The Western Art of hypocrisy

As the G8 leaders and their entourages luxuriated over eight course dinners, courtesy of the finest cuisine Japan has to offer, Gordon Brown declared that the British people should waste less food amid the growing crisis, while he himself set a fine example with his svelte frame and gourmet appetite. Yet further pronouncements from the club house of the world’s eight wealthiest nations. Only last year they told us that biofuels were green and would help the world to combat climate change with only a minimal impact upon food prices. Now we are told that biofuels have led directly to a near doubling of global food prices, as land once set aside for food has been cultivated for palm oils and other cash crops such as oil seed rape, tobacco & poppies.

For those who would take a moment to consider, it was fairly obvious that cutting down established rain forests and turning over arable land to biofuel crops would not increase carbon capture, nor would burning plant oils & alcohols halt carbon emissions, let alone maintain existing levels of food production. You do not need a Harvard degree in economics to realize that such a draconian shift in global agriculture could only worsen carbon emissions through deforestation and trigger increases in world food prices. Whose bright idea was this biofuel bonanza, and how has it turned from panacea to disaster so quickly? Perhaps the sudden shift towards biofuels was a whim over dinner at a G8 summit, possibly a knee jerk reaction from Western governments to declining oil reserves, or it may have been a bright spark from a venture capitalist who realized that rising oil prices had suddenly made a whole new market commercially viable? Whomever is to blame for this latest Western policy fiasco, enacted in the world’s poorest climes, it is symptomatic of a socioeconomic and political elite who have lost touch with reality and pander to those who fund their campaigns, rather than to those who actually vote or suffer the consequences of their decisions.

The root of the malaise is of course money, and money is the brother of those corrupting twins, power and politics. As we discussed before, democracy is a far from perfect system even when, as in Greece, Italy, Germany, or Israel, people are proportionately represented (and just look at the perennial mess in Italy and Israel). America is especially keen on imposing her Western democratic ‘ideals’ upon former communist and Islamic nations, even by force of arms. You might however take a moment to reconsider a system that is so slickly & globally marketed as a shining beacon of democratic freedoms. Candidates for Congress and the Whitehouse are required to raise substantial sums to campaign for office and, unless they are eccentric billionaires like Forbes, Perot or Nader, have to acquire the consent of one of the only two American political parties of significance (all other political movements are reduced to the status of pressure groups). So, in order to attain the power of Congress, a candidate has first to be obscenely wealthy, or to derive from appropriate background and political orientation. Second, he or she must be in political favor with the regional powers that promote them. Third, the candidate must raise enough money for a successful media campaign with background staff, advisors, and production companies. To bid for the Whitehouse, a campaign fund may run towards a $1bn (Senator Obama had already raised more than $265 million by April, and that was just to secure the nomination), and for the senate many tens of millions. Clearly any public-spirited individual who was not born of influence and money, and does not belong to a wealthy political club, could never hope to successfully stand for genuine change.

So why do rich people and organizations contribute so much money towards political campaigns? Is it the generosity of their natures; their desire to give something back; or just brotherly love in liquid form? It is of course none of these. By backing a political horse they expect to be richly rewarded through grace & favor once their candidate is elected. Access to lucrative government contracts, a direct route to the fiscal purse, invitations to elite networking events, and a finger or two on the strings of power and influence are the anticipated rewards. So then, in the sea of American politics, an elected candidate must represent one of two camps (or be obscenely rich), must pander broadly and ecumenically to the doctrines of either one party or the other, and must gather hundreds of IOUs which will have to be paid back with interest over a relatively short four year term in office.

This can hardly be the basis for a free and open political system that is driven by the collective good and the moral majority. I must confess that, whether through design or imagination, I am drawn to the belief that the American political system was the inspiration for the classic novel ‘Dune’, in which two dynasties, the witch coven of House Atreides & the vampiric family of House Harkonnen, duel eternally over land and power. Whether one elects to side with the witches or the vampires, or to choose heads or tails on the toss of a capitalist coin, you are hardly ascribing to a moral or representative political dynasty.

Politicians are masters of sound bites, not solutions. They are skilled in assessing the public mood in response to events, and not their underlying causes. For example, Britain is currently being hit by a wave of deadly knife crime, as impoverished city youths, condemned to a life of low incomes and despair, fight for social and sexual dominance within a world of power and privilege. The root social causes of knife crime and prostitution are as obvious as they are well known. Still the UK’s politicians, who now fraternize within circles of wealth and privilege, cry with one accord that we have to be tougher on knife crime and, rather than tackling the underlying poverty, inequality and hopelessness within our urban society, clamor for mandatory prison sentences for anyone caught with a knife. The public pronouncements of automatic jail sentences are being made in the face of the widely known fact that existing inmates, often guilty of far more serious offences which many are likely to repeat, are currently being released early to ease prison overcrowding. Thus the solution to ‘bang up’ misguided young people for carrying a weapon for self-defense is as logistically flawed as it is bound to fail. The parable of Hercules and the Hydra come to mind as we cut the heads off the gardens weeds and allow their roots to prosper. Personally, if I were a young, slight urban teenager living in 21st Century Glasgow or London, then I too would be exceedingly anxious when walking Britain’s streets unarmed and alone. Indeed, a knife may be all the security that a small youth can muster or afford, but to send knife-carrying youths, who are themselves social victims, to prisons that are overflowing is more a mindless political sound bite than a gainful solution. If instead, UK politicians had diverted the £100 or so million in gratuitous expenses that they have just awarded themselves towards the creation of urban projects that might offer young people a sense of social identity, activity, purpose, community & opportunity, then perhaps we might just solve the present problem.

Such hypocrisy does not only have local ramifications. Iran is now threatening, as it has done before, to target Western and Israeli interests if it is attacked for continuing to develop nuclear ‘technology’, as Israel and the United States have ‘warned’. The G8 have just condemned Iran with one voice, despite the fact that more than half of them have nuclear stockpiles of their own. Surrounded, as it is, by nuclear powers in neighboring China, Pakistan, India, Russia, and of course by belligerent American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is understandably oil rich and anxious. As though sitting on over 10% of the world’s oil supplies does not make Iran a sufficiently attractive piece of real estate for cash-strapped superpowers to invade; the deployment of hostile forces in the region, seemingly desperate to control production of the world’s black blood supply, can only make Iran a trifle nervous. Who can honestly blame Iran from wanting to acquire greater defensive capabilities at a time of such border tensions and regional instability, especially when its traditional American, Jewish and Arab enemies are openly threatening? So how can a nuclear-armed America or Israel, actively threatening to attack and invade their Islamic nemesis, possibly morally justify denying Iran the right to have weapons that they themselves have long developed? Well, no independent sovereign nation would want a rich, religiously extreme, aggressive power with a history of invading other countries to possess such terrible weapons. I have no doubt that most Iranians would agree…