Authors: Russell Brand
Goldsmith then dissects free trade, observing that a system that enables transnational corporations to flit around the world, exploiting labor, benefits only the corporations themselves and not the consumers, the purported beneficiaries. “When Nike moved its manufacturing from the U.S. to Asia shoe prices did not drop, instead
profit margins rose. But the real cost to consumers is that they will lose their jobs, get paid less for their work and have higher taxes to cover the social cost of increased unemployment.”
Or as Flight of the Conchords put it: “They’re turning kids into slaves just to make cheaper sneakers. But what’s the real cost? ’Cause the sneakers don’t seem that much cheaper. Why are we still paying so much for sneakers when you got them made by little slave kids? What are your overheads?”
This is globalization described by a man who knew the system inside out, explained from an informed and honest perspective.
We are given biased, censored information, and even when the consequences of their mad, greedy dabblings become apparent, they deny it.
Goldsmith describes the institutions that benefit from this doomed ideology as “winners of a poker game on the
Titanic
” and says that, unimpeded, this mentality will deeply wound our societies and lead to brutal consequences.
He expresses fears around the mass industrialization of agriculture, which aligns with what Helena Norberg-Hodge told us earlier, that we need to return to localized, organic farming. Everyone is saying the same thing, in fact—return to a more harmonious way of living. Since industrialization, we have moved rapidly out of synchronicity with nature and our own nature. We were told this would be a better way of life, and it is. It’s a better way of life for people that subscribe to the ideology that capitalist apostate James Goldsmith here attacks.
Mass production, synthesization, global trade arrangements are all brilliant ideas for concentrating power in the hands of a few. Well done—it worked; you fooled us. Now can we have our ball back please? Capitalism has brought us many useful tools and systems: the laptop I type this on, the money I bought it with, the fame that means you’ve heard of me and are reading this. We are nothing if not adaptive, and if these systems and tools have now fulfilled their function or have become a hindrance, we owe them no loyalty; we must move on. It’s not an unconditional commitment—we’re not talking devotion to West Ham United here, just a dumb affiliation that we’re just stuck with.
By the end of the book, Goldsmith, who I’d always regarded as a
fundamentalist free marketeer, is mellifluously espousing paganism and environmentalism, quoting Buddhist tracts and Black Elk, the Native American chief who wrote a now-famous letter to President Franklin Pierce in 1854. This letter is a belated and, it turned out, utterly ignored appeal for “the white man” to recognize his role as a strand in “the web of life” to overcome our need to dominate and exploit the land and see all the earth’s resources merely as commodities for the advancement of the few.
This ideology is so antithetical to the business pursuits of Goldsmith or any powerful capitalist that his inclusion of the letter as the denouement to his book amounts to a deathbed conversion to the Revolution.
It is a shame that the means for achieving status and honor in this mercantile culture are so irrevocably entrenched within toxic structures that it is hard to find expression for that kind of dynamism in this mercantile culture.
I wonder if Donald Trump has any tingling epiphanies that he cudgels back to slumber as he goose-steps towards the grave.
I met Trump once and was surprised mostly by his daftness. He was peculiarly juvenile; I thought at the time that he was like a dimwit with a prodigious skill that happens to be highly valued—in his case, making money. He had no curiosity about consciousness, spirituality, interconnectivity, the micro or the macro, or anything, except in how it might relate to making money. It was odd that someone whose mind rattles around within such limited borders had made such a lot of money. It’s almost like being an athlete—ordinary but for one lucrative skill, irrelevant in a parallel world.
Like a world built around excellence at a niche bagatelle, or a dumb parlor trick, or a board game; the masters of the universe are just experts at Hungry Hungry Hippos.
Instead of vying to be heavyweight champion of a cannibalistic and stupid game, we must attune now to a clearer, shared objective. Like Daniel Pinchbeck earlier outlined, or as Buckminster Fuller succinctly described: “To make the world work for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
T
HE
A
MERICAN
R
EVOLUTION LAID THE WAY FOR A NEW KIND OF
imperialism, a new kind of colonization, an expansionist, militant ideology that is only now expiring. We have to decide if what replaces it will be better or worse.
Noam Chomsky, Adam Curtis, and
The Godfather
films have all been trying to tell us—sometimes subtly through story, sometimes wittily through archive and arch voiceover, and sometimes through “being Noam Chomsky”—that “America” is not a land mass, a country, some stars ’n’ stripes, and a song. It is a violent mad gang enforcing the interests of its corporate clients onto a terrified globe. Look at the heroes of its folk tales: the cowboy; a lone justice-dispensing maverick, the gangster; a surly outlaw playing by his own rules, or the gangsta; a bejeweled misogynist making money by moving ice.
All the good things about America either came from the counterculture or were there already when the white people arrived.
What they’ve really mastered, like all good racketeers, is the business of scaring the shit out of people and then telling ’em that they’ll take care of them. They’ve also co-opted a bit too much ideology and technology from the Nazis for my liking.
Sure, get their scientists to build you rockets, if the moon means that much to you, but check this bit of social technology from everyone’s favorite founder of the Gestapo, Hermann Göring: “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
The Americans and their allies, which means the British, of course, have been using this Nazi skullduggery on us for ages. I grew up worried sick about nuclear attack, forever peering out the window when a plane went over. It turns out the threat of nuclear attack comes primarily from the people that got me worrying about it in the first place; it’s the apocalyptic version of “who smelt it dealt it.”
Chomsky—who must have one of the most satisfying names to say in the world, which is apposite for a linguist—explains how this technique has been used to validate U.S. terror, domestically and abroad, since 1823. This is when the Monroe Doctrine was established. Because you are childish, you think the Monroe Doctrine is a pledge to act all sexy and emphysemic, lifting up yer frock, going “poo-poo-pee-doo.” It ain’t. It was a diplomatic commitment from a century and a half ago when the Americans decided that they intended to “dominate the hemisphere,” which is an outlandish objective. It sounds like the sort of devilish intention that kept the British pedo establishment occupied: “I’d like to dominate your hemisphere,” they hollered into hospital wards and children’s homes.
The United States have achieved this domination primarily by scaring us all witless and starting wars either explicitly or by proxy, primarily in countries where they were really confident they would win.
I’m not saying I’m as clever as Chomsky—that would be mad, obnoxious, off-putting, and untrue—but, as is always the case with a prefix of this nature, here is something that makes it seem like what I’m trying to suggest is exactly that. When I was quite young, I realized that the primary motivation for secrecy within powerful structures was not the protection of the people they had power over but the preservation of their own power. I think I’ve even mentioned as much in a previous book (y wook). Those “Top Secret” files at the CIA or MI5 are not full of devious ways to trump the Russians and the Chinese; they’re full of information that is so incendiary
that if we read it, we’d be so aghast that we’d go, “Fuck this lot; let’s have a Revolution.”
In his essay on U.S. foreign policy, Chomsky says the same thing. So if anything, Chomsky is nicking my ideas, likely from my defining work on the subject of propaganda, “The Manufacture of Consenty-Went.” Chomsky’s essay explains that for years the United States used the threat of Russian attack as a palliative to hustle through any ideas that impaired the freedom of the domestic population, contravened international law, or increased the power and wealth of their corporate clientele. Chomsky observes that if the real motivation behind this conduct was the Soviet threat, then it would have ceased when the Soviet threat did in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. It didn’t; in fact, their behavior became far more militant, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is perhaps the most significant political event in my lifetime, but, even though I was fourteen at the time, I remember not especially caring about it, other than when Knight Rider turned up and sang a song on the rubble. Surely it’s an indication of a nation with a bewildered and damaged sense of self is that the first thing they think of after years of enforced segregation end is to enlist David Hasselhoff.
Perhaps I’ve missed something—he might be a vocalist healer. We should’ve got him along for 9/11 or Lockerbie.
After the fall of the wall and lots of images of communists queuing up for McDonald’s, America was able to more freely pursue its agenda to “corporatize” the world by force. They waded into Panama, killed thousands of people, and installed a “client regime.” The media, which shares the same ideology as the U.S. government, always supports them. This could be as Julian Assange says, the cooperation of separate entities with a shared agenda or a more Bilderberg, illuminati, shadowy, evil, clandestine thing—I don’t know, it actually doesn’t matter; the results are the same. Government, transnational corporations, and the media cooperate to advance and maintain an agenda that is detrimental to the majority of us and to the planet.
With the excuse of the Soviet threat gone, the United States
(and, I am at pains to point out, I mean not the American people, who are lovely, kind, passionate folk. The same as when I talk of the UK’s sycophantic, clammy-palmed support, like a rapist’s impotent sidekick, holding his glove. I don’t mean the people; I mean the Establishment) had to dream up new reasons to act in the same way. Like when your girlfriend wants to have a row because she’s got PMS but instead of saying that creates some bizarre reason to thump you, like, I dunno, nose-picking.
The United States said there was an “increased threat from Third-World nations who were developing technology” that could disrupt U.S. domestic serenity—really, they mean economic hegemony.
The United States acts like an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied to. I didn’t know before I read this Chomsky piece that the American government subsidizes the development of weapons. They literally give massive companies grants to make missiles and whatnot, as well as creating ridiculously favorable tax conditions for them to prosper in. That’s state-funded industry—America does believe in communism but just communism for the rich.
In spite of creating this corporate kindergarten environment for their pals, if anyone else tries doing it, especially Arabs or Latinos, America will fuck them up. In El Salvador—along with Israel and Egypt, one of the countries that gets a lot of U.S. military aid and, in a common corollary, has one of the worst human-rights records—the United States trained a military unit at their facilities to wipe out half a dozen Latin American intellectuals, mostly Jesuit priests who were opposing the El Salvadoran government.
When Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out was a lovely fella who bent over backwards to prevent nuclear war and deserved to be remembered for more than that birthmark on his head, allowed a unified Germany to enter NATO, a hostile military alliance, on the condition that “NATO would not expand one inch to the east,” the United States agreed. Then they expanded right into East Germany, likely giggling as they went. This dunderheaded truculence persisted under every U.S. regime change. Just to reiterate the irrelevance of bi-party democracy: We all get excited by the Blairs,
Obamas, and Clintons, with their well-rehearsed gestures and photo-op affability, but when push comes to shove we’re dealing with cunts. Clinton in his tenure expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders. Chomsky says all this aggro we’re having today in the Crimea and Ukraine is because of these unreported acts of military expansionism by the West.
The U.S. government acts to prevent any ideology that opposes corporate dominance emerging. That is why they are constantly meddling with the internal affairs of their neighbors to the south. Latin American people, like the indigenous people whose land they nicked and the Spanish people who nicked it, have some inherent and potent inward drift towards socialism. “Socialism” isn’t a dirty word; it just means sharing. Really, it’s just the bureaucratic arm of Christianity.
Chomsky explains that any country that nurtures a national identity that conflicts with U.S. interests is regarded as hostile and, if possible, overthrown. The people of Iran have been under constant attack since their regime change in the early fifties, and in Guatemala anyone who opposes the interests of the United Fruit Company is likely to be jailed or killed. The United Fruit Company sound so friendly as well, like a posse of bananas and lemons all just trying to get along.
In the fifties, President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles came perilously close to understanding the allure of socialism when they observed that communists had an unfair advantage as their ethos—sharing, equality, community, economic parity, and stability achieved through redistributing the resources of elites would always be more appealing to poor people than an ideology that exploits poor people and makes the rich unassailable.