Think about it – the bus being unable to stop is a comment on capitalism’s need to constantly move forward and grow, and the jeopardy of the bus exploding is a metaphor for if the capitalist system slows down, the world economy will explode – taking many innocent civilians with it. No one being able to get off the bus is just like how it’s impossible for anyone – or any one country – to opt out of global markets and the capitalist system – because of the hold capitalism has upon everyone, whether they like it or not. Anyone who does try to escape – like one of the passengers – will just get destroyed for trying, not through the fault of the other participants in capitalism (the other passengers), but by the structure of the system itself.

Reeves’ saying “The bomb is big enough to blow a hole in THE WORLD” is not the clunkiest line in cinema history – far from it – it’s actually remarkably prescient, and is actually a commentary about the importance of capitalism in world society. If we were to lose capitalism overnight, society would break down.

The gap in the road that the bus has to jump is a metaphor for the occasional crisis that capitalism faces – and the extraordinary steps that are required to get past it (like bank bailouts).

The villain, an ex-cop out to make money is an allegory for the profit driven nature of the capitalist system – and the corrupting influence of money. The good guys in the film are the governments of the world – trying to correct the inadequacies of the free market and counter-balance the unfettered profit-driven motives of private industry.

And of course, Keanu Reeves’ wooden acting is an allegory for the destruction of trees and other natural resources in pursuit of consumption and the bus never stopping.

Look out for my thesis, Pop Quiz Hotshot: Speed, Society and Capitalism, in the new year…

• Serfs Up
• Fight Club
• Fashion, globalisation and why I’m bringing down civilisation!
• Christmas Films
• Subsistence Shopping

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: buses, Films, Keanu Reeves, Movies, Speed

Whilst I can’t dismantle the story entirely – the source material is a book and the TPA haven’t put their data online as far I can detect, what I can tell is that the Telegraph’s story certainly has some demonstrable signs of playing with the numbers and is somewhat dishonest in its portrayal of the truth.

First of all, the headline is pretty misleading, and I’m struggling to work out how they’ve derived it. It seems this figure is based on this, which is explained in the following paragraph:

However, according to a Matthew Elliott, the TPA chief executive, the total cost across the EU is £495 billion or £1,968 for every man woman and child in Europe

Obviously they’ve rounded up £1968 to £2000 to make for a neater headline – but if you do the maths, then it implies that the EU has a population of about 251,524,390 – about 251 million people. Unfortunately, this means that someone’s maths (and to be fair, it could be mine) is bad – the population of the EU is approaching 500 million. “Maybe it’s just the EU15″, I thought – EU15 being the term used to refer to EU members prior to the “Big Bang” enlargement of 2004 which brought in all of the “spongeing” Eastern Europeans. But a quick Google reveals that the EU15 population has never been that small.

In fact, the only reference to the EU having a population of 251 million I can find is a line in this document about the number of people in the EU of working age – and that isn’t “every man, woman and child”.

What bothers me most though is that even if we assume that the TPA’s numbers are correct, is the distortion in the way that it has been reported. I don’t even doubt that there’s a lot of waste and mismanagement in the EU – they have two separate Parliaments and a high-speed rail line linking them for Christ’s sake, but what is happening is that it is being reported in such a needlessly emotive way that it is misleading.

Obviously from the perspective of the individual, paying £2,000 for anything sounds like a lot of money, but this not only tries to create the misleading impression that it’s £2,000 from each of our pockets (obviously though, higher earners pay more tax) It would be wrong to view it as £2,000 out of an annual salaries of the general public though – the EU isn’t just a big bucket, it’s £2000 worth of economic activity. That £2000 is going to be spent back into the European economy, and is constituted not just by income tax, but by every other sort of government income – such as VAT and fuel duty (sorry, “steal tax” in the TPA vernacular) and corporation tax. And £2000 per person viewed a percentage of a GDP of about £1 trillion suddenly doesn’t seem like so much.

Even the £4.1bn in 2007-9 going to Europe that the TPA moans about as a percentage of the UK government budget doesn’t seem like very much when you consider that for 2007-08, the UK government budget was £519,229,000,000 – the EU contribution making up 0.79% of it.

And when you don’t cloud things with the near-meaningless figure of £2,000 per person, it makes the EU seem a lot more reasonable – and though more difficult to calculate, it’s a shame the article doesn’t include any of the benefits of us paying into the EU and retaining our membership of the bloc – such as the immeasurable economic benefits of being part of the free trade area, our ability to participate in the market and so on and so fourth.

To paraphrase the comedian Chris Addison, the sad thing about “Euroscepticism” is that it contains the word “sceptic” – which implies a great philosophical tradition of inquiry and critical thought. In every other area of discourse to be a “sceptic” tends to mean that you’ve actually thought about it.

• Humanity’s value.
• Monetary Fallacy
• Democracy doesn’t work: Economics special!
• I’m a bit worried that in this I come across as some sort of ultra-libertarian anti-taxation crackpot
• First degree murder?

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

The story concerns an apparent clause in the Lisbon treaty that would apparently share Britain’s gas supplies with other EU states in times when supply is compromised, such as in the current situation of Russia turning off the taps to the Ukraine (and thus the rest of eastern Europe). Of course, The Express being The Express, are completely misrepresenting the issue at stake here: that of energy security.

The report contains quotes from a Tory MEP and UKIP’s crackpot leader Nigel Farage saying that Britain shouldn’t share its supplies with the rest of Europe – apparently the Conservative party will “resist any moves towards EU common energy resources”. This is unbelievably short-sighted. It’s all well and good wanting to hang on to the gas you’ve got – but that’s no good if you’ve got none in the first place.

In 2004 the UK became a net-importer of energy (ie: oil and gas) – I can’t find an exact figure for gas alone but this 2004 report speculated that it would happen in 2006, so it’s safe to say we’re probably a net importer by now, or at least will be very, very soon. This means that the gas and oil we need is going to have to come from somewhere else. And this issue of energy security is linked to a bigger issue: security.

Unfortunately for us, that somewhere else where the gas is is quite likely going to be Russia, the non-Israeli bastards of the moment - one of the biggest potential security threats to Britain and the rest of the EU. “Resurgent Russia” or not, Russia is a powerful country so obviously figures heavily into any calculations on national security. The question is simple: Russia has what we want, how can we sustain our supply of it?

Russia need to be tamed if we want to keep the lovely, lovely gas flowing, and the only way this is going to happen is through further Europeanisation of energy security. It’s very easy to demonise BRUSSELS for stealing our energy, but the only thing that is going to give us and the other EU member states any clout when talking energy with Russia is by working together.

Russia currently has the upper-hand in the energy dispute because it follows a strategy of divide and rule- quite sensibly from it’s perspective, it won’t talk to the EU as a whole (something the Express would presumably applaud), but instead prefers to deal with individual member-states, and in effect, is playing them off of each other. Obviously due to factors such as geography and infrastructure, certain states are more dependent on imports than others – Denmark is self-sufficient, for instance, whereas Germany have what in EU-speak is called an Energy Dependence Rate (EDR) of 64.6%, making them a big net-importer, with a big chunk of that energy coming from Russia.

This plays into why the EU is so ineffective dealing with Russia – each country has a different relationship with it, which Russia can exploit. Look at the Georgia war last year on which the EU was utterly conflicted – Britain slagged off the stunningly disproportionate Russian response pretty hard, whereas Germany was much quieter on the issue. I wonder if this had anything to do with Russia being a major supplier of German energy and not being afraid to turn off the taps? (See: Ukraine 2006 – the Germans certainly did.)

The Germany/Russia energy relationship is bilateral. This is important when you consider the physical infrastructure for the transmission of gas. There’s currently talk of building the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany (and then on through northern Europe) that will go through the Baltic sea rather than any of the intervening former-Eastern bloc countries. There’s plans for a similar pipeline in the Mediterranean. What this will allow Russia to do is threaten to cut off gas supplies to Poland and the Ukraine and the like unless they get their own way (“Don’t put those NATO missiles on your territory!”, “Stop looking to the west!”, etc), without compromising western European energy supplies. And this is an obvious threat to the integrity of the European Union and will threaten any pooled European counterweight to Russian power.

If the EU wants to protect its interests and stand up to Russia more effectively than the current strategy of “not standing up to Russia” allows, then the strategy must be to further integrate the EU energy market. More physical infrastructure is needed and political changes are needed to assure that Russia must deal with the EU as one and not individual countries.

If the EU has a single energy market, it will be physically impossible for Russia to hold any country to ransom like it has been doing in Eastern Europe (think of it like a parallel electrical circuit compared to a serial one) – and it’ll be a cold day in hell, or a warm day in Siberia before Russia cut off all of the EU’s supplies. Why? The relationship is symbiotic: The EU members combined are Russia’s biggest customer – more than 50% of Russia’s GDP is oil and gas revenues, and more than half of the federal budget is from money oil and gas has brought in.

And everyone knows that money talks – it’s hard to mount a disproportionate response to an attack in the caucuses if you can’t afford the tanks to do so, so Russia needs Europe. But the Express needs to learn that it doesn’t need Europe individually.

James O’Malley is a blogger and should currently be writing an essay on energy security and the EU-Russia relationship, but is blogging instead.

• The one type of scepticism I don’t subscribe to.
• O’Malley in “classical realist” shocker
• EU don’t get a vote
• Blood-based economy
• An uninformed treatise on Georgia, the international system and international relations generally, that will probably come back to haunt me when I’m older and wiser.

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Back in those heady days of earlier this year, I was taught about Held and McGrew’s various characterisations of globalisation as a process. To cut a long story short, there are basically three schools of globalisation – the hyperglobalists, who reckon globalisation is in full effect, the world will never be the same again the very notion of the nation-state is laughable, and at the very least deserves sneering at, and there’s the transformationalists who believe that globalisation is an ongoing process – and there was a third school, the sceptics, who were could be characterised as having their heads in the sand, still believing in the nation state as an international actor and the like – basically they thought globalisation was a load of rubbish.

It was this last school of thought that I had the most contempt for, to the point where I really struggled to write about it – it felt so self-evidently ridiculous to posit that globalisation hasn’t changed anything that I just wanted to submit photos of me belming and point and my face as a critique of the sceptic position.

The trouble is, that with the on-going financial crisis, I’m starting to wonder if the sceptics sort of had a point, maybe. Banks are being nationalised, the international financial system is slowly creaking to a halt as states work to impose more regulation and it can only be a matter of time before barriers are raised back up and the post-1929 protectionist mantra becomes fashionable again. More importantly, it might take meaning from part of my degree.

You see, I’ve got something of a vested interest in globalisation being an actual thing.  If they decide globalisation doesn’t exist, then my first degree may as well have been BA (Hons) International Relations & Homeopathy. This is probably why I’m so concerned about global financial meltdown.

I’m worried too that it might not end here. What if this collapse causes the entire international system to break down? What if tough economic times and the pursuit of resources causes war and strife? What if we end up destroying each other in a nuclear holocaust and go back to living in caves and a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Then there won’t be any International Relations for me to be moderately insightful about. Meaning that theology students may have more credibility that I do, as we gaze up at the sky and wonder what that big ball that it hurts to look at is.

So please, international banking system, please don’t collapse… For my sake!

• Globalisation
• Tedious university update!
• Shilling for the uni
• An uninformed treatise on Georgia, the international system and international relations generally, that will probably come back to haunt me when I’m older and wiser.
• Expanding Markets

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Economics & Money, global collapse, international relations

All of this turbulence, though, has led to some pundits drawing comparisons with Marx and calling all of the bailouts and nationalisations “socialist” – in fact, it was this reason why many American congressmen wouldn’t vote for the $700bn bailout first time round. What I think is interesting about this is it isn’t too far from the truth. I accidentally attended a socialist party meeting last week (don’t ask) and the speaker made the interesting point that it isn’t Cuban President Raul Castro or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez being the best socialists and nationalising everything – it is in fact George Bush, and it’s the American government who now own some of the world’s biggest banks and insurers, and bizarrely, sponsor Manchester United. Next time they play Newcastle United, sponsored by Northern Rock, it’ll essentially be a proxy-war between America and Britain.

It has made me think though. Maybe it was that socialist meeting warping my mind, but maybe, just maybe, Karl Marx was right, that the revolution is just around the corner? Capitalism doesn’t seem to working out too well, so maybe we do need an alternative. Obviously, if Karl were here now he’d probably suggest communism as the new economic system… but I’m not so sure. I hate to disagree with such a renowned, historical icon and possibly the most famous Marxist intellectual out there, but maybe there’s another system we could bring back that will keep the world economy in check?

Why don’t we bring back the feudal system? We used the system for hundreds of years in the middle ages before, so I can’t see why we can’t use it again. If there’s one thing the banks need at the moment, it’s stability in the system, less of the ups and downs associated with capitalism… and what could be more stable than a rigid system of class-based subservience and subsistence farming? Sure, there could be some minor issues with, say, lack of social mobility, or the vast majority of us becoming peasants who will die at 30 only to have our kids replace us in farming the same plot of land whilst paying tribute to a tyrannical baron, but the environment for big business will be perfect for trade – businesses, or the barons that will replace them, will be able to make big long term decisions as they’ll know what the conditions will be like in ten, fifty, even one hundred years on – because conditions will be exactly the same. The other upshot is that no one will have to worry about job security, as under the feudal system, everyone is guaranteed a job for life – as a peasant farmer.

The Feudal System: It’s not only the past, it’s the future.

• Socialist Networking
• X Marx the Spot
• Musings on American healthcare
• Speed as an allegory for Capitalism
• George Galloway’d

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: capitalism, economy, feudalism

You have to feel sorry for the bankers – it must be difficult living a decadent cocaine-fueled, sports-car driving life of pushing money around and keeping the wealth within the top tier of society. This solidarity with their plight is why I’d like to publicly offer to give them all a hug, as a tangible expression to show that we care and feel sorry for them, and we don’t blame them, even if they are sort of the architects of their own downfall after recklessly lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back, which is what started all of these problems in the first place.

Actually, I’ve just had a better idea – as leading Gotham City entrepreneur The Joker points out in The Dark Knight, “if you’re good at something, never do it for free” – I’ll charge money for hugs instead. Bankers (used to) have a lot of money, so they’re used to paying for things. And when you think about it, I don’t have “unlimited” hugs to dish out – I’m not some sort of robot, and need to sleep and work and so on, so can’t spend all of my time hugging bankers. So really, I should probably try to regulate demand for hugs by varying the price of a hug based on how many bankers want one.

But then if I’m going to do all of this… why don’t I take things one step further? Why don’t I sell the bankers the promise of a hug in the future? Then if they decide they don’t want it, they can sell it on to others, and maybe even make a profit on it? This short selling could be a completely fool-proof way of making money, with absolutely no potential negative consequences whatsoever.

The only way this could possibly fail is if they lose confidence in me and my ability to honour all of the hugs. I am horrendously unreliable (I don’t even like hugging people), but that never seemed to stop the bankers when they were dealing with money – trouble is if I default on the hugs, they’ll lose all of their value, and become worthless. Which could cause even more economic turmoil. And that would presumably mean my hugs would become not empathy but a black-hearted nothing.

I think I might avoid this after all, hugs are too volatile in the current climate.

• Democracy doesn’t work: Economics special!
• Fight Club
• Humanity’s value.
• Monetary Fallacy
• New strategy for Brown: Hope Thatcher dies soon

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bankers, hugs, stupid

I was in awe for as long as one reasonably can be during the four and a quarter how spectacular. After the ceremony had finished, and I’d calmed down after seeing a man fly around the stadium with the Olympic torch (what if he’d accidentally burnt the ropes holding him up?), I did begin to wonder, much like everyone else did, “How are London going to top this?”.

A lot of the ceremony was set aside for teaching us Chinese history through the medium of dance. Unsurprisingly, this missed out a few of the less glorious historical events, like the “Great Leap Forward” – perhaps because choreographing a dance about the deaths of 14-43m people is a bit tricky. This is understandable… but what if London 2012 tries to tell the history of Britain? Won’t most of the dances involve the British beating up the ancestors of the other Olympic participants? It’s not going to make us particularly likeable.

I think the biggest problem facing London 2012 though is how it’s going to be paid for. I’m assuming that unlike Beijing, the people planning the London games are restricted by pesky things known as “budgets”, and they need to make the money they do have go a long way to match up with Beijing’s show – and the games are already said to be way over-budget as it is. However, I think I’ve spotted a solution.

Earlier this week it turned out that a spectacular fireworks display during the Beijing ceremony had been faked and computer generated imagery was used, on the not-too-unreasonable excuse that flying over fireworks in a helicopter to film them might be a bit dangerous. No one noticed at the time – everyone was too busy being impressed.  To take this to its logical conclusion… why doesn’t London just fake the whole Olympics with computers?

Computer technology is comparatively cheap these days – why bother with the faff of setting up all of those 300 events when former Blue Peter producers will verify that we’re the best in the world at TV fakery?

Computer games companies have been trying for years to perfect the sports simulation, so they must be pretty good at it by now… why not just set up the athletes with a Nintendo Wii and run the competition on that? That athletes still get to compete, and viewing becomes more fun as the participants have little cartoon faces. If we get a bit desperate for medals, we could just slyly enter the cheat codes when the other teams aren’t looking.

And best of all, playing out the 2012 Olympics on computers will be more inclusive – they’ll no longer discriminate against the hideously unfit because as long as you’re able to swing a video games controller, you’re basically in the competition… and isn’t everyone playing together part of the Olympic spirit?

Maybe I’m just advocating this idea because it’d be the closest I’ll ever get to being an Olympian?

• Decathalon and on and on…
• You gotta fight for your right to Taipei
• Happy New Year!
• Play knifely, kids
• Merr-wii Christmas

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beijing 2008, cheap, london 2012, olympics

Basically this is just a long winded excuse for being rubbish at international relations. But it’s not like the people who do it professionally are any better.

Take the Georgia “crisis”, for example – which is actually a war, even if the media doesn’t want to call it that yet. Tanks? Check. Incursions on to foreign soil? Check. Opposing armies shooting at each other? Check. I haven’t a clue how to fix it – but I can tell you the problems it has caused.

If anything, this (yet again) exposes the inadequacies with the international system. Back in the 17th century, the chaps around the table at Westphalia probably thought they were being pretty smart coming up with the concept of a sovereign nation-states as discrete territorial units – unfortunately this has become The Done Thing, which means that, in theory at least, all of the minorities or regions after some independence are essentially fucked by international law to the point where you get absurdities like Taiwan not being a real country and having to fudge its way into international things (“Chinese Taipei”) or entire regions of the world in a weird status-quo because the other countries can’t really be seen to be supporting them for fear of pissing off their “rightful owners”. If only Northern Cyprus, or Somaliland, or South Ossetia were as lucky internationally as Kosovo.

This especially doesn’t seem fair for South Ossetia, who seem pretty keen on being a part of Russia, or presumably united with North Ossetia in one way or another. The west have been pretty quick to condemn Russia for their ridiculously disproportionate response and moan on about Georgia’s sovereignty and that… they didn’t seem quite so concerned about Serbia’s sovereignty when they were busy recognising Kosovo. Don’t get me wrong – Russia are massive hypocrites too when they talk about South Ossetia’s rights to self-determination, as I’m sure the people of nearby Grozny would want to point out.

And that’s the overall problem with the international system – it’s horrendously unfair. As any realist will tell you, there’s no real international laws, it’s just the big guys calling the shots. They might play fair if you’re lucky, but chances are they’ll only do it when it’s convinient for them (cf: America ignoring the UN over Iraq, then getting pissy with Zimbabwe and threatening to get a UN RESOLUTION over it – no wonder Mugabe presumably laughed it off and went back to organising gangs to kill opposition supporters).

This setup works when you’ve got a unipolar setup – like the 90s with America basically in charge of the world. It’s by no-means fair, but then international relations never is, but it’s stable because no one has the power to stand up to them. They might fuck a few people over but they’ll generally keep the peace. A bi-polar system like we had in the Cold War is pretty good too as they kept each other in check with the whole Mutually Assured Destruction thing. What’s scary is that it looks as though we’re entering another period of a multi-polar balance of power with the great powers being America, China and Russia (or Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, if you will). This isn’t particularly stable, as 1914 and 1939 grainily illustrated. With more than two powers the balance of power may end up somewhat asymmetrical (Oceania and Eastasia have always been at war with Eurasia), and if backed into a corner in a war sparked off by a small international event – say, the assassination of an Arch-Duke or a power wading into conflict over a breakaway region in the Caucasus region – it can’t be long until someone starts chucking the bigger guns around?

Whilst I paint a pretty nightmarish picture of the imminent apocalypse due to the international community’s inability to adapt to modernity, I would like to think that if any of my former lecturers, or indeed anyone who knows what they’re talking about, are reading they’ll think that what I’m suggesting is laughably implausible because I haven’t factored in the one thing that can save us. And it ain’t a pretty solution. Money could hold the answer to this. More capitalism could be the thing that pacifies the international system. Sure, some sort of revolutionary socialist utopia could probably solve a lot of problems, but let’s be realistic – what’s more likely to happen? Unlike a science experiment, we can’t run a test, and we’re active participants in a constantly changing international environment – in the absence of the interactions of some sort of personal God who happens to be big on Marx, we can’t reform the system from the top-down, so capitalism is the, er, best option.

Though capitalism does make wage-slaves of millions of people in the developing world, keeping them oppressed and unable to participate in the political process, thus maintaining the status quo and allowing for us in the west to become slaves ourselves to consumerism and thus distracted from politicial participation ourselves, it does have one thing going for it. It maintains a degree of stability in the international system.

The term “complex independence” was coined (by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye if you’re looking for someone to blame) to describe circumstances in which states maintaining an economic interest in each other creates a mutual desire to cooperate rather than blow each other up. To take a ludicrously extrapollated example, America would never attack Britain, even if Gordon Brown punched Laura Bush in the mouth and kicked Barney, the Presidential dog, around the face, because America has far too much money tied up in Britain, so it’d essentially be attacking it’s own interests.

Back in the real world for a moment, this makes the apparent response to what’s going on in Georgia all the more bizarre. Obviously no one in the west is talking about military action, as that could be the kiss of death for the existence of biological life on this planet, but someone has suggested (yeah, I do my research thoroughly), that delaying Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation could be a good idea.

Though the WTO isn’t be any stretch of the imagination a force for good in the world, what with the raping of the third world, and the hilariously inbalanced voting system of voting power being weighted based on the size of the memberstate’s economy, surely getting Russia in on the machine that powers the wheels of global capitalism can only help pacify it?

One of the (alleged) reasons for Russia’s continued military action in Georgia is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that apparently pumps 1m barrels a day – about 1/90 of world output – which was specifically designed to not go into Russian territory, meaning the Russian’s don’t get a cut. Similarly, a lot of this “resurgent Russia” talk is centred around Russia’s new importance for supplying Europe and others with energy? If energy wars are going to be the geopolitical flashpoints of the future then surely you want these guys on the inside and negotiating, not left alone outside getting pissed off about it?

(Another option would be to do the decent thing and go green and work on renewable energy, but obviously some sabre-rattling and tough words are much easier.)

It’s utterly bizarre really that “sanctions” in both the metaphorical sense of delayed entry to the WTO and literal sense like pre-2003 Iraq (etc) are touted as a viable tool in international relations as they never work. Putting them on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Cuba… basically the ‘axis of evil’ to name only a few, has only isolated them more – if we’d worked to bring them into the international economic system where they could have been economically active like how, say, Taiwan and Indonesia were transformed in the mid-20th century, or how China is being transformed right now. I really can’t see how working to piss off Russia even more is going to help at all.

A pleasant side-effect of all of the globalisation that I’m rather inexplicably advocating is that it erodes the power of the nationstates – the ones with the weapons – and in one sense makes the economic system fairer as countries compete more fairly – look at Lenovo and Tata from China and India respectively as successful multinationals that are helping gradually shift the power away from America. If Russia were in on the west’s evil system of exploiting the poor in pursuit of nice consumer goods, they might be less inclined to attack the west’s interests.

And yes, the cruel irony of this change in the international system (which to a large extent has already happened) is that we do end up with some sort of horrendous, unaccountable, amoral, profit driven, worker-exploiting corporatocracy, which itself would be a problem at least as massive as one where the nationstates are in charge.

Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t very good at solutions, but was pretty good at describing the problems?

(End note: No, I’ve no idea what my political opinions/leanings are anymore either. I thought I was some sort of liberal idealist, but what I’ve just written may beg to differ. And would you like to see more incoherent treatise on international relations? Or should I stick to going for the lols? Let me know in the comments, like?)

• O’Malley in “classical realist” shocker
• First degree murder?
• Serfs Up
• Globalisation
• Speed as an allegory for Capitalism

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economics, georgia, international relations, nolols, Politics, rant, russia

We know this because a man called Ian Usher, originally from Yorkshire, now living in Sydney, sold his life on eBay – his house, his car, even his job and his friends – for AUS$2.2m. If the ever reliable Wikipedia is anything to go by, with a world population of 6,704,845,726 people, it means as a species we’re worth over £7150 TRILLION.

Considering that the world’s total GDP, the sum of every country’s economic worth is a paltry $65.95 trillion (2006 est)- or about £33.5 trillion, this makes one thing clear to me: the economic case for re-legalising slavery is unarguable.

Think about it – we can beat the credit crunch, pay off all of that third world debt that the news agendas have forgotten about, and still have enough money left for everyone to have a swimming pool in the back gardens of their mansions – simply by remortgaging the human race. Here we are worrying about how we’re going to pay for things, and yet all this time we’ve been literally sitting on a veritable goldmine of cash.

The cash windfall would be like a lottery win for humanity. With money like this, America could easily afford to stay in Iraq for the next 53,000 years (at a cost of $720m – or £365m – a day) – the only danger would be running out of soldiers to send there.

And don’t get me wrong, this wouldn’t be like the rubbish old version of slavery, this would be a whole new, better kind, as we’d all be in charge. You wouldn’t even have to sell off your entire life – what’s to stop us all becoming like the asset strippers, like James Goldsmith, who bought up loads of companies in the 80s, and sold off the inefficient and redundant parts?

Don’t need that womb as you don’t want any kids, ladies? Sell it off! Don’t need to know all that stuff about Shakespeare and photosynthesis that you accrued from school, hairdressers? Sell it off! Need to teach your enemies a lesson, but you’re a bit of a wimp? Literally hire some muscle!

I don’t even think this idea is that terribly revolutionary – after all, we already sell our labour every time we go to work, and in most cases, there is a direct link between amount of work done and the amount of remuneration. There have even already been cases of companies paying people to get a tattoo with their logo on and stuff – monetizing our entire lives is merely a logical extension of this.

I guess the only problem with this is the, er, horrifyingly, fact that I seem to be happily advocating a form of slavery. Would anyone like to buy my sense of shame? It’s going cheap, and I haven’t used it much, so its in near mint condition.

• Monetary Fallacy
• Hugging Bankers
• Democracy doesn’t work: Economics special!
• The Taxpayers’ Alliance distort numbers for their own evil political agenda
• Johnny Quest thinks I’m a sell out.

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: economics, humanity, selling your life, slavery

When trying to explain how they got obliterated in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, the government have been moaning about how everyone was voting Tory because they economy has gone to shit (that’s economic jargon) – and the interviews with the general public on the telly seem to back this up, with the “man on the street” bemoaning the spectacular price of petrol.

But… why punish the government for this? What are they supposed to do about the macro-economic circumstances? We live in a globalised world, where transnational capital flows can’t be stopped by one nation – economic policy these days is merely reactive. If the PM wanted to get the price of oil to go down, he’d have to figuratively do what King Canute did… and would have about as much success in the process.

Unfortunately, this is where democracy fails: the general public are too stupid to understand this. In fact, there was even a candidate in the by-election from the “Cut Tax on Diesel and Petrol” party, who I assume spends more time cutting up people in his white van than studying basic economic theory, such as the laws of supply and demand.

Reducing the tax would merely increase demand, which considering that unless Gordon discovers he forgot about a massive deposit of crude oil in his constituency, would then push up prices, and instead of the cash going to the government to pay for stuff, it’d go to needy oil barons and corrupt dictatorships. And as much as I dislike the government, I’d prefer them to get the money rather than the Saudis.

All the government can do to is fiddle with the tax and the interest rates – and even with these tools they don’t exactly have a free-hand at deciding what the economy does. Tax too much and all of the economic activity dries up, tax too little and there’s no money for hospitals and illegal wars – put the rates up and no one will spend any money, put the rates down and everyone will borrow money and get into stacks of debt. The unfortunate fact is that our entire economy, and by extension, our decadent way of life is entirely down to the whims of the market.

Don’t get me wrong, I find this a bit depressing too, but its true (and something else we can partially blame Thatcher for, excellently). So, like, lay off the government, everyone! Its not their fault they have so little power and influence in reality – they probably already have a complex about feeling powerless, and we’re not helping.

The problem isn’t the government, but the government and its lack of power. And that’s why democracy doesn’t work.

• The Problem with Democracy
• Brown Vs Blair
• Hugging Bankers
• Politalk
• London Election Gerrymandering

© James for James O'Malley... Living Legend, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: democracy doesn't work, economics, oil, tax