Tag: corruption

Wild Eyed Crazy Bernie

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

It’s good to see Bernie is doing well in the Democratic primaries. He came second to Buttigeig in Iowa by less than a thousand votes but has won the next two in New Hampshire and Nevada. Today sees South Carolina before Super Tuesday on well Tuesday of next week. I don’t care what people people say, for anyone familiar with Sky Sports’ sensationalising of football, Super Tuesday sounds ridiculous and merely highlights through which prism we view the world now. I think I understand how their voting system works although I will admit there is probably bits I miss out on. They get votes in each state which leads to getting delegates and super delegates based on their share of the vote to represent them at the Democratic national convention or whatever it’s called, the one with the most wins will get the pleasure of going up against the big bad wolf Trump. I wonder how may Supers they can fit in that contest especially if it ends up being crazy Bernie the wild eyed Socialist running.

Having recent experience of elections and what turned out to be the inevitable disappointment of losing, Bernie going up against Trump makes me nervous. It is impossible to deny the parallels with British politics of recent times. The populist Socialist Corbyn against the populist right winger Johnson. Despite the fact anyone with any sense could see the folly of voting for Johnson and only three months down the line it’s already seemingly falling to pieces, although the same was said about Trump, the establishment and their media did anything and everything they could to keep Corbyn from coming to power. Better the devil you know who does your bidding than the devil you don’t who wants you to pay some tax. For this reason I am nervous then. Even publications like the Economist who I am finding myself starting to trust are focusing a little too much on unelectable Bernie. I have seen the power of the media in the UK and don’t doubt for a second that despite the partisan nature of American politics they would do anything in their power to prevent Bernie from coming to power, even if that means another four years of Trump and four years of him knowing he doesn’t need to worry about being re-elected. You can even see the parallels within the American Democratic and British Labour parties as those who hold the power try frantically to repeat their success of last time when they got Hillary Clinton in with the self-defeating behaviour of many within Labour who would rather their own party were not elected than one led by Jeremy Corbyn.

Politics and power is dirty. I am not American but their politics affects so much of the world and is covered so much in our own media that it is impossible not to take an interest. I hope I am proved wrong because I would love to see Bernie in The White House and Trump back in the penthouse of one of his failing towers, but we’ve already had a trial run for this exact situation and it didn’t end well. If you repeat enough times how unelectable someone is he may just end up being so. We had turkeys voting for Christmas, will they be voting for Thanksgiving this time around?

Corrupt Politicians

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I have just been listening to a podcast on which the subject of the American Democratic candidates were discussed. I try not to talk too much about another countries politics because I am not from that country and there’s a chance I may miss some nuance I would otherwise get were I from there. There is one element of politics though that we can freely talk about no matter which country is the subject of discussion. The issue is corruption. Now I accept politics is not unique in suffering from this ailment, all countries have corruption in different forms. I’ve heard since Tuesday that the World Championship Scotch Pie Awards are fixed, not blatantly but there’s a reason the same few bakers seem to win everything. That is corruption. When people profess to being good moral honourable people though, they should be held up to higher standards. I will often criticise charities more than companies when they both do the same thing; there is no pretence with capitalism once you scrape below it’s wafer thin veil but the aid sector pretends something different.

The same situation exists with politicians and I can see why people like Trump because he doesn’t pretend to be a good guy, his whole act is about being a prick and that must be refreshing. People are tired of politicians, they don’t trust them and rightly the establishment is being called out and challenged. Trump of course is the establishment, just as Boris Johnson is, which shows the con job that has been pulled in both countries. However it’s when people like Elizabeth Warren come out with things like this absurd claim that Bernie Sanders told her in a private conversation that he didn’t believe a woman could be President. After giving it the whole good person who cares about people act for months, it is a legitimate response to want to tell her to go fuck herself. The mainstream media have jumped on the story claiming it to be fact, half of the supposed witnesses where not even there. It’s a hatchet job because he is threatening to upset the Democrats and actually get the nomination. It’s like Britain, the Neoliberals in the Labour party actively tried to sabotage the party and prevent it winning rather than see Jeremy Corbyn be elected Prime Minister. Elizabeth Warren has exposed herself as a dirty liar, she is corrupt and after playing the saint who cares card for so long she deserves the inevitable fallout. She doesn’t stand a chance of beating Trump, neither does Joe Biden, who is also corrupt as this Ukraine investigation exposed. Who knows about Bloomberg, but just ask Trump, you don’t get to become a New York real estate billionaire without embracing a little corruption along the way.

Yet we still follow these people. We accept them as our leaders, allow them to take all they want, subject us to a life of servility while not even leaving us with our dignity. Are we scared to stop and say we’ve had enough? Are we so scared of losing our lousy lot in life? Do we fear those below us taking our position? Has the old carrot lie of one day being them really deceived us that much? We vote for laws to protect billionaires but not poor people. That is fucked up. We will never become billionaires, it just won’t happen, we are not voting to protect our future selves. Let’s stop accepting and being complicit in their raping of society and the hurt that causes. Look after your neighbour and your neighbour will look after you, it’s time to come back together as a community. Having looked after politicians and billionaires all these years it seems there’s a distinct lack of them watching our back. Yet despite there being no genuine prospect of change we carry on making the same choice and expecting a different outcome. We continue to imagine that it will be all fine with this new one, he looks like the kind of guy who could lead this country and give us the life he’s promising. He’s definitely not like that other fella…what’s his name again?

Mental Corruption

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

My plan yesterday had been to start talking about football and depending how it evolved, hopefully find myself on the topic of corruption. My brain however had a mind of it’s own and certainly was a long way from working. Today, has not been that different, my brain still has a mind of it’s own and I haven’t seen much evidence of it working.

It’s that time of year then when we all start to look at our lives and ask the difficult questions. I haven’t necessarily had a bad 2019, it’s been great in many ways but I’m ready for 2020 too, ready to see what it has to offer. I realised recently, or in the last six months I think, that worrying about how old I am and life passing me by is pointless. It stemmed from attempting to move into what could be considered the normal world and thinking that at my age I was ill equipped. In hindsight it’s clear now that the folly there was to mistake what equipment was required.

Of course these fears come from seeing how much stuff people are doing with their lives and while I know I’ve done some cool things, I know right now I could be doing more. I don’t like the idea that life is passing me by even when I know it’s not. I don’t want to be cheesy but ultimately it is all part of a process, and as long as you have a goal you’re on a journey, even if that journey is to merely achieve the goal of finding a goal to achieve. There are some podcast guys I listen to, specifically Dr Christopher Ryan for the sake of this point, who have achieved some known things in life and probably a lot of unknown things, as well as periods of doing fuck all, but he’s now in his late fifties and still evolving into something cool, achieving things along the way. I mention him not to idolise or replicate him but to highlight that really we get caught up so much with this idea of age and having limits of what it is we can and have to have achieved by certain ages. It is interesting really just to see people still doing things at certain ages when societies and many of our peers tell us we can’t or should be doing something else. Saying that it is also double-edged as I met some memorable people traveling still, who had been been traveling too long, who I felt should have perhaps stopped and done something else by their age. If living the dream has now become ironic then you may have gone too far.

I still haven’t managed to talk about corruption but that is fine. You see I’ll get there, that is a point to achieve and everything relating to it or not is just part of the journey in reaching it. So tomorrow will be the last day of this decade, and who knows what the next will hold, but I’m excited for what it will, and that includes how I’m going to get there. Who knows, if I make it exciting enough there may even be a little corruption on the way.

An Assassinated Character

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

One of the scourges of decent political debate in modern times is the cult of the personality. It goes without saying that this has always been a part of politics, players of the game have been getting embroiled in character assassinations probably since the days of feudalism. It seems however, or at least I’ve heard it said by many people and possibly partially been influenced by this myself, that this form of political delegitimising has been on the rise in recent years. This came to mind today when listening to a podcast of a talk with Brian Eno and Yiannis Varoufakis. While I’ve never heard of Brian Eno before, who incidentally has the best full name I’ve heard this week – Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno – Yiannis Varoufakis is for me certainly much more well known. He took on the EU while in his position as Greek Finance Minister, is a fervent critic of the EU although he believes in remaining in so as to tackle it from the inside and is easily and perhaps crudely described as a left wing rockstar economist. I don’t know everything he has to say but there are arguments he makes that appeal to me. My issue then is that people don’t like him not always for his politics but his character.

It is too easy to go into simply disliking someone. There have been many times I have heard people talking about an idea but found myself rejecting them because either I found them annoying or for some unconscious conditioned reaction to how they dress or their accent. It is ignorant and will make a good piece in itself at a later date, but that is for then. Varoufakis when in his position as minister took all his money out of Greece and put it in foreign bank accounts. I don’t think it was him, but the government, and I think it was after he quit his position, introduced laws to stop Greek people doing this. Some preempted this to varying levels of success but I remember chatting with a Greek at the time who disliked Varoufakis because he believed he had told people not to remove their money to safeguard what was left of the Greek economy but removed his own as he knew it was pretty much doomed anyway. Research would be required to confirm the validity of this.

The question though is whether you are capable of putting aside the supposed unpleasant act and therefore issue with his character and still listen to his ideas for what they are, or dismiss his ideas because either you can’t trust him or simply believe him to be sneakily self-preserving and hypocritical. This relates in a huge way to the current election. Boris Johnson is a lying racist scoundrel who cannot be trusted and Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semitic marxist who wants to drag us back to the Stone Age. The point is not whether either are true or not but that people seem willing to still vote for them for their policies while others refuse to vote for them because of their perceived characters. That is of course oversimplifying an incredibly complicated and nuanced situation but fundamentally this is how the parties and media seem to be trying to play it.

It is really challenging to actually listen to someones words and put everything else aside despite your unconscious biases, especially to believe in what they say after they have proved themselves untrustworthy. An extreme would be Hitler and vegetarians but that isn’t worth going into. Both arguments can be rationalised with varying degrees of success, so must we look to the emotional side of the debate? Or it perhaps comes down to your belief in realpolitik. Whatever it is it seems an enormous challenge to actually see the words for what they really are. Certainly though if we all found a way to learn how to we may just manage to drag politics from the gutter it seems to have found itself in, and who knows in the process ourselves too.