Japan has been hit by the worst earthquake in it’s history. It’s the 6th most powerful quake in the entire world since records began in 1900. Just looking at the scenes coming from the disaster – particularly the before and after shots – and it’s clear that despite being a first-world country the deathtoll will be immense, in the thousands if not tens of thousands. It’s already been declared the worst disaster Japan has faced since WW2.
As SSY has already posted natural disasters are often exacerbated by the man-made actions (or inaction) that occurs around them. Whether it’s the botched response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or the comparative defences against Hurricanes by Socialist Cuba and Capitalist Haiti the way your society is organised has a direct effect on how it copes with massive natural catastrophes.
Had the tsunami hit some of the poorer countries in the Pacific like Indonesia or the Phillipines – who do not enjoy the same defences to natural disasters Japan does – the death toll would have been even higher. As a developed country Japan probably could not have done much more to stop it’s citizens being swept away by the tsunami, but it’s modernity has also made another very unnatural disaster possible – one that would not simply stop at the beaches of Japan, but has the potential to affect the entire region.
The earthquake and tsunami has destabilised Japan’s nuclear power stations at Fukushima, and thousands of people have already been evacuated, with residents being told to stay indoors, close their windows and not to drink tap water. Within the past few hours Japanese officials have declared that the fuel rods in all 3 reactors appear to be melting. France’s Nuclear safety agency has also increased the severity of the accident at Fukushima from level 4 to “at least level 5, or even at level 6″. This is significant and extremely worrying. The International Nuclear Event Scale runs from 1 to 7, with 7 being the most serious. There has only ever been one level 7 nuclear disaster – Chernobyl, and the events at Fukushima are (currently) only one scale behind that.
What has happened at Fukushima underlines the inherent dangers of Nuclear energy. Nuclear power operates by using the immense heat given off by nuclear fission to boil water and produce steam which in turn is used to power generators. The problem (and the danger) lies with the fuel itself, which is so hot it needs to be constantly submerged in cool water (this is why many nuclear facilities are near the sea). What’s happened at Fukushima is that the earthquake and tsunami has disrupted the cooling systems, meaning the fuel rods are no longer kept cool. The danger is now that the fuel will become so hot it will meltdown, break out of containment and release nuclear material into the atmosphere.
If this happens it does not matter how far people are evacuated, the material will go as Michio Kazuo puts it, wherever the wind blows. This means not only Japan but the Pacific and potentially the West coast of the USA could be affected. When Chernobyl underwent a meltdown nuclear material was found in Scotland, with restricted zones being set up to stop sheep carrying the radioactive material. If Fukushima does undergo a catastrophic, Chernobyl style meltdown it does not just pose a threat to people near the reactor in the here and now, it also threatens thousands more for the rest of their lives. After Chernobyl melted down, there were thousands of excess cancer deaths that claimed peoples lives years after the event despite the attempts of some to downplay the death toll.
The events at Fukushima may be this generations wake up call to the dangers of Nuclear power, just as Chernobyl was to the past. There’s already been a demo of 40,000 in Germany against the nuclear power plant at Neckarwestheim, whose operational length is undergoing extension despite popular opposition. The UK already announced a new generation of Nuclear Power plants over 3 years ago. The defenders of Nuclear power claim these new plants are much safer than their previous counterparts. Unfortunately, report the Guardian,
The analysis is limited, however. Computed risks for new reactors are lower than for current designs “when only internal events are considered,” according to a 2009 report that the Nuclear Energy Institute wrote for the NRC. (That includes fires or pipe breaks, for example.) But when risks of damage caused by external events — earthquakes, for example — are factored in, the new reactors are no safer than older reactors. In addition, because utilities have no operating experience with the new reactors, the probable risk assessments are purely theoretical and not as reliable as years of actual operating data from existing plants.
The German Government's response to anti-Nuclear protests
The article also quotes Russ Bell, head of new Nuclear Plant licensing in the USA, who is reticent about saying the new generation of Nuclear Power plants are safer because “We think all our plants are safe”. The reality is that everything that has the potential to fail and cause loss of life and limb – whether it’s a boat, aircraft, car or Nuclear Power Plant – is described by the builder as “safe”. The people who describe the new generation of Nuclear Power Plants as foolproof would have said the same thing about plants like 3 mile island in the past.
Accidents happen in the world all the time. Sometimes they are avoidable, and the cause of malicious neglect by the unscrupulous, like the Bhopal disaster or Chernobyl itself. Others are simply tragic accidents that could not have been foreseen or stopped. We cannot stop all technology due to the risk of injury and death – people will always need to use trains, despite the railtrack disasters. But we don’t need to use Nuclear Power in human society, the potential disasters that can occur in Nuclear energy are much more severe than the worst disasters that can undergo in other aspects of man made technology. Put simply when a plane or car crashes, it does not render the surrounding environment uninhabitable and increase the cancer risks of thousands of people for hundreds of miles.
Nuclear Power is a technology that is being promoted and constructed in defiance of public safety (to the point of building reactors near fault lines) in the interests of modern, non-stop growth Capitalism. What energy a society has available to it regulates what kind of technology, industry and civilisation it can build. Access to crops (the product of solar energy from the sun) allowed primitive civilisation to develop in the middle east, and allowed people to become scientists, doctors and teachers and survive off of maize, rice, corn etc instead of constantly having to hunt animals for food. The development of Capitalism 100 years ago was dependent on the use of coal fossil fuels to undergo the Industrial Revolution and transform the UK from a feudal peasant society to a modern Capitalist one – a society able to build ships, trains, use steel and construct cities.
Capitalism today is similar – it needs to constantly be producing consumer goods for people to buy. Capitalist companies which do not keep growing and producing greater profits for their shareholders will be overtaken and destroyed by those that do. This demand for non-stop growth has already led to a world wide economic crisis, ignited by the sub-prime mortgage scandal in the USA, with families being sold homes they could not afford. As well as an obvious economic crisis however, it also threatens to start a much larger environmental crisis – global warming.
The non-stop growth of Capitalism requires the use of the same fossil fuels it did 100 years ago, despite what we now know about the effects of increased CO2 on the environment. Some companies and Government’s have accepted the massive scientific consensus regarding man made (in reality, Capitalist carbon driven) climate change, and are trying to find alternate sources of energy that will allow them to continue non-stop growth. Others are looking for alternate energy for more cynical reasons – avoiding a dependence on middle eastern oil for example. The alternative that many of these companies and Governments are now promoting is Nuclear Power.
The reason they are backing Nuclear is because while it may not give off CO2, Nuclear Power is similar to fossil fuel in many other respects. The advantages of fossil fuels (you can hold on to coal/oil, then use it at levels and times of your choosing in power stations) are present in Nuclear fuel – you can decide when and how you use Uranium for example. Of course there is the Nuclear waste, which continues to be radioactive for thousands of years. Unfortunately capitalism does not think in the long term – if it did there would never be any revolutions or economic crisis – let alone think on a timescale which is many, many, many times longer the establishment not only of Capitalism but any kind of human civilisation itself.
There are alternative sources to both Nuclear and Fossil fuel – renewable energy, like tidal, wind, and solar. The reason these are not encouraged on the same level as Nuclear power is simple, they do not have the same advantages for capitalism as the fossil/nuclear fuel has above. You cannot decide when, where, and to what extent the wind blows, waves move or the sun shines in the same way you can decide what level of fossil/nuclear fuel to use. This kind of renewable energy is not compatible with a society and economic system that is dependent on constant, never ending economic growth.
That’s why as well as changing our energy systems from those that damage the environment we have to change our society to one that isn’t dependent on constant growth, and the neverending production of consumer goods which results not only in the economic crisis Marx predicted a hundred years ago, but now new environmental catastrophes that he could not have foreseen in his worst nightmares. The disaster at Fukushima is connected to the economic crisis throughout the world, and the continuing climate change – the constant non-stop growth demands of Capitalism, in defiance of the needs and safety of the majority of the world’s population.
Are you old enough to remember when it was hippies........................hippies everywhere?
Remember those cops dressed as clowns who were kicking about a few years ago? Well it turns out apparently that one of them was….a cop! More details emerge every day in relation to “Lynn Watson,” an undercover cop who infiltrated the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. It comes hot on the heels of the tale of Mark “Stone” Kennedy, another state plant paid to spy on activists.
Let’s be clear. SSY has no gripe with people who want to dress stupidly and/or take direct action against capitalism - particularly given our own penchant for such things. The Clowns occasionally managed to use their incredible irksome behaviour to outsmart the cops and should be admired for that. We did however know that there would be coppers in their midst. No doubt they did too – given that many of them are seasoned activists. There have been a multitude of stories in the press but nothing we don’t all know anyway. But its worth fleshing out some of what has been revealed for the hell of it.
Most of it centres around the actions of Mark “Stone” Kennedy. Mark spent 7 years undercover, spying on environmental, anarchist and left-wing activists. He recorded their meetings using a modified watch containing a micro-chip which were then downloaded onto Inspector Gadgies PCs. Based on information obtained by Kennedy, 114 people were arrested and many put on trial, having done nothing other than talk about occupying the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station. 20 were convicted of various nonsensical charges while the trial of 6 others descended into farce. The trial collapsed because the police withheld tapes that would have cleared the activists and the role of Kennedy was also crucial. It was claimed that Kennedy was prepared to give evidence in favour of the activists thus exposing the state plot to plot against the state. The collapse of the trial has led to no less than 3 totally “independent inquiries” by the Association of Cunto Polis Oligarchs (ACPO), the Independent Piggy Confectionary Convention (IPCC) and Serious & Organised Clown Army (SOCA). No doubt the police will decide that the police are bad and need to be abolished. We won’t hold our breathe.
Kennedy’s revelations in the press since being exposed have including the fact that he was basically paid by taxpayers to have sex with activists – a tactic apparently sanctioned as an acceptable form of “intelligence gathering” by his seniors. This week there was a demonstration in support of women from Reclaim the Streets , a group of London activists, among others who were conned into having sex with cops they thought were friends. The former member of the Special Demonstration Squad stated this week that promiscuity helped them to “blend in” because – you guessed it – we’re all fucking. I’d like to point out before we move on that tricking people into fucking you is not OK and in my insanely monogamous experience crazy lefties are no more or less likely to fuck around than anyone else. Obvious exception aside.
Kennedy confirmed this week that he was far from alone and that there were a network of undercover officers paid for with our dosh to check what we are doing. And more importantly, to first provoke and then fuck up any opposition to the political and economic elite. “Lynn Watson” was an activist outed by Mark Kennedy as a spy. She kicked about the Leeds area spying for a bit. She was involved in the Camp for Climate Action as late as 2008 having previously been involved in Aldermaston Women’s Peace Camp not to mention an being an Action Medic and of course, a clown. Various tit-bits from her bank details to a video of her in Clown make-up dicking around are coming out every day. But again, nothing we wouldn’t have guessed. She basically came in, made a mess and left like thousands before her.
Every state monitors and disrupts its enemies. That is in fact the PURPOSE of a state. The Black Panthers were destroyed by the CIA flooding the group with drugs, cops and paranoia. The Democratic Socialist Party in Australia counts among its members a former informant who eventually realised that the people she was spying on made more sense than they people she was spying for (I think it was a woman but my googling fails me). The façade of democracy is destroyed when the state acts to disrupt the forces who fight for a more democratic future. I can only imagine the epic boredom state plants must endure to get sketchy details of the half baked plans made by the left. We must avoid the temptation of spending all day asking where the spy is. In the end crippling paranoia is just as dangerous as the actions of the state. But it confirms that the state does watch us and maybe we should be rather more careful at times rather than blabbering our plans all over facebook or even, quite frankly via phone or email. On a positive note it makes you think that maybe, just maybe we are a threat to those we seek to overthrow. We all know they are watching…except them
In a hilarious twist, the UK’s most senior public order police officer, Bob Broadhurst, told Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee in 2009 in relation to the G20 protest in London that:
“The only officers we deploy for intelligence purposes at public order are forward intelligence team officers who are wearing full police uniforms with a yellow jacket with blue shoulders. There were no plain-clothes officers deployed at all.”
This week he scurried back to apologise to MPs for misleading them insisting he…didn’t know. I knew there were undercover cops in London at the G20 and I was sitting behind my desk in Glasgow refreshing the BBC News page at work. The claim that the polis didn’t know where the bacon was is laughable.
In short, the entire saga brings new (although hardly shocking) light on the amount of money and time being spent monitoring what we do. Don’t be paranoid – Don’t be disheartened. I distinctly remember my last encounter with the Clown Army, at Gleneagles at the G8 when they shouting “booo…miserable socialists” at us as they passed by. An older man behind me mumbled “we’re only miserable coz we’re surrounded by cops.” Just remember there are infinitely more clowns in the cops than cops in the Clowns.
Big Ben was burned to the ground last week by protesters angry about the coalition government’s plans to sell off all of England’s publicly owned woodland. Unfortunately, it was just a model – this time, at least.
The government proposes to sell all of the Forestry Commission owned land in England. That’s 650,000 acres of land, including 20,000 hectares of ancient woodland… nearly 20% of all of England’s wooded land.
At the time of writing this article, more than 129,000 people have signed a petition against the plans, and there have been rallies and protests across England – most notably at the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, where 3000 protesters pledged to defend the people’s trees, culminating in a Wickerman-esque effigy burning as a sign of their seriousness and how far they’re willing to take their defence campaign.
In May, David Cameron declared that he wanted to coalition to be the “greenest government ever”. Indeed, the Conservative party logo is a tree. And yet they’re more than happy to sell off one of England’s most vital assets to the highest bidder, to do with what they will. Who needs oxygen producing trees and diverse eco-systems when you can have retail parks and office suites?
Forestry is a devolved issue – meaning that the parliament in Westminster gets has no say over what happens to Scotland’s forests – which is why it is only the land that the Forestry Commission own in England which is to be sold at the moment.
But the Scottish Government are slightly behind Westminster’s schedule when it comes to announcing cuts, and there is a great deal of pressure on Holyrood to conform to the cuts agenda. Scottish Environment Minister Roseanne Cunningham made a statement a few months ago denying any plans to sell off Scotland’s forests, which is definitely a positive step in terms of defending our woodlands against any future attacks.
However, many would see forests and woodlands as an easy target for cuts compared to rowdy students and benefits claimants – which is why it’s more important than ever that the anti-cuts movement is vocal in opposition to all cuts.
Our forests are just as important an asset for the future as education and public services, and we need to prepared to stand up and say so.
And yet in June, he spent £303,006 of our money on a four day trip to Canada. £303,006 on travel, food and accommodation in FOUR DAYS? Perhaps part of the massive cost was the insanely environmentally un-friendly private jet he chartered for him and his mates…
The figures also include a list of presents received by Cameron, Clegg and Co.
Just for fun, let’s see what they all got in the period May-July 2010.
Cameron was given jewellery, bowls and boxes, tennis racquets and wine, whisky, books, hampers, an iPad, a wallhanging, a pen set, leather goods, ties, more jewellery, a clock, a painting, another iPad, and two rugs.
On the 9th of October, in the deepest, darkest Menie there was a collective hate for a certain knob head as hundreds of anti-Trump protesters gathered to show their great discontent towards the American tycoon. Trump thinks that it is ok to evict people out of their homes for his own profitable gain. Today the basic message was that we don’t want Trump or his course or his complete contempt for human rights.
The march had a great reception and turnout with a clearly visible media presence. This event was attended by local residents, pressure groups and ourselves. It was widely agreed that this area is beautiful and should remain the way it has been for thousands of years and should be used for rolling down. The walk was from the Menie visitors centre to “The Bunker” where we all gave Trump’s security a wave! The rude bastards didn’t wave back! Between the visitors centre and The Bunker we walked through the great sand dunes and got to see the fantastic landscape which is at serious risk of no longer existing if Trump gets his way.
We got off the bus and were greeted by Tripping Up Trump activists and organisers. After a quick talk we were starting the walk. This great landscape could soon become a playground for Trump and his rich, corrupt friends whose quality of lives will not be changed by their mistakes. There is no denying the scenery is fantastic and no one can blame Trump for loving it but the moment you alter the dunes in any way thousands of years of development is wiped off, as if it never existed. This is what Trump wants to do. His desire is to destroy this beautiful part of the world so he can add couple million to HIS bank account and NOT to the local economy (which he claims he’s doing it for). The local media in Aberdeen have publicly declared their support for the course claimed that it will fill the gap for the oil industry. This to me seems odd as I cannot see how Trump will offer wages of £8+ to 500,000 people to work on his course as cleaners, KPs, Bar staff without going bust. Therefore he cannot replace the oil industry with one measly golf course. It is impossible to have 500,000 people work on a golf course. Furthermore when the oil industry goes Aberdeen will be broke unless if there is investment into renewable energies. No-one will afford to go onto this course anyways but once all the big oil managers in Aberdeen lose their jobs who will go on. I rest my case.
TUT flags fluttering in the great Menie winds.
The march was attended by 300 odd people and a further 100,000 dogs. After quick speeches at” The Bunker” a few SSY members headed back to a church hall for a meet and greet with Tripping Up Trump and for some free grub! There was information posted on all walls. There was a picture of a map showing what Trump wants to do and where Michael Forbes’ home sits in all this. Forbes is standing strong in his house and putting up a great resistance towards Trump and his international organisation and everyone has to praise him significantly for that. Forbes’ home is in the middle of Trump’s vision of luxury (Yes! Luxury being a concrete jungle in the middle of one of the most scenic places in the world.) When you see this for yourself you really understand the struggle the homeowners are facing just to keep onto their homes let alone protecting the local environment. If Trump gets to use Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) it would sum up what Capitalists think of human rights, “Fuck them, I want Profit.”
This is a campaign in which we as Socialists can fight against. On one level it is showing what sort of people are running this country that they would vote down his course but then he flashes a bit of money and he’s got it, corruption of the highest order. The councillors had a very low price to sell out. From another perspective we cannot let a multi billionaire treat ordinary people like this. It is unbelievably selfish and arrogant of Trump to turn up with a wee bit o’ a swagger and get what he wants. He genuinely believed that this would be a matter of “Greetings mein fuhrer Trump, anything you want you can get it, no questions asked.” Well he is in the middle of big square go with lots of people and we will not be defeated.
This weekend you’ve got a unique chance to hear a heroic leader of the struggle for ecosocialism in Latin America speak in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Hugo Blanco has for decades been a key figure in fighting for the transformation of society in his native Peru, and for the rights of indigenous peoples. On Friday (Oct 15th) he’s speaking at an SSP rally for ecosocialism, which is starting at 7.30 in Partick Burgh Halls. Then on Saturday (16th), Edinburgh Uni Socialist Society is hosting a dayschool on ecosocialism and Latin America, featuring a whole raft of workshops on struggles from across the continent and Hugo, again. It’s on in the Dining Room of Teviot House, Bristo Square from 10.30 – 1.
As a warm up for these exciting events, we thought it might be a good idea to give you an idea just who Hugo is, so that you don’t miss the chance to come and hear him speak.
Billionaire vandal and all round dick Donald Trump has controversially been awarded an honorary degree by Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
Trump wants to kick people out of their homes (with a little help from his minions in the local council) in the Menie estate in Aberdeenshire, destroying the important local dunes ecosystem in the process. This is all in order to build a multi million pound playground for fellow rich bastards -- a golf course, luxury hotel and various other things completely useless, unlike the home for people and wildlife it is currently.
Not surprisingly this has pissed a lot of people off. So the news that an Aberdeen based uni has decided to honour him has folk up in arms.
RGU have said the degree is for his exceptional wrecking people’s lives for his own amusement skills “business acumen” and “the future his company is planning for the North East of Scotland” -- a future of ordinary people kicked and a beautiful place reduced to an ecological deadzone for those with more money than sense to hit balls around with sticks.
The Trump Mafia Organisation has been subjecting local people to some pretty serious intimidation. And now he’s not only getting away with his unbelievably behaviour, he’s being given an award for it!
One man who was particularly unhappy was the former principal of RGU, Dr David Kennedy, who was a key figure at the uni from 1987-97. He’s handed back his own honorary degree in protest. He said (not mincing his words):
“It’s an insult to decent people everywhere. Mr Trump is simply not a suitable person to be given an honorary
Former RGU Principal Dr David Kennedy hands back his own degree in disgust
degree and he should not be held up as an example of how to conduct business. Mr Trump’s behaviour in north-east Scotland has been deplorable from the first, particularly in how he has treated his neighbours.
“The university needs to realise how strongly people feel about this issue. I can think of no better way to express my anger at the decision to honour Mr Trump than to return my own honorary doctorate to the university.
“I would not want to hold the award after Mr Trump has received his.”
This Saturday the Tripping Up Trump campaign is organising the March of Menie to protest about the decision, and Trump’s outrageous actions. It’s a great chance to come down and show your support for the people that live there. The march is meeting at the Balmedie visitor centre at 12, and marching to The Bunker, a plot of land bought up Tripping Up Trump. (See their ace wee film below).
In the words of the campaign:
The Fremen warriors are very upset about the threat to the Dunes
“Bring, friends, family, flags and noise for what is going to be an excellent fun way to show Trump that we will stand up to him. At The Bunker there will games, bagpipes and we’ll take a giant photo.
After the March we’re holding an exhibition to showcase the unique and picturesque dunes at the The Whitehorse from 2-5pm. Refreshments and snacks will be available.”
If you’re in Glasgow and fancy a wee day out, Tripping Up Trump have really generously put on a bus up to Aberdeenshire. It’s all paid for, so although they could do with donations towards the cost, if you’re really skint you can still have a nice trip to a lovely place on Saturday, and show your solidarity while you’re at it. Loads of SSY members are going, so it should be a good laugh. The bus is leaving from Glasgow at about 8am (early I know, but Aberdeenshire is a long way away, and it’ll be totally worth it.) Why not come along? Places are limited, so if you’d like a place leave your contact details in the comments and we’ll be in touch!
The 10:10 campaign, which urges people to make changes to their lifestyle in order to cut their carbon emissions by 10%, has got themselves into a bit of trouble.
They commissioned a short film to promote their campaign, but yesterday were forced to pull it almost as soon as they’d released it after they realised it had the potentially to massively backfire and piss off a whole lot of people. To their credit, they’ve apologised fully and accepted they’d made a mistake. But this piece is about why it would get made in the first place, and the kind of thinking that underlines it. Check it out below:
Apparently the idea behind this was to be funny and edgy, and to be fair anywhere I’ve seen it being discussed the reaction has been really mixed. Personally I thought it was horrible, and potentially disastrous towards the climate movement. The message according to the filmakers was to “challenge apathy”:
“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” said one of the creators, filmmaker Franny Armstrong.
The reason I hate this film is because it’s more of what absolutely has not and will not prevent climate catastrophe: personally guilt tripping individuals, so that we all feel personally responsible and shamed about a massive global problem over which we feel we have little control. What I took away from the film is that if you don’t support the 10:10 campaign you are basically an insensitive bastard who deserves to be blown up. The title of the film is ‘No Pressure,’ which is where the joke lies, because in fact the whole point is that you feel massively under pressure to do something. What else are we to take away from Agent Scully’s menacing repeat of the “No pressure” tagline at the end? (And shouldn’t you be telling Mulder his crazy theory is wrong when it’s clearly right?)
Climate change is a massive global crisis. It’s a crisis that’s resulted from an unsustainable socio-economic model which sacrifices the long term survival of civilisation in favour of the short term enrichment of a tiny minority of the human race, i.e. capitalism. As individuals there’s very little we can do about this. Yes, by all means change your lightbulb (my flat is illuminated by them, because they save you money!) and do your recycling. There’s nothing wrong with doing these things, and you are doing something that’s socially responsible. But the fact is that it simply isn’t going to cut it in the face of climate emergency. As isolated individuals we have little power. The power to do something about climate change comes from collective action as part of a mass movement. And this film will not motivate people to create or take part in such a movement.
The Alberta Tar Sands from space: changing your lightbulb is totally the way to go though
Guilt is a crap motivator. A lot of the environmental movement seems to approach the crisis we face as a species as if it was the result of personal sin and what was needed was a good Calvinist cleansing. Some people will respond to the kind of pressure applied to them by this film, but the vast majority will turn off, look away and react negatively. They have, correctly, concluded that they can’t prevent climate change through individual action.
One one level, I don’t want to just be knocking people who apparently donated their time and skills to try and do something about climate change. But unfortunately, this was a typical, middle class, individualist approach to a social problem. The writer of the film is the god awful Richard Curtis, also responsible for such unwatchable toss as ‘Love Actually’ and ‘Notting Hill.’ He also is one of the co-founders of Comic Relief, a “national institution” that has always done my head in. Similarly to this campaign, the message of his previous charity efforts has been to parade misery and suffering before you, in an effort to get you to give up some of your income, or feel really shitty about yourself if you don’t/can’t afford it. As one astute commenter on the Guardian put it:
“The upper middle class patronising the working class. Now with edge.“
Or as another suggested:
“It’s like a parody of something people mocking enviros would do.”
Which basically sums up the heart of my problem with it: it will turn people off, and yet again see those of us who want to prevent the worst of climate disaster as preachy, irrelevant wanks. It is in fact a gift to the worst enemies of humanity today, the climate change deniers and their backers in the fossil fuel industry. Armstrong said (as part of the rapid backtracking operation):
“Richard Curtis wrote what I thought was a funny and satirical tongue-in-cheek little film in the over-the-top style of Monty Python or South Park.”
In fact it did remind me of South Park, like the episodes where they mock Earth Day or more pertinently the one about ‘Smug’:
The main charity backer of the ad was ActionAid, who are most well known for their ‘Sponsor a Child’ ads which guilt tripping you into feeling you individually can overcome the results of global poverty, inequality and imperialism by setting up a direct debit. They’re a good example of how a well meaning NGO can actually end up doing more harm than good, particularly when you look at some of the cover they’ve given for US imperialism in Haiti.
The fact is, the strategy of mainstream NGOs, which consists of loading up individuals with guilt and insider lobbying of governments, has failed. If governments and big business were going to sort out the climate emergency, they would have done it already -- the facts have been plain for decades, and the world’s leaders have been flying around to talk to each other about it for 20 odd years with no concrete results. Liberal, middle class hand wringing isn’t enough any more, and in fact NGOs are in some ways acting as a block towards us seeing the real extent of the crisis, and how far we need to transform our society to avert it.
We need, as quickly as possible, to put together a mass movement of the majority of the world’s poor and working people to transform our society and stop the dominant social system from taking us all to the brink of apocalypse. We’re not going to be able to build mass support by telling people it’s their fault, and if they’re not taking tokenistic individual action then we’ll blow them up.
Michael O’Leary is the head of Ryanair, one of the richest men in Ireland, and loves nothing more than seeing his own name in the papers. The main job he does for his company is making ridiculous public statements about what cheapskates Ryanair are, like that they might start charging you to use the toilet in flight, or that they’ll have a “fat tax” for larger passengers.
The reason he does this is to make everyone who reads his wacky ideas think “Fucking hell, Ryanair are cheapskate bastards.” Although maybe this will mean you hate him and his company, you will associate it in your mind with cheapness, and check their site first when you’re going away. His whole public persona is built around basically saying to people “I am a total dick, and YOU FUCKING LOVE IT.” He calls it his “dog and pony show.”
It isn’t just an act though. He actually is a knobhead. Although he likes to paint himself as some kind of champion of the common man, but he attended Clongowes public school, described as “the Eton of Ireland.” He’s tried to completely ban trade unions from representing Ryanair staff -- the Irish union Impact say they have 270 outstanding cases of victimising and bullying. Staff have to pay for their own uniforms, training and meals, and office staff have to supply their own pens and are banned from charging their phones at work. He wants total deregulation of the airline industry, meaning your safety at 40,000 feet is in the hands of total free market gangsters -- he described the British Airports Authority as “overcharging rapists.”
It’s not just staff he bullies as well -- in 2002 a woman who won free flights for life as Ryanair’s millionth customer was awarded €67,500 damages after a judge found she’d been abused and bullied when she tried to complain that she’d started being charged again.
On top of all this he’s also a climate change denier, a position that makes quite a lot of sense for the head of a rapidly expanding airline. “Do I believe there is global warming? No, I believe it’s all a load of bullshit,” he said. Scientists argue there is global warming because they wouldn’t get half of the funding they get now if it turns out to be completely bogus. It’s horsehit.” Yes Michael, it makes total sense for scientists to make up something that runs counter to the interests of almost everyone with money, and who would have a vested interest in influencing research. Scientists give factual scientific opinions, not ones tailored to suit an agenda like you do.
In 2004 he bought a taxi license for his private Mercedes so he could drive it through Dublin bus lanes. As he put it to one interviewer: “I don’t give a shite if nobody likes me.”
His latest brainwave really takes the biscuit though. Last week he went on record saying Ryanair might get rid of co-pilots. Instead he said, if anything happens to the pilot a member of cabin crew can take over because “computers do most of the flying now.”
This may be a step too far for Ryanair passengers. The idea of sitting in a giant metal box a couple of miles in a sky that’s being controlled someone who’s training mainly covers flogging smokeless cigarettes and scratch cards. But Michael tried to re-assure us with the claim “”In 25 years with over about 10m flights, we’ve had one pilot who suffered a heart attack in flight and he landed the plane.”
Not Hogwarts, but Clongowes, the incredibly posh public school where O'Leary went
Which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be TOTAL BOLLOCKS. In a response letter to the Financial Times, Capt. Evan Cullen, President of the Irish Airline Pilot’s Association, spoke up on behalf of the pilot in question’s family, who were quite upset by O’Leary’s claims. The reason they were upset is because the guy in question did actually die. He didn’t get proper help from the cabin crew quickly enough because Ryanair hadn’t trained them in what to do if the pilot was incapacitated (I bet they’ll train them to LAND A PLANE th0ugh.) When doctors finally made it to the cockpit they declared the pilot clinically dead. They managed to revive him after “strenuous effort” but he later died. It may shock you to learn this guy did not land the plane, on account of being dead.
More importantly, what the incident in question does illustrate is the absolute necessity of co-pilots. Although the pilot was clinically dead, the plane landed safely because it had a co-pilot who was able to take over. There is a reason that when you go up in the sky you have a back-up in case anything goes wrong with the main person keeping you all from crashing into the ground.
As Capt. Cullen put it, in dead pan style, “That he [O'Leary] is prepared to make such statements while, apparently, not being fully briefed on these important safety matters is entirely consistent with Ryanair’s ‘innovative’ approach to staff relations, safety, pilot fatigue and related matters.”
But in an even better response, a senior Ryanair pilot came up with another suggestion to help the company save money. Capt. Morgan Fischer, who’s head of pilot training for the company, wrote:
“I would propose that Ryanair replace the chief executive with a probationary cabin crew member currently earning about €13,200 (£11,000) net a year. Ryanair would benefit by saving millions of euros in salary, benefits and stock options. Further, there will be no need to petition either Boeing or governmental aviation regulators for approval to replace the CEO with a cabin crew member; as such approval would not be required.”
We think this is a great idea, although we think that even then cabin crew/CEOs could be perhaps at least be paid a living wage. We’d much rather they were doing his job, which essentially involves being an arse in public on a regular basis, than flying planes. Straight off the bat this would save €241,000 in his salary, not to mention all the other money he rakes in from the company. It’s reckoned that he’s worth about €300 million, but nobody is sure. As he put it himself: “Money used to be my motivation. You always want to make the first million. Then you get to £10m and you think about £100m. But somewhere in the middle -- do not ask me where -- you stop worrying about money.” What a knob.
We doubt his cabin crew, existing on about £11,000 a year, have stopped worrying about money. Although we’ve been slagging the idea of cabin crew being made into pilots, that doesn’t mean we should disrespect the vital job they do, protecting people’s safety and making sure everything is ok in the body of the plane. The fact that on a Ryanair flight the main thing they have to do is sell stuff to you is an indictment of the company, not them, and they deserve Michael O’Leary’s millions much more than he ever will.
The Others are shocked by the consequences of Michael O’Leary’s penny pinching.
In love with himself: Bjorn Lomborg looks like he used to be in a boy band but then got too old
Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish statistician and political scientist at the Copenhagen Business School who shot to international prominence a couple of years ago with his book ‘The Skeptical Environmentalist.’
In it he basically argued that taking action to tackle climate change would be too expensive and a waste of money. He tried to show that the risks associated with ecological destruction had been overstated; despite having no particular expertise in climate science he thought he knew better than pretty much all the other scientists in the world. As a result he has faced a lot of complaints about the serious scientific flaws in his work, from bodies like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Scientific American magazine (don’t worry, the right wing Economist mag rushed to his defence!)
Basically his argument is that tackling climate change doesn’t amount to value for money, and if governments around the world are going to spend big cash on a major problem they’d be better placed getting to grips with poverty or AIDS (of course ignoring the fact that poverty, climate change and the spread of preventable diseases are all consequences of capitalism). This has rightly led to him being ridiculed for underplaying one of the greatest threats to ever face civilisation. But last week, The Guardian and other papers were delighted to report that he’d changed his mind and has declared that actually spending £100 billion a year on climate change would be good value for money. Thanks for that Bjorn, not like you’ve been wasting our time up until now!
Although he was never an out and out climate change denier, and accepted its reality, Lomborg became a poster boy for the far right effort to deny scientific reality, that at its root is motivated by people who want to defend capitalism in general, and the energy corporations in particular. So the fact that he’s changed his stance is on one level kind of good news. That is, until you look into what he actually proposes doing.
How Lomborg would like to see us spend a good chunk of this money is the exceedingly mental idea of geoengineering. This means gigantic mega-projects by which humans would attempt to take control of the global climate and control the weather, in order to try and counteract global warming. Projects like sending thousands of ships into the Pacific to spray saltwater mist into the air and make clouds more reflective to deflect heat back into space (one that Lomborg seems particularly keen on), or filling the sea with iron filings to encourage the growth of massive algal blooms that would then lock up carbon in themselves.
One of the ships Bjorn would like to see pumping mist into the clouds. The reason it looks like cheap sci fi concept art is no one has been crazy enough to do it yet
What’s wrong with this? Lomborg puts it quite well himself when he says that geoengineering “could lead to really bad stuff.” Basically, the global climate is an incredibly complex system, with huge numbers of different factors affecting it. Already we’re seeing the unexpected impact of our actions through anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) global warming. There’s absolutely no way to predict what unforseen consequences would result from mega-projects like these. It’s a bit like pulling a thread from a big complex tapestry, and then trying to repair it by pulling out other threads and tying them together to replace them – you’re almost certain to do more damage that you can’t predict.
His other solutions are generally along the lines of finding techno-fixes that will allow us to keep up capitalist society pretty much as it is, but maybe with some greener technology. This is where we get to the rub of why people like Bjorn Lomborg will be unable to prevent climate catastrophe. Fundamentally, what his work does is apply capitalist economics to the global climate and ecosphere, something that capitalism fundamentally can’t understand.
There are some simple facts about life on Earth. All species evolve in ecosystems that support them, and if they exhaust the capacity of that ecosystem to support them then they’re in trouble; if a predator eats all the prey to extinction, then pretty soon it’s extinct as well. Humans have done very well at using technology to offset our need for the natural environment to support us, but ultimately we are just another species, and need to recognise that we now need to choose between the short term survival of our ever expending, ever impoverishing socio-economic system, and long term survival. Lomborg’s line up until now has been to choose disaster in the long run, because it would be a waste of money to prevent it now. Now he’s changed his tune, but he’s still only a capitalist economist, trying to find ways to make our survival as part of the global ecosystem economically viable.
Even if we pretend for a minute that getting technology to fix everything for us would work, instead of just causing more problems, where does it end? Some scientists have tried to calculate the economic worth of all the tasks that the natural world performs for free that allows human civilisation to carry on as it does – purifying water and air, regulating climate, keeping the soil fertile etc. They found it ran to trillions of dollars every day. The more we damage these natural processes, and the more we rely on ourselves and our machines to do the job, the more we will start to take these costs on to ourselves, instead of just trying to live as a part of natural systems, not as a replacement for them.
The survival of civilisation isn’t economically viable under capitalism. It is completely possible for the human race to choose to live better, more equally and in a way that is sustainable over the long term. But to do that we need to get rid of capitalism. The future has a name, and it’s ecosocialism.
There are alternative sources to both Nuclear and Fossil fuel – renewable energy, like tidal, wind, and solar. The reason these are not encouraged on the same level as Nuclear power is simple, they do not have the same advantages for capitalism as the fossil/nuclear fuel has above. You cannot decide when, where, and to what extent the wind blows, waves move or the sun shines in the same way you can decide what level of fossil/nuclear fuel to use. This kind of renewable energy is not compatible with a society and economic system that is dependent on constant, never ending economic growth.
Big Ben was 
This weekend you’ve got a unique chance to hear a heroic leader of the struggle for ecosocialism in Latin America speak in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Billionaire vandal and all round dick Donald Trump has controversially been awarded an honorary degree by Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
The 
Michael O’Leary is the head of Ryanair, one of the richest men in Ireland, and loves nothing more than seeing his own name in the papers. The main job he does for his company is making ridiculous public statements about what cheapskates Ryanair are, like that they might start charging you to use the toilet in flight, or that they’ll have a “fat tax” for larger passengers.
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