The idea that the poor should have leisure and a holiday from work has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.
If there's any lesson to be learned from the unfolding climate disaster and 28 COP failures, it's that as long as governments cede power to corporations and billionaires, and as long as those corporations and billionaires make money from ecological destruction, then ecological destruction is what we get.
A week or so ago, I wrote an article about the organisation with the bogus name, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) which is fronted by the spiv Jordan Peterson….
There are two world wars currently under way: one between democracy and totalitarianism; and one between people and money. This is about the first. The one that everyone knows about…
After the US mid-term elections, I wrote a piece about some astonishing data from the University of Michigan in which 94% of voters (presumably mostly educated young students) at the…