The Banality of Evil

“I shared a platform with David Duke, who was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a totally non-violent one by the way.” Nick Griffin, BNP Leader

 “Which ‘bit too far’, Nick Griffin, did Adolf Hitler do, was it in gassing the Jews?” Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat MP

And so it came to pass. The most loathsome, vile representation of the Id in the political sphere, the British National Party, were allowed onto ‘Question Time‘. Nick Griffin, a personification of insecurity and hate, was rightly mugged by the liberal, i.e. normal, political establishment who find his views abhorrent. But early indications from opinion polls show the BNP may have gained support despite being made look simultaneously ridiculous and sinister. The World hasn’t collapsed since Thursday but something significant has happened: have the BNP gained a massive publicity coup or is this just a flash in the pan?

The BNP is a direct successor to Oswald Mosley’s fascist Black Shirts of the 1930’s. They were avowedly racist then and are proudly racist now. Similar to the KKK in their witless championing of Anglo-Saxon blood purity, the British National Party is a thuggish rump of ignorant and violent (mostly) men. That’s why their leader, Cambridge educated Nick Griffin, is such a quixotic figure for many in the media. From his street-fighting days as a young fascist, Griffin endeavoured to give his party a veneer of respectability in order to become a British Fuhrer. The BNPs still full of knuckle-dragging thugs, but the language has been modified and the party has made big advances in some White working-class areas. And in June, Griffin was returned as an MEP and the BBC felt compelled to allow him greater access to the public airways.

The hype surrounding the appearance of Griffin was extraordinary. Journalists and politicians agonised over whether the apparently media-savvy Griffin would bamboozle or obfuscate his way through the BBC current affairs flag-ship. Would the panel be strong enough to cope with Griffin’s slippery language? Would the mainstream parties be hoisted on their own petard regarding their views on immigration? How would the BNP capitalise on their primetime exposure? (they certainly saw the invite as a huge opportunity, even having a ‘count-down’ clock on their website). Hundreds protested outside the BBC prior to his appearance; there were the usual Socialist Worker party members in attendance but also others appalled by what they saw as the BBC’s naivety in asking a fascist onto ‘Question Time’.

It was a combative and articulate panel that took Griffin on with no-holds-barred. The audience members were in turns scathing and mocking of Griffin’s confused, ridiculous propositions. It was a joy to behold his arguments being demolished by reason and not on the streets. But…in their very efforts to confront the BNPs boots and fists politics, the BBC, Chris Huhne, Bonnie Greer, Baroness Warsi and Jack Straw did to, like any well-prepared debating team, have co-ordinated their strategy. The bulk of the Middle-Class viewership who make up the ‘Question Time’ audience, will not have considered this an ethical issue; why be fair to a party that would abolish democracy if it was ever elected? However, to the prejudiced and uneducated white BNP target voter, it would have looked like liberal ‘them’ ganging up on the oppressed White ‘us’.

Griffin constantly lied and was at times inarticulate but he did score some points. The Conservatives might like to claim that ‘there are many, many people out there who vote for the BNP who are not racist’ but that’s not true. They vote BNP because they know what they’re getting. Mix up some quotes from the Daily Mail, Daily Express and BNP then try to spot the difference. There IS a significant, nasty, small-Englander/racist minority in England that needs to be confronted, not pandered too by Labour and the Tories vying to implement tougher and tougher immigration measures. The BNP and their voters are primitive people and need to be ostracised, not courted.

The paradox about free speech is that we allow those who would abuse freedom access to the media. Sinn Fein were barred from the BBC because it was feared that allowing them on would give them and the IRA ‘the oxygen of publicity’. Well it did. Sinn Fein are now the main Nationalist party in Northern Ireland. But they have changed significantly since the broadcasting ban and are now the Peace Process’s biggest advocate. Broadcasters arrogantly said that Sinn Fein’s arguments would be exposed once censorship was lifted. Some of them say the same about the BNP. Lets hope that they’re right. The prospects of the rise in racist attacks, the poisoning of Britain’s racial relations and the BNP holding real power are too frightening for all decent people. Let’s also hope the audience member who said the following is right too; ‘all you’re thinking of doing is trying to poison politics and poison the minds of people in this country, the vast majority in this audience find what you stand for to be completely disgusting’.

Stick It Where The Sun Don’t Shine

Like a dog returning to its vomit, the news that ‘The Sun’ has switched from Labour to the Conservatives shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. There is, however, significant totemic value in the move and spite in the timing, coming as it does hours after a much better-than-usual speech from a battle-scarred Gordon Brown. Its already been referred to as the final nail in the coffin, conferring huge power on this graceless tabloid.

1997 seems like an age ago; and in political terms, it was. The New Labour inner sanctum spent much of the 1990s sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and News International. There were some sound electoral reasons for doing this; Murdoch, like some latter day William Randolph Hearst had successfully demonised Neil Kinnock during the 1992 election, most notably by asking the last person to leave Britain to put out the lights. John Major’s shock win and ‘The Sun’s treatment of Kinnock, left the party shell-shocked. This was the election that got away. How could you fight a Tory Press?

You fought the Tory Press, it turned out, by abasing yourself at News International management conferences, taking ‘The Sun’ seriously as political commentators, diluting that whole awkward redistribution rhetoric and using the Super Soaraway Sun as a dirty means to an end. Cherie Blair may not have wanted the rag in her house but that didn’t stop her husband praising its proprietor, trimming on hugely important issues such as the Euro and making New Labour a party of an impossibly broad church. There was room for artists and city lawyers, hedge fund managers and teachers, miners and the CBI. When ‘The Sun’ plumped for New Labour in 1997, you knew the election was in the bag.

There was a significant honeymoon period between Blair and the paper; when ‘The Sun’ decides it likes you it becomes nauseatingly, monosyllabically sycophantic.  It backed the Blair/Brown agenda of light-touch, i.e. hapless, financial regulation, non-interference in the media-market and Alistair Campbell’s disastrous crusade against the BBC (the implications of which could hobble the organisation for a generation under a Tory administration). It supported the Iraq war with gusto and lashed into successive Tory leaders. But Murdoch, always loath to back a loser, followed Cameron’s compassionate Conservatism spiel from the start; he saw another Blair in the making. He turned against Brown with the same sense of cynicism that saw him plump for Blair; Murdoch has always been ‘politically loose’ and a King-Maker-manqué.

News International papers hook into the Murdoch family memes; if you want to stay an editor in the empire, you speak with your master’s voice. ‘The Sun’ and the ‘Daily Mail’ became the must-influence newspapers for New Labour – how fickle of the former and naive of the latter to expect any permanence in the relationship. Little England is alive and well in these illiterate and self-induced anger-filled publications. Cameron’s already aligned himself with dangerous extremists on the European stage; ‘The Sun’ will push him along the same disastrous course. For Labour, its time to say good riddance to bad rubbish and use News International to define what they are not. Nobody expects Gordon Brown to win the next election but Labour supporters do expect the party to at least go down fighting.

The good people of Liverpool have lived without ‘The Sun’ for the last twenty years; Labour Party members now have a chance to contrast themselves and their values against those of Britain’s Brightest Daily. Peter Mandelson feels betrayed – well, at least he spoke to News International executives in language they understand.

The West is Best

‘Every once in a while… every once in a while, there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren’t very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that’s way too big for ten words. I’m the President of the United States, not the President of the people who agree with me. And by the way, if the left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.’ President Josiah Bartlet

‘The West Wing’ was an amazing experiment in smart TV. It was a series of political seminars on governing and should be compulsory viewing for anyone in the Obama administration. It was a throwback to great liberal TV shows such as ‘Lou Grant’, ‘Cagney and Lacey’ and ‘Quincy’ – all shows not afraid to wear their ‘issued-based drama’ hearts on their sleeves. It was also a reminder of the power of words and the magic of rhetoric – that sometimes, big things are best said in a big way.

Much of the drama’s strength comes from its characters and the actors who play them. Martin Sheen, warm, cerebral yet steely as President Bartlet, the apex of the pyramid; Leo McGarry, the tough but loveable Chief of Staff, played by the superb and sadly missed John Spencer; CJ Cregg, the wonderful Press Secretary, a role performed with such aplomb by Allison Janney; Josh – the dynamic, obsessive and idealistic Deputy to Leo and Toby, the troubled, curmudgeonly, driven conscience of the series. What administration wouldn’t be privileged to have such a team in place? What state wouldn’t be fortunate to have them governing their country? From the ever loyal Charlie Young to always wise Dolores Landingham, the show had a troop of memorable characters portrayed by a superb ensemble cast.

’The West Wing’ was almost painfully reverential towards the idea of a Just Ruler, i.e. Bartlett. But this idealism was one of the show’s enduring attractions. This fictional White House contrasted painfully with the Bush years: a President committed to ethical foreign policy, an administration willing to ‘Let Bartlet be Bartlet’, one that wasn’t afraid to look and sound intelligent and one which had an approach to the Middle-East that few Presidents have been able to take. The show’s creator, Aaron Sorkin, provided his viewers with an impressive political education combined with wit, humour and pathos. The programme was rarely dull and mostly left the viewer feeling optimistic about how problems can be solved and things changed for the better.

Yet in contrast to this sense of optimism and idealism, the show addressed the realism behind the ideal. The Bartlet White House took opinion polls on everything; it highlighted the politics of personal destruction and the also the ruthlessness involved in wielding power. Bartlet has to routinely weigh issues and decide on the greater good and, often, this is what’s electorally doable rather than what’s right. Leo sometimes operates like an old-style Chicago Boss, sending out his ward-soldiers to marshal the machine for a vote. Josh knows that compromises can betray election pledges; in Mario Cuomo’s phrase, repeated by Leo, ‘We campaign in poetry and govern in prose’.

Issues are at the heart of each episode. To give just two instances:  In ‘Take this Sabbath Day’, Bartlet has Old Testament-like power in deciding whether to commute a federally imposed death-sentence. It’s an award-winning summation of all the moral and ethical considerations around Capital Punishment. Bartlet’s team and the President are largely opposed to the Death Penalty but all know that Democrats since Dukakis have to take the pledge and support state-sponsored execution. The President is still a good man after making his decision but political implications outweigh moral and religious beliefs when the ultimate choice is made.  In ‘Posse Comitatus’ Bartlet considers the morality of a secret military operation to assassinate a terrorist working for an ostensibly friendly Gulf State. In a post 9-11 World, the scriptwriters are conscious of not making ‘The West Wing’ like ‘24’ – anything does not go…but some things, do.

As a series, ‘The West Wing; made us look to the better angels of natures. It regarded political leaders with respect, not ridicule. It argued that democratic change is possible, not illusory. And it said that when it comes to vision, the ability to transform society for the better and the role of powerful, democratic institutions, the era of Big Government is no longer over.

Moon Landing – Beyond the Infinite

It was forty years ago today that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. The plethora of commemorative and retrospective articles and documentaries all rightly remember this day as a great landmark in the development of mankind. By looking at the culture, mores and achievements of 1969, we can ask ourselves what our priorities are now for how we treat each other as nations, our spirit of discovery, our protecting the environment, indeed everything. The Apollo Programme holds a mirror up to where we are today and where we want to go in the future.

Space and politics go hand in hand, often murkily. No cold war, no space race. No Nazi V2s, no leaving Earth’s orbit. No Mutually Assured Destruction, no giant rocketry. The launching of Sputnik and Gagarin’s spaceflight were remarkable achievements for what was a third world country calling itself the second world. But the US military, political and scientific establishment had no real way of knowing just how poor the USSR really were – they just looked at the optics and were dazzled. Kennedy’s mission statement to ‘go to the moon and the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard’ rallied a nation against a straw-man supported by nukes and limitless tanks and soldiers.

And yet a huge amount of idealism lay behind the Apollo Programme. Over 500,000 people were involved in putting the first men on the moon. The astronauts may have been military men but, in the words of every 50s ‘B-Movie’ that caught the popular imagination, ‘they came in peace’. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were 1960s Philosopher Warriors, explorers but not conquistadores, men of action but also poets. The fact that the three Apollo 11 crew have had their many ups and downs as in any human life does not take away from the courage they showed forty years ago in travelling further than man had ever travelled before. They were all too human but still heroic individuals.

The International Space Station has shown what nations can do when they co-operate rather than fight and compete. The growing influence of the BRIC countries, (Brazil, Russia, India and China) means that space has become a community rather than a hegemony. We rely on satellites launched in the former Soviet Union or in French Guiana to make calls to each other around the World on hand-held devices foreseen on ‘Star Trek’ in that decade of dreaming. Space development should be embraced, not feared. Environmentalism owes so much to the ‘Earth Rising’ photo from the Moon; we only realised how fragile our planet was by travelling outside it.

But there are huge negatives too. Arming and militarising space makes life more and not less dangerous. The billions of dollars spent on the space programme need to be balanced against poverty and starvation still all too prevalent on Earth. There were protests in 1969 about the cost of the Space Programme; there are objections now that we can not afford to go to Mars, to do ‘the other things’. Yet peaceful endeavours beyond the atmosphere may be crucial to making nations work with, not against each other.

Brown’s Blues

Poor old Gordon Brown; it seems like he can’t do anything right. Labour’s panacea to an unpopular Tony Blair has generated even more antipathy then his controversial predecessor. Less than two years into the job, Brown could end up having served one of the shortest reigns as Prime Minister. Yes, he bears responsibility for Labour’s disastrous polling and cataclysmic electoral performances but he’s been unlucky in his political fortunes too and this is fatal for any politician.

Westminster has been reeling from an expenses scandal that shows no sign of ending. MPs have been claiming for duck-ponds, moat cleaning, second homes no-where near their constituencies, teddy bears and trouser presses. It’s been a shaming experience for a parliament that’s always seen itself as a cut above those corrupt continentals. Yet it’s Labour who are getting the blame more than the Conservatives for this petty corruption and greed. The two main parties have been up to their necks in milking the system, yet Brown is feeling most of the heat.

Most of the problem lies in the contrast in style and perception between Brown and David Cameron. Brown’s cerebral, Cameron’s verbal: one is tainted as ‘ancien regime’, the other represents the new. Cameron is seen as a man of action, Brown as hesitant. This may not be the reality but they are the perceptions. ‘Dour Scotsman’ is proving to be an impossible label for the Prime Minister to shake off.

Up until comparatively recently, Gordon Brown was starting to make a come back. His success at macro-management of economic responses to the global recession and his organisation and direction of the G20 Summit was garnering him plaudits in the international press and brought him to within five/six points of the Tories. He was winning support as someone who didn’t panic during a crisis and played the long game. And then the smallest of incidents tripped him up. Two of his political cronies were uncovered plotting to spread rumours on the web about Tory opponents. The mood of the Press changed overnight. All momentum from the G20 was lost and the ‘Daily Telegraph’ started printing story after story about sleaze in parliament. His fight back collapsed.

The Obama factor has had a negative impact on Gordon Brown too. Obama is young, vibrant and hip in European and British eyes. Brown is not. The contrast is cruel but then politics has never been about fairness. The much vaunted hope that some of Obama’s charisma would rub-off on Brown has not come to fruition; David Cameron, product of an elite background and education looks more likely to benefit from the ‘outsider’ anti-establishment candidate tag than Brown does.

Brown shares a large part of the blame for the depth of the economic recession in the UK. His reliance on ‘light-touch’ and ‘Principle-Based’ regulation, i.e. minimal regulation, had disastrous consequences for the taxpayer after the City gorged itself on its freedoms. A large part of his growth model proved to be illusory – he will leave Britain in debt for years to come and with social justice, a sine-qua non of the Labour Party, as far away in some sectors as it was in 1997 when the Tories were booted out. Yet, Bill Clinton and other ‘Third-Way’ politicians were believed in the same creed and acted in the same manner. He was a product of, as well as a maker of, his times.
The forthcoming European parliamentary elections will see Labour hammered. British voters will swing to the fringe parties, including the fascist BNP. And there will be calls for a swift coup to replace Brown – his allies in the ‘Guardian’ have deserted him. He is in a very lonely place. If Labour tanks spectacularly, the sharks will move in for the kill.

Brown has come out fighting but it’s the fighting of a man being battered against the ropes. His proposed parliamentary reforms may have merits but the electorate doesn’t want to listen. His re-shuffle will replace key personnel with new faces or familiar faces in new roles. He is preparing his responses to the expected electoral calamity. Gordon Brown is no more corrupt than Tony Blair, John Major or any Prime Minister before him; he runs the risk, however, of having his administration scoured with muck of political venality.

After the Ball is over…

‘Meltdown – The End of the Age of Greed’

Paul Mason Verso £7.99, pp198

According to Alvin Toffler, by now, workers in developed countries would be the most secure they’d ever been, enjoying benefits and luxuries our 1950s forbears could only have dreamt about. Yet here we are in 2009 trying to stave off the worst economic crash since the Great Depression. What gives? Paul Mason, BBC2 Newsnight’s Economics Editor, charts this rise and fall of a global gilded age in his new book ‘Meltdown – The End of the Age of Greed’.

Much of this wealth was illusory: ‘George Soros has described the whole process as the bursting of a ‘superbubble’ built up over a thirty year period and driven by credit expansion, globaliation and deregulation. ‘It is’, writes Soros, ‘not business as usual but the end of an era’.Mason compares the events of September 2008 when Lehman’s collapsed and the world’s financial system stood on a precipice as akin to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa – immediately devastating with long-term destructive effects.

Mason’s trip through the chaos covers familiar and new ground. We see how the slicing-and-dicing of debt into tradable instruments, ‘light-touch’ regulation, greedy short-termism, fraud, the ‘shadow-banking system’ and over-dependence on the financial sector has lead us to the mess we’re in today. Blame lies not just with ‘any banker found to have broken the law [but also with] regulators, politicians and the media who failed to hold them up to scrutiny’.

Mason’s portrait of one the boom’s chief architect’s, Alan Greenspan, is simultaneously humorous and frightening. A follower of the nutty Ayn Rand, Greenspan wrote (admiringly) of ‘Atlas Shrugged’: ‘Justice is unrelenting, Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfilment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason should perish as they should.’ But by October 2008, Atlas himself shrugged when he admitted to Congress that he had uncovered a ‘flaw’ in his free-market economic model as Banks collapsed and Wall Street nose-dived.

The Chicago School and Washington Consensus world-view was entrenched by the ‘Third Way’ progressive movements in the 1990s. ‘It was the Clinton and Blair administrations who designed the light-touch banking regulations that unleashed financial mania’. Selecting archive footage of Gordon Brown praising ‘Principle’ based regulation is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. President Obama will be anxious not have any similar newsreel haunting him in the future.

The world has changed so much in the last eighteen months: ‘yet the policymakers are still trapped, still exhibiting a lack of resolve that may prove fatal, and an attachment to the old ideas and strategies’ Mason states that ‘Basically, neoliberalism is over: as an ideology, as an economic model. Get used to it and move on’. Governments and their advisors are, however, still feeling their way desperately through the fog.

Mason recommends implementing some key ideas from the work of US economist Hyman Minsky. He stated that ‘there was a tendency for the finance system to move from the hedge situation, where everything is under control, to the speculative and Ponzi situations, where they are precarious’. His prescriptions have been partly adopted in some jurisdictions – nationalised banks and insurance: other proposals will grate with the financial establishment – greater regulation, strict limits on speculation and vigorous anti-trust enforcement.

As Mason rightly observes, ‘the jargon used by bankers, politicians and journalists can be exasperating’. He is careful to avoid finance-speak shorthand and this book is an accessible guide to an often-complicated subject. And as with any tricky issue, humour makes the medicine go down: while this is a serious work, Mason twice name checks ‘The Simpsons’. He adds to the growing ‘Crash’ literature with this highly informative, authoritative and stylish contribution. When it comes to a ‘buy, sell or hold’ recommendation, ‘Meltdown – The End of the Age of Greed’ is definitely a ‘buy’.

Looped In

‘In the Loop’, an outstanding film version of the brilliant BBC political spin comedy ‘The Thick of it’, has hit the big screens and hit them in style. It’s a stunning satire on the run-up to a war that’s spun into happening (yes, highly unlikely), and is a combination of hilarious writing, brilliant\ comic acting and deft direction that makes for an compelling movie.

Major credit must go to director Armando Iannucci. His script is superb throughout; his adaptation of the tv series seamless and his skill behind the camera compliments his talents as one of the foremost comic writers in Britain today. This is an excellent piece of filmmaking. An what a script and plot. A hapless Junior Minister (Tom Hollander) kicks against a monstrous foul-mouthed PR flack-cum-Rasputin figure (Malcolm Tucker played by Peter Capaldi) who seeks to control him and events in the run up to a US-led war. Minister Foster seeks independent advice from his hard-pressed but ultimately idealistic flaks. Throw in US government in-fighting, drunken sex between US and British former student lovebirds, a profane but profound American General, a demented constituent obsessed with his garden wall, lots of cursing and you have a gem of a film.

Tucker is awesome in his use of profanities – and Capaldi plays him with a vigour that leaves you exhausted with laughter after watching him. Alistair Campbell, who dismissed the movie as slight, must have been stung severely by this homage to his aggression. Tucker has no doubt about the limits to his power i.e. very few. If there’s any justice, Capaldi should have a BAFTA for this performance – but as Tucker, he’d probably ask the Academy to ‘Stick that fucking statue up your fucking arse you fucking twat’.

Gina McKee and Chris Addison, playing the much put-upon ministerial advisers, are perfect foils for Tucker’s insanity. McKee has an easy charm and attractiveness as an actor and is terrific and likeable as Judy Malloy, a career civil service press officer. Addison shines as the gormless tyro public relations hack. Both convey the madness, euphoria, highs and lows of being caught in a political whirlwind.

There’s some great character acting in ‘In the Loop’. James Gandolfini is razor sharp as Lt General George Miller – a Tony Soprano meets Colin Powell amalgam trying to stop what seems like a headlong rush into war. Steve Coogan is wonderful as a disgruntled constituent stalking the principled but ultimately powerless Minister Foster (played with considerable aplomb by Tom Hollander). Foster learns the truism of the maxim that all politics, is in the end, local.

Running gags abound: the barely post-pubescent White House and State Department officials running empires straight out from college (a swipe a Paul Bremer’s kids that ran Iraq). Tucker and his foul-mouthed, even scarier apprentice Jamie constantly try to out-do each other in their political thuggery and highly inventive use if profanity. Both make for very funny motifs.

Garlands must go to the smaller players too, notably, but not exclusively, Enzo Cilenti, Paul Higgins, Liza Weld, Mimi Kennedy.and Michael Rodgers. The ensemble cast is terrific.

‘In the Loop’ is simply the funniest satirical movie in the last twenty years, skewering the ‘Special Relationship’, excoriating New Labour and leaving the cinemagoer in no doubt that while war isn’t funny at all, the absurdities of war’s justification can make for hilarious viewing.

‘Lights, Camera, Political Action’

What makes a good political movie? Is it a thriller with politics as a backdrop or a didactic film with a political message at its heart or is it a a scathing satire? Do we focus on the credibility of the actors, the pacing of the plot, the guiding hand of the director or a combination of everything that makes for a zeitgeist-defining work? In no particular ranking order, let’s look at some of the best of the genre…

‘All the President’s Men’: Perhaps the most famous and certainly one of the most quoted political thrillers of all time. It gave us some of the cinema’s most memorable phrases that investigative journalists have been adhering to since its release: ‘Follow the Money’ has inspired a generation of muck-rakers. Pakula’s direction keeps the viewer on edge throughout; do we believe‘Deepthroat’s assertion that Woodward’s and Bernstein’s lives are at stake? Is democracy itself under threat? Can Nixon be stopped?

‘The Candidate’: Redford shines again as he plays a candidate sculpted and moulded by his handlers. This film considers the nature of running for office and the compromises involved in doing so. At what stage does the candidate ‘sell out’? Is this a necessary part of politics or driven by special interests and media concerns? Redford is perfect as the idealist who gets sucked into the world of realpolitik. ‘Frost/Nixon’: Watergate’s revisited in this engaging and thoughtful recreation of the titanic television encounter. Michael Sheen shines as the oily, ephemeral but ultimately worthy Frost while Langella’s Nixon is a superb as the self-pitying old crook. Rising star meets falling giant in a fascinating study of corruption and accountability. Nixon was always hung out to dry on television and Sheen’s Frost gets the most out of the medium in eventually skewering Tricky Dicky.

‘Che Part 1 and 2’: This two-parter is unapologetic in its hagiography and is a compelling portrait on one of the most charismatic revolutionaries of the 20th Century. Part One spotlights the incredible levels of inequality and state brutality in Cuba in the 1950’s and looks at the motivation of Guevara and the other bourgeois revolutionaries. Part Two concerns his guerrilla campaign in Bolivia and early demise. An interesting, passionately argued presentation which raises interminable and possibly unanswerable questions on the nature of the ‘just war’ and when one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Benicio del Toro has rarely been better.

‘Wag the Dog’ – Dustin Hoffman excels as the sleazy but likeable spin-doctor getting a US President out of domestic trouble by faking a war. Trouble was, this mirrored events in 1998 all-too closely when Bill Clinton was ‘getting some’ in the White House Oval Office and attacking the Serbs to protect the Kossovans. Art mirrored Reality which mirrored Art – a top-notch exposition on ‘spin’ and the ‘wages of spin’.

‘Bob Roberts’ – A film ahead of its time, this movie tracked and courted the rise of the populist right wing in the US. Candidate Roberts assumes the mantle of counter-cultural rebel but he’s really ‘rebelling’ against social democracy, equality, and ultimately freedom. An entertaining polemic, Tim Robbins portrays the role of the anti-Dylan with verve and panache. A seminal movie for anyone working for the Democrats along the lines of getting to know your enemy.

‘Dr Strangelove’: Kubrick’s biting satire on Armageddon is both terrifying and hilarious. From Slim Pickens riding the bomb to Peter Sellers begging for no fighting in the War Room, this movie constantly satirises the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine. Sellers plays a panoply of parts and uses his comic inventiveness for all its glorious worth. Still remarkably fresh, Strangelove exposes how we could end the human race through our pride, ignorance and foolishness.

Folly and Freedom

“They burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell, and you guys knew that that was going on.” Jon Stewart

The recent showdown between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer has exposed the non-journalism journalism rampant in the world of TV business shows. It highlighted how and why stock picks and show business shouldn’t mix; if we wanted financial advice from a clown, i.e. Cramer, we’d have gone to a circus. And it showed how we can fight back.

Let’s look at Jim Cramer. Like a lot of TV ‘personalities’, he’s in your face, arrogant, opinionated, and sadly, for his viewers and the state of the nation, a myopic shareholder-value fanatic who has always looking to make a fast buck. His type are dime a dozen on CNBC, a news channel that’s to news to news as Goebbels was to press freedom. Noam Chosmky once famously said he trusted the ‘Financial Times’ as they were the only newspaper to tell the truth; he could not say the same CNBC.

There are good business journalists out there. But by and large they tend to be economists; they’re trained to take a broader view of society – what’s good for everybody not just investors. People like Larry Elliot at the Guardian, Joseph Stiglitz, Will Hutton and Paul Krugman have great insights into how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place and how we can get ourselves out of it. They do not have ‘Squawk Boxes’ or discuss shares Siskel and Ebert style but look to the medium and long-term future. If CNBC-style programmes are ever to be taken seriously again they need to either have severe health warnings about investment risk running constantly or become a vehicle for serious journalism; the latter is unlikely.

And then along came the hero of the hour, Jon Stewart. Calling it as it is has been the role of satirists since the Greeks; and with Stewart, it was a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man, If ever there was the need for an avenging angel to swoop down and smite the wrongdoers of Wall Street, it is now and Stewart smote them and smote them real good. With Swiftian righteous indignation he jabbed, punched and eventually floored an inarticulate and buffoonish Cramer, the most irritating unacceptable face of capitalism. Ordinary non-Masters of the Universe everywhere owe Stewart a huge debt of gratitude.

Finance itself is not a glamorous, ‘sexy’ subject. There’s a reason the accountant, fund manager and stockbroker used to be seen as boring, if well-paid jobs; that’s because they were. They were boring before the 80’s because investors wanted responsible and, yes, dull individuals looking after their money. The Jack Welchs and Alan Greenspans who turned these notions upside down were snake-oil salesman whose sorry little trade has come to an end. Jon Stewart was more effective than even Obama when it came to exposing their failings; let’s hope their creed of greed never becomes the dominant ideology again. Con men will always be around; it’s time to make ethics the corner stone of business practice to lessen the influence of the guys promising instant returns at no cost to the rest of us.

Turning Left on Recession Road

“In the last few days, we’ve seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you’d be very familiar with because you’ve been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They’re rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems… So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed.’ Obama Stimulus Speech

President Obama is throwing trillions of dollars at the recession in an attempt to stimulate the US and, by association, World economy. All around him, banks are collapsing, shares are diving, people are scared of losing their jobs and being thrown onto the scrap heap. Executive excess, as typified by that totem of extravagance the corporate jet, is condemned by politicians of all political hues. The Republicans are fighting the Democrats line-by-line in Washington but Obama still has enormous political capital which he intends to spend. Voters are looking to new and old solutions; the era of Big Government has returned in the modern age.

For conservative Americans and free-market radicals, Obama’s plans smack of socialism. Critiques of the Left are centred on the notion of individual freedom. Social democracy, as practiced in Europe and by the Democrats, emphasises the collective over the individual. For the Right, this raises issues of market freedoms, independence of conscience, religion and social self-reliance. Market failure is seen as a temporary, albeit traumatic, aberration; systemic failure is attributed to individual behaviour. Some free marketers want to go further along the Cato model and slash public spending; a case of destroying the village to save it.

The appeal of big government is that it can champion the democratic will; in this ‘credit crunch’, which is really a quasi-depression, everyone is under threat. Professionals, factory hands, office workers and the unskilled have all felt the swingeing axe in the last twelve months; there’s no hiding place when exposed to the vagaries of impersonal capitalism. Successful left wing governments and leaders (Sweden, FDR, Willy Brandt) have constructed what one might call ‘societal insurance’. The plusses of combining and giving the state have a stronger say in our lives during a recession far outweigh the risks and minuses of high-risk, low-guarantee capitalism.

Left wing politics, big government, tax and spend; call it what you like, but the Left is undoubtedly able to connect with people on many levels during economically calamitous times. Firstly, it rejects market and social Darwinism; we can minimise the shock for ‘losers’ in the market who would ordinarily have been ignored by the ‘winners’. Secondly, it taps into a the notion of enlightened self-interest, a staple of economics since Adam Smith; individuals see how they are part of something greater than themselves, a thing called society. Thirdly, it’s an end to economic denial when people’s lives have become unmanageable. Finally, by placing an emphasis on taxation for employment, education and investment, it binds the electorate more closely to the governors.

Societal Insurance allows us to remove some of the appalling risks to all our well-being; the recklessness of bank investment strategy, the fragility of the pensions systems, the disconnect between business and workers. We’re all in this together. Indeed Obama and the European Left are mopping up a mess encouraged by light-touch regulation and speculative booms of the Clinton and Blair years. We need the regulation and government that will save us from being sucked into a Thirties-style morass; we need to change.