Index

2: Book review: The Prostitute State

How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought

Donnachadh Mc Carthy, FRSA - 3 Acorns Publications, 2014
or http://www.lulu.com/shop/donnachadh-mccarthy/the-prostitute-state-how-britains-democracy-has-been-bought/ebook/product-21827747.html.

The author began his serious disillusion with ‘the Prostitute State’ – i.e. Britain (and most/all others) - when in 1992 he accepted the offer of a trip to the Yanomami ‘Indians’ along the Amazon with alternative heath practitioners, and viewed the genocide and forest destruction caused by the European invaders. This triggered his resolve to campaign for change, to save the environment for future generations and for biodiversity, which led to his personal eco-reform and joining and rising quickly in the Lib Dems to become a Deputy Chair of its Federal Executive, despite the opposition of the FE members who he recognised were paid servants of corporate lobbyists, and who ignored and reversed many of the policy-decisions of its Conference. This experience led him to realise the extent of the capture of our democracy by the corporate lobbyists, and after over a decade battling them within the Party, he resigned, having found that serious as it was within the LibDems, it was even worse within the Tories and New Labour.

Then the experience of the Occupy movement outside St. Pauls Cathedral prompted him to widen his research on the power and dire effects of the ‘1%’ and corporate lobbying, and its influence or direct control of our public media and academia, as well as on both Houses of Parliament.

His book details much of the evidence he has collected, and his conclusion that there are ‘four pillars’ to the ‘Prostitute State’: the Corrupted Political System’, the Prostituted Media’, the ‘Thieving Tax Havens’ and the ‘Perverted Academia’. This is supported with a wealth of eamples of each, which he details extensively

It is only near the end of the book that he mentions ‘the core issue of how money is created’, and then devotes less than a page to discussion of this. I must challenge his view that ‘This system worked resonably well until financial deregulation and the arrival of computing”; certainly, the rate of growth of debt has accellerated since then, but it was slowly increasing ever since the founding of the private Bank of England in 1694, and the 1844 Banking Act sought to end the banks’ power to create money, at that time by means of private bank notes – which led straight away to expansion of the use of cheques instead. This debt-based money can be seen as a major cause of both World Wars, as well as the ‘need for growth’ and for ‘full employment’ despite the availability in the 20th C of means to produce enough to meet needs adequately.

-- Brian Leslie
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