch a boon to the economy over the past three years) could face overwhelmingdefaults and drag us all even further into this toxic mire of spiralling debt.

Vital signs from the wider economy don’t offer much hope either. Recent unemployment figures from the Officefor National Statistics show youth unemployment still over a million and therewas a rise in the total number of unemployed to 2.64m in the three months toOctober.

The British Prime Minister might be lionised by a press thatstill longs to sneer and snigger at Johnnie Foreigner and his funny foreignways but the press in the rest of Europe has merely dismissed the British andmoved on.

“Bye Bye Britain – Europe moves forward without you!” warnedGermany’s Das Bild (in German of course...). Der Spiegel was less philosophical: “Cameron is a coward”. Elsewhere,“Birth of a Europe without London” proclaimed Spain’s El Pais. Beyond the parochial and six-fingeredconfines of the Euro-sceptical Conservative rump, David Cameron is beingvilified whichever way he turns.

Parliament? Well, he must have known he’d face some toughopposition there when he tried to explain why he’d played so fast and loosewith Britain’s future. But then, at the cabinet table he had to sit and listento Energy Secretary Chris Huhne telling him had no authority from the coalitionto veto a revision of the Lisbon treaty.

Chris Huhne? Really?

It has come to apretty pass indeed when a paragon of probity and rectitude of such a low orderas Huhne can sit in judgement of the Prime Minister. One might have thoughtthat – what with his alleged traffic woes (and their attendant and putativejusticial perversions) – the Energy Secretary might be apt to less outspokencritique of the PM.

The Lib Dem front-bencher’s credentials were most recentlycalled into question following allegations made by his ex-wife Vicky Pryce.Huhne has denied claims he asked his then wife to take responsibility for adriving offence in 2003.

As a consequence, the Energy Secretary has been under policeinvestigation for more than five months now. The case is still being considered by the Director of PublicProsecutions (DPP). At the end of November, the CPS however suggested they were“very close” to arriving at a decisionon whether to prosecute Huhne, at least according to DPP Keir Starmer QC.

The Energy Secretary has all the recklessness of a condemnedman offered the reprieve of a suicide mission. What has he got to lose? Hell, he may as well go down fighting.

Then there was Prime Ministers Question time on Wednesday.What was required was an oratorical tour de force to rally the left againstthis snide Tory popinjay of a Prime Minister. What we got instead was EdMiliband. And he made Chris Huhne look good...

He barely landed a blow. Cameron parried Miliband’s anodyneinquiries about the nature of relations with coalition partner Clegg withquestions of his own about the Labour leader’s fraternal relations. It was a poor performance and mischief-makerslike blogger Guido Fawkes were tweeting that Labour insiders were alreadynumbering Ed’s days after his lacklustre showing at PMQs.

The European Commission also weighed in against Cameron onWednesday. Michel Barnier, European Commissioner for the internal market,criticised Cameron's decision last week to veto the EU treaty change aimed atsolving the euro zone's sovereign-debt crisis.

"It sounds as though the government is arguing for twosingle markets: one for financial services from which it can opt out, and onefor the rest of the economy," Barnier said. "That is simply notpossible." French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly accused DavidCameron of behaving like "an obstinate kid" when he wielded theBritish veto at the European summit last week.

What the hell is it about Europe that gets some Britishpeople so wound up? For starters, it’s not some place ‘over there’...Britaincan’t just sail off across the Atlantic to rock up on the US east coast as the51st state; much as that might be attractive in a neo-con, sci-fi kinda way.

The reality is that, whether you like it or not my Britishchums, you belong to a European nation, you are surrounded by lots of other European nations:some big, some small; some even had big empires just like Britain used to have,but all that is in the past (at least for most Europeans).

We’ve all spent centuries going to war with each other andthat’s kind of the whole point of this European Union project: to make sure that all our common interestsare so closely connected that we’d never want or need to go to war with eachother ever again.

If the Tories really wanted to pick a fight over Europe, theycould almost certainly have picked a better one than defending the rights ofbankers to keep screwing the rest of us working stiffs out of our savings, ourlivelihoods and our children’s futures.

This Article also appears in Sabotage Times

Low-key launch for Agitprop e-papers

2011-12-13T21:07:00.001Z

DotcomAgitprop.inc, putative and slightly fictitious publisher of The Rusty Wire Service, has launched two new daily services. In conjunction with Paper.li, The Daily Jacobean and The Croppy's Review will offer international news coverage, edited to the exacting standards and eclectic tastes of the editor...make of that what you will.

Should readers eschew Twitter, links for the new publications can also be found on the Rusty Wire Service toolbar. The Daily Jacobean also has its own Facebook page.

It is envisaged that a lunch time edition of The Daily Jacobean will bring together news, sport and business in a comprehensive and (hopefully comprehensible) package. The Croppy's Review is intended more as an evening round-up with analysis rather than a second edition but breaking stories will take priority.

The paper.li is a web app that turns your Twitter stream into a daily online newspaper. In fact, if you don't like what we're doing over at the The Daily Jacobean and The Croppy's Review, then piss off and produce your own. It really is this easy: Start your own newspaper....

Referee faces wrath of Khan

2011-12-11T14:09:00.001Z

On Saturday night, the Bolton lad lost both WBA and IBF light-welterweighttitles after suffering a split-decision defeat to Lamont Peterson.

Khan reckons he was robbed, but then he would, wouldn’t he?(At least he didn’t have broken toes to blame lamely.) Khan was not happy aboutCooper's decision to dock him two points in the bout - one each in the seventhand 12th round.

A joint statement was released by Team Khan and Golden BoyPromotions; "Following the decision in the fight, Team Khan and Golden BoyPromotions intends to make inquiries with the District of Columbia Boxing andWrestling Commission, the IBF and the WBA regarding the performance of refereeJoseph Cooper and will also be seeking clarification regarding certainambiguities with respect to the scores of the fight."

Khan’s trainer Freddie Roach – recently inducted intoboxing's hall of fame – may have seen the writing on the wall. Before thePeterson fight, he predicted that it would be their “toughest fight of all”. Roach,who learned his trade from the legendary Eddie Futch, warned that “Peterson isnot a journeyman and there will be a stage where he has us on the ropes becausehe is a pressure fighter.”

But Roach also told the press afterwards that Cooper "hadacted like a judge in there, rather than a referee". Khan thought he was fightingtwo men in the ring and there’s some pretty convincing evidence that a coupleof hometown rulings could have slipped through the ropes. In the end, Peterson got a majority decisionwith scores of 113-112 from both North Carolina’s Valerie Dorsett and PennsylvanianGeorge Hill; Nelson Vazquez from Puerto Rico gave it to Khan 115-110.

But on a decision that close; even without those two pointsdeducted, Khan doesn’t have a huge amount to grumble about. There certainly didn’tseem to be any unbiased ringside consensus in the reports I’ve read so far but eventaking that into consideration, few had Khan as the clear winner in thatcontest; pushing and shovingnotwithstanding.

Either way. The stage is well set for a lucrative re-match and Khans gets another crack at winning over US fight audiences. Oscar De La Hoya, a boxinglegend in the ring and founder of Golden Boy Promotions was sanguine about theKhan’s defeat. He thought that it was only fair to have a rematch in Khan’s home country of England.

As long he gets Golden Boy’s cut, I’m guessing that DeLa Hoya isn’t too fussy about what where they pitch the ring. A re-match isanother payday for the fighters and for Golden Boy and if they can produce acontest of the same reported intensity of this fight then they’ll have earnedtheir purses.

Through the wringer for Bell Pottinger?

2011-12-10T20:26:00.001Z

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s recently publishedreport on the activities of Global PR firm Bell Pottinger made for pretty grimreading. Particularly if you happened to be one of those people who is morethan mildly surprised by the notion that PR executives, like journalists, lawyers and estate agents, could be anything otherthan a gaggle of venal and overpaid turd-polishers. And of course, I mean that in a good way.

There was perhaps something of the ‘Bear shits in woods andPope is Catholic’ kind of certainty about a headline that told you spin doctorswere amoral bottom feeders. In fact, thewhole affair could have been taken from an episode of Absolute Power shot in‘phone-cam verité’ style.

And that’s not in any way to detract from the sterling workbeing done by the guys and gals over at the Bureau. If nothing else, it invitesone to question the judgment of anyone who’d hire a PR firm that found itselfat the centre of a story this ludicrous.

The saga so far does make for a certain amount of shock and horror. And the storieskeep coming, from all sorts of angles. Allegations of tampering with Wikipedia entries on behalf of arms manufacturers never plays well. Boasts ofbeing able to bend Cameron’s ear in favour of clients were curried withsnake-oil salesman promises of new media manipulation. And all recordedin a hooky meet-up with some would-be apparatchiks from Uzbekistan which, asthe Independent’s report righteously explained, is “a brutal dictatorship responsible for killings,human rights violations and child labour”.

Poor old ‘Call me Dave’: he could probably almost feelsympathy for Bell Pottinger (almost). He’s a former PR man himself; this beingthe only job he’s held outside the six-fingered haven of overbred privilege,colloquially known as the Westminster Village.

The Bell Pottinger story comes at a time when the integrityof the British press is held in pretty poor esteem by the general public. A bitof a bashing for the evil empire of spin always plays well with the public andgives cowed and jaded hacks some sense that they might still be in the job forthe right reasons. It’s also a bullish riposte to the Leveson Inquiry.

In a piece for his own blog www.registan.net, Joshua Foustcounsels that this is all a bit of a non-story. He offers some reasonableadvice here: “while everyone shakes their head at the idea that publicrelations actually requires manipulating public opinion, it’s worthwhile totake a few steps back and see what “damage” Bell Pottinger really did.” Foust’sarticle then helpfully offers the slide slow of the Bell Pottinger presentation to undercover BIJ operatives.

In advising and consulting with Uzbeki officials, theargument would appear to run, these wily spin-meisters are actually a littlebit like human rights ambassadors. According to Foust , “Bell Pottinger is behaving responsibly by refusing to engagein PR activities until reforms take place.” But of course they are.

I was curious as to who this Foust was: I mean, might he justbe a construct; an identity of putative professional probity, a cipher used totell ring the Pottinger Bell?...

I must admit, I was kind of rude when I emailed him inconnection with his story: I suggested, perhaps unfairly, to Foust that givenhis ardent and even compelling defence of Bell Pottinger, was not he sure hehadn’t done anything for Bell Pottinger down the years; you know, a bit ofconsultancy, anything at all like that? And to be fair to him, he got back tome sharpish.

“As far as I know, I have never worked for Bell Pottinger inany way. Classy of you to suggest otherwise, though!” For the record Mr Foust , I’m sorry; yours isa fine piece of devil’s advocacy and I hope you’ll understand my need to at leasttry to maintain standards of journalistic probity; I thought I’d get a quote totry and prop my story up.

Joshua Foust, for the record, comes up as a PBS contributorand “is a fellow at the American Security Project. His writing, which coversmilitary affairs, geopolitics, and strategic energy issues, has appeared in theNew York Times, Reuters, the Christian Science Monitor, World Politics Reviewand the Columbia Journalism Review.”

While I wouldn’t necessarily chime with everything he holdson this matter, his analysis is cogent enough to merit closer scrutiny. His readiness however to discount the blatant manipulationof Wikipedia was a little unsettling. “But is editing Wikipedia to benefit oneself really unethical?” Foustwonders. “Sure, it violates Wikipedia’s terms of use, and is probably stupid,but it’s not like PR firms invented Wikipedia hacking....”

Call me a sentimental old fool but I’m very fond ofWikipedia. It always reminds me of the Hitchhikers’ Guide to The Galaxy;compiled by the travellers through space and time who live in this crazy mixedup Galaxy we call home. Sometimes, it’s blindingly accurate and others, it’s nobetter than a rule of thumb or worse than an overheard rumour.

That notwithstanding, I really like the fact that our globalencyclopaedia has been compiled by the many voices of the hive. And as such,it’s a living breathing organism, so when we catch wee cankers like BellPottinger dumping their toxic sludge on the verges of the Info-super highway,it might be argued that they should justly be held open to odium andopprobrium.

Now, for the record, I have made efforts to speak to BellPottinger. The communications firm has not as yet seen fit to get in touch. Iremain optimistic.

Safe European Home?

2011-12-08T23:48:00.001Z

Misery loves company and the Eurozone isn’t the only placewhere the patrons are drinking in the last chance saloon.

News that the European Central Bank was cutting interestrates for the second month in a row was received by ‘the markets’ with a 'meh', like it was their birthright.

And then, when it became clear that the ECB had no immediateplans for another costly foray into the debt market and they sure as hell hadno plans for printing money Bank of England style, 'the markets', in a manner not dissimilar to Veruca Salt, threatened toscream and scream until they got really sick or had a tantrum and threw theeconomy out of the pram...

I’m not sure, I stopped listening after a while. I must be suffering from Euro-crisis compassion fatigue. Mario Draghi, president of the central bank (and former vice chairman and managing directorat Goldman Sachs International) was happy to kick the problem back to thesovereign states.

‘The markets’ meanwhile (like some remorseless sociopathichurricane of fear and greed) try to scare up odds on which is the next regime ripe forchange in the Eurozone. Would-be ratings oracles Standard & Poors revealed todaythat it was sharpening its knives and that all 17 Euro states could face ablanket downgrading. That presumably would be the same S&P which had LehmanBrothers on investment grade ratings right up to September 2008...

Europe really is in a right old two and eight. They’re talkingin Ireland now about ditching Nama (the Irish National Asset Management Agency) in a fast sell-off; it’s that old scabby-plasterphilosophy innit? This however is more akin to lancing a big boil full of pusand bankers. Nama, to those beyond theHibernian Heimat (better start getting used to the German names...), seemedlike a good idea at the time; put all the toxic stuff in one place till we figure out wtf to do withall €75bn of it.

I still like the idea of hiving Nama off; how would that work? Load up an old hulk with 75 billion toxic IOUs, lash Brian Cowen to wheel and then cut it adrift, to sail the wide accountancy perhaps?

It was therefore with bemused, exasperated resignation that I read last week in the Irish Times that Nama, de facto owner of ghost estates from Bruff toMuff, was buying into London’s premier White Elephant, Battersea Power Station.

But while the UK tries to sit pretty and the Euroscepticsget to crow ‘I told you so’, it’s pretty clear that there are quite a fewproblems under the hood of the Great British Economy.

What was hidden in the detail however were a severalsobering truths for UK plc as another festive season begins. According to The Telegraph,itself sourcing a Deloitte report commissioned by NAMA: “British banks, despitebeginning their disposal programmes much earlier than their ContinentalEuropean peers, still have by far the biggest pool of toxic assets. Deloitteestimates the size of the non-core and non-performing assets held on thebalance sheets of UK banks at £460bn, more than the combined total for Ireland,Spain and Italy.”

So if the news from Europe isn’t bleak enough, spare athought for the gamblers of the Chinese Communist Party. According toBloomberg: “After months of battlinginflation, the government in Beijing has decided its new priority isfalteringeconomic growth. The central bank announced on Nov. 30 it would cut reserverequirements for banks, freeing up 350 billion yuan ($55 billion) to lend inthe coming months.” Now this isn’t a huge amount but it’s evidence of a changein thinking and there’s probably more of this drip-feed credit-easing to comefor the Chinese economy.

The Chinese property market is coming off the boil as wellwith real estate prices falling for the third consecutive month in November inChina’s 10 biggest cities as well as in smaller locales. Counting cranes on theurban Chinese skyline tells you there’s a definite cascade through to steel andother construction-related industries. Steel profits apparently dropped 82.6%month on month in October, according to the China Iron & Steel Association.

With the Chinese economy slowing sharply, the philosophy ispretty simple; “An unbalanced recovery would be better than a balancedrecession,” Vice-Premier Wang Qishan reportedly told US trade officials in Chengdu on 21November. I suppose after an October when European orders for Chinese goods fell 22%from September, it’s enough to bring the gambler out in anyone.

At times like this, it’s got to be the bookie, theboozer or the bible that we turn to for succour. And speaking of suckers, maybethe Vatican has a part to play in all this. What, after all, is the EuropeanUnion except the 21^st century manifestation of the Medieval HolyRoman Empire?

And if it's redemption and rehabilitation that the Evil Empire's after; they should be aware that such commodities don’t come cheap. Maybe the VaticanCity could step up and hock St Peters; issue a AAA-rated sovereign bond to rescue Europe from the ravages of themarkets, if not from the sins of their many 'fathers'. At last, a Catholic Gilt worth having...

Mommy, what’s a Rubberbandit?

2011-12-08T01:30:00.001Z

No, really Mommy, what the fuck is aRubberbandit?

Good question son, maybe we shouldstart with an old Limerick anecdote; told to me many years ago by a native ofthat fine city: ‘There were these two fellas, Bill and Ger, and Bill and Gerwere great mates, until one day, Bill kicked the fuck out of Ger and that wasthat....’

Now you could analyse the postmodernbejesus out of that bleak anti-joke and you might in the end, arrive at somekind of answer to that initial question; what exactly is a Rubberbandit? But itprobably wouldn’t be right.

Sure, you could always go and watchtheir merry japes on Youtube (and they’ve had a few down the years to be fairto them) but would that really get you any closer to the truth?

I resolved to see their schtick formyself. Being a journalist of at least indifferent ability at one time in my life;I made it my business to snaffle a free pass to the Rubberbandits Shoreditchgig.

And the Rubberbandits doing their thingon stage? That was rather like watching a well-observed social satire being sketched out against a slick backdrop of catchy R’n’B grooves and hard ‘hib-hop’ licks. It alsoseemed suspiciously close to a great night out.

You can click here for the full storyon a gig that was a bit like the Late Late Show used to be; in that there wassomething for everyone in the audience. From the knowing Islington hipsters (youcan’t call them that, they don’t like to be called hipsters) to the kind of young workingIrish in London who might just as easily be out at the Saw Doctors thefollowing weekend (or even a putative Pogues revue -- if the rogues had had amind to re-form).

As much as I’m hooked on the choruses,it’s the pure joy of watching a well-honed double-act that really makes theRubberbandits worth catching (not forgetting of course their depraved gimpsidekick, Willy O’DJ –‘I’m not their father, I’m their mother’s boyfriend’...).

They are practically old pros by now; theseboys are hard-working, already well-practiced in stage-craft and getting better;the call/response, the timing, it’s all there and it can be exhilarating andhilarious to watch in live performance.

That was what really interested me. Iwanted to know about how something like that gets started. When did they realisethat they were onto something? Of course, the likelihood of getting a straightanswer to that one was only ever slim at best.

A face-to-face interview with theRubberbandits before they left London and returned Ireland to push their albumlaunch wasn’t possible, I was told. I was actually kind of relieved. After all,what do I really know from interviewing popstars?

The whole notion of sitting in a bar orrestaurant and trying to have a conversation with two geezers in Tesco maskswas always going to prove logistically problematic and manifestly absurd fora low-end, down at heel and hard-bitten freelancer like yours truly. So, verykindly as it turned out, the lads offered to answer a few random posers viaemail.

The Rubberbandits’ origins and their density,excuse me, destiny, are shrouded in mystery. And because we really care at TheRusty Wire Service, we wanted to know, when did it happen first? When did they realisethat they were onto something?This is what the lads told us (Questions, such as they are, appear in italics; responses appear, by and large, to have been givencollectively).

The Rubberbandits: “We realised long before we were even born. Itwould have been sometime around the early 60’s, this side of the Bay of Pigs crisis. I can’t recall too well unfortunately as it was all in black and white.”

Now, you can’t say fairer than that. Sothen I got to wondering, does this veryspecific type of humour travel well? Has anything been lost in the translation?

The Rubberbandits: “No, because at the core, we have very similardesires and interests to Posh English people. Namely Horses and Drugs.”

Speaking of posh, I heard a scurrilous rumour thatyou are actually a pair of nice middle class lads; isn’t that just a load ofrubbish put out there by the bourgeois media?

The Rubberbandits: “We are the Poshest cunts you’ve ever met.”

And of course, let’s not forget the album.Serious About Men went on general release on 02 December (and Gawd bless allwho sail in her). So I thought I’d better ask: ‘Tell us something about the new album.’

The Rubberbandits: “We aremaking only 1 Limited edition issue of this album. In fact it is so limited inits release that it is purely conceptual and will be available in allgood record shops in theory.”

Since living in Limerick, I’ve alwayshad more than a sneaking regard for the place. It’s the way they still seem tovalue storytelling in Limerick. It’s that forthright robustness. Spades are spades in Limerick, not leveraged digging instruments. Scrap Saturday’sTreaty 300 dateline still raises a snigger from me even 20 years later. GerryStembridge put Shannonside on the satirical map. So I asked the lads, why did they think Limerick was such fertile groundsatirically?

The Rubberbandits: “We are the whipping boy for modern Irish media,in particular sensationalist media. It’s not very difficult to makesensationalist journalism surreal and funny.”

No arguments there. In fact I’d go onebetter and say just playing the news straight with no sensational chaser isthese days more surreal than anything even Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror mightreflect.

The songs that challenge in theRubberbandits repertoire are probably Spoiling Ivan and Spastic Hawk.

For the record, I like what they’retrying to do in these tunes; they feel more XTC than Run DMC. But this is the question I asked about Ivan (trying to be wise-guy of course): “What kind of sick mind dreamed up SpoilingIvan?” is what a Daily Mail Journalist might say. What would you say to him orher?

The Rubberbandits: “What kind of sick mind looks at a caringfriendship between a man and boy and needs to project their own inappropriatethoughts onto that friendship?”

That was me told. But I wouldn’t let itlie and I had to make some ham-fisted connectionbetween Ken Loach’s Kes and The Rubberbandits Spastic Hawk and to be fairto them, they mustered at least some enthusiasm for an inquiry they’d probablyhad to answer a dozen times.

The Rubberbandits: “Was Kes a spastic?? Not intentionally, but aftersomeone suggested it, I had another look at Kes and realise that there was anunconscious inspiration. That, and I actually own a hawkery with a physicallyretarded hawk that needed isolation from birth, such was the bullying heencountered. Unfortunately he never got to fly away, I found him dead afteranother hawk had killed him. It’s his spirit that flies away into hawk heaven,where all the mice have huge tits.”

Maybe it was time to talk about the bigbreak on Channel 4 so I asked them:

‘Now that you’ve gone all swanky and Channel 4, areyou going to turn diva on us?’

The Rubberbandits: “Being Posh cunts, we have always been divas.”

What was it like to work with the guy who directedthe classic Father Ted?

The Rubberbandits: “He’s a mad bastard we love him. He used to giveus oranges injected with vodka on set. One time we ordered a pizza to the shootand when he found out that they had forgotten to put peppers on he startedcrying,”

Returning to Limerick, I tried tointerest the Rubberbandits in the idea of a Limerick Profanisaurus:

Could you explain ‘Steamer’, is this a nauticalterm?

The Rubberbandits: “A steamer is a gay man, or sometimes just aterm for someone who is being mean; Other words are Gowl, Yurt, Fref, Marp andGloot. I can’t tell you what they mean.”

Packet or Tripe?(A Limerick Delicacy)

TheRubberbandits: “Both.”

Should they have another go at declaring theLimerick Soviet? Where would Willy O’DJ stand on that issue?

The Rubberbandits: “Yes they should. He’d manage to stand somewherevery inappropriately and an anvil would fall comically on his head.”

Agitprop: Is it (a) A type of glue or (b) Some madRussians poster-makers?

The Rubberbandits: “If my Father hadn’t been a hard core communist Iwould have said Glue.”

Hasn’t Mr Chrome left it a bit late or has he stillgot time to rush out a fitness DVD for the after-Christmas Market?

The Rubberbandits: “His physique is bizarrely the result of beingvery lazy, smoking loads of cigarettes and drinking 2 litres of coke a day.Blindboy on the other hand watches what he eats and exercises, yet he is a fatbastard.”

Nietzsche or Kierkegaard?

The Rubberbandits: “Nietzsche because he said that God is dead. He was a troll well before the internet was invented.”

Is Frodo Baggins really in the IRA?

The Rubberbandits: “He’s responsible for Canary Wharf.”

P-Funk or P-Diddy?

The Rubberbandits: “P Funk to the Last. George Clinton is definitelyin the Ra.”

Limerick to Shoreditch: The Rogues' Progress

2011-11-30T20:06:00.001Z

The Rubberbandits: XOYO, Cowper Street, London, Sunday, 27 November

Mr Chrome, Willy O'DJ, Blindboy Boatclub
(Not taken at Shoreditch gig)

The Rubberbandits UK tour finished on a high note inLondon’s trendy Shoreditch at the weekend and The Deptford Croppy crossed overthe water to watch.

Shoreditch; the very name filled me with dread but we resolved topress on nevertheless; over the river and into the deserted City, winding up Commercial Roadand finally into the Heart of Darkness...or Islington anyway.

XOYO: even its mission statement resonates with portent... “XOYOis a dynamic space across two floors profiling a mixture of Art, Music, Cultureand Media events. We see ourselves as a living, breathing hub, creatingtouchpoints across these activities...”

And in spite of that, we still we pressed on; such was ourdesire to see the Rubberbandits. Besides,it wasn’t all that bad once we got there.

Even if it was a bespoke dynamic space (or sumthin); XOYOstill felt pretty much like any other music venue in which I’d ever had drinkspilled on me or my feet trodden upon; which was nice and comforting to anold-timer like yours truly.

The crowd had a predictably large Irish contingent but therewas also a healthy smattering of ‘hipsters’ (but you can’t call them that, theydon’t like to be called hipsters, as the Rubberbandits were later to point out knowledgeably).And with that same kind of ironic remove and knowing distance, the opening actMassive Horse took to the stage a little bit like Jedward re-imagined as asituationist electric cabaret (and I mean that in a good way).

My Bad Sister were next up and in keeping with the off-kiltercabaret double-act theme of the evening, they were a sister act. Complete withDJ, masked assistants and some nifty dance routines, My Bad Sister got yourattention straight away. Then their energy, banter and soulful harmonies heldit. They had a real crowd-pleaser on their hands with their good old fashionedcockney mash-up; a cross between the Grange Hill theme and the lyrics of OnlyFools and Horses’ Hooky Street . Gypsy Boy was another tune with a great hook,performed with verve.

But the evening inthe end belonged to the Rubberbandits and they took the stage with as much swaggerand poise as one can muster while wearing a plastic shopping bag like a ski-mask. Whichactually turns out to be plenty.

Blindboy and Mr Chrome have a good line in call and responserapping and toasting as they spit the lines and rhymes between them ‘just liketheir hero Tupac’. In ‘Pure Awkward’,the lads are presented with a social dilemma when, while smoking rock with IceCube (as you do), the rapper comes on to them with a raging hard on.

The Rubberbandits are already seasoned performers and theact is well-honed, not unlike Mr Chrome’s abs. It’s easy to forget that it is an elaborate construct,particularly when the tunes are this catchy.

After involuntarily humming the ‘Go Compare tune’ running through my head like a scratched record formonths now, it was a genuine relief tofind my myself singing ‘Fuck your Honda Civic, I’ve a horse outside’. Or ‘A bagfor me, a bag for you, let’s get wrecked on bags of glue’.

‘Up the Ra’ is a tough one to explain to a British audience;especially as there may be many in the crowd for whom the irony of the deviceof the unreliable narrator is not really hitting home. But it works in the end andthe list of IRA members grows ever more improbable. My favourite: ‘FrodoBaggins? He’s in the Ra.’

The Rubberbandits manage to do the clever stuff as welland do it without being overly self-conscious. I laughed out loud as they marvelled at thetube; it’s like downloading yourself to different parts of the city.

Blindboy’s solo on the quirky 'Spastic Hawk' and the darkcheeriness of 'Spoiling Ivan' (a song about the love of a man for a six year oldboy) give you an inkling that there’s much more going on here than New JackCity with a Ballynanty Beg accent.

But they do that schtick so well. ‘I Wanna Fight your Father’is about that age old conflict for young star-crossed lovers. ‘Your Daddy saidhe’s sussed me out, he says I’ll break your heart, but if your Daddy had abusted mouth, he wouldn’t be so smart’. (Their London encore begins with theIrish language version of the same.) ‘Black Man (In My Gang)’ is proof of thesame, if more were needed. Of course Horse Outside, which is the song that endsthe show, is pure joy.

The Rubberbandits’ sense of humour isn’t just culturespecific; a lot of it is probably city particular. But once you buy in to theidea of how Limerick is perceived (ie as hotbed of criminality and socialdeprivation) and how Limerick people actually perceive themselves, then TheRubberbandits experience is a very satisfying one.

By and large, they manage to get that parochial set-upestablished for the joke to work. The whole Willy O'DJ construct is a rich and hilarious back-story all of its own (As well as being a former Minister of Defence, 'He's not my father, he's my mother's boyfriend'...). Explaining ‘Double-dropping Yokes With EamonnDe Valera’ as being analogous to 'Doing Es with Benjamin Disraeli' was a nice turn and all.

The Rubberbandits? Worthbraving Shoreditch for.

The album Serious About Men goes on sale on 02 December

For a sort of an interview/Q&A type of a thing with the Rubberbandits, click here.

The Psychedelic Anorak

2011-11-27T11:52:00.001Z

Let me first be clear: drug use of any kind should never really be undertaken without some sense of premeditation and understanding of its consequences and broadly speaking; that principle holds equally true of caffeine at one end of the spectrum or opium at the other.

So when it came to experimentation, even this was approached with some sense (however spurious and self-vindicatory) of ascertaining the value of the experience in a clinical research context.

What I was to discover to my surprise however on my first experience with LSD, was that it was rather like being thrown out ofan airplane without a parachute; only to discover that I’d always had the power of unassisted flight.

It justcame naturally to me; there were no bad trips. Maybe (and I'd like to think this at any rate) I used to be a lemonade-from-lemons kinda guy. If the experience started outunpleasant, it didn’t stay that way for any length of time (or at least anylength of time that I was conceptually aware of). As long as I embraced whatwas happening and stayed in the moment rather than fighting it, thepossibilities were endless.

With magic mushrooms (my real weapon of choice, psychedelically speaking) it was even better. While an acid trip was vivid andcomic-book sharp, mushrooms were more blurred and the colours more muted; likewalking about in an ever-mutating, endlessly hilarious and profound impressionistpainting.

But my experimentation with hallucinogens was never justthe recreational necking of tabs or shrooms at House parties. I'd actuallystudied and read about psychedelics in great detail long before I ever embarkedon physical experimentation. From Ken Kesey to Tom Wolfe, I devoured theliterature.

From anthropological tracts on shamanism to detailed readingof Tim Leary’s experiments at Milbrook in the early 1960s, I understood all aboutcontext (or set and setting), and I researched all sorts of crypto-shamanistic ideasabout the sacramental nature of this kind of drug use. I could have gone on Mastermind with LSD as myspecialist subject long before I ever got my pupils dilated to saucer-size.

It was never just about recreational diversion, even thoughit turned out to be massively enjoyable when I finally did get thrown out ofthat airplane. I was always curious about the different effects of different hallucinogens;from Fly Agaric toadstools to peyote buttons to the little psilocybin ‘pookies’that grew in native Irish abundance every October, I read about and consumed as I found and happened upon.

But the only substance I ever happened on that scared themother-loving bejesus out of me was datura. A friend of mine at University haddiscovered a local pharmacy that was still selling a long-discontinuedpreparation known as Potter’s Asthmatic Cigarettes.

Now straight away, that’s counter-intuitive; who smokes tocure a life-threatening respiratory condition? But I guess they were simplertimes....The active constituent in this dubious preparation was a herb or weedcalled Datura stramonium or Jimson weed. It does have a number of morecolourful monikers should you ever need to avoid it: devil's trumpet, devil'sweed, locoweed, devil's cucumber and Hell's Bells.

Datura is not an hallucinogenic per se, it is a deleriantwhich is to say it blocks certain neurotransmitters in brain and creates an all-encompassingdelirium. You remember those old scare stories that used to be told abouttaking acid? The old urban legends about people taking LSD, thinking they couldfly and then walking out of third floor windows? (Of course if you’re on acidand you think you can fly then it’s not the acid that makes you jump out thewindow; it’s plain stupidity that makes you do it on the third floor instead oftesting your theory first on the ground...)

But with Devil’s weed, you really are so removed fromreality, that the possibility of doing yourself a fatal mischief is all tooreal. Here’s what the US Department of Agriculture says: “Datura intoxicationtypically produces a complete inability to differentiate reality from fantasy(delirium, as contrasted to hallucination); hyperthermia; tachycardia(increased heart-rate); bizarre, and possibly violent behavior; and severemydriasis (pupil dilation) with resultant painful photophobia that can lastseveral days.” It has high enough levels of toxicity that it can also kill you if you're not careful about the dosage.

Historically, datura has had ceremonial and sacramental usein India and the Americas. Europeans have generally had a less than religious experienceof the Devils trumpet. The name ‘Jimson weed’ for example is a corruption of theterm ‘Jamestown Weed’ which derives from its use and abuse in the 17^thcentury English colony in Virginia.

An extract from ‘The History and Present State of Virginia,In Four Parts’ by Robert Beverley (1673-1722) should give some idea of how thisweed’s effects are to be judged: “The plant, was gather'd for a boil'd salad,by some of the soldiers and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect ofwhich was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it forseveral days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart strawsat it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner likea monkey, grinning and making mows [grimaces] at them; a fourth would fondlykiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces with a countenance moreantic than any in a Dutch droll.”

So far so good, but there was a clear downside for the whacked out squaddies: “In thisfrantic condition the soldiers were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroythemselves — though it was observed that all their actions were full ofinnocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they wouldhave wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented.”

And that’s about right...When myself and some of my bravercolleagues had prepared our own broth by breaking up the ‘Asthmatic’ ciggiesinto teapot with some boiling water, the first thing we noticed was the awfultaste and the powerfully astringent quality of our broth. It dried our mouthsout very quickly leaving us with dark green tongues and blackened lips.

I wish I could give a more scientific account of my encounterwith Jimson weed but my memories of the experienceare fragmented, disjointed and disconcerting with most of it seeming to take placeon an inexplicably fog-strewn moor with shadowy faceless figures screaming at me from theperiphery of my vision.

One of my unenhanced colleagues (the de facto control forour experiment) told me we went to a night-club and I narrowly avoided arrestafter trying to attack someone on the dancefloor during a prolonged strob- littechno set.

One of my colleagues went blind for about three days afterwardsand none of us felt too clever for about a week. The looks we were getting fromstrangers on the street were enough to tell us that the devil’s trumpet was notan instrument to be taken up lightly. Potters Asthmatic Cigarettes were taken out of retail circulation shortly afterwards, not that we ever went looking for them again....

Leveson: truth or whitewash?

2011-11-26T16:21:00.001Z

Back in July, under increasing scrutiny for his own dubiousconnections with News International, David Cameron announced a two-part inquiryinvestigating the role of the press and police in the phone-hacking scandal.

The Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethicsof the press opened with preliminary hearings on 04 October. According to itsown website, it will “make recommendations on the future of press regulationand governance consistent with maintaining freedom of the press and ensuringthe highest ethical and professional standards.” Well, we’ll see about that.

Given that theconduct of the press and the actions of tabloid reporters at News Internationalin particular are already the subject of a parliamentary inquiry as well as apolice criminal investigation; one can’t help feeling that the Leveson Inquiryis at best a whitewash, at worst a cynical attempt to muddy the waters.

While the inquiry has already been underway for some timenow, the real juice didn’t start until last week when submissions began to beheard from members of the public and ‘celebrities’ who had been victims ofpress intrusion. Our shameful appetite for schadenfreude and the reliving ofsalacious details was given full vent by the witness list.

Starting with the appalling case of the Dowler family, wewere shown just what our penchant for gossip had lead reporters to do in thename of news-gathering. Or at least that is how the tabloids would spin it. Theguttersnipes who run these newspapers would happily tell us that our taste for scandal and gossip is at the heart of the problem. And there is some truth in that, theproliferation of scandal rags on our newsstands does bear testimony to thisworld view.

But then, if we extrapolate that logic through a little exercisein reductio ad absurdum, the sale ofarms to third-world dictators is actually the fault of the dictators (andperhaps even the people who didn’t have the courage to rebel against them); thearms manufacturers and dealers are only satisfying a clear market need...

The Dowler Affair has in some respects become the benchmarkof just how low the British Press has sunk in its efforts to boost sales. Whenit becomes acceptable to trade on the misery of grieving families and effectivelyto interfere in murder investigations, we are on shaky ground when advocatingpress freedom and self-regulation.

The Inquiry has also inadvertently given fresh perspectives on the world of celebrity and our craven thrall to people who, in the grand schemeof things, are of utterly no consequence. What, for example, gives ElleMcPherson the power to effectively have one of her employees sectioned as an alcoholic?

Sure, ‘the Body’ looks good in a pair of knickers and she’sproved to be a good brood mare for a multi-billionaire hedge-fund manager butdoes that really justify her exercising such power over an employee that theyfeel they are being incarcerated?

The submissions this week of lawyer Graham Shear also offersome grim insights into the workings of the tabloid press; particularly whenthere’s a chance to do a good-old-fashioned exposé of spit-roasting footballers. That old adageabout not letting the truth get in the way of a good story now seems to takethe form of a cost-benefit analysis: will the price of getting it wrong be lessthan the legal costs of a defamation suit?

Former Editor of the News of the World Phil Hall appeared onBBC Breakfast at the weekend and assured the two unquestioning and empty-headed presenters thatsuch practices as phone hacking were not available during his tenure as editor.(Hall was NOTW editor from 1995 to 2000 when such technology apparently didn’texist; do you believe him?)

However Hall did make a telling admission. He offered theclassic tabloid hack justification, the old ‘nonce’ defence. According to Hall,if during his editorship, he’d had access to such technology and he’d beeninformed of the conduct of a paedophile, then he’d have used hacking techniquesto get the story. The implication being that if you disagree with the right ofa newspaper to breach privacy in this instance, you are somehow no better thana kiddy-fiddler yourself.

In other words, Hall admitted that hypothetically, he wasprepared to break the law in order to get a story to sell newspapers, just aslong as he could be pass it off as public interest. Maybe I’m old-fashioned butthe law is the law and breaking it is still a matter for the police and thejudiciary however corrupt and ineffectual they might be.

There are compelling arguments for closer regulation of theUK press, no doubt about it. Certainly, the Press Complaints Commission has shownitself to be either shockingly ill-equipped or worse, wholly reluctant to bringerrant newspapers to heel. The list of dissatisfiedcomplainants to the PCC is long and I would even include myself in that group,having made a complaint against the Daily Telegraph in 2010 for what waseffectively an incitement to hatred.

Of course, there are some hacks out there who’d have us believethat the press is blameless. According to the Sunday Telegraph’s London Editor AndrewGilligan: "In newspaper terms it [The Leveson Inquiry] has written theheadlines before it has done the reporting. What happened at the News of theWorld was clearly not a failure of regulation … it was a failure of the policeto enforce the law.” (That would be the same Andrew Gilligan who couldn’t betrusted to tell the truth in a job application: According to Labour MP Keith Vaz;“I gave Andrew Gilligan a job as an intern [20 years ago]. He was dismissedbecause he had forged references for his CV.”)

But on the other hand, Private Eye Editor Ian Hislop made apoint that seems to have been forgotten in all this self-righteous fulmination.It wasn’t the police, the politicians or even the other branches of the mediathat blew the whistle on this scandal in the first place; it was actually anothernewspaper that initially exposed the seamy and shocking practices. The policeand the political class were happy to collude in all of this until the balloonwent up.

If indeed it turns out that the press loses some of its hard-wonfreedom, it won’t just be the fault of the politicians, the celebrities or thejudiciary. The fourth estate will have no-one but itself to blame for itsfailure to self-regulate. Do we really want to live in a world where super-injunctions become the norm; where justice and freedom of expression are the preserve of the moneyed few?

If the greed, arrogance and hubris of tabloid journalists leadto a curbing of its freedoms and democracy suffers as a consequence of ahamstrung press, we should be realistic about where to point the finger.

This article also appears in Sabotage Times

Deutschland Über All of Y’all

2011-11-22T19:57:00.001Z

In England, it’s not just the Royal Family that’s German.

Frankfurt-upon-Thames?

Just in case you thought those lovable Teutonics were too busyusing the European Central Bank to topple governments in Ireland, Greece, Italyand Spain, the nice people at Development Securities released a report thisweek which suggests that Germany is the biggest investor in the City of London.

The report – Who Ownsthe City 2011 – suggests that a whopping 52% of The Square Mile is owned byforeign investors. Germany remains the largest overseas investor with a 16%share of ownership, followed by the US (10%). Development Securities is aFTSE-listed company and the fact that anybody is buying up London (even those ghastlyEthel Mermans) is good news for them and their shareholders.

Since the 1980s ownership of London’s Square Mile hasinexorably slipped from English hands. In 1980 less than 10% of the City’soffice stock was owned by overseas interests. Foreign ownership passed 25% inthe mid 1990s and 40% in the mid 2000s.

Cameron: The shirt off my back? Of course Angela.

Listen to this for an exercise in turd-polishing on the partof Development Secrurities Chief Executive Michael Marx (no relation of Karl’s, one hopesat least): “London’s attractiveness to foreign investors has clearly beenundeterred by the widespread economic turmoil.” Marx goes on to smugly tell usthat “City offices are perceived to offer quality and transparency...”

That would presumably be the same transparency for whichEnglish financial institutions are renowned the world over...

But the news from Marx isn’t all rosy: “The specialisationof international financial services in London has served to make the fortunesof owners and occupiers intrinsically linked, creating a highly volatile,one-horse town.”

That one horse town is currently being occupied (on twosites so far) by people who don’t own any horses at all and squatting wouldseem a far more attractive alternative to paying rent to the nice Germanlandlords.

Perhaps we should change the name toFrankfurt-upon-Thames...

Cashing in on the protest dollar?

2011-11-21T00:52:00.001Z

Village life goes on tonight at the Occupy London camp in FinsburySquare much as it would in any sleepy English hamlet.

Old Holborn: Jacobite
or agent provocateur?

The local cafe is a focal point where residents gather and gossipover their teas and coffees. There’s a labour exchange, a newspaper, a housingcommittee and last night, there was even a celebrity guest giving a talk justdown the lane in Sun Street.

Self-styled ‘old time alternative comedian’ Mark Thomas was preachingto the converted at the Bank of Ideas: itself a public repossession of anabandoned office block formerly belonging to UBS bank.

Now, some people might view the Mark Thomas talk as acynical ploy to sell his most recent published offering ‘Extreme Rambling’. Theprotest dollar is, after all, the mainstay of the Thomas demographic.

Certainly, the delightfully contrarian blogger Old Holborn was happy to take a pop at the grand old man of situationism-lite. His openingshots went a little like this: “I notice Mark ‘I earn £100K a year’ Thomas isgoing to talk about poverty today at Occupy London. I'm already laughing”.

A further Twitter exchange gives a flavour of Old Holborn’ssparky banter. When Thomas tweeted in his endearingly self-deprecating way thathe would be “showing off at the Bank of Ideas”, Old Holborn enquired, “will yoube selling your new book there?” Thomas responded that he had no plans to do so. Thomas nevertheless did read several excerptsfrom said tome.

I’ve always been a fan of Thomas; in fact, I’d never haveblagged my way into an arms fair had it not been for the inspirational chutzpahof the south London activist and comic. But even Thomas himself would agreethat orthodoxy should be questioned, however well-intentioned it is; precisely becauseit has become received wisdom.

Thomas: pushing product or lending support?

That’s where Old Holborn comes in. His line of attack isthat “crusties and social misfits” have taken over the Occupy London movementfor their own agendas and turned it into an anti Capitalism campaign as opposedto the Occupy movement, which he maintains is against Corporate Greed and hisself-appointed aim is to oppose this hijacking.

Thomas would probably be a supporter of the Occupy movementwhether or not he had a book to promote and besides, as someone in theTwittersphere not unreasonably pointed out, the contrarian Old Holborn is aself-professed libertarian and champion of free enterprise.

Even in the midst of high-minded internationalist idealismyou have the would-be profiteers and the seething begrudgers....All the world’sa village and parish pump politics never change.

Just an average banking conversation....

2011-11-19T20:18:00.001Z

After ten minutes of hold music and being reminded that thebank was recording the conversation....

Wanker Banker: Hello Soapytitwank Banking and MortgageSolutions, can I help you? [Bank name changed to protect the guilty party]

Deptford Croppy: Hello, I’d like to know why staff at twobranches of your bank told me last week that my direct debit mortgage paymentwent through; yet you then sent me a letter explaining that my payment had notbeen received and that you were charging me for the failed payment.

Wanker Banker: Ah yes sir, that’s because there wereinsufficient funds to cover the transaction, you had reached your overdraftlimit.

Deptford Croppy: OK....that still doesn’t really answer myquestion. Why was I told that the payment went through?

Wanker Banker: I’m sorry sir, I can’t answer that but yourpayment failed because you had reached your overdraft limit.

Deptford Croppy: But I have a statement here in front of me that clearly showsthat you have regularly allowed an unauthorised overdraft on my account well beyondthat agreed limit when direct debits were due. I mean surely, when my mortgageand my current account are with the same bank, that shouldn’t be a problemshould it? You are both from Soapytitwank aren’t you?

Wanker Banker: Yes sir we are, but retail and mortgage atSoapytitwank are separate entities....

Deptford Croppy: You mean like the Holy Trinity?

Wanker Banker: Excuse me sir?

Deptford Croppy: You know, the Father, Son and HolyGhost...is that how it works at Soapytitwank?

Wanker Banker: ........

Deptford Croppy: Would it be fair to say that you’ve noticeda pattern of late payments and now you’re trying to make me default?

Wanker Banker: I’m sorry sir, we don’t have a policy ofmaking customers default—

Deptford Croppy: You mean you’re different to the otherbanks I’ve researched who target struggling customers and pressurise them into defaultsor costly refinancing? As we’re on the subject of banking integrity, I noticed Soapytitwank made a significant ‘goodwill payment’ to me a coupleof months ago...In my experience goodwill payments are usually made as hushmoney in the hope that the recipient will not pursue more costly and profitablelegal action against the bank. Why exactly was that payment made and bear in mind, I’m askingas a customer and as a journalist, so you are on the record...

Wanker Banker: Are you calling as a customer or as ajournalist sir?

Deptford Croppy: I’m calling as both, I am both ‘entities’.Unlike your good self, when I call the bank, I choose not to distinguish between Croppy thecustomer and Croppy the journalist....I was reminded at the start of theconversation that Soapytitwank would be recording our conversation, well, so amI...

Wanker Banker: Wouldyou please hold sir.....[Followed by another ten minutes of Vivaldi....] Hellosir, I can give you the information you require as a customer but I have been instructed totell you that I am not authorised to give interviews to reporters....

Deptford Croppy: So I can have the information once I tellyou I’m a customer but you can’t give it to me if I, as a customer, say I’m ajournalist by trade...It’s okay mate, I think you’ve told me enough....When yougo to work, do you get there on a tiny bicycle wearing a red nose and bigfloppy shoes?

Hib-hop Paddywhack

2011-11-13T20:35:00.001Z

‘There’s no way I’m riding you unless I’m wrecked on bags of glue’

'If you're looking for a ride, I've a horse outside'

With hooks like that, I was always going to be putty in the hands of The Rubberbandits. You may not have heard of them yet if you’re reading this in the UK, but don’t worry; you soon will.

If you like your satire overlayed with smoove R’n’B chops and delivered by scallies wearing plastic shopping bags like balaclavas or alternatively; you like your hip-hop informed by the satirical stylings of old-school Irish absurdist Flann O’Brien, then your prayers have been answered because Limerick City’s finest are in full effect, currently touring the UK and promoting their upcoming pilot for Channel 4.

To be fair, poor old Mother Ireland has never been known as a hip-hop heartland. Sure, there have been Irish American acts like the House of Pain and even quality Dublin artists like Scary Éire back in the day but the Rubberbandits brand of ‘Hib-hop’ refreshes the parts that other acts just can’t (or wouldn't dare) reach.

My first listen to the inimitable Blindboy Boat Club and Mr. Chrome came in the form of ‘Up the Ra’. According to the kind of musos who write about this sort of thing for a living, Up the Ra, “employs the literary device of the unreliable narrator to lambast the Irish phenomenon of armchair republicanism.” Me? I just thought it was hilarious. Hot Press magazine (Ireland’s would-be ‘Rolling Stone’) described them as “this generation’s finest all-singing, all-dancing arch-satirists”.

What started out as the recording of lairy prank calls first became an Irish internet phenomenon and then a household name. Their single ‘Horse Outside’ was only denied the 2010 Christmas Number one slot in Ireland by X-factor’s Matt Cardle (go figure).

Gay racist?

Playing to a festival crowds at the Oxegen festival in July, the Rubberbandits celebrated mass with a cast of altar boy dancers, a live band and a James Brown impersonator. According to the promoters, it was the biggest crowd for an opening act in the history of the event.

When they were awarded an IFTA (Irish Film and Television Academy Award) for Television Moment of the Year in February, they chose to give their acceptance speech from "the moon".
Channel 4 clearly has high hopes for the Rubberbandits and has commissioned a pilot to be directed by Father Ted director Declan Lowney. 'Black Guy (I Need A Black Guy In My Gang)' was posted on Channel 4’s website on 11 November with further sketches aired online every Thursday for six weeks until December 15.

The Rubberbandits UK tour started on Sunday 13 November and they play London on 27 November, chalk it down...

This article also appears in Sabotage Times

Picking lobsters out of Jayne Mansfield’s bum? Chance would be a fine thing...

2011-11-12T23:42:00.001Z

The Worst Job I ever had?...Christ on a bike. Where do Istart? I suppose I could always go into the minutiae of passive aggression and thinly-veiled sociopathy that characterised much of my white collar life and it’s very tempting.

That way, I could talk about the Christmas office partywhere my Secret Santa was one of the company directors and his gift to me was a spud wrapped in a small Union Jack. Or even about the sneering line-manager who asked me if thought I was doing them a favour by coming into work during a family bereavement. I’ve always marvelled at how much deeply unpleasant behaviour people put up with in an office context.

Jayne Mansfield: a lovely girl
but basically, she suffered from
what is known in the medical trade
as 'lobsters-up-the-arsehole'...

While these environments are thoroughly depressing andalmost certainly damaging to your mental health in the long run, I’ve come tothe conclusion that this is how many people actually prefer to work. I guess Ijust lack the corporate killer instinct when it comes to screwing over my colleagues(ie other human beings with families and feelings) for the sake of a kiss-my-arsetitle or a few dollars more. So in that regard, I guess it’s not you, it’s me.

My attitude to work has always been simple: I contract withyou for my labour or expertise for a given period of time and in return forthat, you pay me. I’ll take pride in good workmanship whether it’s roofing orreporting and if I do the job well; you either give me more money or longer holidays.

I’m not interested in workplace politics, I don’t want tohave smoke blown up my ass with fancy-schmancy titles or award presentationsand I certainly don’t want to lick arse or be at the mercy of a petty tyrantline manager. You don’t own me but I’lldo my job whether I like you or not because that’s the professional way. However, if you do want my respect or loyaltyas an employee then you better earn it. And that’s why I try not to work in offices any more.

So if I’m not really office material, I can’t really besurprised if the places are toxic to me. I would therefore rule out the white-collarroles on my resumé in thatquest for the worst job I ever had...

I’d have to go back to the summer of 1988 in search of thatparticular superlative. One Friday lunch-timewhen I was on a concrete gang in the Isle of Dogs, I bumped into an old schoolfriend who was a dumper driver on site and he took me to down to a pub near theriver where they had strippers on.

As a good-looking housewife danced, disrobed and played witha hairbrush, we swallowed four pints and Eamonn told me about a mate of hisdown in Bermondsey who was looking for someone to work in his paper recyclingplant. The money was better and I’d be guaranteed a lift to work, he said.

The following Monday, a red XR3i Cabriolet pulled up besideme on Deptford Broadway. I was picked up by two sullen young men intheir early twenties. Daryl and Lee were brothers and the plant belonged totheir old man. There wasn’t much conversation thrown my direction so I was gladit was a short journey.

We arrived at the plant, which was a big unit in the middleof a light industrial estate by the arches of the London Bridge viaduct. I wasintroduced to Arthur the line manager as ‘Fat Eamonn’s mate'. Arthur was a stocky weehard nut from Rotherhithe who straight away took to calling me Seamus O’Semtex(I kid you not). “Take your bombs with you there now Seamus and I’ll show youwhere you are on the line.”

I followed him into the warehouse which was dominated by amachine that stood as tall as a terraced house, back and centre. A wideconveyor belt, with men working on either side of it, ran at waist height formost of the length of the building, before sweeping steeply upwards to drop througha chute fifteen feet up in the front of this massive mechanical paper shredder.

The job was straight forward; paper was shredded and baledfor recycling according to varying grades and thicknesses. I was quickly shownthe grades and told to get on with it. Most of the paper came from localprinters as rejects; where the colours had bled, the print had blurred or there’dbeen a kink in the roll when the printers were threading it through the rollers.

The first thing I noticed was the paper cuts. This can be aminor irritation when you’re an office bod but on an industrial scale, it canbe very problematic. Because the grade of the paper was determined as much bytouch as sight; the wearing of gloves was impossible. Each passing ream on the conveyor belt couldbe the one that bit deep into the soft creases of your fingers. Sweat salt continuallystung the little lacerations.

The other thing I noticed pretty quickly was the content ofthe printed material being shredded. Some of it was from technical manuals andtrade journals but a huge amount of it was pure filth. Jazz Magazines, Artpamphlets and grumblemags; a smorgasbord of porn, all passing me by on aconveyor belt like a mucky Yo Sushi. Nowat first, I didn’t pay too much attention to this but I must admit that fromtime to time, I did snatch a glimpse or too (and vice versa).

My fat morose colleague along the line was not so bashful. When a particularly juicy batch trundled by,he grabbed a fistful and shoved it up his jumper. He then made some threadbare excuseabout last night’s Ruby and shuffled off to the bog.

The heat in the warehouse was unbearable and the bales ofpaper sucked every bit of moisture out of the still stale air. When my colleaguearrived back on the line, I could see a line of perspiration glistening onhis top lip and I breathed through my nose so I wouldn’t have to smell his stalewank-sweat.

I might have been able to put up with that but there wasworse to come. The machine broke down occasionally, when the feed on the beltwas too heavy or someone had neglected to remove wooden pallets from theproduction line.

When the huge shredder clogged, there was only one thing forit; send someone up the conveyor belt to climb down into the machine to workthe great steel wheels free. I was sent up with an old hand to watch how it wasdone.

Once we dropped down into the gloom, I could make out six coggedwheels, each was about a metre in diameter and a quarter as thick. I’m not sure how fast they turned but I knew theyhad enough RPM to turn me a big pink smoothie. All I could think was ‘Dear God, please don’t let them forget we’re inhere and turn the shredder back on.’ We set to work dislodging the giant paper jamand when the wheels were free enough for us to tread a complete revolution, weclimbed back out. All in a day’s work.

What happened the next day is what made me quit. It startedout business as usual; paper cuts and fuckbooks. Then there was a sudden terrific clatter fromthe shredder. A sheet of steel about four foot square shot out of themachine, arcing across the warehouse before clattering to the floor about a yardaway from me. The flying metal had been part of an awning which covered thewheel housing. It had come loose and fallen into the works, to be spat back outjust as quickly.

I didn’t go back after lunch. The next morning, I was downat Archway Tube Station, looking for a start again with a concrete gang.

This article also appears in Sabotage Times

Smokin’ Joe Frazier: the shadow cast over Ali’s twilight

2011-11-10T03:00:00.006Z

This article also appears in Sabotage Times.

Tributes continue to roll in for former world heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier who died on Tuesday (08 November). The 67-year old, who succumbed to a liver cancer diagnosed only a month ago, was an exceptional fighter, even among the greats from a golden age of pugilism.

Those three bruising showdowns with Muhammad Ali in the early 1970s, culminating in the epic ‘Thrilla in Manila’ in ’75, weren’t just boxing matches, they were world events in their own right. That final battle in the tropics is often seen as the axis upon which the lives of these two fighters turned.

Joe Frazier was born in Beaufort South Carolina in 1944. In his autobiography, he recalls the events that set him on the road heavyweight championship. His family owned a TV set and their house was where friends and neighbours would gather to watch the greats of another golden age of boxing: Sugar Ray and the two Rockies (Marciano and Graziano).

At one of these gatherings, his Uncle Israel remarked on Joe's stocky build. "That boy there...that boy is gonna be another Joe Louis". That was enough for the young Joe. The next day, he got an old burlap sack and filled it with rags, corncobs, a brick in the middle and Spanish moss that grew on trees all over Beaufort County. He then tied a rope to it and hung the makeshift heavybag from an oak tree in the backyard where the mules were kept.

Following an altercation with a white landowner, Frazier left South Carolina behind at the age of 15, first for New York, before settling in the City of Brotherly Love. Frazier's amateur career saw him take the Middle Atlantic Golden Gloves heavyweight championships in 1962, 1963 and 1964. He went on to represent the USA in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and won the country’s only boxing gold.

Frazier turned professional in 1965 and paid his dues throughout the late 60s. Trainer Eddie Futch came on board in 1966 and honed the fighter’s bob-and-weave defensive style. When Frazier and Ali had met in 1967, Ali was still champion and Joe Frazier had 14 wins all by way of knockout. Ali was characteristically dismissive and maintained Smokin’ Joe would never stand a chance of "whipping" him; not even in his wildest dreams.

When their first Madison Square Garden encounter was being promoted in 1971, it was hyped as ‘The Fight of the Century’ and it more than delivered on that bombastic billing. Tickets for this Garden showdown were apparently at such a premium that Frank Sinatra had to double up as a Life photographer just so he could get a seat ringside.

Consummate vaudvillean that he was, the Louisville Lip’s pre-fight trash talk saw Frazier being mocked as an ‘Uncle Tom’. Having been stripped of the World Title for refusing to undertake military service in Vietnam, Ali played this card secure in the knowledge that he was still considered by many to be the legitimate champion. Frazier, who was anything but an Uncle Tom, by and large kept his counsel and his cool.

Smokin’ Joe did his talking in the ring that night. For much of the fight, it was in the balance but it was also clear that Ali shipping a lot more leather than he was used to. Joe came forward relentlessly and in the 11^th, one of Frazier’s trademark ‘heatseeker’ left hooks took the sting out of Ali and marked the turning tide. It was the same sledgehammer hook that delivered the coup de grace in the 15^th.

In Frazier’s own words: “When he went down, we were both dead tired. Fifteen rounds; that’s how long we’d been fighting. And the only thing going through my mind when he got up was what was going through my mind all night: throw punches – just throw punches.” Ali survived the count and he might still have been standing at the final bell but Smokin’ Joe was still the Champion when the scorecards came in. Both men were taken to hospital afterwards.

Frazier lost his title to George Foreman in Kingston in January 1973. After six knockdowns in two rounds, Frazier also lost his undefeated record.

Smokin’ Joe got another tilt at Ali in January 1974 back at the Garden, this time in a 12-round contest for the North American title. As was so often the case between these fighters, a lot of the drama took place outside the ring. The famous TV studio brawl that took place in the run-up to this fight was almost certainly the result of Ali’s constant goading of his opponent. In the end, Ali won on points; ahead on all the judges’ scorecards. But Smokin’ Joe certainly didn’t make it easy and Ali spent a lot of time in a grappling waltz with his nemesis.

Frazier sucked it up, went back to the Gym and found his form again. Later that same year, he fought Jerry Quarry for the second time and decisively stopped the Irish-American five rounds in. Their first outing had been named Ring Magazine’s fight of the year in 1969 and saw the Great White Hope stopped in the 7^th.

March 1975 saw Frazier travelling to Melbourne, to fight Jimmy Ellis, from whom he had originally taken the WBA title in 1970. He knocked the Kentuckian out in nine rounds and that put him in contention for title shot against Ali who’d regained his title on October 30, 1974 by defeating champion George Foreman in "The Rumble in the Jungle" in Kinshasa, Zaire.

The stage was set for the Thrilla in Manila on 1 October 1975. The intensity of this fight still crackles. Watch it again if you don’t believe me. Frasier rolls in low, bobbing and coming forward all the time, looking to land that killer hook on the 33-year old Champion’s body. Meanwhile Ali keeps going for the head and before long, Frazier eyes are far beyond the help of the cornerman’s iron.

It is often told that sometime around seven rounds in, the two fighters went into a clinch, both taking a respite from the toe-to-toe action. “They told me Joe Frazier was washed up,” said Ali. Frazier replied; “They lied, pretty boy”.

By the 14^th they had fought each other to a standstill and in the battle of wits between the two corners. The story goes that Ali was ready to quit but in the end, Eddie Futch, one of the fight game's great trainers, made the decision for his man. “Sit down, son, it’s all over,” Futch reputedly told Frazier. “But no one will ever forget what you did here today.”

Ali himself described that fight as the closest he ever felt to death. Certainly the attrition of that encounter changed both fighters and neither ever again recaptured that blazing intensity. "We went to Manila as champions, Joe and me, and we came back as old men," reflected Ali.

Joe Frazier never quite forgave Muhammad Ali for the taunting he had endured during those years of rivalry. The showmanship that coined phrases like “It will be a killa, a chilla and a thrilla when I get the gorilla in Manila,” had a downside for Frazier, who would later tell journalists about how his children suffered the same schoolyard nickname.

For Frazier, there was always going to be unfinished business with Ali and there is a lingering sense that Frazier never quite got the closure he wanted from his opponent.

To give Ali his due, he has been generous in his praise of Frazier: “Of all the men I fought, the roughest and the toughest was Joe Frazier. He brought out the best in me and the best fight we fought was in Manila. Joe Frazier is a good man. I couldn’t have done it without him and he couldn’t have done what he did without me. And if God ever calls me to a holy war, I want Joe Frazier fighting beside me.”