Channel 5’s Latest Attack on the Poor: On Benefits and Proud

In my last blog post I recommended anyone with an interest in historic technology to watch Beat the Ancestors, a programme on Channel 5 on Mondays, in which a team of engineers, craftsmen and film special effects technicians attempt to recreate and improve upon a device from history. This could be a weapon, such as a cannon, or, as in Monday’s programme, a machine such as the 13th century crane used to build Salisbury Cathedral. It’s an example of the often excellent archaeology and history programmes, which the fifth channel is capable of making, and often does far better than the BBC or Channel 4.

Unfortunately, the Channel is owned by the pornographer and right-wing proprietor of the Daily Express, Richard Desmond. Thus, an hour after this foray into industrial history and experimental archaeology, comes another attack on the unemployed. At 9 o’clock is the documentary On Benefits and Proud. According to the Radio Times, this is about

‘The lifestyles of some of those living off the state who are not currently seeking employment, including of a mother of 11 whose benefits are double the average wage in Britain’.

Now Mike, over at Vox Political, Johnny Void and any number of other left-wing blogs, like Diary of a Benefit Scrounger are doing their level best to disabuse the electorate of the Tory notion that there are people on benefits living good lives at the public expense. One of the guests launched a splenetic, and hilarious diatribe sending up these kinds of stories last night on the long-running satirical quiz show, Have I Got News For You. Nevertheless, they get recycled in order to support the Tory policy of re-introducing grinding, Third-World poverty to this country to punish those unfortunate enough not to be working. Not that Channel 5 is alone in this. The Beeb did something similar a few months ago with Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer in We All Pay Your Benefits. Spamfish over at Oprichnik Rising launched a blistering attack on that one, because of the way it misrepresented one of his friends. I’ve reblogged the story, so it’s over here as well as on his site. Go and look at it to see for yourself how disgracefully manipulative these shows are.

This programme will be broadcast following the story on yesterday’s news that the Red Cross are having to deal with grinding poverty in this country. Millions of people in Britain are, according to yesterday’s edition of the Express, faced with the choice of ‘heat or eat’. They can either buy food, or pay their heating bills, but they can’t do both. Meanwhile the electricity companies, already making vast profits, are raising their bills by another ten per cent and running scare stories about Labour’s plans to cap them. As for higher executives at the Beeb, these are on multi-million pound salaries, as shown by the various golden handshakes given to the Beeb’s Director-Generals, who have been forced to resign following the Jimmy Saville scandal. A casual glance at the ‘Media News’ section in Private Eye will actually tell you just how bloated some of these executives’ salaries are. Now I’ve no doubt that, if confronted about these stories of benefit scroungers and welfare queens the same broadcasting executive would probably try to justify themselves by talking about how they were trying to preserve broadcasting neutrality, and presenting the other side of the argument, in contrast to the stories they’ve run about rising poverty on the news. They have not, to my knowledge, actually presented in documentary form the opposing viewpoint that most people on benefits don’t want to be there, and, in contrast to these highly biased documentaries, are not living at all. It’s about time they did. We, the general public, pay their wages, either directly through the license fee, or indirectly by watching their programmes and forming a demographic for their advertisers. The public may pay for the benefits supporting the unemployed, but the unemployed also pay the salaries of the TV executives. They are responsible to them, and so should make programmes revealing how the real poor live, not the minority that are constantly cited to support the Neo-Liberal fantasies of Right-wing politicos.

Spamfish’s Personal Perspective on BBC’s We All Pay Your Benefits

This comes from nearly a month ago. I’ve blogged before about the inaccuracies with the BBC’s programme Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits. Hosted by Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountfort, Alan Sugar’s henchmen from The Apprentice, this put a group of unemployed people together with a group of ‘strivers’. It gave a profoundly misleading impression that the unemployed were content and well-off on their benefits, unlike those in full-time employment working hard to make ends meet. Spamfish’s blog post, Another BBC Programme Demonising Benefit Claimants: Only This Time It’s Personal is particularly important in analysing the way the BBC carefully edited the show so that it gave the Right-wing message they intended. Spamfish personally knows one of the people, who appeared on the programme. He says of him and the show

This was never meant to be an honest unbiased look at the whole benefit system. No this program had one aim and one aim only. That was to push the whole right-wing callous capitalist agenda of demonizing the poor and needy. The program stunk of propaganda, from the snide comments the totally “neutral” hosts were making, to the stagnant anti welfare soundbites the so-called “strivers” regurgitated on cue. It could have been written by Ian Duncan Smith himself it was so patronising and dismissive of the people involved.

So why this time is it personal?

Because one of the participants is a long time friend of mine. Luther the single dad.

I first want to say, well done bro, you did a great job, you came across as the likeable caring chap we all know you are. This despite the editing they did to push their agenda and the serious lack of detail into your predicament. But of course they don’t want to go into too much detail because that will show the world what a down to earth solid geezer you really are. No they want caricatures of benefit claimants ones that fit into their nasty little pigeon holes they have for us all. They wanted to dehumanize him. Well I’m sorry to say that despite their best attempts they failed.

So why did he do the show, I mean we all knew they would try to paint him in a bad light, after all that is the job of propaganda, to blur the truth and point the viewers towards one conclusion. He knew this perfectly well when he entered into this program but did it because he wanted to do his best to show the world that benefit claimants are human too and to show the audience the inhuman cruelty that some of these cuts can cause. So he used this chance to highlight all the problems with this governments welfare strategy. He spoke about the bedroom tax and the benefit cap, the council tax benefit removal, the sterile anti person ATOS interviews and the DWPs twisting of statistics.

unfortunately that would not of served the BBCs political masters for them to show any of that, so instead they cut and edited almost everything he had to say unless it fit with their opinions.

This shows the personal reality behind the programme, and the deliberate distortion of fact to support and promote the Conservative characterisation of those on benefits as idle scroungers. Spamfish’s post is at http://spamfish23.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/another-bbc-program-demonising-benefit-claiments-only-this-time-its-personal/. Go and read it for the truth behind this and doubtless similar programmes that will come our way in future.

‘Commission Managment’: The Nazi Term for Public-Private Partnership and the Use of Special Advisors from Industry

I’ve already discussed the use of personnel from big business and industry in government, and the establishment of government organs as private corporations in the Third Reich in my post on Spamfish’s post on Wolin’s idea that America is now an ‘Illiberal Democracy’. Another example of this was the appointment of the industrialist Carl Krauch as general plenipotentiary for chemicals and director of the Reich Office for Economic Consolidation , a subordinate body to the Reich Ministry of Economics. The Reich Ministry of Economics was itself in practice the ‘executive organ of the Commissioner for the Four Year Plan’. Under Goring’s management the Organisation for the Four Year Plan appointment a number of business leaders, like Krauch, as general plenipotentiaries.

Krauch had been on the board of I.G. Farben from 1926. From 1933 onwards he was an adviser to the Aviation Ministry, and to Brabag, which was responsible for producing artificial fuel. Krauch initially headed the research division of the Office for Raw Materials and Stock in the Organisation of the Four Year Plan. IN this role he had the full support of I.G. Farben’s board, and could use the company’s planning staff. He also took some of the staff from I.G. Farben to work with him in the Office of the Four year Plan. He was made general plenipotentiary for chemicals in 1938. The Reich Ministry for Aviation and Economics urged him to resign from I.G. Farben and become a state official, and was willing to appoint him state secretary. Krauch turned the offer down after consulting Bosch. he retained his seat on the I.G. Farben’s board, and in 1940 was appointed head as chairman of the company’s supervisory board. Krauch’s position in the Reich ministry was honorary, and he was not officially employed by them, nor was he included in the organisation’s budget. He was regarded with suspicion by other firms because of his continued links with I.G. Farben, and by the state economic bureaucracy, which was used to the strict separation of public and private organisations. The use of expert technicians like Krauch was expanded and became increasingly typical. While Goring and the General Council of the Four Year Plan were responsible for the ministry’s decisions, these were strongly influenced by the suggestions of their plenipotentiaries and by members of staff from the private armaments industry. These were ultimately responsible to the Armaments Ministry, but the ministry’s central administration rarely rejected their suggestions. Krauch described this adoption of managers from private industry in government as the assumption of state duties by the independent sector of the economy. It was described by other political theorists as a new form of ‘Commission Management’. In addition to using advisors and personnel from the Nazi party bureaucracy, the management apparatus of official from private industry was also used at the expense of a uniform state administration. The parallels here between the Nazi use of managers and technicians from private industry, and their use, along with Special Advisors, by contemporary British administrations since Margaret Thatcher as part of an ideology of Public-Private Partnerships are very strong indeed.

The Friends of the Reichsfuhrrer SS

Private industry also sponsored the SS. The Friends of the Reichsfuhrer SS was a group of heads of industry and bankers in Berlin. They donated money and even equipped whole SS units. AS a reward, the group became honorary members of the SS and influential personal contact with its leader, Himmler. One of the advantages this gave the group’s members was access to cheap labour from the concentration camps. To use this slave labour, the SS demanded a price of 6 marks per man per day.

Clearly there is no real comparison between Cameron’s policies and the Friends of the Reichsfuhrer SS, except in the most general sense of private industry donating money to the Conservatives, and other political parties, such as New labour, in return for governmental favours. There might be some if, the DWP adopts the recommendation of independent policy advisors to expand the use of residential centres for the disabled and long-term unemployed, to be employed on workfare, run by private contractors. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the ultimate extent to which the Nazis attracted and exploited contacts with private industry.

Sources

Martin Broszat, The Hitler State (London: Longman 1981)

Friends of the Reichsfuhrer SS, in James Taylor and Warren Shaw, A Dictionary of the Third Reich (London: Grafton 1987) p. 132.

Spamfish on Modern American ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’

There’s a very interesting piece of political philosophy over at Spamfish’s site, Oprichnik Rising. Entitled ‘Inverted Totalitarianism’, it discusses the political philosopher, Sheldon Wolin’s, characterisation of modern American as an ‘illiberal democracy’, managed through policies and special lobbying groups, with the relationship between the government and corporations forming an inverted, mirror image to those of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. It begins

Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin to describe the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin believes that the United States is increasingly turning into an illiberal democracy, and he uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” to illustrate the similarities and differences between the United States governmental system and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union.[

Inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy

Wolin believes that the United States (which he refers to using the proper noun “Superpower”, to emphasize the current position of the United States as the only superpower) has been increasingly taking on totalitarian tendencies as a result of the transformations that it underwent during the military mobilization required to fight the Axis powers, and during the subsequent campaign to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War

Spamfish’s article is at http://spamfish23.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/inverted-totalitarianism/.

It’s well worth reading and I think Wolin’s central idea is largely correct. My only criticism is that in many ways the parallels between the Nazi ‘co-ordination’ of industry and the contemporary influence of private industry on government policy and organisation is actually much closer. Others on the Left have described the modern, Conservative co-option of industrialist and big corporations as ‘Corporativism without the working class’. In Fascist Italy, a corporation was a giant industrial organisation formed to represent the interest of that industry in the Fascist state. There were 12 of these corporations, whose representatives sat in an Industrial Chamber as part of new, Fascist Italian parliament. Each Corporation contained a representative from the unions and the employers’ organisation for that industry, as well as a member of the Fascist party, to represent ‘the people’. In Nazi Germany the middle class organisations, such as the guild and handicraft organisation, which had been campaigning for the greater representation of their interests in the Nazi state, were forcibly incorporated into the Reich Corporation of German Handicraft and the Reich Corporation of German Trade. These formed a kind of compulsory cartel under the leadership of the Nazi party.

There were also short-lived attempts to establish the same kind of corporativist structurre in Nazi German. Attempts to reorganise and align German big business in line with Nazi ideology and policy was countered by the leaders of those industries through their close relationship with Hitler himself, and the support other leading Nazis such as Schacht, Hugenberg, Schmitt and Goring. Following a meeting with fifty leading industrials and bank directors, including Krupp, Thyssen, von Siemens, Stinnes, springorum, Bosch, Vogler and von Stauss, and the heads of the state departments for economic policy and Nazi’s own economic policy advisors, an agreement was made to establish a permanent General Council of the Economy. Heavy industry had a very strong presence in this. Some German industrial leaders were already strongly sympathetic to the Nazis and a corporatist reorganisation of the industrial and social structure. Fritz Thyssen had had contact with Hitler since 1923 and supplied financial support to the Nazis. In collaboration with the advocates of the corporatist state in the NSDAP regional staff, he had set up Institute for Corporatist Organisation in Dusseldorf. Despite this, the party soon rejected such corporativist organisations, and Thyssen’s Institute was forcibly dissolved in 1935. In 1934 the Reich Association of Industry was replaced with the Reich Group Industry. Its leaders and those of the other business associations and chambers were appointed by the state.

The Influence of Private Industry on the Nazi Industrial Organisations

Other Nazi economic organisations were founded as private industries. The Economic Research Association, which was branch of the Reich ministry of Economics, was established in 1934 as private limited company. This was particularly concerned with the construction of fuel depots in strategically important areas. This, and similar departments, were largely untouched by the demands of the state bureaucracy The Nazi state did not attack the principle of private capitalist industry. The state economic planning apparatus curtailed company director’s freedom to manage their own firms, nevertheless the Nazi state tried to operate with the minimum of bureaucracy. In so doing, it allowed the state’s organs of administration and control to be strongly influenced by experts and representatives of private industry. The result of this was, according to historian Martin Broszat, a type of economic leader, who was half state official, and half private businessman.

Nazi Economic Organisation Close to Thatcherite and Reaganite ‘Public-Private Partnerships and PFI

This seems to challenge Wolin’s theory somewhat. Both the Fascist and Nazi states certainly attempted to use the state’s corporativist institutions to control private industry. The above examples from the Nazi regime also shows how private industry attempted to influence Nazi policy, which was frequently carried out through state organisations founded as private companies. The parallels between the Nazis’ policies in this area, and those of Mrs. Thatcher’s and subsequent administrations are particularly striking. Under these administrations, representatives of industry have entered government, and they and their thinktanks and special advisors have formulated government policy. They have also set up private corporations to carry out public policy. An example of this is the Urban Development Corporations Mrs Thatcher set up to circumvent local authorities’ influence and control over the process of urban regeneration. The core of these policies were ‘Public-Private Partnership’ between private industry and the state, and the use of the Private Finance Initiative and government subsidies to support private industry. The Tories’ proposed privatisation of the courts, and the outsourcing of welfare administration to private companies, can also be seen as another example of private industry acting as a government bureaucracy or department similar to Nazi policies in this area.