MEDIA_ACTIVIST JAY BAKER

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Ibama & Obama's Backyard

I recently took a trip with my girlfriend into the area of Algaida here on the island of Mallorca. That's right: Algaida. My first instinct was to think I was going to be killed by terrorists - but I got it wrong; it wasn't Al Qaeda we were facing, but some strange characters from Algaida. Easy mistake to make.

It's funny. The Spanish haven't had to worry about Al Qaeda ever since Madrid was bombed and they promptly elected a socialist government who pulled their troops from the illegal occupation of Iraq.

But Mallorca's had its share of other terrorist attacks anyway, from Basque separatists. And last week I was concerned from my girlfriend's family in Moscow when that city, too, suffered terrorism from the Chechen separatists (thankfully they were okay, which is more than can be said for the dozens killed and hundreds injured).

Being British, I grew up with terrorism - we were still feeling the repercussions from British conquering of Ireland and deep-rooted retention of the north there, with the stubborn Irish Republican Army still attacking us, killing numerous innocent civilians while high-ranking Conservative Party members escaped the Brighton hotel attack.

The idea of being able to "prevent" terrorism was never an issue that occurred to us back then. No one mentioned CCTV cameras, DNA databases, ID cards, or even tighter border controls. As we saw with the Northern Ireland peace process and diplomatic democratic engagement with Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein, the only possible solution to the problem was - yet again - to look at the cause, not the cure that was impossible anyway. You can't stop people killing people if they're adamant about it. You just can't - not without eroding civil liberties that go way beyond mere sensible gun control.

Nonetheless, after 9/11, the U.S. premise of "fighting terror" against an "Axis of Evil" gained momentum. Bush Jr deemed entire peoples "evil" as God supposedly spoke to him: North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria...y'know, the usual suspects.

Wait a minute...Venezuela?

Yep, interestingly, Venezuela's "Bolivarian Revolution" that used oil resources to bring in medical services and even welfare to its shanty towns was just the start of a wave of populism sweeping across South America, in Argentina with Kirchner, Brazil with Lula, and even Bolivia, whose people elected the first-ever indigenous leader in Evo Morales. Oh yeah: while oilman Bush Jr was obsessed with the Middle East and failing to "accomplish" his "mission" there, the sleeping giant in the United States' backyard had awoken and risen.

With Bush and his gang gone, it would be Barack Obama inheriting the turmoil in the Middle East. Cleverly keeping his promise to pull troops from Iraq, he appeased the big-money military industrial complex by then sending thousands more of them into Afghanistan. But what of what was now Obama's backyard?

Well, Obama didn't call democratically-elected Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez "evil" - he simply did what diplomats are supposed to do: he met with him, and offered his hand (into which Chavez cleverly placed the book "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Eduardo Galeano.)

What next for South America? Well, the "Bolivarian Revolution" struggles on, with critics blasting Chavez for shutting down the private TV station criticising his regime (omitting the fact that the station called for him to be violently overthrown). And in Chile, Michelle Bachelet, a former torture victim of dictator General Pinochet that the U.S. and U.K. installed and supported, was replaced by Sebastián Piñera, who has links with Pinochet, in a tale of twisted tragic irony. The recent earthquake there has offered the neo-Pinochet regime an opportunity for what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism" - corporate interests profiting from tragedy and devastation.

Meanwhile, with our own political landscape in turmoil, how do we British treat Obama's Backyard? Well, we treat it like we treat any friend's backyard: like a garbage dump. Yep, the Brazilian environment agency Ibama found that over 1,400 tonnes of trash from the U.K. was dumped all the way over at their coast.

As the people of South America try and fight their way through the lies, corruption, and even the garbage, they at least enjoy the few fruits brought to them by the advance of progressive politics in the region the last several years. Let's hope this revolution doesn't end like all the other revolutions seem to have: with another set of elite interests in power.

- Jay Baker; Mallorca, Spain

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: Barack Obama, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Kirchner, Lula, Michelle Bachelet, Naomi Klein

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Survival of the Fittest?

"Make poverty history." We've heard that a lot. Then the economic crisis hit, and such concepts got conveniently put on the back-burner by powerful people. It hit, and it hit hard, but some of us weren't really surprised; in fact, we'd been warning people about it for quite a while.

As I've said before, you can't remove workers' rights in the workplace, and then ship the rest of the jobs overseas to increase profits and put the poor the furthest behind the rich they've been in forty years...without giving them access to credit (debt). And you can't keep filling the bottom of the barrel with debt without the bottom breaking open and everything falling out from under you.

The media quickly worked to refer to the crisis as the Credit CrunchTM, as though an unavoidable natural phenomenon, and a cereal you have to swallow down and go about your daily business. As is common by intellectual capitalists and Social Darwinists, while they tried to apply laws of nature onto society and politics, referring to the whole thing as a freak of nature, they also kept talking about the "survival of the fittest."

In my homeland, Great Britain, the government moved fast to bail-out the banks who had suddenly found themselves on the brink of destruction. The media drew attention to it, but the focus of their stories were not questioning the bail-outs themselves, but the behaviour of the bankers who were getting bonuses and posting profits in the aftermath - the only scenario where someone was given a raise for doing a bad job! What the media failed to do was question the bailout itself. Hardly anyone did. Funny, huh?

I know what you're thinking, "Well, the banks had to be rescued, because without them our economy might completely collapse, right?" Well, yeah, maybe. But when we talk about "banks," are we talking about the role banks play in our economy, or specific banks - run by corporations? Interestingly, when these corporations - these businesses - failed, suddenly the Social Darwinists weren't using the phrase "survival of the fittest" so much anymore. They weren't cheering for the dying dire banks to be destroyed through a natural selection process of elimination. Even though Metro, Virgin, and even Tesco had suddenly emerged ready to "step up to the plate" as the next line of banks to meet the demand, these older banks - these businesses, remember - were being bailed-out by their buddies in power: Labour, Tory, Same Old Story.

Yeah, the Tories can't comment, for sure - they are, after all, the ones who so loved the Social Darwinist approach to economics by the likes of Milton Friedman that they began massive deregulation of the financial sector years ago, giving the bankers free rein to run amok, with no concern for the disastrous possibilities...because those at the bottom of the barrel will take the brunt of the blow when they're all crushed and "crunched." The bankers - and maybe even the politicians who gave them license - committed financial terrorism on the population, and, as financial pundit Max Keiser suggests, ought to be prosecuted in the Hague.

But the banks have been bailed-out - to the tune of over £1.5 trillion! And why? Well, sure, the likes of RBS have been largely taken under public control, but we still have no say in where their profits are invested (in their case, towards environmental destruction and human rights abuses). And it's still £1.5 trillion we're talking about here!

What else might they have done with that £1.5 trillion? Well, I guess, as my mother always said since I was a kid, we have to "look at the cause, and not the cure." In other words, we ought to be pro-active, not merely reactive. So, will people in poverty without any widespread long-term stable job prospects still seek access to credit? Heck, yeah! Of course they will. That's not going to change unless the whole system changes; until corporations are taxed properly and operate properly, and money is more equally distributed so that people aren't homeless or hungry while rich white men are clinking their champagne glasses together on yachts paid for by overblown bonuses.

Yep, British citizens all across the country are in debt. And while they're in such a bad situation - just as with the poor countries in the developing world indebted to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank - the most decent, humane thing to do, if possible, would be to clear their debts; scrap it all.

But to bail-out the people instead of the banks would cost a lot of money, right? Yeah, there are a lot of citizens in Britain who are bogged-down in debt thanks to loans and mortgages and credit cards. It'd take a lot of money to re-set them all back to zero and liberate the entire population! It'd take a lot of money indeed. In fact, the debt of all citizens in the United Kingdom amounts to...wait for it...£1.5 trillion.

That's right. With the amount of money the politicians - the elite - unilaterally decided to use to bail-out their buddies in the financial sector most of them wanted deregulated, all the debts of all the people in the entire country could have been completely scrapped; gone; ka-put! And you, me, and each and every one of us would be debt-free, overnight. Can you imagine the change felt across the country? Can you imagine the people that would liberate? Citizens going to their jobs free from worry about repaying their debts. No more calls from the bullying collection agencies. No more payments on your mortgage. No more County Court Judgments. Everything you possess, truly owned by you.

It could have happened - with the £1.5 trillion the politicians decided to give to those few banking businesses instead, and now say that those private sector companies have cost the treasury so much money that all the poor people in the country - still, in fact, worrying about their debts - will see their public services slashed as well. A double-whammy! They're taking public money and giving it to private companies. So let's call it what it is: reverse socialism; taking from the poor (the taxpayers) and giving it to the rich (the banking businesses).

Of course, the media and politicians are still telling us that it needed to be done; that the financial sector is so very crucial to our country, and its economy. Is it? Is it really? Let's look at the area in which I work, for example. Media? Pah, pretty trivial stuff, right? Well, aside from the fact that money that could have been invested in cultural industries in communities all across Britain for weeks, months, and even years went instead towards some kind of two-week show in London called "the Olympics," the cultural industry itself is massively undervalued by those in power. But is it comparable to the mighty financial sector? Let's look at the facts.

The financial sector employs about 1million people and accounts for 8% of the GDP. That's fairly significant, right? But the cultural sector employs 1.3million people for 5% of the GDP! Wow...pretty close, huh? Yet the cultural sector is experiencing huge cuts, not just for the Olympics, but for the sake of it, while the financial sector, the failed sector, is gifted £1.5 trillion! (And don't even get me started on social audits that show the benefits culture gives to the people.) Can you imagine a cultural company - such as mine, SilenceBreaker Media - asking the government to be "bailed-out" because I'd badly managed it and run it into the ground (as did the board of directors of my last company after I'd left that)? They'd say "too bad...that's survival of the fittest."

Strangely, everything the Social Darwinists said to excuse their massive dominance and exploitation over the people is no longer applicable to themselves. When their buddies are in trouble, they're bailed out. When it's us in trouble, we get a big "FU." They have had us brought to our knees since the 1980s, when they closed our industries and deregulated those of their buddies. The last thing we should be doing while we're down on our knees is looking up and worshipping them and their business interests. We should be hitting them in their bollocks. We should be hitting them where it hurts. We should be changing the flow of capital.

Make affluence history.

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: bailout, banks, Conservative Party, intellectual capitalism, Margaret Thatcher, New Labour

Monday, March 1, 2010

Overthrowing the Underclass

As you may know, not long ago I was living in Canada, the second-largest country in the world. But long before I moved to Canada from Britain, the UK had sent its colonialism there, where it was embraced; cherished. It was with angst that I arrived there, then - carrying the same angst that all Anglos do when recent history reminds us of the atrocities of our ancestors. But it's true that the colonialism was taken to heart - not overseas, but at home; internally. And yet this is rarely realised.

Often largely due to Canada's favourite historical figure, groundbreaking socialist Tommy Douglas, the nation's international image seems to have become one of a "classless" and/or socialist society while defining its identity by simply reinforcing its differences from its notorious neighbours to the south. This all came about while millions of Canadians grew up in fear of conflict between the United States itself and the Soviet Union, with terrifying Cold War visions of nuclear missiles flying back and forth overhead. The world, in turn, had nothing but affection for Canada.

It was in the United States that I lived briefly following my engagement to a nurse there who, funnily enough, I met in Toronto, Ontario. The accents and highways and suburban sprawl were similar, but these were just superficialities, with a gulf separating Canadian and American fundamental ideals.

However, the trip that cemented my own affection for the country of Canada came after that, when I was earning almost $100,000 a year, and paid for myself and my girlfriend at the time to go on vacation in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'd never seen such an amazing place: in a single day, you can go from walking a suspension bridge over the Capilano, amongst the rainforests, along snow-covered mountains, on a ferry, across sandy beaches, to walking between skyscrapers en route to bustling cafes - making the city one of the most desirable destinations in the world for those who can afford it. Of course, this comes at a cost; you can't have rich without poor.

But I wanted to go there again; my girlfriend didn't. It was representative of the growing differences between us as she attended university and I craved other outlets beyond Britain. After an amicable parting, I went back again, and my life was changed, meeting the Ontarian woman who would become my wife.

When you arrive in Southern Ontario, you find yourself in the most Anglocised area of the entire country, with town names like London, Windsor, and Scarborough. In Brantford, you may catch a glimpse into the secret shame of the country by discovering the appalling living conditions of the Six Nations people there, on the Grand River. It was an eye-opener for me, for sure. To find somewhere more relatable, this Sheffield lad headed to the steel city of Hamilton, only to find that it, too, had seen its workers laid-off and the industrial jobs few and far between. If you travel along Highway 6, you'll see many weird and wonderful sights, from giant model dinosaurs to fences made from bicycles to abandoned tractors and other things seemingly sprung from a Tim Burton film. My then-wife vowed to make a photographic exhibition project about it - it really does have to be seen to be believed.

But that's not the only part of the country that's like something from Bizarro World; I've said before that all those smiles and reassurances of socialism conceal something sinister, and the unease I felt on Highway 6 was warranted. Moving to Canada is fine if you have money - and without a visa, mine had soon run out. My wife and I would soon separate, and only hours later it was further up Highway 6, in Guelph, that my dear close personal friend Lenna Titizian and I would see Naomi Klein speak about Canada's worrying trends, at a New Democratic Party rally, and have her sign her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (the kind of capitalism that was, in fact, taking over Canada, too). I had worked with Klein's colleagues in Toronto, such as those from Ontario's Coalition for Social Justice.

And such movements were needed. Canada, too, was becoming post-industrial, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement actually opening the gates for a flow of labour trickling down all the way to the sweatshops of Mexico. This was something I actively opposed whilst living in the city of Kitchener, in the region of Waterloo. It was there I conceived SilenceBreaker Media - though (fortunately) its limited success there allowed it to grow into something much more innovative and feasibly sustainable back in Britain. Despite claims to the contrary, I held several workshops, events, and successfully won funding for the proposed company in Kitchener, in spite of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority yet militant right-wing government slashing funding for the creative industries, too. It was ol' Steve that offered a lame apology to the Natives after it emerged there had been genocide committed against them on Canadian soil via "residential schools" throughout most of the 20th century.

Funnily enough, while Harper's government were tightening belts and cutting arts funding, they were able to find money for the Winter Olympics, sweeping the disgusting mistreatment of native people under the rug, just as Australia did when they too played host to the International Olympic Committee (while China used the Olympics to mask its attack on civil liberties).

I flew back to the Old World by plane with an empty seat beside me, having been asked by airline staff why my traveling partner - my wife - wasn't with me as booked. I didn't know the reason, and still don't know to this day. We'd been put through a lot of pressure by people determined to see us fail: bitter obsessives who stuck the knife in my back as soon as I turned around to leave Britain for a while (as I was no longer a meal-ticket for many, they influenced a shut-down of my UK company in order to seize its assets). We were to fly back there together, to develop collaboration on a documentary I'd been asked to make, titled Overthrowing the Underclass, and begin a reconciliation; a reconciliation inexplicably abandoned by my wife, and a collaboration killed.

But it was on that long flight that I also had time to reflect on my time there, in a country where its natives - be they First Nations or otherwise - are each systematically overthrown by avarice and exploitation, chewed up and spat out to make way for the next economic policy in the interests of the elite few represented by Stephen Harper.

I had discovered Canada as another kind of pioneer, finding an uglier layer beneath the progressive front: a Canada of unemployment, poverty, prejudice, and of peoples in need of unity to fight for the land they all share.

What happened next? Well, Kitchener was finding itself the destination dumping ground for homeless people being sent there to cleanse neighbouring up-market Waterloo, a city which - like Canada as a whole - was continuing its crucial branding, in its own case as "Top Intelligent Community" and home of the Blackberry loved by right-wingers. Meanwhile, the wife I was sadly divorcing thrived on that prestige - running high-brow amateur events, sending a clear message to the government that they apparently didn't require funding, while calling herself "working class," daughter of a school principal who grew up in one of the largest domestic houses I have ever been in. My current partner, who was born and bred in the Soviet Union, the first largest country in the world, shakes her head at these pampered people supporting separatism and internal issues when there are "bigger, more important problems" they should be united on.

Obviously, the Canadians don't truly know the class system. But at this rate, they will. Sadly, they will know it all too well. Their country isn't quite what they like to think it is.

As John Lennon sang, "You think you're so clever and classless and free, but you're still f*cking peasants as far as I can see."

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: Canada, intellectual capitalism, Naomi Klein, Olympics, Soviet Union, Stephen Harper

Monday, February 8, 2010

Ban Veganism

On October 15th, 2005, I published a blog titled The Real Cost of a Burger. I was pretty pleased with it; I said what I wanted to say on the meat industry and thought that it spoke for itself. I was wrong.

Last night, I was on The Fabulous D Show, hosted by my very dear close personal friend, The Artist D, always looking to raise issues and enlighten folks as "The Internet's First Superstar." You can download and play the podcast, but what you won't ever get is the abuse I did via the live chatroom as I was on-air. The reason? I was talking about saving the planet via the simple action of eating less meat - the number one contributing factor to climate change (more so - according to the United Nations - than all the transport in the world combined). No, Al Gore didn't mention that fact: the most "inconvenient truth" of them all, Al?

I was born in Doncaster, now a post-industrial town trying to recover, just like its top sports team, my beloved Doncaster Rovers, who comfortably play their home games from the brand-spanking-new Keepmoat Stadium after previous years spent struggling to survive in the bargain basements of soccer with an unscrupulous owner hiring a mob to burn the club's previous home to the ground in order to collect insurance, as documented in my film Escape from Doncatraz. Dark days indeed.

Aside from that, Doncaster is famous for its railway development, the historic train the Mallard...and being the birthplace of veganism. Yep: Doncastrian Donald Watson spearheaded the Vegan Society to promote a healthy, more ethical lifestyle of a diet free from dairy and meat products.

"Veganism?" you ask. "What's that all about?" Well, like I said on the show, I don't see the issue so crisp, clear, or binary. As I suggest in my latest book, Pissing in the Mainstream, we're all hypocrites just by way of living in a house; none of us are perfect - but we all do what we can, to varying degrees. All humans live on a vegan diet, some just add differing amounts of meat and dairy produce to their vegan meals! So, with that in mind, we're all on the same side here - as I told D after the show: "We're on the same team!" We don't necessarily have to agree to disagree because deep inside we all know what makes sense, and we all agree that, like, destruction of the planet kinda sucks.

So why is there such a stigma attached to veganism, even from progressive people? Well, unlike declaring yourself to be anti-war - which requires nothing more than the declaration itself - admitting that veganism is in fact a great idea for people and the planet suggests that you really ought to "be the change you wish to see in the world," as that other dirty vegetarian, Mahatma Gandhi, once said. Being anti-war is easy, because it doesn't take any effort at all to, y'know, not participate in the bombing of faraway lands for oil - you just carry on as normal and refrain from rising to power and ordering armies around! But being pro-vegan suggests you ought to start doing something; it's a lifestyle choice. Me? I'd accept a simple admission that it's a good idea - that'd be a nice start. But it's rare we even get that - instead, it's people jumping down your throat quicker than an ironically-named Happy Meal, or your head bitten off faster than a slaughterhouse beheading!

Clearly, due to so many vested interests, this lifestyle is not promoted by the government or the media - despite the absolutely overwhelming evidence from almost all scientific research that if you're simply doing it right (as I have for years) you'll be healthier than the average person (vegans halving their risk of cancer, for example...a hint that humans are totally designed for veganism). This is, of course, aside from the fact that by simply ditching the desires of them trivial taste-buds, you're actually helping to save the world! The diet itself ought to be promoted, proliferated, and even adopted into policy passed through political processes - such are the positives it produces.

But nope! Quite the opposite. We're taught from as early as kindergarten that this whole flesh-eating, milk-guzzling business is normal; natural. And that's capitalism for you: it's a creation of wants, when we don't need it - and if they can actually perpetuate the propaganda enough to have us not only wanting it but believing we need it too, then that's a great public relations victory for the billion dollar industry (and, again, the number one cause of climate change) that is the meat and dairy business. There's a lot of money there, all in a business based predominantly in the Western world that eats more animal produce than anywhere else, and has half of all the whole world's cancers, shipping Texas cattle to fields of fodder in starving Haiti to drain what's left of their resources, fatten cattle on at least 4lbs of grain to produce a measly 1lb of beef, then send 'em back for unnecessary death. What a waste. It's insane. People are starving to death and yet here we are fattening up overpopulated bovine to eat the grain instead - presumably because the average Western waistline isn't quite yet big enough to create a circular circuit of marathon around. Yep, that beef serves a purpose - full of iron that puts us at higher risk of colorectal cancer unlike vegetable-based iron...or protein...or calcium.

And of course, speaking of calcium, we drink their milk! How frickin' natural is that? We are the only species on earth that so voraciously drinks the milk from another's tit - artificially inseminating cows to become pregnant, killing their calves, and then stealing their milk! What the hell are we, Frankenstein or something? I thought Thatcher stealing milk from schoolkids was bad enough, but this is ridiculous. We got so batshit insane that we even tried feeding these herbivores their own kind, causing CJD and BSE (a little sign of how unnatural and unhealthy it is to feed meat to vegans - you see where I'm going here, right?)

And yet we've been so pumped full of this propaganda from an early age that we're taught to believe all of this is perfectly normal, natural, and healthy, when the absolute exact opposite is the case. We're taught that animal produce - causing unnecessary damage to people's health, the planet, and the animals that just want to get on with their own bloody circle of life - is the right thing to do, and to even dare to question that status quo is "weird," as though some McCarthyist Thought Police ought to be called, and veganism banned. Of course. It's a lot easier to sleep at night knowing we can just go about our business as usual. And oh, what a business it is: worth billions, and wrecking the globe - all based on trivial taste. That's it! "Yeah, I'm killing the planet by eating this piece of meat, but I like the taste." Well, bully for you, bubba. Gee, it's a hard life, eh? Being asked to eat something else instead to save the planet. Man, we're like spoiled bratty teenagers, whining about any little thing that's asked of us, even if it's best for everyone.

When are we going to get our heads from our own asses and stop acting like animals? In fact - as D rightly hinted - if we were restricted to the laws of nature like the animals (and our fellow herbivorous friends like those weak and frail vegans such as elephants and rhinos*), things might be a lot better.

We can either accept responsibility - all of us, as a society; as a system - to embrace the role as custodians of the planet, or we can continue on this blood-covered path to destruction and environmental catastrophe, and crack open each other's heads and feast on the goo inside. I know which is easier, I know what makes it easier for us nice fat rich white Westerners. But that's not what it's about - it's about a burger in one hand, and the planet in the other. Hmm.

I'm not preaching here, am I? I ought to be. Yet I don't; I leave other people to their own devices and hope they'll open their minds. And that's what's so tragically ironic about it all - it's those of us great spirits who are at least trying to do something that actually get bashed for it. Many of you know exactly what I'm talking about here. As I examined in Pissing in the Mainstream, the first thing Western society does when it sees anyone doing something good is try to tear them apart; rip them to pieces like prey caught by a predator (something we can't do with our teeth or nails, eh?)

Yet again, that's capitalism for you. And the meat industry is the perfect representation of capitalism: destructive want over need, blindly going forth into the darkness of destruction with gluttonous greed.

Go back to bed, Westerners. Go back to sleep. Close them eyes; close them minds. We'll just ban veganism and anything else that questions the status quo. Hell, it's only the entire planet we're talking about here. No biggie, eh. We've got meat to go eat!

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein. Yeah - he didn't eat meat, either.

*You can find other frail vegans here

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Reservations About Reservations

a.part.heid noun A system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.

It's pretty extraordinary how humans have been treated like animals - worse, in fact: like commodities.

Of course, border controls have only been around for barely more than a century, largely concocted to prevent Jewish people from entering countries like mine - Britain - when it was considered merely an inconvenience. Millions of dead Jews later, the feigned concern for them was used as an excuse to stop Hitler's Nazi quest for white-power world domination when, in fact, it was just that this was a capitalist with potentially more might than our capitalists. Lord Kitchener, after all, had already popularised use of the "concentration camp" model long before those pesky Nazis used it.

Before that, though, the first examples of a concentration camp were in the United States, where predominantly European invaders slaughtered, tortured, raped, pillaged and plundered Native land, and incarcerated their people in confinement. Not satisfied with that, these "Americans" then found that there weren't enough "Injuns" left over to exploit - so had to try to satiate their greed for slavery by going and kidnapping Africans to bring them back over with them for more capitalist exploitation. Yep, you can't have a rich, fat, elite without an exploited poor huddled masses. Why do you think immigration was considered such a good thing at the time, the French beacon to the world's unwanted positioned at the coast? The fat cats were licking their chops at the sight of all these desperate people as tools for profit. The United States of America became an apparatus of avarice, taking in, chewing up, and spitting out minorities in its American Dream machine. My dad always said, "They can't all be Indians; you have to have Chiefs." The dream was an illusion; in actuality a nightmare.

It's been said that in modern America, the concentration camp still exists, but in another form: the ghetto. In these areas, the people with even less chance of realising any kind of "dream" at all have hardly any opportunities, kept at the bottom of the barrel, while U.S. TV shows show the rest of us images of only financially comfortable, perfectly coiffed and manicured African-Americans like Bill Cosby and Damon Wayans in their big suburban homes, while even the aptly-named White House has a token black man placed in it to serve the interests of the privileged class he's surrounded by and harp on with the American DreamTM rhetoric to keep everyone calm.

In-keeping with the agenda, the further abuse and use of Judaism for capitalist methods led to the creation of an Israeli state that would forcibly and often illegally encroach on Palestinian land to steal resources, leading to reactionary violence that Western media would label "terrorism" since it wasn't given approval from a rich white man's rubber stamp or seal while wearing a sharp suit, instead using the tales to demonise Islam and Muslims and commence a colonial War on TerrorTM that continues to this day under the present administrations.

And last but not least: Down Under, in the nation of Australia often considered comprised of convicts from Europe, the Aboriginal people who were there first suffer their own punishment for no sin besides being in the way of greed. The businessmen bartering for an Olympics show on their turf when taking the International Olympic Committee on a tour of Australia hid the sorry sights of these people from the bigwigs. And don't even get me started on Woomera refugee camp, seen in the closing moments of my film Escape from Doncatraz.

But stop the press - there's more! In the same way yet going one step further, the Canadian elite has not only yet again waved its banner and buoyed its image as "accepting" and "tolerant" and, well, "not American" to woo the IOC their way while hiding the horrors of the living conditions of First Nations people there - but even allowed their Olympic projects to help them sweep them under the rug. Oh, what you can get away with in your own backyard when you're juxtaposed against your rowdier, drunken, more violent next-door neighbour. How much longer will the world fall for this pathetic PR attempt from a country with such appalling treatment of First Nations people and a substandard welfare state? Sorry, Canada, you are American: North American, and all that land was native land. But that's for another time and place.

Few have reservations about reservations. Few recognise the apartheid that exists all around the world to this day thanks to a voracious elite distracting, dividing and conquering the mass majority in the world who are not white, yet poor. Slavery never ended - we just gave it another name: capitalism.

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: apartheid, Australia, Canada, Escape from Doncatraz, Israel, Palestine, racism

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

The Big Red One: Santa Clause IV

It's been an interesting year. I've said before that New Labour is a failed brand: nobody asked for New Labour, nobody wanted New Labour, nobody needed New Labour. Re-branding doesn't work when your head honchos love it, but your target market hate it. In 1997, people were so sick to their stomachs of the Conservatives that, heck, they'd have even voted en masse for my beloved Doncaster Rovers team as the next cabinet, if that was the alternative (and back then, they even sucked at soccer - now they're doing well in the Championship and beating teams like Bristol City, which of course I'm not shouting about as I sit here at Bristol International Airport awaiting a flight...to socialist Spain).

Speaking of socialism, I've also said that New Labour are now doomed unless they drop the "New" and return to some of the values they had back when they formed at the turn of the century - a group of trade unionists sitting in the Good Woman pub in St Sepulchre Gate in Doncaster drafting up a proposal to the trade union congress to create a party for the people, a party for the workers: a Labour Party. The Big Red One! Here we are, a century later, and they're almost unrecognizable, and considered virtually unelectable.

Yep, after all the damage Thatcher's Tories did to Britain, 1997 finally saw the working classes mobilize and make sure Labour got into power. What they didn't realize, however, was that New Labour meant Tory LiteTM. Tory Tony Blair scrapped his party's Clause IV (devotion to nationalization of industry), which may not have seemed like a big deal, had it not been for the fact that what it actually symbolized was Blair's devotion to the very opposite: privatization - of areas even Thatcher was hesitant to touch. Blair was able to do this, of course, as a wolf in sheep's clothing; a very dangerous man indeed. And now? Well, today we have his successor, Gordon Brown, trying his best at damage control while leading a party his predecessor put towards privatization, leaving Britain ripe for the pickings of a Tory Party salivating at the thought of finally selling off every last little piece of the country to anyone with the money to buy (their pals). Yeah: thanks - ironically - to New Labour, Tories are more excited than John Major in Edwina Curry's bedroom; their wildest dreams now almost a reality. Almost.

The thing is, New Labour have faced a backlash because of these policies, and today's Independent published results of a poll showing that a massive amount of British citizens still feel the Tory toffs favour the privileged few. And 2009 has seen the demise of New Labour's best-laid right-wing plans.

In 2009, Blair admitted he committed war crimes, compulsory identity cards were essentially abandoned, the plans to privatize the postal service were scrapped, certain banks were taken back into government ownership, and, with an overwhelming 70% of the British public wanting Thatcher's privatized railways back under government control, it actually started to happen. As if the message was not clear enough over the last decade of diminishing votes for the New Labour brand: Britain wanted its working class party back. From the call centre operators to the retail checkout clerks, it wanted a Labour Party again.

So, with the coal of my hometown barely a memory, Santa Claus gets to safely land at the bottom of my chimney with a chance of granting my wish of what I - like most of the working class mass majority - want for Christmas: the return of the Labour Party.

The New Year will bring us a renewed push from the Tory toffs to re-brand themselves, too, as less posh, more relatable, and a far cry from Thatcher's Milton Friedman economics that led to a devastating economic crisis - but it's more of the same. Incredibly, their solution to the crisis has been to repeat what was the problem in the first place: selling off public services, privatization, and deregulation for their banker buddies. What Gordon Brown and Labour have to do, then, is show us what - if anything - is left of the Labour Party that represented the workers; the working class. They have to show us the Big Red One at its biggest and best!

A defining moment in the history of British politics is almost here. Interestingly enough, for Labour to show a shred of integrity means they can still stay in power, while to fail to kick their habit - this new addiction to capitalism - means certain defeat, and a nation wallowing in the mock of avarice.

- Jay Baker; Bristol, England

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, New Labour, Tony Blair

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Asian is the New Black

"White folks ain't trying to keep you down. White folks just don't like to be pushed into a corner. They'll come around. You just got to make it look like it was their idea, like they're the ones that thought of it. They need to feel like they're the great emancipators. Like it was theirs to give in the first place. Let them have it. I mean, if that's all it takes, let them have it." - Laurence Fishburne as Edward Robinson, to a Mexican in the movie Bobby.

Is there a racial hierarchy? The African-Americans have seemingly always suffered racism, a part of U.S. society unchanged by the token election of a right-wing capitalist President who just happens to be black. Then - as if nothing had been learned from Ireland or Palestine - Barack Obama's predecessors began the building of a wall to prevent more Mexicans crossing the border. "Now," I heard one African-American tell a Mexican, "you are the niggers." It was a concept represented by that character, Edward Robinson, in Emilio Estevez's film about Robert Kennedy's last hours. There always has to be an "enemy within" for our true enemies to thrive on.

It's nothing new. Immigration controls are barely more than a hundred years old, conceived initially with the motivation of restricting movement of the Jews; creating the ability to open and close borders at will, as though part of some kind of Social Darwinist selection. But due to the shortage in workforce in 1950s Britain, the "colonials" were suddenly welcomed into the country over from the Caribbean to fill the void. Later, they were met with disdain, but it soon passed as society progressed and people became enlightened.

Soon enough, the soccer hooligans were fighting, but the whites and blacks were joining together in chasing Indians and Pakistanis through the streets; it was their turn, and the blacks were just glad to be able to save their asses and be on the winning team. The Southern Asians in Britain were left to endure the National Front marching through their slums...until the Anti-Nazi League came along, and - taking direct action to another level - ran into those streets and gave the fascist racists a good beating, kicking their cause to the curb.

More recently, we've seen South Asia bombed repeatedly and starved through sanctions, killing millions of children and many more adults. The CIA created the Ba'ath Party led by Saddam Hussein, as well as Osama bin Laden's Taliban, all as part of its effort to control the region, resulting in reactionary terrorist attacks from extremists - among them, ironically, Osama bin Laden himself. But the bombings in London, England, on July 7th, 2005, were by lads from West Yorkshire, where racism had risen and the British National Party had gained ground.

Asians in Britain are trying to counter Islamophobia rife in the mainstream media through groups like MPACUK, and the rich and powerful are galvanising the issue of immigration that only boosts the single-issue politics of the BNP when there is in fact no issue there at all. As a result, while I was making Escape from Doncatraz on this subject, I even heard British-born Asians talk about the supposed threat of refugees and those who seek asylum. Yep: they're the ones now sitting at the bottom of the barrel in a capitalist system that crushes us from the very top, and depends on divisive distraction to get away with it over and over again.

You see, when you've scratched and clawed your way from the bottom of the barrel you, too, fear ever going back there. You'll stand on whoever you can through fear of losing the few things you've gained. Those at the top are so far away, so impossible to reach or even see, it's your only hope of leverage, the only way you feel you can survive. That's capitalism. And until it's gone, the elite will always keep distracting us to "kick the dog" while they continue to enjoy their power, their riches, and that very system that keep them on top at our expense.

- Jay Baker; South Yorkshire.

Jay Baker's brand-new book is Pissing in the Mainstream. You can read a compilation of his best blogs from the past several years, and a few exclusives, in the book Soon To Be Banned: Musings of a Media Activist, available here.

Labels: Barack Obama, Escape from Doncatraz, Immigration, racism, refugees

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