Media coverage of a sort

There might not have been a  media presence at yesterday's protest at County Hall but at least there was a nod in our direction from Shaun Lowthorpe in today's EDP. Writing about the responsibility of power (with no cash) he adds a footnote:


“Funnily enough, campaigners went to a County Hall meeting yesterday to try to get into a meeting of the Greater Norwich Development Partnership in a bid to make the body more accountable. Ironic that they were there trying to get in, as I suspect there may well be officers just as desperate to get out”

He might well be right but it is likely that officers of the GNDP might want to escape for  reasons other than lack of cash!


1 comment:

  1. A brave mission, which resulted in factual proof of the kind favoured by Nassim Taleb (a Lebanese Orthodox Christian).

    He authored the 2007 book The Black Swan which a Sunday Times review described as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.

    He appeared on Newsnight a couple of days ago, being asked to comment on the Wikileaks saga. He seemed a bit hesitant, but said that he thought that possibly it did not matter too much what governments and other elected bodies get up to as they have all lost control of both local and national matters.

    All nation states, in his view, are totally controlled by TransNationalCorporations and other large corporations; he did not come across as an anti-capitalist however, merely as someone stating a fact which might be difficult to prove by what he dismissed as "top-down" research. I suppose what he was saying was, if a taxi driver or a school dinner lady has a gut feeling from the small details of their daily life, that there is no real democracy, they are probably right. They can't prove it, however, unless they start to engage with the Hydra and find out for themselves that this mythical beast does in fact exist by coming up against its retinue of elected officials.

    Many people actually in government are beginning to catch up with taxi drivers and dinner ladies in their grasp of reality - so Mr Lowthorpe may have a point when he says, that some of those GNDP members won't have wanted to be at that meeting or any other. This does not alter the fact that the corporations are almost unstoppable, with or without government support.

    Almost unstoppable - but not quite. Meetings between Councils and Developers may cost us taxpayers a lot, but they cost the Developers a lot too and eat into their potential profits. So keep trying to enforce Democracy - even if it doesn't exist!

    It goes without saying that if you are going to take on companies that are happy to wait 20 years before an incinerator actually gets built, you need to make sure that you are not dependent personally on the services and profits of that and similar companies. And that means living in a sustainable locality in a sustainable country with full biodiversity and above all a low human population density.

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