The "New" Establishment. Andrew Neil doesn't quite get it.

Mr Neil is getting there, but he doesn't quite get it yet.

"They all think the same": exactly so we can bin the left/right distinction. That ends his argument in one move.

Next question Mr Neil : the most important part of the country "the economy": who has that piece of the jigsaw?

Well through successive liberal governments most notably the supposed Left in Blair (who gave interest rates to the BoE on Day 1 of his posting... and just look what happened with the free money bonanza and 2008 crash which the tax payer (not the City) is still plugging the hole of) the Capitalists control the country and the politicians. No surprises then that everyone talks the same language, they are all paid and employed by the same pay master.

So the "New Establishment" is actually quite an old "establishment" one that the Americans have been plugging with billions of pounds of propaganda and the latest brainwashing techniques since the 1920s, backed up by 100s millions of tons of bombs on any one who still doesn't get that US freedom is a great thing. Very gradually the miasma is clouding the brains of even the once alert and we hand complete control to the global rich. well except for a few detractors like Russia, China, North Korea, Iran (that may change soon), Cuba (that has changed).

Fighting pure evil (deception, greed, selfishness, slavery) is for the long haul, will take many lifetimes, but unfortunately the kids of today watch US TV and grow tired of US hostility/sanctions and never knew what freedom really was like so they go beige and lose the will to live and let go, buy a pair of Nike shoes a phone, get some debt and spend the rest of their life paying it off and so allow the Capitalists to enslave them, while their country gets ripped up and sold to the lowest overseas bidder for wealth extraction and the leader gorges themselves on US freebies until they get tired of being a bitch and then the CIA shoots them in a supposed coup and replaces them with a more "reliable" leader, or when the brainwashing is total they can just rely on elections to get the "right" person (according to Washington interests i.e. who opens the door widest to external investment and wealth extraction) in power.

So Mr Neil it's actually a pretty Old Establishment that has all the pieces of the jig-saw now.

"Right-Wing" is an American Post-War nonsense

If you think about it "far right" makes no sense. It is just another name for "Nationalism" the exact same argument we brainwash the military with to get them to fight "for their country." Our military is "far right"?? In America the Patriot is "far right"? It makes no sense. The very real charge of Treason punishable by death in the UK until 1998 means exactly this not support your country. Is Treason "far right"? Are spies who undermine their country Liberal or Left? It is nonsense. This whole nonsense come from America who won WW2 in the West (Russia won WW2 in the East). When America made the USWE (United States of Western Europe aka Europe ruled from Washington as opposed to USSR which was the Eastern version ruled from Moscow) it had a problem. It needed the subsumed states to be loyal to Washington but needed to distance itself from so called "Totalitarian" Moscow. So it invented this "far right" designation to suppress local rejection of Europe and Washington, while keeping Moscow on the Far Left. Leaving Washington "in the middle." But it's a huge brainwash cos it is nonsense. America like Moscow are both on the Right where that means Totalitarian. Any Imperial system is Right. Meanwhile Nationalism is actually on the Left because it rejects Imperialism and asks for local representative government. Beware the Mind Control! especially where the Americans are involved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now is it actually so wrong for a National government to uphold the history, culture and identity of a country? And that means suppressing influence from abroad. This should not be associated with violence against minorities. This should be associated with respect for the indigenous people. America's infamous lack of respect for indigenous people led to the world's worst genocide of American Indians. But instead the Americans point at the Nazis to illustrate the dangers of respecting indigenous populations. If a country cannot protect its own indigenous populations then who will? Now this is complex as no country is homogenous but complexity is where we need to be and a National government is by far the best informed to manage the complex needs of its diverse communities. A far cry from American Imperial Right-Wing propaganda.

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So apparently according to Wikipedia the origins of the term Right-Wing come from France where the aristocracy sat on the Right and the rest sat on the Left. So in fact the origins of the term are exactly as described above. The Left are "The People" and the Right are the Autocratic Aristocracy. Empires then by definition are Right-Wing and America fighting wars and establishing its influence overseas is Right-Wing. Resistance to the US Empires and struggles to remain independent from the West to hand power to The People are Left Wing. What is interesting is that "Freedom" (for The People) is Left Wing. SO the Americans really have got themselves very confused. Lots of Americans join the State Army to fight for growth of the American Empire with apparently little solidarity for the countries they are invading. This is like the Roman Empire and it is Right-Wing. Ironically the jar-heads recruited by the US army tend to be from impoverished backgrounds and will never see the benefits of what they are fighting for because inequality means that the spoils of war in America go to the rich. America really is one of the most Right-Wing countries in Earth and the people in America actually know very little about freedom.

The Left by contrast are a bit of a no-brainer. This political movement opposes the aristocracy and seeks to establish power for the people. It is pretty obvious that brainwashers in the US have done everything they can to turn Americans away from the Left so that they remain safely ruled over by the US aristocracy.

Austerity and Ego

Monks dressed in sack cloth remembering the suffering of Jesus in the cross. It is an enduring image and the path of the spiritual is often seen as a mortification of the mortal flesh in search of higher pleasures.

Well this is correct in a way. Once we have stopped trying to grasp permanently at physical entities especially our self and realise our grasp of things is only supposed to be temporary then the hardships of life just pass by and we remain unaffected.

By contrast stuck with the idea of a need to grasp this world permanently the best we can do is lie to ourselves and pretend to ignore the affects of suffering. We wear the sack cloth but we do so with effort to resist the discomfort and suffering. This is Ego. It is like a challenge to see how long we can resist the discomfort of sack cloth. The discomfort does not go we simply take up resistance to it. What an exhausting process! We may even magnify the suffering to see how much we can endure and string we are. This is nothing more than a circus trick. We are not progressing on the spiritual path. Buddha realised that austerity and self imposed suffering by itself achieves nothing. It will actually make things worse as it comes from the Ego which is the actual thing we are supposed to be putting under scrutiny. In the very act of enduring suffering we are strengthening the problem!

Enlightenment takes a long time, and such wisdom is no use to those who have not yet decided to let go of the need to hold on to the world with a permanent grip. This incidentally is even more exhausting. Unenlightened we try to take grasp of the world in a permanent way, feeling in our heart that if we let go then we will disappear. And in such a state the enduring of suffering is a necessary thing. Psychology says that people ensure suffering much better if they do so as a Hero on a quest turning the suffering into a challenge that they can win again.

The lesson here is that in the very long term the quest is different. It is to gradually realise that constantly resisting and trying to become victorious over suffering is not the path. The path is no longer needing to struggle to attain anything or defend anything from suffering. If we just stop acting under the conviction that the things that happen do so according to some fixed centre or unchanging self then they just happen and suffering is replaced with humble acceptance. Tolerance is also replaced  with humble acceptance. There is no effort anymore and no energy is expended when things happen.

Buddha found Middle Path. In the same way as austerity for its own sake is Ego. Indulgence is the same.  Winning, accumulating, succeeding, owning, keeping all these things can be just the opposite of resisting hardship in austerity. "Can be" in that when it is done with respect to the centre of Ego. Middle Path is anything other than this. If we are expending energy enduring hard things or ignoring good things then this is not middle path.

Buddha is not expending energy here to stay away from Mara's daughters and tolerate Mara's demons. Buddha has no fixed centre to move in one direction or the other. Against the daughters a centre appears that is attracted in that moment, and against the demons a centre appears that is repelled in that moment. But each centre only belongs in its moment and evaporates afterwards. None of those centres is Buddha for there is no fixed centre.

Where is the "Me"?

In previous post said this:

"This is a very old Indian meditation. Look at our hand and see if there is anything in there that is "me." Proof is cut that hand off and see if "me" is any less"

It's actually more subtle than this.

Imagine picking up an apple with the left hand. You can feel the apple. Now do the same with the right hand. You can feel the apple. Now cut off the left hand and give it an apple. We cannot feel it. But we can still feel the right hand. This leads to the idea that "I" am in the body side of the hand, and it being cut off takes the feeling away from "me".

But actually the cut off hand doesn't feel anything! It's not that the feeling has been "bottled" in the hand that is now separated from us. There is no feeling any more! By cutting it off you have stopped the feeling.

To get a feeling you need the nerves attached to the brain. You need the whole thing.

Now it is true that there is the phenomenon of "phantom limb" where someone who has had their limb removed can still feel like it's there. Again this leads to the idea that "we" are in the body not the hand. But this suggests that feelings exist in the body regardless of the presence of the hand or not. So why do we need a body at all to feel anything. Can't we just make it up? And then we're in real trouble because where do we make it up if we don't even need a body to create the feelings.

Well we kind of say something like "data" comes from the bodily feeling receptors and this is turned into the experience of "feeling" in the brain. But we're cheating slightly because the brain is the body. It is there on the mortuary slab during autopsy. If we have decided that feelings are mot in the body and that is just "data" then where are the "feelings" now?

So we dump material existence all together and create a Mind where the feeling and consciousness  occurs. But then we're in Descartes territory with 2 completely separate worlds. How does the data come into consciousness. One idea is that the data IS the consciousness. What looks like electrical signals for the researcher is feelings for the "subject." But where is the subject hiding? where for that matter is the researcher hiding? We already said that body is not "me" so the bodies of the research and study subject are not where these people are hiding. Somehow there are two minds hiding in the room somewhere.

Well this obviously doesn't make any sense.

The whole problem is trying to "hide" things in these pictures. Why are we doing this? Why can't things just be what they are?

So starting again.

We hold the apple in our left hand and we get a feeling. We hold the apple in our right hand and we get a feeling. We let go of the apple in our right hand and we no longer get a feeling. Equally we cut that hand off and the same result of no feeling. Perhaps we get a "hallucination" and we get the feeling of the apple even while touching nothing. That is just what it is: a feeling. And so on, and so on. There is nothing more to do here. There is no need to slot a "person" into any of these situations. Feeling happen by themselves without anyone being present!

Feelings being present without anyone being present is obvious really. If we need to put someone inside us to make us feel, then who is inside them to make them feel!

The point about feelings is that they are simple happenings like any other happening. They happen. They don't need any more scaffolding to exist.

Now in the heart of this is the pervasive idea of a "centre." The world revolves around a centre that is "me." Having this assumed centre means that we even end up trying to enforce it. Things that don't conform to this assumed idea of a centre put us off centre and we feel uncomfortable. We end up trying to restore the centre again. This is what is called "Ego" and the behaviour stemming from this leads in Buddha's analysis to suffering: that feeling that nothing is ever quite right, because nothing ever quite gets to the centre. The reason is because the centre is not real, its just a presumption that we grip onto very strongly.

My current belief is that the bliss that people report on Enlightenment is really the absence of the stress of constantly holding on to this centre. Everything we do more of less involves us grasping this centre. "I am hungry" is not just there hunger of wanting food, its the bringing of food toward this centre. When the centre does not get the food, its not the hunger that really matters, that can make us a bit scratchy and bad tempered, what really matters is that food has not made this centre their centre. Especially if the food goes to someone else we see that another centre is present and that challenges our centre. We can still make this all about ourselves by having ideas like "I'm generous I'll give them the food" or "I'm better than this, I'll not make a big deal over this" thus establishing the whole situation as being around our centre. Spiritual practice can actually make us worse because the broader and wider philosophy can put is ever more in the centre. In Hinduism there is the Atman which is ultimately identified as the Universe (Brahman) which if you do it wrong leads you to see your personal centre as the universal centre which is even worse than when you started! What should happen is you realise your personal centre is a mortal illusion and the actual centre--that previously you hung the idea of The World upon--is the same as your own. But this still places reality around a centre. This is the same as Newton trying to make all motion happen against a true stationary point. Motion is always measured between things the actual motion of which is unknown. The same with the whole of existence: it does not happen according to a fixed centre, but the centre arises between things which themselves have no fixed centre.

So the key manoeuvre we need for freedom from being a slave to this fixed centre is to let go and not need to grasp it. This does not evaporate all centre, but the centre is adrift now occurring only momentarily as things happen and then evaporating again. Most importantly being free from this expectation we no longer struggle to look for and establish this centre. For example we get humiliated and this feels bad because our centre is being challenged. If we build our perspective around something like we are "cool" anything that challenges this moves us from this centre. The struggle between what is emerging and the fixed centre is suffering. We can just ignore it and save ourselves a load of grief, and just get on with things.

 

 

Restore Nature Now - Unifying the Conservation Movement

#RestoreNatureNow Really heart warming rally in London yesterday. 350 separate conservation, ecology and direct action groups brought together to promote the simple message that life itself is under threat.

It is interesting that this blog ultimately is motivated by the same issue. But perhaps a deeper question underpins it of where do we exist in Nature in our own lives as well as collectively as humans. This I believe is called #DeepEcology

Perhaps it is personal taste or OCD, but I always wanted to get to the bottom of things and have a clear and solid foundation. Which gives rise to this blog. The corollary of that however is that anything less than "complete and solid" is insufficient. Reading banners and hearing everyone speak there is no question the passion driving people and wonderful to see that for 61,000 people at very least they do not need to be persuaded that "Life is Important" in and of itself.

But it is obvious that "Life is Important" is not an obvious thing for most people. Particular lives are important like family and friends and the pet dog, but generally its "taken for granted."

 Even after the publishing of the "Blue Marble" photo taken from Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972 it is still hard to grasp that what we have on Earth is all of life there is no other and no backup. As some banners said yesterday "There is no Earth II." 

 Yet somehow this makes little sense in our busy lives.

As Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin reminded us one of the most important mantras is "think globally, act locally." But it is very hard to get that Global Vision. At best it is guess work using statistics and research but who can really get their mind about the fact that "Life" whatever it is is a phenomenon unique the Planet Earth.

Now typically we will go beyond known boundaries and think, it can't be true. The Universe is massive there must be other life out there. We are so used under Capitalist training to the mantra of "use something, throw it away and buy a new one" but this becomes progressively less workable as the scale grows. This mantra is not scalable and how we live our lives locally cannot be expanded to globally. This would be the first indication that Capitalism is false.

This debate can go on. But I wanted to go straight into "Deep Ecology." There seems to be a deeply felt passion, but inability to articulate why we need to save or Restore Nature?

Why does it matter if we wipe Life on Earth out and create a barren desert of a planet. Why does it matter if all human life is extinguished. We will all die one day anyway why does it matter? How would you explain that life matters to a psychopathic politicians hell bent on destroying the planet with nuclear war?

This is possibly a scary thought. What if we can't answer it? What if everything is meaningless and everything we do is pointless. This is a desperately depressing thought, it is an existential threat that we fear will wipe us away. But no panic needed. There is a simple answer. See later.

Now I don't accept emotions as a valid argument here. When Chris Packham plays us the dawn chorus loud across Parliament Square in the heart of the one of busiest cities on Earth drowning out the sounds of the city it is a wonderful moment reminding us the remarkable gifts that nature gives us that are not replicated anywhere in the known universe, precious gifts that everyone there and beyond can relate to in some way. But how can you put that into words for those that do not instinctively understand or have forgotten?

There was a beautiful model Marsh Fritillary on the march. How moving that something so small could arouse so much emotion and speak so well about what we were marching for and what the whole world is missing. But again how to put into words for those who do not see this?  

Perhaps a bit unfair but when we get down deep there seems to be a lack of unity of ideas. Why? Seems to boil down to "we depend on nature, so if we lose it we damage our self."  

I would call these Utility Arguments. I do not agree with Utility as a justification. This places the value of Nature on ourselves. The moment something is of no use to us then we can destroy it. That is obviously not what people mean. That butterfly above is beautiful and value in itself. Not value to a particular human who thinks it is beautiful, but in itself. Once we allow such Anthropomorphic arguments to fill the space we are back to placing Nature on human shoulders. We are looking at Nature from a Human perspective.

One argument that was made in banners is that "We are Nature." This I will call the Ontological Argument not to be confused with the same which is used to prove the existence of God. I mean here arguments about Nature that are based on the Nature of Existence itself (and notice the use of the word Nature there). These I will argue are the valuable argument to Deep Ecology and Conservation.

Let us return to the questions above: Why save anything, why not destroy the planet? These questions come from an Human perspective. We are saying as a human what shall I do? I could destroy everything. Why not? The kind of issues that Sartre called Existential Anxiety. These all stem from an Ego Based view of reality. We are saying "I" have power and what shall I do. The Ontology here is one of Self. All such arguments fit into the Utility Type above. when we ask "why not destroy Nature" we are secretly basing the question on our self.

Once we realise that we realise the question is only valid within that Ontology. What if "I" is not so important? What if "I" actually do not have any such power at all! We shall see in a moment that Humans are not responsible for destroying the planet because this is not what is happening. We do not need to save the planet because we cannot!

The reason that the Planet is Dying is not because we have done the wrong thing, it is because we have acted from a belief in Me. That slogan "We are Nature" says exactly this: it says that what we really are is the same thing as Nature. The key point there is that in place of "me" we really find "nature."

Okay admittedly that is such a shift in thinking, literally swapping places with our mirror reflection that it may not happen properly for a long time.

But it is easy to see that instead of basing our arguments on collectively "ourselves" and individually "me" we realise the answers lie in placing everything in Nature.

Instead of saying that we should preserve nature because humans depend on it, really the truth is that we should preserve mankind because nature depends on it.

Now for people committed to basing everything on themselves and by extension Mankind this will sound odd. But sit that with that odd because the truth is odd when you first see it.

So how am "I" really Nature?

We can take time over this last bit because everything points to it, but it again will take a very long time to full soak in. Meditation is basically the most useful tool to fast track this. But we can take it slowly if we like.

I often mention "mysterious origins." Where did I come from? Well I was born. I have parents. Where did they come from? Well they were born. And so we go back in time. At the moment the belief if that we descend from ape like creatures. And so we can go back to some mysterious soup where basic organic molecules formed and somehow started life. Or perhaps those molecules came from meteorites. But however we think about it we came from inanimate chemicals on Planet Earth. Life came from inanimate chemicals from the air and rocks. Quite literally at some point there was no life just minerals and rocks and then somehow they came together to make life and eventually humans and myself. Inanimate Planet Earth literally birthed all life and humans including myself. That means when we look at the rocks and air of the planet we are looking at our true mother! There is nothing else needed to make us! Now some believe in God creating humans, but God also made Nature so in this version we still all have the same common parent. However you spin this our body comes from Nature (or at least the same creator as nature). There is nothing in us that does not come from the Planet (or God). There is literally no distinction between Myself and the Planet. Habitually we put a division in between life and non-living, and between animals and man, and between our-self and other people. But, these divisions are just convention, they are not real or fundamental.

Another way to see this is possibly easier. This is a very old Indian meditation. Look at our hand and see if there is anything in there that is "me." Proof is cut that hand off and see if "me" is any less. So we keep cutting and then end up with just our head on life support. I imagine we still think "me" exists in tact. So lets be clear at this point the whole body but the head is not any part of "me." Now it gets a bit more complicated. But it is possible to cut the brain in half. Experiments reveal that this results in two people who think they are separate. The mouth is controlled by the Left Brain while the left hand is controlled by the Right Brain. By asking questions and asking the patient to speak and draw the two sides of the brain can be interrogated and they are completely separate and don't understand each other. They start to make up stories to try to make sense of what is going on and try to make it "normal." So where is the "me" now? Well it seems to have split into two separate people each with there own "me." I imagine this process has no end. Now normally psychologists conclude that in reality we are made of multiple selves that all compete for control of the body, like a parliament voting on action. What we do is really the result of many different selves. But--and here is the crux--this makes the same mistake as the "utility" arguments above thinking that a "human" of some description lies at the heart of things and the reason and justification for things. This is a literally an Homunculus Argument. Just as we thought a "self" lives in our head when everything is cut off, that just evolves into multiple "selves" occupying the bits as we cut the core brain functions like talking and drawing. There must be a self talking and another self drawing. The "drop the mic" moment here is realising that there is no self in any of these bits. It is not that multiple selves vote to make a coherent final self, it is that there was no self anyway. At end of day you can't explain a human in terms of smaller humans inside (that is SRH). To explain a human you change from thinking about humans to Nature. We already established above that Planet is sufficient to birth all of life, why should be we surprised to find that the activity of Nature is not enough to create what we call a human, and ultimate "me." [I handle this again in the next blog it is still not completely clear]

Okay scary moment perhaps. Does this means "I" am a natural machine operating not through the decision of a little human inside (that I called "me") but due to physical forces and chemistry? Well is it enough to realise that even that question was generated by a brain working "due to physical forces and chemistry"? The very thoughts we have are created by Nature. Now we are in really Deep Ecology!

This is obvious right? If I fail to drink water then very quickly I get dehydrated and my thoughts start to get messed up, I hallucinate see mirages, and eventually I fall into a coma and don't think at all! How does this "me" inside need water so much? It can only be that it is really based on chemistry!

That is perhaps a "category mistake" does the character in a film depend on the light of the projector? But in a way yes. If the bulb blows then the character's escapades end in a truly profound way! In the same way our "Thoughts" think of themselves that they are so profound, but if the body dies then so do they. So why do we write like I am doing here? Well true once this is written I can die and the words live on. But its another Ontology Argument because I learned the art of writing English from the community that lives on after I am dead. In a way the Community is writing this, and I am just the vessel that physically carries out the acts. Is anything I write here relevant or original? Throughout I make reference to ideas from my community and explore ideas that are brought to me by that community. But communities are just made up of humans and like lost languages they eventually die and not just me who writes this, but the very language, relevance and meaning of this will be lost one day. We should not give so much credence to Thoughts! What lies behind those thoughts is the biology, chemistry and physics that really makes all this happen! But care now as we have taken a really deep dive: "biology, chemistry and physics" are just thoughts themselves: I am now referring to Nature! and that means perhaps "phenomena". Just the simplest manifestations of reality like heart beats, birds singing, sun rises, anger, thoughts occurring to us, remembering something, getting an answer, thinking of a question, realising something, love, the feeling of a carrot crunch in our mouth, feeling of a rain drop on our hand, a breath of wind against our face... the list is endless: these are the most basic elements of reality. Every single one of them is Nature.

It is from this base level that everything comes.

So returning to the top. Why conserve? Is so far from the issue its almost pointless asking it. How could you even think this without Nature providing you with a brain to think it?

As a result we see that there is nothing to conserve. Nature underpins everything already. Even the logging company destroying trees is Nature. The desires of the investor sin the logging company to make money are just Nature. The people shopping for wood is just Nature. The farmers wanting the land for cattle ranching is just Nature. The animals whose homes are being destroyed is just Nature.

We are Nature.

But we think so is that it. Do we just let the planet get destroyed?

Okay now here the issue becomes clear. Why are they cutting down trees?

It is because they have something "better" to do with the land than trees. We see the Utility Argument already. The trees are already being viewed from a Human Perspective.

Didn't we just write 1000 words showing that really everything is from a Nature perspective.

The reason that the planet is being destroyed is because people are not looking at things from the Nature Perspective that underpins everything whether they notice that or not.

There is a deep darkness across the world as people become ever more Human and Self centred and base their lives ever more on the superficial basis of Humanity and Self.

Our lives are becoming ever more trivial. And as we value our own lives less then everything else becomes devalued. We live just for ourselves which is such a small way to live. Even living for the benefit of Mankind is a small existence. Putting any limits on things is to make our lives more trivial.

So the sickness of the Planet is actually a sickness that includes ourselves. Everything is sick. Planet Earth is sick.

The answer is to let the Nature Perspective shine again and stop covering it over with Human and Self view.

It's a simple as just letting and appreciating the sunrise all by itself; being for a while no more busy and planet saving than that. If we all did that then the problem evaporates like the night with the first glow of dawn.

An easy way to solve the problem of Capitalism...

Usual news that the UK health service is facing huge problems, this time heart disease.

Well it is the Capitalists that have defined the "modern life style" that causes heart disease with endless adverts for cars, TV shows and junk food so basically we end up driving to the supermarket and coming home to consume our over processed food in the front of the TV. IF you wanted to kill off a population you'd be hard pressed to find a better way.

Really it is time the governments applied massive taxes to these industries and a law needs to be passed to allow government to raid the bank balances of Capitalists who have creamed off profits while creating wide ranging damage to society and the world.

Now obviously such a law would cause the rats to flee the sinking ship and that really underpins the parasitic and unwholesome way that Capitalists rots your country. So good riddance, take your ill begotten gains with you.

In its place the UK Treasury needs to start lending at no interest. Why would a treasury need to make a profit from loans when the whole point of loans is to grow the economy and create jobs: that is the profit!

Removing the bottomless pits of insatiable private greedy would basically solve the whole problem of national health and many other problems in one simple move.

The only problem with that is those Capitalist pits of criminal money are what pay our political parities at the moment so you can only vote for Capitalist backed candidates. The voting system is itself corrupted by Capitalism.

Long way to go for us to get out of this mess that primarily Thatcher unleashed.

British waterways have experienced 6000 illegal spills in 1 year, but how was Capitalism ever supposed to be different?

BBC uncovers 6,000 possible illegal sewage spills in one year

What I want to know from literally anyone is how was privatisation supposed to work? Since privatisation, £65.9 billion has been paid out in water company dividends. In a public system nothing is paid out to anyone except employees, as all money is allocated simply for the job and none goes into enriching superfluous non-working wealthy investors.

The first responsibility in any listed company is to provide these dividends for investors. That is what listed companies primarily exist for. Secondary is the actual business and at the bottom the customers and the actual product they provide. No one has ever explained how the Capitalist model was ever supposed to work. There is some stuff about "competition" weeding out unsuccessful companies, but competition means 2 people doing the same job, so under Capitalism the one built in corrective mechanism to stop investors stealing everything is built on inefficiency and wasting our money (Fascism is not what Churchill says - it was designed to solve exactly this issue of waste). Capitalism simply does not work (for customers anyway). Which I suspect is why Capitalist countries spend their whole time sanctioning and blowing up other countries to spread capitalism and ironically remove "competition".

Anyway bottom line Privatisation has not, and I can't see how it was ever going to work. However I wonder if it's a coincidence that the people who edit the press, pay for the politicians and political parties, pay for education and persuaded us that Privatisation was a good idea are strangely all Capitalists. Hmm coincidence? If it turns out that Capitalism does not work... wow the last few centuries of killing hundreds of millions of people to promote it and knock out other systems like Feudalism, Fascism and Communism what were they actually for? ... By coincidence it was the Capitalists who told us it was worth fighting for... really a big hmm.

And how did the arch Capitalist country viz America get so powerful? They like to think it was Capitalism, but strange they also needed to kill off 10 million weak people who rejected Capitalism, mass steal their land and turn it to commercial farming (no other country has ever annihilated all the people on its land to start profit making), and then imported another 10.7 million slaves to build the country and run industry at no salary to make massive profits and an absurdly wealthy country which then set about stock piling weapons to expand and take over the world. What I love about American Jews is while they bang on about Holocaust they don't realise that everywhere they stand in America is on the bodies of the largest genocide in human history: they are fully complicit in the biggest Holocaust in history. Irony is always very ironic and all because of Capitalism. Wasn't there a Jewish prophet who said something like, let the one without sin cast the first stone: Jews do a lot of stone hurling.

So remind me how it was ever supposed to work, and why did anyone ever get fooled by its pure evil? And I've not even mentioned the strange coincidence that while humans have lived quite happily on this planet for 1/4 million years since Capitalism arose 300 years ago the Planet is now virtually destroyed and we face ecological catastrophe that threatens all life on earth. It is not just British water ways that Capitalism threatens but all Life. It is firmly and provably the economy of Death.

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So Pro-Capitalists will probably turn to the rise of modern medicine and farming techniques and how many billions of people have been saved by Capitalism.

This is slightly disingenuous. As argued in a previous post if you plot British population the key moment when it goes from flat to growth is the year that Lister implemented the Germ Theory of Disease. Literally the moment people understood that disease was caused by in particular bacteria they started to sterilise and instantly solved the issue of bacteria based mortality especially in child birth. It was literally an over night sensation. 1000s of years of gradual insights came together with Pasteur, Koch and Lister.

All of them were funded by royal patronage and donation. None of them was working for profit or to create returns on investment for investors. None of them was part of a Capitalist system. While donations may well have come from Capitalists, it was not "Capitalist Investment" which would require a return and dividend.

We can see in other systems like Soviet Russia and Fascist Germany how enormous progress can be made by systems other then Capitalism. You could even go so far as to say that Capitalism is the very worst system as it limits funding to just those things where a provable return can be demonstrated. "Blue Skies" research is famously hard to get funding for. I have insider evidence of this from a person working within Pharmaceutical research.

On one occasion "blue skies" funding into oral vaccines which would have literally saved the lives of billions was snowballed and redirected into Viagra research. Viagra a product for the 1st world was the better economic choice with better returns than something for poor 3rd world people. Worse a legal team patented and protected all the research so it could not be developed by anyone else. This is Capitalism!

On another occasion when a paper was published demonstrating that Helicobacter pylori was the cause of most stomach ulcers a legal team was dispatched by a here unnamed Pharma giant to attempt to discredit and shut down the research. The reason obviously: Capitalist economics. An ulcer treatment from said giant was a hugely profitable cash cow. Being able to cure stomach ulcers with a single application of antibiotics would destroy profits. As a capitalist company with investors its first priority was to protect profits and return for those investors and so was committed to protecting that product and obstructing any challengers. How is such a mechanism ever suppose to promote progress? This is the unfortunate truth of Capitalism that it puts the wealthy and investors above the customer (who is never-the-less the real provides of labour, wealth and money). Capitalism is just another way that wealthy elites have learned to exploit the poor.

So in fact the world has progressed and life expectancy has increased not because of Capitalism but seemingly in spite of Capitalism. And this is most clear when you consider that all the huge gains in life expectancy of the last decade are all due to China. Obviously diminishing returns in the West that there is not much more life left to extend, but just pointing out that a system that the West constantly criticises and says is inferior has done exactly the same as the West. Being able to increase life expectancy thus seems to be achievable by anyone which rather undermines the initial claim of Capitalism that it is responsible for increasing life expectancy. What is left in defence of Capitalism and its supposed successes?