News from Blighty: the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK is now greater than at any time since 1921. The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2007, “for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas.”
The Journal study said that the data suggest “it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention” that kept the disparity from being greater. On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism of the Clintonian-Obamaish “New Labour” government (or as the BMJ more politely puts it, “the prolonged state disengagement in promoting equality in outcome”) helped stretch the yawning gap even further.
In other words, the few spare pence that the war criminals of the Labour government threw at the poor kept them from dying quite as fast as they would have done otherwise under the system of voracious corporate rapine that Labour entrenched and expanded after inheriting it from the Thatcherite Tories in 1997.
Now, even those few pence are being stripped away — gleefully — by what many say is the most extremist government Britain has ever seen, outstripping even Margaret Thatcher in the scope of its draconian cuts and the fervor of its market fundamentalism. The savage cutbacks and vast, churning upheavals being pushed through, at breakneck speed, by the new Conservative government (and its truly pathetic coalition “partner,” the lapdog Lib Dems) will sends millions of people tumbling down into a permanent underclass — and finally, after 60 years of trying, gut the national health service with a stealth “Americanization” that will turn the operation of local doctors’ offices over to private firms (many of them from the US) and privatize public hospitals, allowing them to “fail” — and close — if they don’t produce enough cash for their elite shareholders. Meanwhile, the schools are now in the hands of the arch-neocon Michael Gove, who is plotting with revisionist historian Niall Ferguson to impose a pro-Empire, pro-elite “national greatness” ideology on the young. Gove is also using “emergency” legislative procedures to strip public schools away from the oversight of democratically elected local government and put them into the hands of unaccountable corporations, religious groups and wealthy elites.
This Revolution of the Rich is being justified by a carefully crafted, constantly stoked panic about budget deficits, pointing to the example of the perpetually weak government and economy of Greece as a horror story to be avoided at all costs. Yet even if the Greek situation was as dire as the fearmongers make out, the fact remains that the cuts which the Tory-LapDog coalition is making in the much stronger, much more stable UK are actually far in excess than those being imposed upon Greece. As with the fearmongering about “Iraqi WMDs,” the “dangers of the deficit” are being exaggerated — and manufactured — in order to put into place a pre-existing (and transatlantic) ideological agenda: neo-feudal oligarchism.
But in almost all of these measures, the Tory-LapDog government is only entrenching and expanding the “market-led reforms” imposed by New Labour. And “New Labour” was of course a close copy of the “New Democrats” of Bill Clinton and his clique of “triangulating” bagmen for Big Money — scarcely distinguishable from the Reagan-Bush faction that preceded them, and then succeeded them in the Bush dynasty’s second turn in the White House. And we all know that “continuity” is the byword of the Obama administration, which is chock-a-block with holdovers not only from strangulating triangulators of the Clinton era but also the imperial militarists from the two Bush reigns.
Thus for more than 30 years, the world-dominating Anglo-American alliance has been under the sway of factions which, for all their internal squabbling and hair-splitting, are strongly united in their steadfast, unshakeable adherence to the perpetuation — and expansion — of elite power and privilege. They have shown themselves willing — eager — to degrade their own societies (and destroy many others) in the service of this brutal, barbaric, inhuman faith. The poor have no place in this system, which is a retrograde, hi-tech, rhetorically sugarcoated revival of the laissez-faire fantasies of the past, as Jeremy Seabrook notes:
“Pauperism” long ago took on the colour of culpability. The distinction between the idle and improvident poor and the “deserving” goes back at least to the Elizabethan poor law. It took on a new force in the early industrial era, which saw an unprecedented growth in pauperism. The enthusiasts of laissez-faire concluded that the evil was compounded by efforts to relieve it, and helping the poor only increased their number. Everything indicated that “natural” processes should be allowed to take their course. …. In this version of the world, the market mechanism is as flawless a creation as the earth, and should remain untouched by the hand of meddlers, whose only effect is to upset its power to enrich us all. It is remarkable that the establishment of laissez-faire itself in the early 19th century required an enormous amount of government intervention and regulation …
And so it is today. The “regulation” of the health care industry introduced by the Obama Administration is actually a gargantuan transfer of wealth, by force, from working people and the poor to a few huge corporations. The financial “regulation” signed into law is yet another sham that will leave the rapacious fools and fraudsters who brought down the global economy — and triggered the convenient “deficit crisis” by demanding massive bailouts of public money for their private businesses — at large and in charge of the world’s finances. Meanwhile, more and more government regulations restrict the right of ordinary citizens to challenge the rich and powerful in court, or to register a public protest (herding them instead into the truly hideous “free speech zones”) — even as the state grants corporations extraordinary privileges to interfere with the political process with their vast resources and protects their leaders from personal accountability for the ravages they commit. The government “intervention and regulation” on behalf of the industries and elites who service the endlessly expanding symbiosis of corporate, military and ‘security’ power — stretching even to the countenancing and cover-up of torture and murder — is one of the defining elements of our age.
And as Glenn Ford notes, Obama is preparing to “regulate” the last tattered fragments of the social welfare system — already decimated by the progressives’ favorite good old boy, Bill Cinton — right out of existence:
In April of this year, Obama once again reminded everyone that everything is and has always been “on the table,” as far as he’s concerned, including Social Security. His so-called “deficit commission” is stacked with rich sociopaths sharpening their knives to carve up, sell off or otherwise doom Social Security. It is a battle that safety net defenders thought they had won against George Bush. Barack Obama has picked up Bush’s marbles and put them back into play. He is the right wing’s most potent weapon, the one before which liberal Democrats throw up their hands in surrender without the dignity of a fight. Obama, working in plain sight over the past 18 months, has constructed and rigged a deficit commission to render a kind of death sentence to the foundational program of Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This is the system — the creed, the extremist faith — that all “serious” players in all the “major” power faction on both sides of the Atlantic adhere to. Their god of greed demands human sacrifices: and so the poor must die. And to keep the system going, more and more people must be made poor: first those in the “outer darkness” of faraway lands, then finally those in the sacred “Homelands” themselves. We have been watching the latter process play out slowly in the past few decades — but it is accelerating now at dizzying speed.
As I once noted of some our representative elites:
Perhaps if they could obtain these same privileges as easily by other, less horrific means, they would. As it is, they take the world as they find it, and go about their business without fretting over the consequences — the dead, the ruined, the spreading hate, the poisoned planet. Why should they care? As the maggot cannot see beyond the meat, so too these [people] of greed-stunted understanding can see nothing of worth outside their own bottomless appetites.
*Corrected for typos.