“There is no doubt that these comments shame the home secretary, this rotten government and the Tory Party. He is clearly unfit for his high office.”
Current Home Secretary James Cleverly suffers from gobshiteism.
Tory MP James Cleverly has been condemned for allegedly calling Stockton North a ‘s***hole’, after a Labour MP asked why a third of children in the constituency live in poverty.
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Cunningham later told the Commons during a point of order: “During Prime Minister’s Questions today I asked the Prime Minister why 34 per cent of children in my constituency lived in poverty.
“Before the Prime Minister answered, the Home Secretary chose to add in his penny’s worth. I have contacted his office, advising him I planned to name him but sadly he’s chosen not to be in the chamber. He was seen and heard to say, ‘Because it’s a s—hole.’
“I know he is denying being the culprit, but the audio is clear. It has been checked and checked and checked again.
“There is no doubt that these comments shame the home secretary, this rotten government and the Tory Party. He is clearly unfit for his high office.”
In the lead up to Black Friday, we have been bombarded with adverts from brands offering big discounts off various things we probably don’t need, and may not even be able to afford amid an ongoing cost of living crisis.
But a group of activists have used this moment of shopping frenzy to make a wider point about the unsustainability of consumer capitalism through subvertising – or subverted advertising. A subvert often uses the language and style of a brand itself as parody. It’s also known as culture jamming, or brandalism – a mashup of the words brand and vandalism.
The Zap Games was an anti-advertising festival which ran for two weeks from 11 to 24 November, in which people were invited to alter a public advertising space in a creative way to protest against the unbridled consumerism swirling around on Black Friday.
Zap stands for Zone Anti-Publicitaire, French for anti-advertising zone. Launched in Belgium in 2021, the Zap Games have become a global competition run by Subvertisers International. There are awards under categories including sculpture, digital screens and most family friendly intervention.
In one simple example which appeared in the UK city of Birmingham, somebody had created a big poster, tailored to the size of an advertising slot in a bus stop panel, which read: “Don’t buy stuff. Enjoy your friends.” Another, in the style of a John Lewis advert, read “100% saving if you don’t buy anything.”
Subvertisers International is a movement of like-minded activists around the world, which includes Brandalism, a collection of people, artists and activists. The group has been called a number of different things from eco-activists to guerrilla groups, to hackers and street artists.
The movement and its members have attracted media and public attention – and for me that’s particularly important when thinking about the climate crisis. If the point of advertising is to sell, the point of subvertising is to open up that message and attach a whole range of meanings to it, especially related to social and environmental justice topics which are increasingly attracting advertising interest.
It’s a very complicated thing to resist mass consumerism. And it’s as complicated to think and act on the environment – but these groups have been doing so for a number of years.
Environmental narratives
Brandalism began in 2012 during the London Olympics where members started replacing outdoors advertising panels with original artworks. From there they scaled up to a large actions during the COP21 climate talks in Paris in 2015, which is when I first came across the movement. One prominent poster was a parody of an Air France advert, part of which read: “Tackling Climate Change? Of course not. We’re an airline.”
Their main aim during the COP21 action was to critique the corporate sponsorship of the climate talks. In my early research on subvertising, I looked at all of their artwork and selected a purposeful sample which I felt demonstrated the variety of different environmental messages the actions were putting across. One was a critique of corporate greed, another about inadequacy of politicians to challenge the status quo, and another aimed at the role of consumers.
I also came across other kinds of environmental narratives which were more poetic, such as the Earth in mourning. One subvert, for example, showed an image of the Earth withering away, while others were short poems marking the grief brought on by the climate crisis. Finally, another theme concerned people wanting to declare their commitment to the environment and environmentalism. These were poetic nudges: “Let’s stop buying things. Let’s start like spending more time together. Let’s be more connected, rather than disparate.”
In further research on advertising activism and advocacy I interviewed 24 subvertisers in seven countries about their motivations. One was a Paris-based citizen who documented the lives of people who put up public advertising and are paid very little money for it. He was also advocating for less advertising in public spaces. This is more common in France where groups such as Résistance à l’Agression Publicitaire, or resistance against advertising, have lobbied to restrict the presence of advertising in public spaces since the early 1990s. This group also provides schools with pedagogical kits to get students to think about advertising critically.
Another member of Subvertisers International, Democratic Media Please, which is based in Australia, is more interested in damaging outdoor advertising. When I spoke to him he also stressed the significant fact that advertising is the main source of funding for the majority of media organisations and it’s very hard in Australia to come across independent journalism that is not swayed by the commercial interests of its sponsors.
The environment is definitely a key concern of many subvertisers. But while a number of different artists I interviewed talked about the significance of the environment as a key driver in their activism, they told me they never really divorced it from issues of gender and race. Subvertising tries to weave together these concerns. Sometimes we’ve seen campaigns concerned with the whiteness of popular culture, for instance, and increasingly, especially in actions such as the Zap games, you see a lot more interconnectedness when it comes to environmentalism and race and gender politics.
The subvertising movement invites us to think and act critically towards advertising industries, practices and messages. Doing so is central to imagining and creating a future that is inclusive, sustainable and just.
An activist holds up a sign against capitalism during scattered left-wing protests in Kreuzberg district on May Day during the novel coronavirus crisis on May 1, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
“Whenever it’s claimed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, it really exposes the lack of imagination and willingness to develop a better future, not the lack of alternatives.”
“Can you imagine a place where growth is linked to life and justice rather than profit and the economy?”
That’s one of the key questions at the heart of a new publication by Greenpeace which lays out a series of detailed alternatives to rapacious capitalism that dominates the global economy and ruling governments worldwide.
Titled Growing the Alternatives: Societies for a Future Beyond GDP, the report puts a target on neoliberalism’s obsession with gross domestic product and how skewed understandings of what’s considered valuable undermine efforts to build happier, more equitable, and efficient societies.
“Today, a country’s economic growth is used as an indicator of living standards,” the report states. “In other words, the higher a country ranks on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) list, the better the prospects for that country. But that is far from reality when the wellbeing of people and nature is considered.”
The report argues that “the focus on economic growth has led to an anachronism that prioritizes planet-depleting activities and inequalities while overlooking wellbeing.”
According to Paula Tejón Carbajal, the Alternative Futures Campaign lead at Greenpeace International, “Whenever it’s claimed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, it really exposes the lack of imagination and willingness to develop a better future, not the lack of alternatives.”
Greenpeace says that even while GDP remains the economic index most countries use to measure economic health, “its one-size-fits-all approach rewards waste and pollution and does not take into account vital aspects such as people’s wellbeing or the limits of nature.”
The report states:
The world today faces multiple crises that pose an existential threat to the future of human civilization. The modern industrialised world depends on the over-exploitation of nature, which is destroying the Earth’s ecosystems, triggering catastrophic climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These are related problems with devastating consequences that have been building for decades. This is due to the collective failure of governments and businesses to act with sufficient urgency to counter the status quo of a system based on infinite growth, and dependent on fossil fuels, extraction, overproduction, overconsumption, and waste.
Across three detailed chapters, the group’s publication focuses on numerous principles for “wellbeing economies” that challenge the supremacy of economic growth GDP, including: “people and planet over profit and growth”; “equitable distribution of wealth and power”; “wellbeing at the core”; “the common good”; “circular economies”; “nature restoration”; and “real participatory democracy.”
In a world beset by war, human rights abuses, astronomical levels of inequality, and the fast-moving threat of rising temperatures and the climate crisis, Greenpeace argues that the alternatives to profit-at-all-costs capitalism are not only available but plentiful.
“All the examples we have gathered exist, work, and prove that there is a dynamic landscape for many alternative futures,” Tejón Carbajal said.
While the Greenpeace report was made available online last month, it was officially presented Wednesday during a virtual event attended by more than 160 people worldwide.
“In a world wracked by polarization, inequality, climate change, ecological breakdown, and a crisis of hope and imagination, we can’t use the same thinking that created the problem in the first place. Greenpeace calls for governments and global institutions to drive their decision-making according to sufficiency and the wellbeing of people and planet, so that what we really value becomes the new measure of success and can thrive and flourish across the world,” added Tejón Carbajal.
“To create a sustainable and just future for all,” one section of the report concludes, “we must move beyond GDP and develop a measurement framework for wellbeing, inclusion, and sustainability.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk boards his private jet before departing from Beijing Capital International Airport on May 31, 2023.
Who are the polluter elite and why do they matter?
The richest 1% of people are responsible for as much carbon output as the poorest 66%, research from Oxfam shows. Luxury lifestyles including frequent flying, driving large cars, owning many houses, and a rich diet, are among the reasons for the huge imbalance.
Jason Hickel, an economist, argues: “We have to think about the rich in terms of how much they are depleting the remaining carbon budget. Right now, millionaires alone are on track to burn 72% of the remaining carbon budget for 1.5C. The purchasing power of the very rich needs to be curtailed. We are devoting huge amounts of energy to facilitate the excess consumption of the ruling class – in the midst of a climate emergency, that is totally irrational.”
The problem goes far beyond the greenhouse gas emissions arising from these lifestyles, substantial though they are. The polluting elite have an outsized influence on the climate in many ways. Hickel notes: “While personal consumption-related emissions are important, what matters most is control over investible assets. When we account for investments in polluting industries, we find that each billionaire is responsible for a million times more emissions than the average person in the bottom 90%. Who is making the decisions about investment and production in the world economy? About energy systems? When it comes to the question of responsibility, that’s what we need to be focusing on.”
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It is simply impossible to have a polluting elite and a livable climate, argues Farhana Sultana, professor at Syracuse University and fellow at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. Along with many developing country economists, she regards the high emissions of rich people in industrialised countries in terms of colonialism. “Carbon inequality is effectively a colonisation of the atmosphere by the capitalist elite of the planet through hyper-consumption and pollution, while the cost of that climate coloniality is borne disproportionately by the marginalised and vulnerable communities in developing countries.”
The culture of rich people, and rich countries, built on use and discard cannot continue in a world of finite resources and planetary boundaries. “What the 1% do is overuse the earth’s resources through extraction, hyperconsumption, a discard culture that produces enormous amounts of waste and pollution – all these processes together create significant strains to planetary systems,” she says.
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One of the many occasions climate change denier and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak uses a private jet.
Palestine solidarity and anti-imperialist organizations raise demands following the announcement of a 4-day pause in aggression in Gaza
Thousands gather outside of the Pennsylvania Station in New York City on November 17 (Photo: Wyatt Souers/ANSWER Coalition)
In the early hours of November 22, Israeli and Hamas officials announced that they accepted the agreement brokered by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States for a 4-day pause in aggression in the Gaza Strip, which includes the exchange of 150 Palestinian political prisoners for 50 non-military Israeli hostages, as well as the entry of 300 trucks of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza Strip.
This temporary pause comes after Israel has slaughtered over 14,500 Palestinians in Gaza, with 7,000 still trapped under the rubble and over 35,000 wounded. Israel’s airstrikes on hospitals and civilian infrastructure as well as the complete blockade on the enclave means that the thousands of injured have limited access to care and the population overall has restricted access to medicine, water, food, fuel, and electricity. The Government Media Office in Gaza reports that 1.5 million Palestinians have been displaced, with 233,000 homes partially damaged and 45,000 completely damaged. 266 schools have been damaged, and 67 are now out of service. Israel has completely destroyed 85 mosques, and significantly damaged three churches.
“The steadfast resilience and resistance of the Palestinian people has delivered a 4-day pause in the ongoing genocide while securing the imminent release of 150 Palestinian political prisoners,” read a statement signed by the Palestinian Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, The People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition, and the International Peoples’ Assembly.
The groups have called on people to remain in the streets around the world, to ensure that a permanent ceasefire is reached: “We must intensify our commitment and efforts until every single one of our demands is fulfilled: a permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege on Gaza, and an end to all US, Canadian, and European aid to Israel.”
“We call on people of conscience everywhere to Shut it Down on November 24th and to continue protesting, planning and implementing direct actions, and drive campaigns focused on our primary demands,” the statement read, referring to the 3rd announced day of “shut downs” for strategic actions for Palestine.
International NGOs are also pushing for a more permanent ceasefire. In a press briefing on “Ceasefire, Pauses and Safe Corridors” held on November 22, hours after the deal was reached, Joel Weiler, executive director of Médecins du Monde, said “for a medical organization, four days of pause is….band aid, not health care,” arguing it would be insufficient time for treatment of serious injuries. Danila Zizi, Handicap International director for Palestine, said “it’s a kind of drop in the ocean if we don’t have fuel and we don’t have access,” complaining about the lack of clarity around the agreement.
“The only way to meet all these needs,” or respect for human rights and access to healthcare, “is a permanent, sustained cessation of humanitarian law violations and a cease fire long enough to restore human rights to millions of people,” said Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. “That’s why we’re joining this call for an immediate and sustained ceasefire.”
Regarding the announcement of the agreement, Hamas stated, “The terms of this agreement were formulated according to the vision of the resistance and its determinants, which aim to serve our people and enhance their steadfastness in the face of aggression, constantly mindful of their sacrifices, suffering, concerns, and managing these negotiations from a position of steadfastness and strength in the field, despite the occupation’s attempts to prolong and procrastinate the negotiations.”
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that this exact same deal was put forward to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu previously, but was rejected. According to an analysis piece in the Israeli paper of record, Netanyahu caved under pressure from the families of Israelis held hostage in Gaza as well as the IDF, Shin Bet, and the Mossad. Multiplereports indicate that Israeli airstrikes in Gaza have killed many of their own hostages.
On Wednesday, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht, the IDF’s international spokesperson, said in a press briefing that, “our terminology is not ceasefire, our terminology is an operational pause,” implying that Israel could resume violence once the hostage exchange is complete. Hecht also suggests that the pause might not begin in over 24 hours.
Wounded and hospitalized Gazans continue to be targeted by the IOF, with convoys evacuating the wounded obstructed by Israeli forces at checkpoints or Israelis launching further airstrikes near hospitals, such as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital and the Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital.
“As medical humanitarians, we reassert that hospitals should never, under any circumstances be a target,” asserted Avril Benoît, Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières in the United States, in Wednesday’s press briefing. She added, “It’s dangerous and terrifying to think what is happening to the norms, to the laws of war. It’s like this dystopian reality now where all the normal scaffolding of what is the conduct of responsible parties in a conflict are being completely perverted.”
