Not the last literary coffee klatsch

Four years ago a group of us gathered at Cafe 41 in Arcadia (Et in Arcadia ego) for a discussion of Christianity and literature, in imitation of the Oxford Inklings, except that they met in a pub, and we met in a cafe, so our gathering was more in the nature of a coffee klatsch, and for four years we met on the first Thursday of every month. Sometimes there were 3 or 4 of us, sometimes 8 or 10 -- the bigger numbers mainly during university vacations, when university lecturers (and students) could join us.

But one of our regular members was taken ill, and another died, and so it looked as though our fourth anniversary gathering today might be the last. So we had a "Meeting for Business", as the Quakers say, to discuss whether we should continue, and decided that we would. But we also thought that there must be more people in the Great City of Tshwane who liked the Oxford Inklings and their writings, and might like to chat about them, or the kind of things they talked about, over a cup of coffee. So if you are reading this and know anyone like that, please tell them about us.


This time we discussed quite an eclectic range of books, yet there also seemed to be a common theme. I had read one called The Horse Road (review here) about a horse-mad girl in Central Asia in the first century BC whose mother would not allow her to keep slaves as she herself had been a slave. They were nomadic horse breeders, and we talked about the Khoi of the Western Cape, who were originally nomadic pastoralists and moved around.

Janneke Weidema had been reading a book about the Sovietising of outer Mongolia, which she thought had similarities to the enclosure movement in England, perhaps related to a verse:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The Mongols too were nomadic pastoralists and the Soviet Russians had tried to force them to settle on collective farms and grow crops. I had not long ago read a book that dealt with the other end of that process, The last disco in Outer Mongolia.

Nick Middleton visited Mongolia in 1987 and in 1990, shortly before and shortly after the switch from Communist bureaucracy to a more liberal and democratic society. As a geographer on his first
visit he was working on hydrography, on his second he was planning for ecotourism. He catches a society in transition from one mode to another.

So Janneke had read a book relating to the beginning of the Bolshevik period, and I read read a couple relating to the end of it. But I had also read one relating to the middle of it, and that tied up a lot of loose ends. The book relating to the middle of it was Journey into Russia by Laurens van der Post -- see my review here, especially the last couple of paragraphs.

There was a common thread running through all of them -- in both communism and capitalism it was the common people who were being screwed by the bureaucrats, the apparatchiks, the managers, the MBAs. Whether it's the goose on the common, the pastures of the Khoi in the Western Cape or the Mongolian nomads, or the people who are being called on to pay ever more for electricity because of the follies of Eskom and the modern equivalent of enclosures -- land reform in South Africa. It's basically the same at root.

Van der Post put his finger on it when he wrote about the state and the collective farms of the USSR:

The revolution had worked a confidence trick on them all. They had revolted in order to have the land to themselves. But no sooner was the revolution consolidated than a far more inflexible landlord, the State, had taken it away from them again in the name of collectivization. And, judging by the show pieces I saw, there were few farmers in charge of farms. Party secretaries, accountants and factory foremen were the types one usually found in positions of command.

Back in the old days, when Eskom was Escom, the ESC, the Electricity Supply Commission, it was mainly run by engineers. In those days, the 1960s and 1970s, most electricity was generated from coal, and rather than transporting coal to the power stations, they built the power stations where the coal was, in what is now the Highveld of Mpumalanga, which came to be called "Kragveld" for that reason.

Then in the 1980s came the mania for privatisation (the Reagan/Thatcher years).  Escom was privatised and became Eskom, a State-Owned Enterprise (SOE), though since it was still owned by the State one could say it was semi-privatised. But the coal mines that the power stations were built on were fully privatised -- some of them ended up in the hands of the Guptas -- and they found it was more profitable to sell the coal overseas than to sell it to Eskom, and so Eskom had to buy coal where they could, often of the wrong quality and at vastly inflated prices. And the privatised Eskom was run by managers, by bureaucrats, not by engineers, just like the Soviet state and collective farms that Van der Post wrote about.

And so, as George Orwell wrote at the end of his fable Animal Farm, the ordinary animals looked from men to pigs, and from pigs to men, from capitalists to communists and from communists to capitalists, and could no longer tell the difference.

The marvels of privatisation

The really good thing about privatisation is that it provides more opportunities for income-generation, as this example shows - U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money | Reuters: (Reuters) -

Two judges pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting more than $2.6 million from a private youth detention center in Pennsylvania in return for giving hundreds of youths and teenagers long sentences.

Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, entered plea agreements in federal court in Scranton admitting that they took payoffs from PA Childcare and a sister company, Western PA Childcare, between 2003 and 2006.

The benefits of privatisation

Since the Reagan/Thatcher era of the 1980s many formerly public services have been privatised, and according to the "free enterprise" ideologists such a change must be welcomed as entirely beneficial. They would prefer that one didn't look at the drawbacks of unregulated free enterprise.

Why does the Mafia get involved in hauling garbage? - Slate Magazine:

Organized crime appears to have a hand in trash collection all over the world, from Naples to Tony Soprano's northern New Jersey. Why are gangsters always hauling garbage?

It's Mob Economics 101: Find a business that's easy to enter and lucrative to control. Criminal organizations make lots of money from drugs, human trafficking, and counterfeit goods, but creating a monopoly on garbage collection is attractive because the business itself is legal, and public contracts return big profits.

Something similar seems to have happened to things like public transport, for example (dare one say it?) the taxi "industry" in South Africa.

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration

It has long been known that bureaucratic language is diseased language, and this is just one of the latest instances of it

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration - Telegraph

Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration.

NHS health guidelines state clearly that drinking water helps avoid dehydration, and that Britons should drink at least 1.2 litres per day

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large."

The actual text, from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which has been discussed in the alt.usage.english newsgroup is a true masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation, a classic example of bureaucratese.

For reduction of disease risk claims, the beneficial physiological effect (which the Regulation requires to be shown for the claim to be permitted) is the reduction (or beneficial alteration) of a risk factor for the development of a human disease (not reduction of the risk of disease). However, undersupply with water would not be considered as a risk factor for dehydration (the disease) in this context as the beneficial alteration of the factor (increased consumption of water) is not a beneficial physiological effect as required by the Regulation.

Can you make sense of that?

I can't.

But the bigger danger, it seems to me, is that while we are straining at the gnat of bureaucratic jargon, we can overlook the camel of the privatisation of water implied in the term "drink manufacturers".

The claim that I refuse to accept is not the one complained of by the bureaucrats. It is the claim that there are "drink manufacturers" who are in a position to make such claims in the first place.

The only "drinks manufacturer" I recognise in that sense is God, who makes rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.

Atheists who reject that as naive "creationism" are, of course, free to disagree. Perhaps for them "drinks manufacturers" are a product random evolution. Viva Coca Cola! Viva! Viva capitalism! Viva!

Neil Clark: Why we should nationalise our airports

The privatisation mania of the 1980s keeps coming back to bite us, especially in the matter of public transport and communications.

Neil Clark: Why we should nationalise our airports:

"'The government's objective with this bill is to liberate airport management from political interference … to enable airport operators to respond to the needs of their customers, rather than to the shifting priorities of politicians and officials,' declared the Earl of Caithness as he moved the Thatcher government's 1986 airports bill in the House of Lords, which was soon to become the 1986 Airports Act. The privatisation of the state-owned British Airports Authority (BAA), we were told, would ensure that 'better services are provided for all airline passengers'.

I wonder if the Earl of Caithness (or even Margaret Thatcher herself), would have the courage to pop down to Hounslow and tell that to the tens of thousands of holidaymakers stranded at the BAA-owned Heathrow airport for the past three days.

I wrote some other stuff here yesterday, which got lost when my internet connection dies, as it has been doing for the last 10 days. Don't feel like reconstituting it today.

Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law

I've been greatly suspicious of the mania for privatisation that began in the Reagan/Thatcher years, and has continued ever since. But this must surely be one of the most egregious examples. Private prison industry helped draft Arizona immigration law - War Room - Salon.com:

When it comes to creating demand for a previously unnecessary service and making a profit by any means necessary, you can't beat the private sector. So no one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship). NPR investigated the prison industry's role in drafting and passing SB 1070. It's pretty depressing.

Time to curb the ‘asset strippers and robbers’ who ruin the financial markets, say archbishops -Times Online

For more than thirty years the ideology of neoliberalism has spread throughout the world. It was enthusiastically propagated in the Reagan-Thatcher years and led to the mania for privatisation, which continues in South Africa and has led to the deterioration of our roads, the quality of our water, and many other things.

Church leaders have been slow to speak out about these things. It takes a well-publicised financial crisis to get people like the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to start using words like "idolatry" when referring to it in public.

Time to curb the ‘asset strippers and robbers’ who ruin the financial markets, say archbishops -Times Online:

Leaders of the Church of England launched fierce attacks on the world’s stock market traders last night, condemning them as bank robbers and asset strippers and calling for a judicial review into Britain’s financial services.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York demanded stronger regulation and an end to speculation and living on debt.

Dr Rowan Williams spoke out in defence of Karl Marx, defending key aspects of his critique of capitalism and gave a warning that society was running the risk of idolatry in its relationship with wealth.

(Hat-tip to Fr David MacGregor)

The hidden and unintended consequences of the privatisation mania are now beginning to appear. Mutual building societies and insurance cooperatives went commercial, bribing thier members with "windfall" shares (actually, it was only part of their investment received in advance -- they were mortgaging their future value to external shareholders). Some of them, like the Old Mutual, continue to use the word "mutual" in their names, to deceive the public. The Old Mutual should actually be called the "New Commercial". One result of this can be seen in the collapse of Northern Rock in Britain.

Another unintended and unforeseen consequence of the privatisation mania can be seen in the deterioration of the quality of South Africa's water.

News - Environment: SA water quality is fast deteriorating:

South Africa's water quality is fast deteriorating but the shrinking scientific and engineering capacity to counter this is emerging as the 'real crisis' to strike the country.

This is according to Dr Anthony Turton, a senior water researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), who maintains that up to 50 percent of municipalities 'do not even have one qualified engineer' on their staff...

"The original work for that was done in the 1980s in massive programmes based at the CSIR," says Turton. "Those programmes generated many PhD graduates, but also did the primary science on which future management will be based.

"Those programmes are no longer in existence and this is a national crisis of note. We need to recover the bits and pieces we can and then develop new national capacity," says Turton...

"Nowhere else in the world is this happening so we cannot turn to other countries and say: 'Please help us'. We as a nation will be required to solve this problem as a nation. This is where national science councils come in. They are national assets, but the current funding models are so restrictive that their potential is being reduced and the capacity they have is being privatised."

The privatisation of national resources like the CSIR was begun under the National Party government in the 1980s, and has continued under the Thatcherist policies of the ANC. One of the reasons that our water supply has deteriorated under privatisation is that nobody stands to make a lot of money out of water research.

And only when it is actually staring them in the face do Christian leaders publicly speak out, and then mostly against the symptoms, not about the causes of the disease, which has been growing unchecked in the Western world since the 1980s, and metastatising throughout the world through globalisation.

The benefits of privatisation

Walton Pantland, discussing the recent postal strike in the UK, notes some of the benefits of privatisation in Red Star Coven: It's not just about your letters arriving late.

It is not only Britain that has suffered from this process, because the Thatcherist policies of the ANC (and of the Nats before them) have led to a similar process here in South Africa. The Nats introduced toll roads, and the ANC government is extending the system. Life expectancy and literacy rates in some parts of Africa, because the free market enthusiasts demand that governments spend less on health care and education.

Health and healing - private profit from public misery

Pickled Bushman reviews Michael Moore's latest documentary: Sicko (or American refugees in Cuba) showing the ravages wrought by the privatisation mania on the American health-care system, which has slipped from being among the best in the world to 32nd place, just above Slovenia.

The same thing has struck South Africa, since neoliberalism took off in the Reagan/Thatcher years.

Actually the problem is not so much privatisation as commercialisation. One of the things that caused a huge slide in South African health-care services was the nationalisation of all church hospitals in the "homelands" in 1973. This has been documented by Dr Darryl Hackland, who had been Medical Superintendent of Bethesda Hospital (Methodist) in Zululand, and after it was nationalised became a senior official in the KwaZulu Department of Health. The church hospitals were run by "private enterprise", but the difference was that they were not run for profit.

In the 1980s there was a reprivatisation of health services, but this did not take place in the poorer areas of the country, but in the rich ones. The government at the time (under PW Botha) followed the Reagan/Thatcher ideology, and encouraged the formation of commercial clinics, in which doctors owned shares. It was privatisation for profit.

Medical Aid schemes have been infected as well. They were formerly socialist bodies, owned and run by their members, as a form of mutual aid. Now many of them are owned by outside shareholders. They no longer speak of members, but "customers". They no longer provide health care, but "products". They advertise, and refer to themselves as "financial services providers". Beware of any "financial services provider" that tries to sell you a "product". Whenever anyone uses the term "product" for a service, financial or otherwise, it is a pretty sure indication that they are simply out to rip you off. They offer "rewards", like club memberships, and cards that give you discounts in stores -- but be sure of one thing, you are paying for these things, even if you don't use them, and what these frivolities mean is that you get less health care for your money, because your money is being wasted on advertising and promotion and putting money into the pockets of shareholders.

The ANC when it came to power in 1994 has basically continued the policies of the National Party under PW Botha. There have been ritual pronouncements to placate their alliance partners, like Cosatu, but basically nothing has changed.

One thing they could do, for a start, would be to set up a tax structure so that not-for-profit mutual Medical Aid schemes are not taxed, and that commercial ones, making profits for outside shareholders, and ones that run superfluous "incentive" schemes not related to their core business are also taxed. (The same should be done for mutual building societies and life assurance providers.)

Also, "faith-based" and other non-profit private health service providers should be encouraged in a similar way.

I can't speak for other faiths, but from a Christian point of view, Jesus sent out his disciples to preach and to heal, and said "Freely ye have received, freely give." Before 1973, when the provincial governments subsidised church hopspitals, they got a better service for their money than they did when the central government nationalised the services, and then later devolved them to the "homeland" governments. Why? Because Christian doctors and nurses went to work in those hospitals, not for the sake of financial gain, but because of a desire to obey the command of Jesus to "heal the sick". When the government took them over, they found it difficult to get staff willing to work in the mainly rural areas where the church hospitals were to be found, and resorted to using army conscript medical students. Secular doctors were out for money, and only wanted to work in the big cities, where they could specialise in the diseases of the rich.

Doctors in private practice did, of course, have to charge fees in order to make a living. Even healers have to eat. But when they worked on their own, or in small partnerships, they could treat the poor and needy for reduced fees, or even, in hard cases, waive the fees altogether. Where, however, they work for clinics run as for-profit companies, this is much more difficult when the fees are paid to the company, and every reduction of fees for poor patient means a reduced profit for the shareholders.

The Orthodox Church has several saints who were medical doctors, and known as "anargyri" (silverless ones), usually translated into English as "unmercentary doctors". Among them are three pairs of brothers called Cosmas and Damian, perhaps because the later ones consciously followed the example of the earlier ones.

Until now the ANC government has done little more than try to force mercenary doctors, clinics and medical aid scemes to serve the poor. But it might do better to encourage the unmercenary ones, for example by differential taxes, as suggested above.