Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Charlie Angus' concerns about the Cons' Albany Club schmoozing nicely parallel my take on the entire lobbying apparatus they've built up:

Mr. Angus said the Albany Club reception is an example of the kind of informal lobbying, through cozy relationships, that has grown under Mr. Harper’s watch.

“My concern with lobbying isn’t the person who comes and knocks on the door of an MP’s office and dutifully records, it’s the people who have access to power, it’s the people who have access to the back rooms and the private clubs, those are the people who can be much more effective as lobbyists and they’re technically not even lobbying, by just opening doors, and that’s the disturbing part.”

- Tim Harper slams the Cons' rhetoric that any dissent is to be equated with treason, while Allan Gregg suggests an alternative to the Harper model of talking-point politics.

- But John Ivison, who should know better, makes the bizarre argument that we should give a pass to the Cons' current anti-democratic abuses because they've committed worse in the past.

- Finally, George Monbiot discusses the self-attribution fallacy and its application to the sense of entitlement held by the ultra-wealthy:

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. CEOs now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are the chosen ones, possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed upon the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Thatcher and Reagan.
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Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses’ self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, think tanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people’s wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the Corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the Corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.