THE SUNDAY ESSAY: can power and goodness ever go together?

We have fashioned a world almost designed to make the answer to that question “NO”.

The problem is that global-bloc size attracts absolute power desires. Downsizing power from the Ground up is the only way to find some real heroes again.

As long ago as 2007, people were cottoning on to what Bill Gates was really all about. Only 5% of his multi-billion dollar fortune is spent on “good works”, and even this has the advantage of dramatically reducing his tax bill. The other 95% goes on hard-headed investment in companies that variously pollute, cheat, exploit and occasionally poison the very people he claims to help. It’s a neat long-term business strategy when you think about it: make lots of people ill, develop stuff to make them feel better. Covid19 was but a small step onwards – make people frightened of feeling ill, make vaccines to allay the fear.

The other great misanthrope in philanthropic clothing is George Soros. He too funds lots of seemingly worthy causes, like the EU…if top-down fascism is your thing. He seems not to like dictators, and has invested millions in PR to slag off fellow Hungarian Viktor Orban. Sadly for Soros, Orban is right wing, but a genuine democrat who keeps on winning elections. During the war, Soros wound up in the ghetto and actively worked with the Nazis to denounce fellow Jews and help them along to the death camps. He wants the former Soviet apparatchiks in Hungary back in power (the same people close to his former Communist ally, Lord Mandelson). He funds both Antifa and BLM quite openly, and has given money to those running both illegal and deadly migrant crossings. He is, in short, a man who creates division and violence. In the late 1980s, he attacked Sterling and bankrupted tens of thousands of mortgage payers in Britain by so doing.

The leading political figures of our age are also in turn rotten eggs donning curate’s clothing to soften the image. Mutti Merkel is Germany’s directrice with the homely smile and a ruthless track record of DDR Stalinism, shafting BDR leaders who helped her, and quietly buying up drugs and software to control her country’s Covid19 outbreak. She is the archetypal German whose poolside towel is guaranteed to be on the lounger by 6.45 am.

Emmanuel Macron claims to be a Centrist, but is a right-winger with dictatorial narcissist tendencies and a lifelong banker with a sleazy record of cronyism with Big Pharma in the shape of Sanofi. He was elected by Rothschild money, and was among the first to smear Professor Didier Raoult, the champion of HCQ. His hero is Tony Blair.

Boris Johnson has kept but one promise in his political career – that of delivering a clean Brexit. (Although the jury is still hung on even that). At the 2012 London Olympics, his guest of honour was Rupert Murdoch, whom he then declared innocent of phone hacking….and tried to spike the Met Police investigation into it. He opened an Inquiry into the Elm House paedophile bordello supplied by a Tory Council, following which the investigation vapourised. He conspired with Tim Yeo to distort taxi emission data in favour of Yeo’s product, and conspired with property developers in Haringey to rough up any residents saying they didn’t want to leave, thank you. As a journalist, he was fired from one publication for outright lying. But as a TV personality, he developed a smiley, bumbling style of self-deprecation that has endeared him to millions.

President Donald Trump is a high-born but incompetent financier and hotel keeper, and best known for his “reality TV” appearances prior to running for office. He paints an American landscape that bears no relation to what the rest of us see….a reality that caused George Carlin to open a riff about America the Beautiful with the words, “Have you seen it lately? Jesus, it sucks”. Trump is a womaniser, a spoilt kid with infantile tendencies, and an itinerant bully. One minute he is Britain’s best friend, the next just another senior Yank telling us what to do. But he is the elected President, he appeals to a very clear “normality” blue collar sector, and the culturally Marxist Democrats, “liberal” media and the Shadow State hate him. He is the only viable blockage in the way of the final victory of the Kennedy killers in creating the ultimate corporacratic State.

Talking of the Kennedy clan, there is an exception out there, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Oddly enough, along with Trump, he is the highest profile standard bearer for those of us trying to get the message against Covid hysteria and vaccination obsession over to ordinary western citizens. The ‘Camelot’ period of 1,000 days has been both hyped and trashed by biased commentators over the decades. RFK Jr is, however, an unalloyed – clue’s in the name – Kennedy Democrat. So am I, as it happens: and neither of us can watch the cynical antics of the Sleepy Joe Party today and see the remotest trace of what the New Frontier really was about.

Kennedy has been on Fauci and Gates’s case since 2005. He is an accomplished lawyer, and could probably have run for President were it not for the congenital larynx problem that makes him, at times, awkwardly difficult to listen to – almost like someone with a bad stutter. Nevertheless, he’s a straight talker in the style of The Candidate immortalised by Robert Redford in 1971….a characterisation that, once Redford’s candidate had been perverted by the Party, fitted Barack Obama like a handmade silk glove.

RFKJr on himself:

“I don’t even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I’m a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market…What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market….Our landscapes connect us to our history; they are the source of our character as a people, as well as our health, our safety, and our prosperity. Natural resources enrich us economically, yes. But they also enrich us aesthetically and recreationally and culturally and spiritually”.

On Fauci:

“I’m comfortable reading science and dissecting it and discerning the difference between junk science and real science….Anthony Fauci put 500 Million of Our Dollars Into that [COVID] Vaccine…He owns half the patent….I have long been disturbed by the moral hazards and interest conflicts that create vast profits for pharmaceutical giants but drive public health in the wrong direction”.

On Covid19: (alleged private comments with Ron Paul)

“This is really about Mr. Pharma, and the government in his pocket along with the media – and your local practitioner. All that’s left to protect you and your family is you….Look at the data….with good management drugs, there’s no point in a vaccine, which in and of itself is an impossibility anyway….the three groups we can no longer trust are the polluters, the security sector, and the pharma giants.”

Robert Kennedy Junior’s life is not without controversy and fault: for myself, I think some of his theories don’t stack up. But look at his track record: he is the president of the board of Waterkeeper Alliance, a non-profit environmental group that he helped found in 1999.

From 1986 until 2017, Kennedy was a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit environmental organization. From 1984 until 2017, he was a board member and chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper. For over thirty years, Kennedy has been an adjunct professor of Environmental law at Pace University School of Law. Until August 2017, he also held the post as supervising attorney and co-director of Pace Law School’s Environmental Litigation Clinic, which he founded in 1987. In 2017, in fact – long before Covid19 arrived in our midst – Kennedy met Trump (see below left) with the idea of forming a new regulatory agency on vaccines. He is currently professor emeritus at Pace.

Needless to say, the Shadow White House ensured that, while appointed to a position where he could have argued powerfully against the Fauci-Pharma contrick, nothing ever came of the appointment.

Sometimes, it seems clear to me, RFK Jr exaggerates – a sort of boyish enthusiasm gets in the way of his Left Brain. But he is not without humility in all things. He often confides to friends, “Look, I don’t think all vaccines are evil, I just want them to be tested more rigorously by an agency that can’t be corrupted every which way by Global Pharma”.

For years, his enemies have tried to dig the dirt on Robert Kennedy Jr. The best they’ve managed is smears about his “junk science”: when it comes to his public conduct, not a whiff of scandal attaches to him. His shall we say active private life shows he has the Kennedy appetite, and this has been noted by some, but hey – he’s only one marriage ahead of me. In a 21st century context, he is a genuine hero.

Surprise, surprise….he doesn’t have legislative power. Partly it’s that he doesn’t want it, but mainly it’s part of the way things are. I think of Kate Hoey, John Redwood and several others I’ve met and been inspired by during forty years of UK political contact. Right across the spectrum from Old Labour to One Nation Toryism, there are heroic people who simply won’t compromise or court puerile popularity. None of them have ever held office.

Chicken or egg? That is the question. The infamous remark of Groucho Marx applies: “I wouldn’t wanna be a member of any club that would have me as a member”.

It explains why, for over eight years now, I have argued that forming a political Party merely so it can then bought lock, stock and barrel by élites and their lobbyists would be futile. Anyway, in the UK, Westminster is no longer where the power is: that lies with the Secret State, Whitehall, the news and social media, central bankers, and Globalist multinationals.

As a pacifist, I not only abhor violence but also know as a historian by training that violent revolution is a destructive method of dancing round a cynical circle, only to arrive back where one started….often, with even less liberty.

The requirement is to find leaders who will provide sound critiques, organise civil disobedience and change attitudes at ground level. Ground-up has always been better than Top Down: Top Down merely grinds people down, having screwed them up.

Big sucks. Systemics suck. Ideology sucks. Global sucks. Monopolies suck. Secrecy sucks. Financialisation sucks. Privilege sucks.

Does Homo sapiens suck? Well-based psychographic data (even when taking account of social lies) convinced me thirty years ago that the answer, on the whole, is “no”. The biggest fault of the Decency Niche is that they’d rather talk than walk.

Hence we wind up with the usual 3% of psychos in charge – because no sane person wants the job of protecting 75 million people.

Which is why using Ground Up action to scale down to manageably sized communities is, for me, the best way to go.

(He wrote, using a BIG typeface. We’re all ironic in our own ways)

I see what follows as an updated Benthamite philosophy – empirically flexible – and thus not an ideology.

Small is creative. Humans will always be a more powerful Common Good resource than AI. Philosophy based on tolerant observation opens minds. Globalism closes ranks. Competition produces progress. Open government has nothing to fear. Currency with a standardised value is better than diluted electronic loo-paper. Awards for social contribution are superior to privilege based on genes.

None of it is rocket science. But the Decency1 space shot sits rooted to the launch pad. Lose the Voyager Gene, and that’s what happens.

Enjoy your Sunday lunch.