Millbank moment - applauding the students

The admirable student-led protest and invasion of Tory HQ at Millbank yesterday marks a decisive point in the rising campaign of resistance to the Con-Dem purges.

Rejecting the predictable condemnations - obediently emphasised, as ever, by the BBC - Nina Power captures the growing mood for radical street action, making the accurate link between the Cameron-Clegg attack on university education for all and the wider assault on social provision:

"Direct action this most certainly was, the kind writers such as John Pilger have recently been calling for. It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority – it is a genuine expression of frustration against the few who seem determined to make the future a miserable, small-minded and debt-filled place for the many.

The protest as a whole was extremely important, not just because of the large numbers it attracted, and shouldn't be understood simply in economic terms as a complaint against fees. It also represented the serious anger many feel about cuts to universities as they currently stand, and the ideological devastation of the education system if the coalition gets its way. It was a protest against the narrowing of horizons; a protest against Lib Dem hypocrisy; a protest against the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but "investments" by individuals, and denies any link between education and the broader social good."

Urging support for the students, Coalition of Resitance also:

"reject any attempt to characterise the Millbank protest as small, “extremist” or unrepresentative of our movement.

We celebrate the fact that thousands of students were willing to send a message to the Tories that we will fight to win. Occupations are a long established tradition in the student movement that should be defended. It is this kind of action in France and Greece that has been an inspiration to many workers and students in Britain faced with such a huge assault on jobs, benefits, housing and the public sector."

As Patrick Smith notes, the action in London, building on other campus dissent, is also reflective of the disenchantment felt towards a timid and ineffective NUS:

"This kind of radical action shows that some students are disillusioned with the National Union of Students protest and lobby model. With the Lib Dems doing a U-turn on their pledge to vote against an increase in fees, and Labour discredited as a champion of students, students have been left feeling that there is no one left to lobby.

There has been a significant segment of the student movement that has been pushing for more drastic action for a while. What has changed is that that segment has swelled to include a much wider section of the student community.

Several commentators and indeed the NUS have said that the Millbank occupation was not a student-led action and that anarchist agitators are behind it. Images of black-hooded youths have added to this belief. Speaking to the people inside the building, however, revealed a different story."

Taking inspiration from the wave of protests across Europe, Smith argues that such mobilisation will give impetus to greater civil dissent:

"There is a very real possibility that this could motivate people looking to fight the cuts to other public services to look beyond just protesting and lobbying. Across the country there have been meetings and protests already, with speakers at rallies calling for poll tax style revolts."

Smith also includes a neat rebuke to those anxious Guardian liberals afraid that any special government treatment of students will squeeze other, more deserving, social claims:

"No doubt Polly Toynbee will be looking on disapprovingly – she has argued that students are low on the pecking order of pain inflicted by the coalition government. And she is right that students are largely from middle class backgrounds and so won't be as hard hit by austerity as many others. But her argument assumes that there is only a certain amount of space in society for protest. If the students are successful, her argument goes, then others will face more severe cuts. Quite the opposite: if the students make some headway, others will be spurred on to push their agendas more forcefully."

Hopefully, that more forceful agenda will involve further marches on the privileged buildings of those intent on imposing and rationalising these draconian cuts.

Sanctimonious politicians, NUS wannabees and our ever-unctuous media will continue to demonise such action.

In truth it's an understandable, unifying and impressively human reaction to the political vandalism being inflicted on the poor, the vulnerable and the wider social infrastructure.

John

Challenging corporate welfare - mood builds on the High Street

Something just a little radical seems to be stirring across Britain. It's no French-style insurrection, just yet. But, as the cuts really start to bite, we may be seeing the first promise of a rather more serious public dissent. It's even got celebrities like Paul O'Grady going all 'La Marseillaise'.

Is it class war? Probably not. But there is evidence of a gathering cross-class support for active street resistance, even civil disobedience.

Here's a flavour of that nascent mood from a GP writing in a letters page about the unprecedented attack on the welfare state:

"I sympathise with the attitude of the unions and other protestors demonstrating against spending cuts. However, I would dispute the description of protests as being class warfare. I am a GP, which presumably makes me middle class, whatever that means. Not only do I support the protests, but I would suggest that the response to the Government’s austerity measures in this country has been far too meek and mild. I know that many others, whatever their so-called class, feel the same way. The French have the right idea: vive la Revolution!"

The middle classes have always been strongly resistant to any shrinking of the state. They, after all, take most from the public sector, whether in jobs, education, health or benefits - it's a curious irony how poverty and its social debris service the better-off at the expense of the poor.

But there's also something more class consensual, more fraternal, emerging as people from all backgrounds begin to comprehend the enormous social implications of this vast attack on the public sphere.

Writing in the Independent, Yasmin Alibha-Brown suggests:

"The mission is ideological – to demolish the principles and structures of the welfare state, including the humane idea of a shared and caring nation, where those who can support those who can't and even the minority who won't. I have paid taxes since 1975. Some of the money has gone to the "undeserving" indigent – so what? I know about privation. During desperate times, my mum lied to get loans and sometimes "forgot" to pay back neighbours. When the classes are divided by serious inequality, you do what you have to. The poor are castigated if they envy the rich, but the rich, it seems, can now freely express and enact the politics of resentment."

Smooth Etonians like Cameron and Osborne, of course, haven't the remotest idea about what it's like to struggle on paltry benefits and live a life of anxious insecurity. Nor do they feel the slightest concern for the long-term health of people now subjected to this ruthless purge.

Now we have William Hague playing to the Daily Mail gallery with the latest government threat to make 'feckless' claimants do unpaid, menial work or have their benefits withdrawn. It's the standard diversion: blame and punish those at the bottom for the greed and chaos caused by those at the top.

Yet, here too, we're seeing some hope of a gathering resistance, as the Benefits and Work website relates:

"Opposition to the cuts by claimants themselves is undoubtedly growing...At the moment opposition to the cuts is far from organised and is centred around child benefit and housing benefit, at least in the media and amongst politicians. But the message seems to be: begin to make your voice heard in any way you can and who knows what coalitions may grow amongst those who are the targets of these attacks."

John Pilger urges us all to "stand and fight", deriding the bogus message being played-up by a servant media:

"There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a "public spending review". The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that's beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a "shock doctrine" as applied to Pinochet's Chile and Yeltsin's Russia."

While the corporate fat cats and back-in-bonus bankers plunder more of the public kitty, the ideological assault on the poorest intensifies, all willingly executed, notes Pilger, by Liberalism's sleekest:

"Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction's compliance with the dismantling of much of British postwar society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge up to £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who "cheat" the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments was not claimed at all. Labour is his silent partner."

The link between, on the one hand, corporate dependency - bank bailouts, tax privileges and other gratuities to big business - and, on the other, the final abandonment of the public sector, is starting to compute rather angrily on the High Street.

Following recent exposures, Vodafone have felt the wrath of public protests over their £6 billion tax evasion. Many of their key UK stores were forced to close after pickets highlighted the company's gross theft while jobs, benefits and services are being slashed.

The affair has also helped emphasise the revolving door that usually complements such financial largesse. Vodafone had, grudgingly, looked set to pay up:

"Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.” A few days after the decision, Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Tories think it should be done."

The ongoing actions all make for good, popular street education.

Aware of the potential backlash over such greed and favour, some of the big banks like Nat West and RBS have launched charm offensives, smooching customers with sweet-talk of 'improved services' and 'caring attention'.

Meanwhile, as the cuts deepen, it's boom time for top corporations and other private sector companies contracted to the Department of Works and Pensions:

"The scale of the DWP’s infiltration by the private sector is revealed in a list of the top 100 suppliers to the department in 2009 –10 who, between them, walked away with almost £4.6 billion of public funds.

At the top of the list is a company few will ever have heard of, property management company Telereal Trillium who received a staggering £783 million of taxpayer’ cash.

Next in line was American computer giants Hewlett Packard, who took almost £657 million out of the department.

Further down the list at number six, job brokers A4E walked away with over £150 million of public money, even though the Public Accounts Committee reported last month that A4E had:

“achieved on average less than half what they promised in the contracts they signed with the Department. Against an average target of 36% of participants into work, A4E has to date found work for 15% of mandatory participants.”

Equally dismaying for many claimants will be the discovery that Atos Origin also pocketed over £150 million from the public purse. In Atos’ case the cash is for carrying out medicals whose findings are overturned in over 50% of appeals relating to incapacity benefit and over 40% of appeals relating to employment and support allowance."

Corporate parasites and private carpetbaggers, writ large.

Here's the top 10 (from the top 100) suppliers to the DWP 2009-2010:

1 Telereal Trillium £782,949,477.68
2 HP Enterprise Services £656,863,100.86
3 Learning Skills Council £244,979,729
4 British Telecom Plc £232,815,357.01
5 Royal Mail Holdings Plc £175,300,755.13
6 Action for Employment Ltd £150,835,957.26
7 Atos Origin £150,798,434.69
8 Working Links £134,722,405.31
9 Accenture £87,114,892.12
10 Shaw Trust £71,251,397.48

It's not just the administrative costs of public sector cuts and changes to the benefits system that are staggering and unworkable. It's the social carnage and despair that coming generations will have to face.

Thatcherism never went away. It just morphed seamlessly into Blairism, finding its latest brand in coalition-style protection of the rich while 'Con-Demning' the poor.

We're meant to be reassured by Cameron, Clegg and 'wise old uncle' Vince Cable that we're 'all in this together', on an 'emergency footing' to 'save the country'. The lie is becoming all too obvious. Even election-schmoozed liberals are now waking-up to the real truth of who's being saved and who's being sacrificed.

The sham palliative that there's 'no alternative' to the cuts is acted-out relentlessly by an echo-chamber media, the 'national consultation' getting every available minute on Question Time and other protective props for our fictional democracy. As BBC staff strike to protect their own cuts-endangered pensions, you won't see establishment gents like David Dimbleby rushing to join the picket lines.

With what passes at the BBC for 'critical analysis', we also hear of the government's newly-launched transparency website, the latest spin on how to to be 'accountable' while dismantling the welfare state. It's as though producing accounts for removing the basics of society will somehow make us feel better about the loss.

People, all people, have a fundamental human right to a living income, good health and real social security. 'Sorting the budget deficit' is nothing more than a spurious pretext for lavishing the banks, servicing the private sector and dispensing greater welfare to the rich. We're seeing naked state intervention on behalf of the already wealthy and privileged while meagre state 'assistance' to the poorest is being further shrunk in the name of more neoliberal 'solutions'.

What to do? Stay at home, watch the X Factor and hope it will all just, somehow, improve? We all need a little escapism, a little respite from the economic and political gloom. But the stakes here are massive, impacting on the very future of our telly-diverted kids.

Radical responses to that winter-approaching reality may still be in its autumnal phase, but, encouragingly, a promising resistance to the cold frost of this government's biting austerity and protection of the rich looks to be forming.

John

*Update.

It's also well worth reading George Monbiot's latest piece on the tax evasion/benefits purge issue, including this revealing nugget:

"Workers at the Revenue tell me that some offices have been instructed not to chase business debts of less than £20,000, but are still expected to send threatening letters to people who've accidentally been given an extra £200 in tax credits. "The whole system is falling apart. It's predicated on allowing big business to get away with billions, while pursuing the poorest.""

The BBC's 'DNA' - bloggers, genes, censorship and vandalism

First they ridicule you, then they patronise you, then they censor you, then they break your placards.

And that's not to mention all the evasive responses and hierarchical dismissals in between.

Who might we be speaking of here? School bullies? Smug politicians? High court judges? Thug police? Think, rather, the BBC.

First up, on the ridicule variant, the BBC's Andrew Marr on bloggers:

"A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people."

One might reasonably assume that 'professional' journalists would be a little more diligent in their remarks. After all, Marr is, supposedly, one of the BBC's most 'respected' interviewers, renowned for his 'forensic, analytical skills'.

Besides his biased output, such ill-informed stereotyping of the blogosphere says much about the practice of lazy journalism within the mainstream media itself.

As the BBC's interviewer of choice over Blair's recent book launch, such comments illustrate Marr's true establishment loyalties and journalistic capabilities.

Marr will, of course, be ever-identified with this grand homage to Blair as Baghdad fell:

“I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he’s somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result.” (Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)

Next, as if to reassure us of the BBC's authority as a fount of reliable reporting - unlike the 'seedy' blogosphere - we have Director of News, Helen Boaden, dispensing some patronising homilies about BBC objectivity and a correction to those who believe otherwise.

"Impartiality is in the BBC genes", Boaden instructs us:

"I always think that impartiality is in our DNA - it's part of the BBC's genetic make-up.

Anyone who thinks differently doesn't really understand how the organisation works and how seriously we take issues around balance and impartiality.

That's why, for example, we've planned our coverage of the spending cuts so carefully - to make the choices facing the government clear to our audiences and ensuring we cover the "whys and wherefores" of the spending review. It's how we always approach our reporting - whatever the subject.

The licence fee is the public's money so people are clearly fully entitled to their opinion on our coverage. And if they want to criticise it, of course they can and indeed will do so."

Well, that should all be clear to us lowly licence-paying, cuts-affected citizens. Perhaps Boaden will do a Horizon special to help us lay-persons better understand the BBC's place in the great Genome Map.

In truth, the BBC have slavishly followed the elite agenda on who is to blame for the economic crisis and what public service areas should be presented for cuts.

There's no inclusion in any of the BBC poll options asking if bankers and their neoliberal practices are to blame. Nor, for example, in BBC Scotland's options listing 'preferred' areas for cuts is there one specifically asking the wealthy to pay.

That's the carefully-limited extent of the BBC's 'genetically impartial' coverage of such issues.

Next up, the increasing resort to outright censoring of those public opinions.*

The BBC Online Editor, Steve Herrmann, has, apparently, been courting views about the new BBC guidelines on external website links. It's all part of that noble 'consultation' thing the BBC prides itself on upholding.

Except when it gets down to actually allowing real criticism on the BBC Editors blog, or the prospect of featuring serious external sites, like Media Lens, that really do take the BBC apart.

Again, complementing Boaden's wordy outpourings on fairness, this mock consultation and purging of dissent on BBC blogs points to the BBC's growing fear of rational criticism.

Finally, when all else fails, there's always the option of just smashing-up the props of those annoying dissenters. Thus, the BBC's chief political editor Nick Robinson has revealed what he truly thinks of open political argument by seizing and destroying the placard of a demonstrator holding up an anti-war message during his live piece to camera.

Robinson later expressed "regret" over his actions. But not without rebuking such protesters for invading the BBC's apparently inviolable space:

"I am a great believer in free speech but I also care passionately about being able to do my job reporting and analysing one of the most important political stories for years."

Again, all very noble. Yet, here's Robinson, on another crucial story, defending those all-important reporting duties:

"In the run-up to the conflict, I and many of my colleagues, were bombarded with complaints that we were acting as mouthpieces for Mr Blair. Why, the complainants demanded to know, did we report without question his warning that Saddam was a threat? Hadn't we read what Scott Ritter had said or Hans Blix? I always replied in the same way. It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking... That is all someone in my sort of job can do. We are not investigative reporters."

An apologetic admission of just what's expected of the 'responsible' BBC journalist.

In practice, from Marr to Robinson, Boaden to Herrmann, BBC journalists and editors display a remarkably similar tendency towards intolerance and control over serious public dissent.

Maybe there is something 'double-helix-like' in the BBC's establishment make-up, after all.

John

* Update on further censoring of comments at the BBC Editors blog.

Water

In support of this year's international blog day theme

Wonderful, this primal substance
arbiter of life and death
Affluent planet, parched for poorest
Taps and flows in private hands
Thieves have come, the well is stolen
Freedom's thirst remains unquenched
Egregious nature, flooded pastures
Indifference and damned neglect
Rising oceans, tides approaching
Age of stupid, sinking sense

John

Right to water

Media Lens on the Obama cave-in letter

Media Lens have just published a most illuminating Alert on the BBC's and wider media's 'oversight' of the Obama cave-in letter offering Netanyahu a wish-list of 'peace talk' guarantees.

The leaked letter is further confirmation of Washington's 'honest broker' posture and Israel's determination not to relinquish an inch of occupied land.

A short letter on the matter to the BBC's chief Middle East correspondent, Jeremy Bowen:

Dear Jeremy

Beyond your cursory reply to Media Lens, I wonder if you might address more fully the BBC's disturbing failure to report the letter sent by President Obama to Mr Netanyahu detailing his inducements for an extension of the settlement freeze.

Don't you agree that its disclosure paints a damning picture of Washington's carefully-constructed role as "honest broker"?

Doesn't its omission also bring the BBC's own claims to honest and balanced reporting into serious disrepute?

Appropriate BBC coverage of Obama's offers and Netanyahu's outright rejection of them would help call into question the accepted narrative of America and Israel as bona fide peace seekers.

Can you see how proper journalistic illumination of this letter to the viewing public would help contextualise the real power relations and hidden agenda behind the current 'peace talks'?

Why do we have to rely on journalists like Jonathan Cook to convey such crucial details and assessment?

And, please, might you explain why this vital piece of information cannot be covered by the BBC just because you are on another assignment in Lebanon?

Aside from the apparently selective omission of such key evidence, what does this tell us about the BBC's position as a 'leading international news outlet'?

Regards

John Hilley

Brand desire

Those seeking some respite from the standard chat show fare might enjoy Russell Brand being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman. From bland to Brand, from branded to candid, it's a rare vacation from the usual vacuousness of celebrity culture.

Beyond Brand's apparent notoriety, publicised and purloined by the same media that 'made' him, it's refreshing to find someone so personally immersed in brand vacuity yet so animatedly willing to dissect his own 'anointed' place within it.

It's also a measure of the BBC's own dumb-down journey that this kind of interview can only get a late-night Newsnight slot.

The interview with Paxman does, of course, provide Brand with an alternative kind of 'anti-fame' platform from which to promote his book and coming docu-film on the cult of celebrity - a new and developing 'non-brand Brand', perhaps. But underlying the comedian's actual motives and hyper-gesticulations lies a series of apparently sincere truths about our obsession with products and the ways in which fame, or the 'promise' of which, spins its cruel illusions.

Brand is, consciously or unwittingly, speaking 'street Chomsky' in his analysis of the omnipresent, media-driven message to consume, 'aspire' and deify celebs; a constant mind-directing narrative intended to keep us all stupefied, diverted, pacified and enslaved to market conformity.

Reminiscent of the same multi-faceted message explored in Starsuckers, Brand rails against the empty gift box of fame:

"We're presented with the attractive spectacle of fame to distract us from the mundanity of our everyday lives."

"It has absolutely no value of itself. It's a spectacle, an illusion, a distraction..."

The consequences of consumer culture and its failure to bring any meaningful form of contentment are huge, Brand believes. No one cares about grand narratives, like religion or communism, anymore, no one cares about big ideas. Instead:

"we've been fed this grey sludge of celebrity, glittered-up and packaged and lacquered and sent directly into our brains by the media that both you [Paxman] and I work for in different degrees."

His conclusion:

"Celebrity in and of itself is utterly, utterly vacuous."

For Brand, fame involves another painful compromise: the loss of privacy and anonymity; a sacrifice that has no worthwhile function, as opposed to being, or wishing to be, say, a great singer, dancer or basket weaver for its own sake.

Beyond that more meaningful quest for satisfaction from one's art, the famous are bound, he believes, to experience massive disappointment and "dissatisfaction".

Yet, beyond our gazing endorsement of mundane market rewards lies a cultural hinterland which, as in Brand's elucidations, can still be moderately educational and entertaining, a pleasing release from the stultifying tedium of celebrity angst.

Brand sees his own still-captive seduction, his own enduring abandonment, to the lie of fame and consumption, yet seeks something more elusive and enlightening from his inner explorations:

"I thing we should try to examine the things that we're using to make us happy, this pursuit of celebrity, of wealth, of status, this consuming of products, this ignorance towards ecological and economical matters, and aspire towards something more beautiful, something more truthful and honest..."

The politics of desire

Brand's articulations on the ultimate consequences of unbridled desire suggests a core truth about human experience and the kind of false expectations we harbour about our personal lives.

But the same might also be said of the mistaken forms of desire we invest in politicians and their political projects.

Recall, for example, the apparently burning desire in 1997 for an end to Tory rule in Britain, the deliverance of which brought us Blair, more neoliberalism, the Iraq debacle and over a million people dead - Brand's parody of the same media "narrative" over whether to choose 'this or that Miliband' suggests a continuation of that false politics of desire.

Then there was Obama, with larges swathes of the liberal world craving a messiah President; the re-making, no less, of brand America. With no appreciable improvements for the poor and an intensification of warmongering in Afghanistan/Pakistan, the gathering disappointment over Obama's performance might be measured in inverse proportion to the hyped media desire invested in his election.

Think, likewise, of the desire for an end to apartheid in South Africa, a 'liberation' which quickly gave way to resigned disappointment as a new elite plundered the wealth and ignored the plight of those still eking a living in the townships. The political arrangement may be better. But is it the desired result of so much struggle?

The paradox of social and political 'arrival' seems, so often, to be new oppression and deep psychological scarring.

Consider Israel. Having fled the murderous ravages of the Nazis, how content are present-day Jews living in a stolen land? The vital illusion peddled of a 'promised land' has not only resulted in the mass removal and subjugation of another people, it has, in the Zionist desire to occupy more land and punish more Palestinians, instilled greater fear, hatred and unhappiness in its own citizens.

Taking that question to its next potential stage, would the realisation of a so-desired Palestinian state provide the anticipated freedoms and progressive liberation craved by the Palestinian people?

The answer is, probably, no. A new Ramallah elite, already forming, sponsored by the corporate West, might well emerge and suffocate that higher social goal, just as happened in South Africa. Even if a Palestinian state is won, the poor will, likely, long remain impoverished in Balata and other refugee camps, just like the black townships.

Yet, the likelihood of new injustice does not invalidate or preclude the actual struggle against occupation and existing injustice. We don't just lie down and accept apartheid oppression because the potential deliverance from it may be underwhelming. Rather, the act of resistance should involve that same educational check on the potentialities of false desire and selfish attainment.

Comprehending the pitfalls of desire is not just about recognising our own illusionary ambitions, indulgences and disappointments. It's also about understanding the possible realities and let-downs of the all-promising political package.

That's where we might more usefully come to craft a more just deliverance based on political compassion rather than the technical constructions of states, borders and constitutions.

All the world, it seems, is now in thrall to the culture of celebrity and the packaging of dreams, most of which, the market ensures, will never be realised. Consumption is that never-ending cycle, the relentless search for an imagined contentment.

The urge to endorse the 'life-improving' capabilities of the political elite is as ideologically-driven as the encouragement to consume any other never-satisfying product. Yet, we remain conditioned to the same consumerist desire, the brand of political and economic hope they call 'liberal capitalist democracy'.

While brands Obama, Cameron/Clegg and Miliband invoke grand dreams of a 'free world', 'deliverance through cuts' and a 'new politics' for a 'new generation', Brand Russell offers in his small burst of whimsical humility, at least, some more realisable insight into the fabricated nature of desire, false consumer promises and the higher potential rewards to be had by mediating one's own delusional cravings.

Which all makes for a happier human outlook and a more moral-minded politics.

John