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Social mobility is lower in the US than on mainland Europe:
In a comparison of eight European and North American countries, Britain and the United States have the lowest social mobility
A careful comparison reveals that the USA and Britain are at the bottom with the lowest social mobility. Norway has the greatest social mobility, followed by Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Germany is around the middle of the two extremes, and Canada was found to be much more mobile than the UK.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pre…ust_report.htm
Largely as a result of massive inequalities in access to education:
In 1979 a student aged eighteen to twenty-four from the top income quartile was four times more likely to obtain a degree by age twenty-four than a student from the bottom quartile. By 1994, the latest year for which we have figures, the figure was ten times more likely.
In 1965 the Pell Grant, the largest Federal programme for poor students, covered 85% of the cost of four years at a public university; in 2000 it covered just 39% of the bill
Against a background where the funding for public education is declining sharply, as is the quality of it and the esteem within which it’s held. The elite private universities are still great but are increasingly inaccessible for all but the same small segment of the population.
Yet inequality in America is supposed to be licensed by social mobility. The idea is that inequality is ok as long as everyone can “make it”. Yet it’s harder to “make it” than in Europe and it’s a vastly more unequal society:
The richest 20% of Americans earn nine times more than the poorest 20%, a scale of inequality half as great again as in Japan, Germany and France. The US has more of its population living in poverty – 19.1% – than any other Western industrialised nation; worse, the bottom 10% of Americans, even though they live in a richer society, are poorer than their counterparts in Europe, Canada and Japan – only the poorest British rank below the poorest Americans [...] The country boasts some three million millionaires and the richest 1% of the population hold 38% of its wealth – again, a concentration of wealth more mark marked than in any comparable country.
The only real argument defenders of the US can make is favourable rates of employment. Yet it’s a consumer society fuelled by debt:
For those at the bottom, with incomes of $10,000 or less, debt service is an even heavier burden, taking 32% of their income
The Employment Policy Institute in Washington computes that 29% of families have incomes that fall below a reasonable estimate of their budgetary need; mothers simply have had to work, especially over a period in which male wages have been stagnating in real terms.
(Hutton, Will. The World We’re In. Abacus, 2002.)
There’s more employment but it’s driven by people working so that their children don’t starve. The jobs are created by a middle class with booming consumer spending fuelled by personal debt and a growing class of ultra-rich.
It’s also rife with health inequalities:
The U.S. is the only major industrialized nation in the world lacking government-run or subsidized universal health care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000 ranked the United States health care system as 37th by overall performance, 72nd by health and 1st by expenditure (among 191 member nations included in the study)
The most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that 47 million Americans (about 15.8% of the total population) had no health insurance coverage at some point during 2006
Yet in spite of this you have politicians furiously working to bring the US social model to Europe. Do any of them seriously think the great majority would be better off if this were to happen?
I have my misgivings about the EU treaty and I think the near contempt our elected leaders show for the opinions of their electorate paints a damning picture of an arrogant and oligarchic political class. There’s quite plainly a profound democratic deficit at the heart of the European Union and it’s a project driven by a plurality of motivations however I think all those who believe in the notion of popular sovereignty must support it. Only by pooling sovereignty can nations succeed in regaining control over their economic policy. A European bloc is of sufficient size and strength to be able to start to resist the anti-democratic demands of corporate power. If Britain were to implement progressive policies , to divert from an economic agenda of cultivating conditions “amenable to business”, it’s vulnerable to capital flight of a degree able to cripple the economy. As the Economist’s phrase goes, “policy is insulated from politics”, given the relationship between political constraints (particularly the domestic political importance of perceived economic competence) and policy constraints (increasingly all significant policy diversions from the Washington Consensus are met with disciplinary action). The substance of economic policy is moved off-stage (note the significance of Brown’s early move to grant complete control over monetary policy to a unelected body) as an increasingly superficial and media-driven politics preoccupies itself with disputes over totemic policy issues. Thankfully we’ve yet to reach the stage of American politics where popular political discourse is sustained by a self-reinforcing polarisation on guns and abortion (one party likes guns and doesn’t like abortion, the other party likes abortion and doesn’t like guns) and, as it stands, political disputes in the UK still largely have substantive content.
Yet the way argument plays itself out over issues such as Iraq, immigration and Europe is increasingly trivialised: it takes place on a independent register from real policy discussion. Issues of economic policy (particularly any question over the basic assumptions loaded into policy ‘common-sense’) doesn’t play itself out at all. The danger of the European project is that this same rupture between ‘expert’ policy discussion and public political discourse becomes entrenched given (1) the lack of a genuine European public sphere (2) the lack of public interest and understanding of the structures of European politics (3) the existing democratic deficit within European politics (4) the particular opaque role of lobbyists on a European level. Yet leaving aside the aspirations of a lunatic fringe of nascent neoconservatives who want Britain to leave Europe and join NAFTA, I don’t think Britain has a choice between Europe or no Europe. For all their preening arrogance the political class are driven in their moves towards EU constitution by a realisation of the necessity of consolidating the European regional bloc by pooling sovereignty. Without it Europe is doomed to insignificance in a world set to be dominated by the emerging geopolitics of a US/China struggle for hegemony. We shouldn’t be resisting these moves, we should be demanding their democratization.
03/02/07 “Guardian” — – “You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the New World Order … bought and paid for.”(1) “Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and the Special Branch recruit agents?”(2) “Shill, traitor, sleeper”, “leftwing gatekeeper”, “accessory after the fact”, “political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all.”
These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film Loose Change, which maintains that the US government destroyed the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my left-wing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I’ve blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious.
I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by Al Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents. I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a long-standing plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.
But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile, while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the Twin Towers with explosives without attracting attention, and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly-timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes, and induce them all to kept their mouths shut, for ever.
In other words, you must believe that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their pals are all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful, despite the fact that they were incapable of faking either weapons of mass destruction or any evidence at Ground Zero that Saddam Hussein was responsible. You must believe that the impression of cackhandedness and incompetence they have managed to project since taking office is a front. Otherwise you are a traitor and a spy.
Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements which some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues – climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality – are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress; that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy; that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish.
The obvious corollorary to the belief that the Bush administration is all-powerful is that the rest of us are completely powerless. In fact it seems to me that the purpose of the “9/11 truth movement” is to be powerless. The omnipotence of the Bush regime is the coward’s fantasy, an excuse for inaction used by those who don’t have the stomach to engage in real political fights.
Let me give you an example. The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago The column I wrote about Loose Change two weeks ago generated 777 posts on Comment is Free, which is almost a record. Most of them were furious.. The response from a producer of the film, published last week, attracted 467(2). On the same day I published an article about a genuine, demonstrable conspiracy: a spy network feeding confidential information from an arms control campaign to Britain’s biggest weapons manufacturer, BAE. It drew 60 responses(3). The members of the 9/11 cult weren’t interested. If they were, they might have had to do something. The great virtue of a fake conspiracy is that it calls on you to do nothing.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a displacement activity. A displacement activity is something you do because you feel incapable of doing what you ought to do. A squirrel sees a larger squirrel stealing its hoard of nuts. Instead of attacking its rival, it sinks its teeth into a tree and starts ripping it to pieces. Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.
Many of those who posted responses on Comment is Free contend that Loose Change (which was neatly demolished in the BBC’s film The Conspiracy Files on Sunday night) is a poor representation of the conspiracists’ case. They urge us instead to visit websites like 911truth.org, physics911.net and 911scholars.org, and to read articles by the theology professor David Ray Griffin and the physicist Steven E. Jones. Concerned that I might have missed something, I have now done all those things, and have come across exactly the same concatenation of ill-attested nonsense as I saw in Loose Change. In all these cases you will find wild supposition raised to the status of incontrovertible fact; rumour and confusion transformed into evidence; selective editing; the citation of fake experts; the dismissal of real ones. Doubtless I will now be told that these are not the true believers: I will need to dive into another vat of tripe to get to the heart of the conspiracy.
The 9/11 truthers remind me of nothing so much as the climate-change deniers, cherry-picking their evidence, seizing any excuse for ignoring the arguments of their opponents. Witness the respondents to my Loose Change column who maintain that the magazine Popular Mechanics, which has ripped the demolition theories apart, is a government front. They know this because one of its editors, Benjamin Chertoff, is the brother/nephew/first cousin of the US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. (They are, as far as Benjamin can discover, unrelated, but what does he know?(4)).
Like the millenarian fantasies which helped to destroy the Levellers as a political force in the mid-17th century, this crazy distraction presents a mortal danger to popular oppositional movements. If I were Bush or Blair, nothing would please me more than to see my opponents making idiots of themselves, while devoting their lives to chasing a phantom. But as a controlled asset of the New World Order, I would say that, wouldn’t I? It’s all part of the plot.
www.monbiot.comReferences:1. Gary Allen, 911truthnc.org, 6th February 2007. Email.
2. “sirarthurchichester”, 8th February 2007. On Comment is Free.
3. George Monbiot, 13th February 2007. The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2011751,00.html
4. Quoted by Will Sullivan, 3rd September 2006. Viewing 9/11 From a Grassy Knoll., US News and World Report. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060903/11conspiracy.htm
02/06/07 “Guardian” — There is a virus sweeping the world. It infects opponents of the Bush government, sucks their brains out through their eyes and turns them into gibbering idiots. First cultivated in a laboratory in the United States, the strain reached these shores a few months ago. In the past fortnight it has become an epidemic. Scarcely a day now passes without someone possessed by this sickness, eyes rolling, lips flecked with foam, trying to infect me. The disease is called Loose Change. It is a film made by three young men which airs most of the standard conspiracy theories about the attacks of September 11 2001. Unlike the other 9/11 conspiracy films, Loose Change is sharp and swift, with a thumping soundtrack, slick graphics and a calm and authoritative voiceover. Its makers claim that it has now been watched by 100 million people.The Pentagon, the film maintains, was not hit by a commercial airliner. There was “no discernable trace” of a plane found in the wreckage, and the entrance and exit holes in the building were far too small. It was hit by a Cruise missile. The twin towers were brought down by means of “a carefully planned controlled demolition”. You can see the small puffs of smoke caused by explosives just below the cascading sections. All other hypotheses are implausible: the fire was not hot enough to melt steel and the towers fell too quickly. Building 7 was destroyed by the same means a few hours later.
Flight 93 did not crash, but was redirected to Cleveland Airport, where the passengers were taken into a NASA building and never seen again. Their voices had been cloned by the Los Alamos laboratories and used to make fake calls to their relatives. The footage of Osama Bin Laden, claiming responsibility for the attacks, was faked. The US government carried out this great crime for four reasons: to help Larry Silverstein, who leased the towers, to collect his insurance money; to assist insider traders betting on falling airline stocks; to steal the gold in the basement; and to grant George Bush new executive powers, so that he could carry out his plans for world domination.
Even if you have seen or read no other accounts of 9/11, and your brain has not yet been liquidised, a few problems must occur to you. The first is the complete absence of scientific advice. At one point the presenter asks “So what brought down the Twin Towers? Let’s ask the experts.” But they don’t ask the experts. The film makers take some old quotes, edit them to remove any contradictions, then denounce all subsequent retractions as further evidence of conspiracy.
The only people they interview are a janitor, a group of firemen and a flight instructor. They let the janitor speak at length, but cut the firemen off in mid-sentence. The flight instructor speaks in short clips, which give the impression that his pupil, the hijacker Hani Hanjour, was incapable of hitting the Pentagon. Elsewhere he has said the opposite: he had “no doubt” that Hanjour could have done it(1).
Where are the structural engineers, the materials scientists, the specialists in ballistics, explosives or fire? The film makers now say that the third edition of the film will be fact-checked by an expert, but he turns out to be “a theology professor”(2). They don’t name him, but I would bet that it’s David Ray Griffin, who also happens to be the high priest of the 9/11 conspiracists.
The next evident flaw is that the plot they propose must have involved tens of thousands of people. It could not have been executed without the help of demolition experts, the security firms guarding the World Trade Centre, Mayor Giuliani (who hastily disposed of the remains), much of the US Air Force, the Federal Aviation Administration and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the relatives of the people “killed” in the plane crashes, the rest of the Pentagon’s staff, the Los Alamos laboratories, the FBI, the CIA and the investigators who picked through the rubble.
If there is one universal American characteristic it is a confessional culture which permits no one with a good story to keep his mouth shut. People appear on the Jerry Springer Show to admit to carnal relations with their tractors. Yet none of the participants in this monumental crime has sought to blow the whistle – before, during or after the attacks. No one has volunteered to tell the greatest story ever told.
Read some conflicting accounts, and Loose Change’s case crumbles faster than the Twin Towers. Hundreds of people saw a plane hit the Pentagon. Because it collided with one of the world’s best- defended buildings at full speed, the plane was pulverised: even so, both plane parts and body parts were in fact recovered. The wings and tail disintegrated when they hit the wall, which is why the holes weren’t bigger(3).
The failure of the Twin Towers has been exhaustively documented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Far from being impossible, the collapse turns out to have been inevitable. The planes cut some of the support columns and ignited fires sufficient to weaken (but not melt) the remaining steel structures. As the perimeter columns buckled, the weight of the collapsing top stories generated a momentum the rest of the building could not arrest. Puffs of smoke were blown out of the structure by compression as the building fell(4).
Counterpunch, the radical leftwing magazine, commissioned its own expert – an aerospace and mechanical engineer – to test the official findings(5). He shows that the institute must have been right. He also demonstrates how Building 7 collapsed. Burning debris falling from the twin towers ruptured the oil pipes feeding its emergency generators. The reduction in pressure triggered the automatic pumping system, which poured thousands of gallons of diesel onto the fire. The support trusses weakened and buckled and the building imploded(6). Popular Mechanics magazine polled 300 experts and came to the same conclusions(7).
So the critics – even Counterpunch – are labelled co-conspirators, and the plot expands until it comes to involve a substantial part of the world’s population. There is no reasoning with this madness.
People believe Loose Change because it proposes a closed world: comprehensible, controllable, small. Despite the great evil which runs it, it is more companionable than the chaos which really governs our lives, a world without destination or purpose. This neat story draws campaigners away from real issues – global warming, the Iraq war, nuclear weapons, privatisation, inequality – while permanently wrecking their credibility. Bush did capitalise on the attacks, and he did follow a pre-existing agenda, spelt out, as Loose Change says, by the Project for a New American Century. But by drowning this truth in an ocean of nonsense, the conspiracists ensure that it can never again be taken seriously.
The film’s greatest flaw is this: the men who made it are still alive. If the US government is running an all-knowing, all-encompassing conspiracy, why did it not snuff them out long ago? There is only one possible explanation. They are in fact agents of the Bush regime, employed to distract people from its real abuses of power. This, if you are inclined to believe such stories, is surely a more plausible theory than the one proposed in Loose Change.
www.monbiot.com
References: 1. Thomas Frank, 23rd September 2001. Tracing Trail Of Hijackers. Newsday. Viewed at: http://www.pentagonresearch.com/Newsday_com.htm
2. Ed Pilkington, 26th January 2007. ‘They’re all forced to listen to us’. The Guardian.
3. Benjamin Chertoff et al, March 2005. Debunking The 9/11 Myths. Popular Mechanics. http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/1227842.html
4. National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2006. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions. http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/factsheets/faqs_8_2006.htm
5. Manuel Garcia, 28th November 2006. We See Conspiracies That Don’t Exist: The Physics of 9/11.http://www.counterpunch.org/physic11282006.html
6. Manuel Garcia, 28th November 2006. Dark Fire: The Fall of WTC 7. http://www.counterpunch.org/darkfire11282006.html
7. Benjamin Chertoff et al, ibid.
When I consider how short a time my life lasts – absorbed as it is in the eternity that precedes it and that which follows it – and how small is the space that I occupy or even that I can see, lost as I am in the infinite immensity of spaces which I do not know and which do not know me, I am appalled and wonder that I should be here rather than there, for there is no reason why it should be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who has put me here? At whose orders and discretion have this place and this time been allotted me?
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes political power, ownership and management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else. Naturally this means a challenge to the huge institutions of coercion and control: the state, the unaccountable private tyrannies that control most of the domestic and international economy, and so on. But not only these. That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. Sometimes the burden can be met. If I’m taking a walk with my grandchildren and they dart out into a busy street, I will use not only authority but also physical coercion to stop them. The act should be challenged, but I think it can readily meet the challenge. And there are other cases; life is a complex affair, we understand very little about humans and society, and grand pronouncements are generally more a source of harm than of benefit. But the perspective is a valid one, I think, and can lead us quite a long way.
A ferryman is ready and waiting, with his small boat, on the tempestuous waters of a river. A philosopher, wishing to get to the other side, climbs aboard. There ensues the following dialogue:
Philosopher: Do you know anything of history, ferryman?
Ferryman: No!
Philosopher: Then you’ve wasted half your life! Have you studied mathematics?
Ferryman: No!
Philosopher: Then you’ve wasted more than half your life.
Hardly were these words out of the philosopher’s mouth when the wind capsized the boat, precipitating both ferryman and philosopher into the water. Whereupon,
Ferryman shouts: Can you swim?
Philosopher: No!
Ferryman: Then you’ve wasted your whole life.
George Kennan (head of US State Department planning staff) 1948:
We have about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6 per cent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
