The jumped-up ape with delusions of grandeur.

While I have no doubt that the universe is teeming with life, I would like to put forward an idea which suggests that conscious life (that also has the ability to manipulate its environment and therefore the capability of announcing its existence) is either very rare or even non-existent elsewhere in the universe. I hasten to add that this is not a religious argument concerning God-given uniqueness, but a purely philosophical one about man's unsuitability for survival.

This idea starts from the viewpoint that consciousness, far from being an attribute which puts us at the top of the evolutionary tree, is just another of nature's many genetic mistakes. This particular mistake will prove short lived. This attribute has caused our species to quickly step outside nature's constraints and bring about changes to it, the outcomes of which we are neither clever enough to calculate nor intelligent enough to avoid. As we have seen on a small scale throughout history, we are more than capable of destroying the environment which sustains us - we are now doing so on a planetary scale. Add to this idea the possibility of some major, natural disaster either wiping us out, or at least setting us back a good few thousand years, and I would suggest that it begins to look increasingly unlikely that we will survive for any reasonable length of time.

I suggest that consciousness coupled with an ability to manipulate creates a species which will suffer the same fate anywhere in the universe. The survival strategy which drives this type of species to succeed at its beginning is not bred out quickly enough to enable it to deal with the conditions it creates for itself in the future. This is mainly due to it being incapable of selecting for the best attributes, as it could never be intelligent enough to determine what they should be.

Trade Unionism in a Hostile World

I suspect that some of you don’t think the world is hostile to trade unions but please remember that in some countries doing what I do can lead to imprisonment, torture and death but thankfully not here well not the last two at least.

At this moment in time unbridled capitalism thinks it has won the argument but that is only because capitalism panders to peoples greed and at the moment people think it is alright to be greedy. Interestingly I wrote this before the riots and if there is one good thing to come out of them it is that people are beginning to question the rampant greed in our society.

The sole purpose of unbridled capitalism is to exploit everyone and everything to make a fast buck and the purpose of trade unions is to defend workers from exploitation and this conflict of interest automatically leads to a hostile relationship between capital and labour.

Can I remind you that capital also has its unions and they are the CBI and other employers organisations and clubs and their industrial action is to threaten to take jobs out of the country or in the case of the banksters to threaten to take our money overseas if we don’t allow them to carry on plundering the public purse whilst still paying themselves exorbitant salaries and bonuses.

Since the post war heyday of unions we have been under attack. This attack really took off with Mrs Thatcher using the law, the police the army and Mr Murdoch and his right wing press to crush all dissent whilst she exported jobs to the third world. This attack continued with Mr Blair and New Labour’s failure to repeal one word of Mrs Thatcher’s anti union legislation and continues with Mr Milliband wanting the unions to have less influence in the Labour party when Labour is mostly funded by trade unionists. Lately we have had Vince Cable wanting to ban striking altogether. Now the last time I looked, not being allowed to withhold your labour was called slavery.

Let’s have a closer look at these dreadful organisations that are portrayed as a threat to the very fabric of our society. At the moment there are six and a half million members of trade unions in this Country, that is as many people as voted for the Liberal Democrats in the last election. My union has 1.4 million members which is probably more people than all the signed up members of the three main political parties put together and my branch has 3,700 members which is more people than most of our councillors represent.

My branch is a very broad church and we have members from all levels within Cambridgeshire County Council and the other organisations we work with. I can’t tell you about present members but I can tell you that the previous Chief Executive and Directors of HR, finance and resources were members and we have many senior officers in membership now. We have a mixture of political opinions as well, with about a third of our members paying into a fund which supports the Labour Party so I assume the rest of our members support other political parties.

I think you must agree that these organisations are hardly as unrepresentative or lacking in a democratic mandate as the right wing press would have you believe!!

--

At the end of my talk there were two questions which I will answer here:

Q: Did I think it fair to conflate unbridled capitalism with small businesses?

A: If the small business is creating wealth and sharing it fairly with its employees then why do they see themselves as exhibiting unbridled capitalism and aren’t they more socialist than capitalist.

Q: What would I put in capitalisms place?

A: I am not arrogant enough to believe I have the answer to this question but I do know that we can’t continue to exploit the planet and its people the way unbridled capitalism is doing at the moment.

I will finish by asking you to consider this:

If money was to disappear overnight what else would have disappeared when you got up in the morning?

The answer is that nothing else would have disappeared, except maybe a couple of the deadly sins, because money is virtual and nothing relies on it for its existence.  

Money: The root of all evil?

There is currently a lot of talk about the fact that the Occupy Movement do not seem to know what they want. I think this is probably right because this movement are about what people know they don’t want anymore.

We have all been fed the line that communism doesn’t work nor does socialism so capitalism is all that is left but in reality none of these ism’s have ever been tried because they have all been corrupted by the people at the top who have altered these systems for their own ends and that includes capitalism. If we had real capitalism then the financial world would not have been bailed out, the banks would have been allowed to fail and the bankers would now be begging because the state does not have a role in true capitalism where the market rules and there are no subsidies or bailouts.  Another thing that the Occupy Movement know is wrong is the massive accumulation of wealth by the few but this is not about money because, just as we haven’t had any of the ism’s we also haven’t had money as it was originally conceived for a long time either.

The original concept of money was, if you did some work for someone, instead of paying you in pigs which wouldn’t fit in your pockets you were given tokens that everybody agreed represented pigs and you could then use these tokens to exchange for pigs when necessary or if you didn’t need pigs then for anything else that took your fancy. Our present problems began when money, which in itself is mere paper and metal, ceased to represent pigs and became a commodity in its own right to be bought and sold and lent and profited from (Usury).

The present occupation of St Pauls is particularly ironic and appropriate because the Christian church along with Islam, Buddhism and Judaism foresaw the danger of money becoming a commodity and considered Usury to be evil and all preached against it and punished those who did it. It’s a pity that all but Islam have conveniently forgotten this.

The problem with allowing money to become a commodity is that this has allowed a few people to hoard a lot of it. Because of this hoarding the supply of money is running out but unlike any other commodity we can’t just dig more of it up or grow more and it’s a lie to suggest the financiers can create wealth because they can no more create wealth than we can we create more metal or food.

The system’s answer to this problem is called Quantitive Easing which simply means that because we can’t mine or grow more money, we have to print more of it. The problem here is, if you print too much money it then becomes worthless and the rich are not going to let that happen. The only other alternative therefore is to claw back some of what is already out there in the common man’s pockets.

This means higher taxes, wage cuts, cuts to public services, greater productivity (more for less), privatisation (public wealth into private pockets), creative accountancy tricks and of course if all else fails WAR.

Do not be fooled into thinking that any of this is unavoidable; it is only being done because money has been allowed to become a commodity and is running out. What the rich are doing is simple theft because this is like someone coming round to your house and taking back your car, your fridge and your washing machine because we have run out of metal and can’t mine any more.

So what is the solution to the problems caused by allowing money to have become a commodity in its own right?

The solution is to return money to its original status as a means of exchange and reintroduce the sin of Usury. This would not mean the end of capitalism as it would still allow people to work and get paid for their labour, people could still develop new ideas and exploit new resources. All that would be different is that we would not have to support the parasite that is the financial sector and the people in this sector would have to get a proper job doing something useful for society, or starve. If any of you still doubt the virtual nature of money, that it should not be treated as a commodity and that the financial world is a glorified computer game then consider this:

If metal was to disappear overnight, when you woke up in the morning you would probably find yourself lying on the floor with your house collapsed around you and a very different world to have to get used to.

If money was to disappear overnight, when you woke up in the morning nothing else will have changed except the financial parasites would be out of a job.

Little Green Men

Once again we witness a jumped up ape spending $25m on helping to set up The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) to help with the search for intelligent signals in the hope that this may lead to the discovery of thinking beings elsewhere in the Universe, hopefully by the year 2025. This enormous waste of money and energy is all predicated on the jumped up apes' arrogant assumption that he, and therefore by implication intelligent life, is the pinnacle of evolution and therefore there must be more of it out there somewhere. As I have said already, if there was or will be other jumped up apes in the universe sending out recognisable signals they will suffer the same fate and last no longer than us as intelligence has within it its own seeds of destruction. In universal time, even if we send out signals for a few more centuries, our announcement of our existence will be a mere blink so what are the chances of another jumped up ape's blink coinciding with ours?