Watching this Richard J. Murphy podcast with John Christensen I was struck by an anecdote that Christensen shared about corruption on the Isle of Jersey in the late 1990s (note that I didn’t have time to confirm spelling of the proper names mentioned or fact check, so I’m redacting those):
John Christensen:I for quite a long time I had been very disillusioned with the government in Jersey. It’s become clear to me that by and large the the regulatory pro processes the laws in play and regulations in place were window dressing exercises and there was very very weak enforcement or compliance.
So the whole thing as far as I was concerned was a charade.
Late one January evening (and this is 1996) the phone went at my home and it was a Wall Street Journal investigating investigating journalist calling an and he started questioning me about a currency trader who was operating in Jersey and a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS.
The subsidiary was called [redacted] and and and a major churn client churning exercise which had cost a bunch of American investors tens of millions of (dollars).
And what he said was that the government of Jersey was thwarting any attempt at investigating this and allowing these investors who had lost tens of millions to have access to justice.
I said, “I know nothing about this whatsoever.”
He clearly thought I was bullshitting. He said, “But it’s your department that issued the license to the currency trader to trade in Jersey. (The trader) was not a Jerseyman, and it’s your department that gave him the housing or or supported his application for a housing license to rent property in Jersey.
And I said, “Well, to be honest, mate, I know everything that goes on in my department. I’ve never heard of this.”
He clearly thought I was a liar. And I did a deal. I said I will go in first thing tomorrow morning and check the files and if what you’ve said is correct then I will help you. I will cooperate.
Now I was in this extraordinary situation because I was a very senior civil servant. In fact I headed the government economic service. Part of my job was to work with international media.
I went in, checked everything he said, stood up and I realized that in order to circumvent me and my department, my boss, [redacted], the chief adviser…had gone round my back um and issued a license which should never have been issued and had given support for a housing consent which by policy should not have been supported.
And he’d done that because it turns out that at that at the time when this felony started, the most important politician in Jersey happened to be a member of the board of [redacted].
So here’s corruption in a very British form.
…
Another part of the corruption lay with the media in Jersey. BBC Radio Jersey never asked the the correct questions. The Jersey Evening Post never asked the correct questions; which were how the hell did this guy get a license to operate in Jersey and how the hell did he get a housing permit?Because both were against government policy. And the reason they did that was because the Jersey Eden Post at that time belonged to a very senior politician which itself is corrupt.
This is all very British. This is the way things operate in Britain.
Journalists go to great lengths to not ask the right questions because they are themselves corrupted. …It was a staterun organ in effect at that period and it probably still is to some extent.
This anecdote raised conflicting points in my mind.
On the one hand, I admire the seriousness, technical expertise, and ethics of Murphy and Christensen. They represent the best of their generation and have multiple qualities I don’t see from younger reformers.
I also am nostalgic for an era in which a whistleblower like Christensen could actually make an impact by talking to the press. People were tried and convicted, etc.
That kind of thing is much missed in the Trump/Starmer era.
On the other hand, my lived experience of the 1990s contrasts so strongly with how the period is damned to be remembered historically that it inspires awe at the power of the dominant narrative in the West in that era.
The 1990s was the age of Sir Jimmy Saville after all.
🇬🇧 Jimmy Saville was hugely popular TV Star – he presented Top of The Pops & Jim will Fix it on the BBC over several decades.
He was knighted & made a Sir – on of the highest honours anyone can receive in Britain.
He was well known for being good friends with our now King -… pic.twitter.com/w50EKoDDTl
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) May 3, 2024
In America we had Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, who may not have been knighted but had a comparable status as secular sages, beloved and admired.
Of course, we didn’t know then what we know now about Saville being a prolific sex predator, or Cosby being a serial rapist or in Allen’s case, people were trying to tell us, but many people were convinced his marriage to his ex-wife’s daughter was a love match.
We certainly didn’t know Woody was having dinner with Noam Chomsky….and a man we hadn’t heard of yet named Jeffrey Epstein.
It was comforting to watch the official propaganda of Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS and be reassured about the noble nature of both sides in that war and then follow it up with Eyes on the Prize which taught us that things had been bad in the racist past but the miraculous 1960s had solved everything.
Perhaps I was just young and naive, but in the 1990s it somehow seemed plausible to accept the mythologies of the capitalist west.
Things like the Iran-Contra Scandal or Watergate showed that there was corruption, but it was limited and could be dealt with.
After all, wasn’t that bright young Rudy Guliani bringing down the Mafia itself?
Hadn’t the evil empire of the USSR fallen without a war?
Hadn’t an American president united the whole world against Saddam Hussein’s aggression and fought and won a war to liberate Kuwait?
Even better hadn’t the Color Revolution in Serbia shown that Gene Sharp had distilled the non-violent revolutionary techniques of Gandhi and MLK into a formidable instrument for freedom?
From the vantage point of 2026, post-Enron, post-9/11, post-2008, post-Maidan, post-Trump/Brexit, post-COVID, it’s just as impossible to look back fondly at Gene Sharp and company as it is to enjoy the comedy of Bill Cosby with your kids.
Yes, it is upsetting and alarming to watch David Ellison’s CBS blatantly censoring a late night show or US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring a new era of colonialism, but perhaps it’s good that the lies of this era are so flagrant.
spud
in 1992 i knew the rich finally had their man. its been all down hill since then.
notice the picture of the prisoners right behind clinton.
https://jacobin.com/2016/09/stone-mountain-kkk-white-supremacy-simmons/
Bill Clinton’s Stone Mountain Moment
By
Nathan J. Robinson
In 1992, Bill Clinton spoke from the mecca of American white supremacy to launch his “tough on crime” agenda.
“As Democratic strategist Ted Van Dyk phrased it, Clinton’s New Democratic politics were intended to signal to “Reagan Democrats that it is safe to come home to their party because poor, black, Hispanic, urban, homeless, hungry, and other people and problems out of favor in Middle America will no longer get the favored treatment they got from mushy 1960s and 1970s Democratic liberals.””
—
if you read the article fully, you will see where trump got all the power that he is exercising today.
mago
Um, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen were both serial sex offenders, not cozy comfortable comedians and father figures. Just saying.
Nat Wilson Turner
@mago um, that was exactly my point. Guess I’ll have to do an edit and make that explicit. You didn’t notice I was lumping them in with Jimmy Saville?
I’m guessing you’re not a Brit and don’t know about Saville.
Ok I updated it to make it less subtle and more obvious.
Thanks for reminding me that assuming the reader has any awareness or comprehension of anything that isn’t explicitly spelled out is a fool’s errand.
mago
No. I’m ignorant about Saville and popular Brit culture along with much else.
No need to simplify for the non cognoscenti who lack any sense of subtlety and irony such as an uninformed fool like myself.
different clue
@spud,
There was a book about that aspect of Clinton’s political career.
” Superpredator: Bill Clinton’s Use and Abuse of Black America”
by
Nathan J. Robinson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30984134-superpredator
Nat Wilson Turner
@mago sorry didn’t mean to be rude, was just shocked that I’d missed the mark by so much.
spud
different clue:
yep. he was a one man wrecking crew for sure. he also was a major union buster, perhaps the biggest one america ever had.
someofparts
Now that we know more, what next? Can we do anything about it?
Can we stop what is being done to Cuba, right on our doorstep?
Eric Anderson
someofparts —
The answer is so f’ing obvious, but nobody wants to believe it’s the answer because we’re all addicts. Kick television.
Here’s the lyrics to Wilco’s “Kicking Televison”
I’m serious
You’ll see
I’m working on my abs
I’m working on me
Oh, I’m kickin’
Yeah, I’m calm
Oh, I’m kickin’
Television
Television
Stop shopping, even
Stop buying things
I’m kickin’
Yeah, I’m calm
Oh, I’m kickin’
Television
Television
Um..
Oh, I’m serious
You’ll see
I’m kickin’
Yeah, I’m calm
Yeah, I’m kickin’
Television
Television
Television Television.
In an interview with Billboard, Jeff Tweedy explained the meaning of the phrase “Kicking Television”:
“A rock concert is ‘kicking television.’ If you’re out of the house and with a bunch of people enjoying something together, that’s kicking television to me. I don’t think very many people, myself included, will ever kick television cold turkey, but I certainly think more people should be aware of what it’s doing to them.”
Kick tech and be with people. Talk and commune face to face. Get involved with local government. Take all that time that is wasted in front of tech, and make the world a better place.
It’s so plain. But, nobody does it. And so we’re doomed be what Thoreau predicted … tools of our tools, and slaves to the masters of our tools.
The revolution won’t be televised. Because, it won’t happen until nobody can afford a television.
The answer … right in front of your, my, and everyone here’s face.
No brainer.
Eric Anderson
And, Nat, the same applies to 90’s cognitive dissonance. Television.
There was some semblance of shared cultural literacy because we ALL were glued to the television and the big 3 (ABC, NBC, CBS in the U.S.) were in lock step on the issues. They spoon fed us what they wanted us to believe.
Now, with the gutting of the fairness doctrine, we get peeks into the horror. But the “truth” is so atomized that there is no hope of a majority coalition forming to act on it. So, we get piecemeal horrors that the cycle moves to fast to catch.
Not sure which version of the blob is worse.
Jan Wiklund
Perhaps not. Hypocrisy is necessary only if there is a risk to be punished. Rubio can call in a new era of colonialism only because he is sure that nobody can stop him.
Hypocrisy is Sin’s tribute to Honesty. It doesn’t have to, nowadays.
mago
I understand your frustration. It’s funny and ironic that I’m always railing about subtlety, nuance and irony flying over peoples heads. In my defense I read this while distracted and exhausted after a fourteen hour day. I’ll pay better attention in the future.
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… but perhaps it’s good that the lies of this era are so flagrant.
That’s one perspective. Another perspective is that it’s horrible because they don’t even care to hide it now or engage in any sort of conventional decorum. Soon enough, pedophilia by the elite will be on full display and the unwashed will be throwing their children at the elite to be sacrificed on the alter of progress. I mean, that happens already under the aegis of a young college graduate’s career, but considering the implications of AI, select children can be saved from the immiseration of the sprawling favelas by instead falling prey to the exalted depredations of the elite.
At this point, I truly hope the predictions about AI come true. How delightful it will be to see the technocrats, Christy and Chuck for example, thrown to the curb by their overlords. There will be involuntary egalitarianism amongst the dispossessed 99%. You want egalitarianism says the elite, well now you have it. Enjoy.
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someofparts, no, we can’t stop it and no, nothing can be done about it except to create more raging content.
If we can’t beat it, we may as well cash in on it while we can, right?
My YouTube feed tells the tale. If you’re a Rage Addict, there are thousands of drug dealers on every block. It puts Baltimore’s ghetto scene from The Wire to shame and in fact, one of the Rage offerings is a publication called Wired, ironically or not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TraSFcARVwM&list=RDTraSFcARVwM&start_radio=1
We just can’t seem to keep the devil down in the hole, can we?
somecomputerguy
Who’d a thunk it? Gene Sharp; history’s greatest monster.
Move over, Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sacks, post-USSR shock therapy was a kerfuffle.
I wasted my working life serving senior tenured academics at a top-twenty research university.
I watched as they annihilated their own profession by over-subscribing graduate programs for teaching labor while eliminating tenured positions so they could give themselves raises.
Their main use of tenure was to treat everyone around them like crap.
Walking, talking amalgams of every pathology of elite status in America,
their collective lifetime work product, produced at public expense and published in their vanity press, where at least, no one who paid for it will be forced to read it.
It is easy for me to understand why someone from that crowd, might look at Sharp, someone who devoted his life to giving the public a systematic study of non-violent action (i.e., something actually useful) with more than a little resentment.
Kind of the way corporate dems view genuine public servants.
The reason military people are interested in Sharp, is because what he describes is military-style mobilization without guns. Which provokes a wonder; how necessary are the guns?
I don’t recall Sharp advertising his own work as anything like a panacea. I recall it as an antidote to unrealistic expectations.
How shall we contrast this take-down of Sharp, no doubt also produced at public expense, with Sharps work, or out of kindness shall we just pass?
Nat Wilson Turner
@somecomputerguy no one said Sharp was the world’s greatest monster. The point was his work, at a minimum, has been misused by the CIA et al to overthrow multiple governments around the world and there is reason to believe he was working with the Agency the whole time. Just another idol made of clay.
No idea what you’re talking about re: “no doubt produced at public expense.”
somecomputerguy
@NAT I would like to sincerely apologize for the appearance of an attack on you.
I was responding entirely to the linked article. That is what “no doubt produced at public expense.” is about; the site hosting the article–
nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities. nonsite.org is affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
I assumed that would be clear from the context; of course you didn’t accuse Sharp of being history’s greatest monster– I thought that rhetoric would make it clear that I was talking about the linked article.
I respectfully dispute that the author of that article made their case.
That article is of a genre. A young academic wants to make a splash, so they go after someone. The more outrageous the target and the attack, the bigger the splash.
However, given what I know of the academic world, even if everything in that article is actually true, Gene Sharp is still a hero.
When I ordered a copy of the latest edition of one of Sharps books, many many years ago, it was because the Einstein Institute had exactly one employee, and seemed on the verge of shutting down.
Does only uselessness prosper in in academia?
Nat Wilson Turner
@somecomputerguy no worries, I was more confused than offended. Frankly I grabbed that link since it came up quickly in a Google search, but there are plenty more on Sharp and his relationships with US intel.
Most importantly for me is the fine old maxim “By their fruits ye shall know them” and the fruits of Sharp’s metholods have all been net negatives that served empire — whether it’s in Serbia, Ukraine, Kazakstan, Georgia, or Iran “non-violent” color revolutions have all had the effect of supporting the John Boltons and Victoria Nulands, rather than the people nominally “rebelling”