Last night, the American House of Representatives passed legislation to raise the debt ceiling and heavily cut public spending – a historic move if you take into account the first has never been conditional on the latter. Today, the Senate unsurprisingly passed it.

This trimming of the budget was inevitable considering the normalisation of neoliberal policies. Horrendous facts and figures regarding the extent of the cuts aside, the focus is on negotiations which took place and the ideological victory won by the Republicans and their Tea Party offshoot who succeeded in their desire to see no tax increases. The Democrats were evenly split in House votes (95 for and 95 against), whereas the Republicans were heavily in favour of the bill (174 for and 66 against).

Talk of a compromise being made flatters to deceive, with even staunch Obama supporters disillusioned by this legislation. Obama’s posturing has been to attract support from the centre of his party and the independents who are worrying about the deficit and its relationship between Wall Street investment for Main Street businesses and services. However, this will not wash when imagining the destruction of public services, social security and education. If people don’t have these things, they can’t get to work, won’t be qualified to work, and won’t be able to afford the rising costs of living in urban towns and cities.

Its easy to say Obama isn’t to blame; that he’s held in thrall to corporate interests and a Republican majority in Congress. However, it is easy to say he is to blame too. It is foolish for anyone to think he has failed because no one person should ever have that much responsibility or power anyway. The criticism will always be easy if it is about him. I am not taking anything away from his agency as president here, but we must not forget the words being whispered into Reagan’s ear to “hurry up” by Don Regan , his policy man, during a speech, or Clinton and the continuation of the Washington Consensus, or Bush Jr. and both the recent invasions. These men, while being the public faces of the problem, deflect away from a festering undergrowth of corruption, corporate collusion, nepotism and class warfare perpetrated by those who wish to maintain the status quo, their own corporate welfare, and social immobility.

Commentators have suggested this outcome is a severe weakening of Obama’s already lacklustre authority and maybe even his re-election chances, but this is all too simplistic and linear. Americans love a narrative, preferably with a soundtrack, of individuals with ideals battling their nemeses and prevailing for the ambiguously greater good.

It is popcorn politics the American mainstream media try and peddle, and it is the American public who start feeling powerless and apathetic because of it.

While austerity will be pushed onto us here and we will fight it tooth and nail, it is the Americans I wish to see rally and fight this new bill once it is enforced. If a large scale movement can be built with the support and enthusiasm the “Save Our Schools” campaign has recently generated there, there will be huge protests in all the major cities in the U.S, which will in turn reverberate around the developed world.

It has been said capitalism would destroy itself for a profit. We may be witnessing the beginnings of America’s implosion. After all, as we’ve seen with Spain’s “Indignados”, a movement which has been virtually ignored as of late despite daily protests and demonstrations held by thousands, “No es la crisis, es el sistema” (its not the crisis, its the system) must come to mind.

I think, or rather hope, more Americans act on the realisation that it is not Obama who they are now feeling increasingly alienated from, but the sacred system which both major parties defend and maintain with very little deviation.

The rise of the Tea Party in America has presented lefties and liberals with more than two brain cells to rub together on both sides of the Atlantic with a problem.  Picking a facepalm of the week just got a whole lot harder.

Following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, Republican senator Jon Kyl attempted to argue that her assailant was too mentally unstable for it to be a politically motivated attack, despite all of Sarah Palin’s crosshairs.

“It’s probably giving him too much credit to ascribe a coherent political philosophy to him,” Kyl said.

A bit like the rest of the Tea Party then?

“We just have to acknowledge that there are mentally unstable people in this country,” Kyl added.

Glenn Beck, check.

Bill O’Reilley, check.

Sarah Palin

What’s that, you daft accidental anti-semite? Your liberal enemies have accused you of drinking the blood of Christian children? I think we have a winner.

This has been a goodish week  for liberal America. A judge has halted the enforcement of the  ”Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” laws, under which thousands of soldiers have been discharged after the military discovered they were gay. I have always been a little queasy about fighting for people to have the right to join one of the most murderous organisations of the past 100 years, but that is a dilemma for another day. What interests me here is the way in which this reform, like a number of other liberal reforms, was not pushed through congress, but instead the courts.

This is by no means the first time  liberal outcomes have come about like this. On The Third Estate, Owen recently defended the decision of the Californian Judiciary to overturn Proposition 8 – thereby subverting the outcome of a referendum. Compared with Owen, I would say that I hold democracy to be a little more sacrosanct, and treat the power of the judiciary with a little more suspicion. Gay equality is a political issue, which – in the interests of genuine and sustained progress – should  be fought over by a country’s elected representatives. However, in the case of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,  America’s parliamentary machine proved simply incapable of facilitating such a battle.

In Britain the government of the day is largely decides upon the business of parliament. In America, where powers are separated, this is not so. Several weeks back 56 out of 100 senators voted for the senate to hold a debate on repealing “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. Yet the Republicans, despite being in the minority, were able to prevent the debate from going ahead. Under Senate rules, 60 out of 100 senators are needed to force a debate. And so despite the Democrats winning the elections, and despite 60% of the American people favouring a repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” – something that ought to lighten some people’s paranoia about the threat of mass rule to minority rights – America’s democratic institutions could not move forward on the issue. Under such circumstances, it is hard to blame progressive Americans for looking to judicial solutions.

The right to filibuster is jealously guarded in America – regarded by many as an important check on the power of the party with the most seats, and a guarantor of minority rights. Traditionally filibustering involved a parliamentarian speaking for so long that the debate could not be drawn to a close and voted upon. Today, the filibusterer can cease speaking and simply wait for the debate to run out of time. And unless the other side can produce a 60%  ”supermajority”, there is nothing that they can do about it. The 60 votes  that the Democrats needed to push through health reform undoubtedly affected the watered down final act.

The opinions of minorities are important. Yet with  too many checks and balances, it can become effectively impossible for the people to vote for a change of government, or for a government that can change society. The separation of powers – between President, Congress and Senate – means that, for better or worse, President Obama cannot corall Democratic politicians into a particular course of action in the way that, say, David Cameron can. Most substantially, he lacks the power of patronage – since cabinet jobs are not given out to congressmen. When this is combined with the need for super-majorities, and with incredibly loose and diverse party structures – as exhibited by the Blue Dogs and, to a lesser extent,  the RINOs – it becomes very difficult to really alter government and society through the ballot. Hence the Democrats have relatively little to show from a series of great electoral victories between 2006 and 2008.

Now, this might seem like a smug appraisal of America’s constitutional weaknesses. Yet the origins of these problems really lie in England. It is well known that the American revolution – far more than the French – drew heavily upon 17th century English radicalism. The politics world of tyranny and liberty, of Locke and Leviathan, and 1600s Whiggery all shaped the rebellion. And the polity emerged in a world in which government was perceived as almost the only potential source of oppression. Henry David Thoreau’s famous statement that “the government that governs least governs best” sums up a perpetual strand of American thought.

The result, today,  is a constitutional machine  which is designed not to enable elected representatives to wield power, but to prevent them from doing so. While this may keep people safe from tyranny, it also keeps those who benefit most from the current order of things safe from democracy.

Massachusetts was not won by the Republicans, it was lost by Obama

Yesterday’s big news from the far side of the Atlantic was the loss of one of the safest Democratic seats to Scott Brown, a man who represents possibly everything that should make us very worried about the Republicans. In Ted Kennedy’s former seat, which has been blue since 1952, it was the Democrats’ to lose. And they lost it.

They didn’t lose because their opponent drives a truck, because his daughters were available or because it was, after all, the people’s seat and not Ted Kennedy’s as was far too confidently assumed. By all accounts, it was not the number of Republicans voting which swung it, but the number of independents backing Brown and the number of Democrats staying at home. It might be tempting for observers this side of the pond to blame the unerring potential for American political stupidity in falling behind a resurgent GOP just one year after the worst president in living memory retired to Crawford. Obama’s ratings are now lower than any president since Eisenhower at the same stage. But for all the fire and spittle and mad dog hysteria thrown at him by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, the largest part of the blame has to lie with himself.

He is perhaps a victim of the power of his own voice. Obama could probably recount what he had on his toast this morning and turn it into a dazzling charismatic performance that lifts the spirits of the world. But the problem with hot rhetoric is that it does not sit too well with cold pragmatism. Only a fool would have thought Obama’s election meant a fundamental change in the nature of American politics. But he has played too close to the centre to truly capitalise on the yearning for ‘yes we can’. He was never going to appeal to the right in America. But with his lukewarm proposals for reform failing to match up to his lofty words, as speechcraft gets bogged down in statecraft, he is increasingly alienating his left-wing base.

It’s a tragedy for the poor in America that Scott Brown will likely derail even the tiniest table scraps of health care reform that are being thrown to them from Washington. It is a greater tragedy for the poor across the rest of the planet that Obama’s meagre proposals for emissions cuts will fall flat. But it’s a tragedy that Obama has brought on himself. There’s no guarantee that a left-ward swing will prevent him from becoming a one-term president. But at least he could say he tried. At least he could say ‘yes I did’. Because one thing’s for sure. If you sit on the fence, you get splinters.

Guest post by Christos Loutradis

Hands up, who knew there’s an election in Greece tomorrow? The snap election triggered by unpopular conservative Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis seeking a new mandate for his ailing New Democracy party to tackle the economy has received little coverage in the UK. But is the all but certain victory of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and former foreign minister, George Papandreou a strong sign from the Greeks of a wind of change, or simply a matter of urgency owing to Karamanlis’s inability to deal with the consequences of the financial crisis?

Papandreou and Karamanlis certainly have one thing in common. They are the progeny of two leading political families in Greece. Karamanlis’s uncle, Konstantinos, was the first democratically elected Prime Minister after the fall of the military junta in 1974. Karamanlis junior’s term in office, however, will be forever associated with financial scandal and social unrest. Papandreou, on the other hand, is the son and grandson of past Prime Ministers. His stint as foreign minister between 1999 and 2004 marked the thawing of traditionally frosty relations with Turkey and Albania and the cooling of nationalistic rhetoric.

Despite the establishment background of the two candidates, however, this election offers Greeks an ideological choice between conservatism and social democracy. Papandreou’s proposals to increase corporation tax and social investment have been met with strong criticism from the business community, and from Karamanlis, who accuses his opponent of a suicidal policy that will lead to the total removal of growth from Greece’s economic lexicon.

If American-born Papandreou is elected, he will be the first Greek premier born outside of the country. His heritage has earned him the nickname ‘the American’ in the Greek media, a title that is not wholly undeserved given Papandreou’s borrowing of policies from the Obama campaign, promising greater co-operation with US plans to tackle the global financial crisis and pushing towards a greener economy.

If Karamanlis loses tomorrow, it will owe as much to his failure as to his rival’s success. He was elected in 2004 after twenty years of PASOK dominance with the seemingly simple idea to re-introduce morality into the public political sphere. But the man governed with illusions and was trapped by them, not least the belief that victories in Euro 2004 and the Eurovision song contest could provide answers for the problems that Greece faces. How could he have known, studying International Relations in America, that relations with the US would play such an important part in his political future, or lack thereof.

The elections are still a day away, but Papandreou is already regarded the Prime Minister in waiting. The crucial question that remains will be how a new PASOK government will deal with a rising budget deficit whilst tackling high unemployment. The main dilemma of the upcoming election: can the political elites that have led Greece to the edge of financial collapse formulate a concrete and feasible plan for the country to avoid bankruptcy? Iceland is not, after all, so very far away.

America will not prove its openness through hosting the Olympics, but by engaging in diplomacy

It must be difficult for Barack Obama to hear the words ‘no you can’t', but that was exactly what he had to face today as the IOC chose Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympics over his hometown of Chicago. Earlier this morning the US president made a characteristically charismatic speech, telling delegates the games would show that “America at its best is open to the world.” It’s a curious sentiment. Last year’s Beijing Olympics didn’t exactly demonstrate China’s openness to the world, anymore than the 1936 Berlin Olympics gave the globe a nice big hug from Hitler. It’s not through sporting co-operation that America will turn its back on the brinkmanship and dogged unilateralism of the Bush years, but diplomacy.

Yesterday’s meeting in Geneva marked the highest level talks between the US and Iran in 30 years. And whilst the headlines talked of signs of a breakthrough in Iranian co-operation, with the Islamic Republic agreeing to permit international inspections and export a sizeable portion of its uranium for outside enrichment to render it unuseable in weapons, the real breakthrough was seeing America come to the negotiating table. Of course, the US approach to the issue of nuclear proliferation remains one-sided and hypocritical, not least in its double-standards over Israel’s known, but never acknowledged warheads. But whilst the agenda remains the same, the new multilateral approach offers signs of hope for a safer world where simplistic, dangerous sentiments like ‘axis of evil’ give way to a more nuanced approach. Where imperialist aggression, bullying and sanctions give way to talk.

As Latin America celebrates the Olympic Games coming to the continent for the first time in history, its northern neighbour must do more to make its newfound goodfaith clear, building on the turning point it reached when it refused to endorse the Honduran coup by listening to the demands to end the unjust and inhumane embargo on Cuba. America will not, afterall, prove its openess through discus, but discussion.

Guest post by Chris Girffiths

It’s not been an easy summer for Barack Obama. This month has seen yet more shrieking from the right-wings as he attempts to introduce a ‘radical’ scheme to offer US Government-backed health insurance scheme so the poorest people can get medical treatment. Hardly trying to append “SR” to the “US”, is he? But even this moderate move is seen as groundbreaking by the American Right, so sure are they that public sector provision is unpatriotic and even treasonous. Against this backdrop – which looks a lot like a Confederate flag – Obama’s got his work cut out.

The Fox-News-backed protesters are right about one thing though: Obama is a fundamentalist. This is an unpopular sentiment with everyone who’s read those really moving autobiographies; and granted, Obama’s much more likeable than Bush – but let’s face it, he’s not exactly differing from the last President in foreign policy, is he? The occupation of Iraq goes on, more troops go to Afghanistan and the aims are never set out, although we all know it’s about geo-strategic resource issues (oil, to be blunt). Obama rightly criticises British imperialism through his account of his grandfather’s experiences at the hands of the British colonial administration in Kenya, but is happy to serve as Commander in Chief of the most far-reaching empire the world’s ever seen, one that continues to ignore the Geneva Convention and support despotic regimes like Saudi Arabia. This is at odds with the lazy journalistic line that George W Bush was somehow an aberration while Obama is a return to the non-interventionist America we knew and loved – plainly untrue, as the US has intervened in over fifty countries since 1945, overthrowing democracies when they got in the way of American interests.

Aside from directly waging war on underdeveloped countries and contributing to worsening human rights in Iraq, Obama sits atop an economic system designed to subjugate the global South, meaning that informally the continents of Asia, Africa and South America are effectively under colonial rule. The World Trade Organisation continues to campaign for removal of tariff barriers in the developing world, despite the fact that all the major industrialised nations got to where they are today by using tariffs. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank carry on making ‘aid’ loans conditional on privatisation, as if Bechtel and Haliburton hadn’t enriched themselves enough already, prising open the global South for business. Is Obama going to change any of this? Probably not: he believes in American exceptionalism every bit as much as his predecessors, writing in Foreign Affairs that the US is “called to provide visionary leadership”. As leader of the free world, shouldn’t he have given us all a vote on this?

Unfortunately, the journalistic profession and many others in the US and Europe are guilty of extreme sloppiness: they’ve relied on Obama’s own accounts of his political philosophy, heavily analysed his moving speeches, and rightly celebrated the historic occasion of the election of a black President, but failed to step back and consider his policies in any depth beyond whether he was doing enough to sort out the recession. His small number of policy changes are impressive as far as they go, but our biggest worry should be what stays the same: foreign conquest, exploitation and disregard for human rights. There might be a more likeable front-man in place but real change will only come if the people who carried him to power in the first place start holding him to account by using their powerful voice to call for the dismantling of American empire.

I’m a Guardian reader. Middle-class, well educated, long-haired and liberal, I don’t exactly dispel the stereotypes associated with the paper whose readers think they ought to run the country. Nor, as one of those lefty, anti-war, environmentalist types who grew up worrying about the state of the world, should it come as any surprise that the Guardian columnist I’ve always had the most time for is George Monbiot. And with the state of the world looking more worrying than ever, in the midst of an economic crisis and on the verge of an environmental one, it’s only natural that the fifth in my series of interviews for The Third Estate should be with the man who made print journalism and saving the world seem an attractive career path to me. So, on the eve of the most crucial climate change conference the planet has ever seen, as world leaders struggle to implement a strategy to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2C, I caught up with the author-activist to ask him for some happy news.

“The chances of preventing a two degrees rise in global temperatures are now pretty slight and diminishing rapidly,” Monbiot says in the way a schoolteacher might tell a naughty child who has just failed all his GCSEs that he has no one to blame but himself. I realise, at this point, that happy news isn’t looking very likely. “It’s partly because of a long period of inaction and denial and delay and obfuscation on the part of the world’s governments,” he tells me. The G8 finally pulled their heads out of the sand earlier this year to agree an 80% emissions cut by 2050. Is this not enough, I ask? “Not only is it not enough, it’s an irrelevant measure,” he says. “What counts is the cumulative emissions in the atmosphere. Simply because it’s so long-lived. We’ve produced so much greenhouse gas, that when you strip away the aerosols, like for instance sulphate pollution, which are shielding us from the full impact of the greenhouse effect, then it looks as if we’re already committed to two degrees of warming.”

So what’s the solution? “We need to reduce emissions as quickly as possible, never mind by 2050. We need a 10% cut in the coming year. And then a 10% cut in the following year. Otherwise the cumulative emissions will push us above two degrees and more without any question. The idea that the G8 nations can carry on producing an absurd amount of carbon and then bring down emissions later and bring down global temperatures later as a result, it simply does not work like that.”

Naturally enough, Monbiot is a supporter of the 10:10 campaign to bring about exactly the kind of cuts he is talking about. But is there a danger that, although the campaign will be grabbing headlines in 2010, it could go the way of Make Poverty History by 2011? “Yes,” he laughs. “Maybe we’ll need an 11:11 campaign the following year. The purpose of it is to shame governments into acting, ideally at Copenhagen, by saying so many people have pledged to make this cut, the only people holding things up are governments.” I can see a glimmer of hope emerging at this point, but Monbiot is quick to dash it. “Ideally we’d see such a good result at Copenhagen that all the following years would be taken care of. As we know, in reality, that’s not what’s going to happen.”

The Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference in December will bring together 183 nations to tackle arguably the most serious issue of our time. But with China and America together producing over 40% of global CO2 emissions, only two countries at the table will really matter. Are they on course to make the necessary commitments? “Of course not,” Monbiot says without a second’s hesitation. “Those countries are holding out against the kind of cuts that are necessary. If you look closely at the Waxman-Markey Bill, which the US hopes to found their cuts on, and which hasn’t even been gutted by the Senate yet, effectively it means that there will be no substantial cuts until 2050. By which time it’s all over. As for China, it’s both the greenest and the dirtiest country on Earth. Greenest because of its vast investment in alternative energy, but the dirtiest because of its vast investment in coal.”

China’s reluctance to implement a radical reduction in carbon emissions stems largely from the belief that it is Western nations that are responsible for the current climate crisis, and that they should not be denied the opportunities Europe and America have long enjoyed. Convincing the developed world to slash their emissions would seem, then, to be only the tip of a very rapidly melting iceberg as the rest of the developing world looks towards growth. I ask Monbiot how one can possibly convince some of the poorest nations on Earth that they cannot afford to follow the model of rapid industrialisation that lifted so many millions in the West out of extreme poverty. “I fully accept that the poorest nations need industrialisation,” Monbiot says. “We have to make it easy for them to do it without the mass pollution which accompanied our industrialisation. That means major investment in alternative energy, which has to be supported by the rich nations.” The best approach to this, Monbiot believes, is outlined by Oliver Tickell in the book Kyoto2. “It’s a sophisticated cap and trade system. The huge amounts of money generated by putting a price on carbon emissions, probably somewhere between $1-3 trillion per year, could be used to sponsor alternative energy in poorer nations and to help them adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change.”

George Monbiot’s concerns go much further than climate change, however. In his debate with Paul Kingsnorth, who seems to embrace the coming apocalypse of resource depletion and environmental devastation with fatalistic satisfaction, Monbiot says: “for the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so.” But, I ask, does he in all honesty think that there’s still a chance to prevent the societal crisis that many Peak Oil theorists believe will result from the collapse of the resource that almost single-handedly drives the global economy? The answer to that is probably not. “As Robert L. Hirsch noted, you need a run up time of between ten and twenty years to substitute other forms of propulsive energy for the oil that’s running out. And if, as the IEA suggest, we’re looking at oil peaking between 2020 and 2030, we are already almost out of time to address this issue. If we leave it any longer, and no politician seems to be taking it seriously, then we are going to see total economic collapse.”

Monbiot’s hitherto professional optimism has been replaced by a brutal kind of candour. But surely there must be some positives in all of this? Could Peak Oil actually be a crucial driving force in convincing governments to replace fossil fuels with environmentally sustainable sources of energy? In the words of the nodding dog from the Churchill adverts, oh no, no, no! “Some of the measures that Hirsch proposed are even worse than using petroleum,” Monbiot says. “For example, he talks about using oil shale and tar sand and turning coal into liquid fuel, all of which are extremely polluting activities. Instead of addressing Peak Oil in a long-term, measured and environmentally friendly way, we could see governments panic and start exploiting every type of liquid fuel, no matter how destructive and damaging it might be.”

There are few, now, who would disagree that something urgent needs to be done. But worrying about the world is the easy part. It’s much harder to agree on a common solution. Chief amongst the thorny disagreements for even the most ardent of environmentalists, is the issue of nuclear power. In an interview with The Third Estate last week, Caroline Lucas made her opposition quite clear when she told me “nuclear power is hugely costly, and carries major safety and security risks.” I ask George Monbiot, who was once awarded a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement by Nelson Mandela, what his position is now. “I don’t care anymore,” he says with all the blunt urgency the situation warrants. “I just want solutions. And as long as they can be delivered in the right timeframe, and as long as they’re not going to be particularly damaging to other aspects of the ecosystem, or to social justice and human rights, I don’t care what those solutions are. If nuclear power can be used safely, and if waste is disposed of safely, then I no longer have any major objection to it.”

Unsurprisingly, Monbiot has come under fire from leading members of the Green Party for these views, not least from former London mayoral candidate Siân Berry, whose quite bizarre and surprisingly sexist blog post attacked his gender, his age and even his hairstyle, but offered very little explanation as to why she felt he was wrong, aside from the fact he looks like a WW2 fighter pilot. The headline on Monbiot’s damning response in The Guardian read ‘Berry’s nuclear fallout has lost her my vote’. I ask him if that’s really the case. “I was being flippant about that,” he says. “I did think it was a ridiculous post.” I laugh and can’t help agreeing with my interviewee. It was actually incredibly silly. “I don’t think I actually said that I wouldn’t vote Green anymore,” he points out. “The headline suggested that, but it’s not actually my position.” That said, Monbiot tells me that he has finally found his spiritual home. “It’s Plaid Cymru,” he says. “I went to their conference this month and I was absolutely delighted by the positions they were taking on just about every issue and I felt that these were extremely sensible, switched on kinds of people who were trying to put into place many of the issues that I feel most concerned about.” Monbiot briefly supported Respect in 2004 in the hope that they could “forge a genuine red-green alliance.” When that turned out not to be possible, he pulled out. Now he says, “I have finally found the party that I feel very comfortable with. That’s not to say I feel uncomfortable with the Green Party, on the whole I support it, but I feel even more comfortable with Plaid.”

If there’s one person Monbiot definitely won’t be voting for, however, it’s Gordon Brown. In an article earlier this month, Monbiot argued that Brown’s failure to regulate the banks at the G20 meant that no one this side of the Atlantic now bears as much responsibility for ensuring that the economic crisis can be repeated than the Prime Minister. But surely crises are inherent to capitalism anyway, and the idea of boom without bust was a delusion from the start? “Yes,” Monbiot agrees, “I believe that’s true. And I believe it’s the job of government to defend us from the predations of capitalism. And the government has singularly failed to do that. Government exists to defend its citizens from all sorts of threats, including the greed and ruthlessness of capitalists. Instead of doing that, it has encouraged the risk-taking that has thrown so many people out of work.” Monbiot believes that government has a choice. If they’re going to sustain the capitalist system, rather than any other kind of economy, then they have to regulate it in the interests of their citizens. “They’ve consistently failed to do this. In fact they have argued again and again for deregulation, even as the impact of this is plain for everyone to see.”

"Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body"

Monbiot ends his article with the question: ‘why was Brown permitted to remain in power?’ But does he believe there’s anyone in the Labour Party who could successfully replace him before the next general election? “I think the problem is that all the feisty people in the Labour Party have been purged,” he says. “Through the selection of MPs, preventing any interesting and independent minded people from entering Parliament, and through the gradual freezing out of the older MPs, Labour has become a supine monoculture wholly committed to a neo-liberal, neo-conservative vision without a single radical cell in its collective body.” Monbiot’s voice never once betrays a hint of anger, but listening to him deconstruct the failings of a party that once called itself progressive, it’s not hard to picture the moment last year when he attempted a citizen’s arrest on the arch neo-con John Bolton. “There are no more Robin Hoods in the Labour Party,” he says. “Or rather those that are left, like Alan Simpson, are about to leave Parliament. The party has been so comprehensively purged that there are no means by which it can be renewed.”

Labour will be due another purge in next year’s general election. And with a Conservative government looking pretty close to a certainty, I ask Monbiot if things are likely to be markedly different. “A Tory government is going to be a disaster for Britain,” he replies. “It’s going to be disastrous for the poor, for the environment, for foreign policy, and it’s going to be just the same, in almost all respects, as a Labour government. In other words, the current disaster continued.” Monbiot’s distaste for the Conservatives could not be clearer. But could he ever see himself voting Labour to stop them getting in? “No,” he says. “As much as I dislike and am disgusted with the Tories, I think you have to vote for what you think is right. And if you cling onto something bad for fear of something worse, no one will end up with the government they want.”

Naturally, that begs the question, what is the alternative? With so much public hostility directed towards the bankers and the financial institutions that brought about the current crisis in capitalism, and following one of the greatest mass movements in history taking to the streets to oppose the invasion of Iraq, why, I ask Monbiot, is the left weaker than ever before? “I don’t know,” he says quite honestly. Then he laughs. “It’s interesting that you ask this, because it’s exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it at the moment. I think part of the problem is that we have nowhere to turn. The Labour Party was the focus of left-wing opposition when the Tories were in power, but it is as unconcerned about the issues as the Tories are now. I think also, we have been lulled and lulled in a constant void of television and celebrity and events that are peripheral to our lives, which seem to take centre place. And I think we have forgotten the lessons of history. But beyond that, I’m not sure what’s going on and I intend to try and find out.”

It is, perhaps, symptomatic of our confusing post-modern condition that even George Monbiot – Guardian columnist, bestselling author, hardened activist and forty something alpha male with a WW2 fighter pilot’s haircut – has no answer.

I ask him for some happy news.

But he just smiles and turns away.

www.monbiot.com

Guest post by Carl Packman

102 Minutes That Changed America, the brave documentary that aired on Channel 4 yesterday, made for very tough viewing.

The camera was very intrusive, and actually seemed to infuriate people, but it did what was best in documenting some very sombre and terrifying moments. People, covered in dust and debris, would wave their hands as if to say I’ve been in there, fuck off with your camera, and against their sensitivities managed to catch both their anger and their vulnerabilities. The viewer asks themselves the important question, definitely on the lips of those commissioning the programme: is watching this programme not tantamount to voyeurism, or, should I be watching these terrified people in their terror climaxes?

The answer should be no, but what is posterity worth? When Kevin Carter, the nobel prize winning photographer, was asked about filming South African necklacing – the act of filling a rubber tyre with petrol, placing it round a victims neck and setting on fire – he replied:

“I was appalled at what they were doing. I was appalled at what I was doing. But then people started talking about those pictures… then I felt that maybe my actions hadn’t been at all bad. Being a witness to something this horrible wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing to do.”

It was in 1993 that Carter took the photograph of a small girl in famine ridden Sudan, that took him to the long road of depression. What should a photographer do, should s/he attempt to help the subject, does art trump life, what moral proximity does the artist have towards his or her subject if any, and should this jeopardise his or her art or commitment?

It was these questions, and many more that Carter suffered before he took his own life at the age of 33 by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window.

Robert Capa, the Spanish civil war photographer famous for his photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, was held in very high esteem for his very graphic and personal display of the other war against fascism. This year a Spanish professor, José Manuel Susperregui, published a book titled Shadows of Photography, which demonstrated that Capa’s photograph could not have been taken where it was alleged to have been, using separate photographic evidence.

Tough as it may be, sometimes, in order to save your corner, you have to come clean on your allies. In order to keep the Spanish Republican message alive, and by saving the right from using it to their advantage, the truth of Capa had to be released. Similarly, two Canadian documentary filmmakers were once making a film on Michael Moore, the leftwing polemicist, from a supportive bent. However, after weeks of specialising in the remit of Moore, they soon realised that much of his work was born out fiction, covered behind the gonzo-esque, perverting the realm of the anti-war movement in America – which obviously needed all the support it could gather. The point of the filmmakers’ – Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine – efforts could not have been better summed up by the title of their film; Manufacturing Dissent.

The above references – if they have any common theme – is to try and communicate a truth, even if using methods that don’t exactly weigh up as such. Kevin Carter’s profile as one who captures a truth haunted him until his dying day, Capa was willing to stage events in order to send a message across the world detailing the horrors of the Francoist regime – even if this event was fictitious. Sometimes the only way an artist can record the nearest representation to truth, is by recreating it, sometimes truth is not real enough. Perhaps Michael Moore could argue this case also, but two leftist documentary filmmakers were willing to spill the beans to save their corner.

These are the criteria for infiltrating the truth as its happening, for limiting ones own remit to that of the artist – the bearer of the potentially worldwide message – and not the saviour, or at least not in any immediate sense. Does Channel 4′s 9/11 documentary do just that? I’d risk saying not in this instance, the location shots seemed brave, and there was no fear of tweaking the truth of the events, only it seemed to mostly interfere. For what it’s worth, it did capture emotion fraught with fear, but did this hold the same weight as say Kevin Carter, or was it perversion, a glimpse at vulnerability for a public energised by action? I’d risk an accusation of the latter.