[Campaignforrealdemocracy] A Pair of Beauties

[Mark Barrett]

Thanks to Occupy's sharp eyes saw this (below) along this:
*Tom Hodgkinson: 'Boris ought to know his Plato'*
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tom-hodgkinson-boris-ought-to-know-his-plato-6273528.html
and thought they were both rather good ;)

*Opinion |  Bankers are the dictators of the West *

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot
than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I
say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have
about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the
collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East
cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions
and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal
disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal
distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle
East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western
capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the
disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring"
book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have
been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in
Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters,
so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to
ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to
disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up
on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What
drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to
the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal
to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their
countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and
emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had
property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc,
Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc.
And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their
countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed
against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against
"governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in
the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy:
they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their
democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative
traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and
dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think
tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation
rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West.
Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe –
they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power
have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as
false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after
decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the
Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the
UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for
their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy
Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it
helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are
interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank
and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who
AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their
poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by
threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European
nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in
the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive
me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into
the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and
CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as
unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job
started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds
me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover
the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by
an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American
"peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the
good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".

The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall
Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social
"terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and
Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the
West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs,
we can't touch them.

The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week
that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found
themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them
was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers
did tell us? And our reporters, too?
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