Opinion and observation on a world gone crazy

Joe Gill, journalist and game inventor from Brighton, UK

Thursday 20 July 2017

Grenfell and 9/11: Investigating a crime

It is reported that police forensic investigators on the site of the Grenfell Tower disaster will turn to the forensic teams who worked on the 9/11 attacks because of similarities in scale of the events.
The forensic investigation into 9/11 reportedly cost $80 million. As New Scientist reported last year: "An estimated 2753 people were killed at the World Trade Center site. Just 293 bodies were found intact, and 21,900 pieces were recovered from the debris. Despite the most costly forensic investigation in US history ($80 million so far), the remains of 1113 people are unidentified."
As the New Scientist review of a book on the process of victim identification suggests - perhaps unconsciously - 9/11 investigators faced peculiar problems not just of scale - but due to the explosive collapse of the Twin Towers.
I don't think the following sentences will ever be written about Grenfell, since there was no "blast" and body parts are surely unlikely to ever be found on adjacent buildings. A normal fire - if you can call Grenfell normal, considering the criminal negligence that led to it - do not scatter remains so widely.
"We learn how some first responders tried to “reconstruct” bodies, often mingling remains from different people in one body bag. He tells how the blast meant that sometimes parts from one person ended up inside the body cavity of another. And how the different authorities failed to coordinate on the most basic levels, adding to the confusion.
"The inexperience of the New York Police Department in mass gathering of information and biological samples made the OCME’s job harder, because the collection of DNA samples was haphazard and didn’t follow protocols. And although initial recovery efforts focused on the 16-acre site of the World Trade Center, for years afterwards, body parts were still being found in vent shafts, roofs and on ledges of neighbouring buildings."
Clearly I am no scientist or forensic expert, but video footage of 9/11 shows that the collapse of the two towers was so violent that debris was spread far and wide. Despite fires at Grenfell burning at 1000 degrees centigrade for several hours there was no comparable collapse - or "blast" as the New Scientist writer put it, in a strangely revealing way.
For a more scientific review of the terrible events of 9/11, please see the interview with a former National Institute of Scientific Research (NIST) employee Peter Michael Ketcham, who raises profound questions about the nature of the events that puts them into a very different category than Grenfell.
NIST carried out the investigation into the collapse of WTC7 on 9/11, the third building to collapse that day. Ketcham questions their methodology, and confesses his own blindness to the nature of the events until recently. He no longer works for NIST.

Ketcham says that the official narrative of 9/11 may be slowly collapsing. Perhaps it will undergo a rapid collapse like the Twin Towers did, much to the surprise of many news commentators on the day, who described the collapses as looking like a controlled demolition. That idea - of blasts and demolition - disappeared from the public discourse soon after and was forced into the territory of the so-called truth movement. Ketchum is not your classic truther and neither are the scores of scientists who do not accept the official story. Of course, they remain a minority. After 16 years of a bloody war on terror, what they say should be heard and more importantly, listened to.

Tuesday 18 July 2017

Asset owners are enjoying a bubble - but a 'major loss event' could be coming


Here's a really sound - and pretty much Marxist - explanation for the current stock market boom from Southbank Research:
"We’ve created an environment — for an extended period — where we have a decreased frequency of loss events, an accumulating risk of a major event, and a bias that does not contain the wisdom of navigating any such event. So, market volatility is low. At the same time, this environment is increasing the potential for a major loss event.
A “major loss event” is pretty much just what it sounds like. A correction. Or even a crash. Something you don’t see coming until it’s right between your eyeballs, caving in the bridge of your nose.
Yet it’s been over a year since there was even a 5% pullback in the S&P 500. The S&P is in the middle of its longest such “quiet period” since 1995. No matter how hard you look, you will struggle to spot any sign of trouble on the horizon.
Here it would be tempting to make some analogy about dormant volcanoes. Eventually they erupt. Ka-boom! Pyroclastic flows. Herculaneum. Pompeii. Ash, fire, death.
But geologic time scales are so long compared to our own puny lives that few of us would be genuinely afraid about a volcano erupting and ending the world as we know it. And that’s no way to go through life anyway, waiting around for a volcano to erupt.
Let’s leave off the apocalyptics and suggest there may be something else going on today in financial markets. But what, exactly?
The something else is that the financial markets have become a semi-private means for the wealthy and well-connected to improve their position. There are two worlds now. One for people who can afford to own stocks and bonds and one for everyone else.
The share of profit going to corporations is going up. The share to workers is going down. In this way, corporate earnings are quite bullish looking. That’s great news if you’re a shareholder.
Wall Street and the City have the support of the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, respectively. Asset owners and asset managers have friends in high places. And those friends have printing presses.
This is why it’s possible for stockmarkets to make higher highs even as most of the middle class in the Western world falls further behind. If you work in or around finance, you have a chance to earn a big wage and buy financial assets, which are bid up and backed up by the central bank.
If you’re out in the real world with a skill and have to compete for your wage with several other billion people who can also make things or provide services, you’ll be lucky to find a job and stay out of debt (unless you want to buy a home, in which case, borrow away and good luck paying). You’ll be lucky to keep the robots off your back.
Granted all this is just a theory about why stocks can go up while wages (for most people) struggle to match rising health, education and housing costs. But it’s not a bad theory. There are two systems. And they are only connected at the margin.
The world isn’t really a less risky place now that it was 20 years ago. It’s just that all the risks are in one system. All the benefits are in the other.
But don’t rule out “a major loss event”, especially when it’s the most unexpected. One trait we all have in common in the modern world is our increasingly short attention span. Our collective memory is failing."

Thursday 13 July 2017

Bonapartism, Thermidor and Stalin


Trotsky's article The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism is still essential reading. I abandoned Stalinism when I was 20. The Bonapartist Soviet state built by Stalin survived longer than Trotsky could have known, largely because of the Soviet victory over the nazis, which relegitimised the Soviet state and secured its position in Europe and the world. The fundamental contradictions of that state were never resolved, but the Bolshevik tradition could never be restored after the purges of 1935-39. The difference between bourgeois Bonapartism - developed of course under Napoleon - is that the bourgeois revolution can survive the elimination of popular participation. Capitalist relations, once embedded, will not revert to feudalism even with the restoration of aristocratic power, as happened in France in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat. BY contrast, as Trotsky explained, bureaucratic socialism, in the absence of popular democracy, is a husk. He believed a renewed proletarian democratic struggle could revive socialism if Stalinism fell. But the proletariat was atomised and the revolutionists were liquidated by the Stalinist regime. A restoration of socialist democracy was therefore never possible. Only capitalist restoration could happen - it took another 50 years after Trotsky wrote this article.

The strange thing about modern day Stalinists is they are incapable of drawing the logical historical lessons that the Soviet type states have all reverted to capitalism of a particular kind - bereft of socialist democratic traditions and internationalist class consciousness. In many cases they are ultra-liberal, authoritarian, religious chauvinist states. This ought to clarify the way in which stalinism strangled the progressive, revolutionary and democratic traditions of the working class movements in just about all countries in which it was imposed. Once all power was concentrated in the bureaucratic state and leaders like Stalin, the transition was inevitably one toward capitalism. The world-historic conditions for such a restoration did not exist after 1945 and the victory against fascism, achieved by the Soviet army and people. Despite the Stalinist regime's opposition to indigenous revolutions elsewhere, it did co-opt and ally with various liberation movements in the colonised countries, especially in the relatively adventurous period of Khrushchev's leadership. Only in the 1980s did conditions arise again for full counter-revolution in Russia and worldwide. It will take decades for a socialist movement, grassroots based development to return to these countries. This is not simply due to imperialist conspiracy. It is because of the reactionary soil in which such capitalist restoration can flourish in former stalinist states and the atomisation and petrification of autonomous labour and socialist movements in these countries.