Cameron the weasel

October 2, 2014 //

The problem with David Cameron? Well, there are many, but the one I’ve noted recently is that he promises a lot. He says ‘I’ll change things here, I’ll offer more, I’ll make this work better.’ But he doesn’t actually do things. He doesn’t address the parliament on these matters and work to change. He’s reacting. This week at the Conservative Party conference, he was reacting to UKIP defections by saying he’d scrap work protections and do a few other things out of the UKIP playbook.

In response to the approaching referendum on Scottish independence, he promised to devolve more powers to the Parliament in Edinburgh, among other things.

Reasonable as he often sounds, Cameron uses the tricks of the abuser and 9 year old boy. When he finds himself in trouble, or hears that his partner (Scotland, the right wing of his party) is trying to leave, he promises to do better. I cringe when I hear this kind of thing coming from his mouth because as a world leader, he’s supposed to put this stuff up front. Much as I despise Maggie Thatcher and just about everything she stood for in her leadership of Great Britain, when she had a move to make, she made it. Crushing the unions? She stepped up and got the job done. War with Argentina? Order the ships to be built. Cameron, on the other hand, realises he’s about to be punished and like a guilty child promises to do better.

National elections are getting close and these things seem to work. Did his promises work in Scotland? They might have done so. The matter there might also have had to do with Salmond’s great dearth of any actual plan. Among other things.

Why is this asshole lying to me? He says one thing in public, but can’t be trusted to follow through and secure the deal, or to step up and take responsibility for his vision. My feeling is that he doesn’t actually have one. He got into office because the population didn’t feel New Labour (aka Tory Lite) had anything more to offer. And he’ll retain his position until someone with more than a miliband of charisma comes to the fore from the Left. I vaguely recall when one of the characteristics we looked for in a leader was vision, as opposed to ‘that vision thing’. We still prefer it to the tinned thing that weasels like Mitt Romney offer, but we don’t hear it any more.

Time and again in that conference speech, Cameron says, ‘this is what a conservative government *will* do. At one point, he says he didn’t want a coalition government, that it was forced on him. It wasn’t forced: the Tories didn’t win a majority, therefore, to form a government required a coalition. The LibDems could have gone to Miliband and offered their services. The time of New Labour was over and they knew it. So, everything Cameron says he *will* do is based on whether he can secure a straight-up majority. The fact remains, that all these things he promises, he can negotiate in parliament. He can achieve many of them with the compromise a mature democracy engages in because that’s what mature people do. (Note, of course, that the US House of Representatives returned to nursery school about 5 years ago and there’s no sign the teacher is ready to let them go even to kindergarten.)

He talks about scrapping the travesty that is the zero-hours contract. If he were to put this to parliament tomorrow, he could get a win. Labour thinks they’re lousy as well. I’m pretty sure zero-hours contracts are a gift the Tories gave to business to take away more workers’ rights. Labour would welcome the opportunity to debate and vote. No need to wait for the election.

He addresses global business saying that Britain has ‘rolled out the red carpet…cutting red their tape and cutting their taxes…Now you must pay what you owe.’ Again: Put this to parliament. What a wonderful source of deficit-cutting income – Amazon and Starbucks and Apple paying taxes commensurate with what they earn doing business in the UK. Votes wouldn’t be unanimous, but parliamentarians not owned by big business would happily vote yes.

And again, on the opportunity to raise the income level at which taxpayers owe the top rate of 40%. No need to wait except if it’s a threat.

He also talks about differences in how the Tories and Labour view education, but that’s a matter for another post.

Tags David Cameron, election, referendum

Categories Europe, Politics, UK

And some of the music…

September 26, 2014 //

In the vain hope of convincing some colleagues to join tonight’s Swans adventure at the Paradiso in Amsterdam, I sent the following around.

I was unsuccessful, but perhaps a reader or two will be turned on to the unmitigated brilliance…

A good intro to what Swans are doing now *might be* this one:

Avatar A slightly muddy live version from 2012’s The Seer. (Note the skinny tattooed guitarist in the white t-shirt)
No Words / No Thoughts Originally on the 2010 album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Stars
Oxygen Appears on the latest album To Be Kind.
The Apostate From 2012’s The Seer.
A bit of history: New Mind, from 1987’s Children of God. (I didn’t realize the label had given the band a music video budget. This is about two years before they covered Love Will Tear Us Apart, and just as Jarboe (the female singer/keyboardist who isn’t part of the latest incarnation) joined the band. The skinny shirtless guitarist walking behind Gira is the same guy I pointed out in the Avatar video. I think he’s the only current member of the band whose participation goes back to the 80s.)
For a serious sonic adventure, dig Public Castration is a Good Idea, a live document from 1986 that captures their early intensity really well. (They brought Coward (track 5) into the set list for the 2010/2011 tour. (This video is indexed – you can click on the times in the track list.)
Blind Love from the 1987 tour document Feel Good Now always gives me the shivers. The evolution they made in just that one year is astounding.

The Jarboe (’87-’97) period produced some really brilliant stuff, but it’s not as representative of what they’re doing now. The final album of that period, Soundtracks for the Blind had some gorgeous creepy stuff. The Beautiful Days, Her Mouth is Filled With Honey, and Blood Section are recommended, but it’s an album to experience in its entirety.

Tags Michael Gira, Swans

Categories Music, Rock

What if they held a war and no one came?

September 24, 2014 //

I was a teenager in the 80s and had a dreadful fear of Reagan getting us into some kind of heavy duty war. I was 22 when Bush Sr. succeeded in starting a serious war in Iraq to boost the credentials he’d earned invading Panama. As my 20s wore on, there were wars of varying scales in the Balkans, but nothing to really presage the continuous war the US has been engaged in since 2002. Which we’ve just expanded into Syria. I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s reporting on our sickening new airstrikes from ships in the Red Sea and elsewhere nearby. We apparently have amazing CentCom-released footage of Tomahawk missiles going up, but we learned our lessons from 1993: Don’t show the footage of the missiles coming down. 200 missiles in one night against multiple targets including Khorosan, a group no one’s actually discussed until now.

The dread and the horror never lessen. When we invaded Iraq in 1991, my friends and I feared for end times. We didn’t know yet that Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia, and when Bush I refrained from taking Saddam Hussein down, we could breathe deeply again. Maybe we wouldn’t be at war again for a while. The focus just shifted.

I was relatively lucky, or the US governments of my youth were rather more circumspect: while there was mandatory draft registration in place from about ~~1983~~ (ETA: The draft registration was instated by Carter as a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan opposed the draft as governor and opposed the registration in the 1980 campaign but in 1982 indicated it would stay and subsequently pursued selective service prosecutions.[Ref]), there was never a call-up. I don’t recall what the upper age limit was, 30 maybe? I could hear my mother’s relief over the phone, however, when I was no longer eligible. Clinton and the Bushes, though they waged numerous wars, knew better too than to reinstate the draft. Many things brought Nixon down (his own hubris, mainly), but the executive branch learned that a draft to fight a war on foreign soil would need far more justification than any of the recent presidents could come up with. Another blog entry will look at the evaporation of opportunities for the poor such that signing on to the military sounds like a viable proposition.

So now we’re engaged in Syria. Our oil-wealthy allies in the region have lovely air forces that the US, UK, and French defence industries have sold them. And they say they’re prepared to use them to help us in the coming war. Except the ones that won’t. We haven’t armed Syria directly, at least not in a long time – that has been the job of Russia. The phrase ‘poking the bear’ comes to mind.

The rationale has been (until this new group was mentioned) that we’re hunting down and disarming ISIL. (I prefer the version of the name that refers to the Levant, given that one of the group’s rationales is to roll back the Western agreements that broke up the Levant into Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and so on.) Like the War on Terror (or Terra, as some prescient wags have put it), there’s no end to such wars. This is, of course, how the war-making industries would like to keep it. Again.

I think that the war, from the perspective of the United States’ adversaries, has already been won. As soon as we declared a Department of Homeland Security, they knew our security had been irretrievably breached. Once we sent troops to fight on their soil and started building installations to train people they could easily recruit (Mosul, anyone?), the war was won. The Western perspective is that it has only just been re-engaged. When we go in without an exit strategy (again), they’ve won. Orwell’s insight into the Stalinist victory was that once entrenched, the new -ism could take up with its old adversaries and make as though nothing had really changed, to the benefit of each. As long as the blood of the sons and daughters of those in power wasn’t shed.

And we’re there again. We look from man to pig and from pig to man and can’t tell which is which.

Categories Politics, United States, war

More about Swans

September 23, 2014 //

As noted a couple of weeks ago, I’m going to see Swans this coming Friday. I’ve been a fan since about 1988, when they covered Love Will Tear Us Apart. The following year’s major label release, The Burning World was much in the same vein. Lyrically intense, well-produced (Bill Laswell at the helm, not too long after PiL’s Album), acoustic rock which the members have long since disowned. I also listened to the predecessor of those releases, Children of God, which is almost as relentless as their even earlier work in terms of guitar and percussion, but shows a growth towards some kind of pop.

Following The Burning World, Swans’ frontman and mainstay Michael Gira started his own record label, Young God, on which he released four more Swans studio albums and two live collections before calling quits on Swans. He released several albums under the moniker Angels of Light (mostly beautifully intense acoustic work quite reminiscent of The Burning World – in fact on the first Angels of Light tour, he played that album’s God Damn the Sun for an encore), as well as solo work and work by artists he respected, the most successful being Devendra Banhart.

About five years ago Gira had a well-documented revelation about the work he could produce as Swans. He called in guitarist Norm Westberg (whose association with Swans goes almost back to 1983 and who has played on all Swans recordings from the debut album Filth, save for Love of Life) and Phil Puleo (an absolutely fearsome drummer who was in the final touring version of Swans in 1997 and the initial incarnations of Angels of Light), and three other musicians who had been in on various Gira projects. Percussionist Thor Harris had been in Angels of Light, bassist Christopher Pravdica came from outside the band (having previously played with Gunga Gin among other acts) and guitarist Christoph Hahn whose internet presence is minimal to say the least. The first studio album of the reinvigorated Swans, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Stars was a single-disc, relatively (for Swans) straightforward affair. The subsequent studio recordings, The Seer and this year’s To Be Kind (released on Mute outside of North America – their first major-ish label release since ’89) push two hours each with multiple 20+ minute tracks. And each is a step up on the last. This septet has been constant for these most recent records and tours. Having seen Swans twice in the 90s, I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to see them three times (in three countries!) since their rebirth (and one fantastic solo Gira show earlier this year).

I haven’t written anything here about the music. The history is easy to find and doesn’t really help matters any. Gira’s interviews help more, and they’ve been more forthright and interesting, and far less confrontational, recently than they ever were in the 80s and 90s. The experience of the music (preferably live, and at least on a good stereo, though to be honest most music I listen to these days is on sub-par at best earbuds or headphones) is the key. The playlist up at the top is a good start. If you can hold your concentration, I recommend holding on through the nine minutes of No Words/No Thoughts as a good intro. My current favourite work of theirs are the tours de force, like Apostate and Bring the Sun.

Categories Music, Rock

Feminism, the NFL, and Yours truly

September 22, 2014 //

First and foremost: I am probably the wrong bloke to be writing about feminism. In many ways, I’m very stereotypical in my male-ness. The way men are accused of talking over women – yeah, I do that with alarming regularity. I may distinguish myself from other men by kicking myself about it later, but so far I haven’t improved on the behaviour.

I talk the talk however about the radical notion that women are people and oh my gracious, have we still not evolved beyond notions of the glass ceiling? No, we really haven’t. I recently read a blog entry (and I really need to improve my bookmarking of these things if I’m going to cite them myself) about the number of females achieving CEO status in US corporations. Yes, that number has grown in recent years, and so has the number of female CEOs booted for not being able to turn the messes of their predecessors around on a dime.

Bloomberg’s article on the recent study is here:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-29/why-women-ceos-get-fired-more-often

Oddly, the money quote isn’t “To be exact: Over the past 10 years, 38 percent of female chief executives of the world’s 2,500 biggest public companies were fired, compared to 27 percent of their male counterparts.”

The meat of the issue is that women and minorities are hired into senior positions when corporations are in crisis. If turnaround isn’t swift, the boot is, and these crisis hires are generally replaced by white males. Again.

It’s heartening occasionally to note that there are more female prime ministers than there ever have been, but discrimination is still rampant and we still have BS like the current NFL scandal (which Rachel Maddow is covering quite well). There was a bloke on Friday’s show who laid it out. Commissioner Goodell makes something like $44 million per year to keep the scandals at bay and keep the NFL the multi-billion dollar franchise it’s become. There have been three or four domestic abuse cases to come out of the NFL in the last week or so, which of course begs the question: how many have been effectively shoved under the carpet in the last ten years? When this kind of thing goes public in other realms, policies go into place right quick to show that the company in question is serious about addressing the problem. The first thing that came to my mind on hearing about these NFL cases was: why isn’t there an abuse clause in all player’s contracts? Accused of domestic abuse? Benched for an entire season. At least. Convicted? Out. The Ray Rice case is such that a conviction isn’t really necessary: He’s never denied he’s the man on the video. Is it really something we can stand to see or hear equivocated?

Goodell’s lies about when he and the league knew about the tape were almost enough to make me lose my lunch this afternoon.

Jena MacGregor who blogs for the Washington Post argues (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2014/09/19/indra-nooyi-the-nfl-and-the-responsibility-of-female-ceos/) that the female CEOs of Pepsi, GM, and Campbell’s Soup would show great leadership in speaking out, but contrary to the demands of some leaders, they don’t have “a special responsibility” to do so. MacGregor doesn’t name the people calling for female CEOs to speak out, but points to (another) Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-17/nfl-sponsors-staying-mum-on-abuse-crosses-ceo-gender-line.html), which names two: Donna Lopiano, the former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation and Pat Cook, president of Cook & Co., a boutique executive search firm in Bronxville, New York.

I suppose I agree that female CEOs have no special responsibility to speak out, but stakeholders in general – all CEOs who sponsor the NFL, for example, should stop covering their asses and look only to the moral high ground. Tracy Chapman once sang “all that you have is your soul” – well, I’m an atheist. If you believe in your soul, support its well-being by telling the NFL that your $100 million in sponsorship money might be better spent elsewhere. Or simply be honourable and do the same.

Mind you, the boards of Campbells, GM, and PepsiCo will gladly show the CEOs MacGregor cites the door as soon as such a decision is shown to affect the holy bottom line. Such are the times we live in.

Categories Politics, United States