It's more painful to find the same bunk paraded in The Observer under the byline of Will Hutton. Jérôme, you've had a good go at his opinion piece, and I'm not going to duplicate your work. But I just got down a book of Will Hutton's that I read three or four years ago: The World We Are In, 2002. Opening at random, here are some snippets of what I find:
Britain has an American-style deregulated labour market, weak trade unions, indifferent social protection, and a fierce market for corporate control to keep the management of quoted companies, as the conservatives would argue, on their toes. It has, as a survey in Management Today reported in July 2001, rewarded its chief executives more handsomely than other European countries (...) Meanwhile, ordinary workers' pay was the lowest of the same countries. With these advantages, if the conservatives are right the British economy should be clipping along. Instead, its performance is only modest. For the zealots -- rather like ancient druids or the cargo cult islanders -- this is proof only that something is wrong with their rituals and they must redouble their efforts; not that their whole belief system may be awry. Others do not acknowledge the reality at all. The Sunday Times Business Section's economic columnist and conservative zealot Irwin Stelzer is a classic of the breed, who rehearses his prejudices as the truth, selectively choosing his facts while omitting others, week after week (...) In Stelzerland a "sclerotic" Europe has lagging productivity generated by a "eurocracy" that delights in setting burdensome regulations that "drive entrepreneurs mad". (...) The notion that putput per man-hour might be higher in the former West Germany and France than the uS is plainly preposterous, as is the idea that, apart from one or two exceptions, the European corporate sector is anything but deadbeat. Yet Stelzer's partisan effusions go unchallenged in a way impossible for anybody who takes the alternative view. Offered a platform in an American-owned newspaper (in addition he writes for the Sun) to propagandise the Washington consensus and the new conservatism with no health warning, he is part of the internationally accepted common sense.
For the zealots -- rather like ancient druids or the cargo cult islanders -- this is proof only that something is wrong with their rituals and they must redouble their efforts; not that their whole belief system may be awry. Others do not acknowledge the reality at all. The Sunday Times Business Section's economic columnist and conservative zealot Irwin Stelzer is a classic of the breed, who rehearses his prejudices as the truth, selectively choosing his facts while omitting others, week after week (...) In Stelzerland a "sclerotic" Europe has lagging productivity generated by a "eurocracy" that delights in setting burdensome regulations that "drive entrepreneurs mad". (...) The notion that putput per man-hour might be higher in the former West Germany and France than the uS is plainly preposterous, as is the idea that, apart from one or two exceptions, the European corporate sector is anything but deadbeat. Yet Stelzer's partisan effusions go unchallenged in a way impossible for anybody who takes the alternative view. Offered a platform in an American-owned newspaper (in addition he writes for the Sun) to propagandise the Washington consensus and the new conservatism with no health warning, he is part of the internationally accepted common sense.
And it goes on like that, I could happily quote pages.
So I don't get it. Mr Hutton, how is it that you have gone from this kind of clear-eyed fighting talk to this morning's Observer column? Don't you know propaganda when you see it any more? How is it that you have become a shill for a failed Blairite vision of Europe?
This is unbelievable, and sad. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Jérôme, there's a formatting problem with my FDI graph, it's pushing the column way wide. I have two versions on my server, a small and a big. I used the small as an embedded link to the big.
Here's the URL of the small one:
http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a28/afew/ocdefrancefig3003sm.jpg
I am going to refer back to previous thread about Saul's essay in which he comments on precisely this deliberate manufacture of a stance of fatalism and inevitability. and note that precisely the same stance was manufactured to explain white supremacy in the Age of Exploitation ("yes it is very sad about the decimation of all these brown people you know, but it is just the natural superiority of the White Race working out impersonally in inevitable historical/evolutionary processes beyond anyone's control.")
the hardline Marxist cadres had their own take on the "inevitability" of their intellectual model and secular strategy, and anyone who dissented was marginalised as "resisting the forces of History".
in other words, the meme of inevitability and vast impersonal processes is the late-model version of the Divine Right of Kings and used for much the same purpose: to paint any dissident against the agenda of the dominant (or nervously dominant) elite as a dead-ender futilely resisting the Revealed Will of God. there is no power so useful in the hands of the would-be tyrant as the power of futility and despair in the hearts of the populace... The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
