Showing posts with label Junkyard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Junkyard. Show all posts

Tuesday, 6 September 2022

Thing


A Thing that looks like a Police Box, standing in a Junkyard….

It can move anywhere in Time and Space….



“…..it shifts shape again and comes up in the form of Christ The Carpenter
and Says, 
“Do You Know Me?”
and Kirk said, 
“Oh, now I know Who You Are.

 And He Says, 
‘How Strange You Didn't Know
These Other Forms of Me.’


Really, what Gene had written was that this 'thing' was sent forth to lay down The Law; to communicate The Law of The Universe, and that as time goes on The Law needs to be reinterpreted

And at that time 2,000 years ago, The Law was interpreted by this Carpenter image. As time went on, The Law was meant to be reinterpreted, and The Christ figure was meant to reappear in different forms. 

But This Machine malfunctioned, and it was like a phonograph record that got caught in a groove and kept grooving back, grooving back, grooving back. It's important to understand the essence of all this and reinterpret it as time goes on. 

This was a little heavy for Paramount. It was meant to be strong and moving, and I'm sorry it never got made."

"I handed them a script and they turned it down," Roddenberry stated.




“As we wrap up here and I sweep my head clear at last of all things Green Lantern, one reader (hi, Colin McKenzie!) talked about feeling understandably uncomfortable with the ‘cop’ aspect, the stated ‘police procedural’ nature of the book, particularly at a time when in both the USA and the UK way too many policemen were being caught overstepping their bounds in horrific ways.

I grew up with a deep distrust of the police; the police dragged my dad from sit-ins and demonstrations, the police threw him in jail, the police turned up at the door to threaten him. I was raised with a working-class distrust of authority that is generations thick. It took a while to cure myself of instinctively flinching at the sight of a squad car and feeling immediately guilty in the presence of the Boys in Blue.

As I grew older, as I made more effort to take people as they come and give them the benefit of the doubt without prejudice, I met a few police who seemed okay sorts, decent types. Fuck only knows what it took to retain their Humanity in a culture that has been exposed again and again of late as a cesspit of Wrong but I was able to relate to them, have a laugh, and get on as with normal people. They do exist among the ranks.

Nevertheless, it’s hardly controversial to point out that police on Earth are often corrupt, often on the take, often as happy to enforce unjust laws as they are to ignore the law altogether. In short, my last inclination would be to valorize the police in my work.

Were I to write a story about policing in our real world, I would of necessity be compelled to examine some fairly grimy corners of the human experience, it’s true.

The Green Lantern Corps, being fictional, can comprise a finer caliber of polisman! The Rules of the DC Universe allow for the existence of a genuinely trustworthy, honorable, courageous and selfless form of cosmic law enforcement and those were the rules Liam and I chose to play by.

When I decided to approach The Green Lantern as a police procedural in the style of a weekly TV show then, I was borrowing the format and translating it into a science fiction context, rather than attempting to make any meaningful comment about the real life nature of policing on planet Earth which, as is the case with so much human activity tends to exemplify what happens when stupidity, brutality and prejudice are given free license and dangerous weaponry.

Nor was I using the opportunity to comment on the way cop shows romanticize or fetishize law enforcement. I was trying to use cop show tropes to demonstrate what might be the same and what was very, very different about regular policemen compared to Green Lanterns. 

Our ‘re-imagining’ of police procedural began with the Guardians of the Universe, the council of blue-skinned immortals overseeing the activities of the Green Lantern Corps. In the past, the Guardians had often been portrayed as geriatric, out of touch, bureaucratic or authoritarian but Liam and I chose to take a different track and to portray them as wise sci-fi monks with an ancient profound understanding of how the universe really works.

Our Guardians are supremely attuned masters born of an unimaginably ancient race of sages. The ‘laws’ they administer correspond to the Hindu concept of Dharma or the Chinese ‘Tao’, ‘the Way’ or ‘Road’ of Zen.

It takes Olympian suspension of disbelief to imagine an authority that is entirely benign, selfless and still effective - such a chimera does not exist on our planet except in our stories – but the attempt to put aside the constraints of the human condition and actually think about how a cosmic law and order enforcement agency might function without falling prey to the problems of earthly policing can be, if nothing else, instructive and gave us our context for the Green Lantern Corps.

Jordan’s twisty character bio saw him begin life as a glamorous test pilot before deciding to chuck it all in and sell insurance. The insurance gig lasted only until Jordan decided that the wandering life of a toy salesman was the natural next step.

Jordan’s writer, my hero John Broome, gave Hal the soul of the Beat Generation, imprinting a rootless, searching-for-America restlessness that became the foundation for various takes, including our examination of the character. Considering Hal Jordan in the round, it was easy for Liam and I to emphasize his Beat nature and amplify his cosmic Kerouac, Dharma Bum dimensions!

To call the Green Lanterns ‘cops’ is simply to translate into comprehensible terms what they really are which is some combination of knight errant/sheriff/Beat cop/area manager and more…

There is always another story to be told using these characters, of course, one that more closely comments on or reflects events in the real world but that wasn’t our story in this case and the general OTT extravagance of our approach would, I suspect, have been more inclined to trivialize serious contemporary issues.

Thankfully, my job no longer depends on pondering these and other such imponderables on a daily basis!

As peers and admirers  alike stood in line to congratulate Hal Jordan on his achievements, he quietly slipped away in a blaze of emerald into the shadows of space without any great fanfare and so too I made my exit into the aether, the either and the other.

Liam switched to illustrating Batman: Reptilian from Garth Ennis scripts, while writing and drawing his own spectacular graphic novel series Starhenge, (the first remarkable volume The Dragon and the Boar will be available from Image Comics on July  6 - if you liked where Liam was going in the latter issues of The Green Lantern, this is the fabulous flowering of those experiments – Arthurian Celtic Futurism barely covers its scope).
As for Hal Jordan, he flashed that wry grin, thumbed another ride and took to the Road once more, passing out of our stewardship as he’d passed in turn through the hands of John Broome, Denny O’Neill and Geoff Johns among many others. Forever young, self-assured and iron-willed, he lives on, reinterpreted through the personal filters of future creative teams for as long as his IP delivers on the balance sheet!
Reading through it all again for this retrospective, I’m proud of our work on The Green Lantern and look back on it fondly. I think the whole thing – including Season 1, the Annual, Blackstars and Season 2 – hangs together as a tight and complete portrait of a complex, contradictory veteran character who’s seen and done it all.
Despite the intrusion of doubt and loss, the entire enterprise was driven by a spirit of relaxed imaginative play and a desire on the parts of Liam and I to goad one another to new heights of invention.
My own work on The Green Lantern Season 2 – especially the somewhat scrappy experiments on my part in the final two issues - encouraged me to go deeper into those seeming flaws and mistakes in search of inspiration and new energy, which then gave rise to the Xanaduum project with its focus on fragmentation, collage, compressed information, charged symbolic imagery and textual overload.
Season 2’s nimble response to bad times and painful feelings, its willingness to adapt and try different things, its privileging of art over commerce showed me where to go next with my comics.
Liam and I had creative freedom and a joyful working relationship on a book where anything could happen and very often did, and the result, we hope, is a thematically tight collection of interlocking short stories that add up to a timeless portrayal of Hal Jordan as we saw him after his decades of character development.
Although my last extended run on a monthly superhero comic sometimes felt like one of Jordan’s test flights – a full throttle take-off and climb to altitude, wing flex, pulling Gs, busting through harsh turbulence up there on the edge of the sky, followed by a steep white-knuckle landing that called for a bit of improvisation and imagination to bring the bird home – in the end, The Green Lantern worked thanks to the absolute trust Liam and I had in one another’s divine madness!
Sexcelsior!
Soundtrack:

Thursday, 2 April 2020

It is a Massively Complex Quantum Simulation




[Holosuite corridor]

(Rom and Eddington take of a panel to get at the workings.

ROM: 
I've had to make a few modifications 
to this holosuite over the years. 

EDDINGTON: 
A few? It's like a junkyard in here. 

ROM
My Brother won't let me buy new components so I've had to scavenge for what I need. 

QUARK
I'm barely breaking even on the holosuites as it is. 
If I had to buy new equipment every time there was a glitch. 

EDDINGTON
Where's the core memory interface? 

ROM
Oh it's right behind the spatula. 

EDDINGTON
The spatula? 

ROM
It's made of a copper-ytterbium composite, the perfect plasma conductor. 

(Eddington scans the innards with a tricorder.

EDDINGTON
I've found them. All five of their 
physical patterns are in here 
and they're stable. 

ODO
Why here? 

EDDINGTON
The HoloSuite is specifically designed to store 
highly complex energy patterns. 
The Computer's processing 
their physical patterns as if 
they were HoloSuite characters. 
Trouble is, I'm not reading 
any neural energy. 

ROM
Neural energy has to be stored at the quantum level. 
The HoloSuite can't handle that. 

ODO
So if their physical bodies are stored 
here, where are their brain patterns

QUARK
Everywhere else. 
Their brain patterns are so large that they're taking up 
every bit of computer memory on the station. 
Replicator memory, weapons, life supports. 

ODO
He may be right. 
So what do we do about it? 
How do we get them back?

Thursday, 2 January 2020

Confronting Fear is The Destiny of a Jedi
















Now everybody from the 616
Put your motherfuckin' hands up
and follow me - 
Everybody from the 616
Put your motherfuckin' hands up –


Look, look : –
Now while he stands tough,
Notice that This Man
did not have his hands up –
This Last Order's got you gassed up
Who's afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?

One, two, three and to the four
One Pac, two Pac, three Pac, four
Four Pac, three Pac, two Pac, one
You're Pac, he's Pac,
you're Pac none


This guy's no motherfuckin' Ruler over Thee,

I know every last thing
he's got to say against me –

I AM White;

I AM a Junkyard Savage Scavenger;

I DO live in Shipwrecked Star Destroyer on my own;

My Step-Uncle, Master Luke IS an Uncle Tom;

I DO got a dumb friend, 
Dude look like a Dawg,
Who I thought that I had accidentally shot-down, clear, out of Out of The Blue,
after I had gone + gotten way too  mad,
And smote the their ship clear, clean out of the skies with The Force of a Thunderbolt.

I DID get jumped by all six Knights of Ren,
And my Family of Origin DID sell me to a Junkyard trader for fuck-you drinking money —

I'm STILL standing Here screaming


''Fuck Tha Empire!”

Sunday, 28 October 2018

The Seven Ages of Rocky Balboa










All the world's a boxing ring,
And his whole life was a million to one shot
He has his exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. 



At first the Loser and a Bum,
Mewling and puking in some Plain Jane’s arms

And then the Cinderella kid, with track suit
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to the junkyard. 

And then The Champ,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad of The Tale of Clubber Lange,
Made to his mistress' eyebrow,
As Another One Bites The Dust

Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the ICBM silo’s mouth. 

And then the Mentor
In fair round belly with bad brain damage,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. 

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd Patriarchal robes,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. 

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second fatherhood, Lukemia, Unk and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Wednesday, 9 March 2016

The King is Gone, But he's a Federal Narcotics Agent

President Nixon with Special Agent Presley in the Oval Office,
January 1970

1

Dear Mr. President.

First, I would like to introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley and admire you and have great respect for your office. I talked to Vice President Agnew in Palm Springs three weeks ago and expressed my concern for our country. The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it the establishment. I call it America and



2

 I love it. Sir, I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out. I have no concern or motives other than helping the country out.

So I wish not to be given a title or an appointed position. I can and will do more good if I were made a Federal Agent at Large and I will help out by doing it my way through my communications with people of all ages. First and foremost, I am an entertainer, but all I need is the Federal credentials. I am on this plane with




3

Senator George Murphy and we have been discussing the problems that our country is faced with.

Sir, I am staying at the Washington Hotel, Room 505-506-507. I have two men who work with me by the name of Jerry Schilling and Sonny West. I am registered under the name of Jon Burrows. I will be here for as long as long as it takes to get the credentials of a Federal Agent. I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing



4

techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good.

I am Glad to help just so long as it is kept very private. You can have your staff or whomever call me anytime today, tonight, or tomorrow. I was nominated this coming year one of America's Ten Most Outstanding Young Men. That will be in January 18 in my home town of Memphis, Tennessee. I am sending you the short autobiography about myself so you can better understand this





5

approach. I would love to meet you just to say hello if you're not too busy.

Respectfully,

Elvis Presley

P. S. I believe that you, Sir, were one of the Top Ten Outstanding Men of America also.

I have a personal gift for you which I would like to present to you and you can accept it or I will keep it for you until you can take it.

Mr. President

These are all my PVT numbers

Beverly Hills 278-3496
Palm Spring’s
Pvt # 325-3241
Memphis
Pvt. # 397-4427
Col P.S. # 325-4781
Col B.H. # 274-8498
Col. Off M.E.M. 870-0370
WASHINGTON HOTEL PHONE ME  85900
                                                Room 505-506
                                                Under the name of Jon Burrows

PRIVATE 
AND CONFIDENTIAL
            Attn. President Nixon
            via Sen. George Murphy                    

from

Elvis Presley

.

Nixon and Special Agent-at-Large Presley

Special Agent Presley with Roslyn and President Jimmy Carter, 1977

"From my experience I believe Elvis was a puppet, a pawn, and in the end totally directed, and finally, used by these men in control of him....After awhile Elvis couldn't function any longer.  Henry (Kissinger) and his buddies laughed and said that Elvis was like the tin man, all rusted up and ready for the junkyard.  

They waited for him to become seriously dysfunctional from the increasing amount of drugs prescribed by his doctors.  Then they "stopped his ticker so he didn't have to suffer no more".  "

Wednesday, 9 October 2013

Margaret Thatcher and the Decline of West by Webster G. Tarpley





Margaret Thatcher’s first high-profile political job came in 1970 when she was appointed to serve as education and science minister in the cabinet of the liberal Tory Edward Heath.


She imposed a series of brutal budget cuts, the most infamous of which was the abolition of a program left over from the Great Depression, which guaranteed a daily pint of milk to schoolchildren between the ages of seven and eleven.

This was a program which had done much good in the poorer mining, industrial, and farming towns and villages of Wales, Scotland, and the north of England, where vitamin deficiency diseases like rickets and pellagra had been an immense public health problem. 

But for Thatcher, that daily pint of milk was the essence of communism, a violation of the free market. The milk distributions were stopped. Since then, Thatcher has been hated by all Britons of goodwill, and since then her nickname has been “Thatcher milk snatcher.” This is the epitaph which should be inscribed on her tomb. 

The Romans had a saying, “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum” - say nothing but good things about the dead. It is good advice, but in the face of certain enormous crimes against humanity, it cannot be honored. Such is the case of Margaret Thatcher. 

Thatcher offers one of the most egregious cases in recent history of a sociopath in power. She can be seen as the mother, or at least as the grandmother, of the world economic depression which broke out in 2007-2008. Thatcher was a fanatical apostle of the economic theories of the Austrian school ideologue Friedrich von Hayek and especially of Hayek’s 1944 screed, The Road to Serfdom, a raving attack on the highly successful economic methods of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal in the United States. On at least one occasion, Thatcher is known to have brandished a copy of Hayek’s scribblings as her personal holy book. 

Hayek had started after World War I as a hack writer in the pay of rent-gouging Viennese landlords who wanted propaganda articles condemning the evils of rent control. He was considered a very marginal academic, almost a crackpot, until he attracted the attention of economic illiterate David Rockefeller, who hired Hayek to help him in cramming for exams at the London School of Economics. 

Hayek, like his co-thinker Ludwig von Mises, was an exponent of the backward and primitive Austrian school of economic theory, which had been concocted by feudal-reactionary quackademics in the Habsburg empire to undercut the prestigious German-American school of dirigism and protectionism exemplified by figures like Friedrich List, one of the main inspirations for the recent economic success of places like Japan, Taiwan, and China. 

For the Austrian school, any government intervention in or regulation of economic life is automatically classed as totalitarianism. The Austrian school relies on crude slogans of deregulation, privatization, and the free market. The Austrian school is sometimes called the psychological school, since it rejects as collectivist analyses which tried to grasp the broad objectivity of a national economy. The theoretical vantage point of the Austrian school is always the sociopathic urges and desires of the individual predatory speculator. 

Austrianism is therefore much inferior to the deeply flawed neo-Keynesian synthesis, which tends to reproduce the outlook of central bankers. The Austrians are even more inferior in comparison to the American System, which has its central focus in the development of the modern labor force. 

Before Thatcher, the strange beliefs of figures like von Mises and von Hayek - such as their demand that government must never lift a finger to prevent or mitigate a devastating economic depression - meant that they were not presentable in polite society. If an economist claimed that a pint of milk for school children was the leading edge of Bolshevism, most people concluded that such an economist needed to be committed to a mental institution. If such an economist insisted on this point, he risked being reminded that Hitler and the Nazis had been long since swept into the garbage can of history. 

Margaret Thatcher changed all that. The overall impact of her political career has been a radical degradation of the universe of economic discourse of the Western world in the direction of ideas seen in the 1950s and 60s as hopelessly reactionary, or even psychotic. In this sense, Thatcher can be classed as the unifying symbol of a retrograde cultural paradigm shift, not just in Europe and the United States, but worldwide - especially when the influence of her signature monetarist/neoliberal economics on the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and similar institutions is taken into account. 

The austerity policies today ravaging Europe under the auspices of the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission would be simply unthinkable without the massive wave of economic ignorance and barbarism unleashed by Thatcher. 

A Creature of Lord Victor Rothschild 

The legend of Thatcher portrays her as a self-made woman, a greengrocer’s daughter from Grantham. 

In reality, the emergence of Thatcher was the work of a formidable political syndicate. One of Thatcher’s most important handlers was by any measure Lord Victor Rothschild (1910-1990), the third Baron Rothschild. Lord Vic was nominally a Labour peer in the House of Lords, but much of his influence derived from his work between 1963 and 1970 as worldwide head of “research” - meaning intelligence - for Royal Dutch Shell, the policy flagship of the seven sisters oil cartel. During much of this time, Lord Vic was a key security adviser to Thatcher. For a number of years Lord Vic also ran the Central Policy Review Staff, the de facto think tank of the British government. Lord Vic was also closely associated with Sir Keith Joseph, a Tory government minister and Thatcher’s top political brain truster. 

Thatcher was for many years elected to parliament from the safe Conservative seat of Finchley. However, intelligence reports from the 1980s sometimes noted that Thatcher’s hold on this rotten borough or pocket borough had been consolidated with decisive help from Lord Vic. 

Thatcher’s Gurus: Sir Alfred Sherman and Sir Keith Joseph 

Another key Svengali for Thatcher was Sir Alfred Sherman, who had fought as a communist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, but had been followed the typical neocon pattern of evolution towards reactionary ideas. Sir Alfred had been a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Sherman joined with Sir Keith Joseph and Thatcher in 1974 to found the Center for Policy Studies, and soon went on to play a key role in the Conservative Philosophy Group, which elaborated the ideology later known as Thatcherism. This was basically Austrianism with adjustments for the specific conditions of 1970s Britain. 

Sir Alfred facilitated Thatcher’s transformation from an obscure backbencher to shadow Prime Minister for the Tories. Thatcher paid tribute to him in 2005, recalling that “We could never have defeated socialism if it hadn’t been for Sir Alfred.” But Sherman sometimes fail to conceal the true brutality of Thatcherism. On one occasion he told a Soviet journalist, “As for the Lumpenproletariat, colored people and the Irish, let’s face it, the only way to hold them in check is to have enough well armed and properly trained police.” 

Sir Alfred also helps us to understand the real relation between Thatcher and her handlers. After Thatcher had lost power, he said of her: “Lady Thatcher is great theater as long as someone else is writing her lines; she hasn’t got a clue.” And indeed, much of Thatcher’s political career can be reduced to the obsessive parroting of not more than half a dozen primitive slogans, but with devastating effect. 

Sir Keith Joseph, the son of a rich Tory grandee and Lord Mayor of London, had long held that figures like Heath were not nearly reactionary enough. Indeed, Sir Keith and not Thatcher might have become prime minister for the Tories, had it not been for one fateful outburst. Reading a 1974 speech written for him by Sir Alfred Sherman, Joseph added his observation is that, as a result of teen pregnancies among the lower orders of British society, “our human stock is threatened.” 

This sounded very much like Nazi eugenics, and essentially disqualified Sir Keith from ever reaching number 10 Downing Street. Instead, both Joseph and Sherman focused their energies on installing Maggie in that post. Later, Joseph would become a point man in efforts to bust the teachers’ union, levy tuition fees for higher education, and radically cut the salaries of teachers and professors. Thus the note of brutal social Darwinism announced by Sir Keith remained throughout as a constant of Thatcher. Sir Keith also pioneered deindustrialization as an active government policy. When some Tories wanted to rebuild and modernize the shipyards on the Mersey River in Liverpool, Sir Keith argued instead for a “managed rundown.” Industrial demontage was another hallmark of Thatcherism. 

Another secret of Thatcher’s success was the shameless use of advertising and marketing. Some of this was copied from American methods going back to Richard Nixon, but Thatcher elevated the demagogy of mass manipulation to an entirely new level. In her 1979 and 1983 campaigns, Thatcher relied on the Saatchi and Saatchi PLC advertising agency, which had been founded by two Iraqi Jewish brothers. The Saatchis were responsible for Conservative party advertising which claimed that “Labour isn’t working.” Based on the reputation this firm acquired through a helping Thatcher to her early victories, Saatchi and Saatchi became for a time the largest advertising agency in the world. Maurice Saatchi, now a member of the House of Lords, was made the chairman of the Conservative party. 

However, even with this extensive support network, it is not clear that Thatcher ever received the support of a majority of British voters. Her ceiling seems to have been between 40 and 45%, which translated into a majority in the House of Commons only because of the British “first past the post” or winner-take-all system in each election district. 

Before they were willing to accept the degradation of Thatcherism, the British people had to be softened up by many years of crisis. No country suffered more from the fake 1973 oil shock than Britain. There was a period of mass strike captivity in which the British labor movement proved it could paralyze the government, but also proved that it was incapable of seizing power and solving the main problems of society. In 1974, electric current and heating were often interrupted, and conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath put the nation on a three-day week. As I wrote about this phase in Surviving the Cataclysm, “the Sick Man of Europe appeared destined to sink beneath the waters of the North Sea, with journalists asking front-page questions like ‘Is Britain Dying?’” 

Thatcher Filled the Post-Keynesian Void with Barbarism 

It was good luck for Thatcher and her gang that this crisis then had to be administered by the Labour Party government of James Callaghan. The crisis of British society in the middle 1970s had an ideological as well as a practical impact. As I wrote in Surviving the Cataclysm

“this crisis is associated with the abandonment of Keynesian economics by the British Labour Party, and by extension by the center-left around the world. At the Labour Party conference of September 1976, Callaghan remarked that ‘we used to think that you could just spend your way out of a recession… I tell you, in all candor, that the option no longer exists and that in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked… by injecting bigger doses of inflation into the economy, followed by higher levels of unemployment.’ According to one British commentator, these were the ‘words which effectively buried Keynes.’ The liquidation of Keynes left the field dominated by the primitive Viennese monetarism of von Hayek and the even more primitive monetarism of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School. Callaghan himself would soon be supplanted by Thatcher.”

In this new atmosphere, Thatcher’s governing team was full of monetarists or neoliberal ideologues who could pretend to be professing a new economic theory, rather than simply repackaging a set of cruel and stupid doctrines which had been discredited in the 1930s. This applied to figures like Norman Tebbitt, Nigel Lawson, and Norman Fowler. 

Keynes had recommended a mild inflation as a cure for depression. Thatcher demanded the opposite: she wanted to bring on a depression in order to cure inflation. Inflation is a complaint of the rich, who feel that the purchasing power of their cash horde is being diminished. Deflationary depression means unemployment, and this is the scourge of people who need to work for a living. Thatcher proceeded to apply the monetarist recipe with a vengeance, following Milton Friedman’s dumbed-down version of Austrianism. Since Friedman had taught that inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon, Thatcher collapsed the British money supply in a massive exercise of deflation. The value of the British pound soared, and anyone who had any debt was crushed. 

Thatcher Caused the British Deflationary Depression of 1979-81 

Under Callaghan, unemployment had stood at one million. Thatcher managed to double this to over 2 million in short order. It is estimated that in the early years of Thatcherism no fewer than 2 million manufacturing jobs were permanently destroyed in Britain, and the overall level of industrial production and manufacturing output was reduced by one third. The destruction of domestic export industry was helped by the grotesquely overvalued pound. But the City of London banks were able to use the overvalued pound to buy up assets all around the world at a discount. Unfortunately for Great Britain is a nation, a massive balance of payments crisis ensued. 

A constant feature of Thatcherism was the desire to shift the burden of taxation from the wealthy to the middle class, working people, and the poor. This was done through the use of regressive taxation. One such regressive tax was the value-added tax or VAT, which Thatcher raised to 15%. Real unemployment is thought to have reached as many as 5 million persons during this phase. 

By 1981, there were riots in Brixton near Lambeth in south London which were widely attributed to unemployment and despair. Contemporary observers had the impression that the entire social fabric of the British Isles was being destroyed. People who might feel attracted to the rhetoric of Ron Paul and Rand Paul need to be reminded that the essential program of Austro-libertarians of this ilk is precisely to induce a massive deflationary depression along the lines of Thatcher’s infamous handiwork. The goal is to shift more wealth to those who already have it. 

Traditional politicians have promised to raise the standard of living like putting a chicken in every pot. Thatcher, by contrast, was able to have a homeless person living in almost every doorway in the British Isles. Recipients of social welfare payments (“the dole”) saw their benefits gouged and were put under a slave labor or workfare regime, based on earlier US models. 

Some of the less radical members of the British ruling elite now began to have second thoughts about Thatcher’s ideological fanaticism. Thatcher called these figures “The Wets,” and always suggested their main issue was the resentment of leaders who had been prominent under Heath. Lord Carrington and Lord Thorneycroft went to Thatcher in 1981 and demanded that she resign, since her economic policies were manifestly a failure. Thatcher’s response was her trademark demagogy about the need to “stay the course” and her lunatic cry that “the lady’s not for turning.” 

Thatcher Saved By 1982 War with Argentina 

In spite of her bluster, Thatcher would not have survived much longer in office without the Falklands or Malvinas war with Argentina in the spring of 1982. There are indications that Thatcher lured the inept ruling junta in Buenos Aires into grabbing these islands in the South Atlantic. With different tactics, Argentina could probably have administered the British fleet a crushing defeat, but incompetent counsels prevailed. The British could never have taken back the islands without comprehensive logistical and other support from the United States. This was a moment of great shame for Washington, since according to John Quincy Adam’s Monroe Doctrine, these islands were an integral part of Argentina and the United States was duty bound to oppose the British aggression. 

The US had also pledged to defend Argentina under the Rio Pact. But this meant nothing to General Al Haig and the somnambulist Ronald Reagan, who did everything possible to help Thatcher. Thatcher proclaimed that she had overcome the “Suez syndrome” of 1956, meaning that Britain was back as an aggressive imperialist power. Based on chauvinist hysteria around the Malvinas, Thatcher was able to win the 1983 general election, even though she got only 42.4% of the votes. 

Thatcher’s foreign policy as carried out by Lord Geoffrey Howe was worthy of the mythical reactionary Colonel Blimp. Thatcher was a great admirer of the Chilean fascist Augusto Pinochet, whose Friedmanite economic policies were essentially identical to her own. She considered Nelson Mandela as a dangerous communist, and did everything possible to prevent economic sanctions from being imposed on apartheid South Africa by the British Commonwealth. This brought her into bitter conflict with Commonwealth leaders like Rajiv Gandhi of India and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia. But Thatcher took the lead in promoting USSR leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a man she could do business. Later, Thatcher would gloat over the destruction of Soviet power to which she had contributed. 

Thatcher’s racist and jingoistic Little England foreign policy also earned her the enmity of Queen Elizabeth II, who had her vast empire to look after. When Thatcher was denied an honorary degree by Oxford, and when she was criticized by the Church of England, it is safe to assume that those two pillars of the establishment were acting according to the wishes of Buckingham Palace. A political cartoon dating back to one of Thatcher’s elections showed Queen Elizabeth as a Labour Party agitator in the streets screaming “Tories out!” 

But Thatcher’s electoral fortunes were also helped by extensive bombing campaigns by the Irish Republican Army, and organization now known to have been thoroughly penetrated and decisively influenced by British intelligence. When the IRA bombed Thatcher’s hotel in Brighton in October 1984, the Iron Lady launched a new campaign of antiterrorist posturing. 

But a great event of Thatcher’s second term in office was her systematic destruction of the miners’ union during the course of a one-year strike in 1984-85. By crushing the militant miners of the National Union of Mineworkers under Arthur Scargill, Thatcher was able to put the entire British labor movement permanently onto the defensive. Thatcher destroyed not only the miners’ union, but put the entire British re-privatized coal mining industry (previously nationalized between 1946 and 1987 as the National Coal Board) on the path to extinction. 

Great Britain has been described as an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish, but Thatcher’s monetarism in service to the financial parasites of the city of London basically wiped out both mining and commercial fisheries. The conclusion is that Thatcher wanted to destroy the unions as a possible platform of mass resistance against the rule of financial oligarchs, and also welcomed the end of industrial capitalists as another group who might oppose the City of London. Britain today is a postindustrial rubble field and junkyard, largely thanks to Thatcher. 

Deindustrialization through Deregulation and Privatization 

Throughout her time in office, Thatcher mercilessly sought to privatize British government assets, generally selling them off to wealthy Tory clients at bargain basement prices. In addition to the National Coal Board, she also returned British Telecom to the private sector, and set into motion the process which has led to the disastrous re-privatization of British Rail. 

By the end of Thatcher’s term in office, when the Chunnel or tunnel under the English Channel was nearing completion, British industrial capabilities were so weak that the London government experienced tremendous difficulty in providing a short Channel Tunnel Rail Link between London and Folkstone-Dover. Observers on the continent joked that Britain from an industrial point of view had become impotent, isolated, and irrelevant. 

Thatcher was unable to privatize or abolish the British National Health Service, but she did everything possible to cripple it by drastic spending cuts which cost many lives. Labour MP Glenda Jackson has commented on the tragic state of British hospitals during the Thatcher regime. 

In line with her crackpot ideology, Thatcher also fomented a reckless and irresponsible process of deregulation. One of the centerpieces of this was the 1986 “Big Bang” or complete deregulation of the London financial markets. This involved a transition from open outcry trading pits to screen-based trading, but it made London the wild West for derivatives swindles. From this point on, the British regulatory regime was even weaker than the US one. But, precisely because of this lax oversight, predatory bankers, hedge fund hyenas, and other shady enterprises crowded into London, making a success of real estate developments like Canary Wharf. 

Mad Cow Disease Courtesy of Thatcher 

Thatcher’s deregulation push also had very sinister consequences in the intermediate run. Thatcher was convinced that British farmers were being needlessly harassed by nosy agricultural inspectors, so she slashed that form of oversight as well. In the opinion of some informed observers, the worldwide epidemic of so-called Mad Cow disease (or BSE) can be traced back to abuses which flourished under Thatcher’s practically nonexistent regulatory regime in the British beef industry. Once again, producers paid the price: exports of British beef to the European Union were banned from March 1996 to May 2006. 

Like Beppe Grillo today, Thatcher also waged war against local governments she did not like because they were controlled by the Labour Party and opposed her policies. Thatcher’s campaign to destroy the Labour-dominated Greater London Council was a case in point. Thatcher alleged that these local governments were expensive playgrounds for the “loony left.” She also targeted the local governments of Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Birmingham/Coventry, Leeds, and other working-class cities. 

Thatcher also cultivated an atmosphere of hatred against continental Europe. She claimed that socialism had been defeated in Britain, but could always make a comeback through the machinations of the European super-state emerging in Brussels. In reality, Thatcher was able to cripple the European project by thoroughly infecting it with her primitive and barbaric economic methods, which came to dominate the European Commission and the European Central Bank, supplanting earlier and more effective approaches based on Catholic social thought and social democratic pro-worker thinking. One of Thatcher’s ministers was the infamous Nicholas Ridley, who responded to the collapse of the East German communist regime with chauvinist-inflammatory propaganda warning of the reemergence of a “Fourth Reich.” Today’s US-UK attack on the euro is built on this foundation. 

Thatcher’s Downfall: The Regressive Poll Tax 

Thatcher set herself up to be ousted through her fanatical ideological commitment to regressive taxation, meaning in practice the redistribution of wealth from the middle class, working people, and the poor to the rich and super rich who were the beneficiaries of her system. The experience of human society shows that regressive taxes, where everyone pays the same amount, cut heavily into the necessities of the poor and the amenities of the middle class, while hardly touching the sybaritic luxuries of the rich. Proportional taxes do the same thing: this applies especially to sales taxes and to Thatcher’s value-added tax (VAT). The only acceptable tax is a progressive tax, which increases its percentage bite as income rises from affluent to rich to super-rich. Those with the greatest ability to pay should contribute most. 

One of the worst imaginable taxes is a lump-sum poll tax, formerly used in the American South as a subterfuge to prevent poor black people from voting. In 1990, Thatcher wanted to favor her wealthy backers by switching from local property taxes based on the value of real estate owned to a lump-sum property tax that would fall equally on rich and poor. Thatcher’s poll tax was designed to hit 35 million people, rather than the 18 million who had been paying the property tax. This openly regressive and reactionary tax was tremendously unpopular, and it hit many households which had been supporting Thatcher and the Tories. Soon public opinion surveys showed Thatcher almost 19 points behind the Labour Party. 

Thatcher Pushed Bush into War with Iraq 

Thatcher may have seen the handwriting on the wall, and may have tried to save herself with yet another war. When the regime of Bush the Elder in the United States had lured Saddam Hussein into occupying Kuwait, the Thatcher regime was the first to demand a military counterattack against the Iraqis based on Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter. Thatcher’s admirers claim that her desire for war with Iraq was far greater than that of the outwardly wimpy President George Herbert Walker Bush. After a key Anglo-American summit at the beginning of this crisis, press leaks inspired by Thatcher suggested that Bush - perhaps still frightened by the fate of LBJ in Vietnam - had begun to “go wobbly” on the military mobilization, and that Thatcher had been forced to carry out an emergency backbone transplant on the president. 

What followed was Operation Desert Shield, the deployment of immense NATO military resources into Saudi Arabia. But since the bombing did not start until the middle of January, Thatcher’s hopes for a quick new Malvinas were in vain. Instead, in early November 1990, Lord Geoffrey Howe - a loyalist who had now gone over to the Wets - resigned from her government. Soon, Thatcher faced a challenge from Tory leader Michael “Tarzan” Heseltine. When this challenge revealed the extent of hatred against Thatcher, the Iron Lady finally quit. 

Thatcher Claimed “There Is No Such Thing as Society” 

One of Thatcher’s most infamous slogans was in that “there is no such thing as society.” This is because, under Austrian school doctrine, economics does not involve an objective worldwide productive process based on a worldwide division of labor, but rather studies the subjective individual psychological choices of predatory speculators. This is also what Ron Paul and Rand Paul believe. There is no society, since there are only discrete alienated individuals competing with each other. Thatcher was also convinced that money, not skilled labor, modern factories, or state-of-the-art infrastructure was the metaphysical representation of wealth. With Thatcherism, market fetishism, money fetishism and general alienation were more intense than hitherto observed. 

Thatcher was, despite her chauvinist bluster, a determined enemy of the modern nation state. She was especially hated in Scotland, the site of so many industrial bankruptcies caused by her. Because of this pervasive hatred, the British Conservative Party was fatally weakened in Scotland, with the Scottish National Party and others filling the void. The ability of the British establishment to foment a separatist movement of dupes in Scotland at the present time is the direct consequence of the economic devastation wrought under Thatcher. 

The general line of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment, as seen in Iraq, Sudan, and Serbia and planned for many other countries, is the creation of micro-states, mini-states, rump states, failed states, and warlords through the actions of secessionist movements and other vehicles. None of these impotent and squabbling petty entities will have any hope of resisting the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the leading multinational corporations. Thatcherite economics has thus prepared a new round of anti-national subversion a quarter-century after she left government. 

As we can see in this case of Scottish secessionism, the British establishment habitually uses the British Isles as a kind of show window for the policies which it wants to inflict on the rest of the world, with special regard for the United States. That was also true of Thatcher herself, who was used as a prototype for the Reagan regime in the United States. Thatcher’s mantra of deregulation, privatization, market fetishism, union busting, colonial aggression, and general sociopathic outlook was wholly taken over by the reactionary actor in the White House. 

Thatcher’s Key Role in the Decline of the West 

For almost half a century after 1933, the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal provided the model for public institutions and policy in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and in much of the world. The New Deal state was highly successful, withstanding challenges from economic depression, fascism and communism, while unlocking the secrets of the atom, and inaugurating the era of manned space travel. But the oligarchical elites of the Western world always resented the New Deal because it placed limits on their boundless greed and lust for arbitrary power and status. As the Soviet challenge receded, these oligarchical elites began using the methods of deregulation and privatization to dismantle the New Deal institutions. 

After Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had in 1971 wantonly deregulated the highly successful Bretton Woods economic system set up in 1944, the time was ripe for a demagogic ideologue of oligarchical privilege to emerge. That demagogue was Thatcher. Her career has unquestionably marked the beginning of a new phase of the decline of the West. Whether Thatcher’s sociopathic handiwork can be rolled back and her damage undone is the question which remains to be answered. 







One aspect of Thatcher's malign legacy that few have assigned appropriate historical weight to is her key support and logistics role in both the October Surprise and the four year plan leading up to the Double-Coup that systematically destablised and overthrew both the Carter Adminstrarion and the Peacock Thone in Tehran;

The two most well-documented manifestations of this were the role played by both the Bank of England and Margaret Thatcher herself personally in stage managing the precise timing of the release of the 56 Hostages until 20 seconds after Jimmy Carter was no longer President - Carter, Brezynski, Gary Sick and others pulled an all-nighter in the Oval Office, constantly on the phone, Carter personally twisting arms with banks and finance ministers worldwide to assemble the final package of froze  Iranian state funds and reimbursements on undelivered military spares and equipment; and its all documented by a film crew, as were (with hindsight) the layers of transparent bureaucratic delaying tactics by everyone from mid-level clerks at the US Treasury, to the Governor of the Bank of England, who were holding most of Iran's gold bullion.

The Governor deferred to Thatcher, who authorised the release early on the morning of Inauguration Day, removing the final hurdle, just as Carter was summonsed to put his suit on and get dressed to leave for the ceremony.