Cassandra Voices

Tag: change

  • Fiction: Change

    Neil went to tea break for the gossip, to find out what was going on, although he screened out the small talk about football and politics. The canteen overlooked the carpark with the smoking shed at the other end – another good source of information. It was raining the day he heard a replacement boss was coming at the end of the month. She was something new, a bit of an innovator. The rain continued as the men discussed this new woman. Some were dismissive of anyone making a difference. Neil was silent. Sometimes change was a good thing, there was certainly no point in avoiding it. He had joined the organisation five years ago after college and he still daydreamed about the future. Nothing would stop him, he smiled slightly. He had his plans and maybe this new woman would help him.

    By three thirty the rain had stopped, but the roads were flooded, pooling around the drains in large puddles. It was dark when Neil got on his bike to cycle home and, on the way, he was soaked through by unforgiving passing cars. His mother was in the kitchen boiling potatoes the windows running with condensation.

    ‘I have a lamb chop for your tea,’ she said accusingly.

    Neil took off his backpack and hung up his wet jacket in the hallway.

    ‘How’s the captain of industry?’ his father asked amiably as he passed.

    One day Neil thought, they’ll all see. He ate his dinner without comment reading The Evening Herald unenthusiastically and then went to his room. It was his belief that things would change, his life would be transformed. He was certain of it.

    The office was a large room on the third floor. Desks were mainly clustered around the windows with managers discreetly hidden behind wooden framed screens. They were the middle managers; the senior managers had their own offices filled with books and manuals of all kinds. One of them kept a full set of golf clubs leaning against a cupboard under the window while a framed picture of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca hung on the wall. Neil wasn’t even a middle manager; he was an executive assistant which meant he was a nobody. In the afternoons after lunch he let his thoughts wander to his amalgamation project. Imagine consolidating all the programmes and centralising the funding. Think of the savings! He’d done the research, and it was possible. Why had no one thought of it before? It came up at his last annual appraisal. They were in the process of discussing his Key Core Deliverables when he took out his folder with all his ideas and the costings to back them up.

    ‘That would be a matter for Corporate Affairs,’ his supervisor said primly.

    Neil shouldn’t have expected more from Amanda. She’d been in the job so long she could remember when they’d worked things out on their fingers.

    Down in the pub he complained to his mate Kevin.

    ‘No one can see the bigger picture,’ Neil said taking a gulp of his pint. ‘They’re all so busy squirrelling away at their own jobs no one puts their heads above the parapet.

    ‘Good way to get it shot off,’ Kevin said glumly.

    ‘What do you mean?’

    ‘Well if nobody does anything then nobody makes a mistake.’

    Neil had to admit to himself that Kevin was right. He was having doubts about spending much more time in the place anyway. He’d already done two competitions for promotion without success largely because Amanda had commented that he needed to improve. She said he needed more training to bring him up to speed on the organisation’s mission and objectives. It was a polite way of saying he didn’t know his job, but the idea of training wasn’t a bad one and he toyed with it over his ham and cheese sandwich in the canteen. He thought about the training courses he’d done so far in management skills and accountancy. He really needed to get a qualification like a Masters of Business Administration. Meanwhile the replacement manager was due to arrive on Monday. Rumours spread wildly, on the one hand describing her as a ruthless manipulator to a listening ear on the other. Neil decided to wait and see.

    Over the weekend he googled admissions criteria for an MBA. None of the colleges were taking applications until the spring, still it was something to aim for. He took out his C.V. It wasn’t impressive. For the last five years he had been working for Amanda in the same job. It didn’t look good, and HR had blocked his application for a transfer because of his poor performance at his appraisals. On Monday Kevin emailed him:

    ‘Just met the new boss. Her name is Stella Reynolds, and she has the corner office across the hallway from the D.G.’

    So she was a highflyer, well that could be a good thing.

    Usually Neil didn’t discuss work with his parents. Occasionally his mother asked him if he was happy at the office. It wasn’t a question he asked himself. The job wasn’t about happiness. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves Amanda was fond of saying. He had good days when he got something done and he felt satisfied for a little while. A lot of the time though the days were long and tedious. He was twenty-six and Neil didn’t consider himself young anymore. At this stage he should be getting on with his career, things should be happening! Instead he woke each morning with a heavy feeling of apprehension about the day ahead. He looked at Kevin’s email again and wondered if he was fooling himself thinking there was anything significant in her arrival. At tea break he skipped the canteen and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin was there smoking and drinking a can of Red Bull.

    ‘Everything OK?’ Neil asked cautiously.

    ‘I’ve had enough,’ Kevin blurted out. ‘I’m going to my brother in New Zealand. He says he can get me a job.’

    ‘When are you going?’

    ‘Next month.’

    So Kevin had found an escape route. Neil was envious, but also felt a surge of energy, now he really had to do something. When he got back to his desk there was a notification about a presentation on Financial Efficiency in the board room on Friday at three. Stella Reynolds was the lead speaker. So this was Neil’s opportunity to meet her. He accessed the slides for the talk and the topics covered coincided with the work he had done on amalgamation. This was it; this was his chance. Kevin once asked him if he believed in God. Neil was so surprised that for a few minutes he didn’t say anything. Then as if it was obvious he said:

    ‘No I believe in myself.’

    ‘But what if you’re not enough,’ Kevin said. ‘What if you try and try and it’s still not enough.’

    Was that why he was going to New Zealand? Was Kevin looking for God on the other side of the world? It wasn’t true that Neil just believed in himself, he also knew that luck had a large part to play in it. Even the best plan could come asunder if you were unlucky. He thought about Stella Reynolds and looked up her staff details on the HR link. She wore glasses and peered anxiously towards the camera. It wasn’t a good picture. She was probably nervous about having her photo taken. Then he looked at his own staff details. The photo wasn’t too bad, but he was wearing that striped shirt that always made him look like a wide boy. On Friday he would look his best and his most confident. If this plan didn’t work, it wouldn’t be because he didn’t make the effort.

    On Friday morning he left for the house early and noticed that the day was fine and dry. The trees were still bare and wintry, but there was a brightness in the sky that suggested spring. At his desk he took out his folder and went through his spreadsheets again. It wasn’t perfect, but he was sure some of his ideas would work. Then he looked up and saw Amanda was standing beside his desk.

    ‘Come with me,’ she said tersely.

    He followed her to a large cupboard hidden by a row of filing cabinets at the bottom of the room. She opened the cupboard to reveal a mess of documents lying higgeldy piggeldy on the shelves.

    ‘These have to be ordered by subject and date then filed away.’

    ‘But this will take days.’

    ‘Have you anything else on hand?’

    ‘I wanted to go to the presentation.’

    ‘This takes precedence.’

    Neil reminded himself that there was nothing to be gained by getting angry and set to work. He tried to work quickly, but the task was more complicated than he realised. By Friday evening he reckoned he was about halfway through. He took a break around four and went down to the smoking shed. Kevin looked up and asked the obvious question:

    ‘Where were you?’

    ‘Don’t ask.’

    ‘Let me guess, Amanda. Why not bring your stuff up to Stella Reynolds anyway? You’ve got nothing to lose.

    The two young men sat in silence for a few moments, smoke hung in the air and the light faded gradually as the day ended. They talked about New Zealand and staying in touch. There was a note of sadness in their conversation. Neil finished the filing job although it was difficult to tell if Amanda was happy with it. She was nowhere in sight when he left the room and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. He walked slowly to the corner office, the door was open, he went through. Stella Reynolds smiled at him and said:

    ‘What can I do for you?’

    ‘I’ve got something to show you,’ Neil said.

     

  • Climate Change: What’s Driving us Crazy?

    Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime (2018) by the recently deceased French philosopher Bruno Latour points to a conspiracy theory perpetrated by elites since the 1970s to conceal the true nature of climate change.

    Latour argues the intervening period, associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, ‘was initially marked by what is called “deregulation”, alongside ‘the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities.’

    This coincided, he says, with another phenomenon less often stressed: ‘the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change’. He defines “climate change” in broad terms as ‘the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives,’ rather than simply the climatic consequences of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, as the contemporary environmental challenge is commonly reduced to.

    This broader definition of “climate change” therefore encompasses ecological constraints – the material conditions of our lives – which even the most vociferous denier cannot gainsay, as well as other readily ascertainable phenomena such as pollution and nature loss.

    Latour continues, ‘It is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone.’

    He contends: ‘they [“the elites”] decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally.’

    Thus, ‘From the 1980s on the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others.’

    He offers the stark conclusion that any observer of social media can attest to: ‘The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.’

    Dominant players in the fossil fuel industry were undoubtedly aware of climate change by the late 1970s, and developed communication strategies designed to confound the public. Through their risk analyses, leading investment banks – representing the real elites – would surely have been privy to such information that had been circulating since the 1960s.

    Latour is correct to assert that since the 1970s inequalities have spiralled to the advantage of these elite ruling classes. However, his book fails to anticipate how canny operators among the elites – while preparing boltholes in remote locations – shifted approach on climate change

    Rather than ignoring what had emerged as a scientific consensus on the need to find alternatives to the extraction and use of fossil fuels, elites recognised mouth-watering opportunities for further wealth accumulation from renewable energy.

    Thus, investment portfolios were diversified, and bets hedged. It hardly mattered that technologies branded “clean and green” could still have devastating environmental impacts, or lead to new relationships of dependency in developing countries. In this re-alignment, companies create halo effects around products through greenwashing strategies. This explains the unprecedented attention to climate change we now see across mainstream media.

    The belated embrace of environmentalism – once the preserve of hippies – by elites also distracts from the urgent need for structural adjustments.

    The delusion of elite-led reform is sustained by a compromised and sycophantic media, reminiscent of the fawning courtiers of unaccountable monarchs. But all the indicators are that reforms will be cosmetic, as successive emission reduction targets are not met.

    Lacking “a common world”, where resources and opportunities are shared equitably within countries and internationally, populists may point to the hypocrisy of a system that permits “vertiginous” inequalities. Under private ownership, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables yields profits for the elites, but may impoverish many who are already living on the edge.

    Since Latour’s book, much abides, but much has changed too. The apparent “symbol” of our collective madness, Donald Trump, lost the 2020 Presidential election, while other populist leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson have also exited stage right, for the time being at least. But inequalities only increased during the pandemic, when trust in science was undermined by profiteering.

    The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, alongside simmering US-Chinese tensions over Taiwan, indicate the era of globalisation has come to an end. In this new edition of the Cold War, conservative, authoritarian leaders are pitted against Western governments dominated by elites that appear to be profiting from another crisis.

    Environmentalists ought to recognise that we are facing a nuclear winter, worse even than the impact of climate change, if the Ukrainian-Russian conflict escalates, and support attempts to broker a negotiated settlement. Moving forward, a new global compact is urgently required to address environmental challenges and rampant inequality.

    The environmental movement should develop a more nuanced understanding of the social and political forces ranged against meaningful reforms in the West. To develop, as Latour puts it a “common horizon” – and overcome collective madness – in the face of climate change and inequality, democratic governments must act to reverse the deregulation that occurred in the 1980s, and in particular assert control over a highly profitable renewable energy sector.

    Feature Image: “Rebellion Day” on Blackfriars Bridge, 2018.

  • The Key Change to Fix the Irish Constitution

    The Harp needs more than tuning. The single most important and useful change we should make to our Constitution is to remove the first paragraph of Article 45 which reads:

    Directive Principles of Social Policy

    The principles of social policy set forth in this article are intended for the general guidance of the Oireachtas. The application of those principles in the making of laws shall be the care of the Oireachtas exclusively, and shall not be cognisable by any court under any of the provisions of this constitution.

    As detailed below, this article provides clear instruction to the Oireachtas to ensure the material welfare of the people, but, crucially, prevents any meaningful judicial enforcement.

    Article 45 covers a lot, instructing the Oireachtas:

    • to promote the welfare of the entire people.
    • to secure wage equality and sufficiency.
    • to manage the natural assets to ‘subserve the common good.’
    • to prevent free competition from detrimental concentration of essential commodities.
    • to manage credit for the benefit of the people.
    • to ensure private enterprise is efficient and where lacking be supplemented by the State.
    • to safeguard the interests of the weak and needy.
    • to ensure the health of the people and prevent exploitation.

    There is so much to welcome here. It is clear, humane, balanced, and entirely workable. Sadly, our Constitution grants the Oireachtas, and hence the Government, a judicial free-hand, and so allows them to ignore their responsibilities.

    An amendment to remove the offending ‘cognisable’ clause, highlighted above, would allow judicial oversight of the vast majority of Government business, requiring efficiency, charity and compassion.

    There is limited jurisprudence on the matter. Initially the courts refused to countenance any argument appealing to Article 45, but it has also served as guidance, insofar as it has been used to inform decisions. This progressive approach to allow reference to the Article has yet to be accepted by the Supreme Court, and current conservative thinking reckons it to be clearly beyond the competence of any court: ‘an invalid usurpation of legislative authority’, and a breach of the separation of powers.

    Quite apart from rendering these goals easily ignored by the government, as citizens we have no recourse in law against any government for failing in its duties. Witness the Housing Crisis, Direct Provision, wage inequality, the gap between the minimum and a living wage, the destruction of natural habitats, commercial exploitation of natural resources, multinational tax avoidance, and the general inefficiency of public services, especially health care in all its forms.

    Instead, our government suggests we turn our attention to the Blasphemy clause. This is welcome among secularists, profoundly uncomfortable for the devout, and so will stir a lot of debate but it will make no meaningful difference to the lives of people.

    Consider one issue afflicting the Nation: the Housing Crisis

    The ideology that free markets are inherently efficient is rampant across the world, and clearly evident in Ireland. The common belief that only very lightly regulated business can achieve efficiencies unobtainable in the public sector is especially clear in our Government’s current policies. This avoids both the fundamental conceptual problem of measuring efficiency in terms of money, or more generally wealth creation, and also breaches sections 1, 2-ii, 2-iii, 2-iv, 2-v, 3-ii, and 4-1 of Artcle 45.

    There are almost 100,000 empty houses in Ireland, and about 10,000 homeless people, of which some 3,755 are children, in 1,739 families.

    Rents are rising rapidly, and are already 23% above the pre-Recession peak.

    Rather than exercise Eminent Domain and issue Compulsory Purchase Orders, an old and well established technique of Government, to buy and re-use exiting property to house families, the Oireachtas is considering the Home Building Finance Ireland Bill, which proposes:

    to provide for the establishment of a company called Home Building Finance Ireland (HBFI), to increase the availability of debt funding for residential development in the State. HBFI will provide financing to developers seeking to build viable residential development projects in Ireland on commercial, market equivalent terms and conditions.

    The Bill facilitates funding of HBFI from resources currently held by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), the granting of the necessary power to the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) to provide staff and services to HBFI on a cost recoverable basis, the granting of specific powers to HBFI to enable it to carry on the business of residential development finance, and ensures appropriate accountability for HBFI.

    This overtly favours property developers, contrary to the common good. Indeed, the cost of administering this HBFI will likely run to many millions, millions which could be spent directly by the Government on building and maintaining public housing.

    Consider section 2-iv of Article 45 states:

    that in what pertains to the control of credit the constant and predominant aim shall be the welfare of the people as a whole.

    This bill favours developers over the people who are in most need of housing. It is against the spirit of Article 45, but our current Government is happier delegating responsibility to poorly overseen private quangos. This is just one example of why we need to be able to challenge our Government in our Courts.

    Were we to remove the offending paragraph we could not only pursue our indolent government in our Courts for their derelictions of duties to the people; we could also ensure that all future legislation would take full account of our socio-economic rights.

    This is not a charter for vexatious litigants, it should not and would not allow suit against the Government for minor infringements. The Supreme Court is, by necessity, selective in the cases it hears, and once a matter is decided there the precedent is binding on lower courts. But the doctrine of Separation of Powers should not allow the Supreme Court to deny jurisdiction over any part of our Law.

    Let us recall that these principles of Article 45 are already for the guidance of the Oireachtas. That our elected representatives neglect their responsibilities is nothing short of abhorrent.

    It is our Constitution and we must change it. It is up to us as citizens to elect representatives that will introduce legislation for a referendum to fix this broken string.