Issue 68, June 2010

The European Convention on Human Rights - Article 10

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
 

Nation Revisited

# 68 June 2010. 

Coalition government
 

When the 2010 general election resulted in a Tory-Lib Dem coalition government many of us hoped that the moderates of both parties would influence the extremists. But in the first week William Hague was spouting warmongering propaganda against Iran and pledging his loyalty to America. The UK has a crippling national debt, an almost stagnant economy and a runaway population boom fuelled by Third World immigration. But instead of focusing on those problems the Neanderthal wing of the Tory Party is busy making mischief in the Middle East.

When we have restored our battered economy and addressed the social inequalities that still condemn people to poverty, then perhaps we can afford to take an interest in foreign affairs. Until then failed leaders of the Tory party like William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and the Zionist fanatic Michael Howard should keep their mouths shut. Dave Cameron would be well advised to sack them before they undermine the new government.

We have got to pay back the billions of pounds borrowed by the last government to fund two foreign wars and the deliberate importation of millions of immigrants. This will require tax increases and spending cuts. It will take many years to achieve and result in a drop in our standard of living. But it might make us realise that we are not a world power with a navy that rules the waves and the means to feed and defend half the world.

President Barack Obama has done nothing to restrain American foreign policy. He has actually increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan and expects his allies to do the same. The Republican scare stories about him being a liberal have come to nothing. If Dave Cameron maintains the ‘special relationship’ we will be dragged into a war with Iran that will be as senseless and costly as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The new government must stop wasting money, stop getting involved in American wars and start putting British interests first. We must opt out of any agreement to accept asylum seekers. Our neighbours; Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Spain are free and democratic countries. It’s ridiculous for us to grant political asylum to people who have travelled through safe countries in order to get here.

The overwhelming majority of British people are not racist or xenophobic. In the general election only 5% of voters supported the far-right against 36% for the Tories, 29% for Labour and 23% for the Lib Dems. We are not narrow nationalists but we are fed up with unlimited Third World immigration, and being told that it’s good for us by lying politicians. The new government must accept that Britain is an overcrowded island that cannot accommodate anymore economic refugees. Dave Cameron must keep his promise to control non-European immigration. When the economy is sorted out we can look at the wider issue.

First we must sort out the banks. They were bailed out by an irresponsible government that gave them carte blanche to lend more money than they could cover. They were greedy and unprofessional but we can’t blame them for all our troubles, it’s their business to lend money but nobody is forced to borrow. We had no choice in 1945 when we spent our last penny dropping bombs on Germany. But since 1997 we have borrowed recklessly to fund an inflated civil service, provide social security to millions of immigrants and fight pointless wars. 

Gordon Brown borrowed money like a madman to buy popularity and only stopped when he was defeated at the polls. The government didn’t care that the country was going broke so long as their jobs were safe. It is now known that they embarked on a spending spree during their last months in power and left a facetious note saying “sorry but all the money has gone.”

 The EU is now proposing that member states agree to affordable spending plans. The Daily Mail will scream about ‘national sovereignty’ but the idea makes sense. Deficit spending distorts economies and condemns future generations to poverty. The taxpayers of Iceland, Ireland, Greece and Britain are now facing years of hardship because their governments lived beyond their means.

When the squabbling states of Europe finally get their act together we will build a sustainable economy based on self sufficiency within a guaranteed market. But until then governments must think ahead and stop relying on short term solutions. 

Under the current free-for- all the financial vultures that circle the stock markets are allowed to undermine national economies by betting against currencies and manipulating foreign exchange rates. They have played havoc with the dollar and have now moved onto the euro. It’s only a matter of time before they pick on the pound. Germany, France and America have acted against the speculators but Boris Johnson and George Osborne are defending their banking chums and warning against regulation. They claim that the bankers would flee the City of London if we forced them to trade fairly but most of them would rather stay here and behave themselves than risk their lives in Shanghai. The Chinese police regularly shoot criminals, particularly ‘rootless cosmopolitans.’

The Labour Party incurred Britain’s enormous debts with the help of the Tories and Lib Dems. The Tories were mad keen for war and the Lib Dems supported the open door immigration policy. They were more interested in fiddling their expenses that saving the country. Now the eurosceptic Tories have formed a coalition with the europhile Lib Dems; an unlikely marriage of opposites tasked with rescuing Britain from bankruptcy.

The Tories’ track record does not inspire confidence. They are not as wasteful as the Labour Party but they are traditionally the party of big business. They must overcome their instinct to trust the banks and take positive steps to balance the budget. At the Berlin summit Dave Cameron emphasised that Britain does not use the euro but he accepted that it’s vital to our interests. He acknowledges that in or out of the EU we are inseparable from the world’s largest trading bloc.

Europe’s Future Challenges by Kai Murros

Reprinted from the author’s website: www.kolumbus.fi

A growing population was our demographical weapon, which combined with the scientific revolution and growing industrial output provided us with the means to conquer the world.
Today, after a long period of demographical transition, our population growth has virtually stopped and will soon be in decline. Historically we have moved from High Fertility + High Mortality -phase to The greatest threats to Europe’s economic and social stability and actual physical survival in the future are the population explosion in the developing world, global ecological crisis, the depleting natural resources and the globalization of the economy. The survival of our civilization depends on our ability to solve these problems - we must be prepared to take decisive action to protect Europe from the perils of the collapsing world. It would be a mistake to see these global problems as separate problems since they are always intertwined. They are, after all, only different aspects of the same Primary Problem. An even greater mistake would be to believe that anyone else but us has the intellectual, cultural and material means to deal with these problems.

The Primary Problem our planet is facing today is the diffusion of the effects of the western scientific-industrial revolution to non-European societies. The world is out of balance as practically all human societies on the planet are being ravaged by the violent changes of modernization. The scientific-industrial revolution, which originated in Europe and catapulted our civilization to its zenith, has found its way to every corner of the world so that there is no traditional culture left untouched by its side effects.

The present population explosion has long historical roots - going back at least to the 18th century in Europe.

The population of Europe had been steadily growing ever since the massive collapse caused by the Black Death in the 14th century. Due to various reasons there was a considerable decline in the mortality during the 18th century, which then was followed by massive population growth—the growth rate in Europe in those days was the same as in the Third World today.

High Fertility + Low Mortality -phase and finally have reached the Low Fertility + Low Mortality -phase with a quickly ageing population.

At the same time the results of the scientific and industrial revolution have spread into the Third World resulting in a High Fertility + Low Mortality –phase with massive population explosion.

The question of life and death for our planet is: How long will the demographic transition take in the Third World - that is, how long will it take from the Third World to move from High Fertility + Low Mortality phase to Low Fertility + Low Mortality phase?

If this demographic transition takes 200 years like in Europe the planet is doomed—100 years is equally impossible. In fact we have to be able to find a way to curb the population growth within the next 50 years—which also, unfortunately, seems to be impossible. 

The biggest obstacle seems to be the fact that this demographic transition requires creating an industrial society to increase the material production and in this way to dramatically raise people’s living standards. This is exactly what happened in Europe between 1770-1970 and today it would still seem impossible to bring about a similar demographic transition in the Third World without a massive improvement in the material means of life. 

The problem however is whether it is possible because it has been estimated that this would require 4.6 times the resources of our planet. In short we can say that in order to save our planet from the perils of the population explosion we should be able to create a global industrial consumer society which is just as impossible as the current population growth run by poverty and backwardness. 

We must also bear in mind that industrialisation alone didn’t absorb the ever-swelling masses of Europe’s rural poor. 

At the critical juncture of our history when the population growth reached its height Europe was blessed with boundless opportunities to colonize new land: The Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Siberia, large parts of Southern and Eastern Africa absorbed the demographic pressure of millions of Europeans when the pace of industrialization was not quick enough to provide these people with jobs and income. 

Today, 100-200 years later we encounter these migrations again except that this time the world is packed. There are no empty continents to colonize, no wilderness to tame and to settle. The Third World poor are now pushing into our densely populated societies with only a modest economic growth, which reduces the ever-increasing masses of low-skilled labour permanently into a hostile underclass. 

Our conclusion must then be that there are simply too many people on this planet. Human population is not qualitatively different from any other population of social animals. Human intelligence has made it possible for the human race to break the environmental limitations and grow exponentially… at least until now. 

Demographic expansion, which used to be our strength, has become our weakness. Now we are in danger of being overwhelmed by more expansive populations. Like in nature, these populations will keep on growing as long as they can send their surplus to colonize new territory. The masses of the Third World will keep on growing until they reach and cross the absolute limit their habitat can sustain, after which they will collapse. As long as Europe, Australia, USA and Canada allow the flux of immigrants from the Third World, the growth will continue unchecked. 

The population explosion in the Third World will be the final push in the exponential growth of mankind beyond the limits of earth’s sustainability, a process that started in the 18th Century in Europe. 

By absorbing the population surplus of the Third World we are only facilitating the growth and in this way speeding up the global ecological disaster. 

It is clear that with a rapidly growing population the attempts to increase consumption per capita in the long run fail because the natural resources nevertheless remain limited and as a result the amount of available resources per capita is only shrinking. 

Some optimists seem to think that it could be possible for the developing economies to avoid our “mistakes” and bring about an industrial revolution and improve the material standard of living of the poor by acquiring sophisticated technology that pollutes less and consumes less energy and resources. These optimists place their faith in technology that one could avoid phase 1 and go straight to phase 2. 

This however is simple fantasy given the enormity of the problem – the staggering amount of poor whose lives should be improved and the short time span when this should happen. In the coming decades an estimated 1, 2 billion people will enter the job market and only about 300 million will find employment if things remain as they are. 

Also nobody really seems to know exactly what this new environmentally friendly technology should be like. We may assume that new technology is always more expensive than the old technology. Therefore if the developing economies wish to repeat the industrial revolution of the West and improve their standard of living, they will have to resort to less sophisticated labour intensive technology, which also consumes more energy and raw materials and pollutes more. 

Since even we haven’t yet reached phase 2 it is difficult to think that the industrialization of the Third World could be ecologically any friendlier than the industrialization of the West originally was. 

It is very unlikely that science in the foreseeable future can make breakthroughs that would increase the amount of usable natural resources - at least in such quantities that it would satisfy the growing needs in time. As the natural resources are getting scarcer while the demand is growing, the direct result is that the Third World societies are under increasing strain.

Political Collapse 

Many Third World countries are in danger of collapsing under the intense pressure of growing population. Many African countries have long ago ceased to function as states and have been reduced into mere theoretical political concepts. Population explosion causes a massive strain on the social structure intensifying the conflict between the rich and the poor and in case there actually is economic growth, the growing population has the tendency to strip societies of its results since the number of the poor grows quicker than the economy.
As the social and economic strain builds up, new political and religious extremist groups will emerge – the rise of radical Islam can be seen as a way of channelling the social frustration of the Islamic world. The modern megacities should be seen as incubators of violence in a global scale. 

Global population explosion and the depleting natural resources create not only internal threats to poor societies but also external threats. Future wars will be fought over basic necessities of life – water, arable land and maybe even clean air. These future wars will be ecological wars; they may decide the starvation or survival of millions of people. The future wars will mean the introduction of ecological factors into global politics and geo-strategy.
Third World societies will eventually plunge into chaos as it will become impossible to govern such massive populations. The refugee problem we face today is only an appetizer to what will come in the future. The number of refugees will grow exponentially – large sections of the population in the poor south will be on the move desperately seeking for a better life, desperately trying to survive. More and more people will be on the move due to environmental reasons and it will be increasingly difficult to tell apart political refugees from environmental refugees as social, political and ecological crisis intertwine.

Globalization

Much of the current industrial activity in the developing economies is largely the result of outsourcing of western industrial base to countries with substandard wages and working conditions and no environmental laws. For decades the economists have been explaining to us that this erosion of Europe’s industrial base only benefits us and the entire world in the long run – by now it should be clear to everybody that this is not the case.

The outsourcing of Europe’s industrial base brings us two serious problems:
1. Mass unemployment in Europe
2. Loss of tax revenues

The massive loss of industrial jobs during the last few decades hasn’t been balanced by an equal number of reasonably paid service jobs – as was the original liberal economic theory. The opposite has happened instead – the ample supply of new low-skilled workers from the Third World has often reduced service jobs to modern slavery with less than minimum wages and substandard working conditions. As a result large numbers of Europeans suffer now from perpetual poverty.

Outsourcing of industry has turned large sections of Europe into a decaying wasteland and people living there into a rotting underclass predetermined to a life of poverty and misery. This plague of post-industrialism is only spreading as the global liberal economy deems most ethnic Europeans redundant and useless.

If we choose to accept this post-industrial fallacy we are committing a slow suicide. The power and wealth of the western civilization came from industrial production. If we now deliberately give up our industrial base, we are also fragmenting the bedrock of our civilization. TV game shows and Mac jobs will not sustain our global power and strength or our pride as a race. We must have the intellectual courage to challenge the prevailing paradigm in modern economics which states that outsourcing Europe’s industrial strength benefits not only us but the whole world. 

The outsourcing of industry mostly to China and India also means that the profits the transnational corporations accumulate cannot be taxed. This erosion of tax base leads eventually to a collapse of the western nation states as they become increasingly incapable of providing basic services for their citizens and maintaining the infrastructure. So far we have been able to avoid this pitfall simply by borrowing more money.

By allowing the transnational corporations to move industrial production and capital freely, we accept their dominance over us. We accept that these companies operate beyond our laws and keep to themselves all the profits they make by utilizing cheap non-European labour and our buying power.

We have allowed transnational corporations to grow more powerful than nation states; we have allowed them to extort us, to bleed us and to abuse us. We have allowed the transnational conglomerate complex to become more powerful than European civilization itself. We have been led to believe that the prosperity of transnational corporations is our prosperity as well – once we realize that this is not the case, we will deem transnational corporations redundant.

Transnational corporations are mere paper tigers. They are not natural communities that are based on blood, soil and emotional ties. Transnational corporations are market places where people gather to sell their work force. Transnational corporations are based on immaterial agreements and on the delicate balance between greed and trust. Once the trust is gone, the transnational corporation dissolves. In the end it will be very easy to shake transnational corporations off our back – their power is only an illusion – we can knock them down with a feather.

A transnational corporation cannot exist without natural communities. The immaterial and parasitical nature of transnational corporations requires the existence of concrete natural communities. Transnational corporations devour the nation states and their life energy. A transnational corporation needs the nation state and the services it provides – services it demands free of charge – everything the transnational corporation then does only wrecks the human society in which it operates.

The driving force behind modern global capitalism is the disparity between the affluent West and the poor Third World. Modern global capitalism thrives as long it can demolish the western societies without them falling into utter chaos. Once the western societies are dilapidated enough, utter chaos breaks out and global capitalism ends. 

The greatest threat to the ecosphere comes from western industrial production that has been outsourced to Third World countries. The poor chaotic societies down south are totally unable and unwilling to control how the environmental needs are met in these sprawling industrial plants. Had the industrial complex stayed in Europe, it could have been scrutinized and placed under strictest supervision until all environmental needs would have been met. Instead the opposite happened – the very competitive advantage of the developing economies is the lack of environmental laws or their inefficient supervision.

It is ironic that as Europe is getting weaker by haemorrhaging its industrial strength into the Third World, it is also speeding up the process of global environmental collapse.