Debt deal: anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires’ coup by George Monbiot starkly highlights the ongoing bizarre nature of US politics and voting, mostly with regards to the latest political spat surrounding the debt bill.

There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor.

Monibiot says there are exceptions to these rules, but they’re largely solid. In the US, like most countries, there’s absolutely no balance between rich and poor:

As the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz points out, in the past 10 years the income of the top 1% has risen by 18%, while that of blue-collar male workers has fallen by 12%.

In fact, in the US, as in other countries, even the middle classes are now finding costs spiralling. Logically, then, the vast majority should demand over the short term to make the super-rich pay more tax, in order to rebalance society and not have everyone but billionaires screwed over. But in the US, the reverse happens, because the super-rich control the media and have a sneaky plan:

So the rich, in a nominal democracy, have a struggle on their hands. Somehow they must persuade the other 99% to vote against their own interests: to shrink the state, supporting spending cuts rather than tax rises. In the US they appear to be succeeding.

Thus, you have poor, jobless people and even the reasonably well off fighting tooth-and-nail against tax rises that wouldn’t affect them but that would potentially make their lives better, and demanding breaks for people who already have more money than they know what to do with. As Monbiot says, many people in the USA therefore

mobilise against their own welfare.

It’s a depressing state of affairs, but the UK’s getting sucked into this way of thinking. Rather than looking east (or north-east) at the genuine big societies of Scandinavia, where there’s a high-tax but also high-support and high quality of life agenda, we have people begging for taxes to be slashed, while the Tory-led government argues for a Big Society that means “deal with everything yourselves, but we won’t support you and, in some cases, we’ll demand you don’t do what you want to, if we decide you shouldn’t be doing it”. Marvellous.

I’m really not sure what the solution is. UK politics will in 2015 take a depressingly huge swing towards partisanship again, when the Liberal Democrats return a dozen or fewer seats. We’ll again see the Tories and Labour trading blows, trying to win an election by using policies to seduce a few important seats, probably in part by pledging to keep taxes low, even for people earning millions. (Scotland will be a partial exception, since the SNP will remain strong, although that party’s tax plans appear to be in almost constant disarray.)

I don’t want to see a return to the kind of Wilson-era supertax, which inspired George Harrison to write Taxman. I don’t think a 95% tax on the super-rich is sensible, and it would almost certainly be detrimental. You’d end up with a ton of tax exiles, more tax cheats, and a lack of willingness in the entrepreneurial space. But the Tories seem determined to scrap the 50% tax band (applied only to earnings over £150,000—about seven times the skewed national average), which doesn’t seem a particularly sensible move. And when you look at the compromises in the USA—slashing benefits for the poor, in order to ensure the rich don’t have to pay an extra penny in taxes—arguing for a low-tax society seems like precisely the opposite of what civilised nations should be doing.

Gary Marshall for TechRadar on BT being ordered by the High Court of Justice to block access to Newzbin2, a site largely devoted to sharing illicit copies of files, as reported by the BBC and others. This is an unbelievably fucking stupid decision. Marshall:

It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious: anyone with even a passing knowledge of how piracy works knows that going after specific sites is a giant game of whack-a-mole. But there’s more to this than piracy. Blocking copyright infringement sets a dangerous precedent.

The people who want to access Newzbin2 will be able to find workarounds, so piracy won’t be affected to any great degree. But it’s that second point that’s most important here. UK law now has precedent for ISPs to be compelled to block sites deemed to be infringing copyright, censoring content due to the demands of a corporate entity. What next? BitTorrent? YouTube? Anything the media industry and government decides people shouldn’t have access to? That might sound alarmist, if it wasn’t for the Tory-led UK government already considering a national firewall.

Charlie Brooker for The Guardian:

If anyone reading this runs a news channel, please, don’t clog the airwaves with fact-free conjecture unless you’re going to replace the word “expert” with “guesser” and the word “speculate” with “guess”, so it’ll be absolutely clear that when the anchor asks the expert to speculate, they’re actually just asking a guesser to guess. Also, choose better guessers. Your guessers were terrible, like toddlers hypothesising how a helicopter works.

This refers to the recent and terrible events in Norway, but also happens to be relevant for an awful lot of news coverage these days.

Good grief. Via The Medium is Not Enough, here’s Fox News’s take on the News International hacking scandal. In short: “They’ve done the right thing! Why do people keep banging away at this story?” Well, maybe that’s because News International was so powerful it had an entire government scared stiff and also practically decided who was elected. And, frankly, that Fox News piece pretty much showcases what happens when a media organisation has too much power. Impartiality? Facts? Fuck that—much more fun to pander to your parent company’s CEO’s wishes!

I’m not sure what’s more sad about Steve Silberman’s An Eye-Opening Adventure in Socialized Medicine, the fact that someone from a wealthy, democratic country—the USA—was totally shocked about being treated, essentially for free, in London when he came down with a bad case of conjunctivitis, or that the NHS as we know it is still under threat from aggressive Conservative-led policy.

Silberman’s story highlights a poor aspect of US healthcare and the best of British. Having spent a large number of dollars battling with his US provider (“The Kaiser rep simply repeated her question in a more brittle tone of voice and added, ‘Just answer yes or no.'”), he finally got ‘permission’ to phone a London number for emergency care.

Amazingly, a human being picked up the phone right away — an affable guy with a disarmingly chummy accent and an empathic manner. Yes, yes, of course I should see a doctor right away. Where should they send him?

What? This guy was offering to dispatch someone to examine my eyes immediately in my apartment in the middle of the night?

He then ends up discovering, having heard about the evils of British healthcare, that there weren’t in fact thousands of people fighting for attention in the waiting room, that the staff were generally courteous and efficient, and, eventually, that the entire event cost him under a tenner for the prescription. The consultation was, of course, free.

In the comments, there are notes from people that Silberman only didn’t get charged because it’s too much hassle for the NHS to bother for such a small incident and consultation, but this nonetheless highlights two important things. First, the NHS was willing to spend some resources on a tourist, without any questions over insurance; secondly, that this is the default level of service you can enjoy with the evils of ‘socialised’ healthcare—and it costs a fraction of US healthcare insurance, along with being available to all.

There’s also a second point made, in that the NHS isn’t ‘free’ but ‘free at the point of entry’. But this is still a safety net that surely beats the US model, where you often aren’t even covered if you travel out of state. (Imagine telling a Londoner they’re not covered in Wales… they’d just look at you as though you were bonkers.) It’s strange that in a country that has ‘socialised’ aspects (police forces, benefits, various industries), health is such a sticking point. Why would it be a terrible thing for the USA to set up its own NHS? It’s not like you’d be forced to use it—after all, the UK has additional paid-for tiers—but at least then everyone would be covered and not petrified about losing their healthcare if they should lose their job. And the argument against—Why should I have to subsidise someone else’s healthcare?—makes no sense, given that this is precisely what you’re doing with insurance-based systems anyway. Insurance costs are always based in part around the people who are not insured, which drives premiums up.

The NHS isn’t perfect and I’m sure there are plenty of things that could be done to tighten things up. Yes, waiting lists are sometimes long and there are inconsistencies throughout the service. But the day the NHS is morphed into any kind of privatised service will be very sad indeed.