Letters to My Manager

What Free Market?

Hi Adam, 
I went into my local store yesterday to get a drink. I wanted something natural. I don't want to put artificial chemicals into my body. Some of my friends don't read the labels on the food and drinks they buy, and they mock me for doing it, but I don't think it's a laughing matter. Cancer, diabetes, obesity … where do people think this is all coming from? Food has to be a part of it right? I even read some professor the other day writing that eating the wrong kind of food can cause depression. Basically, your gut health is linked to your mental health. Anyway, back to the store. There was a large fridge with about thirty products in it. I couldn't find what I wanted. The labels you see, they were all saying the same thing ... preservatives, synthetic flavours, artificial sweeteners, artificial colours, some or all of. Then I realised something. All those drinks were from the same manufacturer. One single company. I looked at the chocolate section. Almost the same again. At a rough guess, 80% of the shelf stock was from one company. We don't live in a free market Adam. We are sheep being farmed by massive monopolies who stuff our food full of the cheapest shit so they can make the biggest possible profit. And then we get ill. And then another massive monopoly comes and sells us the medicine to make us better. Except that the medicine isn't so good for us either. Oh boy. Can't name names of course ... I'd get trolled to death.
Regards, Debuchelon
12 March 2024

Where to Begin?

Hey Adam, 
I was on the train home last night when some girls sat down on the seats opposite. They’d just been to a concert and boy didn’t they want everyone to know it. This particular singer talks a lot but doesn’t have much to say. Terrible clichés that would make most people over the age of thirty groan, but for these girls they’re the words of a sage. How is it that some airhead who knows relatively little about the world and its workings can be so influential, while knowledgeable people with a lifetime of study and experience are ignored? I was faced with a choice of moving seat and looking rude, staying put and suffering a silent meltdown, or saying something. And this is my question. Where do you begin with people like this? If you give the slightest hint that you're not as addicted to their goddess as they are, they'll diss you. In the end I decided to stay quiet. My thinking is that in order to influence people, you first have to win their trust, which can take years, and these girls had never met me before. It's only when someone trusts you, when they have a conviction that you're a sincere person without an agenda, that they'll begin to listen to you. But of course to some extent I do have an agenda. I want to limit the damage being done by the airhead. I suppose I'll just have to hope they grow out of it. Can't name names of course ... I'd get trolled to death. 
Best, Debuchelon 
21 April 2024

Ugly Buildings

Dear Adam, 
Have you noticed how ugly England is becoming? I was on the road up north last week and two things stood out. One is the decay. Potholes, houses with the windows rotting or the roof slates falling off, open spaces overgrown with weeds, that kind of thing. And then there's the newly built stuff. It's so characterless. The same concrete, the same plastic facades, the same cheap look and feel, cloned in every town. This new stuff pays no homage whatsoever to the English architectural tradition ... it says "Birmingham" about as much as it says "Bangkok".
I reckon the peak of English civilisation (in economic not technical terms) was about 100 years ago. The properties that were built then used higher quality materials, bricks instead of wood for example, they had larger rooms, higher ceilings. Even the factories that were built were beautiful, so much so that these days developers convert them into expensive loft apartments. Look at the windowless grey sheds we build these days for the likes of Amazon. No one in their right mind would convert one of those into loft apartments. Are you seeing what I'm seeing?
Here's another way of looking at things ... who wants to go to a modern town centre when they're on holiday? It's the historic towns that everyone wants to go and see, right? And why? Because that's where the beauty is, where the humanity is. Leon Krier, the architect, makes a point in his book "Choice or Fate". He says that the amount of built space produced by humanity from the beginning of time until the Second World War, very roughly, is about the same as what has been built since then. He supposes that, if we demolished everything that has been built since 1945, most people wouldn't be that bothered from an architectural point of view. But if we demolished everything that was built before 1945 there would be a complete outcry. Why? He's making the same point that I am. Our modern economic system produces crap and we just can't stop doing it. 
How do we explain all this? I think part of the answer is that when one has an empire, resources flow into the economy, and the results show. When the empire declines, the results also show. Look at the buildings of imperial Rome, of Athens ... beautiful once, nowadays crumbling. A second theme is that because the purpose of modern capitalism is to make profit, there's an insatiable drive to reduce costs and therefore, in many cases, product quality. I've bought six kettles in the last ten years, all broken one after the other. My mum and dad's kettle lasted fifty years. Once upon a time, the object of business was not just to make a profit but also to create something of lasting value for the community. In the nineteenth century, the Quaker businessmen in England built whole towns of superb accommodation for their workers which today are among the most desirable areas in the country. They wanted to put wealth in, not suck it out.
But there's a third point I'd like to make, which Krier doesn't. A lot of the blame for this descent into Crapitalism rests with our financial system. I sung about it in the Oh Money song. The bit about "money growing on trees, if you have the keys". Like the Austrian economists once said, if you debase the money system, you debase the whole society. Stay tuned for more.
Regards, Debuchelon
20 May 2024

What Democracy?

Hello Adam, 
Have you woken up yet? I know it’s only 8am but I just found out something very important. We don’t live in a democracy. Shocking huh? All that preaching from our politicians telling us that “we” decide who rules over us, and that we live in a “free” country. Well consider this. Whoever we elect as our leader, the same unelected central bankers decide what the interest rate is, and the same media moguls control what news we see. The same corporate bosses decide which rivers to pollute and the same lobbyists use their muscle to sway our elected representatives. Did you know, for example, that the pharmaceutical lobby spent almost $700 million lobbying against Obama’s healthcare reform? Where’s the democracy there? Many people voted for Obama precisely to get healthcare reform. Second, whether a politician is from the right or the left, they all support a system which keeps 1% of people owning more than 50% of the wealth. How can it be right that millions go without proper food or accommodation while tax cuts are handed out to people who are multi-millionaires? If no politician offers an alternative vision on basic issues like these, there really isn’t much of a choice is there? And if there isn’t a choice, there can’t be a democracy right? In some countries there’s only one leader on the ballot paper. In ours, there’s only one system. You can go back to sleep now.
Best, Debuchelon 
19 June 2024

The National Health Service Black Hole

Dear Adam,
The UK's National Health Service is in the news today. The Prime Minister is making a speech about the crisis in the service as portrayed by the government's own appointed inspector Lord Darzi.  None of Darzi's seven recommended "themes" for "how to repair" the NHS mention the most important part of the explanation as to how things got this bad in the first place. 
A surgeon friend of mine working in London told me a while back that a small office room in his hospital was badly in need of a repaint. He volunteered to come in one weekend to do it himself with a colleague but the office manager said no. It would have been a breach of contract with the hospital's maintenance provider which had secured the right to bid on all hospital maintenance work for a period of twenty years. The maintenance company duly sent a man for half an hour to look at the room and decide how much it would cost to paint. A few days later the quote came back along with the bill of £5,000 (for the cost of quoting, not for the cost of actually doing the work).
This is only a small example of the kind of legalised extortion in which the UK's health service is entrapped. In November 2010 the columnist George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian newspaper about the redevelopment of two hospital buildings in Coventry. A plan for the refurbishment of this old hospital complex was costed by a group of health service managers and contractors at £30 million. Then the usual corporate interests got wind of things and used government regulations under the so-called Private Finance Initiative ("PFI") to force a halt to proceedings so that they could bid for the project. The PFI rules were so skewed in favour of these big contractors and their bankers that they eventually won the contract. Total cost including interest? £410 million. And all this for a hospital with fewer beds than the first group would have provided at less than one tenth of the price. Incredibly, rules implemented by the then Labour government made most of these PFI contracts confidential so that no outside party could read them. No wonder. When some contract details were eventually leaked, it turned out that payments to the corporations involved were typically guaranteed for the life of the contract so that, even if their services were no longer needed, they still had to be paid for them.
You might think that this money wasting extravaganza couldn't reach beyond the hundreds of millions in any single episode, but you'd be wrong. Transparency International says that during COVID, over £4 billion of public money was handed out to companies which were politically connected with the government. 51 contracts were awarded to companies recommended by sitting politicians, many of which had no trading history or experience in the health sector. Of the £48 billion of public money spent on private contracts during COVID, £15 billion was written off by the government.
It is a hobby in the UK to say that the National Health Service needs more government funding but the truth, probably, is that it needs less. What we really need to do is 1) stop throwing money into the black hole of corporate corruption, and 2) abolish the collective of politicians, contractors, bankers and managers that has shown itself so incapable of delivering healthcare in the public interest. Maybe the best way of doing this is to relieve hospital managers of the spiders' web of rules that presently tie them to their corporate and political overmasters. Why not let doctors run their own hospitals? Construction contracts, service delivery, budgets, hiring, the lot basically? Doctors are good people (usually). They give their lives to help others. Corporations and banks don't have souls, they don't lose sleep at night, they just want the money. Can't name names of course, I'd get trolled to death.
12 September 2024

Religious or Not?

Hi Adam,
I walked past a preacher near Oxford Circus the other day. She had a mike, a big speaker and she was certain of what she was saying. If you don't believe that Jesus died for your sins, then you're going to hellfire for ever. Someone stopped to argue with her. Big risk in my view. She's got the mike! This is how it went (roughly, I wasn't taking notes).
Passer-by: Jesus died for my sins?
Preacher: Yes he did
Passer-by: And if I don't believe in Jesus, I go to hell?
Preacher: Yes
Passer-by: So what happens to the people who died before Jesus was born?
Preacher: What do you mean?
Passer-by: Well, if I died before Jesus was born, then I would never have had the chance to believe in him
Preacher: And so?
Passer-by: And so would I go to hellfire?
Preacher: (short pause) Yes
Passer-by: So everyone who died before Jesus was born goes to hell?
Preacher: Yes
Passer-by: Including Prophets Like Moses?
Preacher: (longer pause) No
Passer-by: Why do the Prophets not also go to hell?
Preacher: You have to believe in Jesus in order to be saved
Passer-by: That's not an answer to the question I asked
Preacher: What question did you ask?
Passer-by: You have a very short memory
Preacher: I won't talk with you if you're just going to insult me
Passer-by: The followers of the Prophet Moses go to hellfire for not believing in someone who hasn't yet been born, but Moses himself doesn't. Why?
Preacher: Moses believed in Jesus
Passer-by: But Jesus wasn't born until after Moses died
Preacher: Moses knew the future, he was a Prophet, so he knew of Jesus
Passer-by: And that's what saves him from hellfire?
Preacher: Yes
Passer-by: So why didn't he tell his followers about Jesus? If he truly cared about his followers, he would have told them the one thing that could have saved them surely?
Preacher: (no answer)
Passer-by: What message did Moses give to his followers?
Preacher: What do you mean "message"?
Passer-by: Well, for example, did he say to them, "Follow me, put up with all that hardship from Pharaoh, cross the Red Sea, wander in the wilderness for forty years, be patient, and then go to hellfire". Was that his message?
Preacher: (no answer)
Passer-by: Why did God wait thousands of years to tell humanity that he has a son and that if they don't believe in him then they go to hellfire?
By this stage it was five-nil to the passer-by and I was actually feeling sorry for the preacher. All she could do by way of response was to offer debating tactics (pretend not to understand the question, accuse the other person of being insulting, everything except answer the question). Eventually she explained that Jesus would go down into hellfire, preach to its inhabitants, and those who accepted his message would be taken out of hellfire and put in paradise. I thought to myself, "who wouldn't accept Jesus under those circumstances?". And anyway, under what fair logic should these people have gone to hell in the first place?
In a way I admired the preacher for being certain about her religion, but she either doesn't know her stuff, or if she does, then the stuff itself isn't quite right. But in this case the certainty was also her undoing, because when someone knowledgeable came along, she froze. Suddenly her pre-prepared arguments were no longer up to the job. Now, I grant you, this was a particularly bad case. A seasoned preacher will freeze only momentarily, because part of their art is to look like they're in control, like they haven't been surprised by the other person's ideas. 
There are of course people out there who despise all religions and those who promote them, and yet, if one sees religion as a set of values and beliefs by which a person lives, then all of us have a religion. One could for example say that communism and atheism are religions just as much as Christianity is. Communism regards private ownership as a bad thing (this is a value) and many communists argue that by the application of their values society will eventually enter a condition of utopia (this is a belief). Atheists believe that God does not exist and, for them, this is such a central idea that it is little different to a religious pillar. In short, one can be as religious about "God existing" as one can be about "God not existing". 
So the question today isn't whether to be religious or not, because whichever way of life you decide to follow, THAT is your religion. So if "not being religious" isn't an option, then the only remaining issue is which religion to choose. Christianity? Communism? Capitalism? Jedi? There's a sea of choices out there, so here's a navigation aid. You can weed out the false religions from the true ones by looking at the answers they give to the most important questions in life. There are only three of these. Where did I come from? Why am I here? And where am I going?
27 September 2024