The Pre-Eminent Rights of Man

At some point in very early human history, there was a shift away from matrilineal and matrilocal family arrangements to patrilineality and/or patrilocality, and from intra-group cooperation and mutuality to competitive and stratified arrangements. The groundworks for the emergence of the patriarchal arrangements which have predominated throughout recorded history, were laid when men took physical and psychological control of women's productive and reproductive capacities.

The reasons for that are too complex to go into in this article in any depth but, despite all the evidence of the greater efficiency and effectiveness of matrilineal/matrilocal family forms within balanced and essentially cooperative wider social arrangements, human social arrangements became dominated by descent (and transmission of wealth and position) via the male line and with that, came the need to control female fertility.

The more importance that was placed on the fact of paternity, the greater the need was to sequestrate  and control women – either physically or, more practically, through the use of a combination of religious ideology and secular law. The most common form of that is monogamous, religiously proscribed and legally sanctioned, heterosexual marriage in which the man's conjugal RIGHTS are, at times, absolute and at least, take precedence over the woman's.

In patriarchal religious lore, the husband was deemed to have "divinely ordained" conjugal RIGHTS over his wife's person and property, and she was deemed to have "divinely ordained" conjugal DUTIES of chastity, modesty and obedience. If she had any rights at all, they flowed from, and were subordinate to those, first of her father, and then of her husband.  Even today, in the formal Christian tradition, a bride is shielded from the eyes of men by a veil; she wears white to symbolise her virginity; she is "given away" by her father; she vows to be obedient and chaste within marriage; she and her children take her husband's name.

This is all to do with the need to guarantee paternity – to protect the male line. The dominance of patrilineal descent and patrilocality laid the foundations of the full blown patriarchy that has dominated human recorded history. It was the first and the most fundamental clash of interests.

The most blatant and stubbornly resistant manifestation of this is in the fact that a man could not be charged with the rape of his wife because the principle of consent on which rape law hinges, was clouded by the religious notion of patriarchal conjugal rights.  It was the same "problem" that the law had with wife beating – and its ugly sibling, the beating of one's offspring.

A husband's RIGHT to have sex with his wife when he chose, and her DUTY to be obedient to him meant that, in the eyes of the law, she could not withhold her consent – ergo, rape could not occur in marriage. Similarly, a man's right to chastise his wife and his children meant the law was slow to intervene in cases of domestic violence.

The contradiction and conflict between the emerging formal rights of women and patriarchal relations in marriage sharpened until eventually the law makers in many countries (but far from all) have had to accept that the legal right of a woman to say 'no' to sex was greater than the ideological right of her husband to demand it – which meant the crime of rape could occur in marriage.

The first country ever to criminalise spousal rape was the Soviet Union – in 1922. It took until close to the end of the 20th century for this to be accepted in British and related law. NZ recognised marital rape in 1985 and the UK did not end the marital rape exemption until 1991. The Australian state of New South Wales was the first to criminalise spousal rape but it took until 1993 for all the Australian states to follow suit.

It was not until 1993 that marital rape was criminalised throughout the USA, and even today in some states, marital rape is treated differently from other rape e.g. shorter penalties, or excluding situations where no violence is used, or shorter reporting periods.  

To understand why this is so we need to consider the fact that the power of the conservative religious Right in the USA has ensured that there still is not an Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution 90 years after it was first tabled in 1923.

And today Russia is dominated by right wing and patriarchal financial and religious oligarchs.

The problem with the idea of human and legal rights is that invariably those who are denied them start to question why that should be.  Men who were wealthy, or thought they had the right to become wealthy, resented the old orders whose authority rested on the notion that their power was a divine right – devolved to them from god. This acted as a barrier to the advancement of those who were assigned a lower place in the "god-given" order of things. They may have had a formal right to own property but that right was devolved from those with the divine right to rule and they could (and did) seize that property if and when it suited.

Who got to control wealth and to wield the power that wealth buys became a battle field between the old feudal order and the newly emerging capitalist class. The American War of independence was the quintessential expression of this struggle.

With the triumph of capitalism, the old notion of the divinely ordained rights of the ruling class with its patriarchal underpinnings, simply changed clothes.  The new order had demanded the right of economic freedom and access to political power and, once it achieved it, the doors were slammed shut on all others. The Rights of Man – were actually the rights of those men who owned property.

In early capitalist economics and jurisprudence, the RIGHTS of the property owner were starkly pre-eminent.  The Capitalist was not seen as committing the economic equivalent of rape when he expropriated the products of people's labour and enclosed commonly owned lands because the ideology of capitalism ensured the RIGHT to exploit other humans and the natural world for PROFIT was granted an a priori ascendance over all other rights.

As with patriarchal marital rights – which granted the male head of household legal and moral authority over his wife, children and servants – the property owner was regarded as having an equally absolute RIGHT to extract profit by whatever means possible and this RIGHT to make profit preceded and was greater than any rights of those he extracted profit from.

Creatures in the natural world had no rights because religious lore (written by older patriarchs) decreed that God had granted men complete dominion over the natural world. The labouring humans who were the means by which the natural world was exploited, had no or few rights and also were deemed to have a divinely ordained DUTY to accept their lot and to labour for the property-owner. This DUTY to labour and accept one's lot in life, like the marital duty of the wife, was enshrined both ideologically and legally. 

The Capitalist needed to be legally free to invest his capital and to utilise that capital, he needed to be able to buy labour either in the form of slaves, or in the form of people who lacked the means of producing their own subsistence and who had to sell their labour in order to live.  

Neither had any control over the conditions in which they exercised their labour nor the products which resulted from it. Their lives, and the lives of their families, were moulded to fit the needs of the machine. When the machine no longer needed them, if they could not be remoulded, they were discarded. 

The situation led inexorably to workers combining to improve legal status and wages and conditions, and it also led to Capitalists combining to deny and depress them. The intersection of the RIGHTS of Capitalists to exploit maximally and the RIGHTS of Labour to resist exploitation always have been and always will be a battleground. 

At various points in time and place the balance of power evens out enough that Capitalists are forced to accept that their RIGHT to extract profit is not PRE-EMINENT, that they too have legal and moral DUTIES – the prime one being to acknowledge and respect the legal and moral RIGHTS of other people – and other creatures.

But they, and those who support them, are driven by a rigid belief in the immutable, PRE-EMINENT RIGHT to make as much profit as possible, by whatever means possible. It is their literal raison d'être, and in defence of that right, they will always try to undermine or rescind the rights that have been gained by those they need to exploit.  

The triumph of neo-liberal economic theory saw the mushrooming of finance Capitalism and the rise of mammoth global Corporations run by powerful technocrats. The fatuous theory was that they would generate so much wealth that even the poor would be sustained by the "trickle down". The situation became more opaque, so much so that to some it seemed to some as though the class struggle was over.  But that was all smoke and mirrors. The capital has simply been moved to places where greater real profits can be extracted by a more intensive exploitation of people and the environment, and the profit makers found new and more devious ways to make false profits out of such contrivances as trading in currency and debt.

It's so obvious that it is hard to know how anyone can be fooled by it. But, just as the crime of marital rape was clouded by the ideology that underpins patriarchal relations of reproduction, corporate wrong-doing is clouded by the ideology that underpins capitalist relations of production – the business of business is to maximise profits by whatever means necessary.  If those means stray into areas that are in conflict with the current law or public opinion, the end is usually judged to have justified the means.

Even when the means and/or the ends are simply too harmful to be justified, the sanctions that are applied to the wrong doers are different in type and scale from those applied to ordinary citizens, and they do not fundamentally interfere with the exercise of the PRE-EMINENT RIGHT. 

This is exemplified by the US Supreme Court which has demonstrated its role as the creature of Corporate Capitalism by creating the legal fiction that Corporations are people. Not just the technocrats who run the Corporations, but the legal / economic entity itself is considered to have legal and human rights. The Corporations use that legal fiction to further strengthen their PRE-EMINENT RIGHT to exploit people and things for maximum profit.

A surreal and terrifying expression of this is in the fact that under the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement a Corporation may sue a Government if that Government refuses to allow the Corporation to extract profit – because of the legal fiction that the Government is denying the Corporation its right to make profit. 

"If you steal $25, you’re a thief. If you steal $250,000, you’re an embezzler. If you steal $2,500,000, you’re a financier.” A quote from the Nation magazine, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

The Profiteers quite literally get to have their cake and eat it. Unfortunately, their cake is the world, and they are intent upon consuming it.

Patriarchy, the male control of the means of reproduction, and Capitalism, the private ownership and control of the means of production, are inextricably linked. It doesn't matter that some women scrabble to the top or are born into and able to exercise privilege – just as it doesn't matter that some people of colour or poor people achieve wealth, power and status.

The world is still divided on ancient lines, arguably more divided, more unequal and more unstable than at any point in human history. At the bottom of the social order are the ranks of the Poor and the Utterly Poor – amongst whom the notion of a god-given superiority over women or over people of another skin colour or religious belief often acts as an illusory compensation for their own powerlessness.

The Amygdala Brigade and Confirmation Bias

I was sent an email recently, headed up, " 4 Simple Questions from a New Jersey Attorney".  It should have read, "4 Questions from a Simple New Jersey Attorney". 

It is a prime example of right wing rumour-mongering and confirmation bias. 

We've got a lot of reasons to distrust and to criticise Obama but this Tea Party orchestrated 'birther' nonsense is offensive both because it is motivated by racism, and because it is astonishingly dumb.

So, here's the e-mail- in all its erudite glory. 

1. Back in 1961 people of color were called ‘Negroes.’ So how can the Obama ’birth certificate’ state he is “African-American” when the term wasn’t even used at that time?

2. The birth certificate that the White House released lists Obama’s birth as August 4, 1961 & Lists Barack Hussein Obama as his father. No big deal, right ? At the time of Obama’s birth, it also shows that his father is aged 25 years old, and that Obama’s father was born in “Kenya , East Africa”. This wouldn’t seem like anything of concern, except the fact that Kenya did not even exist until 1963, two whole years after Obama’s birth, and 27 years after his father’s birth. How could Obama’s father have been born in a country that did not yet Exist? Up and until Kenya was formed in 1963, it was known as the “British East Africa Protectorate”. (check it below)

3. On the Birth Certificate released by the White House, the listed place of birth is “Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital”. This cannot be, because the hospital(s) in question in 1961 were called ”KauiKeolani Children’s Hospital” and “Kapi’olani Maternity Home”, respectively. The name did not change to Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital until 1978, when these two hospitals merged. How can this particular name of the hospital be on a birth certificate dated 1961 if this name had not yet been applied to it until 1978?
Why hasn’t this been discussed in the major media ?

4. Perhaps a clue comes from Obama’s book on his father. He states how proud he is of his father fighting in WW II. I’m not a math genius, so I may need some help from you. Barack Obama’s “birth certificate” says his father was 25 years old in 1961 when Obama was born. That should have put his father’s date of birth approximately 1936 – if my math holds (Honest! I did That without a calculator!). Now we need a non-revised history book – one that hasn’t been altered to satisfy the author’s goals – to verify that WW II was basically between 1939 and 1945. Just how many 3 year olds fight in Wars? Even in the latest stages of WW II his father wouldn’t have been more than 9 years old. Does that mean that Mr. Obama is a liar, or simply chooses to alter the facts to satisfy his imagination or political purposes? If you copy and paste the following into your search engine, you will see Obama making the statement that his father served in WWII.

Now for some FACTS which have been verified by sources such as Snopes. 

Point 1 : 
The original short form birth record that was released by the Obama campaign in 2007 was a copy of an electronic form created in 2001 when Hawaii computerised its birth records, i.e., it was based on an original part typed/part handwritten document that is kept in a bound volume in an archive. 

In neither that form, nor the long form that the White House later released to try to quiet ultra-rightist rumours about his ineligibility to be President, is there any mention of the term African-American. In both documents, Obama's father's race is given as "African" - which was very likely how Obama Snr described his own ethnicity.

The originals have been viewed by many agencies and individuals, none of which/whom have found them to be false. All the claims that the electronic images had been doctored have been proven to be false by many independent experts.

Point 2 : 
The British East Africa Protectorate was a combination of what is now Uganda and Kenya and was formed by Britain to protect its colonial interests in the region. It became the colony of Kenya in 1920 and it gained formal independence from Britain in 1964. Anyone born in the colony after 1920 would describe their place of birth as Kenya.

1950 National Geographic map.


Point 3:
The former Kapio'lani Maternity Home became the Kapio'lani Maternity and Gynecological hospital in 1931 and retained that name until it was renamed the Kapi'olani Hospital in 1971.  The KauiKeolani Children’s Hospital merged with the Kapi'olani Hospital in 1978 to become the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children. There are other people born at the same time as Obama with the same hospital name on their birth certificates and all this is easily verifiable.

Point 4:
Because of the pressure on US political candidates to prove their "patriotism" by either having served in the military or by laying claim to family who have, Obama made a speech in which he said his father served in WW2.  

Now, Obama was a constitutional law professor, and even his detractors will acknowledge that he is a bright man, so, what makes more sense: that he would make the ridiculous claim that either his father or his stepfather served in WW2 when both of them would have still been children; or, that he was referring to his maternal grandfather, who raised him from the age of 10 and who he regarded as his primary paternal influence, who did serve in WW2?  Either he thinks of his grandfather as his father – hardly uncommon – or it was a slip of the tongue, i.e., he meant to say "grandfather". 

He also said an uncle helped liberate Auschwitz, and he was attacked for that as well because of course the Soviets liberated Auschwitz.  He didn't lie about the uncle, but he did get the name of the camp wrong; his uncle had been in the US forces which liberated Buchenwald. It's an easy enough mistake to make. It might even be a measure of how partisan and partial the US education system is when it comes to both its own and world history, and never more so than in relation to the Soviets' role in WW2. 

Once right-wing conspiracy theorists have something in their sights, they plough on in pursuit, disregarding any fact that doesn't support the theory, and in the process dispensing with logic. If their assertions are proven beyond doubt to be wrong, they either abandon them and create new ones (and once abandoned it's as if the initial assertions never existed), or they just make up stuff to counter the counter arguments. 

I think that most of these chumps just can't get their heads around someone of mixed race being President of their still profoundly racist country. They have to prove he's not really an American, that he's a puppet of some shadowy, anti-American force, because the disruption to the foundations of their little world simply cannot be borne. The very earth feels unstable beneath their feet; their fused senses of self and nationhood have been wrenched out order and big gaps have opened up in the fabric of their reality. When they salute their flag and pledge allegiance to their country, instead of feeling that deep sense of complacent certainty that comes from the belief in their essential superiority, they are looking at – a person of colour!  Their little brains are screaming "does not compute!!" and their already hyper-active amygdalas go into overdrive. 

And how about all the female and black chumps in the Tea Party?  Well, it all goes to prove that, in the final analysis, it's ALL about class – not the social class you were born into, but the class interests you identify with. 

I distrust Obama because he is in bed with the Corporatocracy; if he hadn't been prepared to pander to them he'd never have been elected or re-elected,  but I detest the sort of people who attack him on the grounds of his ethnicity. Odd that the person who started the "birther" hysteria was Hilary Clinton. With friends like that ......

How to put the Con in Conservative ....

Colin Craig's supporters are baying for Chris Trotter's blood because Trotter criticised him. One chap in a letter to The Press even described Trotter's comments as verging on "hate speech".  I wonder if that person felt the same about Al Nisbett's racist cartoons?

So, what does the perpetually smiling Mr Craig stand for? 

The superstructure may have been painted to resemble moderate conservatism but the base is that of the far right.  I think the Keyster has told Craig how to walk the electoral tightrope –- to persuade the far right (for whom National is too soft) to vote for him but without ending up looking like the New Zealand Taliban which might scare mainstream National voters, and give the opposition some great ammunition.  

National might do an Epsom to ensure Craig gets an electoral seat and the magic 5%; the Greens and Labour won't do a deal to avoid splitting the vote and voila! we will have another three years of neo-liberalism. Just what the oil industry ordered.

No doubt the Craigster is as much an opportunist as one would expect and will have sorted himself a cabinet position.The poor schmucks who vote him in won't realise they've been hoodwinked and used as electoral cannon fodder until it's too late and, tragic though it is, some won't ever realise it. 

So how is Craig conning the increasingly impoverished Kiwi working class? What's he promising them?

Will he:

Raise the ludicrously low minimum wage? No, because that would be "a cost to businesses and lead to job losses".   (Of course sensible people know this is not necessarily the case because government could help small businesses, promote buy local, stop the export of capital, enforce tax laws etc, and big business could easily cut its massive management costs, reduce shareholder dividends etc. But the monetarist mantra is that raising wages makes business less profitable  – which actually proves the Marxist theory of surplus value. Ironic or what?)

Remove income tax and leave only GST? No, that's too complicated.

Raise the tax threshold? Yes, and to a whopping $25000 which would mean part-time low paid workers and all those living on superannuation only would pay no tax, and those on the minimum wage working a 40-hour week would pay almost no tax. 

If the tax threshold is raised, what would he cut to make the savings necessitated by the reduction in tax revenue?  

My thoughts on what his answers would be:

Police? No, can't cut the police because they're necessary for crowd control and most of them vote National.

Prisons? No, can't cut prisons because they're also necessary, otherwise why have police? Some of Sheriff Joe's ideas to save costs might be tempting, but if prisons are privatised and big business is permitted to use prison labour as they do in the USA, they can't make the conditions too tough or the prisoners won't be able to work as hard. (NB. Tricking the tax payer into subsidising big business is just too good a joke –it ranks up there with the one about wealth trickling down.)

Military? No, can't cut the defence force because they might be needed to back up the police.

Civil Service and local government? Can't cut the top levels because they mostly vote National but there's bound to be some slack identified in the front line services and there's definitely scope for some creativity, e.g. chain gangs for road works, plant and animal pest control. Get the spin guys onto that one, John.

Education? Now that's definitely a contender. Increase class sizes, remove all "unnecessary" elements of the curriculum in working class schools, give free rein to charter schools, lower the school leaving age, reduce teacher holidays – plenty of scope. It's bound to increase the prison population and thereby the pool of publicly subsidised forced labour, so what's not to like about that? And who needs an educated working class anyway?

Income support?  Yes, that seems like a popular area for cuts but .....

Can't cut invalid benefits too much because sick, disabled beggars on the streets isn't a good look for a first-world country.

Can't cut the rest home subsidy because that would affect all the rich National voting people who own or have shares in rest homes, and a lot of wrinklies vote National.

Can't cut the housing subsidy because landlords charge rents that low paid workers can't afford, and we have to keep wages down to keep profits up – so the housing subsidy is actually a subsidy for landlords and employers. 

Can't cut support for families as too many right wingers like that one, leastways not unless we give them more tax cuts.

CAN cut unemployment benefit because the spin doctors have done such a good job in persuading the target audience that it's only useless lazy work shy (brown) people who don't have jobs. In fact, they've done such a good job spinning this, I reckon they could bring back the workhouse and there'd be people who'd argue it was too soft.

Raise the retirement age? Hmm. That'd be unpopular with the working class but it's very likely because it won't affect most of those who vote National. Besides, it's a hoot, give them a tax break and make them pay for it themselves by working an extra 2 or 3 years before an impoverished retirement and hopefully they'll die before they get to it or too far into it, thus saving on the rest home subsidy. Win win! And as jokes go, it's right up there with the private use of prison labour and trickle down wealth.

So, there's not all that much scope but there is the big diversion – Craig's favoured child  – the binding citizen initiated referendum. CIR = People Power!

On the CP website someone asked the question, "Would the Conservative Party honour the results of previous referenda, in which the vast majority of NZer's rejected Govt. legislation, such as the homosexual law reform, civil union bill, same sex marriage legislation, the anti-smacking bill, and the decision to keep the number of MP's at about 120?  Would our party be bold enough to reverse such iniquitous legislation imposed against the majority voice?" 

It's interesting what's included in the list of "iniquitous legislation", given the first three were not subject to a CIR. A curious omission was prostitution law reform but maybe the writer approves of that. It's also interesting that CIRs were regarded by the Royal Commission on the Electoral System 1986 as,  "blunt and crude devices... that  blur the lines of accountability and responsibility of Government."  

I guess that's why the Ranting Right like them so much. Look at the parties and organisations which have supported CIRs – ACT, NZ First, Family First NZ, Sensible Sentencing Trust,  Kiwi Party and now the Conservative Part – it's Amygdala Central. Even the Maxim Institute doesn't want them to be binding.

Craig's answer was a classic tightrope walk; he promised to honour the outcome of referenda, but as CIRs currently are not legally binding, that's pretty meaningless and there's no way he'd be able to force through legislative changes.

Any working class Kiwi who thinks that Colin Craig gives a rodent's fart about them, is deluded. And that's my final word on the subject – for now at least.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Forensic Psychology....

Nigel Latta’s celebrity and professional cachet as a clinical psychologist add considerable weight to his theories about criminals. With Mark Lundy out on bail, it's interesting to look back on Latta’s pronouncements about him, and others, in the Beyond the Darklands (BTD) series.

Latta didn’t address the soundness of Lundy’s conviction. As far as Latta was concerned Lundy's guilt was a given. Clearly the six Judges of the Privy Council and the QC and members of the legal team who worked on Lundy's appeal were not of the same mind as Latta or journalist Jane Clifton, who wrote in a Dominion Post article :

"Though there has been much debate about the correctness of the jury decision to convict Lundy, owing to controversy about the timings of events the night of the murder, no one seeing this programme can be left with much doubt." 

It’s easy to see why Clifton’s article is reproduced on the website of Screentime, the company that makes BTD. She wrote:

"It's hard to imagine a more useful and engrossing programme than Beyond the Darklands…Not only is it world-class in production terms, with skilful winding-in of docu-drama, but it helps viewers to understand the most bewildering questions about some of our most horrific crimes."

Or not. From my perspective, it's hard to imagine a less useful programme, and what I find most engrossing about it is the fact that it’s used in Police training.

Clifton also stated that, "unlike a lot of professionals, (Latta) doesn't hedge his answers about, or trouble with sensitivities toward, the criminal. He has the self-assertive bluntness to spell out how these individuals come to be so evil."

In other words, he has the courage to say the things others are too scared, or too "PC" to say. The religious connotations of terms like "evil" and "redemption" are interesting in that they appeal to, and reinforce the view that some people are inherently bad and just have to be kept locked up forever – or be killed.

Importantly, Clifton didn’t ask how Latta arrived at his assessment of Lundy as a narcissistic, exhibitionist alcoholic who brutally battered his wife to death because of her opposition to his money-making schemes, and who killed his daughter because she was an "encumbrance".

A thorough clinical analysis would involve extensive interviews of the subject, or at least of the professionals who have worked with him, plus meticulous, informed analysis of documentary evidence such as trial transcripts, school and medical records etc. Most of this would need the permission of the subject and various Government agencies. As it’s unlikely Latta had that access, unless he was being fed information unofficially, he’d have based his assessment on the sort of case specific data that’s available to the public.

Interviews with family and friends are there mainly to back up the assessment, not be the basis of it. Anecdotes provide the all-important personal narratives, and dramatised scenes provide the visual element without which a lot of the target audience would quickly lose interest.

Given the seriousness of the content, ideally the commentator should remind the audience that forensic psychology isn’t an exact science and that an analyst is totally dependent on the quality of information s/he has to work with. S/he should caution the audience that an assessment presented in a 45-minute television programme will not have the precision and thoroughness of a formal clinical analysis. S/he might even clarify the interface and critical differences between forensic psychology and criminal profiling.

One indicator of the rigour of Latta’s analysis is his notion of "limb specific grief". The image that most people will have of Lundy is at the funerals – grief-stricken, with his arms draped over the shoulders of two friends. Latta typified this expression of grief as "limb specific", ie the fact that Lundy was able to support himself on his arms proves his grief was phony, and is evidence of his guilt.

The term sounds impressively scientific. It’s not. Physical reactions to extreme emotional distress vary between individuals and may well affect the legs more than the arms.

I did a more in-depth analysis of the BTD episode about Peter Holdem. I concluded that, in relation to impartiality and accuracy, that episode proffered no evidence drawn from recent or current professional assessments; it relied heavily on hearsay and failed to alert viewers to the possibility that some contributors might not be accurate in their recollections; it failed to point out that almost all stories about the subject available to the public contain inaccuracies and are emotive in tone; and it manipulated viewers both with the use of supposition stated as fact, and the use of misleading and highly emotive images.

Reality television should make thinking people ask the questions – whose reality is this, and who benefits from it?

In my view, BTD has a political agenda that is close to that of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. It was no accident that the episode on Holdem came in advance of his parole hearing, and that people who have campaigned to keep Holdem in prison were heavily involved in the making of the programme.

I don’t pretend that any of this is easy – doing the socially sensible thing often isn’t.  It’s far easier to label people as "evil", "unredeemable", "born bad". No one can dispute the fact that there are people who are so dangerous they have to be kept incarcerated. But there are people who have been so damaged in the care of the State that they are now unrecoverable – which should make us question the fitness of that care. And, there are many people in prison who are at risk of becoming unsalvageable, who should not have been sent to prison because they are innocent, or because their crimes did not warrant it.

No person of integrity can question the fact that, as a society, we imprison far too many people: more men than women; more young than old; more brown than white; more poor than affluent; more uneducated than educated.

Our incarceration rate and the ethnic and socio-economic profile of our prison population is a national disgrace. Young, poorly educated men of colour end up in prison in NZ at truly alarming rates. In this, we follow the USA, which leads the world in both the number of its citizens it imprisons and the proportion of people of colour.

Mark Lundy was lucky to have people who believe enough in the legal principle of beyond all reasonable doubt to have fought his corner. There are many who aren’t so lucky.

The Meme Machine

The metaphor of the division of a cake in how the products of human endeavour are / or should be divided is a useful device because most people relate on an emotional level to the sheer injustice of some people having more cake than they could ever possibly eat, while some get no cake at all, and others get just a few crumbs that fall off the table. 

What's often not considered is the role of those who get more cake in exchange for their support for the notion that the OWNERS of the cake have the RIGHT to more than they could ever eat and at least a major say in how it should be divided.   

Cake baking is a social process. The labour of many is necessary for the making of any given cake. No single person is born with the knowledge of how to make a cake, nor does any single person ever produce –by their own  effort – all the ingredients and all the implements necessary for its baking. 

The knowledge of what a cake is and how to bake it is acquired and handed down by people operating socially; the ingredients are grown and harvested and processed by people operating socially; the implements used in the baking of the cake are manufactured by people operating socially ….

At some point in pre-history, long before cake making was possible, the notion of private property and trade was born – very likely as a result of the domestication of cattle. With the notion of privately owned property came the notion of the right to appropriate the labour of others  – if I can "own" a cow, I can "own" another human being. (There was another HUGE development that is highly pertinent to cake making as it happens, which was the dominance of a patrilineal family form and the birth of patriarchy – but that's a story for another day.)

Many different means were used to force people to give up the products of their labour and to be allowed to keep / be given only what was necessary for their subsistence. Some means were coercive; others were ideological –usually calling on god's / gods'  authority.

Inevitably some greedy bastards decided they owned EVERYTHING and declared divine support for that right. They employed swathes of people to keep it that way – law makers and law enforcers and the all important ideologues – The Meme Machine. 

And look how successful the The Meme Machine has been. Many people cannot even conceive of a different, more just, balanced and sustainable way of organising production. They dutifully parrot the line that the rich deserve to be rich because they are cleverer, more talented, more creative and that it is the rich who are the "wealth generators".  Instead of carping about the unfairness of the system, they argue that we should invest in enterprises set up by the "wealth generators" so they can turn the tap on a little and the occasional drip (necessitated by the wealth generators not being able to afford more) can become a trickle – which is more than enough to keep the simple folk at the base happy. 

But this inverts reality. The wealth generators are not those at the top of the social pyramid – they're the people at the base. The whole system (including the truly, madly, deeply insane world of virtual finance) relies on the exploitation of human labour – and that exploitation gets more obvious, coercive and brutal the further down the pyramid you go.  

Companies move to countries /locations where labour is cheaper and there are fewer environmental / health and safety laws; they do so to keep production costs down in order to extract the maximum surplus to pay the shareholders and the technocrats and the ideologues -  and to feed the various State machines that help keep the wasteful, unstable, unsustainable system going.  

The idea that the rich deserve to be rich, that they generate wealth is stupid. It is so stupid it is hard to comprehend how any rational person can fall for it. But that's where The Meme Machine  is so important. It has persuaded enough people that the current way we organise production – the economy – is the most efficient (maximum productivity for minimum expense/effort) and effective (achieving an intended or desired outcome) way possible. 

This is often demonstrably untrue even when judged by the system's own stunted methodologies.  If we use a wider angled lens and accept that production is a social process, we see that the relations of production (like the relations of reproduction) have evolved and any measurement of the efficiency and effectiveness of an enterprise must also consider the concepts of equality of opportunity, equity of treatment in legal terms and ethical practice. Without these, a true measure of efficiency and effectiveness can't be made. 

If we simply want the current system to be fairer, we can use the very political and legal concepts that challenged the divine right of kings and latter day autocracies to force it to change. But that's always a struggle. No social, economic or political advance has been given freely by those in power until it was in their interests to do so. And every hard won advance must be guarded because it can be easily lost. Sometimes the loss is sudden and catastrophic and obvious, and sometimes it's gradual and surreptitious and the loss goes largely unnoticed.

What the rich and powerful and their supporters forget or choose to ignore is that people at the base are not passive ciphers. Excellence, talent, intelligence, insight, creativity, goodness are not the preserve of the rich - as even the most cursory examination proves beyond all doubt.

So, people of the base, use all that excellence, talent, insight, creativity and belief in natural justice to bring about change – because if we don't change the way we do things, we're all stuffed.

Dear President Obama....

I was one of the many people who felt that the world had become a slightly better place when you were elected President of the USA.  I didn't forget the betrayals of Blair's Labour government in the UK after 14 years of divisive and destructive Thatcherism. Nor did I forget the betrayal of everything the Labour Party had stood for when the Lange government was swept to power in New Zealand in 1984, and Roger Douglas ushered in the 29 years of neo-liberalism that has divided the country of my birth to an extent unknown in my lifetime. But I still hoped you would be different. 

I know that your background, education and profession make you as distant from the lives and concerns of the mass of American poor and the struggling "middle classes" as George Bush Jnr was, but the emblematic power of your election was enormous. It had profound symbolic meaning, not just to Americans of colour and  to progressive white Americans, but to the whole world – just as it was known it would by the powerful people who backed you.

Sensible people knew that your candidacy was calculated to divert the growing anger of those people whose American Dream has been shattered, but many of us still hoped that you might somehow break your corporate shackles and act to control the destructive forces that dominate American government.  Many people – and not just Americans – desperately want to believe that American democracy and decency exists – that it has just lost its way and is waiting to be liberated. 

It's a hard thing for people reared on the myth of American exceptionalism to confront the fact that most people in the world regard America – not with affection, respect, or approval – but with varying degrees of fear and loathing.  Most see the USA, not as a mature, even-handed, progressive force for good in the world, but the absolute opposite, a country that acts like a paranoid adolescent with a narcissistic personality disorder who has control of a vast arsenal of weapons. How could any rational person not be frightened of such a country?

When intelligent Americans answer the question "why is America the best country in the world'" by listing the many reasons why it is not - they have to add the rider, "but it could be". They have to do that because so many (maybe most) Americans are incapable of facing the truth – that their country has grown powerful by behaving like a psychopathic bully, stamping its illegal authority all over the world to extend and defend its global interests. 

A large proportion of  Americans, by virtue of their narrow education and a politically compliant and vacuous media, are insular, superstition-ridden, and parochial. Through their votes and their inaction, those Americans have not only allowed their government to become the world's bad cop –  on occasion they have demanded it. Most Americans did not care about the USA's carpet bombing of Japanese cities with incendiary bombs, or dropping two nuclear bombs on non-military cities even when the scale of civilian deaths and injuries was made public. Most didn't care about their military raping women and massacring innocents in Vietnam, or the fact that the USA dropped more bombs on that country than had been used in WW2.  A large number feel nothing but pride that no country in history has dropped more bombs on civilian targets than the USA did during WW2 and since.

An outcome of this mindset is that the scales of natural justice for Americans are heavily weighted in their favour. Just under 3000 people (12% of whom were not Americans) died in the September 11th attacks. It was a tragedy, and no person of conscience can defend attacks on non-combatants – whatever the cause is – but, the illegal attacks on Iraq by the USA and its Coalition partners killed twice that number in the two weeks of the USA's "Shock and Awe'" bombardment. Economic sanctions prior to invasion, and the ongoing hostilities since the invasion have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. Hundreds of thousands have died in Afghanistan and in Libya.

In Syria, 100,000 have already died. And you want to add to that – to appease the Ranting Right whose sole measure of America's "greatness" seems to be the numbers of "enemies" it has killed.

The current tub-thumping and handwringing by politicians and compliant media over the use of chemical weapons in Syria is the grossest hypocrisy. America stockpiled vast quantities of chemical weapons during WW1 and in 1918 prevailed on the British and French to drop them on German cities – having first whipped up extreme anti-German feeling in the USA. Only the wind direction prevented America becoming the first country to use chemical weapons against civilians. The USA has never got rid of its stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. Why would it keep them unless it either had the intention of using them, or wanted the implied threat that it would use them?

That aside, what was the76,000,000 litres of dioxin contaminated herbicide that was sprayed on farm land and forest in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, if not chemical warfare? An estimated 400,000 people died and 500,000 children have birth defects as a result of its use – numbers that are cynically rejected by the Americans as "unrealistic". Attempts by Vietnamese victims to get compensation have been disdainfully dismissed by the US Judiciary.  The budget to clean up contaminated ex-US military bases is insultingly low in light of the profits being made by the principal manufacturers of Agent Orange, Dow and Monsanto – and even more so in light of the fact that the USA spends about $1.3 trillion dollars every year on "defence" of its global empire. 

Is death by a nerve agent any more horrible than death by bombs containing white phosphorus and petroleum jelly? 

Most Americans neither know nor care about the role their country played in the slaughter of 1.5 million Indonesian communists and socialists by the military and political Islam after the overthrow of Sukarno. That was the first cynical use of political Islam as a reactionary force, and it was so successful it was used again in Afghanistan to suck the USSR into an unwinnable war. The USA has funded, armed and encouraged political Islam, overtly and covertly, and as certain Islamic adherents have been driven into being more and more fundamentalist and reactionary, the monster America created destabilises countries and is the raison d'être for the so-called "war on terror'".

The list of the USA's war crimes and its internal repression exceeds that of many of the regimes it attacks. The use of torture, kidnapping, spying on its own and others' citizens, the illegality and inhumanity of Guantanamo – are matched by the appalling incarceration rates of American citizens, grossly disproportionate numbers of whom are poor and people of colour. 

From a George Bush or a Ronald Reagan we expect nothing better but you were supposed to be different. I know it's silly we should have expected that you, simply because your father happened to be Kenyan, would be the president of the USA the bulk of the world's population longs for.  And despite all your betrayals of the trust that was placed in you, I suspect most of us still feel more sadness than anger, even though your betrayal is arguably worse than the likes of Clinton, Carter and Kennedy. We expected nothing better from the likes of Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and the Bush dynasty – but we did of you. 

Peter Holdem's latest Parole hearing

I wrote an article some time back about Peter Holdem – that most unsympathetic of offenders – a compulsive paedophile and convicted child killer. 

Holdem was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1986 abduction and murder of 6-year-old Louisa Damodram. In 2007, the Parole Board took the unusual action of cancelling his parole hearings for 3 years. That was after a high profile media campaign by The Christchurch Star under the leadership of editor Barry Clark, who interviewed the emotionally fragile and still grieving mother of the victim, and organised a petition calling for Holdem to be be kept in prison.

In 2010, the Board denied parole, and in 2011, it imposed another 2 year postponement.

In 2012,  Nigel Latta included Holdem in his Beyond the Darklands television series and ended the episode with a powerfully worded statement that, in his (professional) opinion, Holdem should never be released.

Holdem's 2013 parole hearing came and went without any prior media comment that I was aware of, and there was a fairly muted response to the further denial of parole. In its report The NZ Herald repeated the inaccurate claim that, when Holdem murdered Louisa Damodran, he had just been released after the abduction and attempted murder of a 10 year-old girl. He was actually charged with attempted rape.

The Parole Board based its decision on a psychological report in February 2013, which described Holdem as "predatory and opportunistic" and "ingratiating" towards authority figures. In addition, it was said that, despite Holdem's claim not to be interested in women or girls, "images of scantily clad females" were found in his cell.  Holdem claimed they had been planted there but the Board did not believe him.  One of the other observations made by the Parole Board was that Holdem has no support network in the community – which is hardly surprising.

The conclusion of the professionals is that rehabilitative programmes at the prison are of no further use; in other words Holdem is  - using Latta's word - "unredeemable".

They may well be right, and who would want to take a chance on a compulsive paedophile and convicted child murderer, of whom Latta, a person of considerable influence, has said:

"I have never come across an offender that I am so unreservedly convinced will reoffend.' ...  'He (Holdem) ‘cannot be rehabilitated, not now, not ever; there are no psychological therapies that can change what this man is and no medications that can control him."

In my opinion, the BTD episode on Holdem was appalling in respect of its errors, bias and sensationalism. I had intended to register a complaint with the Broadcast Standards Authority but for various reasons I didn't. However, I did contact the Parole Board to register my disquiet. I sent my notes to Holdem's solicitor, Mr Vigor-Brown, and I phoned his office on several occasions to ask to speak to him. I got no response from him or even an acknowledgement that he had received the notes.

I had discussions with the Sunday Star Time's crime reporter about collaborating on an article, which did not eventuate, and I have had no reply to a subsequent email. I spoke to the acting editor at The Press who was not interested in the story; he said it was unlikely they would run anything about Holdem until nearer to the Parole hearing.

After several months of sending emails and leaving messages, I finally spoke to Barry Clark about his reasons for using the Christchurch Star to run the 2007 campaign. He claimed it was because it was a "community issue" but he was not willing to discuss the issues in any depth so I have not been able to establish who initiated the campaign. 

Nor do I know who approached who for the Radio New Zealand interview in 2011, but the common denominator is Mel Griebel.

It was clear from Ingrid Leary's email to people whose names she pulled off the Old Friends website, that Griebel was heavily involved in the BTD programme.

Griebel claimed in the email to his contacts which Leary used, that Nigel Latta's mind was already made up. Certainly the impression I gained was that they were looking for information which would confirm the conclusions Latta had already arrived at.

Nigel Latta's strongly worded and unconditional pronouncements about Holdem at the end of the BTD episode stood in stark contrast to the sort of information he appeared to have at his disposal i.e. what is in the public domain, and anecdotal evidence from people who knew Holdem at various points in his life all of which was from at least 26 years, and as much as 56 years, prior to the making of the programme.

The in-depth clinical information that should support such a powerfully worded conclusion could only come from careful analysis of police and court records and from Holdem's personal records. The latter can only be accessed by people who are professionally involved with Holdem, or who have his permission.

If an expert had legitimate access to that sort of information, why wouldn't s/he mention that in the programme given it would add immeasurably to the weight that could be given to any conclusions?

If an expert had access to personal information which was given without a person's permission, it could be illegal and certainly would be grossly unethical. 

Griebel has claimed publicly that Department of Corrections staff keep him up to date on Holdem. If true, and in light of Griebel's involvement in the moves to keep Holdem imprisoned, that would surely constitute a serious breach of professional standards.

The political dimension of the BTD programme was as obvious as its sensationalism. A group of people took it upon themselves to use the popular media to influence the judicial process and were confident enough to state their agenda openly.

Do they all have the same motives?

Nigel Latta is selling a commodity, but what about Mel Griebel?  It seems fair to say that Griebel is obsessed with Holdem. His overt and covert statements about what Holdem deserves as punishment, and his statements that Holdem is "evil" indicate that this is a deeply personal issue for him.

It's apparent from things Griebel has said publicly, that the original investigation was flawed. The areas of concern that we know about – persuading Holdem's girl friend that he was guilty and using her in the interrogation to force a confession, taking Holdem and her to the river, keeping Holdem in a motel room overnight without having sufficient evidence to charge him – are bad enough to ask if there were other examples of poor practice. That question must be asked, however horrible the crime was.

It would be easy to let Peter Holdem rot in prison, and it may well be that, despite his sloppy research and populism, Latta's conclusion is right and Holdem does pose such a severe risk to young girls that  he must remain incarcerated for the rest of his life.

There are people who deserve to be in prison who are not; there are people who have been held in prison for decades who are known to be innocent; there are cases of people having been sent to prison after evidence was planted by the police or as a result of poor practice.

Something is not right in this story – and the fact that Peter Holdem is a deeply flawed and possibly dangerous man who has been convicted of an appalling crime does not give the law and order brigade the right to distort the truth and manipulate the system.