Predicting the Uniparty: Peter Oborne’s "The Triumph of the Political Class"

Predicting the Uniparty: Peter Oborne’s "The Triumph of the Political Class"

Mark Gullick • July 23, 2024

• 2,800 Words • 

The Triumph of the Political Class
Peter Oborne
Simon & Schuster, 2007; paperback: Pocket Books, 2008

Words and phrases often enter the political lexicon via the US media before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the UK, and one such recent migrant is the “uniparty”. The Americans have been using it for some time, and the Right-of-center media in Britain are now cautiously trying it out. The idea, of course, is that the two-party system central to both US and UK politics is an optical illusion, and in fact the difference between Republicans and Democrats, or Conservatives and Labour, does not exist in any meaningful sense. If the British MSM read more and talked less, they would have realized that the British uniparty was discovered back in 2007 in a book entitled The Triumph of the Political Class, by lobby journalist Peter Oborne.

A lobby journalist is the equivalent to a member of the White House press pack, guaranteed access to the inner circles of government and thus worth the attention of the political observer in a way that plain op-ed writer is not. Many political hacks write about government with their faces pressed up against the window looking in; Oborne has been respected and even befriended by some of the most powerful people in British government. But the book was inspired by Oborne’s increasing disillusionment with the way in which the great political reforms made by the much-mocked Victorians were overridden as the twentieth century turned into a new millennium. What had been a system which prioritized public service over private acquisition had changed into a new political cadre in which “the most bitter rivalries at Westminster have involved factional conflicts within individual parties rather than collisions of ideology and belief”. This discovery, Oborne writes, “was very frightening indeed”.

Oborne begins with the architecture of the British political class, calling it “a manifestation of the state”, and locating its inception specifically with the arrival of Tony Blair as Prime Minister in 1997. Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, he writes, was the last time there was a genuine ideological difference between the two main parties. Whereas politicians once gained status in Parliament by virtue of their position in society, they now gain status in society directly relative to their position in Parliament, and there is increasingly a disconnect between politicians and the real world of employment, a world they find baffling. Britain had shifted to what Oborne calls “cartel politics”, an impregnable ideological fortress within whose walls both major parties co-exist.

Oborne makes no claim to having discovered the concept of a political class, citing the late nineteenth-century lawyer and social theorist Gaetano Mosca, whose Elementi di Scienza Politica was translated into English as The Ruling Class. It is notable that the book is “today viewed by some historians as a theoretical precursor of the fascist ideology”. This has now become a commonplace move with ideas that are getting too close to the truth: file under fascism.

Oborne sets the political class in its recent historical context by contrasting it with the British “Establishment”, a phrase coined by historian A. J. P. Taylor, and which Blair in particular used as a political tool by claiming it was outmoded and hidebound. His “big tent” politics gave the illusion that the days of the Eton-educated, old money, traditionalist ruling class were over, and that politics was about to descend from its class-bound Olympus to dwell among mortals. This was technocratic smooth talk, of course, but Blair’s people went to work on the idea of the Establishment with fine attention to detail.

One of Oborne’s key insights is that, in 2007, the techniques of the political class were still a work in progress. A complementary realization is that the new political class would not have the organic core of the old landed class, but would rather be put into the hands of PR gurus, spin doctors and focus groups. Media coverage had accelerated, and so the new breed required grooming in dress, speech, and lifestyle, in order to promote to the public a carefully tailored image.

This is not a simple requirement to act with decorum or integrity, as it once would have been, but rather a pre-programmed regimen whereby politicians are “outfitted” for the media, the synaptic link between the political class and the electorate. This extends to speech, and the famous “Queen’s English” (now once again the King’s English) once favored by the political class defers to so-called “Estuary English” (from the region known as the Thames Estuary) as a default speech pattern. Clothing becomes indistinguishable from that worn in the corporate management workplace. A politician’s private life, once off-limits to the media, is now used as a form of self-promotion, and “It is automatic for a member of the Political Class to exploit family and friendships in order to sell his political career”.

This is the positive PR veneer. The negative involves the attack on existing and once-respected standards of behavior. Politicians, it is stated ad nauseam, are “judged by higher standards than ordinary people”, implying that the plebs have lower standards, that “virtue only resides in the state, and that civil society is largely corrupt”. After citing Mary Wilson, wife of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 1970s, who did not accept £33 for some published poetry, Oborne compares Tony Blair’s wife Cherie, claiming that the human-rights lawyer was exemplary of the new political junta: “She would have been a familiar part of the landscape in the mid-eighteenth century, when the governing class made little secret that it sought public office as a vehicle for pursuing self-interest”.

Her outrageous abuse of position included a speaking engagement for a cancer charity dinner for which her fee exceeded the amount raised at the event, a personal phone call to a director of Manchester United football club to negotiate a discount for a team shirt featuring David Beckham’s number, and an invitation from a Melbourne designer store to take a few things as a gesture of goodwill. She walked out of the store with seventy items. These seem like trifling examples of shameless behavior, but they are indicative of a new code of office in which personal enrichment outpaces public duty.

Her husband’s talent was to mask the project to insulate the political class while making it look as though a much-needed revolution would return politics to the people. Blair pledged “To liberate Britain from the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices, old ways of working”.

Compare Mao Xidong’s list of revolutionary aims from China’s “Red August” in 1966, just after the Cultural Revolution began. Mao’s mission was to sweep away the “four olds”: Old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. This rejection of the outmoded political past was cast as modernization, the shibboleth of the political class.

The sweeping away of the past was not, however, to return to the values of public service, but intended instead to remold the British constitution to answer the needs of this new style of politicking, and that meant undermining the major institutions of government. The Blair government systematically attacked the civil service, the judiciary, the intelligence services and the very power of Parliament itself. The idea of a collective executive loyal to the crown was anathema to Blair. Everything came down from him and his inner circle.

Oborne quotes fellow journalist Hugo Young in defining the British Civil Service as a body which “represents and personifies the seamless integrity of past, present and future government rolled indistinguishably into one”. This is precisely the tradition Blair’s government sought to undermine and, in Oborne’s phrase, “emasculate”. With Blair’s huge mandate, this led immediately to “a sustained and brutal attack on the influence of permanent officials”. The role of Secretary to the Cabinet sounds menial but is in fact one of the most important roles in the Civil Service, and Oborne shows Blair reducing the holder of the post to “a debased and peripheral figure”.

There was nothing slow about Blair’s march through the institutions of government. The Foreign Office, once one of the most respected government departments, found that its very integrity made it a target. The Blairs were notorious for holidaying at the expense of others, and took full advantage: “Very soon after entering Downing Street the Blair family started to see the foreign service, with its access to large houses in desirable overseas locations, as a potential travel agent”.

British intelligence saw the rise of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6. Intelligence increasingly became a political tool, and Oborne notes its rise as coincident with that of the new political class. The intelligence gathered before the contentious entry of Britain into the Iraq War both served that class, and led ultimately to the notorious “sexed-up dossier” which many have found misleading at best, and designed solely to bring the UK into the conflict at the behest of the Americans at worst. This shake-up of government also saw MI6 as increasingly less concerned with national security threats and more dedicated to intruding into the lives of ordinary people, which leads Oborne on to discuss Labour’s manipulation of the law of the land.

The analysis of the judiciary by Blair’s Home Secretary, David Blunkett, “was extremely close to the Marxist proposition that the protections offered by the courts are simply ‘bourgeois freedoms’.” With a sustained offensive against Britain’s famous habeas corpus law, aimed at preventing illegal detention in the absence of evidence, the new breed of politicians struck back at ancient history and the Magna Carta. It was a short step to taking on one of the most ancient and venerable of British institutions; the monarchy.

The co-opting of the funeral of Lady Diana Spencer by Tony Blair, and his sentimental catchphrase, “the people’s princess”, have become notorious as a symbol of Blair’s wish to have a higher public profile than the royal family. The most telling example of Labour’s contempt for the monarchy came from Blair’s infamous press enforcer, Alastair Campbell, largely responsible for the Iraq dossier noted above, and to all intents and purposes a member of Blair’s Cabinet. In Jordan for the funeral of King Hussein, Prince Charles came to meet Blair and Campbell in a makeshift office with only one chair. Blair shook hands with the then Prince of Wales, while Campbell “was sitting slumped in his chair making calls on his mobile [and] simply ignored the Prince”.

As an experienced journalist, one might expect Oborne to be strong on the vital role of the media, and its effective capture, in the formation of the political class. This new executive , he writes “sought to give an almost constitutional role to the British media by building it up as an alternative to existing state institutions”. The result of this replacement is that “at its simplest, journalists become instruments of government”. Journalistic aims are altered, and not subtly, from being supposedly impartial reportage to forming a quasi-constitutional department of government devoted to myth-building and the maintenance of the Blairite project. The Blair government oversaw the creation of the “narrative” we hear so much about, a word which has its roots in story-telling to the tribe.

An added function of media is to act both as a client of government, and to be cast as hostile, the enemies of progress and modernization. Blair divined early on that enemies of his government needed to be put into the public consciousness even if they didn’t actually exist, and despite Rupert Murdoch being effectively a key member of Blair’s cabinet, the line from government was implicitly that the state was fighting with monsters who would oppose good and righteous governance. The BBC — who began to be referred to as “the state broadcaster” around this time — were the mainstay of the operation:

“The distinction between an aggressive, illegitimate press and a well-meaning government has formed the template of a great deal of BBC reporting over the last decade. It became automatic for BBC reporters and commentators to portray any government crisis as a contest between press and government, just as Campbell had suggested”.

I saw Alastair Campbell once on a street in London. We looked at each other for several seconds, and he was obviously aware that I knew who he was. I wouldn’t say the look he gave me portrayed the face of evil, just the face of ambitious malevolence.

The Iraq War was the pinnacle of Labour’s media-generated deception program. The government effectively lied both to the public and to the House of Commons over Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, his willingness to use banned chemical weapons on British troops, and the likely death toll for allied forces. This was, in the end, far outstripped by hecatombs of dead Iraqis. It is a strongly held opinion on both sides of the British political divide that both Blair and Campbell should have been tried for war crimes.

The final masterstroke of the Blair government’s total occupation of the political estates was its use of techniques of mass formation honed in the world of corporate advertising and marketing. Blair copied and adopted Bill Clinton and Karl Rove’s technique of triangulation, whereby advanced software could discount blocs of votes and concentrate on a relatively small number of undecided voters in swing states. Britain has a similar balloting system to America’s electoral college, and so the persuasiveness of any policy message to the people becomes instead a jig-saw puzzle with key pieces which must be privileged when campaigning: “The Political Class negotiates with the voters through television and searches out their opinions through mechanisms such as focus groups and techniques based on market research or borrowed from the advertising industry”.

This “manipulative populism” has been in place ever since, and Oborne’s book shows it under construction, unclear at the time but now a familiar apparatus.

Oborne wrote, in 2007, that the political class had won. The theatrical element to politics, increasingly absorbed from the US, had become the whole show. Oborne relates a story of his visit to a Tony Blair walkabout in an English town. Blair was filmed talking and smiling with all his charm and empathy on show, the good people delighted to bask in the presence of Dear Leader. The only problem is that all the “members of the public” had been hired and paid by the Labour Party. When security realized who Oborne was, they tried to keep him away from the press event. When he finally got in, they tried to throw him out. He was a bad courtier.

Oborne’s epilogue was written as Gordon Brown had recently taken over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister, and despite some cosmetic pledges to correct some of the constitutional excesses of the Blair era, such as announcing government policy in the House of Commons and not via the media, Oborne notes that he only typified the political class. Oborne’s final sentence is in the hope that David Cameron would be “capable of leading an insurgency against the Political Class — or whether he will… become no more than another manifestation of its alluring, corrupt and anti-democratic methodology”. Britain got its answer, and now that the political class is merging fully with the global elites, we have just had the bizarre experience of a nominally Conservative party spending 14 years setting up a far more socialist Labour regime which is only just beginning to show what is to come.

We see the results of the changeover Oborne describes today in Britain. In 2007, “The values of the Political Class… [were] still in the process of formation”.

Now, another chapter has been added to the playbook, as the British uniparty — which recently passed the baton between its two main runners — is happy to allow criticism of government incompetence be openly pronounced. But Government incompetence is a psy-op. The British uniparty is in fact highly competent, just not in an area of expertise which serves anyone else but themselves. The course of Britain towards ruin is not sloppy governance but grand design, part Bezmenov, part Samuel T. Francis’s anarcho-tyranny. The British political class are not only competent, they have been honing that competency over the last 30 years and are, to put it simply, becoming very good at being very bad. This class has done what they have always said they wanted to do, which is to reintroduce morality into politics. Just not, as a child might say, in a nice way. Oborne’s prediction for the future of Britain, made 17 years ago in this most important of British political books, has shown itself to be prescient: “This estrangement between a tiny governing elite and mainstream British society is one of the overwhelming themes of our age, and it will only get more desperate, and more dangerous”.

(Republished from The Occidental Observer by permission of author or representative)

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Source

https://www.unz.com/article/predicting-the-uniparty-peter-obornes-the-triumph-of-the-political-class/

The Rise and Fall of Western Science

The Rise and Fall of Western Science

Tomas Fürst   December 4, 2024   History, Pharma, Technology  

Before you start reading, take a moment and look around you. There’s a good chance that everything you see is human creations—sophisticated products of human ingenuity and intelligence backed by hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how and why nature works. The prosperity of our civilization is based on the following virtuous circle:

1. Find out how and why nature works,
2. based on this understanding, develop technologies and innovations,
3. manufacture them… 
4. …and sell them.

And if you sell these technologies and innovations – for example, microscopes or spectrometers – to researchers, they can even better investigate how and why nature works, and the virtuous circle rises to the dizzying heights of the immense wealth of our civilization.

However, the virtuous circle needs some important institutions to work properly: Science cannot thrive without freedom of speech and thought, the development of technology, and innovation requires a certain degree of capital accumulation, manufacturing requires stable and predictable property rights, and sales are best organized in a free market. But without Science, the virtuous circle breaks. Thus, we need to understand where and why this wonderful human activity started and where it is heading. 

The Technological Sprint of the Late 19th Century

Before the Reformation, one monolithic religious Truth reigned in Europe and there was no room for other opinions. However, the Reformation split this truth into two – mutually exclusive ones. In the gap between the two religious truths, scientific truth began to sprout. Almost immediately, the virtuous circle described above kicked in, and miraculous technologies began to emerge.

For example, in 1742, Benjamin Robins noticed that by combining Newton’s law of motion and the equation of state of gases (discovered a few years earlier by Robert Boyle), the muzzle velocity of an artillery projectile could be calculated. This discovery made artillery much more precise. Frederick the Great of Prussia noticed the discovery and asked Leonhard Euler to translate and supplement Robins’ work. On this basis, Frederick completely rebuilt his army – he introduced fast and accurate horse-drawn artillery, which was an almost unbeatable force in Europe at the time. Napoleon later only copied and perfected this model. 

European rulers noticed that the key to these military successes lay in Science. The constant rivalry among states accelerated the spread of innovation and created enormous pressure for further research. This sprint resulted in a technological whirlwind in the late 19th century, the scale and scope of which was incomparable to anything that happened before (and afterward). In 1859, Edmund Drake drilled the first successful oil well in Pennsylvania, starting a revolution in lighting, as burning animal fat could be replaced by kerosene lamps. This was very useful, especially in the sweatshops of the North, where it was always dark.

In 1876 Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz invented the four-stroke engine, creating a demand for oil that exceeded the need for lighting by orders of magnitude. Just in time, because Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb two years later, effectively ending the era of kerosene lighting. A year later, Benz came up with the two-stroke engine, and Rudolf Diesel patented the diesel engine in 1892, which allowed internal combustion engines to be scaled up to power trucks, ships, and submarines. At the same time, Werner von Siemens constructed the first electric locomotive.

Ten years later, the Wright brothers introduced the first steerable aircraft powered by an internal combustion engine. This technological whirlwind was brought to a close in 1909 by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who mastered a method of nitrogen-fixing that enabled the mass production of industrial fertilizers, without which the planet could barely support a billion people. 

Each of the above technologies alone changed the world more than anything that had emerged since the birth of Jesus Christ. Together, they revolutionized the world in ways few can imagine today. It is worth noting that this fascinating transformation took place at a time when governments did not interfere much with Science. Scientists were often inventors and entrepreneurs at the same time. They were mostly white men with a beard or mustache who believed in God, were certain that European civilization was superior to all others, and agreed that it was the white man’s moral obligation to wisely govern and administer the rest of the world. 

Collectivist Ideologies of the 20th Century

But then, quite unexpectedly, the world came to an end. Before European nations could reap the fruits of all these fascinating technologies, World War I broke out. The European nations used all the miraculous new technologies and all their scientific potential to kill their fellow humans as efficiently as possible. The generals planned the war on horseback with bayonets. In the end, the war was fought with planes, tanks, battleships, submarines, trucks, and machine guns. It is unbelievable that almost no one today can explain anymore why that war happened.

The war brought a radical change in the position of Science. The main casualty of the war was the belief in the good old Christian God and in the White Man’s Burden. This loss of faith in God – and themselves – left a hole in the souls of Europeans which various false prophets immediately started filling with nationalism, socialism, communism, or fascism. These modern secular religions were quick to understand that Science was too important to be left unchecked. Moreover, each of these ideologies needed an appearance of legitimacy.

After the war, the source of legitimacy was no longer religion, but Science. And so the “nationalization” of science gradually began to take place, with various totalitarian regimes supporting Science in exchange for results that served the ideological needs of the regimes. This disease of the 20th century bore its first poisonous fruits in the form of Nazi biology, eugenics, or Soviet Lysenkoism. In the Communist bloc, it continued long past World War II in almost all scientific fields, as some readers may still remember. The current “scientific consensus” on man-made CO2-driven climate change is just another offshoot of state-funded “nationalized” Science, the purpose of which is not to understand the world but to legitimize various collectivist ideologies and their perverse goals. 

The interwar collectivist ideologies quickly led the world to another war, which repeated the apocalypse of the previous one – once more and for good. All the murderous technologies of WWI were used again, but perfected, mass-produced and used on a scale that defied all imagination. Cryptography, radar, and the nuclear bomb were added, symbolically confirming the total dominance of Science: The power to destroy the world no longer belonged to God, but to the Scientist. Europe, the cradle of Science, lay in ruins and the center of gravity of the world moved to the United States and the Soviet Union. 

Big State and Big Business

Since the beginning of the Cold War, the two superpowers disagreed on everything, apart from one thing: Everything must be based on Science. The East continued with “nationalized” Science. Under this system, the areas of research that thrived in the Soviet bloc were mainly those that were not asked to “scientifically” underpin communist ideology but rather to “catch up and overtake” the capitalist bloc. Technical sciences and mathematics more or less kept pace with the West, while social sciences and humanities languished and perished in the suffocating embrace of communist ideologues. 

In the West, the original “Naturwissenschaft” was gradually replaced by the victorious Anglo-Saxon Science. At first, it went well. The post-war American conjuncture was supplemented by the open atmosphere of American (mostly private) universities, where a generation of (often Jewish) emigrants with rigorous German interwar education blossomed. After half a century-long orgy of murder and destruction, the world seemed to be returning to the technological whirlwind of the late 19th century. Semiconductors, computers, nuclear power, and satellites appeared, and man walked on the moon. 

But then, things started going downhill in the West as well. Science increasingly fell victim to two cancers of the 20th century: Big State and Big Business. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson announced the “Great Society” program, and American society embarked on a path that had long since destroyed the social sciences in the East. The federal government declared war on poverty, war on racism, and war on illiteracy, and in all these campaigns, it needed social science to legitimize its political goals.

The amount of public funding increased sharply and more and more research areas started to appear, where it was clear which results were politically desirable and which were not. It mostly concerned social sciences, which willingly metastasized under state funding into various branches of Gender Studies, Puppet Arts, and EcoGastronomy, but in the end, Natural Science was not spared either. Historically, the first post-war victim of “nationalized science” was climatology, which today serves exclusively to legitimize the political goals of the deindustrialization of the West.

Moreover, the second deadly threat to Science – corruption by Big Business – started to creep in. The history of this tragedy can be traced back to 1912, when a German medical doctor named Isaac Adler first hypothesized that smoking might cause lung cancer. It took more than 50 years – and 20 million deaths – for this hypothesis to be confirmed. This absurdly long time is explained, among other things, by the fact that the greatest figure in statistics of the 20th century, the avid smoker Ronald Fischer, devoted a large part of his mind and influence to vehemently and very inventively denying any causal link between smoking and lung cancer.

He didn’t do it for free – it was later discovered that he was paid by the tobacco industry. Yet, after half a century, the tobacco concerns finally lost the battle, and in 1964 the Surgeon General issued an authoritative report confirming the causal link between smoking and lung cancer. Big Business learned a lesson: Next time, they needed to bribe not only the scientists but the regulatory authorities, too.

Going Downhill

More and more disasters followed, in which rigged research overseen by corrupt regulators led to damage on a staggering scale.

For example, pharmaceutical companies managed to convince American doctors that “chronic pain” is a problem that tens of millions of people suffer from. Through a combination of aggressive marketing and manipulated scientific studies, they created an addiction in millions of people to opioids (sold under the names OxyContin or Fentanyl), which they falsely claimed were “safe and effective,” and – above all – non-addictive. This tragedy continues to unfold in the United States, and to this day, over half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses and millions more have fallen into addiction to harder drugs. The economic and social damage is almost incalculable. In the United States, about one painkiller per person per day is consumed.

This tragedy is based on science corrupted by the pharmaceutical business and dysfunctional drug market regulation. In Europe, pharmaceutical regulation is not as broken as in the US, but deliberately falsified or manipulated research poisons the global publication record. Science is therefore equally affected all over the world, because in the field of biomedical research today no one knows which published results are true and which are not. When John Ioannidis published the article titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in 2005, it became an instant scientific bestseller.

The opioid story is perhaps the most visible but by no means the only one. Tobacco companies – having lost the battle for lung cancer – used the accumulated capital to buy several food giants (for example, Kraft or General Foods). Their armies of scientists immediately went after the same goal as before, only in a different area: Over the following years, they developed hundreds of addictive substances that the companies started to add en masse to industrially processed food. Instead of a tobacco addiction, they plunged America into a “junk food” addiction.

Much of “food science” has been manipulated by the food corporations to make it appear that the main problem is natural fats, not industrially processed sugars and other crap. The corruption of science gradually reached such absurd proportions that, for example, the American Pediatric Society was sponsored by the Coca-Cola company. What do you think the Society’s “expert opinion” on sugary drinks was?

Accompanied by almost complete disinterest of the public, more and more scientific fields gradually became victims of the Big State or Big Business. The results came soon – more and more money was poured into Science, but those miraculous technologies and innovations have not appeared. I bet you to name at least three technologies that appeared since 2000 and changed the world as the invention of the internal combustion engine. I personally witnessed billions of Euros from European structural funds being poured into provincial East European universities. Dozens of laboratories were built, expensive equipment was bought, speeches by the university presidents were made, newspaper articles were written…and nothing useful ever came out of it.

The West Goes out of Its Mind

But the real catastrophe for Western Science has come with the Covid epidemic, when the West went completely out of its mind. At that moment, the two scientific curses of the 20th century met in terrible synergy. Big Business quickly understood that the epidemic represented an opportunity that may not be repeated. If opioids were worth a few lies, the possibility of selling billions of “vaccines” to panicked governments all over the world was worth many lies. Moreover, the American left has just experienced the enormous shock of Trump’s election victory and readily jumped at every opportunity to derail his presidency.

So, when Donald Trump initially (very rationally) refused to panic, refused to introduce drastic mass-scale measures, and encouraged experimentation with available drugs (especially Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine), the American left launched a hysterical campaign to panic as much as possible, implement as drastic across-the-board measures as possible, and attack any attempts to use repurposed drugs to treat Covid. Academic and scientific circles, which have always sided with the left and hated Trump fiercely, began to spew out a flood of falsified, manipulated, and completely meaningless “studies” whose sole aim was to promote the Covid madness. Moreover, it has become fully apparent that the regulatory bodies (CDC and FDA) are completely controlled by Big Pharma, and rather than protecting the public from corporate greed, they acted like their sales departments.

The election of Joe Biden finished the disaster. The interests of Big Pharma suddenly became aligned with the interests of the federal government and the entire monstrous power apparatus of the government threw itself into a battle against its own citizens. The military (vaccine distribution), the secret services (censorship of social networks), the police (surveillance of lockdowns), and many other repressive branches of the state became involved in this appalling project. Later generations will remember this as the era of Covid fascism.

In a matter of months, the entire building of Western Science, carefully assembled over several hundred years, collapsed. Every aspect of the Covid disaster has been linked to some scientific failure. It is almost certain that the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself originated from the Wuhan laboratory, where – at the expense of Western taxpayers – extremely problematic gain-of-function research was carried out. Throughout the epidemic, doctors and scientists lied about the ineffectiveness of early treatment because they knew that was exactly what the establishment wanted to hear from them.

As soon as the end of 2021, however, it was clear that Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D (and many other drugs) represented a cheap, safe, and effective treatment and prevention that could have saved millions of lives. Despite that, the entire scientific establishment completely denied the principles of Evidence-Based Medicine and repeated the CDC’s political “You’re not a horse” propaganda.

The experimental gene technology masqueraded as a “vaccine” was the final nail in the coffin of Western Science. The hysterical push for “vaccine” mandates under the Safe and Effective mantra violated almost all professional, legal, and ethical principles of Science. The next few years will reveal the full extent of the catastrophe, but already today it can be said that mRNA “vaccines” prevented few cases of Covid (if any) but harmed millions. Right now, this terrible arithmetic gradually creeps into public space. Once the public realizes the extent of this disaster, it is safe to assume that their anger will turn not only against the political establishment but also against the institutionalized Western Science that caused every aspect of the Covid disaster.

The End of Science

European Science has not fared any better than American Science, as they have been connected vessels for decades. Both the diseases of American Science have been present in Europe, too. Moreover, the big publishing houses that decide what can and cannot become part of the “published record” have long been multinationals and don’t care about national borders. If the European Union surpasses America in anything, it is the aggressiveness of promoting the “climate change” agenda. At present, climate change ideology seems to be the only thing holding the European Union together.

After 300 years, the Enlightenment project of Western Science has reached an important crossroads. At the end of the 19th century, Science brought fascinating progress to mankind. During the 20th century, Science gained so much prestige that it replaced religion and became the central ideology of the world. Gradually, however, like Christianity before the Reformation, it became a victim of its own success: Instead of seeking the Truth about how and why the world works, it began to abuse its prestige and serve the powerful and rich. 

By the end of the 20th century, Science had already been damaged beyond repair either by Big Governments to legitimize their ideological goals or by Big Business to legitimize the distribution of their (often toxic) products. The rotten edifice of Western Science finally collapsed in 2020 during the Covid crisis.

We have to wait now before enough people realize that Science – the central ideology of our civilization – is in ruins. Then we can start thinking about what to do. Christianity was saved by the strict separation of Church and State. To save Science, an equally daring step will be needed. But that is a topic for further essays.

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Author

Tomas Fürst teaches applied mathematics at Palacky University, Czech Republic. His background is in mathematical modelling and Data Science. He is a co-founder of the Association of Microbiologists, Immunologists, and Statisticians (SMIS) which has been providing the Czech public with data-based and honest information about the coronavirus epidemic. He is also a co-founder of a “samizdat” journal dZurnal which focuses on uncovering scientific misconduct in Czech Science

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 Source

 https://brownstone.org/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-western-science/

Jeffrey D. Sachs: What Ails America – and How to Fix It

Jeffrey D. Sachs: What Ails America – and How to Fix It

By Jeffrey D. Sachs / Common Dreams

America is a country of undoubted vast strengths—technological, economic, and cultural—yet its government is profoundly failing its own citizens and the world. Trump’s victory is very easy to understand. It was a vote against the status quo. Whether Trump will fix—or even attempt to fix—what really ails America remains to be seen.

The rejection of the status quo by the American electorate is overwhelming. According to Gallup in October 2024, 52% of Americans said they and their families were worse off than four years ago, while only 39% said they were better off and 9% said they were about the same. An NBC national news poll in September 2024 found that 65% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track, while only 25% said that it is on the right track. In March 2024, according to Gallup, only 33% of Americans approved of Joe Biden’s handling of foreign affairs.

At the core of the American crisis is a political system that fails to represent the true interests of the average American voter. The political system was hacked by big money decades ago, especially when the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions. Since then, American politics has become a plaything of super-rich donors and narrow-interest lobbies, who fund election campaigns in return for policies that favor vested interests rather than the common good.

Two groups own the Congress and White House: super-rich individuals and single-issue lobbies.

The world watched agape as Elon Musk, the world’s richest person (and yes, a brilliant entrepreneur and inventor), played a unique role in backing Trump’s election victory, both through his vast media influence and funding. Countless other billionaires chipped into Trump’s victory.

Many (though not all) of the super-rich donors seeks special favors from the political system for their companies or investments, and most of those desired favors will be duly delivered by the Congress, the White House, and the regulatory agencies staffed by the new administration. Many of these donors also push one overall deliverable: further tax cuts on corporate income and capital gains.

Many business donors, I would quickly add, are forthrightly on the side of peace and cooperation with China, as very sensible for business as well as for humanity. Business leaders generally want peace and incomes, while crazed ideologues want hegemony through war.

There would have been precious little difference in all of this with a Harris victory. The Democrats have their own long list of the super-rich who financed the party’s presidential and Congressional campaigns. Many of those donors too would have demanded and received special favors.

Tax breaks on capital income have been duly delivered by Congress for decades no matter their impact on the ballooning federal deficit, which now stands at nearly 7 percent of GDP, and no matter that the U.S. pre-tax national income in recent decades has shifted powerfully towards capital income and away from labor income. As measured by one basic indicator, the share of labor income in GDP has declined by around 7 percentage points since the end of World War II. As income has shifted from labor to capital, the stock market (and super-wealth) has soared, with the overall stock market valuation rising from 55% of GDP in 1985 to 200% of GDP today!

The second group with its hold on Washingtons is single-issue lobbies. These powerful lobbies include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, Big Oil, the gun industry, big pharma, big Ag, and the Israel Lobby. American politics is well organized to cater to these special interests. Each lobby buys the support of specific committees in Congress and selected national leaders to win control over public policy.

The economic returns to special-interest lobbying are often huge: a hundred million dollars of campaign funding by a lobby group can win a hundred billion of federal outlays and/or tax breaks. This is the lesson, for example, of the Israel lobby, which spends a few hundred million dollars on campaign contributions, and harvests tens of billions of dollars in military and economic support for Israel.

These special-interest lobbies do not depend on, nor care much about, public opinion. Opinion surveys show regularly that the public wants gun control, lower drug prices, an end of Wall Street bailouts, renewable energy, and peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. Instead, the lobbyists ensure that Congress and the White House deliver continued easy access to handguns and assault weapons, sky-high drug prices, coddling of Wall Street, more oil and gas drilling, weapons for Ukraine, and wars on behalf of Israel.

These powerful lobbies are money-fueled conspiracies against the common good. Remember Adam Smith’s famous dictum in the Wealth of Nations (1776): “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The two most dangerous lobbies are the military-industrial complex (as Eisenhower famously warned us in 1961) and the Israel lobby (as detailed in a scintillating new book by historian Ilan Pappé). Their special danger is that they continue to lead us to war and closer to nuclear Armageddon. Biden’s reckless recent decision to allow U.S. missile strikes deep inside Russia, long advocated by the military-industrial complex, is case in point.

The military-industrial complex aims for U.S. “full-spectrum dominance.” It’s purported solutions to world problems are wars and more wars, together with covert regime-change operations, U.S. economic sanctions, U.S. info-wars, color revolutions (led by the National Endowment for Democracy), and foreign policy bullying. These of course have been no solutions at all. These actions, in flagrant violation of international law, have dramatically increased U.S. insecurity.

The military-industrial complex (MIC) dragged Ukraine into a hopeless war with Russia by promising Ukraine membership in NATO in the face of Russia’s fervent opposition, and by conspiring to overthrow Ukraine’s government in February 2014 because it sought neutrality rather than NATO membership.

The military-industrial complex is currently—unbelievably—promoting a coming war with China. This will of course involve a huge and lucrative arms buildup, the aim of the MIC. Yet it will also threaten World War III or a cataclysmic U.S. defeat in another Asian war.

While the Military-Industrial Complex has stoked NATO enlargement and conflicts with Russia and China, the Israel Lobby has stoked America’s serial wars in the Middle East. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, more than any U.S. president, has been the lead promoter of America’s backing of disastrous wars in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria.

Netanyahu’s aim is to keep the land that Israel conquered in the 1967 war, creating what is called Greater Israel, and to prevent a Palestinian State. This expansionist policy, in contravention of international law, has given rise to militant pro-Palestinian groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. Netanyahu’s long-standing policy is for the U.S. to topple or help to topple the governments that support these resistance groups.

Incredibly, the Washington neocons and the Israel Lobby actually joined forces to carry out Netanyahu’s disastrous plan for wars across the Middle East. Netanyahu was a lead backer of the War in Iraq. Former Marine Commander Dennis Fritz has recently described in detail the Israel Lobby’s large role in that war. Ilan Pappé has done the same. In fact, the Israel Lobby has supported U.S.-led or U.S.-backed wars across the Middle East, leaving the targeted countries in ruins and the U.S. budget deep in debt.

In the meantime, the wars and tax cuts for the rich, have offered no solutions for the hardships working-class Americans. As in other high-income countries, employment in U.S. manufacturing fell sharply from the 1980s onward as assembly-line workers were increasingly replaced by robots and “smart systems.” The decline in the labor share of value in the U.S. has been significant, and once again has been a phenomenon shared with other high-countries.

Yet American workers have been hit especially hard. In addition to the underlying global technological trends hitting jobs and wages, American workers have been battered by decades of anti-union policies, soaring tuition and healthcare costs, and other anti-worker measures. In high-income countries of northern Europe, “social consumption” (publicly funded healthcare, tuition, housing, and other publicly provided services) and high levels of unionization have sustained decent living standards for workers. Not so in the United States.

Yet this was not the end of it. Soaring costs of health care, driven by the private health insurers, and the absence of sufficient public financing for higher education and low-cost online options, created a pincer movement, squeezing the working class between falling or stagnant wages on the one side and rising education and healthcare costs on the other side. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans did much of anything to help the workers.

Trump’s voter base is the working class, but his donor base is the super-rich and the lobbies. So, what will happen next? More of the same—wars and tax cuts—or something new and real for the voters?

Trump’s purported answer is a trade war with China and the deportation of illegal foreign workers, combined with more tax cuts for the rich. In other words, rather than face the structural challenges of ensuring decent living standards for all, and face forthrightly the staggering budget deficit, Trump’s answers on the campaign trail and in his first term were to blame China and migrants for low working-class wages and wasteful spending for the deficits.

This has played well electorally in 2016 and 2024, but will not deliver the promised results for workers in the long run. Manufacturing jobs will not return in large numbers from China since they never went in large numbers to China. Nor will deportations do much to raise living standards of average Americans.

This is not to say that real solutions are lacking. They are hiding in plain view—if Trump chooses to take them, over the special interest groups and class interests of Trump’s backers. If Trump chooses real solutions, he would achieve a strikingly positive political legacy for decades to come.

The first is to face down the military-industrial complex. Trump can end the war in Ukraine by telling President Putin and the world that NATO will never expand to Ukraine. He can end the risk of war with China by making crystal clear that the U.S. abides by the One China Policy, and as such, will not interfere in China’s internal affairs by sending armaments to Taiwan over Beijing’s objections, and would not support any attempt by Taiwan to secede.

The second is to face down the Israel lobby by telling Netanyahu that the U.S. will no longer fight Israel’s wars and that Israel must accept a State of Palestine living in peace next to Israel, as called for by the entire world community. This indeed is the only possible path to peace for Israel and Palestine, and indeed for the Middle East.

The third is to close the budget deficit, partly by cutting wasteful spending—notably on wars, hundreds of useless overseas military bases, and sky-high prices the government pays for drugs and healthcare—and partly by raising government revenues. Simply enforcing taxes on the books by cracking down on illegal tax evasion would have raised $625 billion in 2021, around 2.6% of GDP. More should be raised by taxation of soaring capital incomes.

The fourth is an innovation policy (aka industrial policy) that serves the common good. Elon Musk and his Silicon Valley friends have succeeded in innovation beyond the wildest expectations. All kudos to Silicon Valley for bringing us the digital age. America’s innovation capacity is vast and robust and an envy of the world.

The challenge now is innovation for what? Musk has his eye on Mars and beyond. Captivating, yet there are billions of people on Earth that can and should be helped by the digital revolution in the here and now. A core goal of Trump’s industrial policy should be to ensure that innovation serves the common good, including the poor, the working class, and the natural environment. Our nation’s goals need to go beyond wealth and weapons systems.

As Musk and his colleagues know better than anybody, the new AI and digital technologies can usher in an era of low-cost, zero-carbon energy; low-cost healthcare; low-cost higher education; low-cost electricity-powered mobility; and other AI-enabled efficiencies that can raise real living standards of all workers. In the process, innovation should foster high-quality, unionized jobs—not the gig employment that has sent living standards plummeting and worker insecurity soaring.

Trump and the Republicans have resisted these technologies in the past. In his first term, Trump let China take the lead in these technologies pretty much across the board. Our goal is not to stop China’s innovations, but to spur our own. Indeed, as Silicon Valley understands while Washington does not, China has long been and should remain America’s partner in the innovation ecosystem. China’s highly efficient and low-cost manufacturing facilities, such as Tesla’s Gigafactory in Shanghai, put Silicon Valley’s innovations into worldwide use … when America tries.

All four of these steps are within Trump’s reach, and would justify his electoral triumph and secure his legacy for decades to come. I’m not holding my breath for Washington to adopt these straightforward steps. American politics has been rotten for too long for real optimism in that regard, yet these four steps are all achievable, and would greatly benefit not only the tech and finance leaders who backed Trump’s campaign but the generation of disaffected workers and households whose votes put Trump back into the White House.

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Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism” (2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,” (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

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https://scheerpost.com/2024/11/25/jeffrey-sachs-what-ails-america-and-how-to-fix-it/