A Global Coup?

When General Pinochet laid waste to the Chilean democracy in 1973, with the not-very-covert aid of the USA, there were great many deaths! Chile, now happily rid of the brutal dictator- today recognises that more than 40,000 individuals perished under the iron fist of Thatcher's close friend, and it seems quite likely that the official figure will be incrementally increasing for a while yet to come. Those known-to-be-surviving victims of the general's persecution have been awarded a lifetime pension, if 'pension' is really the right term, of about $260 a month. I think it would be fair to assume that the good ol' US of A will not this time be featuring in the exchange of 'funds.'

If only Pinochet had been able to somehow hide those deaths, if only he'd had a better 'population accountant,' one who'd been more adept with numerical-slight-of-hand. Thousands 'disappeared,' but the general's handiwork required a more rigorous form of accounting.

Still, Thatcher quite liked the man, snuggled him close, alongside such figures as President Regan (illegal mining of Nicaraguan waters) and Jimmy Saville (history of sexual abuse of countless NHS patients and others). Of course, nobody with any sense could honestly believe that, as with the Hillsborough cover-up, and the as-of-now still suppressed/denied Orgreave report, she was ever unaware! Her one time parliamentary private secretary, Peter Morrison- known then as an abuser of younger boys- was not only shielded by the woman, but also later knighted. Aware, and yet never charged as being so, curious... and highly pertinent to the gist of this posting!

But this post is not really about Thatcher or Pinochet, more it is woven about and around the premise that a coup, even one that might bring about the deaths of thousands, could effectively be hidden, just enough, just below the surface, from the public gaze.

Take a step back, take several steps back, and peruse the global scene. Back in the twentieth century it would have been difficult to envision so many populist presidents and prime ministers rising to positions of power, more, it would have been particularly difficult to imagine quite so many countries that nestle so ingenuously under the universal banner of 'democracies' falling prey to the populists. And yet, twenty years later...

The alarms are ringing loud, for those who are prepared to hear. But, slip into the comfy world of, perhaps, one's parents' generation, maybe the pseudo-middle classes, perhaps those with investment property portfolios, and it is as if the sirens are but dog-whistles to be carried away upon the breeze.

To cite but a few, we have India, under Narenda Modi's 'Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with its 'Citizenship Amendment Bill,' which pointedly and highly-selectively offers asylum to persecuted minorities from neighbouring countries. We can see that the bill has been created in a manner to exclude Muslims, and that it has effectively opened the door to consequent escalating religious persecution. Modi, as have other populists, recognises that there is strength to be gleaned from carefully targeted persecution.

Meanwhile the 'rise' of Bolsonaro in Brazil has enabled various resource-extraction interested parties to further persecute a whole wealth of Amazonian minorities, favouring 'slash and burn,' and 'escalating logging' of the globe's most extensive remaining rainforest over any kind of respect and protection for the peoples that may reside therein. Brazil, more so than any other nation, has given rise to the phrase, 'the World's on fire!' Myopic in the extreme, but then populism requires more than a fair degree of short-termism.

Australian President, Scott Morrison, worryingly elected despite his woeful grasp of the global climatic situation, quite Trumpesque with that lump of coal grasped so vacantly in his fist, seemed almost to welcome the coastal blaze that quickly engulfed the east coast of 'his' nation. Fortunate indeed then, that the flip side of this climatic emergency has been the record deluge that has recently swamped Sydney and New South Wales. Why, one can almost imagine a half-formed 'thought' bouncing about inside his immense echo chamber of a skull! Affected residents- those who have not perished- have been heard to call the man, "an idiot!" His critics tend to be those adversely affected, or those blessed with the powers of constructive thought, but not generally those employed in the upper echelons of the Australian Coal Board (ACB), or from amongst his populist 'supporters.'

I have, in recent times, devoted much time to highlighting Israel's apartheid politics, so will not dwell overly upon that nation's shameful manoeuvrings, either within the country's internationally-regarded-as-illegal borders or further afield. It almost goes without need of mention that Benjamin Netanyahu's persecution of Palestinians must be regarded as being the actions of yet another populist government, and rather more 'deserving' of closer observation than many of its allies. Israel, 'better' than any other nation, seems to have mastered the dark arts of dabbling in other government's affairs.

More cumbersome, fingers in surely the greatest number of international pies, over the Atlantic Ocean barely a day passes without the US president further seeking to cement his place as easily the most populist president in living memory, to whom the USA has yet fallen prey. The US's internationally questioned or condemned dealings with Israel should be drawing the closer attentions of all concerned global citizens. Meanwhile, inside the its borders, the angry rednecks appear to have quickly grown accustomed to misinformation peddled as whatever the president on-a-whim currently requires. The world watches the president being rightfully impeached, the world knows the man to have abused and likely raped women, and the world watches him walk free and laugh in the face of justice! Populists elsewhere have looked on and are quickly learning the tricks of the trade.

And then there's the UK, currently spluttering along in the US's slipstream, eager to learn and to more frequently exercise the power of 'fake news,' or the lie! It seems that, in barely the blink of an eye, the UK has transformed from a nation where the general population was being increasingly misinformed at the behest of a shrinking elite, to one where 'our' PM's deployment of 'the lie' is so frequent as to have become the preferred political form of discourse.

And yet, all of these nations would call themselves democracies. How so?

And now we need again, to step up close, and to investigate specifically our own nation, although 'own' seems such an inappropriate prefix these days.

The hidden coup requires, more than anything else, an element of control of the means of dispersing information- enough of it- and it requires also time. Time enough that the bloody corpses (like those of Pinochet's coup) might be made a little less obvious, might not pile up so! But this on its own is not enough, it also requires the right levers to be pulled, and that these levers might, where necessary, set one part of a nation against another part. The device has been in operation for eons, coined formerly as 'divide and rule!' The premise is the same, but the parameters have evolved.

Thatcher understood parameters, which is why she so swiftly set about tampering with them. She understood that only an idiot electorate would willingly vote against their better interests, and for her Conservatives, so she set about a program of 'creative' accountancy, bribery, and variable boundary changes. This was really where the dismantling of the Welfare State began. She utilised the nation's assets, small things at first, like British Aerospace. Then, impatient to sell more of what was not her's to sell, the nation lost Jaguar, British Telecom, and all British Gas interests. 'Tell Sid,' was the word on the street- 'Sid' was the archetypal grasping British lesser-thinker of that era. Next it was British Steel, British Petroleum, Rolls Royce, British Airways, Water and Electricity. Perhaps wary of unsettling too many of the nation's clearer thinkers, the NHS was gradually 'introduced' to the concept of the 'internal market.' For 'internal market' imagine a more covert form of privatisation, to be yet further morphed at the end of the millennium, under Blair's New Labour hatcheted upgrade of the Tory 'Private Finance Initiative' (PFI). But that was to come later.

Back in the 1980s, in order to pillage quite so swiftly, Thatcher was going to need to control certain elements within the media; newspapers such as the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the News of the World, The Times, the Financial Times, the Telegraph, not every newspaper's owner or owners was/were quite on board, but the majority were there or thereabouts. The 'free press' we still tend to term this bunch of eager misinformants. Those journalists who wished not to incur the wrath of editors such as Kelvin MacKenzie (he of Hillsborough repute), or wishing to retain their positions of employment, were swiftly knocked into line!

British Coal, Powergen and National Power, British Rail followed the rest in the mighty conflagration; everything must go! And it pretty much did!

Chief amongst those charged with misinforming the general public was, and still is, a certain Rupert Murdoch, owner (then) of the 'News of the World' (1968) and (still) the 'Sun' newspaper (1969) and chief in command, eventually and amongst others, of the likes of Kelvin MacKenzie (Sun 1981) and Piers Morgan (Sun 1988). It would be naive to assume Murdoch, an Australian, to have concentrated all of his efforts upon the UK's political landscape; far from it, he has been busy upon both sides of the Atlantic, also back at home in Australia. Such dealings though have enabled him to dabble more powerfully in the UK's politics. Branching out exponentially- a great deal of 'you scratch my back' trading- his empire now wields greater clout than do a number of smallish nations. His and Sky's 'partial monopoly' (oxymoron) of the UK's sport has seen Sky taking one meaty cut of the gambling cartels blood-money-profits. Suicides as a  direct consequence of gambling debts are disputed, of course they are, so by design are partially obscured. But, if we take the average estimate of annual deaths then we have 450 per annum; projecting this back over the last decade would give us 4,500 deaths. Obviously, the data has been kept deliberately 'muddy,' but then that's true of the wider mental health issue. We might assume then that the figure could be considerably greater!

Murdoch has been a major horsefly in the ointment of democratic due process for longer than the average Brit has been alive. Since his initial interference in Western politics Murdoch has greased and threatened his way into favour with all manner of individuals who in turn have been manoeuvring to exert heavy influence upon the UK's hierarchical structures. All have come and gone and yet the man just refuses to 'die.' He has never presented as a philanthropist nor an egalitarian figure, yet has seldom shied away from seeking to wield his immense political clout to mislead or to bully. If one turns one's face into the Whitehall wind and listens very carefully is it just possible that one might pick up on the icy fear that yet another of the man's dark disciples, Rebecca Brooks- editor of News of the World (2000-2003) and the Sun (2003-2009)- might claw herself unto the ascendancy for the next director general of the BBC?

Brook's reputation follows her around like bluebottles around a corpse, but her might and influence, under the auspices of her mentor, Murdoch, has thus far kept her on this side of the prison bars, unlike some of her former employees-. Imagine the favours that such a role might do for the man's media empire!

The Mainstream Media (MSM) may be the virtual plaything of just a tiny handful of billionaires, yet still the orchestrators of the secret coup are not quite happy with the levels of influence they are able to exert. One of the few more honest journalistic homes, the 'i' newspaper, has recently been bought up by the owners of the Daily Mail, for just under £50 million, whilst the BBC's deputy political editor, John Pienaar, has recently quit the corporation in order to take up another post in the Murdoch empire, at Times Radio. A few of us might be aware of the fact that in 1933, when the German electorate were last permitted to vote in that decade, just under 50% of the voting population actually voted for one Adolph Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party. The persuasive powers were a tad more 'hands on,' but then the UK's not currently beating a path in the opposite direction, is it?

If we are to identify just one from the mighty pillaging pile of Thatcher's acquisitions for the invisible coup, we could do no better that to cite her sell off of council homes. She, or one of her henchmen/women termed this act as 'right to buy.' Properties were undervalued, giving due process to the claim that the sell-off was far more about the redistribution of wealth, than it was the acquisition of further monies for government to utilise. If we think about it for the briefest of moments we soon recognise that it was never intended to 'do as it said on the tin!' Naturally many families did choose to purchase their council home, indeed who wouldn't choose to do so? It was really quite deviously clever. But it was also outrageously wrong! One of her then infamous think tanks will have projected that many of the homes would have swiftly been sold on, or else repurposed as investment properties. Thus was was born the landlord strata, another parameter was duly altered. If only someone in the inner sanctum could arrange to devalue people's pensions. Oh, they did didn't they!

Conservative chancellor Norman Lamont's cut, from 25% to 20%, the tax relief given to pension funds, Advance Corporation Tax (ACT), and, in doing so, significantly weakened the UK's pensions. The later New Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown chose to abolish tax relief altogether, enabling Blair's government to snaffle a whopping £5.4 billions per annum, yet causing, in part, thousands of pension funds to crumble quickly into the dust. Sometimes it can be difficult to separate some of the more callous Thatcherite acts, from those later repurposed under Blair's Tory-lites.

Pertinent to this conundrum, there are two points highly-worthy of consideration. Firstly, prior to Blair's first election victory he is known to have held 'closed door' talks with Rupert Murdoch, whereupon it has been speculated that a swing in support, from the 'Sun' newspaper, from the Tories to New Labour, greatly assisted the result. The subject matter discussed remains a mystery. Secondly, Blair is now an immensely wealthy man. His business empire is routinely estimated to be worth in excess of £60 millions; his Windrush Ventures 'company' has tax affairs so obscure, thus dubious, that the Guardian newspaper for years was offering a cash reward to anyone who might be able to untangle the web. Blair was also a significant factor in Labour's most recent election defeat... not unduly curious, in the light of his monetary situation!

The serious downgrading of the UK's pension funds, when coupled with a wholesale reduction in council and other social housing, by design we could say, brought about the 'property portfolio' generation. It enabled an increased upward pressure always upon the housing market, regardless of the real worth of houses. It generated also a boom in the developer mentality; the TV channels are saturated with such ideology!

It also brought about a great deal of 'red-tape-cutting,' as UK governments quickly came to frame the idea. Smaller homes, with fewer safeguards or worthwhile guarantees, but a great many little 'boxes.' Companies prepared to indulge in a deal of unofficial corner-cutting, those such as RG Carter, threw up construction sites almost overnight. Banks initially allowed mortgages to spiral from a secure 3.5 times salary, to six, seven times salary. Individuals wishing to secure a home were driven to increasingly elaborate upon their abilities to 'keep up payments,' checks became less thorough. In the absence of council homes, rents spiralled and housing costs exploded! A new strata of slum landlords began to exert downward pressure upon checks and safeguards. And homelessness became normalised!

The Office for National Statistics estimated homelessness related deaths (England and Wales) in 2018 to be 726, a 22% increase from the previous year. Obviously this is another shameful statistic, so we know that it is never going to be dwelt upon in the Commons. The (homelessness deaths) figures for the years going back to 2013 state the total number of victims to be 3,353. Roughly projecting this rise back a full decade would bring this bloody total to 4,784 premature deaths.

But the UK's shareholder generation has been born and one of the things about the larger shareholders is that voting records seem to suggest that they frequently value profit over welfare. Another parameter change? The deaths may intermittently feature in the UK's media but the ties with the skewing of the housing market are invariably made more tenuous, and those with longer-projected Conservative goals even more so!

The UK's Mainstream Media (MSM)- headed by highly-manipulative figures such as Paul Dacre- has openly embraced the nation's transformation. Shock jocks and emboldened hate mongers such as Katie Hopkins daily snipe at dissenting-voices from their given platforms. It is said that a character such as Piers Morgan, charading outrageously as a relayer of news, is able to exert far greater national influence through his twitter feed than through his also highly abrasive TV roles. He comments not so much through any discernible insight or evident understanding, merely 'opinion' born of his fledgling years under Murdoch's wing, often forcibly Hopkinesque! Meanwhile the greater bastions of variable impartiality, the BBC and Channel 4 are under attack for daring to ask the 'wrong questions' of the current PM. Surely what the nation now requires- diametrically-opposed to the ideology of the unelected Dominic Cummings- is a great deal less of the MiniTrump, twittersphere-emboldened PM, a great deal more in the manner of informed and open political debate!

Any three-word slogans shouted from any podium is never going to inform, but then the quiet coup requires nothing so much as an absence of considered thought. Should Mr Johnson now too-often be pressed to elaborate, with full and proper rhetoric, then maybe the lies will not sit so comfortably. A two-way conversation might cause the man to implode! "There is no press here!" can only feature on national TV if there is.

Deregulation in the housing market has compromised the UK's stock of new homes, many of them. Seventy-two people died as a result of corner-cutting at Grenfell Tower (2017) and the government slight-of-hand seems to have created nothing so much as distance between the perpetrators of this tragedy and those now seeking justice. I doubt that there are reliably compiled figures yet, upon the number of deaths brought about as a consequence of deregulated or unregulated building practices- isn't this, anyway, the sort of thing that our MSM prefers to report of other nations? 'Seventy-two' maybe the headline figure, but the lesser numbers of victims are going to add up to something far greater. Perhaps Johnson's governance will see the 72 reduced, although his fire-service cuts likely contributed, while the true figure of fatalities in the wider nation remains currently out of reach.

The social media that seems to be distracting the UK's population, or else seriously reducing its powers of concentration, has given far greater weight to a quickly dispatched three-word slogan. Stumbling half-aware along the nation's pavements, there are citizens today who do not have time to stop and read or to listen. The new parameters are far more given to trading quick insults, heaven forbid someone might compose a whole paragraph, or bother with a bit of research, prior to wading in! Instead, it appears the nation's gearing down to leave the bigger things to those with the plans, then to find out, when the landscape's changed and it's too late, what those plans were.

Maybe that's why there's such reluctance, on the part of government, to tinker with the bigger cogs, when so many of the smaller ones are dancing to the required tune? Never mind the nation's ballooning issues with mental health! In 2018 in the UK there were 6,859 suicides, a rise of 10.9% on the previous year. The rate amongst under 25s rose by 23.7% in the same period, reaching 730 highly-premature deaths in 2018. Even if we are to be very generous and to project backwards suggesting a constant of +10.9% per annum, this would still give us the scandalous total of 40,797 deaths over a decade. As we are being constantly informed by various mental health groups, the rise is accelerating, so the true figures again are likely to be considerably greater.

Also highly pertinent to the theme of distractedness we have the national obsession with the motorcar, or perhaps the motorbike. I understand that Johnson has sought to grab the moral high-ground, and it is to be hoped that this is where he believes himself to be. But this requires that we gloss over the government's record, Johnson's government's record, of the past decade. The clamour for increased public transport, reduced car usage, has been constant- constant and constantly ignored! Buses and trains, trains especially, are invariably overly expensive and often overcrowded. Both are frequently late and otherwise unreliable. Compared to the rest of Western Europe, tickets purchased on the day, the UK's public transport averages out at the most expensive, far lower in the ratings when it comes to reliability! More shareholdings again, profits competing against the provision of more efficient services. As we know, the parameters have changed!

Johnson enjoys the spot light, he is a man of ego more than almost anything else, if we discount 'disinformation.' But, is it not more the case that the industry has been driving the man? Finally there are whispers of progress, now that the motor industry is gearing up to replace the cars with different cars. Why else would it be the case that the modified exhaust has, for an age, featured far more prominently than has modified fuel consumption, or indeed speed? Johnson's clean air act, whilst Mayor of London, seems far more to have driven up the sale of new cars than it has driven down the scale of inner-city pollution. Air pollution in the UK is now linked to 40,000 premature deaths annually! 40,000! 

Of course, it would be unfair to attribute quite all of those deaths purely (or impurely) to traffic pollution, there are all of those wood-burning stoves, and, somewhat ironically, various cleaning products. There's smoking, cooking gases, air fresheners, ol' king coal and other industrial contributors. Still, it is reckoned that staying indoors in the capital (for example) is less harmful to one's lungs than is venturing outside, which is where the traffic pollution tends to be. I guess it would be just about impossible to break down the 40,000, into specific forms or combinations of pollution. Even so, I'm going to stick my neck out and to strongly suggest that traffic pollution features significantly more so than say 'air fresheners.' Imagine what the breakdown might look like for the last decade! If we attributed merely half of all the premature deaths to traffic pollution- surely easily the most significant contributor- we'd end up with something in the region of 200,000 deaths that a sensible outlay upon public transport might have prevented.

The secret coup may not always require that people be despatched upon the streets- although 'give the police enough powers and who knows?- but the numbers do still tend to stack up, if not so the actual bodies!

The UK's NHS is systematically being atomised by the increasing number of sniping PFI 'health service providers,' has been for the previous forty years. If one is unfortunate enough to have to avail oneself of the health service, or to become temporarily, or more permanently, reliant upon the service, it is now almost impossible to keep track of which aspects of one's treatment are within and which are now effectively, and by some measures, outside of the NHS. I recently underwent a two-day hospital stay, during which I was moved through half-a-dozen different beds (or locations). I'm guessing that administratively a lot of boxes were ticked, but I still came out the other end with the same (diminished) or another infection. A lot of admin, but 'health-wise' the change was rather too minimal for the patient's (my) better requirements.

Even so, the NHS remains one of the envies of the world. It is run, for the most part, by caring and highly competent staff, many of whom have just been served up one massive kick in the teeth, in the form of the referendum (corrupted) result. But the 'internal market' increasingly now requires that hospital corners are far more to do with 'financial cutting' than 'bed making.' In the field of compromised health even a perfect system is going to witness its fair share of mortality. In the high pressure disciplines of saving, repairing and improving lives, the greater the corner cutting the greater the mortality rates! How could it reasonably be any other way? In 2017 it was estimated that up to 9,000 NHS deaths a year could have been prevented. Search for 'NHS deaths' and one will find the Daily Mail gunning on the part of the invisible coup, the angle for covert privatisation barely hidden from even the vaguely discerning eye.

Given that there is no standard definition of 'avoidable death' the figure must remain a very approximate one. Different NHS Trusts (frequently another unhelpful administrative intrusion) will have different judgement criteria. I doubt that any trust currently holds such detailed data, as to be able to surmise which deaths occurred through actual human error and which were brought about through other constraints, such as time or monetary considerations. Also, had I (for example) failed to survive my hospital stay (most unlikely), and had this been down to human error, quite how would this statistic have been recorded? 'Death through doctor error,' or 'death through time or monetary constrains imposed upon said doctor?' If we are outrageously generous and we attribute one whole quarter of these 9,000 deaths to wholly human error, then the figure for the decade still pans out at 67,500 deaths for the glorious invisible coup!

But, for all of their neoliberal ideology, this government continues to resist the pull of the big narcotics grab. We can speculate as to why this might be the case, perhaps they worry that the element of control they seek to maintain over the population could be threatened. Perhaps they fear that there are answers within cannabinoids that might undermine the mighty grasp that the pharmaceutical giants seek to gain over all medication? "Cannabis, the gateway drug!" it has so often been argued. But they're no strangers to the exploitation of 'gateway' thinking. If one should for a moment doubt their plans for the NHS then one need look no further than dentistry. NHS dentistry, that remnant shell of its former self, now seems to function not so much as a health benefit as a gateway to private treatment. If one is able to locate a dentist still operating under the umbrella term 'NHS,' then one should 'pray' that the NHS side of the practice doesn't simply set things in motion for the 'private design' in the adjoining room.

It has been said that one should judge any nation state, not by how well it looks after its better-off citizens, but by how well it caters for the less fortunate. Of course it's often been said, it's clearly a given. Even in the most outrageously demonic countries those at the top of society are being well catered for. If the character's are far enough up the societal ladder, then the state will ship someone overseas, should the state deem it 'necessary.' The world's final failed attempt at trialling General Pinochet occurred when Chile, then still wriggling free of his misrule, shipped him to Thatcher's Britain, that he might undergo back surgery. Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garson indicted the brute for, amongst other human rights violations, 94 counts of torture. He was arrested but subsequently released under Thatcher's drooling guidance. Even in international 'waters' money and the favour of fellow monsters might afford the wealthy-enough international protection that they remain almost unaccountable.

In the UK the government's commitment to the care of the less-well-off, the most vulnerable, has been slipping steadily backwards for twenty years. Under the awful premiership of Ms May, following on from the awful one of Cameron, and prior to the currently-even-more-awful one of Johnson, the role out of Universal Credit currently caps this intended decline. The 'credit' was sold to the nation as multifaceted, miss-sold as 'umbrella,' and indeed it is multifaceted. It aims to reduce (disguise) unemployment figures, to force unwell individuals into low-quality (zero-hour) non-contracts, to undermine the criteria by which those judged to be unwell qualify for welfare, and to cut back significantly upon welfare payments. It is the case now that the majority of those currently receiving Universal Credit is working families, where one (single parent) or both partners are in full-time employment. These families may well also be those who are increasingly reliant upon the UK's blossoming food-banks! When the figures for subsequent Universal Credit related suicides and other fatalities become more obvious will the victims become further 'mental health' statistics, or will a new category emerge? Another small alteration to the approaching 320,000 deaths?

Likely Pinochet also notched up more than a handful of additional related deaths, on top of the recognised 40,000 to date. Pinochet eventually reaped the international contempt that his reign of terror deserved, albeit far too late! One wonders if the human species' far more covert record (UK or internationally) will ever be so honestly acknowledged?

As Cambridge Analytica came to realise, when one is hiding something of importance from any electorate, one only ever needs to hide it from just enough of the population. Maybe, in the case of our current government, 'hidden from just enough of the population, for just long enough?'

Alternatively, we might more-collectively all just wake up!