Budget

Spending too much time this morning thinking about modelling prisoner's dilemma on children's robots to really take the time to write what I had intended to write.

Another budget and another confused set of tools will emerge. Bertie had his supposed 'road to damascus' when he discovered the ordinary people had begun to blame him for the neoliberal ruin that was emerging and the huge disparity in income that is developing and so claimed he was 'the last socialist in Ireland'. This budget will be another set of giveaways; institutional giveaways to the very rich and corporate greed that will see the bifurcation in Irish society entrenched; and handouts to the poor to buy votes - increases in social welfare for groups (like the elderly) that his electoral machine is afraid of losing. The cynicism of this clientelle politics is really sickening. It's also deeply infuriating as their hypocrisy is damaging for the country. In reality the key economic policy of this government is croneyism rather than the neoliberalism of Charlie McCreevy (though of course he was guilty of cronyism as his tax breaks for billionaire horse pimps shows). They rub shoulders and create a corrupt business environment for their billionaires they worship in the Galway Races hospitality tents and up a few shillings (bread and circuses again) for the excluded's dole rather than seeking an economy where the rising tide raises all boats. Many of the boats have holes in them and handing out life jackets isn't the best use of public money.

Not that the best use of public money is something this government has shown the slightest understanding of.

Thailand

You see, the problem with Thailand isn't their politicians: they're as corrupt as you let them be. Which is quite a lot. Thailand is a seriously corrupt place both internally and internationally. It's the bunch of chancer arrivistes calling themselves the Thai royal family. They deal with every corruption, every manifestation of the sickness in Thai politics and Thai people pretend to themselves that their are hands clean. They are the cancerous heart of Thailand's body politic. While they are 'the voice of the people' like the tzar was father of the peasants democracy can never work in Thailand. Look what happened to Cambodia for a chilling endgame to the relentless politicking of a royal family removed from any consequences.

We were in Thailand nearly three years ago when the government decided to admit there was a war on. It had been waging for years but they'd just sent ten policemen or something to the axis of the unwilling, coerced, or were caught in when they were pretending to be out behind the sofa and couldn't avoid sending in some token unarmed nobodies to Iraq. But anyway, they thought this was an opportunity to pretend that their little problems with predominately muslim ethnic minorities (they don't look like Thai people either: but then Thailand is a mixture of many different looking people) was part of a global war on 'terror' rather than yet another example of Thailand's centrifugal force. I remember being in Pai in Northern Thailand (lovely place up around there) and somebody was talking of going on a trek to see the hill tribes and I said 'why not just go to the shop?' Almost nobody around there is ethnically Thai: but it's better being there than across the border in Burma. I'd love to visit Burma. The people are even nicer than Thais if that's possible and the massages are even better. I digress.

Royal families everywhere are chancers and arrivistes. Two generations out of the saddle living in yurts on yaks yoghurt and the Chinese royal family lived in the forbidden city surrounded by castrated guards and a cult of personality unrivalled by the current US mysticism surrounding the job of president. Our history is as full of the madness and sickness of kowtowing to royalty as it is of deferring to religious fantasy. Ancient Egypt is particularly interesting in the relationship between the two.

Are we inherently infantile? Can we not just take responsibility for ourselves?

What the civil war denied us the joy of...

News that the lovely people at the progressive democrats have fallen out with each other (and why wouldn't you? You have a viper in your midst.) has been greeted with glee tempered with dread round our way. Mary Harney has many faults - chief of which is being leader of a party which defends privilage and as morally correct and capital as something, the operation of which is beyond human interference - but I don't think she is a crypto fascist. McDowell is. That's not to say he personally believes in scientifically outmoded racial inferiority doctrines (for those not paying attention for the last fifty years or so the notion of a race among human populatios is derided by geneticists) but racist is as racist does and his constitutional referendum that he slipped by used the race card and people's fear of race. It redefines citizenship in a way which is not appropriate for a republic but one which is for a nation: in this situation McDowell chose not to follow the progressive model of the US but is instead heading the direction of Serbia. This is particularly ironic given the Minister for Justice is a disciple of all things American including their failed criminal justice system and their barbaric, expensive, and useless prisons. It seems to be no coincidence that a media panic about gang wars opens up on his watch. During all this the minister has an ever lengthening Criminal Justice Bill which will solve all problems. He just doesn't have any legislation passed ever. His bloated incompetence is further demonstrated by his aloof sang froid as the courts had no option but to reveal the unconstitutionality of our statutory rape laws. Their illegality is not his fault - it was pointed out to us in college about 18 years ago - but what is his fault is his failure to react when cases were in progress as had never happened before. So, we have a Minister for Justice that single handedly created a racist nation, failed to protect children from child abuse, who by his own admission is minister for justice during soaring gang crime that he believes needs much legislation to crack down on but who has introduced no such legislation (just reamended and deamended drafts) - in other words as abject a failure as a minister as has ever held a post in this country. Why should anyone worry? His stop-start career, built on media whoredom should be over. Unfortunately Harney had the nerve, the balls, the chutzpah, to take the post of Minister for Health - perhaps the most underfunctioning department in the government. She was always going to fail there. Her stock is crashed.

So why the stalled leadership bid? Harney is a link to the old school: to a time before it would have been acceptable for a man with the moral stink of McDowell to run for public office. His kind would be seen as the kind of beast that rose in central and Eastern European countries: no decency about him. The PDs under him could mutate, slightly, from the party of capital and privilage into an actual racist extreme right wing party thus able to, possibly, garner a popular vote (it currently has no sizeable electoral base and weilds power in great disproportion to its support) and move up a gear. What would possibly unite the very rich and the very poor other than having a classic old school extremist right wing party like we never had in Ireland? Naive class self interest is rampant in this country. Comments like "I'm a builder/nurse/pensioner Haughey looked after us", laughably naive (he gave back a bit of what he stole, like a porcine Robin Hood), are common stock. The poor are under the cosh. Their jobs have not got better wages and conditions over the last decade. They see them being taken by better educated immigrants who will move up and move on or just work like, well whatever hard working people work like these days, and take the money and spend it in another country where it's worth something. That is how they could give their allegiance to the party of the divine right of capital which has stolen their futures from them.

It is quite funny that the PDs were founded to break us out of civil war politics and they may just succeed. It's difficult to explain Ireland's political parties to someone from abroad. I usually say that left and right is only one axis. There is also the y axis of socially liberal and conservative. Then there is the z axis of republican versus unionist. The independence/ republican/ nationalist axis was at its most extreme socially liberal and left wing rather than fascist like in the rest of Europe so we never had an all out fascist party due to our civil war politics. McDowell's PDs, if he gets to run them, may change that. Finally a break from civil war politics will allow the creation of a fascist party that so many in this state will benefit from. In the old days he would have needed religious support for this. The beauty of the state we now live in where our rights are defined by our nature as consumers rather than as citizens and our aspirations by consumption rather than production is that this is no longer necessary.

He serviced some state

So he's dead then. And why should we speak ill of the dead? Because we can. Because his censorship of dissent by threat and writ is over. His control over a craven media is finished and the backlash is audible today. Because I can honestly think of nothing positive to say of him. I'm a dog in the streets from North Dublin in a town the size of the whole of Longford with a wee country road and no buses. His corruption polluted the whole of the country. I'm not saying the country was great before him, but it was much, much worse with him. There is no legacy. When people try to convince me of his 'presidential' qualities they usually mention the tax exempt status for artists that allows the multimillionaire Bono to lecture at me about helping the poor. It strikes me as symptomatic of his seigneurial contempt for the plain people of Ireland. We should be indebted to the great and the good and be glad to fund their lifestyle.