I Know What is Wrong With The World - and there is no way to fix it

I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world in three words:

People Are Stupid.

We like to think we are the pinnacle of evolution (in itself a stupid misconception of how evolution works) and that our vast intelligence separates up from the animals (sorry, stupid mistake, the other animals, I mean), but the fact is that we're not all that bright. We have a few advantages over, say primates, language and better memories for example, but research suggests that when it comes to sheer reasoning ability, we're not all that much brighter than chimps. I don't want to get into an IQ debate here, but let's assume there's some correlation between general intelligence and IQ. The average is around 100 (it varies from group to group and culture to culture - mainly because we're too stupid to devise a sensible test where the average is always 100 for every place and time).

Give or take a couple of standard deviations, most of us - like 96% of us - have that IQ. And it's abysmally low. It's the IQ of the kind of person who reads Murdoch newspapers, the IQ of the kind of person who watches soaps (even if it's the slick US cop show or medical show type and you think it's somehow better than Home and Away), and the kind of person who believes in the supernatural ("well, there has to be something more than this, doesn't there, science can't explain everything").

If you're still reading, it probably means you think you're not one of the stupid people I'm talking about. Well, you're wrong. Here's a little test to show just how stupid you are. 

• Q1 Can you solve world poverty? 
• Q2 Can you stop war? 
• Q3 Can you stop the persecution of minorities?
• Q4 Can you devise an economic system that treats everybody fairly?

The answers to all those questions are "No". I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of other questions that you would have to say no to, too. The fact is, we are all, even the very brightest among us, deeply and unutterably stupid. We can't solve the world's problems because we're too thick. We've been trying throughout recorded history (and presumably long before then) and we have failed. Failed dismally. Failed in a way that should be excruciatingly embarrassing to all of us. Let's face it, we're a bunch of chimps with cars and cell phones and we haven't got a clue.

And that's why there is no way to fix the world; we just haven't got the brains. We might as well give up, go back to the trees and scratch our arses until we're extinct.

Oh, hang on, we can't do that, can we? We stupidly cut down all the trees.

Now how did he get here?

    

Jobs, Justice and Climate

In the UK yesterday, Trades Union Congress general secretary, Brendan Barber, said this to world leaders assembling for the G20 summit meeting next week. "The old ideas of unregulated free markets do not work, and have brought the world's economy to near-collapse, failed to fight poverty and have done far too little to move to a low-carbon economy."

The Metropolitan Police estimate that 35,000 people marched through London on the 'Put People First' demonstration, the first of many events planned for the G20 summit. Put People First's slogan is "jobs, justice and climate".

With civil unrest growing across Europe as job losses mount and the recession bites ever harder, I really hope that the G20 leaders are listening. We've had decades of unfettered greed and government-backed corporate callousness, the rich have got richer and the poor have starved. The fiction that 'economic growth' will filter down to the poorest and make everybody better off has been exposed, and the future is looking bleak for working people everywhere as the value of their pensions has halved in a single year.

We might struggle through this recession but worse ones are coming. Peak oil is nearly upon us. Climate change is now unstoppable. The population is still growing and resources are still dwindling. Economic growth has natural limits and we are reaching them. Managing global capitalism requires more skill and ability than the world's capitalists and their governments are able to provide.

This is the kind of future that leads to uprising. It is the kind of future that leads to riots and even revolution. I hope the G20 leaders, isolated as they are from real life by their power and wealth, do not underestimate the amount of anger there is among the people they have been exploiting for so long. That crowd of 35,000 in London is the tip of an iceberg of resentment and disgust. It could easily turn from a peaceful march with reasonable requests into a furious mob, burning effigies and storming the parliament.

A Trades Union For Bloggers

I like trades unions. I think they are the best thing since sliced bread. The demise of the unions since the late nineteen seventies is one of the tragedies of our age – and something we will all live to regret. I've been in several trades unions in my time. I even sat on a picket line during a strike back in 1976 – it was boring as hell but I'm glad I did it. So you'd think I might be in favour of the current push to form a trades union for bloggers. After all, I'm a blogger aren't I?

But I'm not.

The thing is, unions exist to protect the interests of working people. Ordinary people like you and me don't have much clout when it comes to negotiation with our employers. In fact, employers can roll right over the interests of their employees if they feel like it and the current employer-biased legislation we all live under (of which Australia's IR laws are a typical example) grants employers legal support for the exercise of their already-one-sided power when it comes to negotiating employment contracts, removing and restricting benefits, and terminating employment. It is only by organising, by acting together, that working people have a power that is even vaguely comparable to that of their employers. It is only through collective bargaining and collective action that working people can possibly hope to get fair treatment from employers and from conservative governments.

That's why the trades unions exist. They are simply groups of working people, acting together to give themselves some say in the conditions under which they work.

So a trades union for bloggers doesn't even make any sense to me. Bloggers don't work for anyone. They don't negotiate their work contracts because they don't have any. They're not paid, they don't have conditions of employment, they don't have 'benefits' to win or protect and they can't be sacked. So what's it all about? Says Gerry Colby, president of the U.S.A.'s National Writers Union, “Bloggers are on our radar screen right now for approaching and recruiting into the union. We're trying to develop strategies to reach bloggers and encourage them to join."
The NWU has done a lot over the years to help freelance journalists. Journalism is one of those areas of employment which uses a lot of freelance labour and where employers were quick to understand the value of having a low-cost, vulnerable and dependent pool of casual labour. Many other employers have caught on and there is a big push on to reduce permanent staff and replace them with casual labour. My own area – information technology – has created a large body of freelance 'contractors' who live by taking individual, short-term contracts with employers, often through intermediary employment agencies (which take a big slice of the money they earn). The movement to casualise labour is so extensive that governments have had to change the tax laws to prevent these casual professionals from benefiting – at the taxman's cost – by running their own companies and taking the tax breaks. These days, for casual labour, there are almost no tax breaks at all and operating your own company to sell your own labour no longer offsets the financial disadvantages of casual labour in any way.

In this climate of throwing people out of full-time employment and then taxing them as if they were employed full-time, freelancers need the protection that only organisation in trades unions can offer – to set standard contracts, to help negotiate, to provide standard benefits (like healthcare, in those countries like the US where the state doesn't provide it) and to defend people against unfair dismissal, discrimination, harassment, and so on.

Now, some bloggers are essentially freelance journalists. It's a tiny, tiny minority but they are, of course, vocal. There may be only a few hundred of them worldwide, possibly a couple of thousand, but for these guys, membership of the NWU or a local equivalent would make sense. They're trying to sell their services as freelance writers and they should try to get the same union support. For the rest of us – the other 55 million – the idea of a union of bloggers, or of bloggers joining a union, is just nonsense. A bloggers' mutual support society or shopping club - so we can get 10% off our motor insurance or whatever - might make some sense, but not a bloggers' trades union.