STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
UK Surveillance State Deflates?
By Staff News & Analysis - May 19, 2010

The most radical redistribution of power from the state to the people for 200 years is to be made by the new coalition Government, Nick Clegg is to claim … The public will be asked what laws they want ripped up, in far-reaching reforms designed to put back "faith in politics", the Deputy Prime Minister will say. The reordering of power will sweep away Labour legislation and new criminal offences deemed to have eroded personal freedom. … It will involve the end of the controversial ID cards scheme, the scrapping of universal DNA databases – in which the records of thousands of innocent people have been stored – and restrictions placed on Internet records. The use of CCTV cameras will also be reviewed. Dubbed the "Great Reform Act", the measures will close down the ContactPoint children's database. Set up by Labour last year, it includes detailed information on all 11 million youngsters under 18. In addition, schools will not be able to take a child's fingerprint without parental permission. In an attempt to protect freedom of speech, ministers will review libel laws, while limits on peaceful protest will be removed. Mr. Clegg said the Government wanted to establish "a fundamental resettlement of the relationship between state and citizen that puts you in charge". – UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: We have heard you, British voters, and now we will act to rein in Labour's laws.

Free-Market Analysis: We are not sure that Britain's coalition government will do anything, ultimately, other than expand the state in ways that Labour was not able to do toward the end of its latest disastrous era. But that is not the point of this analysis. We cover power elite memes, and these dominant social themes are shifting right before our eyes – and yours. The mainstream media along with political announcements are a kind of semaphore of power elite intentions and distress. And, as we have reported previously, we think the power elite is feeling fairly stressed these days (as stressed as anybody can be with a couple of hundred trillion in the bank).

Anyway, we think the language being used by this new British coalition is most interesting. One can almost watch the political elite (and the power elite itself) scrambling back (rhetorically, anyway) from the Orwellian nightmare that Britain has become under Labour, its economic crack-up artist Gordon Brown, its war-monger Tony Blair, etc. This would be expected anyway (for it is the way elite promotions work – regime change is supposed to pretend to bring "new thinking" to tortured democracies) but nonetheless, the frankness of the language that is being used by this strange coalition of right and left wing politicians is surprising. As a site (the only one) that daily analyzes the dominant social themes of the power elite, we think this language means something. Something has changed – maybe a little, maybe a lot.

Before we move further into this analysis, let us provide some additional background. It's no secret (given that we write about it regularly) that we believe the power elite is losing at least some control of its fear-based promotions as a result of the Internet. Not to blow our own horn (or not too much) but we have a pretty good track record over the past two years (and actually long before that for different publications).

• The Bell's staff reports were perhaps the first to state publicly mid-last year that the elite's central banking meme was in trouble, specifically the Federal Reserve in America – problems with credibility that have now spread abroad to the EU. And, yes, the Fed is in trouble, having bled credibility and dissipated its small store of good will among the American public during the financial crisis of the past few years. Many simply don't believe anymore that a small group of men can fix the price of money and then print fiat dollars out of thin air to support the public "economic good."

• The Bell was also among the first, if not the first, to report that the authoritarian Chinese government had a big problem on its hands with inflation and that generally the Chinese economy at its most powerful levels was a kind of communist hoax – a Potemkin Village of banks and industrial firms that masquerade as competitive enterprises. This, too, has been borne out over time with others reporting the same thing. (And please note, dear reader, the Chinese have yet to get a handle on their real-estate inflation, which is actually symptomatic of a much larger problem that is bound to explode sooner or later in a fiat-money blow-off.)

• The Bell was among the first publications to analyze in some depth the reality of the American Tea Party movement, its Sarah "Palinization" and generally the schism between its conservative and libertarian factions.

• The Bell anticipated by several years the ongoing problems of the EU and predicted the acrimony between Europe's various tribes (ie: Germany and Greece).

• The Bell has been ahead of the curve in predicting that the war in Afghanistan is not going well and has explained why America and its NATO allies (the ones that are left) will have a tough slog pacifying 40 million Pashtuns increasingly exercised about the destruction of their way of life and of civilian deaths.

• The Bell was one of the first publications to explain in detail how the global-warming promotion worked and how it generally paralleled the Bell's larger presentation of the exercise of elite dominant social themes.

Our heads are not swelled despite the above results! We know there are other alternative sites with sterling forecasting results – perhaps better than ours, or more practical or detailed. And, yes, we know that power elite promotions are extraordinarily stubborn things that persist simply because of the money-power behind them. But our point here is that none of the mainstream press (so far we are aware) has anywhere near this record of forecasting.

Of course, we are not very big resource-wise, compared to multi-billion dollar outfits like CNN and Fox, either. Yet like some other alternative news and analysis sites, we regularly accomplish one important thing that the mainstream media simply cannot: Our reporting proceeds from fundamentally REALISTIC analysis of the way the world works. We do not duck the obvious reality that there is a historical power elite and that its fear-based promotions have come into conflict with Internet truth-telling in the 21st century. We regularly acknowledge the reality of free-markets and what drives the great truths of Austrian (free-market) economics towards inevitable victory over regulatory manipulations and central bank price manipulations.

And what now? What do make of this latest series of pronouncements from the new British government? Hm-mm. We think the elite is feeling the heat. The power elite in particular has been trying to drive Western society toward a far more authoritarian construct in the 2000s. We've been startled frankly by the level of aggression and naked manipulation this has entailed, especially given a blogosphere that quickly reports on and often rebuts the most obvious and evident promotions. But we sense some give now, some flex.

The power elite uses a Hegelian dialectic to position its fear-based promotions. And one can gain a pretty good perspective on how confident the elite is of its prospects by scrutinizing the positions that the elite via its mainstream news organizations is taking on both sides of a given argument. Based on this approach, we'd have to say that the elite is scrambling pretty hard away from the authoritarian side of the field at the moment. Many mainstream publications have seemingly turned far more querulous about central banking, about the EU, about the endless Anglo-American wars, about global warming, etc.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the elite has given up its authoritarian dreams – or is not in some cases near realizing them – only that its various tools, especially the mainstream media, have been acknowledging the changing conversation of the West and have, with varying degrees of efficiency begun to acknowledge the new conversation.

We try always in our analyses to be level-headed about the progress, if any, that is being made against power elite promotions. And given that we believe an elite has haunted the Western world's city-states since the advent of the Neolithic age, we don't think anyone can take us for sunny optimists. But we do see changes. The changes may be in large part rhetorical, but rhetoric is of absolute critical importance to the elite, which has spent billions if not trillions in trying to figure out the best ways to propagandize the citizens of (especially) the West.

Naked apes are above-all tool-using creatures, but the making and wielding of tools requires as a prerequisite an intense level of yapping. Humans talk everything to death, and if you can control the conversation, then you control share of mind and ultimately the actions that people take. Lose control of the conversation and you have lost most … if not all. And, yes, the elite is losing some of that control (at least currently).

When the elite-controlled conversation itself begins to change and when its political mouthpieces (Cameron and Clegg are surely two) begin to espouse freedom and free-markets – fewer laws and less governmental intrusion generally – then something is going on above business as usual. Again, it is only rhetoric, but the statements being made are fairly over-the-top. Is this new coalition really going to engage in "the most radical redistribution of power from the state to the people for 200 years?"

Here's some more from this Telegraph article:

In a speech in London [Clegg] will say: "This Government is going to transform our politics so the state has far less control over you, and you have far more control over the state. This Government is going to break up concentrations of power and hand power back to people, because that is how we build a society that is fair." He will describe the plans as "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes".

He will say that reform will not simply mean "a few new rules for MPs [or] the odd gesture or gimmick to make you feel a bit more involved". Mr. Clegg will announce that he wants to hear about which laws should be scrapped to roll back the state encroachment into people's lives. "As we tear through the statute book, we'll do something no government ever has: We will ask you which laws you think should go.

Because thousands of criminal offences were created under the previous government. Taking people's freedom away didn't make our streets safe. Obsessive law-making simply makes criminals out of ordinary people. So, we'll get rid of the unnecessary laws – and once they're gone, they won't come back. We will introduce a mechanism to block pointless new criminal offences." The measures to repeal so-called surveillance state laws will be included in next week's Queen's Speech.

Mr. Clegg will add: "It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide. It has to stop. "This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state. That values debate, that is unafraid of dissent."

Let us take stock, dear reader. Many power elite fear-based promotions (intended to consolidate wealth and increase the power of a handful of already intensely powerful people) have gone awry in the past few years as the Internet has made increasing inroads into the believability of these malevolent campaigns. And since the Internet and the ramifications of its truth-telling have really just got going, we would anticipate that the elite will have even more difficulty in the future than it has had in the immediate past.

Rhetoric is not all, but rhetoric is important, because it presages change that may actually occur. When the elite's mainstream media dialogue begins to shift, when the political rhetoric changes dramatically, when the facts on the ground begin to move radically away from acceptance of the elite's promotional messaging, then a trend is taking shape that may move things in a new direction. This is important to note as a citizens of the Anglo-American axis, of the West generally and certainly as an investor.

After Thoughts

In the 20th century one could bet with almost absolute certainty on any one of a number of elite campaigns and institutions. In the 21st century, such bets seem less certain. From global warming to the euro, to the EU itself, to central banking and fiat money, to stock and bond markets, and maybe (now) to the surveillance state and the industrial effluvia that provides its "services," nothing is seemingly as certain as it once was. Some may find this distressing.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
loading
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap