BBC bias on America - index of banned books

I listened to the AM slot 9-9.45, 22nd September, to hear a discussion about the United States, which concentrated on America's Achilles heel, race. It was inspired by the current presidential race and the issues separating the candidates - but don't expect to hear both sides of the story. Moderated by Justin Webb, leftist America correspondent for the BBC, the world's premier left-wing News organisation (funded by the British Taxpayer, but never mind), had invited onto the programme as guests three Americans: a socialist sympathiser, a woman called Castillo and Sidney Shelby, who was black. For much of the programme there was the usual unanimity of opinion between the participants, all of whom seemed to have been invited on in order to be critical of the United States, its institutions and its history. In fact, the tone of the debate was unremittingly negative, concentrating on Racism and exploitation, the exception being the occasional comment from the African American Shelby, such as that the US eventually got round to facing these issues and deserved some credit for having faced them, unlike other countries.

At one stage, about 40 minutes in of a 45 minute programme, when Shelby started talking up America - "but the problem for Black people is within their own culture" or words to that effect, and that there was something about the US to be admired, Webb jumped in and calmly remonstrated with him for departing from the script. Shelby was black and alone amongst the participants in showing a belief in the virtues of hard work and wealth creation. At the end, the socialist said that wealth was "given disproportionately to the rich" and Shelby heatedly disagreed saying they worked for it. At last an argument after 45 minutes of typical BBC discussion show group think. Then Justin Webb wrapped it up, with Shelby the only dissenting voice from the enlightened message that Justin wanted to dispense. Presumably he was only invited on because he was black and it was assumed that he would follow the opinions of the white liberals and leftists on the show. When he didn't play the part written for him, Webb, supposed objective, gently reminded him of the error of his ways. In spite of Shelby being off-message, Shelby was similar to the others in being distrustful of religion and seemed to dislike social conservatism. So the republicans had no friends in this debate.

What is the point of discussing Evangelicals or Social conservatism if you don't get one of these evangelicals or social conservatives on board? Are they some exotic tribe that can't represent themselves? Presumably Webb put the programme together with a view to promoting a certain message and he chose people whom he thought could be relied on to promote it. What an abuse of the taxpayer's money by the so-called National Broadcaster. What a charade. Well done to Shelby for not playing along.

The BBC has an index of banned books, I'm sure. Top of the list is "Can we trust the BBC?" by Robin Aitken, which has never been mentioned once on the airways of the Nation's broadcaster. Too bad for free debate because the BBC controls 87% of the broadcast media. "State of Emergency" by Pat Buchanan on the immigrant invasion of the United States is no doubt another. Clash of civilisations another. The term appears only as a cardboard charactature argument to be refuted by leftist commentators.

One type of capitalism has failed: ours

We hear a lot of talk at the moment of the failure of capitalism. Certainly, this is the failure of a version of capitalism, the one that, in an environment of world-wide transfers of capital, emphasises consumption as the engine of growth rather than production. The idea was that if you have easy credit, low interest rates and low income taxes, especially for the rich, this stimulates growth. It stimulates spending, but unlike in the 50’s, the money does not stimulate industrial production at home to anything like the same degree. In an era of untrammelled free trade with global movements of capital and people, the extra money in peoples’ pockets goes in large proportion on foreign goods, rather than supporting home-grown industrial jobs; low interest rates have stimulated a housing bubble an incentive to borrow; cheap borrowing with weak credit controls have encouraged a culture of debt, much of the spending siphoned off to an overpriced asset, the housing market or to increasing the balance of payment surpluses of other (non-western) countries. Laissez-faire economists will say that it is the best of all possible worlds for everyone – well, it is good for those countries who are selling to us: they make money, which enables their companies and their governments (SWFs) to invest in their own countries and to buy up large chunks of ours. We are lifting millions of people out of poverty, they say. Yes, but we cannot keep spending more money than we earn: that is a recipe for impoverishment of the West, and for a decline in our power and prestige, even our ability to defend ourselves. Military capacity needs money and an industrial base.

Just as the political and social project of exporting liberal democracy floundered in Iraq, so the economic liberalism of Bush, McCain, Blair and Brown has struck aground on bad debt and over-reliance on the benefits of globalisation, not enough care for its dangers.

As for those who say Capitalism itself has failed, well look at China's more nationalistic, state-controlled, production-based version.

nation first - ditch the religion of free trade

I believe in trade, I believe in free trade where appropriate; but I do not believe in the religion of Free Trade, no matter what the consequences may be to our national standing. The imperative of any government should be the security of our citizens, their prosperity and their freedom. Free Trade policies as pursued today threaten all of these.

In our political climate, it is dangerous heresy to say this: both Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservatives support the orthodoxy that liberal economics was the one way, eventually to be adopted by the world. Only it is not being adopted: the most successful economies, China and Japan, have high tariffs; China does not allow its currency to float free on the exchange markets, they keep it low in order to promote exports and increase their industrial capacity. They are not adopting free trade because they don’t need it; they leave it for us to make it easier for them. True believers in Free Trade say that this is the best of all possible worlds, that it pulls millions out of poverty; they neglect to say that it is impoverishing the western world and putting our people into poverty instead. The economy has boomed over the last 15 years, but it has been accompanied by an unparalled increase in debt; the consumer boom is paid for by borrowing, not by wealth production. See how many companies are being bought by Far Eastern and Middle Eastern funds, many of them, Sovereign Wealth Funds, owned by foreign governments. The western world is strapped for cash; why because we have no commodities and our production is overseas.

In the 19th century USA and Germany pursued policies based on production, not consumption. By the early 20th century, these were the economic powerhouses of the world; Britain, which believed in Free Trade unconditionally was in industrial decline. For all its communism, Stalin succeeded in finishing the industrialisation of the USSR; and it is the constraints imposed on African Governments by the west, which prevent African economies, flooded with goods from outside, from increasing production.

Though not in a particularly healthy state, the best performing western country in terms of balance of payments is Germany, a far cry from the moribund economy characterised by liberal “flat-earth” ideologues at the start of the Iraq War, when neo-con/liberal hubris was at its height. Its export-led recovery from 2005 was based on not anticipated by those who promoted debt in Britain and America.

Free trade at any cost is part of the ideology of western suicide. As we lose our industrial base, we lose our capacity to influence events in the world, as well as our ability to control our own affairs. Without an industrial capacity, we will lose our military capacity as well; a de-industrialised nation cannot defend itself against armies backed by advanced industrial economies. Coupled with the demographic decline caused by low birth rates, this spells disaster for the West.

How have we accepted this? Part of the answer is the facile internationalism that passes for enlightened policy amongst the liberal elites and the left. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, socialism was seen as the means to bring the world together, to eliminate conflict, to encourage all countries to buy into the values of progress and prosperity. With the fall of Communism, those same socialists became capitalists but they kept their internationalist ideology. Now free trade is the way to eliminate national and ethnic conflict; now free trade would redistribute wealth; now free trade would make people abandon their regressive cultures and adopt the ways of the enlightened west.

It hasn’t happened: the west has become more impoverished, a not very creditable role model. The rest of the world ignore us because they see how we are failing.


One of the features of life under new labour has been the increase in inequality – not between the oppressed poor and the rest, as the left would have had us believe; but between the elites and the rest. Investment bankers have made millions and have bought the best houses, outpricing professional families; non-domicile millionaires live in Britain, used our public services, put up house prices, without being taxed. Those who didn’t work get benefits to pay for drugs and idleness; they get a council house; any immigrant who rolls up with a torn-up passport and a family gets a council house too – as well as other benefits. The deserving poor can’t get a council house and they can’t buy a house as well; house prices have gone up while immigrants have driven down wages.

If you are very rich it is OK; if you very poor you get benefits. The people who are suffering are the hard-working ordinary people. They pay for the excesses of the bankers and finance the drugs culture of the underclass. Brown and livingstone say this is OK, as long as they can finance their welfare policies.


solution
We have to pursue policies that benefit our own people. It calls for a major change of strategic direction: abandon unlimited free trade, promote our own industrial base, eliminate the culture of debt, stop taxing the ordinary people, help them have more children. Stop benefits for the underclass and for the elites.

The damage done by abortion to women

Contrary to the euphemistic reassurances of the abortion industry, including feminists, who are supposedly on the side of women, it is clear that abortion damages the mental well-being of the women who undergo it; that these millions of women – something of 1/3 of woman in our society are likely to have an abortion – suffer a deep sense of loss and shame for their destroyed child. The justification for it, that she can have another child later to replace the other, that she can, without the burden of a baby, get on with her career or life are undermined by the moral truth of the act of abortion; instead, she looks into the eyes of her other children and wonders what the aborted child would have been like; grief undermines the mental equilibrium needed to enjoy or accomplish the goals for which she has sacrificed the milk of human kindness.
They tell us that human autonomy is paramount, but we know that young girls are pressurised into having an abortion because it is the only responsible choice; that boyfriends refuse to support the mother-to-be because abortion is available; we know that many pregnancy advice centres automatically advise abortion. Clearly autonomy is under pressure when there is so much pressure not to have the baby. They tell us that abortion is the rational choice, that the child is just a foetus, a collection of cells, pre-human, therefore not human at all; they tell us that we are autonomous units, that we have a right to live our lives the way we want, that we should put ourselves above the needs of others; that rationality dictates we see the foetus as a collection of cells. That is the model of the human that they provide for us. But humans are not like that, they feel guilt and horror at what they are told is rational, non-problematic and responsible; they feel shame when the model tells them they should feel relief or nothing; they feel shame when the logic of the pro-abortion lobby tells them they should feel proud; they promise the preservation of an autonomous rational self uncompromised by the burden of a child; but for many women, abortion brings a dimunition of the self, a disintegration of the self. Part of us is moral and when we wrong ourselves and pretend we have done the right thing, we leave a part of ourselves behind. We are not like the model they provide, we are better than that; that is why abortion causes so much suffering to all those involved in it.

treatment of the old and abortion

When we think about the hundreds of thousands of older people in care homes, half of whom apparently are given chemical coshes to make them easier to handle, we should remember that he best way to help the old is to protect the young. The aborted children of the past generations would have paid the pensions and insurance contributions of their parents and grandparents; they would have helped staff the care homes. See how the end of life and the beginning of life are linked.

Sarah Palin marginalised by republican elite; the BBC reaction

Exciting to see Sarah Palin as McCain's choice for VP. Energises the base, yes; causes debate, yes; emphasises that being a woman and being pro-life are not mutually exclusive, that in fact woman are generally more pro-life than men. What worries me is that Bush was elected by Christian Conservatives, but his presidency was suborned to the Neo-Con and big business agenda; Palin will get social conservatives to vote Republican again, but she will be marginalised by McCain - the socially conservative agenda will be shelved after the Christian right has done its job as voting fodder. The compensatiion for this wory has been the horror of politically correct types on the BBC; Palin is an affront to all those who want to colonise women's issues for the left, and to paint social conservatives as irrational and ill-informed; both agendas the BBC supports wholeheartedly; however, highlighting the many flaws and biases of the BBC doesn't mean that the republican insiders will not betray social conservatives. Apparently Karl Rove was one of the insiders advising McCain to pick a pro-life candidate instead of McCain's preferred candidate, Joe Liebermann, the pro-Iraq War democrat; Karl Rove referred to evangelical leaders as "the nuts". Will we see the same when (as looks likely) McCain wins? after wooing the Christian right and social conservative movement in the election, the new administration will treat their views with contempt when making policy.

Incidentally James Naughty has been rather complementary about Palin - her personal impact at least if not her policies. The BBC will still not take social conservatism seriously as a set of political, social and ethical viewpoints. They either ignore it completely, so starving it of the oxygen of publicity or they charactiture it. Justin Webb, the America correspondent for the BBC characterised social conservatives as people whose foreign policy opinions amount to thinking that Al-Qaida is a bad thing and that Mexicans should stay in Mexico; what a trivialisation, if not distortion of an important political set of views. The BBC has a mandate to report objectively.

Note that on Friday's Today program, after the sympathetic but humorous sketch on America's rednecks, the two "serious" commentators were Simon Schama and Bonnie Greer, both on the liberal left. On Sunday's Broadcasting house, the commentators on Sarah Palin are both negative; they invite a comedian, Charlie Higson on who expresses his worry about Palin's environmental views; would they invite a right-of-centre comedian on? Rory Bremnar ia sketch on the Andrew Marr show trashes the conservative party by saying something like the Republican are an unevolved species; fair enough, if he were to say something similar about the democrats. To be fair James Naughty on Today during the week has been relatively sympathetic to her - at least in reacting to her personality - but there is no objective considerations of socially and morally conservative views. The very fact that Sarah Palin exists and is candidate for US VP may help to change that.

"liberal conservative not neo-conservative"

Reported yesterday on the BBC Today program that Cameron is at the Republican congress calling himself a "liberal conservative not neo-conservative"; sounds good to progressive types, but it is not often realised that neo-conservatism is a progressive ideology, dedicated to destroying traditional structures in order to impose a new order based on an absolute conception of Liberty. In this it differs from Bolshevism in that the bolsheviks wanted a new order based on Equality. There is another conception of liberty which is based on the idea of civic society rooted in traditional values, a diffusion of power through institutions and a less powerful state: this is classical liberty.

The Iraq War was a liberal war - or more properly a liberal progressive war: an alliance between democratic fundamentalists on the right (neo-cons) and liberal humanitarians on the left.

This is the question about Cameron. Is he a progressive liberal or a classical liberal?

Not like '68

People compare Russia and Georgia to 1968; a better comparison is 1938 and Germanys demands on Czechoslovakia, followed by the collapse of the Czech state and Hitler's creation of a protectorate. As yet, Russia have not annexed Georgia and even the neo-cons don't expect them to do so.

The problem with giving guarantees to small nations against our strategic rivals is that we go beyond defending their integrity and give them a blank cheque to be intransigent and aggressive themselves.

Look at our guarantee to Beck's poland and Beck's subsequent (consequent) intransigence against what were in fact Hitler's reasonable demand for the incorporation of German speaking Danzig into the third reich; the poles had illusions of being a great power (Taylor) but reality demanded that they ally with Germany and Russia; the same is true of Georgia just as we were on the wrong side of Germany to defend Poland, so we are on the wrong side of Russia to be able to defend Georgia; it is the fate of small nations to ally themselves with larger ones in order to protect their security and a glance at the map of the Caucases tells us that they have to choose between Turkey, Iran and Russia. The obvious choice is Russia given culture and history. Georgia cannot use the west as a means to gain complete independence from the power politics of the region; we can't allow ourselves to be used in that way. Yet there are those who want to

When taking decisions of geo-political consequence we would do well to know why we do what we do. Is there a moral imperative to defend small nations? Well, who is the small nation here? Georgia defending itself against Russia or S. Ossetia (not to mention Akarzia) defending itself against Georgia? or do we aim to clip the claws of the russian bear in order to defend our own self-interest? - to make a stand in Georgia so that the Russians know we will defend Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics. If Russia made a move on eastern Ukraine and the Crimea, would we seriously intervene? given that the population there see themselves as Russians?

Cameron's views on abortion have a certain logic if you are pro-abortion (pro-choice). that is if you accept the empirical assumption that easier abortion at an early stage leads to less late abortions – the flaw in this reasoning is that you assume a fixed number of abortions, irrespective of abortion laws,whereas evidence from the US is that more liberal abortion leads to more abortion overall.
The logic of personal identity as conceived today also supports the avoidance of late abortions since an early foetus can be seen as less human than a more developed one. It is interesting that this conception of personal identity shows the similar philosophical underpinnings of progressive liberalism and old-style soviet communism; there was no sense of a unified personality continuing over time, a person being merely the totality of his behaviours and therefore infinitely mutable. this conception is needed for pro-abortion too; as I understand it the western legal system depends on the continuity of the person over time.
Cameron is also for abortion of disabled children up to birth; he cited his own experience of bringing up a severely disabled child. This argument has some plausibility until you consider how under the same provisons of the act, children are aborted for cleft palates and webbed feet – 40 in 200? according tothecatholicherald.