Paul Mason's Report On Newsnight

[Dorkins]

Not at all. A hung parliament would be brilliant. Do you know what happens when no-one has complete control. You have to talk sensibly and realistically and agree on a policy - not some half-witted dogma that is the party line.

I'll believe it when I see it. Seems to me that when nobody is in charge, nobody will want to take responsibility for making difficult decisions which may be painful in the short term but will eventually fix the problem. A single party government working within a 5 year election cycle could start hacking away at public sector spending on day 1 Irish-style in the hope that it could get it sorted and have some positive results to show in time for the next election. Unfortunately I doubt any of our major parties have the intellect or the cojones to do that, so discipline will eventually be imposed upon them by market forces in the form of a Greek-style bond crisis. I guess the result will be the same in the end, would be nice to think we could do it ourselves sooner and before it gets any worse rather than having terms dictated to us by our creditors.

[Cicero]

It's achieving exactly what it's meant to - the mass churning out of useless, knowledgeless unemployables with a massive sense of entitlement is no accident.

Follow the votes/money.

Yep, absolutely spot on.

[lets get it right]

I'll believe it when I see it. Seems to me that when nobody is in charge, nobody will want to take responsibility for making difficult decisions which may be painful in the short term but will eventually fix the problem. A single party government working within a 5 year election cycle could start hacking away at public sector spending on day 1 Irish-style in the hope that it could get it sorted and have some positive results to show in time for the next election. Unfortunately I doubt any of our major parties have the intellect or the cojones to do that, so discipline will eventually be imposed upon them by market forces in the form of a Greek-style bond crisis. I guess the result will be the same in the end, would be nice to think we could do it ourselves sooner and before it gets any worse rather than having terms dictated to us by our creditors.

But the trouble is neither Tories nor Labour will tell it as it is - because, in Labour's case, it will be clear who is to blame and, in the Tories case, they think if they tell us the truth we won't elect them preferring to listen to the siren Labour voices who tell us 'we'll cut the deficit in 4 years, nothing to see here, we're in charge, we know what we're doing' etc.

The only party able to give us the truth is the Lib Dems because they think they won't get elected.

What I'd like to see is Clegg and Cable really shooting from the hip - they have nothing to lose and, you never know, might get elected. Even if they just hold the balance of power, you'll see a huge shift in language. Then it will be all about 'we've GOT to do this or we're going down the pan'.

[dances with sheeple]

Agreed. We have built a high cost economy (housing, utilities, taxes) supported by the debt injection but forgotten about those who cannot command a high enough price for their time. Of course we can magic them into being more "valuable" by putting a minimum wage in place but that just means they will never be cheaper than a machine.

Maybe there are some things we could get them to do (god knows we have enough pot-holes need filling) but those lads are not going to be worth much to someone in an economically depressed area. So we tax everyone else to keep these chaps on the dole/housing benefit/ because we can't let costs in the economy fall (withdraw houseing benfits and see how many landlords get wiped out and how quickly rents fall) as that would hurt the asset rich people running the show.

There's only so much longer it can go on like this. We are going to hit the buffers of reality soon.

Tax take can`t support this now though can it? Next stage is economic migrants out, then no dole if you don`t take menial work, hard to see any other outcome? UK sheeple will turn on incomers when the going gets really tough otherwise?

[lets get it right]

It's achieving exactly what it's meant to - the mass churning out of useless, knowledgeless unemployables with a massive sense of entitlement is no accident.

Follow the votes/money.

So you think the lads in Stoke in that piece last night on Newsnight are going to be natural Labour voters? I think you judge them incorrectly. They sounded to me like they want to work. They'll vote for anyone they think will give them the opportunity to earn some money and not spend their lives in boring idleness.

You think Labour have deliberately given a generation a poor education because they will vote for them?

I think Labour wanted to give everyone a good education myself - but, unfortunately, they are congenitally incapable of doing anything properly - apart from borrowing money. They are good at that.

[Injin]

So you think the lads in Stoke in that piece last night on Newsnight are going to be natural Labour voters? I think you judge them incorrectly. They sounded to me like they want to work. They'll vote for anyone they think will give them the opportunity to earn some money and not spend their lives in boring idleness.

I think they are dependant on the state. Labour are a minor faction.

You think Labour have deliberately given a generation a poor education because they will vote for them?

No I think the state as a whiole wants everyone as thick as shit and entitled because who do you turn to if that's your mental state?

Do you make a start up, or do you ask for more legislation to be passed in your favour?

Do you sign on/find a job working at the council or do you make stuff from ntohign on your own?

Which one would the statists prefer?

I think Labour wanted to give everyone a good education myself - but, unfortunately, they are congenitally incapable of doing anything properly - apart from borrowing money. They are good at that.

Labour are good at borrowing in everyones name and pulling the guilt card. The tories are good at collecting it and being an object of hate for the little guy.

It's a tag team.

[lowrentyieldmakessense(honest!)]

I doubt if anything "top down" will work now and will result in mal investment. It really requires "bottom up" investment and involvement to work. Almost a "grass roots" involvement if you can drag people away from X factor for long enough.

Quite how this will occur I don't know. It might require something cataclismic, perhaps even Injin's "state failure", where people just get on with doing there own thing. I don't know. No one does!

For example get the state to do something and you end up with ludricrous situation where it costs over £300 to put an extra power socket into a hospital. "The people" doing it directly will know an electrician that will do it for a fiver (thus bypassing the crony capitalist service company).

The state machine and crony capitalists such as the Branson's of this world need to be bypassed, then the tapeworm will start to die.

Even people like Michael Portillo, are discussing these idea's now.

link

[lets get it right]

I think they are dependant on the state. Labour are a minor faction.

No I think the state as a whiole wants everyone as thick as shit and entitled because who do you turn to if that's your mental state?

Do you make a start up, or do you ask for more legislation to be passed in your favour?

Do you sign on/find a job working at the council or do you make stuff from ntohign on your own?

Which one would the statists prefer?

Labour are good at borrowing in everyones name and pulling the guilt card. The tories are good at collecting it and being an object of hate for the little guy.

It's a tag team.

If I thought like you, I'd have to leave the country. You REALLY think there is some sort of giant 'statist' conspiracy going on? One where goverments secretly decide how to deliberately lower education standards so that they'll end with a nation of useless dependents? What use is a nation of useless dependents to them? They are just a drain on EVERYONE. What's the point?

Why not just put something in the water? Why not legalise drugs in the hope we all turn ourselves into .... what exactly ... soporofic drones - but drones who do no work? Or is it deeper than that? When's martial law being declared?

[Cicero]

I doubt if anything "top down" will work now and will result in mal investment. It really requires "bottom up" investment and involvement to work. Almost a "grass roots" involvement if you can drag people away from X factor for long enough.

Quite how this will occur I don't know. It might require something cataclismic, perhaps even Injin's "state failure", where people just get on with doing there own thing. I don't know. No one does!

For example get the state to do something and you end up with ludricrous situation where it costs over £300 to put an extra power socket into a hospital. "The people" doing it directly will know an electrician that will do it for a fiver (thus bypassing the crony capitalist service company).

The state machine and crony capitalists such as the Branson's of this world need to be bypassed, then the tapeworm will start to die.

Even people like Michael Portillo, are discussing these idea's now.

Yep, sounds good to me.

Perhaps something lasting and worthwhile shall be wrought from state failure.

[Cicero]

If I thought like you, I'd have to leave the country. You REALLY think there is some sort of giant 'statist' conspiracy going on? One where goverments secretly decide how to deliberately lower education standards so that they'll end with a nation of useless dependents? What use is a nation of useless dependents to them? They are just a drain on EVERYONE. What's the point?

Why not just put something in the water? Why not legalise drugs in the hope we all turn ourselves into .... what exactly ... soporofic drones - but drones who do no work? Or is it deeper than that? When's martial law being declared?

Well, this American educator puts forward a compelling argument:

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/

[oracle]

The UK has deeply rooted structural unemployment, and I have no idea how we re-skill to get create wealth again...

a picture tells a thousand words!!

is it me or does the guy on the left look a bit like a court jester?

Edited March 30, 2010 by oracle

[Injin]

If I thought like you, I'd have to leave the country. You REALLY think there is some sort of giant 'statist' conspiracy going on? One where goverments secretly decide how to deliberately lower education standards so that they'll end with a nation of useless dependents? What use is a nation of useless dependents to them? They are just a drain on EVERYONE. What's the point?

It's not a giant conspiracy, it's openly stated policy. The exam structure, the school day, the funneling effect, the denial of what are actualyl pretty simple jobs until you have qualifications (which just so happen to take 15 years to acquire and need you to be in enormous amounts of debts and therefore unable to rock the boat.)

The thinking is we need a certain %age of unemployed surplus labour, only a certain %age of people need to be taught anything relevent (i.e we have a managerial class) and everyone else can just suck it or doesn't need to know.

Why not just put something in the water? Why not legalise drugs in the hope we all turn ourselves into .... what exactly ... soporofic drones - but drones who do no work? Or is it deeper than that? When's martial law being declared?

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

[Cicero]

a picture tells a thousand words!!

is it me or does the guy on the left look a bit like a court jester?

The bloke in the middle resembles a wannabe gangsta rapper innit?

And the lass looks like a wannabe WAG, Lap Dancer, Fashion Model type.

[Cicero]

It's not a giant conspiracy, it's openly stated policy. The exam structure, the school day, the funneling effect, the denial of what are actualyl pretty simple jobs until you have qualifications (which just so happen to take 15 years to acquire and need you to be in enormous amounts of debts and therefore unable to rock the boat.)

The thinking is we need a certain %age of unemployed surplus labour, only a certain %age of people need to be taught anything relevent (i.e we have a managerial class) and everyone else can just suck it or doesn't need to know.

http://www.johntaylo...om/underground/

Spot on again Injin.

[The Masked Tulip]

a picture tells a thousand words!!

is it me or does the guy on the left look a bit like a court jester?

For some reason I am now thinking of a Sunday roast!

[The Masked Tulip]

Not only do they get you to spend tens of thousands on re-skilling or re-training yourself but once enough people do in pa articular industry they then move the goal-posts.

They either bring in taxes specifically related to that industry - re IR35 for IT workers which ended up bringing in less revenue for the Exchequer as it decimated the UK IT industry overnight - or they decide to outsource that work to overseas firms or allow in thousands of cheap workers from the third world to vastly undercut the UK worker.

So you get yourself in debt to retrain and then they screw you again.

Look what is happening in 'green' industries now - the next big thing. People are looking for ways to get in, lots of training courses that costs thousands but, once qualified, who says that some Govt Minister will not get on a plane to Bombay, become friendly with some billionaire in Delhi or Shanghai and arrange to outsource all the green industry stuff to the billionaire's firms in third world?

[Cicero]

Not only do they get you to spend tens of thousands on re-skilling or re-training yourself but once enough people do in pa articular industry they then move the goal-posts.

They either bring in taxes specifically related to that industry - re IR35 for IT workers which ended up bringing in less revenue for the Exchequer as it decimated the UK IT industry overnight - or they decide to outsource that work to overseas firms or allow in thousands of cheap workers from the third world to vastly undercut the UK worker.

So you get yourself in debt to retrain and then they screw you again.

Look what is happening in 'green' industries now - the next big thing. People are looking for ways to get in, lots of training courses that costs thousands but, once qualified, who says that some Govt Minister will not get on a plane to Bombay, become friendly with some billionaire in Delhi or Shanghai and arrange to outsource all the green industry stuff to the billionaire's firms in third world?

Precisely.

Wind farming is a prime example of the genre. Virtually all the power generators are foreign owned, buying the turbine equipment from overseas. We foot the costs, through extortionate utility bills.

No wonder the European conglomerates think of the UK as "Treasure Island".

Edited March 30, 2010 by urban commando

[Cicero]

For some reason I am now thinking of a Sunday roast!

I can almost hear Harry H Corbett uttering those immortal words:

"You dirty old man!"

[The Masked Tulip]

I can almost hear Harry H Corbett uttering those immortal words:

"You dirty old man!"

Wot? For enjoying a nice piece of crackling and lashings of gravy? Some apple sauce would not go amiss either.

[The Masked Tulip]

Precisely.

Wind farming is a prime example of the genre. Virtually all the power generators are foreign owned, buying the turbine equipment from overseas. We foot the costs, through extortionate utility bills.

No wonder the European conglomerates think of the UK as "Treasure Island".

Yes, the madness of this is truly staggering - why not simply own the infrastructure and the technology on a nationa level. You can always let the Tories sell it off later but Labour jumped in straight away and outsourced a national resource.

You have to wonder why they are so keen on outsourcing?

[lowrentyieldmakessense(honest!)]

It's not a giant conspiracy, it's openly stated policy. The exam structure, the school day, the funneling effect, the denial of what are actualyl pretty simple jobs until you have qualifications (which just so happen to take 15 years to acquire and need you to be in enormous amounts of debts and therefore unable to rock the boat.)

The thinking is we need a certain %age of unemployed surplus labour, only a certain %age of people need to be taught anything relevent (i.e we have a managerial class) and everyone else can just suck it or doesn't need to know.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

another link

why cant people think

link

H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

[Cicero]

Wot? For enjoying a nice piece of crackling and lashings of gravy? Some apple sauce would not go amiss either.

The mere mention of a "Sunday Roast" gave rise to the not unconnected vernacular image of a "spit roast".

[Cicero]

Yes, the madness of this is truly staggering - why not simply own the infrastructure and the technology on a nationa level. You can always let the Tories sell it off later but Labour jumped in straight away and outsourced a national resource.

You have to wonder why they are so keen on outsourcing?

First rate question TMT.

They get rich at our expense.

The rich keep getting richer at the expense of the poor.

And thus it ever was!

[lowrentyieldmakessense(honest!)]

First rate question TMT.

They get rich at our expense.

The rich keep getting richer at the expense of the poor.

And thus it ever was!

not if enough know the con

[shindigger]

Precisely.

Wind farming is a prime example of the genre. Virtually all the power generators are foreign owned, buying the turbine equipment from overseas. We foot the costs, through extortionate utility bills.

No wonder the European conglomerates think of the UK as "Treasure Island".

Yes. Good bit on Paul masons report last night, (see other threads). EDIT This IS the Paul Mason thread.....!!!

Mentioned "a land dotted with wind turbines, none of which are made here" (cue aerial pic of giant turbine with German name emblazoned across the side).

Mandy didnt even bother stepping in when the IoW turbine plant shut recently.

They cant even lie properly.

Edited March 30, 2010 by shindigger