The Judge RANTS!
Date: 30/12/07
What's Another Year?
So what's changed since the end of 2006?
Everything, and yet nothing.
On the home front, if anyone was sufficiently deluded to believe that the departure of The Great Deceiver from office in the middle of the year was going to mean a new era of openness, inclusivity and intelligence from government, then even the most hoodwinked of them should by now have tumbled to it. How anyone could seriously think that replacing that grinning, self-righteous bastard with the man who had sat at his side for a decade was going to change anything for the better is quite beyond comprehension.
And so, indeed, it has proven. The same craven capitulation to the agenda of a foreign power (albeit expressed now more with a rueful scowl than a puppy-like simper), the same oiling up to the mega-rich for money in return for power, the same refusal to see economic justice as not merely sound policy but as a moral imperative, the same blaming of the victims for the crimes committed against them, and the same obsession with their own secrecy whilst wishing to deprive us of even our most fundamental right to privacy.
And all this without even the thin veneer of competence which the spin doctors of the previous régime managed to project, however risibly.
And so our society falls further and further apart: the gap between the rich and the rest of us widens by the day; corporations are allowed to use every dodge in the book to avoid their responsibilities, whilst the most minor infractions of the rules by those without money or clout are punished by ever more extreme and vindictive sanctions; if you can't afford to employ a lobbying company, the State will not hear your voice, however loud your scream of anguish; billions of pounds of our money are thrown into the laps of management consultants and private corporations so that they can bank the largesse in tax-dodge paradises whilst exporting jobs to low-wage markets in Asia and eastern Europe. And the only thing the State can think about is how to control, even to the extent of giving the police effectively a licence to murder with impunity.
Further afield, the forthcoming presidential election in the US is a cause for gloom. The complete ethical corruption of the process must now be obvious to anyone who cares to think beyond the next commercial break. The Repugnicons are trying to find someone who is Bush-but-not-Bush, i.e. folksy but with a small degree of intelligence. And if they're a religious nut, it'd help. Meanwhile the Dimocraps, having completely squandered the mandate they were given a year ago to stop Bush's wars - instead of which they have further enabled them by voting through the budgets for them, whilst at the same time blocking any attempt to impeach Bush and his ventriloquist - are dividing up in support of two equally unattractive candidates, neither of whom have anything much that the people of war-psychotic, sub-prime, outsourced America want to hear. The Bland leading the Bland. And no doubt, when the turnout for the election turns out once again to be below 50%, the professional political and pundit classes who have encouraged a situation whereby no-one who has anything worth saying can be allowed to succeed will be wringing their hands and proclaiming that there's a Crisis For Democracy, and that it's the fault of The People rather than a machine which is broken beyond repair or redemption (much as they are doing here, in fact).
There are small signs of hope, in that more and more people are getting wise to the ever-closer relationship between governments and corporations. However, this is far from being a mass phenomenon, and so the populace at large can easily be diverted from what matters by manufactured scandals involving soap stars or other nobodies, or by carefully-stoked campaigns of prejudice and vituperation against a convenient alien scapegoat.
Happy new year...
