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Dec 31, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Originally from: Advertising and academia are controlling our thoughts. Didn't you know- - George Monbiot - Opinion - The Guardian
By abetting the ad industry, universities are leading us into temptation, when they should be enlightening us
... ... ...
I ask because, while considering the frenzy of consumerism that rises beyond its usual planet-trashing levels at this time of year, I recently stumbled across a paper that astonished me . It was written by academics at public universities in the Netherlands and the US. Their purpose seemed to me starkly at odds with the public interest. They sought to identify "the different ways in which consumers resist advertising, and the tactics that can be used to counter or avoid such resistance".
AdvertisementAmong the "neutralising" techniques it highlighted were "disguising the persuasive intent of the message"; distracting our attention by using confusing phrases that make it harder to focus on the advertiser's intentions; and "using cognitive depletion as a tactic for reducing consumers' ability to contest messages". This means hitting us with enough advertisements to exhaust our mental resources, breaking down our capacity to think.
Intrigued, I started looking for other academic papers on the same theme, and found an entire literature. There were articles on every imaginable aspect of resistance, and helpful tips on overcoming it. For example, I came across a paper that counsels advertisers on how to rebuild public trust when the celebrity they work with gets into trouble. Rather than dumping this lucrative asset, the researchers advised that the best means to enhance "the authentic persuasive appeal of a celebrity endorser" whose standing has slipped is to get them to display "a Duchenne smile", otherwise known as "a genuine smile". It precisely anatomised such smiles, showed how to spot them, and discussed the "construction" of sincerity and "genuineness": a magnificent exercise in inauthentic authenticity.
ss="rich-link tone-news--item rich-link--pillar-news"> Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling 'insecure' and 'worthless' Read more
Another paper considered how to persuade sceptical people to accept a company's corporate social responsibility claims, especially when these claims conflict with the company's overall objectives. (An obvious example is ExxonMobil's attempts to convince people that it is environmentally responsible, because it is researching algal fuels that could one day reduce CO2 – even as it continues to pump millions of barrels of fossil oil a day ). I hoped the paper would recommend that the best means of persuading people is for a company to change its practices. Instead, the authors' research showed how images and statements could be cleverly combined to "minimise stakeholder scepticism".
A further paper discussed advertisements that work by stimulating Fomo – fear of missing out . It noted that such ads work through "controlled motivation", which is "anathema to wellbeing". Fomo ads, the paper explained, tend to cause significant discomfort to those who notice them. It then went on to show how an improved understanding of people's responses "provides the opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of Fomo as a purchase trigger". One tactic it proposed is to keep stimulating the fear of missing out, during and after the decision to buy. This, it suggested, will make people more susceptible to further ads on the same lines.
AdvertisementYes, I know: I work in an industry that receives most of its income from advertising, so I am complicit in this too. But so are we all. Advertising – with its destructive impacts on the living planet, our peace of mind and our free will – sits at the heart of our growth-based economy. This gives us all the more reason to challenge it. Among the places in which the challenge should begin are universities, and the academic societies that are supposed to set and uphold ethical standards. If they cannot swim against the currents of constructed desire and constructed thought, who can?
• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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Oct 17, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The fund reports that Britain's finances are weaker than all other nations except Portugal, and says privatisation is to blame
Columnists usually proffer answers, but today I want to ask a question, a big one. What price is paid when a promise is broken? Because for much of my life, and probably yours, the political class has made this pledge: that the best way to run an economy is to hack back the public realm as far as possible and let the private sector run free. That way, services operate better, businesses get the resources they need, and our national finances are healthier.
It's why your tax credits keep dropping , and your mum has to wait half a year to see a hospital consultant – because David Cameron slashed public spending, to stop it "crowding out" private money. It's why water bills are so high and train services can never be counted on – because both industries have been privatised.
We let finance rip and flogged our assets. Austerity was bound to follow Will Hutton
From the debacle of universal credit to the forced conversion of state schools into corporate-run academies, the ideology of the small state – defined by no less a body than the International Monetary Fund as neoliberalism – is all pervasive. It decides how much money you have left at the end of the week and what kind of future your children will enjoy, and it explains why your elderly relatives can't get a decent carer.
I don't wish to write about the everyday failings of neoliberalism – that piece would be filed before you could say "east coast mainline". Instead, I want to address the most stubborn belief of all: that running a small state is the soundest financial arrangement for governments and voters alike. Because 40 years on from the Thatcher revolution, more and more evidence is coming in to the contrary.
Let's start with the IMF itself. Last week it published a report that barely got a mention from the BBC or in Westminster, yet helps reframe the entire debate over austerity. The fund totted up both the public debt and the publicly owned assets of 31 countries, from the US to Australia, Finland to France, and found that the UK had among the weakest public finances of the lot. With less than £3 trillion of assets against £5tn in pensions and other liabilities, the UK is more than £2tn in the red . Of all the other countries examined by researchers, including the Gambia and Kenya, only Portugal's finances look worse over the long run. So much for fixing the roof.
'British governments have flogged nearly everything in the cupboard from airports to the Royal Mail – often at giveaway prices – to friends in the City.' Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Rex/ShutterstockAlmost as startling are the IMF's reasons for why Britain is in such a state: one way or another they all come back to neoliberalism. Thatcher loosed finance from its shackles and used our North Sea oil money to pay for swingeing tax cuts. The result is an overfinancialised economy and a government that is £1tn worse off since the banking crash. Norway has similar North Sea wealth and a far smaller population, but also a sovereign wealth fund. Its net worth has soared over the past decade.
The other big reason for the UK's financial precarity is its privatisation programme, described by the IMF as no less than a "fiscal illusion". British governments have flogged nearly everything in the cupboard, from airports to the Royal Mail – often at giveaway prices – to friends in the City. Such privatisations, judge the fund, "increase revenues and lower deficits but also reduce the government's asset holdings".
Throughout the austerity decade, ministers and economists have pushed for spending cuts by pointing to the size of the government's annual overdraft, or budget deficit. Yet there are two sides to a balance sheet, as all accountants know and this IMF work recognises. The same goes for our public realm: if Labour's John McDonnell gets into No 11 and renationalises the railways, that would cost tens of billions – but it would also leave the country with assets worth tens of billions that provided a regular income.
Instead, what this IMF research shows is that the Westminster classes have been asset-stripping Britain for decades – and storing up financial trouble for future generations.
Just look at housing to see the true cost of privatisation Dawn Foster
Privatisation and austerity have not only weakened the country's financial position – they have also handed unearned wealth to a select few. Just look at a new report from the University of Greenwich finding that water companies could have funded all their day-to-day running and their long-term investments out of the bills paid by customers. Instead of which, managers have lumbered the firms with £51bn of debt to pay for shareholders' dividends. Those borrowed billions, and the millions in interest, will be paid by you and me in our water bills. We might as well stuff the cash directly into the pockets of shareholders.
Instead of competitively run utilities, record investment by the private sector and sounder public finances, we have natural monopolies handed over to the wealthy, banks that can dump their liabilities on the public when things get tough, and an outsourcing industry that feasts upon the carcass of the public sector. As if all this weren't enough, neoliberal voices complain that we need to cut taxes and red tape, and further starve our public services.
This is a genuine scandal, but it requires us to recognise what neoliberalism promised and what it has failed to deliver. Some of the loudest critics of the ideology have completely misidentified it. Academics will daub the term "neoliberal" on any passing phenomenon. Fitbits are apparently neoliberal, as is Ben & Jerry's ice-cream and Kanye West. Pundits will say that neoliberalism is about markets and choice – tell that to any commuter wedged on a Southern rail train. And centrist politicians claim that the great failing of neoliberalism is its carelessness about identity and place, which is akin to complaining that the boy on a moped who snatched your smartphone is going too fast.
Let us get it straight. Neoliberalism has ripped you off and robbed you blind. The evidence of that is mounting up – in your bills, in your services and in the finances of your country.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist and senior economics commentator
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Paulare -> NeilofSydney , 3 Jun 2018 23:32
Spending cuts reduce demand in the economy, for every dollar spend by the govt at the lowest levels (welfare and essential services) around five to seven dollars of extra economic activity is generated.This sustains demand in the economy, and despite what Scott Morrison thinks, demand is actually the thing that drives investment. Investment will not be made by businesses if there is no demand, no matter how low the tax on profits is.
If you continually cut govt spending you will dampen down economic activity and demand.
If you give tax breaks on profit to those who with a low propensity to spend locally (ie foreign investors and super wealthy) and then impose Austerity to "balance the books" then you will do a few things:
Profits in the short term will increase as there is a greater intensive to declare profits as the tax is lower;
The increased profit will be more than likely achieved by reducing investment and and not giving wage rises. Both are costs deducted before profit is calculated;
Investment in productive businesses will stall as demand falls as austerity measures kick in;
Investments in speculative / safe haven investments will increase (shares, Property, artworks etc); This will drive up speculative house prices and price out many ordinary people.
Wages will stagnate and start to fall in real terms; Demand will stagnate and fall.
Businesses will cut back on investment and wages.
Inequality will worsen; and
Social discontent rise.
The cut taxes and impose austerity mantra is the fatuous economic and social thinking we have come to expect from from the neo-cons.
IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER
It never was going to work long terms. Only the massive con job by the media and politicians made it seem even plausible.
If you want evidence of a con job by politicians you need look no further than the assumption made that "all government spending is worthless" made by scot Morrison and co. Even with this ridiculous assumption he was only able to get even one of five scenarios to give a 0.5% boost to GDP in ten years time.
If he actually subtracted any negative effect of cutting govt spending, even without any multiplier effect, then there was no scenario where the tax cuts made any sort of economic sense.
And of course the MSM which is owned by the super wealth elite, will only continue to put out pro neo-cons propaganda and ruthlessly degenerate any opposition viewpoint.
This is actually ironic as capitalism actually works best for all, including by the way the super wealthy, when governments continually redistribute wealth downwards.
Economic well-being is something that thrives very well with social well-being.
Capitalism will fail catastrophically if governments continue to redistribute wealth upwards.
Social dislocation is the probable outcome of the current ideological trajectory.
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off-guardian.org
The "Resistance" -- the loose affiliation of liberals, progressives and neo-conservatives dedicated to opposing Donald Trump -- is NOT a grass-roots movement. They don't speak for the everyman or the poor or the oppressed. They are a distraction, nothing more. A parlor game. The face to Trump's heel .
The Resistance is the voice of the Deep State -- Pro-war, pro-globalisation, pro-Imperialism. It just hides its true face behind a mask of "progressive values". They prove this with their own actions -- opposing Trump's moves toward peace with North Korea and finding common ground with Russia.
In fact, though the resistance lives to criticize the Trump administration, they have been notably quiet -- even in favour of -- three key issues: The bombing of Syria, the tearing up of the INF treaty and the prosecution of Julian Assange.
They tell us, in clear voices, who they are and what they want and millions of people refuse to listen. So totally brain-washed by the "Orange Man Bad" hysteria, that they will side with anyone hitting the same talking points, spouting the right buzzwords, using the same hashtags.
This process has contrived to turn hard-line, inveterate warmongers into a pantheon of "liberal" heroes . John "bomb bomb Iran" McCain was mourned across the media as if he were a champion of civil rights, while Bill Kristol and his ilk are suddenly regular guests on notionally "liberal" channels .
and Robert Mueller receives a glowing write-up in the Guardian, being praised as "America's straightest arrow" .
The painful prose paints a blurry picture of Mueller. Slapping ounces of vaseline onto the lens of reality. It praises his hair and his clothes and his 35 dollar watch. It declares him a soldier "forged in combat", regaling us with tales of the bravery of Mueller's marine regiment -- "The Magnificent Bastards".
Vietnam is reduced to a movie set -- nothing but a backdrop for Mueller's courage under fire. He won a bronze star, you know. Apparently while "The Magnificent Bastards" strode around the Vietnamese jungle, burning villages down and watching the napalm fall from the sky, a couple of angry farmers shot back and Mueller was wounded.
Taking a bullet in the leg from a terrified peasant who just wants you to sod off out of his country will always win you medals, but it shouldn't.
Voluntarily signing on to enforce Imperial foreign policy in a war of conquest will always have the media paint you as a hero, but it shouldn't.
What flaws the author does ascribe to Mueller are those we all happily admit to having ourselves. He's a "micromanager" and he's "too tough".
Yes, and I'm sure he works himself too hard and doesn't suffer fools gladly and always speaks his mind aswell.
Read the column if you want, but I'd suggest not eating for a few hours first. A more nauseating panegyric I have not witnessed, at least since Barack Obama left office .
Far more telling than what it does say is what it does not say. It mentions Mueller's role as head of the FBI during the launch of the "war on terror", but doesn't go into any of the abuse of human rights that accompanied (and still accompanies) the increasingly authoritarian powers granted to US intelligence agencies by the Patriot Act.
Let's be clear: Mueller's FBI was complicit in rendition, torture, Gitmo. All of it.
Given that, it's rather unsurprising that the article doesn't mention the word "Iraq" once. A breath-taking omission, considering Mueller's testimony in front of congress played a key role in spreading the lie of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction":
It doesn't matter how many Vietnamese peasants took pot-shots at him, it doesn't matter how tidy his hair is, or how cheap his watch. It doesn't matter if he looks like Cooper or speaks like Eastwood or walks like Wayne. He is a proven liar -- a man culpable in the greatest crime of the 21st century. He is, and always will be, a servant of the Deep State.
A proven liar. A proven killer. An Imperialist. A criminal.
Is this the stuff of which political heroes should be made?
Only in "the Resistance".
Obviously, Trump's administration is dangerous -- it still stokes warlike approaches to Iran and Russia. It has directly threatened Venezuela and Cuba. But you can't fight the right-hand of the Deep State by clasping the left. They all join in the middle. They're the same monster.
Anti-Trumpers, all over the world, need to take a good look at WHO they're fighting alongside, and ask themselves WHAT they are fighting for.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he's forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
systemicfraud Nov, 26, 2018
Yarkob Nov, 25, 2018Mueller's FBI named their 9/11 investigation PENTTBOM=Pentagon Twin Towers Bombing
There were also numerous media accounts of explosives being used on 9/11–even ABC's John Miller
stated initial FBI feedback was that there were additional explosives used at WTC on 9/11.Did FBI test for explosives?
What were the results?
If no tests were done–why the F not?
Why didn't media or Congress ever follow up and ask FBI about the explosions which were reported?Antonym Nov, 25, 2018i was reading that puff-piece yesterday, thinking "i wonder how long off-g's response to this journalistic offal will be in coming" you haven't disappointed! Kit..sorry, i sound like a gushing fanboi. most people outside of america don't realise how deep statey Mueller really is. he's the Harvey Keitel character from pulp fiction. the mob cleanup guy
the Graun is particularly odious at the moment. today's leader is a blatant opinion piece where the "writer" is practically rubbing their hand on their thighs with glee, telling us how trump is facing a subpoena cannon from the dems. good too see they're using their newly re-minted political capital on the important business of running the country resistance my arse
homeslicez Nov, 25, 2018The same Mueller went after Iranians instead of Saudis for the Khobar bombing despite contrary evidence, and ignored Russia's warnings about future Boston bomber Tsarneav. He was also the biggest obstacle for Sept. 11 families who wanted to sue Saudi Arabia. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/robert-mueller-was-the-biggest-obstacle-for-sept-11-families-who-wanted-to-sue-saudi-arabia
A "good ol boy" in rogue CIA speak.Einstein Nov, 24, 2018And with the anthrax investigation (which of course the Guardian doesn't mention), he's also a proven incompetent.
Have to say though–I'm looking forward to the day when this investigation is wrapped, the report comes out, and it's not at all what the Maddows wanted to hear. At that point Mueller will suddenly be a Russian agent himself; incompetent; compromised, and any/all other smears to explain why his investigation didn't find their irrational hysteria to be true.
Then maybe a few months later Trump will fire him and he'll be a hero again and get a Gofund to help this poor unemployed honorable soul.
Paul Nov, 24, 2018Wonder how the Grauniad will explain away the Skripal case when it's revealed that Mueller's Steele dossier was written by Skripal.
No wonder the British Deep State are panicking to prevent the publication of the documents ordered by the Orange One.Roberto Nov, 24, 2018What documents has he ordered?
USAma Bin Laden Nov, 24, 2018The ones specified in late September 2018.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-23/mi6-scrambling-stop-trump-releasing-classified-docs-russia-probeGary Weglarz Nov, 24, 2018The so-called anti-Trump Resistance(TM) plays the role of Good Cop to the Trump Regime's Bad Cop. Nothing more.
This is the nature of the political shell game that passes for American democracy, which in reality is an imperial plutocracy.
In all these Anglo imperialist nations in general like America, Britain, or Australia, there is only one true party: the party of Anglo American imperialism.
The anti-Trump "Resistance" is merely one faction of the Anglo-American Empire, which is in conflict with another faction of the Anglo-American Empire.
The supposed differences between them are similar to the differences between Coke and Pepsi, or McDonald's and Burger King.
Distinctions without a difference.
A pox on all their houses.
Paul Nov, 24, 2018("A proven liar. A proven killer. An Imperialist. A criminal.
Is this the stuff of which political heroes should be made?
Only in "the Resistance").
-- - ah, there you go again bringing in reason, a rational argument, the historical record, common sense, and in short objective – "reality" – into the equation. Of course if you are using these sort of criteria Mueller isn't going to look so good. You have to understand that the "Resistance" is, well, more of a "feeling" than anything rational or intellectually defensible.and valorizing Muller certainly isn't based on his "real-world" behavior. Simply put, Muller stands in opposition to Trump and that "feels" right to the "resistance." You know, just like it "feels right" to this same segment of the U.S. population not to let themselves think about the fact that Obama was illegally and immorally bombing 8 Muslim countries as he left office.
Of course in the end Mueller as "hero" of the "resistance" is simply the deep state's slight of hand PR campaign to oppose Trump as the impossibly and unacceptably "bad face" for U.S. empire that he is.
I mean how are Merkel or Macron or May supposed to rally their even half-awake citizenry into dutifully following our tweet crazed endlessly offensive "Orange One" into the next all important battle against the newest deep state defined "Hitler" in Iran, or Syria, or . . . while maintaining any credibility with their own populations?It's astonishing how many self professed 'Progressives' swallow the Resistance line. There certainly is a war within the Administration, Dark State v the President. The latest episode seems to have centred around cutting off the legs of Trump's big partner in the ME and his son in law's close friend, Crown Prince bin Salman. What promoted Turkey to release the information they had on the murder in Istanbul? We can be satisfied it wasn't borne out of humanitarianism! Were they acting in lock step with the American Agencies like the CIA that now tells Turkey it has intercepts 'proving' the Crown Prince ordered the killing? The 'bloodless' Regime Change that is underway aims to remove an arrogant and reckless not to say bloodthirsty man from Absolute Power, a position he might have held for 50 years or more. No wonder Erdoghan would like to see him sidelined. 50 years of Absolute Power in one of the richest countries on earth is an awful lot of time! For the Americans it is a case of seizing control of Foreign Policy in the ME from Trump who keeps talking about 'getting out' of Syria: the Military and the Agencies regard that as not in American interests; they intend to stay and control the vast oil wells in the NE. But it requires agreement with Turkey so who knows what the Agencies promise Turkey in return? It sounds like a deal dividing northern Syria between the Turks and the Americans; no room for the Kurds (again). It's the most serious blow to Trump's authority akin to the time the American military disobeyed Obama over the cease fire with Russia in Syria when instead they 'accidently' bombed Syrian soldiers, killing 80 of them. President's it seems are not allowed their own Foreign Policy and in reality that has been the case since the CIA was founded. Only Kennedy seriously tried to break away
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Phoroneus57 , 3 Jun 2018 23:03
'Trickle down effect' - the favourite buzzword of neoliberal supporters. I'd like to see trickle down effect tried at the local pub on the taps by the local mp. Imagine what would happen. Definitely doesn't pass the pub test.
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Dec 27, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Dumping On The Donald
by Tyler Durden Tue, 12/25/2018 - 15:00 41 SHARES Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth,
I still had some things I didn't talk about in Sunday's Trump Derangement International , about how the European press have found out that they, like the US MSM, can get lots of viewers and readers simply by publishing negative stories about Donald Trump. The US president is an attention magnet, as long as you only write things about him designed to make him look bad.
The Guardian is only too happy to comply. They ran a whole series of articles on Sunday to do juts that: try to make Trump look bad. Note that the Guardian editorial team that okayed the articles is the same as the one that allowed the fake Assange/Manafort one , so their credibility is already shot to pieces. It's the magic triangle of today's media profits: spout non-stop allegations against Russia, Trump and Julian Assange, and link them when and where you can. It doesn't matter if what you say is true or not.
Anyway, all the following is from the Guardian, all on December 23. First off, Adam Gabbatt in New York, who has painstakingly researched how Trump's businesses, like Trump Tower and the Trump store, don't appear to have sufficiently (as per him) switched from Happy Holidays to Merry Christmas. Sherlock Holmes would have been proud. A smash hit there Adam, bring out the handcuffs.
Trump's 'Merry Christmas' Pledge Fails To Manifest
During Donald Trump's presidential campaign he talked often about his determination to win one particular war. A war that had been raging for years, he said. Specifically: the war on Christmas. But despite Trump's repeated claims that "people are saying Merry Christmas again" instead of the more inclusive "happy holidays", there are several places where the Christmas greeting is absent: Trump's own businesses.
The Trump Store, for example. Instead of a Christmas gift guide – which surely would be more in keeping with the president's stated desire for the phrase to be used – the store offers a holiday gift guide. "Shop our Holiday Gift Guide and find the perfect present for the enthusiast on your list," the online store urges. "Carefully curated to celebrate the most wonderful time of year with truly unique gifts found only at Trump Store. Add a bow on top with our custom gift wrapping. Happy Holiday's!"
The use of the phrase "Happy Holiday's" [sic] in Trump marketing would seem particularly egregious. The long-standing "War-on-Christmas" complaint from the political right is that stores use the phrase "Happy Holidays", rather than specifically mentioning the Christian celebration. It is offered as both an example of political correctness gone mad, and as an effort to erase Christianity from the US.
It's just, I think that if Trump had personally interfered to make sure there were Merry Christmas messages all around, you would have remarked that as president, he's not allowed to be personally involved in his businesses. But yeah, you know, just to keep the negativity going, it works, no matter how fluffy and hollow.
Second, still on December 23, is Tom McCarthy for the Guardian in New York, who talks about Robert Mueller's phenomenal successes. Mueller charged 34 people so far. In a case that involves "this complexity which has international implications, aspects relying on the intelligence community, complicated cyber components". It really says that.
And yes, that's how many people view this. What do they care that Mueller's original mandate was to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and 'Russians', and that he has not proven any collusion at all so far, not even with 34 people charged? What do they care? It looks like Trump is guilty of something, anything, after all, and that's all the circus wants.
Robert Mueller Has Enjoyed A Year Of Successes 2019 Could Be Even Stronger
One measure of special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutorial success in 2018 is the list of former top Donald Trump aides brought to justice: Michael Cohen pleaded guilty, a jury convicted Paul Manafort, a judge berated Michael Flynn. Another measure is the tally of new defendants that Mueller's team charged (34), the number of new guilty pleas he netted (five) and the amount of money he clawed back through tax fraud cases ($48m).
Yet another measure might judge Mueller's pace compared with previous independent prosecutors. "I would refer to it as a lightning pace," said Barb McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor and former US attorney. "In a case of this complexity which has international implications, aspects relying on the intelligence community, complicated cyber components – to indict that many people that quickly is really impressive work."
But there's perhaps a more powerful way to measure Mueller's progress in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election and links between Moscow and the Trump campaign; that's by noticing how the targets of his investigation have changed their postures over the course of 2018, from defiance to docility – or in the case of Trump himself, from defiance to extreme, hyperventilating defiance.
In reality, you would be at least as correct if you would claim that Robert Mueller's investigation has been an abject failure. Not one iota of collusion has been proven after 20 months and $20 million in funds have been used. And any serious investigation of Washington's culture of fixers and lobbyists would land at least 34 people who have committed acts that border on or over illegality. And in a matter of weeks, for a few hundred bucks.
Third, still on December 23, is Julian Borger in Washington, who's been elected to convey the image of chaos. Trump Unleashed, says our modern day Shakespeare. With Jim Mad Dog Mattis characterized as ".. the last independently minded, globally respected, major figure left in the administration".. . Again, it really says that.
Because woe the man who tries to bring US troops home, or even promises to do so a few days before Christmas. For pulling out America's finest, Donald Trump is being portrayed as something eerily close to the antichrist. That truly is the world on its head. Bringing troops home to their families equals chaos.
Look, guys, if Trump has been guilty of criminal behavior, the US justice system should be able to find that out and convict him for it. But that's not what this is about anymore. A million articles have been written, like these ones in the Guardian, with the sole intention, evidence being scarce to non-existent, of smearing him to the extent that people see every subsequent article in the light of a man having previously been smeared.
Chaos At Home, Fear Abroad: Trump Unleashed Puts Western World On Edge
The US stumbled into the holiday season with a sense of unravelling, as a large chunk of the federal government ground to a halt, the stock market crashed and the last independently minded, globally respected, major figure left in the administration announced he could no longer work with the president. The defense secretary, James Mattis, handed in his resignation on Thursday, over Donald Trump's abrupt decision to pull US troops out of Syria.
On Saturday another senior official joined the White House exodus. Brett McGurk, the special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Isis and the US official closest to America's Kurdish allies in the region, was reported to have handed in his resignation on Friday. That night, senators flew back to Washington from as far away as Hawaii for emergency talks aimed at finding a compromise on Trump's demand for nearly $6bn for a wall on the southern border, a campaign promise which has become an obsession.
Now look at the next headline, December 23, Graeme Wearden, Guardian, and ask yourself if it's really Trump saying he doesn't agree with the rate hikes that fuels the fears, or whether it's the hikes themselves. And also ask yourself: when Trump and Mnuchin both deny reports of Trump firing Powell, why do journalists keep saying the opposite? Because they want to fuel some fears?
From where I'm sitting, it looks perfectly logical that Trump says he doesn't think Powell's decisions are good for the US economy. And it doesn't matter which one of the two turns out to be right: Trump isn't the only person who disagrees with the Fed hikes.
The main suspect for 2019 market turmoil is the inevitable fallout from the Fed's QE under Bernanke and Yellen. And there is something to be said for Powell trying to normalize rates, but there's no doubt that may hasten, if not cause, turmoil. Blaming it on Trump not agreeing with Jay Powell is pretty much as left field as it gets.
White House Attacks On Fed Chair Fuel Fears Of Market Turmoil In 2019
Over the weekend, a flurry of reports claimed Donald Trump had discussed the possibility of firing the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell. Such an unprecedented move would trigger further instability in the markets, which have already had their worst year since the 2008 crisis. US officials scrambled to deny Trump had suggested ousting Powell, who was appointed by the president barely a year ago.
The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, tweeted that he had spoken to the president, who insisted he "never suggested firing" Powell, and did not believe he had the right to do this . However, Trump also declared – via Mnuchin – that he "totally disagrees" with the Fed's "absolutely terrible" policy of raising interest rates and unwinding its bond-buying stimulus programme, piling further pressure on the US's independent central bank.
And now, in the only article in the Guardian series that's December 24, not 23, by Victoria Bekiempis and agencies, the plunging numbers in the stock markets are Trump's fault, too.
Trump 'Plunging Us Into Chaos', Democrats Say, As Markets Tank And Shutdown Persists
Top Democrats have accused Donald Trump of "plunging the country into chaos" as top officials met to discuss a growing rout in stock markets caused in part by the president's persistent attacks on the Federal Reserve and a government shutdown. "It's Christmas Eve and President Trump is plunging the country into chaos," the two top Democrats in Congress, House speaker nominee Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, wrote in a joint statement on Monday. "The stock market is tanking and the president is waging a personal war on the Federal Reserve – after he just fired the Secretary of Defense."
Trump criticized the Federal Reserve on Monday, describing it as the "only problem" for the US economy, even as top officials convened the "plunge protection team" forged after the 1987 crash to discuss the growing rout in stock markets. The crisis call on Monday between US financial regulators and the US treasury department failed to assure markets, and stocks fell again amid concern about slowing economic growth, the continuing government shutdown, and reports that Trump had discussed firing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
The last one is from one Jonathan Jones, again December 23, again for the Guardian. And it takes the top award in the narrative building contest.
Again, the Guardian editorial team that okayed this article is still the same as the one that allowed the fake Assange/Manafort one, an editorial team that sees no problem in making things up in order to smear people. To portray Trump, Assange and anyone who's had the misfortune of being born in Russia as suspicious if not outright criminal.
But look at what Jones has to say, and what Guardian editor-in-chief Kathy Viner and her ilk allowed and pressured him to say. He wants to have a say in how Trump should dress (seasonal knitwear), he evokes the image of Nazi architect Albert Speer for no reason at all, and then it's a matter of mere inches until you arrive at Trump as a king, an emperor, an inner tyrant.
"He's in a tuxedo!", Like that's a bad thing for Christmas. "She's in white!". Oh dear, call the pope. If both Trumps would have put on Christmas sweaters in front of a fire, the writer would have found something negative in that.
Trump Portrait: You Couldn't Create A Creepier Yuletide Scene If You Tried
The absence of intimacy in the Trumps' official Christmas portrait freezes the heart. Can it be that hard to create a cosy image of the presidential couple, perhaps in front of a roaring hearth, maybe in seasonal knitwear? Or is this quasi-dictatorial image exactly what the president wants to project? Look on my Christmas trees, ye mighty, and despair! If so, it fuels suspicions that it is only the checks and balances of a 230-year-old constitution that are keeping America from the darkest of political fates. You couldn't create a creepier Yuletide scene if you tried. Multiple Christmas trees are currently a status symbol for the wealthy, but this picture shows the risks.
Instead of a homely symbol of midwinter cheer, these disciplined arboreal ranks with their uniform decorations are arrayed like massed soldiers or colossal columns designed by Albert Speer. The setting is the Cross Hall in the White House and, while the incumbent president cannot be held responsible for its architecture, why heighten its severity with such rigid, heartless seasonal trappings? Everything here communicates cold, empty magnificence. Tree lights that are as frigid as icicles are mirrored in a cold polished floor. Equally frosty illuminations are projected on the ceiling. Instead of twinkling fairy magic, this lifeless lighting creates a sterile, inhuman atmosphere.
You can't imagine kids playing among these trees or any conceivable fun being had by anyone. It suggests the micromanaged, corporate Christmas of a Citizen Kane who has long since lost touch with the ordinary, warm pleasures of real life. In the centre of this disturbing piece of conceptual art stand Donald and Melania Trump. He's in a tuxedo, she's wearing white – and not a woolly hat in sight. Their formal smartness adds to the emotional numbness of the scene. Trump's shark-like grin has nothing generous or friendly about it. He seems to want to show off his beautiful wife and his fantastic home rather than any of the cuddly holiday spirit a conventional politician might strive to share at this time.
It begs a question: how can a man who so glaringly lacks anything like a common touch be such a successful "populist"? What can a midwestern voter find in this image to connect with? Perhaps that's the point. After more than two centuries of democracy, Trump is offering the US people a king, or emperor. In this picture, he gives full vent to his inner tyrant. If this portrait contains any truth about the state of America and the world, may Santa help us all.
I realize that you may be tired of the whole story. I realize you may have been caught in the anti-Trump narrative. And I am by no means a Trump fan. But I will keep on dragging you back to this. Because the discussion should not be based on a handful of media moguls not liking Trump. It should not be based on innuendo and smear. If Trump is to be convicted, it must be on evidence.
And there is no such evidence. Robert Mueller has charged 34 people, but none with what his mandate was based on, none with Russia collusion. This means that the American political system, and democracy itself, is under severe threat by the very media that are supposed to be its gate keepers.
None of this is about Trump, or about whether you like him or not, or even if he's a shady character or not. Instead, it's about the influence the media have on how our opinions and ideas about people and events are being shaped on a daily basis.
And once you acknowledge that your opinions of Trump, Putin et al, even without any proof of a connection between them, are actively being molded by the press you expect to inform you about the truth behind what goes on, you will have to acknowledge, too, that you are a captive of forces that use your gullibility to make a profit off you.
If our media need to make up things all the time about who's guilty of what, because our justice systems are incapable of that, then we have a problem so enormous we may not be able to overcome it in our present settings.
Alternatively, if we trust our justice systems to deliver true justice, we don't need a hundred articles a day to tell us how Trump or Putin are such terrible threats to our world. Our judges will tell us, not our journalists or media who are only in it for a profit.
I can say: "let's start off 2019 trying to leave prejudice behind", and as much as that is needed and you may agree with me, it's no use if you don't realize to what extent your views of the world have been shaped by prejudice.
I see people reacting to the star writer at Der Spiegel who wrote a lot about Trump, being exposed as a fraud. I also see people trying to defend Julian Assange from the Guardian article about his alleged meetings with Paul Manafort, that was an obvious big fat lie (the truth is Manafort talked to Ecuador to help them 'sell' Assange to the US).
But reacting to the very obvious stuff is not enough . The echo chamber distorts the truth about Trump every single day, and at least six times on Sunda y, as this essay of mine shows. It's just that after two years of this going on 24/7, it is perceived as the normal.
Everyone makes money dumping on the Donald, it's a proven success formula, so why would the Guardian and Der Spiegel stay behind? They'd only hurt their own bottom line.
It has nothing to do with journalism, though, or news. It's smear and dirt, the business model of the National Enquirer. That's how far our once truthful media have fallen.
dcmbuffy , 18 minutes ago link
uhland62 , 54 minutes ago link"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." Shakespeare Henry IV
like trump said- "no-one said it would be easy."
All these journalists are influenced and manipulated by 'Australian-American Leadership Dialogue', 'Atlantikbrücke', Open Society Foundation money etc. Wars boost the NYSE because many weapons manufacturers are listed there.
If the journalists weren't manipulated all 2018 compilations would not have omitted the World Cup in Russia.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
PossumBilly , 3 Jun 2018 23:25
This message is clear and concise. It is however never going to be heard beyond the 'Guardian'.The MSM are hardly going to publish this article, nor are they going to reference it, why should they? It goes against everything they have been fighting for and the tin ear of their readership are unwilling to change teir views.
The only thing that they understand is money and the concentration of wealth. This misonception as Dennis So far this has been handed to them on a plate, the taxation system has enabled them to manipulate an multiply their earnings. So much of money the has nothing to do with adding value to this countries economy but is speculative in nature based on financial and overseas instruments.
No is the time for our government to take the lead and start as the Victorian ALP have done and invest in people and jobs on the back of strategic investment. It is a fallacy that governments don't create jobs they, through their policies do just that.
Friends of mine who make a living out of dealing both in stock and wealth creating schemes have no loyalty to this country, they are self motivated and libertarian in persuasion. "Government should get out of the way!" This is nothing short of scandalous.
Unless we stand up for our rights and a civil society that provides adequate provision for fair and balanced policy making,xwe will continue until we will see an implosion. History is littered with examples of revolution based on the kind of inequality we are seeing happen in this country. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MajorMalaise , 3 Jun 2018 23:44
A couple of thoughts - in no particular order.When governments like the LNP (driven as it is by its ideology of greed, the IPA manifesto and Gina Rinehart's idea of what Australia should look like [and how little she should pay to pillage "communally owned" assets to enrich herself beyond imagination - she has no greater claim over the Pilbara than any other Australian, but like all who live by the ethos of greed, she thinks she should get it all for nothing]).
When the LNP talk about "small government" and "slashing red tape" it is politician-speak for small government and NO red tape for the rich. What it also means is much more government and red tape for the poor and vulnerable - as we would expect, the rich and powerful, who really dictate economic and social policy in this country enlist willing governments to enact measures that suppress the lower classes. It is not quite calling out the military (as Hawke did during the pilot's strike at the insistence of the corpulent Ables - one act for which I will always despise Hawke), but it has the same result by more surreptitious, lasting and egregious means.
And one of the lasting legacies of the philosophies of neo-liberalism, from which the Hanson's of the world "suck their oxygen" is that the political and corporate dialogue of the last 30 or so years has pushed the notion of self-entitlement and vilification of the poor and vulnerable further down the economic ladder. So now, we have countless Australians on reasonable incomes who, like the rich, are convinced that all of our social and economic ills can be rectified if we stop giving handouts to the bludgers, the malingerers, the disabled and the indigenous - the neo-liberal rhetoric is now so widespread that it is easier than ever for the vulnerable to be attacked and for many, that is seen as absolutely necessary. It is the false US-sourced notion that if you are poor, it is because you deserve to be and if I am rich - it isn't luck or inheritance - it is because I deserve it. This world-view makes it so much easier to attack the vulnerable as receiving way to much to sit at home and bludge.
Want to forget the now disgraced CEO of Australia Post who bought a Sydney mansion for $22 million and now wants to sell it for $40 million - tax free I might add. He is entitled to that wealth enhancement. But someone on the dole smokes a spliff now and then and we think they should lose their entitlements to an income that doesn't even get them up to the poverty line (but they should be grateful for that pittance). Want to forget the CEO's who pretentiously do their "sleeping rough" for a night and proclaim their empathy for the homeless who would shriek at paying more tax to genuinely fund programmes to help the down and outs. No problem - just embrace the selfish and greedy neo-liberalism philosophy.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
RatioDecidend , 4 Jun 2018 01:33
This article is excellent and well overdue. All we need to do now is to wrench control of our mainstream media out of the hands of Corporate (foreign) control. We are being told to vote against ourselves in order for the few corporate elite to accrue massive wealth and power over us.RatioDecidend -> Lawrie Griffith , 4 Jun 2018 00:51MEDIA laws need to be very strict with very, very severe financial penalties for bias and propaganda. Certainly remove this concept of self regulation whereby they sit on their own disciplinary boards. Raise the standards of our media and allow us to retrieve some semblance of our democracy.
Without media control, how would corporations be able to manipulate and propagandise the populace with their own vested interests.
That is why governments are doing corporate bidding and getting fascist style surveillance of its people, in order to counteract the ability of the people to gain knowledge through the internet and vote against corporate control of our democracy.... nothing to do with terrorism which was caused mostly by corporate foreign extraction of wealth through weapon sales; resource acquisition, etc.
Oops, got to go, hope that makes sense.
It is back to control of our mainstream media by the very (foreign) corporations that are sucking out our wealth and putting nothing back.Corporate media ia all powerful. They insidiously permeate the populace with corporate views of Australia's financial and economy; infrastructure and every aspect of social life from birth to euthanasia with racism and religion thrown in for good measure.
Should a politician have the audacity to act against their corporate interests, they do not last long, without exclusions - PMs Whitlam and Rudd being prime examples.
This current mob of gutless underachieving dinosaur neo con nutters in govt, are completely turning over Australia to these Corporate (foreign) parasites and our prospect is not looking good.
Within no time we will be a Corporatocracy (as is the USA) and along with that comes 1% owning 99% of the wealth; third world poverty; crime through the roof; drugs out of control; public health and education a joke; public services non existent; legal system in disarray and entrenched with bias and inequity.
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Jun 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
After the mining boom and decades of economic growth, how can Australia be broke?
Gina Rinehart was becoming the world's richest woman those on the minimum wage were falling further and further behind
Australia just experienced one of the biggest mining booms in world history. But even at the peak of that boom, there was no talk of the wonderful opportunity we finally had to invest in world-class mental health or domestic violence crisis services.
Nor was there much talk from either major party about how the wealth of the mining boom gave us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in remote Indigenous communities. Nope, the peak of the mining boom was not the time to help those who had missed out in decades past, but the Howard government thought it was a great time to introduce permanent tax cuts for high-income earners. These, of course, are the tax cuts that caused the budget deficits we have today.
Millions of tonnes of explosives were used during the mining boom to build more than 100 new mines, but it wasn't just prime farmland that was blasted away in the boom, it was access to the middle class. At the same time that Gina Rinehart was becoming the world's richest woman on the back of rising iron ore prices, those on the minimum wage were falling further and further behind their fellow Australians.
https://www.theguardian.com/email/form/plaintone/4148
Like Joe Hockey, Rinehart saw the problem of inequality as having more to do with the character of the poor than with the rules of the game: "If you're jealous of those with more money, don't just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."
Privatisation is deeply unpopular with voters. Here's how to end it | John Quiggin
Australia isn't poor; it is rich beyond the imagining of anyone living in the 1970s or 80s. But so much of that new wealth has been vacuumed up by a few, and so little of that new wealth has been paid in tax, that the public has been convinced that ours is a country struggling to pay its bills.
Convincing Australians that our nation is poor and that our governments "can't afford" to provide the level of services they provided in the past has not just helped to lower our expectations of our public services and infrastructure, it has helped to lower our expectations of democracy itself. A public school in Sydney has had to ban kids from running in the playground because it was so overcrowded. Trains have become so crowded at peak hours that many people, especially the frail and the disabled, are reluctant to use them. And those who have lost their jobs now wait for hours on the phone when they reach out to Centrelink for help.
Although people with low expectations are easier to con, fomenting cynicism about democracy comes at a long-term cost. Indeed, as the current crop of politicians is beginning to discover, people with low expectations feel they have nothing to lose.
As more and more people live with the poverty and job insecurity that flow directly from neoliberal welfare and industrial relations policies, the scare campaigns run so successfully by the likes of the Business Council of Australia have lost their sting. Scary stories about the economy become like car alarms: once they attracted attention, but now they simply annoy those forced to listen.
'If governments can't make a difference and all politicians are corrupt, why not vote for outsiders?
After decades of hearing conservative politicians say that government is the problem, a growing number of conservative voters no longer care which major party forms government. If governments can't make a difference and all politicians are corrupt, why not vote for outsiders like Jacqui Lambie or Clive Palmer? There is perhaps no clearer evidence of the short-termism of the Liberal and National parties today than their willingness to fan the flames of anti-politician rhetoric without considering that it is their own voters who are most likely to heed the message.
Back when he was leading the campaign against Australia becoming a republic, Tony Abbott famously argued that you couldn't trust politicians to choose our head of state. And more recently, in campaigning against marriage equality, Minister Matt Canavan was featured in a television advertisement laughing at the thought that we could trust politicians.
Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world
Convincing Australians that the country was broke also helped convince us that we have no choice but to sell the family silver. But of course we have a choice. Just as there is no right answer as to whether it's better to rent a home or buy one, there is no right answer to whether it's better for governments to own the electricity supply, the postal service or the water supply, or none of these things.
Different governments in different countries make different decisions at different points in time. While much of neoliberalism's rhetorical power comes from the assertion that "there is no alternative," the simple fact is that the world is full of alternatives. Indeed, even the so-called free marketeers in Australia can see alternatives.
Consider stadiums, for example. The NSW Liberal government has a long track record of being pro-privatisation. It has sold off billions of dollars' worth of electricity, water and health infrastructure. But when it comes to football stadiums, it has no ideological problem with public ownership, nor any fiscal inhibition about spending billions of taxpayers' dollars.
In 2016 the NSW Liberal government spent $220m buying back ANZ Stadium, built in the 1990s with taxpayer funds at a cost of $690m and subsequently sold to Stadium Australia Group. Having bought back the stadium, the NSW government plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars refurbishing it. That same money could build a lot of school science labs, domestic violence crisis centres or skate parks for the bored kids the shopping malls don't want scratching up their marble stairs. For the past 30 years, Australians have been told that we can't afford high-quality public services, that public ownership of assets is inefficient, and that the pursuit of free markets through deregulation would create wealth and prosperity for all. But none of this is true.
While the policy agenda of neoliberalism has never been broadly applied in Australia, for 30 years the language of neoliberalism has been applied to everything from environmental protection to care of the disabled. The result of the partial application of policy and the broad application of language is not just a yawning gap between those with the greatest wealth and those with the greatest need, but a country that is now riven by demographic, geographic and racial divides.
Cutting the budget deficit is very important – except when it isn't
Australian politics isn't about ideology, it's about interests. The clearest proof of that claim is that neoliberal ideas such as deregulation were never aimed at powerful interest groups like the pharmacists or the gambling industry. And savage spending cuts were never aimed at subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry or private health insurers.
Tony Abbott, who claimed to have a philosophical problem with carbon taxing, once proposed a 20% increase in the tobacco excise
Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends. Here are some examples:
John Howard said he was obsessed with deregulating the labour market, but introduced 762 pages of labour-market regulation, which he entitled WorkChoices. He didn't deregulate the labour market; he re-regulated it in his preferred form. He knew that government decisions matter. Similarly, the Abbott government declared it was waging a war on red tape, yet the Turnbull government is determined to pass new laws restricting unions and NGOs. If there is one thing that neoliberals really seem to believe, it is that reducing the budget deficit is very, very important. Except when it isn't. The political and business leaders who said we needed to slash welfare spending because we had a "budget emergency" are currently advocating a $65bn tax cut for business – even though the deficit is bigger now than it was at the time of the alleged emergency. The Productivity Commission and state treasuries spent years advocating the deregulation and privatisation of the electricity industry – and succeeded in creating a "free market" system governed by 5,000 pages of electricity market rules. Electricity is too dangerous and too important to be deregulated, and those pushing for deregulation always knew that. They didn't want a free market; they simply wanted a market, one in which the government played a smaller role and the private sector made large profits selling an essential service for much higher prices than the government ever charged. The NSW government requires NGOs and disability service providers to compete with each other but, when it sold Port Botany and the Port of Newcastle, it structured the sales to ensure that Newcastle could not compete with Port Botany for the landing of the millions of containers that arrive by ship each year. While "competition policy" is applied to the vulnerable, those buying billion-dollar assets are protected from those same forces of competition.To be clear, there has been no obsession among the political elite with the neoliberal goals of reducing government spending, regulation or tax collection in Australia over the past three decades. None. They didn't mean a word of it. While there may have been economists, commentators and even business leaders who sincerely believed in those goals, it is clear from their actions, as distinct from their words, that John Howard, Tony Abbott and even the former head of the Business Council of Australia Tony Shepherd, the man tasked with running Abbott's National Commission of Audit, had no principled objection to spending large amounts of public money on things they liked spending large amounts of public money on. Indeed, in his speakers' agency profile, Tony Shepherd brags about his ability to get public money for private ventures:
It is no mean feat to convince governments to support private sector proposals, but as former prime minister, the honourable Paul Keating, said, "Tony managed to get more money out of my government than any other person I can recall."Hundreds of new pages of regulation now govern the conduct of charities. Billions of taxpayers' dollars have been spent by "small government" politicians on everything from television ads for innovation to subsidies for marriage counselling. And Tony Abbott, who claimed to have a philosophical problem with carbon taxing, once proposed a 20% increase in the tobacco excise.
The political strategy behind these contradictions is simple: it is difficult to criticise government spending on health and education, or popular regulations like consumer protection and limits on executive pay. So why not just criticise all government spending and all red tape in general? Once you have convinced the public that all government spending is inefficient, you can set about cutting spending on your enemies and retaining it for your friends. And once you convince people that all regulation is bad, you can set about removing consumer protections while retaining the laws that protect the TV industry, the gambling industry, the pharmaceutical industry and all your other friends.
Cover of Dead Right by Richard Denniss, Quarterly Essay.
When powerful groups want subsidies, we are told they will create jobs. When powerless groups want better funding for domestic violence shelters or after-school reading groups, they are told of the need to reduce the budget deficit. When powerful groups demand new regulations, we are told it will provide business with certainty, but when powerless groups demand new regulations, they are told it will create sovereign risk.
Ideology has a bad name these days, but it simply means a "system of ideas and ideals." By that definition, it is possible to think of neoliberalism as an ideology focused on the idea that market forces are superior to government decision-making. But while large segments of Australian politics and business have draped themselves, and their policy preferences, in the cloak of neoliberal ideas and ideals, in reality to call them "ideologues" is to flatter them. They lack the consistency and strength of principle to warrant the title.
This is an edited extract of Richard Denniss's Quarterly Essay 70, Dead Right: How Neoliberalism Ate Itself and What Comes Next , $22.99
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Dec 27, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Former RBA governor says Coalition pursues low-tax road to jobs and growth despite lack of evidence to support it
Tue 16 Oct 2018 13.00 EDT Last modified on Tue 16 Oct 2018 19.11 EDT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email This article is over 2 months old Australian economic growth has been a 'standout' says Bernie Fraser, but too many have missed the benefits. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/EPA Neoliberalism has caused "misery and social polarisation" yet remains in vogue with the Coalition government, according to the economist Bernie Fraser.
The former Treasury secretary and Reserve Bank governor has made the comments in a presentation circulated to participants of the Australia Institute's revenue summit to be held in Canberra on Wednesday.
Michael Keating, a former secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, will also use the summit to raise doubts about the Morrison government's budget forecasts.
Australia's housing boom is not heading for a soft landing. How did we get here? | Greg Jericho Read more
In the background notes for Fraser's speech, seen by Guardian Australia, he says that Australia's 27 consecutive years of economic growth is a "standout", "Winx-like" performance.
But the record deserves only "qualified applause" because "too many Australians remain unemployed, under-employed, underskilled, underpaid and lack job security".
Fraser warns that society has become "less fair, less compassionate and more divided" and "more devoid of trust in almost every field of human activity" in the past 20 years.
"As a disinterested player in climate change negotiations and a miserable foreign aid donor, we have slipped well down the list of good global citizens."
Political ideologies appear to have contributed to inequality and disadvantage in Australia in that time, he argues.
Fraser in large part blames "neoliberalism" and its influence on policymaking for the "disconnect between Australia's impressive economic growth story and its failure on so many markers to show progress towards a better, fairer society".
"Favouring the market system ahead of the state system, and individual interests ahead of community interests, can lead to profoundly unfair social outcomes.
More than three million Australians living in poverty, Acoss report reveals Read more
"Those unable to afford access to decent standards of housing, healthcare, and other essential services have to settle for inferior arrangements, or go without."
Fraser says charitable organisations see the effects of "real poverty" that result in "misery, anxiety and loss of self-esteem of mothers unable to put food on the table for their kids, of old and young homeless people, and the victims of domestic violence and drug overdoses".
Fraser summarises the key thrusts of neoliberalism as "the pursuit of the lowest possible rates of income and most other taxes and the maximum restraint on government interventions and spending programs".
Evidence in Australia and overseas shows the influence of neoliberalism on fiscal policy "and the misery and social polarisation that has come with it", he says.
The global financial crisis "should have" marked a tipping point, when the "idealised view of financial markets being self-regulating" was shattered. While Australia "avoided the worst traumas of the GFC" with prompt fiscal and monetary policy responses, in Europe "taxes were increased and spending programs slashed", resulting in a further five or six years of severe recession.
Fraser says that all political ideologies – taken to extremes – can be divisive and cause damage, including an ideology "based on a state system".
But the former Reserve Bank governor focuses on neoliberalism because it "remains in vogue". The Morrison government "continues to reaffirm its over-riding commitment to lower taxation, and to assert that this is the best way to increase investment, jobs and economic growth" - despite the lack of evidence to support the theory .
Although Fraser recognises that politics never can or should be taken out of policymaking, he suggests the best course is to "hammer away" at flaws of particular approaches.
For example, Fraser praises "the avoidance of costly tax cuts accruing to large corporations" as a positive development – referring to the Turnbull government abandoning the big business component of its $50bn 10-year company tax cut plan.
He suggests the "quick done-deal" of Labor signing up to the Coalition's proposed acceleration of the cut to taxes on small and medium business was an example that "political interests are always lurking nearby".
In a separate presentation Keating – who headed PM&C from 1991 to 1996 – warns the government's promise to cap expenditure while simultaneously cutting taxes and returning the budget to surplus is based on overly optimistic assumptions of growth in GDP, wages and productivity.
Why are stock markets falling and how far will they go? Read more
According to Keating, the government must stop assuming there have been no structural changes in the relationship between unemployment and the rate of wage increases.
He notes that predictions of a tightening labour market leading to higher wages are predicated on assumptions of growth averaging 3% or as much as 3.5%.
He will also say a sustained return to past rates of economic growth will be impossible unless we can ensure a reasonably equitable distribution of income, involving a faster rate of wage increases, especially for the low-paid.
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Dec 27, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck, has a forthcoming book, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities . He argues that what I would call "bad nationalism" – the global surge in rightwing populism – is driven by large-scale immigration, and the threat it poses to the cultural identity of the ethnic majority. Some people fear change; they prefer the monocultural landscape in which they grew up, and visible changes to it threaten their sense of belonging and security. Certain attitudes are, if not hereditary, baked in to the point where they may as well be.
He supports this view with plentiful survey data, a favourite nugget being that the way you answer the question, "Would you prefer your children to be well-mannered, or to be considerate?" is a major predictor of whether you'd vote for or against Trump and Brexit .The question is a proxy for what the cognitive linguist George Lakoff calls the strict father (well-mannered) versus the nurturant family (considerate) model. These frames are the timeless and elemental organising principles for our political divisions – authoritarian versus pluralist, right versus left – all the way back to Christ the Warrior versus Christ the Saviour.
I believe people respond to authoritarian and pluralist arguments according to who's making them, how trenchantly they are made, and the economic, media and political environment around them. Austerity soil has always been notoriously fertile for authoritarian ideas. Yet Kaufmann dismisses any economic factor, saying that had there been one, 2008 would have seen an upturn in rightwing nationalism, not 2017. My view is that depressions take years, not months, to grind people down.
UnstableGenius -> KingOfNothing , 9 May 2018 15:20
To me the key questions are how are the key decisions made and by whom are they made?DavidPavett -> formerlefty , 9 May 2018 15:16Globalism (not globalization, mind you) is a process whereby decisionmaking gets shifted farther and farther from the people and democratic accountability is continually weakened - ironically often with the rationale that we need this to "compete with China".
As a result, national borders (and therefore cultures) become less and less important and institutions like central banks, the EU, the WTO, etc. become ever more powerful. What you call neoliberalism is an effect - not the cause - of this phenomenon, in my opinion.
By the way, I agree with you that there is hope - in fact I am more optimistic today than I have been for many years - although probably for very different reasons than you.
I am quite sure that for the time being the nation state is an essential form of political and economic organisation. So I accept the necessity of nations. I reject nationalist ideologies which at best are confused, like ZW's argument, and at worst are very nasty things indeed.KingOfNothing -> UnstableGenius , 9 May 2018 15:01I was stunned by the modernity of Renan's speech when I read it. Glad to see that it is available online. Hope you read it.
No, thats not the case.UnstableGenius -> KingOfNothing , 9 May 2018 14:15Globalisation is the ability to move goods/finance/ideas/culture around the global at speeds unheard of - there is no way to alter this, so your definition is inexact by quite a margin.
What is happening is neoliberalism - the economic sytem which has hijacked Globalisation - is playing havoc across the world.
These are not one and the same thing. Nationalism is a reaction to neoliberailsm, and the way it is concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
Take a look at places like Finland, Norway and other parts of Europe, where they have restrained neoliberalism and do not have the same levels of inequality as in the USA or the UK. Japan is the most equal developed nation in the world. We need to marry strong democratic structures (at national and global level) with globalisation at the expense of neo-liberalism, not in support of it.
In short, your view is depressing and misguided. There is hope.
Globalism is a system where a cosmopolitan class of technocratic elites makes all the decisions after talking among themselves in well-appointed conference rooms to which common people are not given access (think of what goes on in Brussels or in the ECB tower every day).TheVixen -> hflashman , 9 May 2018 09:32
Democracy is something else.
In my opinion the two are mutually incompatible.Yes, I'm talking about both British and non-British Muslims. Here's the clarification you're looking for: ICM Research for Channel 4 found that more than 100,000 British Muslims sympathize with suicide bombers and people who commit other terrorist acts. Moreover, only one in three British Muslims (34%) would contact the police if they believed that somebody close to them had become involved with jihadists.DavidPavett -> brexitman , 9 May 2018 07:21In addition, 23% of British Muslims said Islamic Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations.
On social issues, 52% of the Muslims surveyed said they believe homosexuality should be illegal, compared to 22% of non-Muslim Britons.
39% of Muslims surveyed believe women should always obey their husbands, compared to 5% for non-Muslims. One in three British Muslims refuse completely to condemn the stoning of women accused of adultery.
Admittedly, this ICM survey is from 2016 so the picture may have improved, but I think you'll agree, these attitudes are quite a long way from the enlightenment values mentioned.
Open borders and nationalism are really different issues. One can recognise the need for borders and border controls without convincing oneself that the people within a given border line are therefore endowed with some common essence about which they can feel pride or shame.DavidPavett , 9 May 2018 03:37The pity about this is that liberal writers like ZW nearly always start from zero on this issue as if there wasn't a whole mass of discussion of a very detailed kind that has already taken place. Thus I would say that Ernest Renan's speech to the Surbonne in the 1880s published as What is a Nation? (reprinted in Shloma Sand's book On the Nation and the 'Jewish People' ) is well in advance of ZW's musings.
I am with Einstein on this. He was once asked if he regarded himself as a German or a Jew. He replied: "I look upon myself as a man. Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind".DavidPavett -> DrDeYoung , 9 May 2018 03:26I found ZW's suggestion that "you do not need to be proud of Oliver Cromwell in order to be proud of Jessica Ennis-Hill" both revealing and ridiculous. If one is going to pick a figure from English history not to be proud of why on earth would one choose Cromwell? And on what grounds exactly does ZW feel proud of JE-H?ponkala , 9 May 2018 02:13The Cromwell reference leads to a further point. Can the English, on ZW's argument, take pride in the actions of Scots prior to the Act of Union? And can they take pride in the actions of the Irish from Northern but not Southern Ireland?
I would nuance what you say just a little. Our actions contribute to producing not only things but also people. A parent can feel justified pride in the actions of his/her children as can a teacher in the actions of his/her pupils. There can also be a justified sense of collective pride for people who have contributed to that collective. ZW is right about that. She gets into a muddle when she tries to project this collective pride backwards in time to things we could have had no part in.
People can be proud of their country , there is nothing wrong with it ,but when a country consists of many ethnic groups and religions, identifying the country only with majority ethno linguistic or religious group can lead to discrimination , alienation and resentment . This has led to civil wars in many regions. Canada and Switzerland are some of the exceptions where federal system and equalities of ethno linguistic groups have strengthened their countries .I would call this good nationalism.joylessnortherner , 9 May 2018 00:50
On the other hand, many countries in Asia and Africa are suffering from the conflicts due to persecution or discrimination inflicted upon minorities from the majoritarian governments.
Modi in India is using the nationalistic card, trying to give an impression that the country only belongs to Hindus and Hindi speakers. In reality, India is not even a country , it is a collection of nation states with many ethnic groups , languages and religions which were united during the British rule. It is more diverse than the whole of Europe .However Modi is keen to perpetuate the myth India is homogenous , this natinalistic ideology might risk formenting divisions and conflicts in the future.I would call it 'bad nationalism 'Aren't we looking for the word patriotism as opposed to nationalism here Mz. Williams? I've always cleaved to Orwell's definitions of patriotism and nationalism. Predictably, nationalism gets short shrift.....largely because nationalism is dim, divisive and utterly undigestible for the vast majority of a nation at ease with itself. This is why Moggo, Bojo, Foxy and Gove prefer nationalism.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Jas636 -> Friarbird , 4 Jun 2018 01:38
Why would I refute points that I agree with?internationalist07 07 -> Jas636 , 4 Jun 2018 01:34I'm not the one who has a problem with neo-liberalism, it's provided for me more than adequately. Having spent a lot of time living overseas, it's provided ALL Australians with a far better deal than a few billion others.
If you are too naive to see this, then maybe you need to try an alternative for a while. It's quite ok, i'll be waiting for when the alternative fails (they always do) and I can come back and pick off the assets from the carcus of that little experiment for less than a cent in the dollar.
The dog eat dog economy simply represents our nature, it's who we are, we thrive under libertarianism.
I think you mean Neo liberal utopiaFriarbird -> GoronwyPrice , 4 Jun 2018 01:31Po-faced, Libertarian BOLLOCKS.GreyBags -> Shiner01 , 4 Jun 2018 01:29
Privatisation is sucker-farming.
Milking the punters, like ants milk aphids.
Farming them, like bellbirds do with leaf-bugs.
And even THAT is only part of the equation.
The fondest goal, the one which gives the management class hard-ons ?
Privatisation de-unionises their workforces.It is quite strange that the biggest supporters of neo-liberal economics with its belief that giving money to the rich will solve all our problems call themselves 'Christians'.Friarbird -> RobertJREYNOLDS , 4 Jun 2018 01:20I can't remember when Jesus preached trickle down. I don't remember the bit where Jesus said to treat those seeking asylum and fleeing violence like they are the scum of the earth. I don't remember when Jesus said the poor needed a good kick in the guts while they are down to motivate them to work harder. I don't remember when Jesus said we should cut funds from the sick to balance the budget. I don't remember Jesus saying that if you bear false witness often enough then you will fool enough of the people enough to keep power so you can look after your corporate buddy buddies.
In fact, almost all of the politicians in the Coalition who proclaim to be 'Christian' must have their own secret bible because nothing I have heard from the New Testament justifies their actions.
Me, I'm an atheist and I have more care, consideration, ethics and compassion than the entire collection of right wing bible bashers sitting in parliament today.
"......the scam that is neo-liberalism."Ozponerised , 4 Jun 2018 01:19No throwaway line.
A 'farming the suckers' scam is all it ever was.
With a view to massive wealth transfer.Hasn't it worked well ?
Thanks for this. We need more of these articles pointing out the bullshit behind this story that the Coalition has been feeding the gullible peasantry with for over 30 years, sneering, smirking and sniggering as truckloads of public money goes to private corporations. The money received from selling off public assets has been shoved into private businesses who then feel very free to charge like bulls.Mal_Function , 4 Jun 2018 01:16
It's a shame so many folk still fall for this bullshit meaning that their own families, work colleagues and community get shafted through diminishing public services.Brother Can You Spare a Dimeprettygoody -> GoronwyPrice , 4 Jun 2018 01:11They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there right on the jobThey used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that yankee doodle de dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through hell
And I was the kid with the drumSay, don't you remember, they called me Al
It was Al all the time
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal
Buddy, can you spare a dime?Songwriters: E. Y. Harburg / Jay Gorney
Brother Can You Spare a Dime lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc, Next Decade Entertainment, Inc, Shapiro Bernstein & Co. Inc.'This is more or less the definition of increased productivity and it is what ultimately leads to improved living standards for everyone'Friarbird -> ADamnSmith2016 , 4 Jun 2018 01:05Lazy, neoliberal, supply-side economic guff. Neoliberals undermine government and democracy and then scavenge on the wreckage. When does 'ultimately' begin for 'everyone'? Never.
'Private companies provide the same service with much less labour'
Firing people is the answer? What a hardened realist you are. Must be great to be so certain in your neoliberal convictions. Are you really telling us that every privatisation has been a success?
These pieces of infrastructure have been built through generations of work and wise investment - they are not any one government's to sell. It's just easier for a corrupt, rudderless, feckless neoliberal shill to sell it than it is for them to to run it.
Can't even begin to address the characteristic Libertarian slyness in all that.Tasmanian Cryptik -> 20thCenturyFox , 4 Jun 2018 00:58
But I'll try.
"What you call neoliberalism was a set of responses to the failure of socialism or as Tony Blair said 'what matters is what works'."
Incorrect.
What I--what the world--calls "Neoliberalism', is the corpse of Classical economics, resurrected post-WW2 by Friedman and Hayek's 'Mont Pelerin Society. '
Why was it buried ?
Because during the Great Depression, its dogmatic insistence on continued austerity and wage cuts only made things worse.
After all, in an economic slump, whats the worst thing you can do ?
Deprive people of whatever little purchasing power they have.
So, goodbye Classical economics.
After which, govts SPENT their societies out of slump, putting people to work.
(O, the horror ! O, the heresy !)
The public works of that era include Germany's autobahns and the US New Deal projects, including the Tennessee Valley system and similar in Western States.
( O the horror ! O the heresy !)
Friedman, Hayek and the gang looked at those and post-WW2 programs of public benefit, such as the UK's NHS and shat themselves. Typical fear-driven conservatives, they were convinced such programs represented the thin end of the wedge which MUST end in imposition of Soviet-style conditions.
What utter paranoid crap.
Their resurrected corpse of Classical economics ?.
THAT is what is 'Neoliberalism'.
Whether or not I call it so is immaterial.
Then, this lofty bit of finger-wagging assertion;
"This process of economic evolution is necessarily imperfect and incomplete...."
Your Lordship's overview is appreciated...
"....but currently leaves you free to own a computer, read news on-line, communicate using the internet (maybe using NBN?) and express your views freely. "
Sez who ?
You ?
Besides, the only one talking about that old bogey, "socialism" is you.
Because its a conveniently perjorative label, eh ?
Pretty infantile, though."Anybody who doesn't agree with EVERYTHING I say, must be a 'socialist.' And they can't play with my toys."
PS 'Adam', why do LIbertarians always project a Superiority Complex ?
Why are the buggers always so PLEASED WITH THEMSELVES ?Socialise the losses, privatise the gains.RatioDecidend -> Elizabeth Connor , 4 Jun 2018 00:55intelligent comment. Due to corporate media indoctrinating propaganda it will take sometime for others to understand where the problem lies.20thCenturyFox , 4 Jun 2018 00:41Neoliberalism = Socialism for the Rich - Capitalism for the Poor.grumpyom -> Fred1 , 4 Jun 2018 00:28Politics needs reform, plain & simple. Fed ICAC and Integrity Commission is a good start but it's not enough. The rules have to change too. Major decisions like privatising services or tax handouts to the rich, shouldn't by law be allowed to get through parliament or the senate unless the claims being made to justify them are quantifiable & demonstrated to be in the National Interest. Currently politicians have no obligation to do either.
e.g. claiming that jobs will be created if Penalty rates are cut = there's no way to quantify such a BS claim and Doug Cameron got them to admit that in Senate Estimates. Even so they were allowed to lie through their teeth and impose it anyway with no requirement to prove their BS claims. This corporate tax handout = once again they claim it will lead to more wealth to average Australians and more jobs but it can't be quantified or guaranteed via regulation so it's all bullshit. The rich will hoard the wealth & kick Australians in the guts as usual. That's what they've always done and always will do. Privatisation of electricity..what a crock of shit. They claimed it would create competition and drive down prices. What's happened? The complete opposite but politicians KNOW they're not accountable and therein 'lies' the problem. The shortsheeting of the original NBN, = yet another lie. They've totally crippled Australia's ability to compete in a digital age and completely screwed regional 2nd tier cities and towns in terms of growth. As far as the National interest is concerned the shortsheeting of the NBN is the complete opposite. Even so they were allowed to bastardise that too without any accountability whatsoever. Australians need to start demanding political reform so these bastards are accountable to the people.
Neoliberalism is just the academic name for the political ideology of greed, corruption, self interest, self entitlement, corporate welfare, inequality, user pays, and poverty is your fault.grumpyom , 4 Jun 2018 00:18George Monbiot does it well too.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiotDo you see any contradiction between privatised electricity and socialised stadiums?Elizabeth Connor , 4 Jun 2018 00:10Neoliberalism explains it all. Corruption in politics means that only profitable assets are privatised. Stadiums lose money, so are kept in private hands as corporate welfare for the various billionaire team owners and TV networks.
I love Richard Denniss! What a brilliantly concise and yet well supported argument. Now we just need someone who can say it in terms that will persuade unwilling voters to think carefully about their vote. If they do think carefully they simply cannot return this government to power, now that they're all revealed as nothing but crony capitalists.sierrasierra -> telbraithwaite , 4 Jun 2018 00:04I must admit that like many people I also thought neoliberalism was an ideology, but then I couldn't understand why they were so inconsistent in their spending of 'tax-payers' funds'.
From now on I'll be pointing out those inconsistencies with more confidence - armed with Richard's incontrovertible points, and also by a closer reading of Canadian Kean Birch's article:
https://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84755.
Here's Birch's definition of neoliberalism:
[The term neoliberalism ] is used to refer to an economic system in which the "free" market is extended to every part of our public and personal worlds.
And here's wikipedia's definition of crony capitalism:
Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of risks they take, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class.
NB But there's a more explicit definition here, which I like much better:
Crony capitalism is a term describing an economy in which success in business depends on close relationships between business people and government officials. It may be exhibited by favoritism in the distribution of legal permits, government grants, special tax breaks, or other forms of state interventionism.
And from where I sit, crony capitalism cannot be defended by anyone with any kind of integrity.
Yes, we have a spot of bother, and I think that their name - Institute of Public Affairs - is quite a misnomer.Billyswagg , 4 Jun 2018 00:03The way these people operate is more akin to Opus Dei and many other 'secret societies' that have another public face altogether.
Given that IPA's agenda is a private members wish list which has a huge impact on matters of a broad public nature, it's rather akin to incest, and we know where the confusion between Church and State takes us regarding separation of powers, exactly where we are right now .two Royal Commissions that are joined at the hip, Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013 – 2017) and our current horror show Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation, and Financial Services Industry which could for all intents and purposes be as long as aforementioned.
Stay with me, as these are issues that relate to other 'energy' systems, namely money, sex and power, and if we have any doubts as to how far this cancer has spread, a quick purview of the following members ought to resolve it for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Public_Affairs#Political_links
https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1bz7et/ipas_75_point_list_for_abbott /
For the 70th Birthday big bash, we know that guests to the party were:
• Gina Rinehart
• Rupert Murdoch
• Tony Abbott
• George Pell - Australian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church
• Michael Kroger - President of the Victorian division of the Liberal Party of Australia and former director of the IPA
• Mitch Fifield - Communications MinisterThink horizontal and vertical industries/associations and you begin to get the picture, and that's before thinking about BCA and VECCI.
First, elect the other mob next time around. They're in the pockets of the multinationals and the US alliance as well, but they're not quite as bad, yet. The next thing is a full-on assault on mainstream media. The frontline of the revolution, if there is to be one, is the media. No more guns or territorial claims, it's a battle for the mind. Education is the key. The "Neolibs" attack education at every opportunity - teachers, curriculum, funding etc. etc. but there's nothing wrong with education - the real problem is that the mainstream media relentlessly, all day every day works to an agenda of dis-education, deliberately undermining and destroying the work of our schools. They preach doubt and mistrust - of learning, facts, truth, intelligence, pure science, art, music, culture, thoughtfulness, forbearance, empathy and altruism. They teach us to monetise and gamble on everything. Their aim is to dumb everyone down to the point where not only can't they read an analog clock or drive their own car but become entirely dependent on the word of authority (of which they are the mouthpiece) for a continued existence. Today, with our vast social platforms we can target their lies and threats, one by one. Pick each one, attack it, viciously, loudly, risibly, with facts, comedy, derision and invitations to dance. Spread it wide. Call them out at every opportunity. Sneer them into oblivion. Mainstream media is the primary problem. That's what must be destroyed.Dunkey2830 -> Dave Bradley , 3 Jun 2018 23:53BiggerPictureCait -> Stopthelibs , 3 Jun 2018 23:53Maybe the ALP have learnt from their mistakes
No, regrettably they have not.
The neoliberalist 'mistake' has been going on for around 40 yrs now - it has proved a relentless descent into inequality and austerity.Chris Bowen at the National Press Club :
"...Labor will go to the next election:
Achieving budget balance in the same year as the government;
Delivering bigger cumulative budget surpluses over forward estimates as well as substantially bigger surpluses over the ten year medium term; and
That the majority of savings raised from our revenue measures over the medium term will go towards budget repair and paying down debt...."Pure neoliberal economic poison that will create further hardship for our citizens, worsen inequality and recess the economy yet further.
People have got to come to understand that the bigger surpluses Bowen speaks of are federal tax collection surpluses; i.e. he intends to withdraw further spending capacity from the private sector, all while the current account deficit already draws 3.5% GDP (~$30bn) a yr from that same heavily indebted private sector.
This Bowen statement report from the SMH :
"The whiff of a surplus, not reaching at least 1 per cent of GDP until 2026-27, does not adequately protect Australia against the potential roiling seas of international uncertainty," he will say.
"Australia needs bigger surpluses, sooner than the government is scheduling.
"We can't afford to let the next four years go to waste in the efforts for a healthier, safer budget surplus."Absolute macroeconomic stupidity, arrogant, vandalous ideological madness.
When will the people come to their senses and stop supporting such socially destructive errant neoliberal economic alchemy?Just look at the Citizens Assembly overseeing the law change in the recent Irish referendum. Worked a treat, cause those involved wanted to find the bvest alternative, rather than feather their own nest.
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Dec 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
It is indeed important to make the distinction between the ideology of neoliberalism - the ideology of private enterprise is good, and public spending is bad - and the operational system of crony capitalism - the game of mates played by government and the special interests.And it is certainly equally important to call out the monumental hypocrisy involved in the government's application of the ideology's set of rules to the powerless and public and the government's application of corrupt practice rules to the special interests.
The system is destroying the egalitarian character of Australia and fanning the flames of nativist authoritarianism here.
But what's even more dangerous is the fundamental dishonesty that the system necessitates, and the alienating influence it has - on top of the growing economic inequality.
The system has destroyed the economic and environmental viability and sustainability of the planet on which human civilization depends.
What is becoming increasingly clear to more and more of the public is that - simple put- the system cannot be allowed to go on as it has been proceeding because it threatens the future of civilization on earth.
Change is imperative now. However, how that will unfold is unclear, as well as, the toll the destruc5turing system will take.
What is clear is that a great restructuring must happen - and soon.
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Dec 25, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Michael Greenwood , Geoff Naylor and David Murray on the failures of economic policy
While agreeing with the thrust of Paul Mason's article ( A new politics of emotion is needed to beat the far right , Journal, 26 November), it is surely necessary to employ economics if we are to defeat neoliberalism. We have lived under this regime, with increasing severity, for 25 years or so. The result has been the stagnation of real incomes for the large majority, with the benefits of GDP growth accruing to those at the top of income and wealth distributions. This has suppressed growth, as those with less money tend to spend it and those with more hide it and avoid tax. Lower UK growth is clearly shown in comparative data.
So if neoliberalism is a school of economics, it is a failure if the aim of economic policy is to encourage growth and the reinvestment of the benefits. Of course, neoliberalism is not economics, it is political dogma, supported by its beneficiaries. We need economics undergraduates to demand to be taught real economics and not the propaganda of power that is neoliberalism.
Michael Greenwood
Manchester• In his search for a political narrative of economic hope to counteract the rise of rightwing populism, Paul Mason overlooks the sense of belonging that exists in faith communities. Here, a selfless collaboration for the inclusive good of one another has never required disruption of the free-market economy. It is just that this ethos has not been introduced at the national economic and political levels.
Geoff Naylor
Winchester, Hampshire• All suffered the same 2007-08 financial crash, but the "UK has weakest wage growth of wealthy nations" ( Report , 27 November). Anything to do with Tory-led government economic policy?
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey
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Dec 25, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
For 40 years, the ideology popularly known as "neoliberalism" has dominated political decision-making in the English-speaking west.
People hate it . Neoliberalism's sale of state assets, offshored jobs, stripped services, poorly-invested infrastructure and armies of the forcibly unemployed have delivered, not promised "efficiency" and "flexibility" to communities, but discomfort and misery. The wealth of a few has now swelled to a level of conspicuousness that must politely be considered vulgar yet the philosophy's entrenched itself so deeply in how governments make decisions and allocate resources that one of its megaphones once declared its triumph "the end of history".
... ... ...
Paul Keating's rejection
It was a year ago that a third sign first appeared, when the dark horse of Australian prime ministers, Paul Keating, made public an on-balance rejection of neoliberal economics. Although Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser instigated Australia's first neoliberal policies, it was Keating's architecture of privatisation and deregulation as a Labor treasurer and prime minister that's most well remembered.
Now, "we have a comatose world economy held together by debt and central bank money," Keating has said, "Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise." What does the disavowal mean? In terms of his Labor heir Bill Shorten's growing appetite for redistributive taxation and close relationship to the union movement, it means "if Bill Shorten becomes PM, the rule of engagement between labour and capital will be rewritten," according to The Australian this week. Can't wait!
Tony Abbott becomes a fan of nationalising assets
Or maybe's Sukkar's right about the socialists termiting his beloved Liberal party. How else to explain the earthquake-like paradigm shift represented by the sixth sign? Since when do neoliberal conservatives argue for the renationalisation of infrastructure, as is the push of Tony Abbott's gang to nationalise the coal-fired Liddell power station? It may be a cynical stunt to take an unscientific stand against climate action, but seizing the means of production remains seizing the means of production, um, comrade. "You know, nationalising assets is what the Liberal party was founded to stop governments doing," said Turnbull, even as he hid in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains to weather – strange coincidence – yet another Newspoll loss.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
"new introduction to a re-released Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment."fleax -> internationalist07 07 , 27 Apr 2018 05:43Might be true. But frightening that people should naively still think that democracy is to be found in the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' [ ie those who know what's good for you even if you don't like it ] of the Communist Manifesto after the revelations of what that leads to in the Gulag Archipelago , Mao's China , Pol Pot , Kim John - un .
How quickly the world forgets. - you might just as well advocate Mein Kampf it's the same thing in the end !
most "isms" kill off their rivals and the unbelievers when they usurp powercharleyb23 -> RedmondM , 27 Apr 2018 05:37That's what you claim and it might be so but I'm not interested in keeping a score on the matter. The point you failed to get is that the people you mentioned where totalitarian thugs. They used the banner of communism to achieve their ends. They would have used what ever ideology that was in fashion to achieve the same results.daily_phil , 27 Apr 2018 05:35Does present day neo-liberalism actually qualify as a political movement?Vested interests and the dollar seem to have all the power. Lies and deception are so common the truth is seen as the enemy. The voting public are merely fools for manipulation. Nah, neo-liberalism is not government, it is something far nastier, and clearly not what the public vote for, presuming a vote actually counts for anything anymore.
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Dec 24, 2018 | off-guardian.org
The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge." Lord Acton
George Herbert Walker Bush died on Saturday. He was 94 years old. Thanks to decisions he made throughout his career, thousands – perhaps millions – of people never got near 94. He invaded Iraq in 1991, instituted sanctions that destroyed the country. He pardoned those involved in the Iran-Contra affair and was head of the CIA when Operation Condor launched the military coup in Argentina in 1976 .
None of that makes it into The Guardian 's obituary , of course.
Instead, Simon Tisdall – a mindless servant to the status quo, always happy to weave invective about our designated enemies – treats us to paragraph after paragraph of inane anecdotes.
Good old Georgie once gave him a lift in Air Force One.
Barbara gave him useful advice about raising Springer Spaniels.
The following words and phrases are not found anywhere in this article: CIA, Iraq, Iran-Contra, Argentinian coup, Iran Air Flight 655, NAZI, Panama.
Rather, Tisdall refers Bush's term as "before the era of fake news". Which makes him either a complete a liar or profoundly under-qualified to write on the subject – as the Bush-era spawned the original fake news: The Nayirah testimony . A pack of lies told before the Senate, and used to justify a war in the middle-east.
A Bush family tradition.
Tisdall talks of Bush's family – "he enjoyed a privileged upbringing in a monied east coast family" – but doesn't say that his father, Prescott Bush, was a known Nazi sympathiser and was even implicated in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Franklin Delano Roosevelt .
Bush started two wars as President. Planned and enabled countless crimes as director of the CIA. pardoned all those implicated in the Iran-Contra affair. Refused to apologise when the US Navy "accidentally" shot down an Iranian airliner, killing over 200 civilians, including 60 children.
He was the original neocon – his administration brought us Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld. Gave birth to the ideology that stage-managed 9/11, launched the "War on Terror", and cut a blood-stained swath across North Africa and the Middle East.
We don't hear about that.
What we DO hear about is Bush's "deep sense of public duty and service" and that "Bush was a patriot who did not need cheap slogans to express his belief in enduring American greatness". No space is given over to analysis, to examine the fact that "belief in enduring American greatness" is quasi-fascism, and responsible for more violent deaths this century than any other cause you can name.
In hundreds of words, a notionally left-wing paper has nothing but praise for a highly unpopular right-wing president. No space is given over even to the gentlest of rebukes.
The whole article is an exercise in talking without saying anything. Pleasantries replacing truth. Platitudes where facts should be. A nothing burger, with a void on the side and an extra order of beige.
It's an obituary of Harold Shipman that eschews murder talk and rhapsodises about his love of gardening.
A eulogy to Pinochet that praises his economic reforms but neglects all the soccer stadiums full of corpses.
An epitaph to Hitler that focuses, not on his "controversial political career", but on his painting and his vegetarianism.
Did you know Genghis Khan once lent me a pencil? He was a swell guy. The world will miss him.
We're no longer supposed to examine the lives, characters or morals of our leaders. Only "honour their memory" and be "grateful for their service". History is presented to us, not as a series of choices made by people in power, but as a collection of inevitabilities. Consequences are tragic but unavoidable. Like long-dead family squabbles – To dwell on them is unseemly, and to assign blame unfair.
Just as with John McCain, apologism and revisionism are sold to us as manners and good taste. Attempts to redress the balance and tell the truth are met with stern glares and declarations that it is "too soon".
It's never "too soon" to tell the truth.
John McCain was a dangerous war-mongering lunatic. George Bush Sr was a sociopath from a family of corrupt sociopaths. The world would be a far better, and much safer place if just one major newspaper was willing to say that.
Really, there are two obituaries to write here:
First – George HW Bush, corrupt patriarch of an old and malign family, passing out of this world to face whatever eternal punishment (hopefully) awaits those who sell their immortal soul in exchange for a brief taste of power.
Second – The Guardian, perhaps a decent newspaper once-upon-a-time, now a dried out husk. A zombified slave to the state, mindless and brainless and lifeless. No questions, no reservations, no hesitation. Obediently licking up the mess their masters leave behind.
It's sickening.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he's forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
Michael McNulty says Dec, 9, 2018
My mother believed it was only Bush Senior's longevity that prevented some of the neo-cons from bumping off Bush Junior. He was President in name only and has long since fulfilled his usefulness in committing the US to endless war. He is prone to verbal gaffes and that must make him a liability, and when powerful evil people get nervous they often turn deadly.vexarb says Dec, 5, 2018
Like son, like father -- Bush War Crimes in Iraq:vexarb says Dec, 4, 2018
Cut&Pasted from Lavrov interview in today's Saker Vineyard:different frank says Dec, 4, 2018Question: When the death of President George H.W. Bush was announced, President Putin expressed his condolences in a very emotional message. George Bush Sr. believed that one of the worst mistakes of his presidency was failure to prevent the Soviet Union's dissolution. Did you meet with him? What are your impressions of him?
Sergey Lavrov: I believe that George Bush Sr greatly contributed to the development of the United States and ensured that his country responsibly played its role in the world, considering its weight in international affairs.
I remember very well how President George H.W. Bush visited Moscow, and then he went to Ukraine where he encouraged the Soviet republics' political forces to do their duty by preserving the country rather than create huge, tragic problems for millions of people who became citizens of different states the morning after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Mr Bush was a great politician. I believe that every word that will be said about his achievements reflect the people's true attitude to this man. However, one comment about the link between President Bush and the demise of the Soviet Union. I heard a commentator say that George Bush Sr made history by helping Mikhail Gorbachev soft-land the Soviet Union. In fact, George Bush Sr never did that; he simply wanted to protect millions of people from political games. This is what we can say confidently about him.
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The Webster tarpley book about him is interestingFrancis Lee says Dec, 4, 2018
Also regarding the "gulf war". The then US ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie gave saddam the nod to invade Kuwait.
He was set up.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/april.html
It was German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte actually spilled the beans regarding the western media in his best seller, Journalisten Gekaufte, (Bought Journalists). Ulfkotte described the degree to which the CIA has penetrated the western media and corrupted, or bribed ( including himself) the system which has become a PR organization for the intelligence services, and MIC. On publication it immediately sold 120,000.00 copies and then strangely became unavailable in English. He was described as a 'conspiracy theorist' (but of course) and died at the relatively young age of a heart attack at 56. There are some salient issues surrounding his death raised by Jonas Schneider in his book 'The Mysterious Death of Udo Ulfkotte: Evidence for a Murder.
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Dec 24, 2018 | off-guardian.org
Peter Bolton says Dec, 6, 2018
You know already what I will respond to this. And I know already what you will say in return. So, instead of getting into a back and forth about it, I will simply leave you with something to consider.milosevic says Dec, 9, 2018The fact that each successive report that comes out that refutes the claims of the truther movement is automatically dismissed by people like you shows how conspiracy theory thinking works. The final 9/11 report comes out in 2004 and, of course, the truthers dismiss it because it was written by a branch of the federal government who you believe perpetrated 9/11 in the first place. Then Popular Mechanics publishes a 5,500 word report in 2005 extensively answering and debunking the movement claims.
Here, you people can't claim that it was a government cover-up -- at least not directly -- because Popular Mechanics is a privately owned publication. Therefore, new sub-conspiracy theories are invented to "prove" how Popular Mechanics is part of the cover-up. To give just one example Christopher Bollyn "claimed to have discovered why the 100-year-old engineering magazine would take part in a government cover-up of the crime of the century: A young researcher on the magazine's staff named Benjamin Chertoff was a cousin of then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and the magazine was seeking to whitewash the criminal conspiracy with its coverage." (Slate 2011) Here we are seeing the kind of incredible mental contortion that truthers are willing to engage in to continue believing their theories.
Then in 2008 the National Institute of Standards and Technology released the final installment of its study into the causes behind the collapse of the buildings -- $16 million was invested into the investigation. And, as I well know, you and other truthers will have a smart Alec come-back as to why the NIST report is wrong, its authors are part of the vast conspiracy and so on. On and on it goes no matter how many reports are published by however many experts.
Again, I am not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth about the merits and demerits of these reports. Rather, I wish to point out the flawed reasoning inherent to 9/11 trutherism: that it has its own internal mechanisms for discounting any evidence that contradicts its central tenets. It therefore constitutes a closed system of thought because there is nothing that would ever count as a refutation. In other words, for all contradictory evidence another explanation is made to retroactively fit the latest gap in the theory that is exposed.
Now, I know full well that this is probably not going to change your mind either. And I'm sure that there will be plenty of responses to this comment and thumbs down from Off-Guardian readers. But I hope that you at least consider whether you are wrong about this subject. For my part, I worry that 9/11 trutherism obscures what are indeed important subjects -- US imperialism, US govt. corruption, the nefarious influence of the CIA, the legitimate grievance that people in the Middle East have against the US, Israel, the Saudi dictatorship and so on. Above all, I worry that 9/11 trutherism makes it open season for the real enemies -- the US foreign policy establishment, et cetera -- to portray the resistance to them and their agenda as a bunch of tin foil hat wearing fruitcakes. I feel strongly that the left needs to jettison this in-group, conspiracy theory-type stuff really become a major force and overturn the status quo.
People like you must count as a great success for the obedience training that keeps capitalist society running smoothly, with the few dissidents casually dismissed as "a bunch of tin foil hat wearing fruitcakes".Peter Bolton says Dec, 16, 2018Even NIST eventually admitted that WTC-7 free-fell for 2.5 seconds. That can only happen if all the support columns fail at exactly the same time; otherwise it would topple over sideways. Only controlled explosives can make that happen.
Your touching faith in the word of ruling-class "experts", over the evidence of your own eyes, and basic physics, is a credit to the Middle Ages. It would warm the hearts of the Catholic theologians who refused to look through Galileo's telescope because they knew, as a matter of revealed truth, that what he said couldn't possibly be true.
What do the claims of a bunch of tinfoil-hat-wearing fruitcakes count for, against not just ruling class dogma, but the entire weight of respectable middle-class opinion? The social status and careers of millions of right-thinking professionals, like you, depend on believing, or at least pretending to believe, not just the 9/11 Official Story, but all the other Official Stories as well. How could all those comfy middle-class people, with their comfy middle-class careers and high-status friends, be wrong? That would throw the entire plan for next weekend's dinner party into question.
Do you believe the Offical Skripal Story? The Official ISIS story? The Official Syrian Chemical Weapons Story? The Official JFK Assassination Story? The Official USS Liberty Story? The Official Tonkin Gulf Story? How do you decide which Official Stories to believe, except on the basis of careerism and status-seeking?
Again, I am not interested in getting drawn into a back-and-forth about the various claims of 9/11 truthers like yourself. I would just like to make one comment and then leave two things for yourself and other truthers on here to consider.Makropulos says Dec, 3, 2018First, I would like to comment upon the fact that I have been subjected to some rather nasty personalized abuse on this thread simply for challenging the claims of trutherism. I'm not pointing this out to feel aggrieved or to search for sympathy or to make myself out as some kind of victim. Rather I do so to illustrate how it is indicative of the negative and mind-closing effects of the group-think and the conspiracy theorist mind-set. It goes something like this: "everyone who questions the tenets of the great truther theory is the enemy, not just a skeptic but rather a collaborator in the evil system that suppresses the "truth"."
Second, I want to provide a link to an excellent article that addresses the claims of truthers head-on: https://www.skeptical-science.com/critical-thinking/911-conspiracy-theories-debunked/
The people it discusses were truthers and many of them reexamined their beliefs after being confronted by actual specialists on the subjects basing their truther beliefs on. If you are open-minded as you claim to be, then have the decency to at least read the article and consider its points, rather than just reflexively rejecting the source as part of the great cover-up.
Finally, I would like to leave you with a quote from Noam Chomsky. Now, I am well aware that you think Chomsky is a sell-out for not getting on board with trutherism and that you have all kinds of fancy come-backs as to why he is wrong. But he raises a very important issue of priorities for people on the anti-imperialist left to consider. Is this obsession with this issue really helping us to fight against imperialism and all of the other iniquities of the world? I think not:
"One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state, and their institutional background, crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work." Noam Chomsky
Ah "truther", that neologism which serves the same purpose as the recasting of the term "conspiracy" to designate foolishness, gullibilty etc.milosevic says Dec, 3, 2018And as for Chomsky, well here's what he had to say about the 9/11 "inside job" theory:
"And even if it were true, which is extremely unlikely, who cares? It doesn't have any significance. It's a little bit like the huge energy that's put out on trying to figure out who killed John Kennedy. Who knows? Who cares? Plenty of people get killed all the time, why does it matter that one of them happened to be John F. Kennedy?"
Let's just consider that for a moment. Chomsky is considering the possibilty -- however remote in his view -- that 9/11 may indeed have been an inside job. And he's saying it doesn't have any significance that the US goverment carried out an attack on its own population! It doesn't have any significance that the "war on terror" was launched on the basis of a lie!
This is the moment when Chomsky truly stood revealed. He was like the kid with his hand in the cookie jar who instantly concocts any number of excuses all of which contradict each other. And yet even when caught out like this, he has his supporters who say he "dispels 9/11 theories with sheer logic"!
Makropulos says Dec, 3, 2018That's the one. I mean – who knows and who cares? It's not as if a terrorist attack on mainland America that altered the face of New York and launched a war across the world is actually important.Peter Bolton says Dec, 4, 2018Well, I think the fact that Noam Chomsky has said this demonstrates how few people accept these 9/11 truther ideas -- even amongst people who generally agree with your (and my) kind of politics. George Galloway, who like Chomsky is about as far politically from the neocons as you can get, has also spoken very eloquently against trutherism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A5ToK6g0m8Makropulos says Dec, 4, 2018Ironically, the only remotely public figure who does that I've heard mentioned on this thread is some Reaganite crank that I had never heard of until now. That really does not bode well for you, does it?
Au contraire Peter, it does not bode well for the entire realm of mainstream discourse. Logically what Chomsky said is simply monstrous. As is this:Makropulos says Dec, 4, 2018"I think the fact that Noam Chomsky has said this demonstrates how few people accept these 9/11 truther ideas"
What is the hold that this man has that he only has to say something to "demonstrate" what most think?
And having now listened to Mr Galloway and once again having to put up with his portentous stretching out ..of the ..sentence to -- quite frankly pad the time out, I see that his "points" come down to the following:milosevic says Dec, 4, 2018Two planes flew into the twin towers. Yes -- there's no disputing that one.
GW Bush could not possibly have planned the thing himself. Yes again -- no dispute. At this point I must express my gratitude to Reagan for finally proving that the guy in front is just a puppet.
If the US did it themselves and it "got out" it would be the end of America's credibility. Yes indeed. Which is why, all across the mainstream press, it will only ever be presented as a "nutty conspiracy theory"
Galloway: "I saw, myself, the airplanes hitting the twin towers."flaxgirl says Dec, 4, 2018-- which is supposed to constitute proof of the official Evil-Terrorists-In-A-Cave-In-Afghanistan story.
attention, "flaxgirl": your grand unified theory of 9/11 now needs to incorporate George Galloway as a fake witness for the US government, which seems strange, given his decades of opposition, both before and after, to the imperial warfare for which 9/11 served as a pretext.
The political function of the No-Planes-At-WTC claims could not be more clear; it's so that people who dispute other aspects of the Official Story can all be dismissed as deranged idiots.
But Peter you need to look at the evidence for yourself and not take others' word for it. And be guided by those who know how buildings collapse -- Chomsky certainly doesn't.flaxgirl says Dec, 4, 2018
This is a wonderful tutorial by Richard Gage, founder of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.The story of 9/11 is utterly preposterous. The only reason people believe it is to do with psychology of how we relate to power nothing to do with the actuality of the story -- because it's utterly ludicrous.
Forgot link to tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ged-FIf46dcJay-Q says Dec, 4, 2018This is my article on Chomsky's sophistry on 9/11:
https://off-guardian.org/2016/10/11/analysis-of-the-sophistry-of-noam-chomsky-on-911/Wut? " less violent ones like England, the US or France " From here on it just gets worse until Chomsky has no credible position left to argue from.flaxgirl says Dec, 4, 2018Heightened sense of cognitive dissonance by old Noam.
' even if it were true, which is extremely unlikely, then who cares? It doesn't have any significance."
Wow, for someone with such intellect this is some low-level thinking. I almost feel sorry for Chomsky for holding such an immoral position. Would he feel the same way if his wife was murdered? "Ah, there's other things to worry about, anything else is a diversion of energy." Very sad.
Where basic physics is concerned we should not speak of theory. The only possible explanation for the collapse of the buildings is controlled demolition. There is no doubt whatsoever that 9/11 was an inside conspiracy. There is also no doubt that death and injury were staged – at least, there is zero evidence of its reality in the visual record and one would think that for the 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured claimed there would be at least one piece of evidence for their reality, rather than every piece (anomalously small in number) in the visual record perfectly fitting "staged". Not to mention other anomalies unrelated to the visual record and that actual killing and injuring of people by the perpetrators would take a highly-problematic form in the shape of a great number of loved ones (as opposed to the tiny number presented) and the injured themselves when controlled demolition was so obvious.kevin morris says Dec, 4, 2018When you say that there is no doubt whatsoever that 9/11 was an inside conspiracy, I feel you are being overconfident unless what you are saying is that there is some evidence that some figures at the World Trade Centres seemed to have foreknowledge.milosevic says Dec, 4, 2018Frankly, although we all have our theories as to who was responsible, I remain in full agreement with Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth who state simply that the official account conflicts with physics. All else is suspicion and supposition. It may well be well grounded supposition, but until we discover who planned and executed the event and who definitely had foreknowledge, what we are dealing with is speculation.
The problem with that is that the great many people who refuse to believe anything other than the official account of 9/11 dismiss our views as those of cranks
there is some evidence that some figures at the World Trade Centres seemed to have foreknowledgeflaxgirl says Dec, 7, 2018Kevin,flaxgirl says Dec, 7, 2018The buildings came down by controlled demolition. The evidence for that is incontrovertible and the rationale presented by NIST for fire being the cause is demonstrably not based on a skerrick of evidence and is obviously fraudulent and false. There is not a single reason to suspect that the cause of collapse of all the buildings wasn't controlled demolition. If you believe there is a single reason to suspect another cause can you please provide it.
Since waking up to 9/11, I find that people either decide something is something with too little evidence or refrain from deciding on what something is when the evidence is so overwhelming you're practically drowning in it. Being conservative in judgement in the face of overwhelming evidence is no virtue in my opinion.
I have engaged in conversation with Mick West who runs the metabunk.org website that allegedly debunks all the conspiracy theories. We have gone back and forth a number of times over the cause of WTC-7's collapse and I have invited him to respond to an Occam's Razor challenge to provide 10 points that favour "fire" over "controlled demolition". He did not respond to the challenge, nor could he provide a single point that favours fire over controlled demolition. Not a single point -- didn't change his mind though.
https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/5000-challenge.htmlNor has anyone responded to my other Occam's Razor challenges. I judge when I see that there is a reasonable amount of evidence and that evidence points all one way and there is no evidence pointing any other way. If you disagree with this method fair enough.
And just to add, that, of course, it must be an inside job in the case of controlled demolition. As Graeme MacQueen says, there is no room in the official story for controlled demolition.flaxgirl says Dec, 4, 2018The big secret is though that death and injury were staged. That's the real secret.
It was a totally excellent piece. No reservations.Anticitizen one says Dec, 4, 2018"Theory"? Are you serious? If you believe that 9/11 was the work of 19 barely-trained terrorists (one of whom cried when asked to do steep turns and stalls according to his alleged flying instructor but was tasked with the most impossibly-expert manoeuvre of doing a 330 degree turn into the Pentagon), armed with boxcutters who managed to hijack 4 planes, navigate them into 3 iconic buildings without being molested by a single fighter interceptor through the most defended airspace on earth, which subsequently caused the 10-second collapses (displaying all the characteristics of controlled demolition and none of fire-caused collapses) of three high-rise steel frame buildings, here's a $5,000 challenge for you. All you have to do is provide 10 points that support the "fire" hypothesis over the "controlled demolition" hypothesis for the collapse of WTC-7 and you can choose your own structural engineer to validate your points. There's so very much material on the collapse it shouldn't be very difficult. In fact, all you have to do is come up with one point to support WTC-7's collapse by fire and I'll give you $5,000. One point -- validated by a structural engineer of your choice. https://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/5000-challenge.html
9/11 is probably the biggest hoax in history and includes the very clever subhoax of 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured. Not only was it a hoax but they did not aim for realism in any shape or form and gave us extra clues in addition to their preposterous against-physical-and-administrative-reality story.
This is what Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy, who has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service, and business, has to say about 9/11.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/pages/about-paul-craig-roberts/According to the official story, on September 11, 2001, the vaunted National Security State of the World's Only Superpower was defeated by a few young Saudi Arabians armed only with box cutters. The American National Security State proved to be totally helpless and was dealt the greatest humiliation ever inflicted on any country claiming to be a power.
That day no aspect of the National Security State worked. Everything failed.
The US Air Force for the first time in its history could not get intercepter jet fighters into the air.
The National Security Council failed.
All sixteen US intelligence agencies failed as did those of America's NATO and Israeli allies.
Air Traffic Control failed.
Airport Security failed four times at the same moment on the same day. The probability of such a failure is zero.
If such a thing had actually happened, there would have been demands from the White House, from Congress, and from the media for an investigation. Officials would have been held accountable for their failures. Heads would have rolled.
Instead, the White House resisted for one year the 9/11 families' demands for an investigation. Finally, a collection of politicians was assembled to listen to the government's account and to write it down. The chairman, vice chairman, and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission have said that information was withheld from the commission, lies were told to the commission, and that the commission "was set up to fail." The worst security failure in history resulted in not a single firing. No one was held responsible.
Washington concluded that 9/11 was possible because America lacked a police state.
The PATRIOT Act, which was awaiting the event was quickly passed by the congressional idiots. The Act established executive branch independence of law and the Constitution. The Act and follow-up measures have institutionalized a police state in "the land of the free."Osama bin Laden, a CIA asset dying of renal failure, was blamed despite his explicit denial. For the next ten years Osama bin Laden was the bogyman that provided the excuse for Washington to kill countless numbers of Muslims. Then suddenly on May 2, 2011, Obama claimed that US Navy SEALs had killed bin Laden in Pakistan. Eyewitnesses on the scene contradicted the White House's story. Osama bin Laden became the only human in history to survive renal failure for ten years. There was no dialysis machine in what was said to be bin Laden's hideaway. The numerous obituaries of bin Laden's death in December 2001 went down the memory hole. And the SEAL team died a few weeks later in a mysterious helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The thousands of sailors on the aircraft carrier from which bin Laden was said to have been dumped into the Indian Ocean wrote home that no such burial took place.
The fairy tale story of bin Laden's murder by Seal Team Six served to end the challenge by disappointed Democrats to Obama's nomination for a second term. It also freed the "war on terror" from the bin Laden constraint. Washington wanted to attack Libya, Syria, and Iran, countries in which bin Laden was known not to have organizations, and the succession of faked bin Laden videos, in which bin Laden grew progressively younger as the fake bin Laden claimed credit for each successive attack, had lost credibility among experts.
Watching the twin towers and WTC 7 come down, it was obvious to me that the buildings were not falling down as a result of structural damage. When it became clear that the White House had blocked an independent investigation of the only three steel skyscrapers in world history to collapse as a result of low temperature office fires, it was apparent that there was a coverup.
After 13 years people at home and abroad find the government's story less believable.
The case made by independent experts is now so compelling that mainstream media has opened to it. Here is Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth on C-SPAN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zbv2SvBEec#t=23The only thing that surprises me about 9/11 these days is that new evidence linking Russia to the event hasn't been fabricated, sorry, discovered yet.
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Oct 11, 2015 | The Guardian
The documents reveal him as Alexis Bellegarde, one of four White Russian aristocrats believed to have been behind an infamous forgery 15 years before the war began. The revelations of Bellegarde's importance to MI6 will increase suspicions that British agents had a hand in the production of the "Zinoviev letter"; its leak to the Daily Mail many believe cost Labour the 1924 general election.
foolisholdman -> Brian Milne 11 Oct 2015 05:55
Brian Milne
It is also a nice illustration of how "Westminster Style" democracy works. Any chance that the electorate might elect a left wing government and you get a Zinoviev letter or a Bologna railway station bombing.
In other words "Elect whom you like". ("Provided we like them too!") It's really a bit like herding sheep.
AlbertTatlock53 -> LordUpminster 11 Oct 2015 08:35
LordUpminster ID7678903 11 Oct 2015 04:04Despite the blandness of the OH volumes on Ultra, some facts did leak out, like having a month's notice of the Italian declaration of war and useful tactical and operational details like the positions of wolf packs. It also reminded me of a couple of anecdotes about Ultra information by unwitting sources in memoirs. I wouldn't deprecate Ultra or the British war effort that far. The British army that went to Normandy was the most mechanised and armoured army in history and pulled rather more than its own weight in the coalition. The principal offensive weapon of the British empire was Bomber Command, which in the spring-summer of 1943 began to devastate the German war economy.
The Soviet and then the US contributions to the war dwarfed the British empire but only relatively, it was still a superpower in 1945, though by the Suez crime it had become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Murder Inc.
Brian Milne 11 Oct 2015 04:00And no doubt the establishment will continue to play such dirty tricks to undermine our so called democracy
Not the slightest: according to our friend jamesforysthe below that's essentially what they're for.
Re. the Zinoviev letter, I did see one theory many years ago that the man behind it was the then-Polish Army Minister Władysław Sikorski, the one who later headed the Polish exile government in London and was killed in an air crash. Certainly in October 1924 he was bragging to people in governmental circles in Warsaw that it was his agents who had arranged it - though why exactly is not easy to see, given that Poland had no particular political interest in Britain at the time. I suspect that it was empty boasting, and that it was Russian emigrés who were responsible.
Coming up soon: conclusive proof that Jeremy Corbyn was once an agent of the Tsarist Okhrana.
samuel glover -> jamesforsythe 11 Oct 2015 01:43Had Labour won, thus Baldwin, MacDonald, Baldwin, Chamberlain probably not have been the course of politics, would the UK necessarily have moved further left? The question remains to be seen, but unless somebody more genuinely socialist had replaced MacDonald probably not. However, the outcome may well have been a far more amicable relationship with the Soviet Union, the Versailles Treaty and League of Nations possibly better conformed to and the rise of Hitler less likely. The Zinoviev letter may well have been as much a contributory denominator in that than is implied. Of course, we hall never know really, only historians expounding their own theories and interpretations of history.
error418 -> jamesforsythe 10 Oct 2015 23:21"Some brilliant espionage across the Middle-east and Israel is precisely what's needed to bring these politically infantile areas into western like democratic administrations, this century, not next. And with fewer wars. "
First, you think western intelligence agencies **haven't** been prominent in the history of that region?!?!?
Second, you think these same agencies are capable of just whipping up entire social and political structures and cultures on demand? Do you read newspapers?
Remember that these agencies -- in America, in Britain, in every NATO country -- spent decades and billions of dollars and billions of man-hours staring obsessively at the USSR. EVERY ONE of them was completely blindsided when the Soviet Union folded up.
Frisco27 10 Oct 2015 19:06"Our" best interests or that intelligence service´s best interests? ISI in Pakistan is a good example of such a service gone rogue. Experts in election rigging.
"Sexing up" documents? What a scumbag... That would never happen these days.
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Dec 05, 2015 | The Guardian
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle for access to the basics
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The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom. The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
... ... ...
Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing – just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.
Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?
mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37
Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its day, it has mutated into criminality.
Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23
In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.
The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees. Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying their own grave diggers.
mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17
I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser. It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.
Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!
Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.
BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic systems that have been tried from time to time.
I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.
brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52
As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy, nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations. I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial. We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power, we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."
Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31
Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04
AmyInNH -> tommydogYou'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think it should be rather than what it is.
It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism. It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.
seamanbodine,They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?
And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment insurance, etc.
Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero, as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever), and average black family wealth in the four figures.
The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.
But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply not the case, and the difference does matter.
Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want, but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.
If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.
Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.
But nor are they any better.AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization of markets and power?
Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability, while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society. A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few, as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt, and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?
Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.
And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.
The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go?
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.
The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power (power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules – policy changes they've used their wealth to champion.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44
Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms – human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production – physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs, like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule, as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive capital.
As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic growth from the slavery of past savings.
I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP class they too overwhelmingly belong to.
Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)
The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13
I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty and without a father figure adds to the problem.
What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the wealth is well-known in many countries.
nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59
Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32
Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive taxation.
In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater equality.
Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.
We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.
They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.
Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and they have been doing nothing for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone else doing all the work.
Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.
The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied externally.
Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31
I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.
Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States". That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.
Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.
family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.
soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26
It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people and stole their land and wealth.
When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.
David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted with the Leisure Class.
I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.
George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:
"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the 17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next in line."
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:24
DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13The working and middle classes toil to keep the upper class in luxury and leisure.
In the UK nothing has changed.
We call our Leisure Class the Aristocracy.
For the first time in five millennia of human civilisation some people at the bottom of society aren't working.
We can't have that; idleness is only for the rich.
It's the way it's always been and the way it must be again.
Did you think the upper; leisure class, social calendar disappeared in the 19th Century?
No it's alive and kicking in the 21st Century ....Peer into the lives of today's Leisure Class with Tatler. http://www.tatler.com/the-season
If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.
"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow (miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say, "life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender or both.Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these facts help to fog the issue.
Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially recognized as such.
HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME, unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.
This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder: If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again, if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block, often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal contradictions.
mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.
Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.
Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.
You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap pay.
Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.
Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term, O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.
That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism. Use it to build shared prosperity.
oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.
We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions, for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist societies and is wholly unequal by design.
Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.
As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even permit us to believe there could be another, better way.
Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33
Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.
I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries.
VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29
Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.
In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.
The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't end in starvation.
A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this. If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no one company can dominate and control markets.
Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27
Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26
The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society - one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships across class differences that are that large.
"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 14:17Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated capitalistic system.
This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.
Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?
But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones and how many ounces.
So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.
neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?
The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making profits.
The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery by capitalists.
Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as the core ideology.
Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism
tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12
Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.
Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12
It's an equal opportunity plantation now.
Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11
The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.
Here is my list:
The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.
The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.
Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.
Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.
Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11
If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.
We created this mess and we can fix it.
Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03
Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.
Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48
As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1 vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."
Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow on your own personal land.
Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.
"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism eradicating poverty on a global scale?"
The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers (44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).
However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.
(Data from the U.S. census.)
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Oct 24, 2015 | The Guardian
"Phoning in sick is a revolutionary act." I loved that slogan. It came to me, as so many good things did, from Housmans, the radical bookshop in King's Cross. There you could rummage through all sorts of anarchist pamphlets and there I discovered, in the early 80s, the wondrous little magazine Processed World. It told you basically how to screw up your workplace. It was smart and full of small acts of random subversion. In many ways it was ahead of its time as it was coming out of San Francisco and prefiguring Silicon Valley. It saw the machines coming. Jobs were increasingly boring and innately meaningless. Workers were "data slaves" working for IBM ("Intensely Boring Machines").
What Processed World was doing was trying to disrupt the identification so many office workers were meant to feel with their management, not through old-style union organising, but through small acts of subversion. The modern office, it stressed, has nothing to do with human need. Its rebellion was about working as little as possible, disinformation and sabotage. It was making alienation fun. In 1981, it could not have known that a self-service till cannot ever phone in sick.
I was thinking of this today, as I wanted to do just that. I have made myself ill with a hangover. A hangover, I always feel, is nature's way of telling you to have a day off. One can be macho about it and eat your way back to sentience via the medium of bacon sandwiches and Maltesers. At work, one is dehydrated, irritable and only semi-present. Better, surely, though to let the day fall through you and dream away.
Having worked in America, though, I can say for sure that they brook no excuses whatsoever. When I was late for work and said things like, "My alarm clock did not go off", they would say that this was not a suitable explanation, which flummoxed me. I had to make up others. This was just to work in a shop.
This model of working – long hours, very few holidays, few breaks, two incomes needed to raise kids, crazed loyalty demanded by huge corporations, the American way – is where we're heading. Except now the model is even more punishing. It is China. We are expected to compete with an economy whose workers are often closer to indentured slaves than anything else.
This is what striving is, then: dangerous, demoralising, often dirty work. Buckle down. It's the only way forward, apparently, which is why our glorious leaders are sucking up to China, which is immoral, never mind ridiculously short-term thinking.
So again I must really speak up for the skivers. What we have to understand about austerity is its psychic effects. People must have less. So they must have less leisure, too. The fact is life is about more than work and work is rapidly changing. Skiving in China may get you killed but here it may be a small act of resistance, or it may just be that skivers remind us that there is meaning outside wage-slavery.
Work is too often discussed by middle-class people in ways that are simply unrecognisable to anyone who has done crappy jobs. Much work is not interesting and never has been. Now that we have a political and media elite who go from Oxbridge to working for a newspaper or a politician, a lot of nonsense is spouted. These people have not cleaned urinals on a nightshift. They don't sit lonely in petrol stations manning the till. They don't have to ask permission for a toilet break in a call centre. Instead, their work provides their own special identity. It is very important.
Low-status jobs, like caring, are for others. The bottom-wipers of this world do it for the glory, I suppose. But when we talk of the coming automation that will reduce employment, bottom-wiping will not be mechanised. Nor will it be romanticised, as old male manual labour is. The mad idea of reopening the coal mines was part of the left's strange notion of the nobility of labour. Have these people ever been down a coal mine? Would they want that life for their children?
Instead we need to talk about the dehumanising nature of work. Bertrand Russell and Keynes thought our goal should be less work, that technology would mean fewer hours.
Far from work giving meaning to life, in some surveys 40% of us say that our jobs are meaningless. Nonetheless, the art of skiving is verboten as we cram our children with ever longer hours of school and homework. All this striving is for what exactly? A soul-destroying job?
Just as education is decided by those who loved school, discussions about work are had by those to whom it is about more than income.
The parts of our lives that are not work – the places we dream or play or care, the space we may find creative – all these are deemed outside the economy. All this time is unproductive. But who decides that?
Skiving work is bad only to those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
So go on: phone in sick. You know you want to.
friedad 23 Oct 2015 18:27
We now exist in a society in which the Fear Cloud is wrapped around each citizen. Our proud history of Union and Labor, fighting for decent wages and living conditions for all citizens, and mostly achieving these aims, a history, which should be taught to every child educated in every school in this country, now gradually but surely eroded by ruthless speculators in government, is the future generations are inheriting. The workforce in fear of taking a sick day, the young looking for work in fear of speaking out at diminishing rewards, definitely this 21st Century is the Century of Fear. And how is this fear denied, with mind blowing drugs, regardless if it is is alcohol, description drugs, illicit drugs, a society in denial. We do not require a heavenly object to destroy us, a few soulless monsters in our mist are masters of manipulators, getting closer and closer to accomplish their aim of having zombies doing their beckoning. Need a kidney, no worries, zombie dishwasher, is handy for one. Oh wait that time is already here.
Hemulen6 23 Oct 2015 15:06
Oh join the real world, Suzanne! Many companies now have a limit to how often you can be sick. In the case of the charity I work for it's 9 days a year. I overstepped it, I was genuinely sick, and was hauled up in front of Occupational Health. That will now go on my record and count against me. I work for a cancer care charity. Irony? Surely not.
AlexLeo -> rebel7 23 Oct 2015 13:34
Which is exactly my point. You compete on relevant job skills and quality of your product, not what school you have attended.
Yes, there are thousands, tens of thousands of folks here around San Jose who barely speak English, but are smart and hard working as hell and it takes them a few years to get to 150-200K per year, Many of them get to 300-400K, if they come from strong schools in their countries of origin, compared to the 10k or so where they came from, but probably more than the whining readership here.
This is really difficult to swallow for the Brits back in Britain, isn't it. Those who have moved over have experiences the type of social mobility unthinkable in Britain, but they have had to work hard and get to 300K-700K per year, much better than the 50-100K their parents used to make back in GB. These are averages based on personal interactions with say 50 Brits in the last 15 + years, all employed in the Silicon Valley in very different jobs and roles.
Todd Owens -> Scott W 23 Oct 2015 11:00
I get what you're saying and I agree with a lot of what you said. My only gripe is most employees do not see an operation from a business owner or managerial / financial perspective. They don't understand the costs associated with their performance or lack thereof. I've worked on a lot of projects that we're operating at a loss for a future payoff. When someone decides they don't want to do the work they're contracted to perform that can have a cascading effect on the entire company.
All in all what's being described is for the most part misguided because most people are not in the position or even care to evaluate the particulars. So saying you should do this to accomplish that is bullshit because it's rarely such a simple equation. If anything this type of tactic will leaf to MORE loss and less money for payroll.
weematt -> Barry1858 23 Oct 2015 09:04Sorry you just can't have a 'nicer' capitalism.
War ( business by other means) and unemployment ( you can't buck the market), are inevitable concomitants of capitalist competition over markets, trade routes and spheres of interests. (Remember the war science of Nagasaki and Hiroshima from the 'good guys' ?)
"..capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt". (Marx)You can't have full employment, or even the 'Right to Work'.
There is always ,even in boom times a reserve army of unemployed, to drive down wages. (If necessary they will inject inflation into the economy)
Unemployment is currently 5.5 percent or 1,860,000 people. If their "equilibrium rate" of unemployment is 4% rather than 5% this would still mean 1,352,000 "need be unemployed". The government don't want these people to find jobs as it would strengthen workers' bargaining position over wages, but that doesn't stop them harassing them with useless and petty form-filling, reporting to the so-called "job centre" just for the sake of it, calling them scroungers and now saying they are mentally defective.
Government is 'over' you not 'for' you.Governments do not exist to ensure 'fair do's' but to manage social expectations with the minimum of dissent, commensurate with the needs of capitalism in the interests of profit.
Worker participation amounts to self managing workers self exploitation for the maximum of profit for the capitalist class.
Exploitation takes place at the point of production.
" Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wages system!'"
Karl Marx [Value, Price and Profit]
John Kellar 23 Oct 2015 07:19
Fortunately; as a retired veteran I don't have to worry about phoning in sick.However; during my Air Force days if you were sick, you had to get yourself to the Base Medical Section and prove to a medical officer that you were sick. If you convinced the medical officer of your sickness then you may have been luck to receive on or two days sick leave. For those who were very sick or incapable of getting themselves to Base Medical an ambulance would be sent - promptly.
Rchrd Hrrcks -> wumpysmum 23 Oct 2015 04:17The function of civil disobedience is to cause problems for the government. Let's imagine that we could get 100,000 people to agree to phone in sick on a particular date in protest at austerity etc. Leaving aside the direct problems to the economy that this would cause. It would also demonstrate a willingness to take action. It would demonstrate a capability to organise mass direct action. It would demonstrate an ability to bring people together to fight injustice. In and of itself it might not have much impact, but as a precedent set it could be the beginning of something massive, including further acts of civil disobedience.
wumpysmum Rchrd Hrrcks 23 Oct 2015 03:51There's already a form of civil disobedience called industrial action, which the govt are currently attacking by attempting to change statute. Random sickies as per my post above are certainly not the answer in the public sector at least, they make no coherent political point just cause problems for colleagues. Sadly too in many sectors and with the advent of zero hours contracts sickies put workers at risk of sanctions and lose them earnings.
Alyeska 22 Oct 2015 22:18I'm American. I currently have two jobs and work about 70 hours a week, and I get no paid sick days. In fact, the last time I had a job with a paid sick day was 2001. If I could afford a day off, you think I'd be working 70 hours a week?
I barely make rent most months, and yes... I have two college degrees. When I try to organize my coworkers to unionize for decent pay and benefits, they all tell me not to bother.... they are too scared of getting on management's "bad side" and "getting in trouble" (yes, even though the law says management can't retaliate.)
Unions are different in the USA than in the UK. The workforce has to take a vote to unionize the company workers; you can't "just join" a union here. That's why our pay and working conditions have gotten worse, year after year.
rtb1961 22 Oct 2015 21:58By far the biggest act of wage slavery rebellion, don't buy shit. The less you buy, the less you need to earn. Holidays by far the minority of your life should not be a desperate escape from the majority of your life. Spend less, work less and actually really enjoy living more.
Pay less attention to advertising and more attention to the enjoyable simplicity of life, of real direct human relationships, all of them, the ones in passing where you wish a stranger well, chats with service staff to make their life better as well as your own, exchange thoughts and ideas with others, be a human being and share humanity with other human beings.
Mkjaks 22 Oct 2015 20:35
How about don't shop at Walmart (they helped boost the Chinese economy while committing hari kari on the American Dream) and actually engaging in proper labour action? Calling in sick is just plain childish.
toffee1 22 Oct 2015 19:13
It is only considered productive if it feeds the beast, that is, contribute to the accumulation of capital so that the beast can have more power over us. The issue here is the wage labor. The 93 percent of the U.S. working population perform wage labor (see BLS site). It is the highest proportion in any society ever came into history. Under the wage labor (employment) contract, the worker gives up his/her decision making autonomy. The worker accepts the full command of his/her employer during the labor process. The employer directs and commands the labor process to achieve the goals set by himself. Compare this, for example, self-employed providing a service (for example, a plumber). In this case, the customer describes the problem to the service provider but the service provider makes all the decisions on how to organize and apply his labor to solve the problem. Or compare it to a democratically organized coop, where workers make all the decisions collectively, where, how and what to produce. Under the present economic system, a great majority of us are condemned to work in large corporations performing wage labor. The system of wage labor stripping us from autonomy on our own labor, creates all the misery in our present world through alienation. Men and women lose their humanity alienated from their own labor. Outside the world of wage labor, labor can be a source self-realization and true freedom. Labor can be the real fulfillment and love. Labor together our capacity to love make us human. Bourgeoisie dehumanized us steeling our humanity. Bourgeoisie, who sold her soul to the beast, attempting to turn us into ever consuming machines for the accumulation of capital.
patimac54 -> Zach Baker 22 Oct 2015 17:39
Well said. Most retail employers have cut staff to the minimum possible to keep the stores open so if anyone is off sick, it's the devil's own job trying to just get customers served. Making your colleagues work even harder than they normally do because you can't be bothered to act responsibly and show up is just plain selfish.
And sorry, Suzanne, skiving work is nothing more than an act of complete disrespect for those you work with. If you don't understand that, try getting a proper job for a few months and learn how to exercise some self control.TettyBlaBla -> FranzWilde 22 Oct 2015 17:25
It's quite the opposite in government jobs where I am in the US. As the fiscal year comes to a close, managers look at their budgets and go on huge spending sprees, particularly for temp (zero hours in some countries) help and consultants. They fear if they don't spend everything or even a bit more, their spending will be cut in the next budget. This results in people coming in to do work on projects that have no point or usefulness, that will never be completed or even presented up the food chain of management, and ends up costing taxpayers a small fortune.
I did this one year at an Air Quality Agency's IT department while the paid employees sat at their desks watching portable televisions all day. It was truly demeaning.
oommph -> Michael John Jackson 22 Oct 2015 16:59
Thing is though, children - dependents to pay for - are the easiest way to keep yourself chained to work.
The homemaker model works as long as your spouse's employer retains them (and your spouse retains you in an era of 40% divorce).
You are just as dependent on an employer and "work" but far less in control of it now.
Zach Baker 22 Oct 2015 16:41I'm all for sticking it to "the man," but when you call into work for a stupid reason (and a hangover is a very stupid reason), it is selfish, and does more damage to the cause of worker's rights, not less. I don't know about where you work, but if I call in sick to my job, other people have to pick up my slack. I work for a public library, and we don't have a lot of funds, so we have the bear minimum of employees we can have and still work efficiently. As such, if anybody calls in, everyone else, up to and including the library director, have to take on more work. If I found out one of my co-workers called in because of a hangover, I'd be pissed. You made the choice to get drunk, knowing that you had to work the following morning. Putting it into the same category of someone who is sick and may not have the luxury of taking off because of a bad employer is insulting.
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Dec 21, 2018 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Pavel , December 21, 2018 at 10:47 am
The Grauniad just quoted a tweet from a predictably OUTRAGED @HillaryClinton:
Actions have consequences, and whether we're in Syria or not, the people who want to harm us are there & at war. Isolationism is weakness. Empowering ISIS is dangerous. Playing into Russia & Iran's hands is foolish. This President is putting our national security at grave risk.
This from the woman who almost singlehandedly (i.e. along with David Cameron and Sarkovy) destroyed Libya and allowed -- if not encouraged -- the flow of US weapons to go into the hands of ISIS allies in the US-Saudi-Israeli obsession with toppling Assad regardless of the consequences. As Justin Raimondo wrote in Antiwar.com in 2015:
The policy of the Obama administration, and particularly Hillary Clinton's State Department, was – and still is – regime change in Syria. This overrode all other considerations. We armed, trained, and "vetted" the Syrian rebels, even as we looked the other way while the Saudis and the Gulf sheikdoms funded groups like al-Nusra and al-Qaeda affiliates who wouldn't pass muster. And our "moderates" quickly passed into the ranks of the outfront terrorists, complete with the weapons we'd provided.
This crazy policy was an extension of our regime change operation in Libya, a.k.a. "Hillary's War," where the US – "leading from behind" – and a coalition of our Western allies and the Gulf protectorates overthrew Muammar Qaddafi. There, too, we empowered radical Islamists with links to al-Qaeda affiliates – and then used them to ship weapons to their Syrian brothers, as another document uncovered by Judicial Watch shows.
After HRC's multiple foreign policy fiascos she is the last person who should be commenting on this matter.
a different chris, December 21, 2018 at 11:50 am
> the people who want to harm us are there & at war
Sounds like then they are too busy to harm us? She is truly an idiot. Thanks again, Ivy League.
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Dec 04, 2018 | off-guardian.org
you're one of the millions of human beings who, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, still believe there is such a thing as "the truth," you might not want to read this essay. Seriously, it can be extremely upsetting when you discover that there is no "truth" or rather, that what we're all conditioned to regard as "truth" from the time we are children is just the product of a technology of power, and not an empirical state of being. Humans, upon first encountering this fact, have been known to freak completely out and start jabbering about the "Word of God," or "the immutable laws of quantum physics," and run around burning other people at the stake or locking them up and injecting them with Thorazine. I don't want to be responsible for anything like that, so consider this your trigger warning.OK, now that that's out of the way, let's take a look at how "truth" is manufactured. It's actually not that complicated. See, the "truth" is well, it's a story, essentially. It's whatever story we are telling ourselves at any given point in history ("we" being the majority of people, those conforming to the rules of whatever system wields enough power to dictate the story it wants everyone to be telling themselves). Everyone understands this intuitively, but the majority of people pretend they don't in order to be able to get by in the system, which punishes anyone who does not conform to its rules, or who contradicts its story. So, basically, to manufacture the truth, all you really need is (a) a story, and (b) enough power to coerce a majority of people in your society to pretend to believe it.
I'll return to this point a little later. First, let's look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing "truth." I'm going to use The Guardian's most recent blatantly fabricated article ( "Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy" ) as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by "respectable" outlets over the course of the last two years. The "Russian Propaganda Peddlers" story. The "Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton" story. The "Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid" story. The "Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape" story. The "Novichok Assassins" story. The "Bana Alabed Speaks Out" story. The "Trump's Secret Russian Server" story. The "Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis" story. The "Russians Orchestrated Brexit" story. The "Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms" story. The "Twitter Bots" story. And the list goes on.
I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama, and many others). [ ed. including us ]
The short version is, The Guardian's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece (employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.
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Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com
The Guardian's latest attack on Julian Assange was not only a fallacious smear, it represented a desperate attempt on behalf of the British intelligence community to conflate the pending US charges against the journalist with Russiagate. The Guardian's article seeks to deflect from the reality that the prosecution of Assange will focus on Chelsea Manning-Era releases and Vault 7, not the DNC or Podesta emails.
We assert this claim based on the timing of the publication, the Guardian's history of subservience to British intelligence agencies, animosity between The Guardian and WikiLeaks, and the longstanding personal feud between Guardian journalist Luke Harding and Assange. This conclusion is also supported by Harding's financial and career interest in propping up the Russiagate narrative
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Dec 20, 2018 | disobedientmedia.com
Regular followers of WikiLeaks-related news are at this point familiar with the multiple serious infractions of journalistic ethics by Luke Harding and the Guardian, especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. However, another individual at the heart of this matter is far less familiar to the public. That man is Fernando Villavicencio, a prominent Ecuadorian political activist and journalist, director of the USAID-funded NGO Fundamedios and editor of online publication FocusEcuador .
Most readers are also aware of the Guardian's recent publication of claims that Julian Assange met with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on three occasions. This has now been definitively debunked by Fidel Narvaez, the former Consul at Ecuador's London embassy between 2010 and 2018, who says Paul Manafort has never visited the embassy during the time he was in charge there. But this was hardly the first time the outlet published a dishonest smear authored by Luke Harding against Assange. The paper is also no stranger to publishing stories based on fabricated documents.
In May, Disobedient Media reported on the Guardian's hatchet-job relating to 'Operation Hotel,' or rather, the normal security operations of the embassy under former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. That hit-piece , co-authored by Harding and Dan Collyns, asserted among other things that (according to an anonymous source) Assange hacked the embassy's security system. The allegation was promptly refuted by Correa as "absurd" in an interview with The Intercept , and also by WikiLeaks as an "anonymous libel" with which the Guardian had "gone too far this time. We're suing."
A shared element of The Guardian's 'Operation Hotel' fabrications and the latest libel attempting to link Julian Assange to Paul Manafort is none other than Fernando Villavicencio of FocusEcuador. In 2014 Villavicencio was caught passing a forged document to the Guardian , which published it without verifying it. When the forgery was revealed, the Guardian hurriedly took the document down but then tried to cover up that it had been tampered with by Villavicencio when it re-posted it a few days later.
How is Villavicencio tied to The Guardian's latest smear of Assange? Intimately, it turns out.
Who is Fernando Villavicencio?
Earlier this year, an independent journalist writing under the pseudonym Jimmyslama penned a comprehensive report detailing Villavicencio's relationships with pro-US actors within Ecuador and the US. She sums up her findings, which are worth reading in full :
" The information in this post alone should make everyone question why in the world the Guardian would continue to use a source like Villavicencio who is obviously tied to the U.S. government, the CIA, individuals like Thor Halvorssen and Bill Browder, and opponents of both Julian Assange and former President Rafael Correa."
As most readers recall, it was Correa who granted Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Villavicencio was so vehemently opposed to Rafael Correa's socialist government that during the failed 2010 coup against Correa he falsely accused the President of "crimes against humanity" by ordering police to fire on the crowds (it was actually Correa who was being shot at). Correa sued him for libel, and won, but pardoned Villavicencio for the damages awarded by the court.
Assange legal analyst Hanna Jonasson recently made the link between the Ecuadorian forger Villavicencio and Luke Harding's Guardian stories based on dubious documents explicit. She Tweeted : 2014 Ecuador's Foreign Ministry accused the Guardian of publishing a story based on a document it says was fabricated by Fernando Villavicencio, pictured below with the authors of the fake Manafort-Assange 'secret meeting' story, Harding and Collyns."
Jonasson included a link to a 2014 official Ecuadorian government statement which reads in part:
"There is also evidence that the author of this falsified document is Fernando Villavicencio, a convicted slanderer and opponent of Ecuador's current government. This can be seen from the file properties of the document that the Guardian had originally posted (but which it has since taken down and replaced with a version with this evidence removed)."
The statement also notes that Villavicencio had fled the country after his conviction for libeling Correa during the 2010 coup and was at that time living as a fugitive in the United States.
It is incredibly significant, as Jonasson argues, that the authors of the Guardian's latest libelous article were photographed with Villavicencio in Ecuador shortly before publication of the Guardian's claim that Assange had conducted meetings with Manafort.
Jonasson's Twitter thread also states: " This video from the news wire Andes alleges that Villavicencio's name appeared in the metadata of the document originally uploaded alongside The Guardian's story." The 2014 Guardian piece, which aimed a falsified shot at then-President Rafael Correa, would not be the last time Villavicencio's name would appear on a controversial Guardian story before being scrubbed from existence.
Just days after the backlash against the Guardian reached fever-pitch, Villavicencio had the gall to publish another image of himself with Harding and Collyns, gloating : "
One of my greatest journalistic experiences was working for months on Assange's research with colleagues from the British newspaper the Guardian, Luke Harding, Dan Collins and the young journalist Cristina Solórzano from
@somos_lafuente " [Translated from Spanish]The tweet suggests, but does not specifically state, that Villavicencio worked with the disastrous duo on the Assange-Manafort piece. Given the history and associations of all involved, this statement alone should cause extreme skepticism in any unsubstantiated claims, or 'anonymously sourced' claims, the Guardian makes concerning Julian Assange and Ecuador.
Astoundingly, and counter to Villavicencio's uncharacteristic coyness, a recent video posted by WikiLeaks via Twitter does show that Villavicencio was originally listed as a co-author of the Guardian's Manafort-Assange allegations, before his name was edited out of the online article. The original version can be viewed, however, thanks to archive services.
The two photographs of Villavicencio with Harding and Collyns as well as the evidence showing he co-authored the piece doesn't just capture a trio of terrible journalists, it documents the involvement of multiple actors associated with intelligence agencies and fabricated stories.
All of this provoke the question: did Villavicencio provide more bogus documents to Harding and Collyns – Harding said he'd seen a document, though he didn't publish one (or even quote from it) so readers might judge its veracity for themselves – or perhaps these three invented the accusations out of whole-cloth?
Either way, to quote WikiLeaks, the Guardian has "gone too far this time" and its already-tattered reputation is in total shambles.
Successful Propaganda, Failed Journalism
Craig Murray calls Harding an " MI6 tool ", but to this writer, Harding seems worse than an MI6 stooge: He's a wannabe-spook, hanging from the coat-tails of anonymous intelligence officers and publishing their drivel as fact without so much as a skeptical blink. His lack of self-awareness and conflation of anecdote with evidence sets him apart as either one of the most blatant, fumbling propagandists of our era, or the most hapless hack journalist to stain the pages of printed news.
To provide important context on Harding's previous journalistic irresponsibility, we again recall that he co-authored the infamous book containing the encryption password of the entire Cablegate archive, leading to a leak of the unredacted State Department Cables across the internet. Although the guilty Guardian journalists tried to blame Assange for the debacle, it was they themselves who ended up on the receiving end of some well-deserved scorn.
In addition to continuing the Guardian's and Villavicencio's vendetta against Assange and WikiLeaks, it is clearly in Harding's financial interests to conflate the pending prosecution of Assange with Russiagate. As this writer previously noted , Harding penned a book on the subject, titled: " Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win." Tying Assange to Russiagate is good for business, as it stokes public interest in the self-evidently faulty narrative his book supports.
Even more concerning is the claim amongst publishing circles, fueled by recent events, that Harding may be writing another book on Assange, with publication presumably timed for his pending arrest and extradition and designed to cash in on the trial. If that is in fact the case, the specter arises that Harding is working to push for Assange's arrest, not just on behalf of US, UK or Ecuadorian intelligence interests, but also to increase his own book sales.
That Harding and Collyns worked intensively with Villavicencio for "months" on the "Assange story," the fact that Villavicencio was initially listed as a co-author on the original version of the Guardian's article, and the recent denial by Fidel Narvaez , raises the likelihood that Harding and the Guardian were not simply the victims of bad sources who duped them, as claimed by some.
It indicates that the fake story was constructed deliberately on behalf of the very same intelligence establishment that the Guardian is nowadays only too happy to take the knee for.
In summary, one of the most visible establishment media outlets published a fake story on its front page, in an attempt to manufacture a crucial cross-over between the pending prosecution of Assange and the Russiagate saga. This represents the latest example in an onslaught of fake news directed at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ever since they published the largest CIA leak in history in the form of Vault 7, an onslaught which appears to be building in both intensity and absurdity as time goes on.
The Guardian has destroyed its reputation, and in the process, revealed the desperation of the establishment when it comes to Assange.
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Dec 17, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
AmyInNH -> Riever , 23 Aug 2016 10:00
Swing between extremes, however, consistent in US history, economic predatory dependence on free/ultra cheap labor with no legal rights. Current instantiation, offshored and illegal and "temporary" immigrant labor. Note neither party in the US is proposing "immigration reform" is green card upon hire. Ds merely propose green card for time served for those over X number of years donated as captive/cheap.CivilDiscussion , 23 Aug 2016 10:25
The entitled to cheap/captive now want it in law, national laws and trade agreements.
All privilege/no responsibilities, including taxes.
Doesn't scale. 1929 says so, 2008 says so.Liberals, the Left, Progressives -- whatever you want to call them suffer from a basic problem. They don't work together and have no common goals. As the article stated they complain but offer no real solutions that they can agree on. Should we emphasize gay pride or should we emphasize good-paying jobs and benefits with good social welfare benefits? Until they can agree at least on priorities they will never reform the current corrupt system -- it is too entrenched. Even if the Capitalist Monstrosity we have now self-destructs as the writer indicates -- nothing good will replace it until the Left get their act together.AmyInNH -> Juillette , 23 Aug 2016 10:16"Lesser of two evils" needs to go on the burn pile.Dave_P -> Isiodore , 23 Aug 2016 09:59
Encumbent congress needs a turn over.
Not showing up to vote is not okay. If people can't think of someone they want to write-in, "none of the above" is a protest vote. Not voting is silence, which equals consent.
Local elections, beat back Koch/ALEC, hiding on ballots as "Libertarian". "Privatize everything" is their mantra, so they can further profitize via inescapeable taxes, while gutting "regulation" - safety and market integrity, with no accountability.
Corporation 101: limited liability. While means we are left holding the bag. As in bailout - $125 billion in 1990, up to $7.7 trillion in 2008.Anything the Economist presents as the overriding choice is probably best relegated to one factor among many. I respect Milanovic's work, but he's seeing things from where we are now. Remember we've seen populist surges come and go from the witch-burnings and religious panics of the 17th century to 1890s Bryanism and the 1930s far right, and each time they've yielded to a more articulate vision, though the last time it cost sixty million dead - not something we want to see repeated. This time it's hard because dissent still clings to a "post-ideological" delusion that those on top never succumbed to. But change will come as what I'd term "post-rational" alternatives fail to deliver. Let's hope it's sooner rather than later.willpodmore , 23 Aug 2016 09:53"Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt." Thank you Martin, at least someone writing in the Guardian has got the point!AmyInNH -> ciaofornow , 23 Aug 2016 10:39
We voted against the EU's unelected European Central Bank, its unelected European Commission, its European Court of Justice, its Common Agricultural Policy and its Common Fisheries Policy.
We voted against the EU's treaty-enshrined 'austerity' (= depression) policies, which have impoverished Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
We voted against the EU/US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would privatise all our public services, which threatens all our rights, and which discriminates against the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
We voted against the EU's tariffs against African farmers' cheaper produce.
We opposed the City of London Corporation, the Institute of Directors, the CBI, the IMF, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, which all wanted us to stay in the EU.
We voted against the EU's undemocratic trilogue procedure and its pro-austerity Semester programme. We voted to leave this undemocratic, privatisation-enforcing, austerity-enforcing body.Bailout was because that was public savings, pensions, 401ks, etc. the banks were playing with, and lost. Bailout is billing all of us for it. Bad, letting the banks/financial "services" not only survive but continue the exact same practices.AmyInNH -> Dave_P , 23 Aug 2016 09:40
Bailout: $7.2 to $7.7 trillion. Current derivative holdings: $500 trillion.
Not just moral hazard but economic hazard when capitalism basic rule is broken, allow bad businesses to die of their own accord. Subversion currently called "too big to fail", rather than tell the public "we lost all your savings, pensions, ...".Relocating poverty from the East into the West isn't improvement.marxistelf -> Tobyrob , 23 Aug 2016 09:24
Creating sweatshops in the East isn't raising their standard of living.
Creating economies so economically unstable that population declines isn't improvement.
Trying to bury that fact with immigration isn't improvement.
Configuring all of the above for record profit for the benefit of a tiny percentage of the population isn't improvement.
Gaming tax law to avoid paying into/for extensive business use of federal services and tax base isn't improvement.
Game over. Time for a reboot.I am glad you finally concede a point on neo-liberalism. The moral hazard argument is extremely poor and typical in this era of runaway CEO pay, of a tendency to substitute self-help fables (a la "The monk who sold his Ferrari) and pop psychology ( a la Moral Hazard) for credible economic analysis.Homer32 , 23 Aug 2016 07:32
The economic crisis is rooted in the profit motive just as capitalist economic growth is. Lowering of Tarrif barriers, outsourcing, changes in value capture (added value), new financial instruments, were attempts to restore the falling rate of profit. They did for a while, but, as always happens with Capitalism, the seeds of the new crisis were in the solution to the old.
And all the while the state continues growing in an attempt to keep capitalism afloat. Neoliberalism failed ( or should I say "small state" ) and here is the graph to prove it:
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/usgs_chartSp03t.pngInteresting, and I believe accurate, analysis of the economic and political forces afoot. However it is ludicrous to state that Donald trump, who is a serial corpratist, out-sourcer, tax avoider and scam artist, actually believes any of those populist principles that you ascribe so firmly to him. The best and safest outcome of our election, in my opinion, would be to have a Clinton administration tempered by the influences from the populist wings of both parties.Juillette , 23 Aug 2016 06:42Great article, however the elite globalists are in complete denial in the US. Our only choice is to vote them out of power because the are owned by Wall Street. Both Bernie and Trump supporters should unite to vote establishment out of Washington.Dave_P -> ShaunNewman , 23 Aug 2016 06:38The opiate of the masses. As the churches empty, the stadiums fill.Dave_P -> ciaofornow , 23 Aug 2016 06:36There were similar observations in the immediate aftermath of 2008, and doubtless before. Many of us thought the crisis would trigger a rethink of the whole direction of the previous three decades, but instead we got austerity and a further lurch to the right, or at best Obama-style stimulus and modest tweaks which were better than the former but still rather missed the point. I still find it flabbergasting and depressing, but on reflection the 1930s should have been a warning of not just the economic hazards but also the political fallout, at least in Europe. The difference was that this time left ideology had all but vacated the field in the 1980s and was in no position to lead a fightback: all we can hope for is better late than never.idontreadtheguardian -> thisisafact , 23 Aug 2016 05:16Yes it is, it's an extremely bad thing destroying the fabric of society. Social science has documented that even the better off are more happy, satisfied with life and feel safer in societies (i.e. the Scandinavian) where there is a relatively high degree of economic equality. Yes, economic inequality is a BAD thing in itself.SaulGe -> John Black , 23 Aug 2016 03:30Oh, give me a break. Social science will document anything it can publish, no matter how spurious. If Scandanavia is so great, why are they such pissheads? There has always been inequality, including in workers' paradises like the Soviet Union and Communist China. Inequality is what got us where we are today, through natural selection. Phenotype is largely dependent on genotype, so why shouldn't we pass on material wealth as well as our genes? Surely it is a parent's right to afford their offspring advantages if they can do so?
Have you got any numbers? Or references for your allegations. I say the average or median wealth, opportunity, economic circumstance and health measures are substantially better than a generation (lets say 30 years) ago.shastakath -> TimWorstall , 23 Aug 2016 03:17Heres this years data. Note the top 25 or so are almost all liberal western type democracies with mixed economies. http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?itemId=105
And here is the graph showing growth in wages whilst it slowed for a variety of complex reasons has been overall strong for 25 of the last 30 years http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2015/jun/pdf/bu-0615-2.pdf
Again I don't think our system is perfect. I don't deny that some in our societies struggle and don't benefit, particularly the poorly educated, disabled, mentally ill and drug addicted. I actually agree that we could better target our social redistribution from those that have to those that need help. I disagree that we need higher taxes, protectionism, socialism, more public servants, more legislation. Indeed I disagree with proposition that other systems are better.
George Orwell said, in the 30s, that the price of social justice would include a lowering of living standards for the working- & middle-classes, at least temporarily, so I follow your line of thought. However, the outrageous tilt toward the upper .1% has no "adjustment" fluff to shield it from the harsh despotism it represents. So, do put that in your statistical pipe and smoke it.
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Dec 17, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
ShaunNewman -> TyroneBHorneigh , 23 Aug 2016 00:29
The only problem is that 'America' does not exist. America is a part description of a continent and I think we are talking about the USA (only one country on North American soil) Why do the yanks always have to exaggerate their own importance like the Olympics bloke who claimed he was robbed at gunpoint lol! Do the USAians actually have an inferiority complex?
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Dec 16, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
ShaunNewman -> Mauryan , 23 Aug 2016 20:59
Exploitation is high on the priority list of any Tory government, wealth should be distributed much more fairly than it currently is. The tories only serve the rich, they have no time or empathy for the poor.Empathy and compassion are vacant in the tory philosophy of the world. These two components make up a psychopathic personality.
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Aug 21, 2016 | www.theguardian.com
In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?
The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.
After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.
The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.
But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion.
It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.
But by far the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. Until very recently, this had been virtually ignored. With extraordinary speed, however, it has emerged as one of, if not the most important political issue on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically in the US. It is, bar none, the issue that is driving the political discontent that is now engulfing the west. Given the statistical evidence, it is puzzling, shocking even, that it has been disregarded for so long; the explanation can only lie in the sheer extent of the hegemony of neoliberalism and its values.
But now reality has upset the doctrinal apple cart. In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for over 30 years .
A not so dissimilar picture is true of the UK. And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions; the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.
As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent essay in Foreign Affairs : "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.
Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s. Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.
The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the "working class" was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.
Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment. The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.
The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labor movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain. The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.
Indeed, Ukip has been as important – in the form of immigration and Europe – in shaping its current attitudes as the Labour party. In the United States, both Trump and Sanders have given expression to the working-class revolt, the latter almost as much as the former. The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of politics.
The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly strong, it is now dismal. Europe is barely larger than it was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007; the United States has done better but even its growth has been anaemic. Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation .
Worse, because the recovery has been so weak and fragile, there is a widespread belief that another financial crisis may well beckon. In other words, the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced in the 1930s. With this background, it is hardly surprising that a majority in the west now believe their children will be worse off than they were. Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.
A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States, with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been a massive seller. His work and that of Tony Atkinson and Angus Deaton have pushed the question of the inequality to the top of the political agenda. In the UK, Ha-Joon Chang , for long isolated within the economics profession, has gained a following far greater than those who think economics is a branch of mathematics.
Meanwhile, some of those who were previously strong advocates of a neoliberal approach, such as Larry Summers and the Financial Times 's Martin Wolf, have become extremely critical. The wind is in the sails of the critics of neoliberalism; the neoliberals and monetarists are in retreat. In the UK, the media and political worlds are well behind the curve. Few recognize that we are at the end of an era. Old attitudes and assumptions still predominate, whether on the BBC's Today programme, in the rightwing press or the parliamentary Labor party.
Following Ed Miliband's resignation as Labour leader, virtually no one foresaw the triumph of Jeremy Corbyn in the subsequent leadership election. The assumption had been more of the same, a Blairite or a halfway house like Miliband, certainly not anyone like Corbyn. But the zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. The most extreme forms of this phenomenon were New Labour and the Democrats, who in the late 90s and 00s became its advance guard, personified by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, triangulation and the third way.
But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman , what is the point of a social democratic party if it doesn't represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically they were supposed to represent. Is it surprising that large sections have now deserted the party who deserted them? Blair, in his reincarnation as a money-obsessed consultant to a shady bunch of presidents and dictators, is a fitting testament to the demise of New Labour.
The rival contenders – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – represented continuity. They were swept away by Corbyn, who won nearly 60% of the votes. New Labour was over, as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Few grasped the meaning of what had happened. A Guardian leader welcomed the surge in membership and then, lo and behold, urged support for Yvette Cooper, the very antithesis of the reason for the enthusiasm. The PLP refused to accept the result and ever since has tried with might and main to remove Corbyn.
Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour, had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. David Cameron was guilty of a huge and irresponsible miscalculation over Brexit. He was forced to resign in the most ignominious of circumstances. The party is hopelessly divided. It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. The Brexiters painted an optimistic picture of turning away from the declining European market and embracing the expanding markets of the world, albeit barely mentioning by name which countries it had in mind. It looks as if the new prime minister may have an anachronistic hostility towards China and a willingness to undo the good work of George Osborne. If the government turns its back on China, by far the fastest growing market in the world, where are they going to turn?
Brexit has left the country fragmented and deeply divided, with the very real prospect that Scotland might choose independence. Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.
Dramatic as events have been in the UK, they cannot compare with those in the United States. Almost from nowhere, Donald Trump rose to capture the Republican nomination and confound virtually all the pundits and not least his own party. His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has weakened the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. He believes that the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has had the effect of exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP and the TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.
To globalisation Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His appeal, above all, is to the white working class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's) arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the 1980s. Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. With the arrival of Trump they finally found a representative: they won Trump the Republican nomination.
Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources
The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by Bernie Sanders , who ran Hillary Clinton extremely close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively chosen by the Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.
Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal – "Make America great again" – is his position on foreign policy. He believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is unfair, with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little. He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's European members as prime examples. He seeks to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.
As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind of financial burden. Rather than putting the world to rights, he believes the money should be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure. Trump's position represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left. He is a populist of the right. He has launched a racist and xenophobic attack on Muslims and on Mexicans. Trump's appeal is to a white working class that feels it has been cheated by the big corporations, undermined by Hispanic immigration, and often resentful towards African-Americans who for long too many have viewed as their inferior.
A Trump America would mark a descent into authoritarianism characterised by abuse, scapegoating, discrimination, racism, arbitrariness and violence; America would become a deeply polarised and divided society. His threat to impose 45% tariffs on China , if implemented, would certainly provoke retaliation by the Chinese and herald the beginnings of a new era of protectionism.
Trump may well lose the presidential election just as Sanders failed in his bid for the Democrat nomination. But this does not mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation – unrestricted immigration, TPP and TTIP, the free movement of capital and much else – will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining ground. Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems". And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.
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Dec 16, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Quote: According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.ShaunNewman -> shockrah , 23 Aug 2016 21:28How strange. American politicians, Obama in particular, constantly talk about "the middle class" when they want to refer to the bulk of the working population, as if almost everybody were doctors, lawyers, teachers and managers. It's good therefore to know that the American people know better than their politicians how to classify themselves.
This situation in the USA remind me of Australia where we have a choice between two right wing parties. The LNP is extreme/ultra right wing and our Labor Party is right wing controlled. At least in Britain you have a choice, from afar it seems that your Conservative Party is equal to our LNP but your Labour Party seems to be a little more Left wing than our Labor Party which is a good thing for Britain.ShaunNewman -> willpodmore , 23 Aug 2016 21:21willpodmore your next target must be your tory government, they are doing to you what our tory government in Australia is doing to us and if Trump gets elected the USA tory government will do to them, austerity for the working class while the rich go untouched even to pay a fair share of taxation. It's world wide the servants of the 1% who own 50% of the world's economy. If you don't believe me type the 1% own 50% of Earth's economy into Dr Goggle and see what come up.ShaunNewman -> CivilDiscussion , 23 Aug 2016 21:16The one thing all Left leaning people do agree on is 'fairness' and equity for all, in economic terms it means that huge corporations pay a fair share of tax, as working people do. Sadly Tory govts ignore the profits of corporations and fail to force them to pay a fair share of tax. The basic problem that the neo-cons suffer from is insatiable greed where enough is never enough, selfishness is also a trait along with lack of empathy or compassion for their fellow mankind.ShaunNewman -> IsleWalker , 23 Aug 2016 21:12"neoliberalism" is simply unregulated capitalism as practiced by Tory governments around the world. Labour governments usually regulate and force these huge corporations to pay a fair share of taxation from their huge incomes. The corporations are owned by the 1% who own 50% of the world economy and continuing to grow on a daily basis.ShaunNewman -> Vintage59 , 23 Aug 2016 21:09Yes, nothing has changed in my lifetime except the 1% now own 50% of Earth's economy. Working people have always struggled while the rich build their mansions, both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have the right idea of a fair distribution of wealth. This means these huge corporations paying their fair share of their income in taxes to the host country so "all" the people receive some benefit, apart from the 1%.ShaunNewman -> blaster1 , 23 Aug 2016 21:04blaster1, the joke of the century, globalisation -- which will only increase to the benefit of everyone eventually. You obviously have little knowledge apart from what the Tories feed you. 1% of the global population own 50% of Earth's economy and through their corporations who the tories allow to avoid paying tax will build on that 50% how long will it eventually take the other 99% to receive any benefit? 200,000 years?ShaunNewman -> Mauryan , 23 Aug 2016 20:59Exploitation is high on the priority list of any Tory government, wealth should be distributed much more fairly than it currently is. The tories only serve the rich, they have no time or empathy for the poor. Empathy and compassion are vacant in the tory philosophy of the world. These two components make up a psychopathic personality.ShaunNewman -> pantomimetorie , 23 Aug 2016 20:56pantomimetorie yes, and England could also be if you had a government who were not merely servants of the rich. A government interested in the fair distribution of wealth. Not a tory government, obviously!ShaunNewman -> pantomimetorie , 23 Aug 2016 20:53foryousure -> pantomimetorie , 23 Aug 2016 19:00There's no such thing as neoliberalism, it's just capitalism and capitalism actually works, unlike socialism.Yes it works alright, it works for the 1% of the global population who own 50% of the global economy, sadly it leaves in its wake an underclass of people living below the poverty line struggling to survive. It works for the rich, but there is no mechanism in the system that the conservative will use to force the rich to pay their fair share of taxation to the country included in that are the multibillion pound multinational corporations who pay little to naught in taxes also which leaves a huge swathe of the population on Struggle Street and the sooner that democratic socialism is instituted the better off the other 99% will be.
Keep up! There is no country in the world that doesn't have a mixture of both. The mix is probably a bit strained in north Korea but those countries where private capital is supreme all have intolerable conditions for workers. The Nordic countries probably have the most enlightened approach and best living standards for the majority. Remember well the old adage: With communism man exploits man. With capitalism it's the other way round.foryousure -> AmyInNH , 23 Aug 2016 18:51Think they call it lobbying. Companies pay professional lobby firms staffed with ex MPs or whatever to ' meet' ministers. The PR companies make 'donations' to party funds and push for government contracts, changes in legislation, favorable to their industry tax breaks. You can do it of course. Write to your mp to get your local roads, parks, libraries, improved. Don't hold your breath.pantomimetorie , 23 Aug 2016 17:02That has to be the joke of the year if not the century!!!!!!!!!!!!
66378741 , 23 Aug 2016 14:50The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.It would be interesting to see those growth figures with inflation taken into account or to average them out across the whole world and not just the West. I suspect that if the massive growth in India, China and the rest of Asia was taken into account the growth figures wouldn't be so bad.
one can only hope neoliberalism is dead and/or dying....Dave_P -> AmyInNH , 23 Aug 2016 13:58Excuse me? You're the one claiming rural inhabitants "have no idea" what city life entails. That may have been the case centuries ago, but not now. Offshoring is small potatoes in the shift of global production. It may have been big news a decade ago. We aren't a decade ago.makingtime -> ijustcalledtosay85 , 23 Aug 2016 13:36"Poverty = no kids" is your myth. Human history proves otherwise. Nobody's "decimating western/westernized population for profit". Is what you're about really more white people, fewer brown people? Just say it, this is the Guardian, we've heard it all before.
So run your country then. But intelligently, not on the basis of twisted myth-making and dodgy race myths that we had enough of in 1945.
Mauryan , 23 Aug 2016 13:24The left, at least as far as I know, have not been able to build up a solid set of ideas on which to build a political agenda nor have they sought to gain traction for their ideas in sites of knowledge production. The neoliberals were organised and waiting when their turn came. For me, the left have fragmented and have turned to cultural critiques and identity politics, forgoing any kind of realistic transformative agenda.
Apologies for not answering earlier.
i) Traction in sites of knowledge production is happening certainly. Again I can point to the article for support - Stiglitz, Ha-Joon Chang, Piketty etc did not arise to such prominence due to an organised left-wing agenda but because events in the real world demanded an explanation for why neoliberalism wasn't delivering its universal benison as promised, and indeed was showing empirical signs that it might be poisonous to economic activity in certain fundamental ways.
ii) In my view it is quite possible to support identity politics (social liberalism if you like) and a more left wing view of economics. At present the more enthusiastic placard wavers are seeing identity politics as more likely to produce a beneficial change, but many are recognising that the former hegemony of neoliberalism is breaking, and the best way to really enhance the welfare of vulnerable groups is to promote universal economic justice in some form.
iii) You appear to want to replace one hegemonic system of thought with another. But these are the wrong tactics for me, since we have things to do in the real world.
By all means explain some of the properties your new left hegemonic theory should have, I'd be very interested to hear them.
But in the end the practical steps are obvious and consist of applying left wing principles to the modern economy. An example would be privatising the natural monopoly of the railways.If that sounds retro, it isn't, because we've never had to deal with an economy in this condition before. We must proceed step by step in my view. The hegemony of neoliberalism was damaging and lasted 40 years and counting. We must be pragmatic to be successful, given what we know about the modern economy, and proceed by finding successful strategies rather than an abstruse new theory that ignores the messy present in favour of some pure, simple conception of the world backed up by the PR department. As I said above, one of the critical faults of neoliberalism is its insistence that it is the answer to everyone's prayers. That certainty is also the seed of its destruction, because to avoid doubts it eventually has to answer those unrealistic prayers.
Trump does not truly represent the labor or economically frustrated class. He is saying things that they'd like to hear. He is a rich and pompous man who belongs to the class which benefited tremendously from neoliberalistic policies. People are so fed up with inequality, their emotions can be directed in any direction and manipulated. Anger needs a target - Mexicans, Blacks, women, Muslims, immigrants and the list expands. Trump is misleading them by speaking in their voices while enjoying the comfort of luxury that he built by exploiting those very people.AmyInNH -> Dave_P , 23 Aug 2016 13:18Billions of Chinese and Indian have never seen a toilet in their life, so yes, they really don't know what life in a city is. And that doesn't make them "dumb". In their domain, farming, you don't look like a brain storm either.Matthew Coate -> blaster1 , 23 Aug 2016 12:52Offshoring isn't a "tiny element". We are no longer self sustaining and if China slammed the door (as they did for a brief instant on Japan), there'd be serious heartburn in the US before transitioning.
The official western tautology is fail/fail for the public. Not enough jobs to consider having kids? Too bad. Not enough money to raise your kids? Too bad. Due to natural events? No, due to political gaming.
Decimating western/westernized population for profit. It's not complicated. It is you who claim immigration is needed to leave it as it is. "Ending our ability to pay pensions by ending immigration isn't improvement either. "
The west has no business meddling with the rest of the planet if it can't run their own countries.
Dave_P -> AmyInNH , 23 Aug 2016 12:29What they are really referring to is globalisation -- which will only increase to the benefit of everyone eventually.
Given the available statistics, your statement can only be described as the proclamation of a sort of religious faith.
People aren't so dumb as you imagine. They really didn't know about life in the city? Every village had its emigrant. I've no such disdain for those who made that move.weematt -> Mizzentop , 23 Aug 2016 12:13Offshoring's now a tiny element in western deindustrialisation. Your costs are too high, you can't compete: don't blame those worse off than yourself, put your own house in order and educate your workforce to do better than flip burgers.
"Birth control brings down reproduction rates" is a meaningless tautology. People have been practising birth control for centuries, mainly by delaying marriage. The PRB peddles malthusian nonsense that the past half-century has clearly discredited. I thought you were for population growth anyway: "economies so economically unstable that population declines"? Make your mind up.
The ridiculous boom did crash, in 2008. Maybe you missed it. I want to know how we go forward. But people need to pay attention to what's going on outside our head too.
I correct misrepresentations of the truth such as yours.blaster1 , 23 Aug 2016 12:04Communism and socialism is a post -capitalist society, means exactly the same thing to me as they did to Marx also.And the problem with communism is that it suspends peoples right in favour of central control.
The common ownership and democratic control by us all, of all the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth. 'Common' and 'social' mean the same. Nothing to do with state ownership or corporate or private ownership.
Nothing to do with central control either . It is a post-capitalist system which utilises the technological advances of capitalism to produce for use to satisfy human needs, using self feeding loopback informational tools for stock measurements and control with direct inputs at local regional and global levels to allow calculation in kind, as opposed to the economic calculation of capitalism, only necessary to satisfy profit taking.
Nonsense. If you are born poor you will most likely die poor. Poverty is both absolute and relative. All wealth comes from the exploited abour of the working class which creates a surplus value above its rationed access (wages). A commonly owned society, would not have rich or poor, we would all have free access to the commonly produced wealth, with no elite classes creaming it off and storing it.The reality is that we can all choose to be rich or poor. We are free to do as we wish (within the law).
Other than that, mind your own damn business, if you can't deal with the arguments.
One of the biggest downsides of the rise of Corbyn and Sanders, interesting though it is, is the oxygen it seems to be giving to several old Marxist hacks who have made a good living for decades banging on about their discredited and blood soaked ideology, ie Jacques et al. Recently joined by that newly hatched Marxist harpie on the block, the hipster bearded and thoroughly poisonous Richard Seymour.AmyInNH -> foryousure , 23 Aug 2016 11:18
The fact is there is not and never was any such thing as "neoliberalism". What they are really referring to is globalisation- which will only increase to the benefit of everyone eventually. The world is shrinking ever faster and that is no bad thing. Progress, evolution, the future, call it what you want. To try and make out that it is halting or in reverse is plainly nonsense.They buy politicians who gift them with cheap labor via labor glut. Buying politicians is called bribery.AmyInNH -> Roger Elliott , 23 Aug 2016 11:14???AmyInNH -> ShaunNewman , 23 Aug 2016 11:00
What I remember of Reagan,
- spent like a drunken sailor, "defense" spending, til it broke US economy
- unbounded "adjustable rate" and "balloon" mortgages, first bank bailout, bill kicked down the road to Bush Sr., $125 billion, when it blew up
- "trickle down", wealth transfer, via having taxed public pick up the tab for not just his defense binge spending, but also corporate welfare programs (patent office, Import/Export bank, infrastructure, etc.)
- first soup kitchens, adults panhandling/will work for food signs that I'd ever seen
- illegal immigrant amnesty, millions
- "War On Drugs" and right after that black neighborhoods flooded with crack
Reagan and Thatcher kicking off their "gut the public of wealth" agenda.Including suppression of wage/benefits by flooding the labor markets.AmyInNH -> macsporan , 23 Aug 2016 10:57Their story is "you're a failure". Because a) you don't work hard enough/long enough, b) hold your household together (if you were at work all waking hours), c) don't know how to raise decent, independent kids (whilst being at work every waking hour), d) aren't motivated to improve your lot in life if you need to work every waking hour and e) probably need to take stress management classes if this gets on your nerves because you personally are driving up "our" health care costs with your irresponsible neglect of your health.CivilDiscussion , 23 Aug 2016 10:54Or, as the economists tout in the papers, "Productivity is up!" Or as the oligarchical put it, "we need immigrant work force", who'll do it for cheaper and not complain or burden us with their need for an actual life outside of work.
Clinton is, was, and still is. despite her recent fake reversal, a staunch supporter of TPP and other trade agreements that will further impoverish the working class. She is the furthest thing from a populist. Case closed.Vintage59 , 23 Aug 2016 10:54It's the neobullshit era but then it always is.AmyInNH -> Mkjaks , 23 Aug 2016 10:40The "experts", like Greenspan, use extremely limited variables. Hence, reports of a "good economy". We ask, good for who?
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Themiddlegound -> Themiddlegound , 11 Jun 2013 05:42
The American Chamber of Commerce subsequently expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to over a quarter of a million ten years later. Jointly with the National Association of Manufacturers (which moved to Washington in 1972) it amassed an immense campaign chest to lobby Congress and engage in research. The Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs 'committed to the aggressive pursuit of political power for the corporation', was founded in 1972 and thereafter became the centrepiece of collective pro-business action.The corporations involved accounted for 'about one half of the GNP of the United States' during the 1970s, and they spent close to $900 million annually (a huge amount at that time) on political matters. Think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the Center for the Study of American Business, and the American Enterprise Institute, were formed with corporate backing both to polemicize and, when necessary, as in the case of the National Bureau of Economic Research, to construct serious technical and empirical studies and political-philosophical arguments broadly in support of neoliberal policies.
Nearly half the financing for the highly respected NBER came from the leading companies in the Fortune 500 list. Closely integrated with the academic community, the NBER was to have a very significant impact on thinking in the economics departments and business schools of the major research universities. With abundant finance furnished by wealthy individuals (such as the brewer Joseph Coors, who later became a member of Reagan's 'kitchen cabinet') and their foundations (for example Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Pew Charitable Trust), a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick's Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values. A TV version of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose was funded with a grant from Scaife in 1977. 'Business was', Blyth concludes, 'learning to spend as a class.
In singling out the universities for particular attention, Powell pointed up an opportunity as well as an issue, for these were indeed centers of anti-corporate and anti-state sentiment (the students at Santa Barbara had burned down the Bank of America building there and ceremonially buried a car in the sands). But many students were (and still are) affluent and privileged, or at least middle class, and in the US the values of individual freedom have long been celebrated (in music and popular culture) as primary. Neoliberal themes could here find fertile ground for propagation. Powell did not argue for extending state power. But business should 'assiduously cultivate' the state and when necessary use it 'aggressively and with determination'
In order to realize this goal, businesses needed a political class instrument and a popular base. They therefore actively sought to capture the Republican Party as their own instrument. The formation of powerful political action committees to procure, as the old adage had it, 'the best government that money could buy' was an important step. The supposedly 'progressive' campaign finance laws of 1971 in effect legalized the financial corruption of politics.
A crucial set of Supreme Court decisions began in 1976 when it was first established that the right of a corporation to make unlimited money contributions to political parties and political action committees was protected under the First Amendment guaranteeing the rights of individuals (in this instance corporations) to freedom of speech.15 Political action committees could thereafter ensure the financial domination of both political parties by corporate, moneyed, and professional association interests. Corporate PACs, which numbered eighty-nine in 1974, had burgeoned to 1,467 by 1982.
The Republican Party needed, however, a solid electoral base if it was to colonize power effectively. It was around this time that Republicans sought an alliance with the Christian right. The latter had not been politically active in the past, but the foundation of Jerry Falwell's 'moral majority' as a political movement in 1978 changed all of that. The Republican Party now had its Christian base.
It also appealed to the cultural nationalism of the white working classes and their besieged sense of moral righteousness. This political base could be mobilized through the positives of religion and cultural nationalism and negatively through coded, if not blatant, racism, homophobia, and anti feminism.
The alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives consolidated, not for the first time has a social group been persuaded to vote against its material, economic, and class interests the evangelical Christians eagerly embraced the alliance with big business and the Republican Party as a means to further promote their evangelical and moral agenda.
Themiddlegound -> Themiddlegound , 11 Jun 2013 05:23
Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold.The worldwide political upheavals of 1968, for example, were strongly inflected with the desire for greater personal freedoms. This was certainly true for students, such as those animated by the Berkeley 'free speech' movement of the 1960s or who took to the streets in Paris, Berlin, and Bangkok and were so mercilessly shot down in Mexico City shortly before the 1968 Olympic Games. They demanded freedom from parental, educational, corporate, bureaucratic, and state constraints. But the '68 movement also had social justice as a primary political objective.
Neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power. It has long proved extremely difficult within the US left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the the Construction of Consent desire of political actors for individual freedom and for full recognition and expression of particular identities. Neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.
In the early 1970s those seeking individual freedoms and social justice could make common cause in the face of what many saw as a common enemy. Powerful corporations in alliance with an interventionist state were seen to be running the world in individually oppressive and socially unjust ways. The Vietnam War was the most obvious catalyst for discontent, but the destructive activities of corporations and the state in relation to the environment, the push towards mindless consumerism, the failure to address social issues and respond adequately to diversity, as well as intense restrictions on individual possibilities and personal behaviors by state-mandated and 'traditional' controls were also widely resented. Civil rights were an issue, and questions of sexuality and of reproductive rights were very much in play.
For almost everyone involved in the movement of '68, the intrusive state was the enemy and it had to be reformed. And on that, the neoliberals could easily agree. But capitalist corporations, business, and the market system were also seen as primary enemies requiring redress if not revolutionary transformation: hence the threat to capitalist class power.
By capturing ideals of individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests could hope to protect and even restore their position. Neoliberalism was well suited to this ideological task. But it had to be backed up by a practical strategy that emphasized the liberty of consumer choice, not only with respect to particular products but also with respect to lifestyles, modes of expression, and a wide range of cultural practices. Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism. As such it proved more than a little compatible with that cultural impulse called 'postmodernism' which had long been lurking in the wings but could now emerge full-blown as both a cultural and an intellectual dominant. This was the challenge that corporations and class elites set out to finesse in the 1980s.
In the US case a confidential memo sent by Lewis Powell to the US Chamber of Commerce in August 1971. Powell, about to be elevated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, argued that criticism of and opposition to the US free enterprise system had gone too far and that 'the time had come––indeed it is long overdue––for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it'.
Powell argued that individual action was insufficient. 'Strength', he wrote, 'lies in organization, in careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations'. The National Chamber of Commerce, he argued, should lead an assault upon the major institutions––universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts––in order to change how individuals think 'about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual'. US businesses did not lack resources for such an effort, particularly when they pooled their resources together.
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Dec 01, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Good article. I especially like this:BradBenson , 29 Aug 2012 15:48The more important objection is that the fact that a certain behavior is common does not negate its being corrupt. Indeed, as is true for government abuses generally, those in power rely on the willingness of citizens to be trained to view corrupt acts as so common that they become inured, numb, to its wrongfulness. Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable.
Because once we go from "corruption is getting more and more common; something must be done" to "meh," we are crossing from a flawed democratic republic to outright tyranny and oligarchy with little way back.
Besides, they don't all do it ... there are honorable reporters out there, some few of whom work for the Times and the Post.
Another great article Glenn. The Guardian will spread your words further and wider. Salon's loss is the world's gain.CautiousOptimist , 29 Aug 2012 15:40Why would anyone expect anything different from the Times, or any major U.S. Newspaper or media outlet? They are organs of the intelligence community and have been for many years. That these email were allowed to get out under FOIA is indicative of the fact that there are some people on the inside who would like to get the truth out. Either that, or the head of some ES-2's Assistant Deputy for Secret Shenanigans and Heinous Drone Murders will roll.
Glenn - Any comments on the recently disclosed emails between the CIA and Kathryn Bigelow?CasualObs , 29 Aug 2012 15:32Scott Horton quote on closely related Mazzetti reporting (in this case regarding misleading reporting on how important CIA/Bush torture was in tracking down and getting bin Laden, the focus of this movie):Montecarlo2 , 29 Aug 2012 15:29"I'm quite sure that this is precisely the way the folks who provided this info from the agency [to Mazzetti] wanted them to be understood, but there is certainly more than a measure of ambiguity in them, planted with care by the NYT writers or their editors. This episode shows again how easily the Times can be spun by unnamed government sources, the factual premises of whose statements invariably escape any examination."
http://www.hillmanfoundation.org/blog/winners-sinners-mary-murphy-mark-mazzetti
I think the ridiculous and pathetic explanations by NYT in this case are, in part, due to the fact that they simply don't care enough to produce better answers. In their view, these CIA connections and those with other Govt. agencies are paramount, and must be maintained at all costs.
If you don't like their paper-thin answers, tough. In their view (imo) this will blow over and business will resume, with the all-important friends and connections intact. Thus leaving the machinery intact for future uncritical, biased and manipulative "spin" of NYT by any number of unnamed govt. sources/agencies...
hominoid , 29 Aug 2012 15:27In what conceivable way is Mazzetti's collusion with the CIA an "intelligence matter" that prevents the NYT's managing editor from explaining what happened here?
That one is easy, as we learned in the Valerie Plame affair. It is likely that the relationship is a little more formal than mere collusion.
Just another step down the ladder towards despotism. "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few" [George Bernard Shaw"LakerFan , 29 Aug 2012 15:13The relationship between the New York Times and the US government is, as usual, anything but adversarial. Indeed, these emails read like the interactions between a PR representative and his client as they plan in anticipation of a possible crisis.
Has been since Judith Miller told us there were WMD in Iraq in 2003. They don't plan anticipations of crises, but the actual crises themselves. In a moral world, the NYT is as guilty of genocide as Bush and Blair.
The humor seems to go completely out of the issue when 100,000 people are dead and their families and futures changed forever.
Like I said, in a moral world....
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
samesamesame , 1 Sep 2012 13:02
bin laden gave terror a face. how conveeeenient for warmongers everywhere!loftytom , 1 Sep 2012 10:40kantarakamara , 1 Sep 2012 10:04I assume we're going to see a NYT expose on the large scale dodgy dealings of the Guardian Unlimited group then?
They could start with the tax dodging hypocrisy first. http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/05/16/has-the-guardian-exploited-tax-loopholes-to-save-millions/
"@smartypants54Therealguyfaux -> Montecarlo2 , 1 Sep 2012 07:4829 August 2012 9:44PM
Glenn,I've often wondered what you think of the journalism of someone like Seymour Hirsch. (sic) He broke some very important stories by cozying up to moles in the MIC.
You'e confusing apples with oranges. Hersh seeks information on issues that outrage him. These do not usually include propaganda for the intelligence agencies, but information they would like to suppress. He's given secret information because he appears to his informers as someone who has a long record of integrity.
It's straight outta that old joke about the husband being caught by his wife in flagrante delicto with the pretty young lady neighbour, who then tells his wife that he and his bit on the side weren't doing anything: "And who do you believe-- me, or your lying eyes?"Haigin88 , 1 Sep 2012 06:58New York Times a.k.a. The Langley Newsletterglobalsage , 1 Sep 2012 06:32CIA in collusion with mainstream newspaper NYT. And you call this news ?snookie -> LakerFan , 1 Sep 2012 05:46collusion between the us media and the us government goes back much, much further. Chomsky has plenty of stuff about this...hlkcna , 1 Sep 2012 02:28The NYTimes has its own agenda and bends the news that's fit to print. Journalistic integrity? LOL. No one beat the war drums louder for Bush's Neocons before the Iraq war. Draining our nation's resources, getting young Americans killed (they didn't come from the 1%, you see). The cradle of civilization that's the Iraqi landscape wiped out. Worst, 655,000 Iraqis lost their lives, said British medical journal Lancet, creating 2.5mn each internal & external refugees.Grandfield , 1 Sep 2012 00:56Following the pre-Iraq embellishment, NYT covered up its deeds by sacrificing Journalist Judith Miller. As Miller answered a post-war court case, none other than Chairman & CEO Arthur Sulzberger jr. locked arms with her as they entered the courtroom.
The NYT never dwelled on the numbers of Iraqis killed. Up to a few weeks ago, its emphasis on the current Syrian tragedy is to inform us on the hundreds or thousands who've lost their lives.
World financial meltdown? When Sanford Weill of Citi pushed for the repeal of Glass-Steagall late 1990's, the FDR era 17-page law separating commercial from investment banks, a measure that's preserved the nation's banking integrity for over half a century, the Nyt added its megaphone to the task, urging Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to comply, editorializing In 1988: "Few economic historians now find the logic behind Glass-Steagall persuasive" . In 1990, that "banks and stocks were a dangerous mixture" "makes little sense now."
NYT, a liberal icon? In year 2000, when I lived in NYC, New York Daily News columnist A.M. Rosenthal used to regularly demonize China in language surpassing even Rush Limbaugh. I told myself nah, that's not the Rosenthal-former-editor of the NYT. Only when I read his obituary a few years later did I learn that it was indeed the same one.
Well of course. And just off the top of my head I recall the editor of one of a British major was an MI5 agent; this is in the public domain.weallshineon , 1 Sep 2012 00:42We pledge subservience to the Owners of the United Corporations of America, and to the Oligarchy for which it stands, one Greed under God, indivisible, with power and wealth for few.JET2023 -> MonaHol , 31 Aug 2012 21:53NOAM CHOMSKY _MANUFACTURING CONSENT haven't read it? read it. read it? read it again.
thought totalitarianism and the ruling class died in 1945? think again. thought you wouldn't have to fight like grandpa's generation to live in a democratic and just society? think again.
You are not the 1 percent.
Would that we could hold these discussions without reference to personal defamations -- "darkened ignorance" and "educate yourself" which sounds like "f___ yourself". Why can't we just say "I respectfully disagree"? Alas, when discussing political issues with leftists, that seems impossible. Why the vitriol?JoshuaFlynn , 31 Aug 2012 20:15Greenwald's more lengthy posts make it clear that he believes that people who differ with him are "lying" and basing their viewpoint upon "a single right wing blogger". He chooses this explanation over the obvious and accurate one -- legal rationales developed by the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration. The date of Greenwald's archive is February 19, 2006. Oddly, he bases all of his contentions upon whatever he could glean up to that date. But the legal rationale for warrantless wiretaps was based upon memos written by John Yoo at the OLC that Greenwald did not have access to in 2006. The memos were not released until after Obama took office in 2009.
Obama released them in a highly publicized press conference staged for maximum political impact. Greenwald could not possibly have understood the legal rationale for the program since he had not been privy to them until March 2009 if, indeed, he has bothered to acquaint himself with them since then. Either way, nobody was "lying" except those who could have understood the full dimension and willfully chose to hide or ignore the truth. It's not exactly like I am new to this subject as you seem to imply. I wrote a 700 page book about Obama administration duplicity in this same vein. An entire chapter is devoted to this very topic.
Warrantless wiretaps were undertaken after a legal ruling from OLC. And after Obama took office, warrantless wiretaps were continued. Obviously since they were based upon OLC rulings, since no prosecutions have ever been suggested and since they have continued uninterrupted after Obama took office, the Justice Department under both administrations agrees with me and disagrees with Greenwald. We arrive at this disagreement respectfully. Despite Obama's voluminous denunciations of the Bush anti-terror approach on the campaign trail, he resurrected nearly every plank of it once he took office.
But this is a subsidiary point to a far larger point that some observers on this discussion to their credit were able to understand. Despite all of these pointless considerations, the larger point of my original post was that Greenwald missed the "real" story here, which was that the collusion between NYT and CIA was not due to institutional considerations as Greenwald seems to allege, but due to purely partisan considerations. That, to me, is the story he missed.
I find that people who are losing debates try to shift the focus to subsidiary points hoping that, like a courtroom lawyer, if they can refute a small and inconsequential detail raised in testimony, they will undercut the larger truth offered by the witness. It won't work. Too much is on the record. And neither point, the ankle-biting non-issue about legality of warrantless wiretaps or the larger, salient point about the overt partisan political dimension of NYT's collusion with a political appointee at CIA who serves on the Obama reelection committee, has been refuted.
Joseph Toomey
Author, "Change You Can REALLY Believe In: The Obama Legacy of Broken Promises and Failed Policies"Conspiracy theorists, have been, of course, telling you this for years (given media's motive is profit and not honesty). I suppose the exact same conspiracy theorists other guardian authors have been too eager to denounce previously?MonaHol -> JET2023 , 31 Aug 2012 18:50JET2023 -> Franklymydear0 , 31 Aug 2012 18:43The NSA wiretap program revealed by Risen was not illegal as Greenwald wrongly asserts. As long as one end of the intercepted conservation originated on foreign soil as it did, it was perfectly legal and required no FISA court authorization.
Mr. Toomey, in 2006 Greenwald published a compendium of legal arguments defending the Bush Admin's warrantless wiretapping and the (sound) rebuttals of them. It is exhaustive, and covers your easily dispensed with argument. By way of introduction to his many links to his aggregated, rigorous analyses of the legal issues, he wrote this:
I didn't just wake up one day and leap to the conclusion that the Administration broke the law deliberately and that there are no reasonable arguments to defend that law-breaking (as many Bush followers leaped to the conclusion that he did nothing wrong and then began their hunt to find rationale or advocates to support this conclusion). I arrived at the conclusion that Bush clearly broke the law only by spending enormous amounts of time researching these issues and reading and responding to the defenses from the Administration's apologists.
He did spend enormous time dealing with people such as yourself, and all of his work remains available for you to educate yourself with, at the link provided above.
Maybe you'd like to explain that to Samuel Loring Morison who was convicted and spent years in the federal system for passing classified information to Janes Defence Weekly. I'm sure he'd be entertained. Larry Franklin would also like to hear it. He's in prison today for violating the Espionage Act.utkarsh356 , 31 Aug 2012 12:39Courts have recognized no press privilege exists when publishing classified data. In 1971, the Supreme Court vacated a prior restraint against NYT and The Washington Post allowing them to publish the Pentagon Papers. But the court also observed that prosecutions after-the-fact would be permissible and not involve an abridgement of the free speech clause. It was only the prior restraint that gave the justices heartburn. They had no issue with throwing them in the slammer after the deed was done.
Thomas Drake, a former NSA official, was indicted and convicted after revealing information to reporters in 2010. The statute covers mere possession which even NYT recognized could cover reporters as well. There have been numerous other instances of arrests, indictments and prosecutions for disclosure to reporters. It's only been due to political calculations and not constitutional limitations that have kept Risen and others out of prison.
Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of mass media by Noam Chomsky can perhaps explain most of the media behaviour.HiggsBoson1984 , 31 Aug 2012 12:26The NYT has been infiltrated for decades by CIA agents. Just notice their dogged reporting on the completely debunked "lone-gunman" JFK theory---they will always report that Oswald acted alone---this is the standard CIA story, pushed and maintained by the NYT despite overwhelming evidence that there was a conspiracy (likely involving the CIA).Leviathan212 , 31 Aug 2012 10:54What outrages me the most is the NYT's condescending attitude towards its readers when caught in this obvious breach of journalistic ethics.Leviathan212 -> AnnaMc , 31 Aug 2012 10:28Both Baquet and Abramson, rather than showing some humility or contrition, are acting as if nothing bad has happened, and that we are stupid to even talk about this.
ranroddeb , 31 Aug 2012 10:10This article misses the elephant in the room. Namely, that the NYT only plays footsies with Democrats in positions of power. With the 'Pubs, it's open season.
Not true. There are many examples of the NYT colluding with the Bush administration, some of which Glenn has mentioned in this article. Take, for example, the fact that the NYT concealed Bush's wire-tapping program for almost a year, at the request of the White House, and didn't release details until after Bush's re-election.
" The optics aren't what they look like " This phrase brings to mind the old Dem catch phrase " Who you gonna believe me or your lying eyes? " .
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
Chris Harlos , 29 Aug 2012 19:01The New York Crimes. The seamless web of media, government, business: a totalitarian system. Darkly amusing, perhaps, unless one begins to tally the damage.rrheard , 29 Aug 2012 18:36USA Inc. Viva Death,
Did you hear the one about the investment banker whose very expensive hooker bite off his crank?
I'm not sure what's scarier--that the CIA is spending taxpayer dollars spending even a split second worrying about what a two bit hack like Maureen Dowd writes, or that the NY Times principals are so institutionally "captured" that they parrot "CIA speak".024601 -> SanFranDouglas , 29 Aug 2012 18:32Well what's actually scarier is that Operation Mockingbird has never stopped.
Or maybe that our purported public servants in the legislature are bipartisanly and openly attempting to repeal portions of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987 banning domestic propaganda.
America is becoming a real sick joke. And the last to know will be about 65% of the populace I like to call Sheeple.
Very depressing. I thought we would get a smart bunch over here. The major trend I've noticed instead? Blind support for the empire and the apparatus that keeps it thriving. Unable to be good little authoritarians and cheer for the now collapsing British Empire, they have to cheer for it's natural predecessor, the American Empire. This includes attacking all those who might question the absolute infallible of The Empire. Folks like.. Glenn. It is fascinating to watch, if not disheartening.SanFranDouglas -> smartypants54 , 29 Aug 2012 18:29shenebraskan -> Jpolicoff , 29 Aug 2012 18:12So all cozying up to spooks is not always a bad thing, huh?
Just my point.
I see. I thought your point was that there was some sort of equivalence between Hersh's development of sources to reveal truths that their agencies fervently wished to keep secret and Mazzetti's active assistance in protecting an agency's image from sullying by fellow journalists.
I guess I stand corrected. . .
And that ended his career in government service, as it should have...or not:Jpolicoff , 29 Aug 2012 18:01From Wikipedia: John O. Brennan is chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; officially his title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President.
Unfortunately this is nothing new for Mazetti or the New York Times, nor is it the first time Glenn Greenwald has called Mazetti out on his cozy relationship with the CIA:CitizenTM , 29 Aug 2012 17:52The CIA and its reporter friends: Anatomy of a backlash
The coordinated, successful effort to implant false story lines about John Brennan illustrates the power the intelligence community wields over political debates.
Glenn Greenwald Dec. 08, 2008 |...Just marvel at how coordinated (and patently inaccurate) their messaging is, and -- more significantly -- how easily they can implant their message into establishment media outlets far and wide, which uncritically publish what they're told from their cherished "intelligence sources" and without even the pretense of verifying whether any of it is true and/or hearing any divergent views:
Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, New York Times, 12/2/2008:
Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama's likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency's detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a "strong opponent" within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.
Mr. Obama's search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.
Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama's decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that "if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted," and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency's clandestine service.
...The story, by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, noted that John O. Brennan had withdrawn his name from consideration for CIA director after liberal critics attacked his role in the agency's interrogation program, even though Brennan characterized himself as a "strong opponent" within the agency of harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan's characterization was not disputed by anyone else in the story, even though most experts on this subject agree that Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/12/08/cia/print.html
The Government leaks classified material at will for propaganda advantage, but hunts Assange and tortures Private Manning for the same.tballou , 29 Aug 2012 17:51"these emails reflect the standard full-scale cooperation – a virtual merger – between our the government and the establishment media outlets that claim to act as "watchdogs" over them."SanFranDouglas -> OneWorldGovernment , 29 Aug 2012 17:51Glenn - the only objection I have to your column and all your previous columns on this matter is that I am not sure the establishment media actually claim to be watchdogs, at least not any more, and certainly not since Sept 11. They really are more like PR reps.
OneWorldGovernment , 29 Aug 2012 17:44The media is another tool in the [government, in this case] arsenal to help send a message, as are speeches before think tanks and etc.
Yes. The issue under discussion here, however, is the extent to which the media is an eager partner in the message-sending, rather than an unwitiing tool.
Did everyone forget the Judith Miller article? The usage of Twitter and other social media during the Iranian election of 2009? The leaks about the Iranian nuclear program in the Telegraph? ARDA?SanFranDouglas -> smartypants54 , 29 Aug 2012 17:42The U.S. government, along with every other government in the world, uses the media to influence public opinion and send geopolitical messages to others that understand the message (normally not the masses). The media is another tool in the arsenal to help send a message, as are speeches before think tanks and etc.
We use social media to create social unrest if it aligns with our interests. We use the media to send political messages and influence public opinion. The vast majority of reporting in the N.Y. Times, WSJ, Guardian, Telegraph, and etc. do not reflect this, but every now and then "unnamed sources" help further a geopolitical message.
In this country, it has been that way since before the founding fathers and the Republic. Remember the Federalist, Anti-Federalist, Sam Adams as Vtndex, and etc.? Newspapers used for "propaganda" purposes.
DuErJournalist , 29 Aug 2012 17:42Upthread I asked him for his comments on the reporting of Seymour Hirsh. He is someone who cozied up to all kinds of people - and wound up busting some extremely important stories in the process.
I think a modest amount of review of Sy Hersh's work will demonstrate that his "cozying up" hasn't included running interference for the spooks' official PR flacks.
The New York Times: Burn after reading!
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Jun 09, 2013 | theguardian.com
MysticFish -> Crackerpot , 8 Jun 2013 14:43@Crackerpot - The whole austerity crisis thing appears to have been engineered so that a few blinkered and unpatriotic, vulture mafia privateers can make a killing, selling off vital state assets, such as infrastructure and ports, to the Chinese. This is a very suspicious and widespread trend.artheart , 8 Jun 2013 14:38artheart -> HolyInsurgent , 8 Jun 2013 14:32Bob Marley got it right.... the human race is becoming a rat race, and it's a disgrace.
I see it every day from the window of my flat, on a main road, in Bethnal Green. There's a 'mentally unstable' Rastafarian who stands by the overground station, and shouts things out to people like "You're living in babylon".
I do sometimes think he's not the mental one.
@HolyInsurgentMikeInCanada , 8 Jun 2013 14:28The biggest problem is the financialisation of the economy... what is the actual value of things? The market is so manipulated that real price discovery is not possible.
We have an over-cooked service-sector economy unsustainably reliant on cheap debt, cheap energy, and cheap manufactured goods to fuel our 'high-end levels of consumption, and mobility or living standards, and an over-heated housing market that is unsustainably run according to the needs of investors and landlords rather than residents or tenants.
The whole thing is going to blow apart. Our 'aspirations' are slowly killing us - they're destroying the social fabric.
What we need is a coordinated approach between our nations. Undercutting each other on corporate taxes, writing tax avoidance into law, and continuing to allow multinationals to influence our politicians and play our governments against each other is exactly the game we must end.HolyInsurgent , 8 Jun 2013 14:08peterpuffin -> PointOfYou , 8 Jun 2013 14:03Deborah Orr: Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further....
I never thought I would live long enough to see this level of honesty ATL. It should have been published long ago, but at least the discussion now begins.
"Ransom". There is no better word to describe it. This (the ransom mentality) is exactly the reactionary, vindictive, doctrinaire psychology that must be extracted like a cancer from our institutional lives and the human species. A monolithic task. But identifying the cause is the first step to cure.
@PointOfYou - these are the new medieval transnational barons
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Jun 08, 2013 | discussion.theguardian.com
Jenny340 -> EllisWyatt, 8 Jun 2013 13:37
@EllisWyatt - Here's the funny thing about those who cheer the broken neoliberal model. They promise we will get to those "sunny uplands" with exactly the same fervor as old Marxists.PointOfYou , 8 Jun 2013 13:37Snookerboy -> OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 13:17Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom
Neoliberalism? This is not just a financial agenda. This a highly organized multi armed counterculture operation to force us, including Ms Orr [unless she has...connections] into what Terence McKenna [who was in on it] termed the `Archaic Revival'. That is - you and me [and Ms Orr] - our - return to the medieval dark ages, if we indeed survive that far.
The same names come up time and time again. One of them being, father of propaganda, Edward Bernays.
Bernays wrote what can be seen as a virtual Mission Statement for anyone wishing to bring about a "counterculture." In the opening paragraph of his book Propaganda he wrote:
"..The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind..."[28]
Bernays' family background made him well suited to "control the public mind." He was the double nephew of psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud's sister Anna, and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife Martha Bernays.
@OneCommentator - the UK government did intervene in the economy when it bailed out the banks to the tune of many billions of pounds underwritten by the taxpayer. The markets should always be regulated sufficiently (light touch is absolutely useless) to prevent the problems currently being experienced from ever happening again.ATrueFinn -> OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 13:09Those at the bottom of society and those in the public sector are the ones paying the price for this intervention in the UK. If you truly believe in the 'free' market then all of these failing organisations (banks, etc) should have been allowed to fail. The problem is that the wealth created under the current system is virtually all going to those at the top of the income scale and this needs to change and is one of the main reasons that neo liberalism should be binned!
@ OneCommentator 08 June 2013 5:21pmclairesdad -> brighton2 , 8 Jun 2013 13:06No, it was as recently as ww2 more or less
Traditional liberalism had died decades before WWII and was replaced by finance capitalism. What happened after WW II was that capitalism had to make various concessions to avoid a socialist revolution: social and political freedoms indeed darted ahead.
Do read a book about history!
@brighton2 - No chance mate, at least not all the time greasy spiv and shyster outfits like hedge funds are funding Puffin face and the Vermin Party. They are never going to bite the hand that feeds them.NotWithoutMyMonkey , 8 Jun 2013 13:01And in case we get uppity and endeavour to challenge the economic paradigm and the rule of these neoliberal elites, there's the surveillance state panopticon to track our movements and keep us in check.TedStewart , 8 Jun 2013 12:51kingcreosote -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 12:47Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransomAre you saying neoliberalism is a great big useless pile of shit? Then you are absolutely right!
@ MickGJ 08 June 2013 1:08pm . Get cifFix for Firefox .taxhaven , 8 Jun 2013 12:44I know what you are saying it's just sooner or later as those at the bottom continue to be squeezed the wealthy will sow their own seeds of destruction. I think we are witnessing the end game which is reflected in the desperation of the coalition to flog everything regardless of the efficacy of such behavior, they feel time is running out and they would be right.
Call it what you will - "neoliberalism", "neoconservatism", "socialism" or whatever it is...dmckm -> OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 12:43This debate is not even really solely about money: this is about liberty , about free choice, about being permitted to engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services with others, unmolested. About the users of services becoming the ones paying for those services.
Ultimately the real effect will be to remove power from governments and hand it back to where it belongs - the free market.
@ OneCommentator 08 June 2013 5:04pm . Get cifFix for Firefox .jazzdrum -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 12:25voluntary transactions among free agents. That's called a free market and it is by far the most efficient way to produce wealth humanity has ever known.
Could you explain how someone bound by a contract of employment, with the alternative, destitution, is a 'free agent'?
@SpinningHugo - Nothing comes out of nothing and i well remember black Monday in the City. That was the start of the spivs running the economy as if it were a casino. If you think its only on CiF that Thatcher gets the blame, think on this, Scotland, a whole nation blames her too.TedSmithAndSon -> theguardianisrubbish , 8 Jun 2013 12:24@theguardianisrubbish -outragedofacton -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 12:02There is not a shred of logical sense in neoliberalism. You're doing what the fundamentalists do... they talk about what neoliberalism is in theory whilst completely ignoring what it is in practice. In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable are). The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism.Unless you are completely confused by what neoliberalism is there is not a shred of logical sense in this.
Savers in a neoliberal society are lambs to the slaughter. Thatcher "revitalised" banking, while everything else withered and died.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can pay for, otherwise you can just pay... like everyone else. In Asia and South America it has been the economic preference of dictators that pushes profit upwards and responsibility down, just like it does here.Neoliberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom, communism is definitely not. Neoliberalist policies have lifted millions of people out of poverty in Asia and South America.
I find it ironic that it now has 5 year plans that absolutely must not be deviated from, massive state intervention in markets (QE, housing policy, tax credits... insert where applicable), and advocates large scale central planning even as it denies reality, and makes the announcement from a tractor factory.
Neoliberalism is a blight... a cancer on humanity... a massive lie told by rich people and believed only by peasants happy to be thrown a turnip. In theory it's one thing, the reality is entirely different. Until we're rid of it, we're all it's slaves. It's an abhorrent cult that comes up with purest bilge like expansionary fiscal contraction to keep all the money in the hands of the rich.
@MickGJ - You are wrong about the first 2 of course. Banksters get others to do their shit.LetsGetCynical , 8 Jun 2013 11:57But unfortunately the poor sods who went down on D Day were in their way fighting for Wall Street as much as anything else. It's just that they weren't told about it by the Allies massive propaganda machine. So partly right
5/10
outragedofacton -> artheart , 8 Jun 2013 11:55The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe
Which would be what? State planning? Communism? Totally free market capitalism? Oh wait, we already have the best of a bad bunch, a mixed capitalist economy with democracy. That really is the crux of it, our system isn't perfect, never will be, but nobody has come up with a better solution.
@artheart - Thank goodness for RT.ATrueFinn -> fr0mn0where , 8 Jun 2013 11:51Learn also about the West's nefarious activities in the Middle East.
@ fr0mn0where 08 June 2013 4:29pmdmckm -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 11:50Barclays bank "only" paid out £660m in dividends to the bearers of risk capital, while its bonus pot for a very select number of its staff was £1.5bn.
Fascinating! Now, one could infer that Barclays represent "beneficial capitalism", rewarding its hard-working employees, but maybe we won't.
This is not the traditional capitalist style
The Traditional capitalist is not an extinct species but under threat. For the time being the population is stagnant in some countries and even increasing in some others. However, due to the foraging capacity of Neoliberal creature , competing in the same economical niche, the size and life expectation of it are diminishing.
@ SpinningHugo 08 June 2013 10:59am . Get cifFix for Firefox .szwalby -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 11:30She, knowingly, let neo-liberal economic philosophy come trumpeting through the door of No10 and it's been there ever since; it has guided our politicians for the past 30 odd years. Hence, it is Thatcher's fault. She did this and another bad thing: the woman who glorified household economics pissed away billions of pounds of North Sea Oil.
@MickGJ - No, you're right. Why let yesterdays experience feed into what you expect of the future? Lets go forwards goldfish like, every minute a brand new one, with no baggage!fr0mn0where -> ATrueFinn , 8 Jun 2013 11:29
And by the way, who saved the hide of the very much private sector banks and financial institutions? The hated STATE, us tax payers!@ATrueFinn -theonionmurders -> theguardianisrubbish , 8 Jun 2013 11:05I think I agree with everything that you say here? The people at the top these days aren't really of much use for anything, including capitalism. The only thing that they do excel at is lining their own pockets and securing their privileged position in society.
They have become quite up front about it. There was a bit of a fuss last year when Barclays bank "only" paid out £660m in dividends to the bearers of risk capital, while its bonus pot for a very select number of its staff was £1.5bn. Barclays released a statement before their AGM explaining:
"Barclays is fully committed to ensuring that a greater proportion of income and profits flow to shareholders notwithstanding that it operates within the constraints of a competitive market."
This is not the traditional capitalist style competition that they are talking about where companies competed as to who can return the biggest profit for their shareholders this now comes secondary to the real competition which is for which company can return the biggest bonuses for a small group of employees.
@theguardianisrubbishpetercs , 8 Jun 2013 10:44Bailouts have been a constant feature of neoliberalism. In fact the role of the state is simply reduced to a merely commissioning agent to private parasitical corporations. History has shown the state playing this role since neoliberalism became embedded in policy since the 1970s - Long Term Capital Management, Savings and Loans, The Brady Plan, numerous PFI bailouts and those of the Western banking system during the 1982 South American, 1997 Asian and 2010 European debt crises.
No wonder you're so ignorant of the basics of economic policy if you won't flick through a book - fear of accepting that you're simply wrong is a sure sign of either pig ignorance or denial, and is as I said embarrassing so its not really much point in wasting anymore time engaging with you.
Crackerpot , 8 Jun 2013 10:43..."neoliberal", concept behind the word, has nothing to do with liberal or liberty or freedom...it is a PR spin concept that names slavery with a a word that sounds like the opposite...if "they" called it neoslavery it just wouldn't sell in the market for political concepts.The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
..."austerity" is the financial sectors' solution to its survival after it sucked most the value out of the economy and broke it. To mend it was a case of preservation of the elite and the devil take the hindmost, that's most of us.
...and even Labour, the party of trade unionism, has adopted austerity to drive its policy.
...we need a Peoples' Party to stand for the revaluation of labour so we get paid for our effort rather than the distortion, the rich xxx poor divide, of neoslavery austerity.
When the IMF 'admitted' that the first bail out of Greece was 'bungled' are they trying to imply that the subsequent bail outs have been a success....artheart , 8 Jun 2013 10:34People need to start watching The Keiser Report to hear the truth, if they can handle the truth. Link here: http://rt.com/shows/keiser-report/MickGJ -> bluebirds , 8 Jun 2013 10:30I simply cannot recommend it enough.
epinoa -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 10:25Of course it has. And it will continue to "fail", while provide us with all sorts of goodies, for the foreseeable future. Capitalism's endless "failure" is of no more concern than human mortality. Ever tried, ever failed, try again, fail better.@bluebirds - deregulated capitalism has failed
@CaptainGrey -In as much as a zombie is.Except it's not. It is still very much alive and growing.
I'd say the current oligarchical form of capitalism has crashed quite spectacularly. I say this as a free market capitalist too.The "alternatives" have crashed and burned save Cuba and North Korea.
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Jun 08, 2013 | discussion.theguardian.com
epinoa -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 10:19
@Fachan -bridkid5 -> NotAgainAgain , 8 Jun 2013 10:18Shame we only have bastardized forms of them.Just as democracy is the worst system of government except for all other, so capitalism is the worst economic model except for all other.
@NotAgainAgain - this is very true, it reminds me of an engineering company I worked for in Nottingham (since gone under). The production manger was a corrupt thief. He gradually sub-contracted the production work out to other companies in the area, taking backhanders for his troubles.ATrueFinn -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 10:13Once all the production was farmed out, he somehow got himself promoted to director level, where he and a sycophant subbed all the design work out. So all the production and design was done out of house, standards dropped and the company closed, leaving him with a nice payoff, just prior to retirement.
Some would say he played a blinder, my interpretation is he ruined a perfectly viable company, making a very good product, and over the course of about 5 years put over 30 people out of work.
In a just world he would be spending his retirement in prison.
@ MickGJ 08 June 2013 2:16pmATrueFinn -> fr0mn0where , 8 Jun 2013 10:10ext year's harvest (possibly of GM food which makes better use of scarce resources)
Indeed. Wheat will grow as flour and fly to our cupboards.
@ fr0mn0where 08 June 2013 1:53pmcrinklyoldgit , 8 Jun 2013 10:04Income distribution and a happy workforce is actually very good for business as well as society!
Of course it is, but the capitalists do not know it. In many countries, including Finland, the "condition of the working classes", ie. working conditions, have been in rapid decline for the last 20 years.
Permanent salaried jobs have been replaced with temps from agencies, unpaid overtime is becoming the norm, burnouts are commonplace and so on.
If in your country things are different, no mass lay-outs and outsourcing to China, count yourself lucky!
On form, Debs. Here is something I like.MysticFish -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 09:57But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments
Noam Chomsky pointed this out aeons ago though-that the American model is to use tax money to benefit private interests through technological infrastructure.
It was ever thus, if in slightly different forms. Still it is surprising that they have gone so quickly from their stated position at the start of the republic of a rejection of kings and emperors to their position now of corruption so ingrained it is impossible to make distinctions. Proxy emperors are emperors all the same, no matter the rhetoric that promotes them.
One senses that there is very little 'going back' possible. Besides, the great Neoliberal scam is predicated upon the qualities of the 'governments' we have and the capacity of those 'rhetoricians' with the capacity to say anything or play any role, to lick any arse, to get elected. Such apparent strength is weakness. In this world that now exists here, we have now entered the same world as the USSR in the eighties, where the announcement of bumper harvests of wheat, made everyone with a brain cell groan and think 'Oh fuck! no bread this winter-quick, run to the shops now, and buy up all the flour there'.
But there is now no way to declare that without being seen as beyond the pale-a bug eyed conspiracist.
Still, I am a believer in the connectedness of this world. The economic system and its mythologies are just weird and distorted canaries in the coalmine of the wider environment. It is indicating that there is a misalignment between the way we think and what is possible in this world. Austerity promoters and 'Keynsian' Ballsites are one and the same thing-both pretenders that the key to the problems is within their narrow gifts
Hubris is followed by nemesis. In a wider sense what we seen now is a complete failure of the capacity to educate and to learn,and moderate behaviour, and find some way of caring for our 'others', beyond the core of 'self'. nationalism is essentially an extension of 'self'. We now shall see the failure of a retraction of thought into nationalism and scapegoating.
I predict that the population of the world will decline over the next century-quite markedly.
The only solace is that at the end of the process, the pain will be forgotten. It always is.@MickGJ - Cameron said 'We will cut the deficit, not the NHS,' and promised to be the 'greenest government ever,' saying that you could 'go green,' if you voted 'blue.'Spoutwell , 8 Jun 2013 09:53Now we see moneyed entities with vested interests, carpet bagging and flogging off the NHS and an unelected fossil fuel mandarin, at the heart of government decision making, appointing corporate yea-sayers, to the key government departments, with environmental responsibilities. Corporations capturing the state apparatus for their own ends, is 'corporatism.'
MurchuantEacnamai -> DasInternaut , 8 Jun 2013 09:49There was very little 'healthy economic growth' in Britain in the second half of the 20th century. Britain was bankrupt after WW2 with its people dependent on Marshall Aid and food contributions from its former 'colonies'.Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce.
Whatever 'growth' occured after Marshall Aid arrived was scuppered by a class system where company managers were more concerned with walking on the workers than with keeping their businesses afloat while such discrimination provoked hard left trade union policies which left british industry uncompetitive and ultimately non-existent.
If that wasn't enough, Thatcherism arrived to re-inforce class discrimination, sell off national services and assets and replace social policy with neo-liberal consumerism. Whether the workforce was swollen by women or anyone else is immaterial.
The anti-democratic incestuous class conflict latent in British society continues to ensure that the UK will remain a mere vassal state of foot-soldiers and consumers for international neo-liberal capitalism.
@DasInternaut - Completely agree. The performance has been poor to absymal. But this is a failure of democratic governance because the collective interests of citizens as consumers and service users are not being represented and enforced by the elected politicians since they have been suborned by the capitalists elites and their fellow-travellers.Itsrainingtin , 8 Jun 2013 09:44The people, indeed, have been sold a lie, but, unfortunately, it is only UKIP which is making the political waves by revealing selected aspects of this lie. The three established parties have been 'bought' to varying extents. But more and more citizens are beginning to realise the extent to which they have been bought.
There is an upside to all of this, maybe I wont get modded so much from now on for being so angry at the ideological criminals . Hopefully the middle classes will cotton on to the fact that all this is not a mad hatters tinfoil hobby, we need more of them to be grumpy.szwalby -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 09:43@MickGJ - We've already seen it. Not great so far. GS4, Winterbourne view, southern cross, trains...............Welfare to work companies, delivering no better results than people left to their own devices. Energy companies.MurchuantEacnamai -> TedSmithAndSon , 8 Jun 2013 09:39We'll see if the new wave of free schools, academy schools, and all the service outsourced by the council perform any better.
Doubtful, as to make a profit, they have to employ poorer paid people, less well qualified, and once they've got a contract, they've got very little competition, as when the second round of bidding comes around, as the firms having got the first contract are the only one with relevant experience, they are assured of renewal, the money machine will keep going!
@TedSmithAndSon - There's a huge difference between meddling and ensuring effective governance. But I expect in your omniscence you know that.theguardianisrubbish -> theonionmurders , 8 Jun 2013 09:38@theonionmurders - I am not going to read a book.theguardianisrubbish -> TedSmithAndSon , 8 Jun 2013 09:28Neoliberalism are policies that are influenced by neo classical economics. If you are suggesting that the neoliberal school of thought would advocate any kind of a bailout then you are mistaken. Where else have I "apparently" embarrassed myself?
@TedSmithAndSon - This is just an inaccurate rant not a reply.theonionmurders -> theguardianisrubbish , 8 Jun 2013 09:24"The system depends on the wealthy not being allowed to suffer the consequences.."
Unless you are completely confused by what neolibralism is there is not a shred of logical sense in this.
"The debt industry are the lenders who take advantage of a financial system..."
Which is what savers are. They come in the form of individuals businesses and governments. This encompasses everyone.
"whilst paying the lowest possible rate. Wonga, for instance."
If you are a lender you do not pay anything, you receive.
"Thatchers revolution was to take our citizenship and give it a value, whilst making everyone else a consumer, all for a handful of magic beans in the shape of British Gas shares."
...not forgetting that she revitalised the economy and got everyone back to work again.
"Neoliberalism in practice is every bit as bad as Communism in practice, with none of the benefits."
Neoliberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom, communism is definitely not. Neoliberalist policies have lifted millions of people out of poverty in Asia and South America. Communism has no benefits for society open your eyes!
MickGJ -> ATrueFinn , 8 Jun 2013 09:16@theguardianisrubbish - Does this author not realise that a government bailout goes against the whole neoliberal school of thought?
No it isn't. You're confusing neoliberalism with neo classical economics. The level of knowledge on economic theory here is sometimes embarrassing.
richmanchester -> MurchuantEacnamai , 8 Jun 2013 09:13Next year's harvest (possibly of GM food which makes better use of scarce resources). I imagine the sun will eventually stop bombarding us with the energy that powers photosynthesis but I'm not losing any sleep over it.@ATrueFinn - After they are finished, what do Singaporeans eat?
@MurchuantEacnamai - I think the point is this, Amazon make money by selling books, they avoid paying taxes, yet expect an educated, literate population to be provided for them, on the grounds that illiterate people don't buy books, and expect roads to move the books around on.TedSmithAndSon -> theguardianisrubbish , 8 Jun 2013 09:12So who will pay for this?
@theguardianisrubbish - No! The bailout is simply actual neoliberalism as opposed to the theory inside tiny right wing minds. The system depends on the wealthy not being allowed to suffer the consequences of their own greed, or it would represent revolution and still not work.szwalby -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 09:04The debt industry are the lenders who take advantage of a financial system designed to push profits upwards (neoliberalism in practice), whilst paying the lowest possible rate. Wonga, for instance.
Thatchers revolution was to take our citizenship and give it a value, whilst making everyone else a consumer, all for a handful of magic beans in the shape of British Gas shares.
Neoliberalism in practice is every bit as bad as Communism in practice, with none of the benefits. It always amusing to see neoliberal morons shout about the red menace when they're two sides of the same coin.
@MickGJ -DasInternaut -> MurchuantEacnamai , 8 Jun 2013 08:59as opposed to the private sector, who always does what it says it will do, at reasonable cost, for the benefit of their customers, and with due regards to ethics? Like the Banks, the financial sector, who will never sell you a product that isn't the best for you, regardless of their interest? the private companies like Southern Cross, GS4?.and provides them at a massively inflated cost accompanied by unforgivable waste and inefficiency, appalling service and life-threatening incompetence.
The private insurance who refuse to take you on the minute you've got some illness or disability? Get off it! The state isn't perfect, the services it provides are not perfect, but replacing them with private provision isn't the answer!
@MurchuantEacnamai - How would you rate how well British government has done in ensuring markets are genuinely competitive. How well has British government done in ensuring our energy market is competitive, for example. Does the competitiveness we observe in the energy market give customers better or worse value than they had before deregulation? How do you rate the British government's performance in rail and public transport, with respect to competitiveness?Personally, and notwithstanding the notable exception of telecoms, I rate the British (and US) government's performance in deregulating state entities, creating new markets and ensuring competition, as poor.
Neoliberalism is nothing if not the opposite extreme of the communist planned economy. Like the communist planned economy, neoliberalism is doomed to failure. I think we've all been sold a lie.
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Jun 10, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
WyldeWolfe , 10 Jun 2013 19:42
disorderedworld , 10 Jun 2013 17:21Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom
So it's been a success then.
A wonderful article that names the central issue. Neoliberal ideology acted as a smokescreen that enabled the financially powerful to rewrite the rules and place themselves beyond the law. The resultant rise of financial capitalism, which now eclipses the productive manufacturing-based capitalism that was the engine of world growth since the industrial revolution, has propelled a dangerous self-serving elite to the centre of world power. It's not just inequality that matters, but the character of the global elite.MatthewBall -> murielbelcher , 10 Jun 2013 16:23@murielbelcher -MatthewBall -> Grich , 10 Jun 2013 15:40The neo-liberal order commenced only in the late 1970s - there was a very different order prior to this which was not "soviet socialism" as you term it.
So it seems that your suggestion is for a return to western capitalism post-war style - would that be right? (b.t.w. if I bring up the whole Soviet Union thing, it is partly because quite a few commentators in this debate come across as if they wish for something much more leftist than that).
Anyway, my worry with this idea is that I am just not convinced that life in "The West 1945-80" was better on the whole than in "The West 1980-present". It's true that unemployment is higher these days, but a lot of work in the post-war years was boring and physically exhausting; in factories and mines where conditions were degrading and bad for health; and where industrial relations were simply terrible. I think as well that the higher unemployment is a localized phenomenon that many developing countries are not experiencing (this is relevant because Deborah Orr proposes change for the whole world, not merely the West).
There were also frequent recessions and booms - in fact, more frequent (albeit shorter) than now. What seems to have changed in this respect is that, whereas we used to alternate regularly between 2-3 years of boom and 1-2 years of bust, we now have 15 years of continuous boom followed by a (maybe?) 10 year bust (this pattern began around 1980). If you asked me which of these two patterns I preferred, then I think I'd go for the pre-1980 pattern, but its not clear to me that the post-1980 pattern is so much worse as to underwrite a savage indictment of the whole system.
As for Casino banking: they should reform that. Britain's Coalition Government has done something in that respect, although its not very radical - I am hoping Labour can do more. There is certainly a lot to be said for banks going back to a pre-"Big Bang" sense of tradition and prudence.
Buts let's not also forget the plus sides in the ledger for post-1980 capitalism: hundreds of millions in the former third world lifted out of poverty; unprecedented technological innovation (e.g. the internet, which makes access to knowledge more equal even as income inequality grows); and the accomodation (at least in the West) of progressive social change, such as the empowerment of ethnic minorities, LGBT people and women.
Change, yes - but lets be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
@Grich -MarkHH -> MickGJ , 10 Jun 2013 13:34What you have missed, is that the lions share of the proceeds of that growth are not going to ordinary people but to a tiny minority of super rich. It is not working for the majority. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/07/58-of-real-income-growth-since-1976-went-to-top-1-and-why-that-matters.html
OK, but both the claim and the link cited in support talk only about a problem in the US. This can't really answer my point, which was that the rest of the world should not be expected to support a change to the economic system of the whole world just because of problems that are mostly localised to North America and Europe. People in developing countries might like the fact that they are, at last, catching "the West" up, and might well not care much about widening inequality of incomes in Western societies.
If you are going to propose changes that you want the whole world to adopt, as Deborah Orr does, then you should be careful to avoid casually assuming that Africa, India, China, et al, feel the same way about the world's recent history as we do. It seems to me that not enough care has been demonstrated in this regard.
Toeparty , 10 Jun 2013 05:28@MickGJ - Left to their own devices the most extreme neo-liberals would remove the state almost completely from corporate life.
Except when the State has to step in to prop up an unsustainable ideology. Then it's all meek murmurings and pleas for forgiveness and a timid "we'll be better from now" concessions and the Government obliges the public with the farce that they actually intend to do anything at all but make the public pay for the financial sector's state subsidized profligacy.
Once the begging bowl is re-filled of course then the pretense of "business as usual" profligacy rises to the fore.
The taxpayers are left to pick up the tab, nations are divided against immigrants and scroungers and then unfettered evangelists like you can spout as pompously as you like about how much big business would like to remove the state from corporate affairs.
When you well know that is the last thing big business would like to do. More of the state owned pie is always the most urgent of priorities. Poorer services at inflated costs equates as 'efficiency' until the taxpayer is again left to step in and pick up the bill.
Without the state there wouldn't be neo-Liberalism, it took state regulated capitalism to build what unfettered purists insist on tearing apart for short term greed.
The trouble is Neo-Liberals do not want to remove the state at all, they want to BE the state and in the process rendering democracy pretty much meaningless. And they've succeeded.
The biggest swindle ever pulled was turning the most glaring and crushing failure of unfettered corporatism into the biggest and most crushing power grab implemented in order to suppress the will of the people.
Just as IMF loans come with 'obligations' the principle of democracy itself was sold as part of 'the solution'.
The unsustainable, sustained. By slavery to debt, removal of society's safety net and an economy barely maintained by industries that serve the rich, vultures that prey on the weak and rising living costs and the drudgery of a life compounded by a relentless bombardment of everything in life that is unattainable.
Nobody hates a market more than a monopoly and capitalism must inevitably end in monopoly as it has. For the profiteering monopolies investment especially via taxation is insane as it can only undermine their monopoly. With the economy now globalised not even a world war could sweep away the current ossified political economy and give capitalism a new lease on life. It's socialism or monopoly capitalist barbarism. Make your choice.DracoTBastard , 10 Jun 2013 05:26Malakia123 , 10 Jun 2013 03:35Money that the governments don't actually need as they can print their own money and spend it to use their countries own resources and then raise taxes to offset the extra spending and thus maintaining monetary value. The reality is that a government should never, ever borrow money.The IMF exists to lend money to governments,
The beginning period between the two world wars (1919-33) in Germany called the Weimar Republic shows us exactly what severe austerity imposed by the Treaty of Versailles caused. Because the German economy contracted severely due to reparations payments, steady inflation and severe unemployment ensued. Of course the FED having started the Great Depression in America had not helped matters much anywhere in the world. The bankers have always known that the austerity caused by having to pay off un-payable loans, that increase every year, will eventually produce countries very similar to the "Weimar Days" in pre-Hitler Germany.brucefiiona -> MysticFish , 9 Jun 2013 20:36They also know that drastic conditions such as these often lead to a collapse of democracy and a resurgence of Fascism.
What causes inflation is uncontrolled speculation of the kind we have seen fed by private banking at various crucial points in history, such as the Weimar Republic. When speculation is coupled with debt (owed to private banking cartels) such as we are seeing in America and Europe now, the result is disaster. On the other hand, when a government issues its own "good faith" commerce-related currency in carefully measured ways as we saw in Roman times or Colonial America, it causes supply and demand to increase together, leaving prices unaffected. Hence there is no inflation, no debt, no unemployment, and no need for income taxes.
In reality, the Weimar financial crisis began with the impossible reparations payments imposed at the Treaty of Versailles. It is very similar to the austerity being imposed on European Nations and America as we speak – regardless of the fact that the IMF is trying to pose as "the Good Cop" at the moment! The damage has been done to nations like Greece, and others are soon to follow. The uncontrollable greed of banks and corporations is leading to an implosion of severe magnitude! It's time to open their books and put a stop to these private banks right now!
@MysticFish - So the US who has a greater spend on the military than communist China is neoliberal?brucefiiona , 9 Jun 2013 20:28Neoliberalism could not exist without massive state support. So the term is meaningless. There is nothing "liberal" about having a huge state funded military industrial complex that acts a Trojan horse for global corporations, invading other countries for resources.
The term neoliberal is not only meaningless but misleading as it implies a connection with true liberalism, of which it has no meaningful connection.
Do away with deceptive terms like neoliberalism, capitalism, socialism, left wing and right wing and things become clearer.fr0mn0where -> murielbelcher , 9 Jun 2013 14:42At root a lot of the people who get involved in all of the above have very similar character traits - love of power, greed, deceitful, ruthlessness. Most start out with these character traits, and others gain them as a result of power.
Anyone high up in politics or business is unhinged. You have to be. The organizational structures in these things are so synthetic, the beliefs so artificial, rigid, dogmatic and inhuman that only a unhinged person could prosper in this climate.
Most reasonable people admit doubt, are willing to accept compromise, are willing to make the occasional sacrifice for the greater good. All these things are what make us human, however all these things are seen as weaknesses in the inverted world of business and politics.
Business and politics creates an environment where the must inhuman traits prosper.
@murielbelcher -MysticFish -> AssistantCook , 9 Jun 2013 14:28"no but the highly placed banking and financial class are along with their venal political mates"
For sure but are they capitalists? Although they may well own capital does their power derive from the ownership of capital? You may, or may not be interested in this lecture on the future of capitalism by John Kay.
@AssistantCook - Neoliberalism is a branch of economic ideology which espouses the value of the free-market, and removing all protective legislation, so that large companies are free to do what they want, where-ever they want, with no impediments from social or environmental considerations, or a nation's democratic preferences. Von Hayek was a major influence and Thatcher was a loyal disciple, as was the notorious dictator, Pinochet. It is economic theory, designed for vulture capitalists, and unpopular industries like fossil fuel or tobacco, and usually the 'freedom' is all one-sided.MysticFish -> DavidPavett , 9 Jun 2013 14:12@DavidPavett - If states are too big, then what about multinational banks and corporations? I wonder why Neoliberal ideology does not try to limit the size of these. They are cumbersome and destructive, predatory dinosaurs and yet our politicians seem mesmerised to the point of allowing them special favours, tax incentives and the ability to determine our nation's policies in matters such as energy and health. Why not 'Small is Beautiful,' when it comes to companies? It doesn't make sense to shrink the state but then let non-transparent and unaccountable, multinational companies become too powerful. One gets the feeling the country is being invaded by the interests of hostile nations, using all-too-convenient Neoliberal ideology and hidden behind a corporate mask.Jesús Rodriguez , 9 Jun 2013 12:46Is the IMF ever stop evading its responsibility and blaming others for the worldwide financial tragedy it has provoked? Is it ever stop hurting the working class?theguardianisrubbish -> murielbelcher , 9 Jun 2013 07:28@murielbelcher -theguardianisrubbish -> murielbelcher , 9 Jun 2013 07:10"Neo-liberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom for the rich and powerful elites is all."
No it is not that is what you want to believe. There is nothing in this statement other than an opinion based on nothing.
"Many people across the globe were lifted out of poverty between 1945-1980 so what does your statement about neo-liberalism prove"
Which countries during this period saw massive sustainable reductions in poverty without some free market model in place?
"It is you who should open your eyes and stop expecting people on here to accept your ideological beliefs and statements as facts."
I don't expect people to accept my beliefs I am just pointing out why I think their beliefs are wrong. This is a comment section the whole idea of it is to comment on different views and articles. How can you ever benefit or make an accurate decision or belief if you do not try to understand what the opposite belief is? I think nearly everything I have said has been somewhat backed up by logic or a fact, I have not said wishy washy statements like:
"Neo-liberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom for the rich and powerful elites is all."
Unless you can expand on this and give evidence or some form of an example why you think its true then it makes no sense. You are not the only commentor on this article to make a similar statement and the way people have attempted to justify it is due to bailouts but as I have said a bailout is not part of the neoliberal school of thought so if you have a problem with bailouts you don't have a problem with neoliberalism.
@murielbelcher - I don't want to go to far into Thatcherism because it is slightly off topic. The early 80s recession was a global recession and yes during the first few years unemployment soared. Why was that because the trade unions were running amok the UK was losing millions of days of work per month.theguardianisrubbish -> someoneionceknew , 9 Jun 2013 06:34Inflation was getting out of control and the only way to solve it was a self induced recession. You cannot seriously believe that without the reforms that she implemented we would not have recovered as quick as we did nor can you argue that it was possible for her or anyone else to turn around such an inefficient industry. Don't forget the problems of the manufacturing industry go back way before Thatcher's time.
@someoneionceknew -MysticFish -> MickGJ , 9 Jun 2013 06:17"Here's your problem. You believe that banks lend savings. They don't. Loans create deposits create reserves."
I am not claiming to be an expert on this if you are then let me know and please do correct me. I agree banks do not lend deposits but they do lend savings. There is a difference putting money on deposit is different to say putting money into an ISA. I don't agree though that deposits create reserves I believe that they come from the central bank otherwise banks would be constrained by the amount of deposits in the system which is not true and something you have said is not true.
Nevertheless, the majority of liquidity in the bond markets (like most other markets) comes from institutional investors, i.e pension funds, unit trusts, insurance companies, etc. They get their money from savings by consumers as well as sometimes companies. Ok we don't always give our money to insurance companies when we save but via premiums is another way the ordinary consumer contributes to this so called "debt industry". I also said that foreign and local governments buy debt and companies invest directly into the debt market.
@MickGJ - Business-friendly to who exactly: the nation or hostile overseas speculators?theguardianisrubbish -> TedSmithAndSon , 9 Jun 2013 06:14theguardianisrubbish -> theonionmurders , 9 Jun 2013 05:35"In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable are). "Iceland would disagree.
"The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism."
Why have only the rich benefited from the bailout? You are not making any sense.
"The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism."
Why? You cannot just say a statement like that and not expand, it makes no sense.
"Thatcher "revitalised" banking, while everything else withered and died."
...but also revitalised the economy and got everyone back to work.
"Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can pay for, otherwise you can just pay... like everyone else."
Again you have to expand on this because it makes no sense.
"In Asia and South America it has been the economic preference of dictators that pushes profit upwards and responsibility down, just like it does here."
Don't think that is true in most cases nor would it make sense. Why would a dictator who wants as much power as possible operate a laissez-faire economy? You cannot have personal freedom without having economic freedom, it is a necessary not sufficient condition. Tell me a case where these is a large degree of political freedom but little to no economic freedom. Moreover look at the countries in Asia and South America that have adopted a neoliberal agenda and notice their how poverty as reduced significantly.
"I find it ironic that it now has 5 year plans that absolutely must not be deviated from, massive state intervention in markets (QE, housing policy, tax credits... insert where applicable), and advocates large scale central planning even as it denies reality, and makes the announcement from a tractor factory."
Who has 5 year plans?
"In theory it's one thing, the reality is entirely different."
If the reality is different to the theory then it is not neoliberalism that is being implemented therefore it makes no sense to dispute the theory. Look at where it has been implemented, the best case in the world at the moment is Hong Kong look at how well that country has performed.
"a massive lie told by rich people "
I can assure you I am not rich.
"Until we're rid of it, we're all it's slaves."
Neoliberalism is based on personal freedom. If you believe this about neoliberalism in your opinion give me one economic school of thought where this does not apply.
@theonionmurders -ATrueFinn -> fireman36 , 9 Jun 2013 04:17"Bailouts have been a constant feature of neoliberalism."
What you are saying does not make sense. Whatever you say about that there was no where else to turn the government had to bailout out the banks a neolibralist would disagree.
"In fact the role of the state is simply reduced to a merely commissioning agent to private parasitical corporations. "
That's corporatism which so far you have described pretty well.
"History has shown the state playing this role since neoliberalism became embedded in policy since the 1970s - Long Term Capital Management, Savings and Loans, The Brady Plan, numerous PFI bailouts and those of the Western banking system during the 1982 South American, 1997 Asian and 2010 European debt crises."
What?! Bailouts have been occurring before the industrial revolution. Deregulation in the UK occurred mainly during the 80s not 70's. Furthermore financial deregulation occurred in the UK in 1986. In the USA the major piece of financial deregulation was the Gramm Leach Bliley Act which was passed in 1999. So you have just undercut your own point with the examples you gave above. You could argue Argentina and we could argue all day about the causes of that, but I would say that any government that pursues an expansionary monetary policy under a fixed ER is never going to end well.
"...policy if you won't flick through a book."
My point was that when people quote a source they tend to either quote the page that the point comes from. To be honest if this book is telling you that neoliberalism and neoclassical are significantly different (which you seemed to suggest in you earlier post) then I would suggest put the book down.
@ fireman36 09 June 2013 1:32amGrich -> MatthewBall , 8 Jun 2013 22:29Don't like it? Change the rules.
Exactly! However:
"Google, Amazon and Apple... avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments."
Yes to the first, no to the second. Corporations with revenues exceeding the GDP of a small nation have quite a lot of power: Exxon's revenue is between the GDP of Norway and Austria. In Finland Nokia generated 3 4 % of the GDP for a decade and the government bent backwards to accommodate its polite requests, including a specific law reducing the privacy of employees' emails.
@MatthewBall -oriel46 -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 22:08I am not sure if this is true. We have the same economic system (broadly speaking, capitalism) as nearly every country in the world, and the world economy is growing at a reasonable rate, at around 3-4% for 2013-14 (see http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/01/pdf/c1.pdf for more details).
We percieve a problem in (most of) Europe and North America because our economies are growing more slowly than this, and in some cases not at all. The global growth figure comes out healthy because of strong growth in the emerging countries, like China, Brazil and India, who are narrowing the gap between their living standards and ours. So, the world as a whole isn't broken, even if our bit of it is going through a rough patch.
What you have missed, is that the lions share of the proceeds of that growth are not going to ordinary people but to a tiny minority of super rich. It is not working for the majority. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/07/58-of-real-income-growth-since-1976-went-to-top-1-and-why-that-matters.html
@Fachan - Except that it isn't capitalism that was being criticized here, but neoliberalism: a distinction that's often lost on neoliberals themselves, ironically.TomorrowsWorld , 8 Jun 2013 19:58I'm sure that Denis Healy and any number of African economists would confirm that the IMF is quite simply a refuge of absolutely last resort, when investor confidence in your economy is so shattered that the only way ahead is to open the shark gates and allow big money to plunder whatever value remains there, without the benefit of any noticeable return for your people. Greece is but one more victim of a syndrome that encompasses all the science and forensic analysis of ritual sacrifice.murielbelcher -> OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 19:10@OneCommentator - don't confuse economic deregulation which acted as handmaiden to global finance and multinationals as economic freedoms for populationmurielbelcher -> theguardianisrubbish , 8 Jun 2013 19:04China's govt was doing what china's govt had decided to do from 1978 BEFORE the election of Thatcher in 1979 or Reagan in 1980 (office from Jan 1981), so very little correlation there I think
The GATT rounds whether you agree with their aims or not were the products of the post war decades, again before Thatcher and Reagan came to power
The golden age of 1945 - 1975 or so witnessed huge rises in standards of living so your point linking neo-liberalism to rising standards of living is literally meaningless. There was an explosive growth in economic activity during the three or four post war decades
@theguardianisrubbish - you can't get away with thisfireman36 , 8 Jun 2013 19:03She DID not get everyone back to work again. There were two recessions at either end of the 1980s. She TRIPLED unemployment during the first half of the 1980s and introduced the phenomenon of high structural unemployment and placing people on invalidity benefits to massage the headline unemployment count. Give us the figures to back up your assertion that she "got everyone back to work again." I suspect that you cannot and your statement stands for the utter nonsense that it is in any kind of reality.
A few months after she was forced out Tory Chancellor Norman Lamont in 1991 during yet another recession declared that "unemployment was a price worth paying"!!!
Neo-liberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom for the rich and powerful elites is all. Many people across the globe were lifted out of poverty between 1945-1980 so what does your statement about neo-liberalism prove
It is you who should open your eyes and stop expecting people on here to accept your ideological beliefs and statements as facts.
Because they are not: in no shape, way or form
Not very impressed to be honest. For starters:MickGJ -> JohnBroggio , 8 Jun 2013 18:42"The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State."
That's glib and inaccurate. A better read about the IMF from an insider: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/ Digest: the biggest problem the IMF have to deal with in bailouts is always the politics of cronyism; free-market oligarchs and government in cahoots.
"Many IMF programs "go off track" (a euphemism) precisely because the government can't stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program "goes back on track" once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern -- and thus win or lose -- under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos."
Generally whoever happens to be in opposition at the time. This made the LibDems the ideal (sorry) choice for a long time but then they broke a long-standing if unspoken promise that they would never actually be in government.@JohnBroggio - who caters for the idealist vote?
Last weekś Economist has some very interesting stuff from the British Social Attitudes survey which shows the increasing drift away from collectivist ideals towards liberalism over each succeeding generation.
The assumption shared by many round here that the young are some untapped resource of revolutionary energy is deeply mistaken
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Jun 08, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe
Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT First published on Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT
The IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Boris Roessler/DPA FILE T he International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.
Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in "the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF, put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless, to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda. But how can the privatisation of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister, Anna Soubry , suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up. It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead of waking up, smelling the coffee and realizing that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
justamug , 8 Jun 2013 18:09This article is a testament to our ignorance. Orr is no intellectual slouch, but somehow, like many in the mainstream, she still fails to address some fundamental assumptions and thus ends up with a muddled argument.murielbelcher -> MurchuantEacnamai , 8 Jun 2013 18:06"What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return;"
Lending has not stopped - it's just moved out of one market into another. Banks are making profits, and banks profit are made by expanding credit.
Yes and no. There is a difference between what is preached and what happens in practice. The era of neoliberalism has seen a massive increase in government, not a shrinkage. The biggest change is the role of governments - to protect markets rather than to protect the rights and dignities of its citizens. When viewed by outcome rather than ideological rhetoric, it becomes increasingly clear that neoliberalism has nothing to do with shrinking the state, freeing markets, or freeing the individual, and everything to do with a massive power grab by a global elite.Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless, to be efficient and responsive.
freedomrespect , 8 Jun 2013 18:00@MurchuantEacnamai - well righty ideologues such as yourself and your venal political acolytes have utterly failed to support the case or institute measures that: "apply effective democratic governance to ensure marketWhat was the billions of pounds in bank bailout welfare and recession on costs all about? You tell me. All the result of the application of your extremist free market ideology? Let the banks run wild, they mess up and the taxpayer has to step in with bailout welfare and pay to clear up the recession debris
Market participants and their venal political friends have during the past 30 years of extremist neo-liberal ideology rigged, abused, distorted and subverted their market and elite power to tilt the economic and social balance massively in their favour
You the taxpayer are good enough to bail us out when we mess up but then we demand that your services are cut in return and that your employment is ever more precarious and wages depressed (at the lower end of the scale - never ever the higher of course!! That's the neo-liberal deal isn't it
Neo liberalism = the favoured ideology of the very rich and powerful elite and boy don't they know how to work its levers
Very insightful commentary and at last somebody is looking at globalisation and asking whose interests is it designed to serve? It certainly ain't for the people. Amazing it's been approved on a UK liberal newspaper as well!Boguille -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 17:57@Fachan - There was nothing in the article about envy. It was an exposition of the failure of our present system which allows the rich to get ever richer. That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that the increasing disparity in wealth is bringing down the economy and making it less productive while leaving a large part of the population in, or on the verge of, poverty.murielbelcher -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 17:41@CaptainGrey - but we're not talking about that form of capitalism are we?murielbelcher -> fr0mn0where , 8 Jun 2013 17:39Surely you must realise that there are very very different forms of capitalism. The capitalism that reigns now would not have permitted the creation of the NHS had it not been devised in the1940s when a very different type of capitalism reigned. Its political acolytes and its cheerleader press would have denounced the NHS as an extremist commie idea!!
@fr0mn0where - it was crumbling in the 1980smurielbelcher -> fr0mn0where , 8 Jun 2013 17:35The Chicago boys swarmed into eastern Europe after 1989 to introduce a form of gangster unbridled capitalism. The very Chicago boys led by Milton Friedman who used the dictator Pinochet's Chile as test bed for their ideology from September 1973 after the coup that overthrew Allende
@fr0mn0where - no but the highly placed banking and financial class are along with their venal political matesmurielbelcher -> MatthewBall , 8 Jun 2013 17:33We've had three decades of asset stripping in favor of the rich elites and look at the mess we're in now.
@MatthewBall - social democracyRidiculousPseudonym , 8 Jun 2013 17:26The neo-liberal order commenced only in the late 1970s - there was a very different order prior to this which was not "Soviet Socialism" as you term it.
As such this extremist rich man's ideological experiment has had a long innings and has failed as the events of 2008 laid bare for all to see - it has been tried out disastrously on live human beings for 34 years and has now been thoroughly discredited with the huge bank bailouts and financial crash and ensuing and enduring recession It was scarcely succeeding prior to this with high entrenched rates of unemployment, frequent recessions/booms and busts and unsustainable property bubbles and deregulated unstable speculative aka casino banking activity
Time for a change
This is basically right, but a few comments.HolyInsurgent , 8 Jun 2013 17:221. Neoliberalism cannot be pinned on one party alone. It was accepted by the Thatcher government, but no Prime Minister since has seriously challenged it.
2. Neoliberalism is logically contrary to conservative values. Either there are certain moral imperatives so important that it is worth wasting money over them, or there are not. No wonder that Tories are torn in two, not to mention Labour politicians who also try to combine neoliberalism and moral principle.
3. Saying "even Adam Smith" is understandable but unfair. His work was rather enlightened in the context of mercantilism, and of course the Wealth of Nations was not his only book. Others will know his work better than me, but I think he dwells rather strongly on problems of persistent poverty.
4. The political and redistributive functions of nations are indeed damaged by neolib, but I don't think there is any realistic way of getting that power back without applying capital controls. If we apply capital controls, all hell breaks loose.
5. Ergo, we are stuck with a situation where neolib is killing democracy, distributive justice and conservative moral values, but there is nothing we can do about it without pulling the plug altogether and unleashing a sharp drop in wealth and 1930s nationalistic havoc. A bit of a tragedy, indeed.
someoneionceknew -> colonelraeburn , 8 Jun 2013 17:18Deborah Orr: The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt.
I strongly believe that people are not being told the full story. Like the NSA surveillance revelation, the effects will not be pretty when the facts are known. No country needs the IMF. Any national government with its own national currency sovereignty can pay its own debts within its own country with its own currency. International borrowing in foreign markets is the biggest myth since religion. But since neoliberalism and its inherent myths have been swallowed whole for so long, we are still at the stage where the child points and laughs at the nude emperor. The fallout from the revelation and remedy is to follow.
The problem with the Eurozone is not that the Euro is the "national" currency. Control of the Euro resides with the European Central Bank, not the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, IMF). The European Central Bank, as sole controller of the Euro (the "national" currency), can issue funds to constituent Eurozone states to the extent necessary. I challenge anyone to demonstrate how any central bank does not have power over its own currency!
The mythology surrounding deficits and national debt is a religion that the world is in desperate need of debunking. Like religion, the mythology is used as a means of power and entrenchment of privilege for the Ruling Caste, not the plebs (lesser mortals).
@colonelraeburn - Excuse me? Private bank credit caused the housing price inflation.MickGJ -> DavidPavett , 8 Jun 2013 17:16Politicians were complicit in deregulating and appointing non-regulators but they didn't make the loans.
katiewm -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 16:46Gray wrote this in the Guardian in 2007:@DavidPavett - Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? There are certainly no leads on this in the link given to "the philosopher" John Gray
This doesn't seem to support Orrś assertion that he is calling for a structural adjustment, rather the opposite. I'ḿ not really familiar with Grayś work but he seems to be rather against the universal imposition of any system, new or old.Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale
@CaptainGrey - Capitalism is not an undifferentiated mass. Late-stage neoliberal hypercapitalism as practiced in the US and increasingly in the UK is a very different beast than the traditional European capitalist social democracy or the Nordic model, which have been shown to work relatively well over time. In fact, neoliberal capitalism - the sort Orr is talking about here - is marked by increasing decline both in the state and in the economy, as inequality in wealth distribution creates a society of beggars and kings instead of spenders and savers. The gains achieved through carefully regulated capitalism won't stick around in the free-for-all conditions preferred by those whose ideology demands the sell-off of the state.jazzdrum -> PeterWoking , 8 Jun 2013 16:16@PeterWoking - For some parts of the world , yes they are more affluent now , but a huge part of the globe is still without food and water .I think de regulation of the financial sector has caused a huge amount of damage to the world all round and to be honest, i expect more of the same as the Bankers are still in control.
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Oct 13, 2018 | off-guardian.org
The "special relationship" between the United States and the United Kingdom is often assumed to be one where the once-great, sophisticated Brits are subordinate to the upstart, uncouth Yanks.
Iconic of this assumption is the mocking of former prime minister Tony Blair as George W. Bush's "poodle" for his riding shotgun on the ill-advised American stagecoach blundering into Iraq in 2003. Blair was in good practice, having served as Bill Clinton's dogsbody in the no less criminal NATO aggression against Serbia over Kosovo in 1999.
On the surface, the UK may seem just one more vassal state on par with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and so many other useless so-called allies . We control their intelligence services, their military commands, their think tanks, and much of their media. We can sink their financial systems and economies at will. Emblematic is German Chancellor Angela Merkel's impotent ire at discovering the Obama administration had listened in on her cell phone, about which she – did precisely nothing. Global hegemony means never having to say you're sorry.
These countries know on which end of the leash they are: the one attached to the collar around their necks. The hand unmistakably is in Washington. These semi-sovereign countries answer to the US with the same servility as member states of the Warsaw Pact once heeded the USSR's Politburo. (Sometimes more. Communist Romania, though then a member of the Warsaw Pact refused to participate in the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or even allow Soviet or other Pact forces to cross its territory.
By contrast, during NATO's 1999 assault on Serbia, Bucharest allowed NATO military aircraft access to its airspace, even though not yet a member of that alliance and despite most Romanians' opposition to the campaign.)
But the widespread perception of Britain as just another satellite may be misleading.
To start with, there are some relationships where it seems the US is the vassal dancing to the tune of the foreign capital, not the other way around. Israel is the unchallenged champion in this weight class, with Saudi Arabia a runner up. The alliance between Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) – the ultimate Washington "power couple" – to get the Trump administration to destroy Iran for them has American politicos listening for instructions with all the rapt attention of the terrier Nipper on the RCA Victor logo . (Or did, until the recent disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Whether this portends a real shift in American attitudes toward Riyadh remains questionable . Saudi cash still speaks loudly and will continue to do so whether or not MbS stays in charge.)
Specifics of the peculiar US-UK relationship stem from the period of flux at the end of World War II. The United States emerged from the war in a commanding position economically and financially, eclipsing Britannia's declining empire that simply no longer had the resources to play the leading role. That didn't mean, however, that London trusted the Americans' ability to manage things without their astute guidance. As Tony Judt describes in Postwar , the British attitude of " superiority towards the country that had displaced them at the imperial apex " was "nicely captured" in a scribble during negotiations regarding the UK's postwar loan:
In Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes:
"It's true they have the moneybags
But we have all the brains."Even in its diminished condition London found it could punch well above its weight by exerting its influence on its stronger but (it was confident) dumber cousins across the Pond. It helped that as the Cold War unfolded following former Prime Minister Winston Churchill's 1946 Iron Curtain speech there were very close ties between sister agencies like MI6 (founded 1909) and the newer wartime OSS (1942), then the CIA (1947); likewise the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, 1919) and the National Security Administration (NSA, 1952). Comparable sister agencies – perhaps more properly termed daughters of their UK mothers – were set up in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This became the so-called "Five Eyes" of the tight Anglosphere spook community, infamous for spying on each others' citizens to avoid pesky legal prohibitions on domestic surveillance .
Despite not having two farthings to rub together, impoverished Britain – where wartime rationing wasn't fully ended until 1954 – had a prime seat at the table fashioning the world's postwar financial structure. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference was largely an Anglo-American affair , of which the aforementioned Lord John Maynard Keynes was a prominent architect along with Harry Dexter White, Special Assistant to the US Secretary of the Treasury and Soviet agent.
American and British agendas also dovetailed in the Middle East. While the US didn't have much of a presence in the region before the 1945 meeting between US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Saudi King ibn Saud, founder of the third and current ( and hopefully last ) Saudi state – and didn't assume a dominant role until the humiliation inflicted on Britain, France, and Israel by President Dwight Eisenhower during the 1956 Suez Crisis – London has long considered much of the region within its sphere of influence. After World War I under the Sykes-Picot agreement with France , the UK had expanded her holdings on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, including taking a decisive role in consolidating Saudi Arabia under ibn Saud. While in the 1950s the US largely stepped into Britain's role managing the "East of Suez," the former suzerain was by no means dealt out. The UK was a founding member with the US of the now-defunct Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in 1955.
CENTO – like NATO and their one-time eastern counterpart, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) – was designed as a counter to the USSR. But in the case of Britain, the history of hostility to Russia under tsar or commissar alike has much deeper and longer roots, going back at least to the Crimean War in the 1850s . The reasons for the longstanding British vendetta against Russia are not entirely clear and seem to have disparate roots: the desire to ensure that no one power is dominant on the European mainland (directed first against France, then Russia, then Germany, then the USSR and again Russia); maintaining supremacy on the seas by denying Russia warm-waters ports, above all the Dardanelles; and making sure territories of a dissolving Ottoman empire would be taken under the wing of London, not Saint Petersburg. As described by Andrew Lambert , professor of naval history at King's College London, the Crimean War still echoes today :
"In the 1840s, 1850s, Britain and America are not the chief rivals; it's Britain and Russia. Britain and Russia are rivals for world power, and Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, which is much larger than modern Turkey -- it includes modern Romania, Bulgaria, parts of Serbia, and also Egypt and Arabia -- is a declining empire. But it's the bulwark between Russia, which is advancing south and west, and Britain, which is advancing east and is looking to open its connections up through the Mediterranean into its empire in India and the Pacific. And it's really about who is running Turkey. Is it going to be a Russian satellite, a bit like the Eastern Bloc was in the Cold War, or is it going to be a British satellite, really run by British capital, a market for British goods? And the Crimean War is going to be the fulcrum for this cold war to actually go hot for a couple of years, and Sevastopol is going to be the fulcrum for that fighting."
Control of the Middle East – and opposing the Russians – became a British obsession, first to sustain the lifeline to India, the Jewel in the Crown of the empire, then for control of petroleum, the life's blood of modern economies. In the context of the 19th and early 20th century Great Game of empire, that was understandable. Much later, similar considerations might even support Jimmy Carter's taking up much the same position, declaring in 1980 that "outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." The USSR was then a superpower and we were dependent on energy from the Gulf region.
But what's our reason for maintaining that posture almost four decades later when the Soviet Union is gone and the US doesn't need Middle Eastern oil? There are no reasonable national interests, only corporate interests and those of the Arab monarchies we laughably claim as allies. Add to that the bureaucracies and habits of mind that link the US and UK establishments, including their intelligence and financial components.
In view of all the foregoing, what then would policymakers in the United Kingdom think about an aspirant to the American presidency who not only disparages the value of existing alliances – without which Britain is a bit player – but openly pledges to improve relations with Moscow ? To what lengths would they go to stop him?
Say 'hello' to Russiagate!
One can argue whether or not the phony claim of the Trump campaign's "collusion" with Moscow was hatched in London or whether the British just lent some " hands across the water " to an effort concocted by the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, the Clinton Foundation, and their collaborators at Fusion GPS and inside the Obama administration. Either way, it's clear that while evidence of Russian connection is nonexistent that of British agencies is unmistakable, as is the UK's hand in a sustained campaign of demonization and isolation to sink any possible rapprochement between the US and Russia .
As for Russiagate itself, just try to find anyone involved who's actually Russian. The only basis for the widespread assumption that any material in the Dirty Dossier that underlies the whole operation originated with Russia is the claim of Christopher Steele , the British "ex" spy who wrote it, evidently in collaboration with people at the US State Department and Fusion GPS. (The notion that Steele, who hadn't been in Russia for years, would have Kremlin personal contacts is absurd. How chummy are the heads of the American section of Chinese or Russian intelligence with White House staff?)
While there are no obvious Russians in Russiagate, there's no shortage of Brits. These include (details at the link) :
Andrew Wood , a former British ambassador to Russia Stefan Halper , a dual US-UK citizen. Ex-MI6 Director Richard Dearlove . Robert Hannigan , former director of GCHQ; there is reason to think surveillance of Trump was conducted by GCHQ as well as by US agencies under FISA warrants. Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ soon after the British government denied the agency had engaged in such spying. Alexander Downer , Australian diplomat (well, not British but remember the Five Eyes!). Joseph Mifsud , Maltese academic and suspected British agent.At present, the full role played by those listed above is not known. Release of unredacted FISA warrant requests by the Justice Department, which President Trump ordered weeks ago, would shed light on a number of details. Implementation of that order was derailed after a request by – no surprise – British Prime Minister Theresa May . Was she seeking to conceal Russian perfidy, or her own underlings'?
It would be bad enough if Russiagate were the sum of British meddling in American affairs with the aim of torpedoing relations with Moscow. (And to be fair, it wasn't just the UK and Australia. Also implicated are Estonia, Israel, and Ukraine .) But there is also reason to suspect the same motive in false accusations against Russia with respect to the supposed Novichok poisonings in England has a connection to Russiagate via a business associate of Steele's, one Pablo Miller , Sergei Skripal's MI6 recruiter . (So if it turns out there is any Russian connection to the dossier, it could be from Skripal or another dubious expat source, not from the Russian government.) Skripal and his daughter Yulia have disappeared in British custody. Moscow flatly accuses MI6 of poisoning them as a false flag to blame it on Russia.
A similar pattern can be seen with claims of chemical weapons use in Syria : "We have irrefutable evidence that the special services of a state which is in the forefront of the Russophobic campaign had a hand in the staging" of a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018. Ambassador Aleksandr Yakovenko pointed to the so-called White Helmets, which is closely associated with al-Qaeda elements and considered by some their PR arm: "I am naming them because they have done things like this before. They are famous for staging attacks in Syria and they receive UK money." Moscow warned for weeks before the now-postponed Syrian government offensive in Idlib that the same ruse was being prepared again with direct British intelligence involvement, even having prepared in advance a video showing victims of an attack that had not yet occurred.
The campaign to demonize Russia shifted into high gear recently with the UK, together with the US and the Netherlands, accusing Russian military intelligence of a smorgasbord of cyberattacks against the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and other sports organizations, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Dutch investigation into the downing of MH-17 over Ukraine, and a Swiss lab involved with the Skripal case, plus assorted election interference. In case anyone didn't get the point, British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson declared : "This is not the actions of a great power. This is the actions of a pariah state, and we will continue working with allies to isolate them."
To the extent that the goal of Williamson and his ilk is to ensure isolation and further threats against Russia, it's been a smashing success. More sanctions are on the way . The UK is sending additional troops to the Arctic to counter Russian "aggression." The US threatens to use naval power to block Russian energy exports and to strike Russian weapons disputed under a treaty governing intermediate range nuclear forces. What could possibly go wrong?
In sum, we are seeing a massive, coordinated hybrid campaign of psy-ops and political warfare conducted not by Russia but against Russia, concocted by the UK and its Deep State collaborators in the United States. But it's not only aimed at Russia, it's an attack on the United States by the government of a foreign country that's supposed to be one of our closest allies, a country with which we share many venerable traditions of language, law, and culture.
But for far too long, largely for reasons of historical inertia and elite corruption, we've allowed that government to exercise undue influence on our global policies in a manner not conducive to our own national interests. Now that government, employing every foul deception that earned it the moniker Perfidious Albion , seeks to embroil us in a quarrel with the only country on the planet that can destroy us if things get out of control.
This must stop. A thorough reappraisal of our "special relationship" with the United Kingdom and exposure of its activities to the detriment of the US is imperative.
James George Jatras is an analyst, former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate GOP leadership.
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
sanda1scuptorNYC , 30 Aug 2012 07:36Howard Zinn said, in a speech given shortly after the 2008 Presidential election, "If you don't know history, it's like you were born yesterday. The government can tell you anything." (Speech was played on DemocracyNow www.democracynow.org about Jan. 4, 2009 and is archived, free on the website.)sigil , 30 Aug 2012 05:49Being older (18 on my last Leap Year birthday - 72), I recall the NYTimes and CIA have had relationship with, and was caught having "planted CIA workers" as NYTimes writers. Within my adult lifetime, in fact.
Brusselsexpats , 30 Aug 2012 05:49This is what the CIA reflexively does: insists that [...] it is an "intelligence matter".
In a sense the CIA is always going to be right on this one - "Central Intelligence Agency" - but only as a matter of nomenclature, rather than of any other dictionary definition of the word "intelligence".
Actually the collusion between the CIA and big business is far more damaging. The first US company I worked for in Brussels (it was my first job) was constantly being targeted by the US media for having connections to corrupt South American and Third World regimes. On what seemed like an almost monthly basis our personnel department would send round memos saying that we were strictly forbidden to talk to journalists about the latest exposé.kcameron , 30 Aug 2012 05:26It was great fun - even the telex operators knew who the spies were.
The line "'The optics aren't what they look like,' is truly an instant classic. It reminds me of one of my favorite Yogi Berra quotes (which, unlike many attributed to him, is real, I think). Yogi once said about a restaurant in New York "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Perhaps Yogi should become an editor for the Times.AmityAmity , 30 Aug 2012 04:55British readers will no doubt be shocked -- shocked! -- to learn of cozy relations between a major news organization and a national intelligence agency.MiltonWiltmellow , 30 Aug 2012 02:40... ... ...
"'I know the circumstances, and if you knew everything that's going on, you'd know it's much ado about nothing,' Baquet said. 'I can't go into in detail. But I'm confident after talking to Mark that it's much ado about nothing.'
"'The optics aren't what they look like,' he went on. 'I've talked to Mark, I know the circumstance, and given what I know, it's much ado about nothing.'"
How can you have a Party if you don't have Party elites?
And how can a self-respecting member of the Party claim their individual status within the Party without secret knowledge designed to identify one another as members of the Party elite?
[Proles are] natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals ... Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals the Party was trying to achieve. ... The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering -- a world of of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons -- a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting -- 300 million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes... [ 1984 ,pp 73-74]
It makes no difference if an imagined socialist England, a collapsing Roman city-state empire, an actual Soviet Union, or a modern American oligarchy.
Party members thrive while those wretched proles flail in confused and hungry desperation for something authentic (like a George Bush) or even simply reassuring (like a Barack Obama.)
Non-elite members of the Party -- functionaries -- mistake their "secret" knowledge as professional courtesy rather than as perquisite and status marker. (I don't suppose it's a secret to anyone that the US CIA regularly plants stories in the NYTimes and elsewhere... unless you weren't paying attention in the strident disinfo campaign prior to the Iraq invasion.)
Manzetti has "no bad intent" because he is loyal to the Party.
Like all loyal (and very well compensated) Party members, he would never do anything as subversive as reveal Party secrets.
People can be detained for almost any reason these days!
After all, what's the future of a Party that lacks effective enforcement?
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Nov 14, 2017 | www.theguardian.com
As even its harshest critics concede, neoliberalism is hard to pin down. In broad terms, it denotes a preference for markets over government, economic incentives over cultural norms, and private entrepreneurship over collective action. It has been used to describe a wide range of phenomena – from Augusto Pinochet to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, from the Clinton Democrats and the UK's New Labour to the economic opening in China and the reform of the welfare state in Sweden.The term is used as a catchall for anything that smacks of deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation or fiscal austerity. Today it is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas and practices that have produced growing economic insecurity and inequality, led to the loss of our political values and ideals, and even precipitated our current populist backlash .
We live in the age of neoliberalism, apparently. But who are neoliberalism's adherents and disseminators – the neoliberals themselves? Oddly, you have to go back a long time to find anyone explicitly embracing neoliberalism. In 1982, Charles Peters, the longtime editor of the political magazine Washington Monthly, published an essay titled A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto . It makes for interesting reading 35 years later, since the neoliberalism it describes bears little resemblance to today's target of derision. The politicians Peters names as exemplifying the movement are not the likes of Thatcher and Reagan, but rather liberals – in the US sense of the word – who have become disillusioned with unions and big government and dropped their prejudices against markets and the military.
The use of the term "neoliberal" exploded in the 1990s, when it became closely associated with two developments, neither of which Peters's article had mentioned. One of these was financial deregulation, which would culminate in the 2008 financial crash and in the still-lingering euro debacle . The second was economic globalisation, which accelerated thanks to free flows of finance and to a new, more ambitious type of trade agreement. Financialisation and globalisation have become the most overt manifestations of neoliberalism in today's world.
That neoliberalism is a slippery, shifting concept, with no explicit lobby of defenders, does not mean that it is irrelevant or unreal. Who can deny that the world has experienced a decisive shift toward markets from the 1980s on? Or that centre-left politicians – Democrats in the US, socialists and social democrats in Europe – enthusiastically adopted some of the central creeds of Thatcherism and Reaganism, such as deregulation, privatisation, financial liberalisation and individual enterprise? Much of our contemporary policy discussion remains infused with principles supposedly grounded in the concept of homo economicus , the perfectly rational human being, found in many economic theories, who always pursues his own self-interest.
But the looseness of the term neoliberalism also means that criticism of it often misses the mark. There is nothing wrong with markets, private entrepreneurship or incentives – when deployed appropriately. Their creative use lies behind the most significant economic achievements of our time. As we heap scorn on neoliberalism, we risk throwing out some of neoliberalism's useful ideas.
The real trouble is that mainstream economics shades too easily into ideology, constraining the choices that we appear to have and providing cookie-cutter solutions. A proper understanding of the economics that lie behind neoliberalism would allow us to identify – and to reject – ideology when it masquerades as economic science. Most importantly, it would help us to develop the institutional imagination we badly need to redesign capitalism for the 21st century.
N eoliberalism is typically understood as being based on key tenets of mainstream economic science. To see those tenets without the ideology, consider this thought experiment. A well-known and highly regarded economist lands in a country he has never visited and knows nothing about. He is brought to a meeting with the country's leading policymakers. "Our country is in trouble," they tell him. "The economy is stagnant, investment is low, and there is no growth in sight." They turn to him expectantly: "Please tell us what we should do to make our economy grow."
The economist pleads ignorance and explains that he knows too little about the country to make any recommendations. He would need to study the history of the economy, to analyse the statistics, and to travel around the country before he could say anything.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair and Bill Clinton: centre-left politicians who enthusiastically adopted some of the central creeds of Thatcherism and Reaganism. Photograph: ReutersBut his hosts are insistent. "We understand your reticence, and we wish you had the time for all that," they tell him. "But isn't economics a science, and aren't you one of its most distinguished practitioners? Even though you do not know much about our economy, surely there are some general theories and prescriptions you can share with us to guide our economic policies and reforms."
The economist is now in a bind. He does not want to emulate those economic gurus he has long criticised for peddling their favourite policy advice. But he feels challenged by the question. Are there universal truths in economics? Can he say anything valid or useful?
So he begins. The efficiency with which an economy's resources are allocated is a critical determinant of the economy's performance, he says. Efficiency, in turn, requires aligning the incentives of households and businesses with social costs and benefits. The incentives faced by entrepreneurs, investors and producers are particularly important when it comes to economic growth. Growth needs a system of property rights and contract enforcement that will ensure those who invest can retain the returns on their investments. And the economy must be open to ideas and innovations from the rest of the world.
But economies can be derailed by macroeconomic instability, he goes on. Governments must therefore pursue a sound monetary policy , which means restricting the growth of liquidity to the increase in nominal money demand at reasonable inflation. They must ensure fiscal sustainability, so that the increase in public debt does not outpace national income. And they must carry out prudential regulation of banks and other financial institutions to prevent the financial system from taking excessive risk.
Now he is warming to his task. Economics is not just about efficiency and growth, he adds. Economic principles also carry over to equity and social policy. Economics has little to say about how much redistribution a society should seek. But it does tell us that the tax base should be as broad as possible, and that social programmes should be designed in a way that does not encourage workers to drop out of the labour market.
By the time the economist stops, it appears as if he has laid out a fully fledged neoliberal agenda. A critic in the audience will have heard all the code words: efficiency, incentives, property rights, sound money, fiscal prudence. And yet the universal principles that the economist describes are in fact quite open-ended. They presume a capitalist economy – one in which investment decisions are made by private individuals and firms – but not much beyond that. They allow for – indeed, they require – a surprising variety of institutional arrangements.
So has the economist just delivered a neoliberal screed? We would be mistaken to think so, and our mistake would consist of associating each abstract term – incentives, property rights, sound money – with a particular institutional counterpart. And therein lies the central conceit, and the fatal flaw, of neoliberalism: the belief that first-order economic principles map on to a unique set of policies, approximated by a Thatcher/Reagan-style agenda.
Consider property rights. They matter insofar as they allocate returns on investments. An optimal system would distribute property rights to those who would make the best use of an asset, and afford protection against those most likely to expropriate the returns. Property rights are good when they protect innovators from free riders, but they are bad when they protect them from competition. Depending on the context, a legal regime that provides the appropriate incentives can look quite different from the standard US-style regime of private property rights.
This may seem like a semantic point with little practical import; but China's phenomenal economic success is largely due to its orthodoxy-defying institutional tinkering. China turned to markets, but did not copy western practices in property rights. Its reforms produced market-based incentives through a series of unusual institutional arrangements that were better adapted to the local context. Rather than move directly from state to private ownership, for example, which would have been stymied by the weakness of the prevailing legal structures, the country relied on mixed forms of ownership that provided more effective property rights for entrepreneurs in practice. Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs), which spearheaded Chinese economic growth during the 1980s, were collectives owned and controlled by local governments. Even though TVEs were publicly owned, entrepreneurs received the protection they needed against expropriation. Local governments had a direct stake in the profits of the firms, and hence did not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
China relied on a range of such innovations, each delivering the economist's higher-order economic principles in unfamiliar institutional arrangements. For instance, it shielded its large state sector from global competition, establishing special economic zones where foreign firms could operate with different rules than in the rest of the economy. In view of such departures from orthodox blueprints, describing China's economic reforms as neoliberal – as critics are inclined to do – distorts more than it reveals. If we are to call this neoliberalism, we must surely look more kindly on the ideas behind the most dramatic poverty reduction in history.
One might protest that China's institutional innovations were purely transitional. Perhaps it will have to converge on western-style institutions to sustain its economic progress. But this common line of thinking overlooks the diversity of capitalist arrangements that still prevails among advanced economies, despite the considerable homogenisation of our policy discourse.
What, after all, are western institutions? The size of the public sector in OECD countries varies, from a third of the economy in Korea to nearly 60% in Finland. In Iceland, 86% of workers are members of a trade union; the comparable number in Switzerland is just 16%. In the US, firms can fire workers almost at will; French labour laws have historically required employers to jump through many hoops first. Stock markets have grown to a total value of nearly one-and-a-half times GDP in the US; in Germany, they are only a third as large, equivalent to just 50% of GDP.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'China turned to markets, but did not copy western practices ... ' Photograph: AFP/GettyThe idea that any one of these models of taxation, labour relations or financial organisation is inherently superior to the others is belied by the varying economic fortunes that each of these economies have experienced over recent decades. The US has gone through successive periods of angst in which its economic institutions were judged inferior to those in Germany, Japan, China, and now possibly Germany again. Certainly, comparable levels of wealth and productivity can be produced under very different models of capitalism. We might even go a step further: today's prevailing models probably come nowhere near exhausting the range of what might be possible, and desirable, in the future.
The visiting economist in our thought experiment knows all this, and recognises that the principles he has enunciated need to be filled in with institutional detail before they become operational. Property rights? Yes, but how? Sound money? Of course, but how? It would perhaps be easier to criticise his list of principles for being vacuous than to denounce it as a neoliberal screed.
Still, these principles are not entirely content-free. China, and indeed all countries that managed to develop rapidly, demonstrate the utility of those principles once they are properly adapted to local context. Conversely, too many economies have been driven to ruin courtesy of political leaders who chose to violate them. We need look no further than Latin American populists or eastern European communist regimes to appreciate the practical significance of sound money, fiscal sustainability and private incentives.
O f course, economics goes beyond a list of abstract, largely common-sense principles. Much of the work of economists consists of developing stylised models of how economies work and then confronting those models with evidence. Economists tend to think of what they do as progressively refining their understanding of the world: their models are supposed to get better and better as they are tested and revised over time. But progress in economics happens differently.
Economists study a social reality that is unlike the physical universe. It is completely manmade, highly malleable and operates according to different rules across time and space. Economics advances not by settling on the right model or theory to answer such questions, but by improving our understanding of the diversity of causal relationships. Neoliberalism and its customary remedies – always more markets, always less government – are in fact a perversion of mainstream economics. Good economists know that the correct answer to any question in economics is: it depends.
Does an increase in the minimum wage depress employment? Yes, if the labour market is really competitive and employers have no control over the wage they must pay to attract workers; but not necessarily otherwise. Does trade liberalisation increase economic growth? Yes, if it increases the profitability of industries where the bulk of investment and innovation takes place; but not otherwise. Does more government spending increase employment? Yes, if there is slack in the economy and wages do not rise; but not otherwise. Does monopoly harm innovation? Yes and no, depending on a whole host of market circumstances.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'Today [neoliberalism] is routinely reviled as a shorthand for the ideas that have produced growing economic inequality and precipitated our current populist backlash' Trump signing an order to take the US out of the TPP trade pact. Photograph: AFP/GettyIn economics, new models rarely supplant older models. The basic competitive-markets model dating back to Adam Smith has been modified over time by the inclusion, in rough historical order, of monopoly, externalities, scale economies, incomplete and asymmetric information, irrational behaviour and many other real-world features. But the older models remain as useful as ever. Understanding how real markets operate necessitates using different lenses at different times.
Perhaps maps offer the best analogy. Just like economic models, maps are highly stylised representations of reality . They are useful precisely because they abstract from many real-world details that would get in the way. But abstraction also implies that we need a different map depending on the nature of our journey. If we are travelling by bike, we need a map of bike trails. If we are to go on foot, we need a map of footpaths. If a new subway is constructed, we will need a subway map – but we wouldn't throw out the older maps.
Economists tend to be very good at making maps, but not good enough at choosing the one most suited to the task at hand. When confronted with policy questions of the type our visiting economist faces, too many of them resort to "benchmark" models that favour the laissez-faire approach. Kneejerk solutions and hubris replace the richness and humility of the discussion in the seminar room. John Maynard Keynes once defined economics as the "science of thinking in terms of models, joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant". Economists typically have trouble with the "art" part.
This, too, can be illustrated with a parable. A journalist calls an economics professor for his view on whether free trade is a good idea. The professor responds enthusiastically in the affirmative. The journalist then goes undercover as a student in the professor's advanced graduate seminar on international trade. He poses the same question: is free trade good? This time the professor is stymied. "What do you mean by 'good'?" he responds. "And good for whom?" The professor then launches into an extensive exegesis that will ultimately culminate in a heavily hedged statement: "So if the long list of conditions I have just described are satisfied, and assuming we can tax the beneficiaries to compensate the losers, freer trade has the potential to increase everyone's wellbeing." If he is in an expansive mood, the professor might add that the effect of free trade on an economy's longterm growth rate is not clear either, and would depend on an altogether different set of requirements.
This professor is rather different from the one the journalist encountered previously. On the record, he exudes self-confidence, not reticence, about the appropriate policy. There is one and only one model, at least as far as the public conversation is concerned, and there is a single correct answer, regardless of context. Strangely, the professor deems the knowledge that he imparts to his advanced students to be inappropriate (or dangerous) for the general public. Why?
The roots of such behaviour lie deep in the culture of the economics profession. But one important motive is the zeal to display the profession's crown jewels – market efficiency, the invisible hand, comparative advantage – in untarnished form, and to shield them from attack by self-interested barbarians, namely the protectionists . Unfortunately, these economists typically ignore the barbarians on the other side of the issue – financiers and multinational corporations whose motives are no purer and who are all too ready to hijack these ideas for their own benefit.
As a result, economists' contributions to public debate are often biased in one direction, in favour of more trade, more finance and less government. That is why economists have developed a reputation as cheerleaders for neoliberalism, even if mainstream economics is very far from a paean to laissez-faire. The economists who let their enthusiasm for free markets run wild are in fact not being true to their own discipline.
H ow then should we think about globalisation in order to liberate it from the grip of neoliberal practices? We must begin by understanding the positive potential of global markets. Access to world markets in goods, technologies and capital has played an important role in virtually all of the economic miracles of our time. China is the most recent and powerful reminder of this historical truth, but it is not the only case. Before China, similar miracles were performed by South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and a few non-Asian countries such as Mauritius . All of these countries embraced globalisation rather than turn their backs on it, and they benefited handsomely.
Defenders of the existing economic order will quickly point to these examples when globalisation comes into question. What they will fail to say is that almost all of these countries joined the world economy by violating neoliberal strictures. South Korea and Taiwan, for instance, heavily subsidised their exporters, the former through the financial system and the latter through tax incentives. All of them eventually removed most of their import restrictions, long after economic growth had taken off.
But none, with the sole exception of Chile in the 1980s under Pinochet, followed the neoliberal recommendation of a rapid opening-up to imports. Chile's neoliberal experiment eventually produced the worst economic crisis in all of Latin America. While the details differ across countries, in all cases governments played an active role in restructuring the economy and buffering it against a volatile external environment. Industrial policies, restrictions on capital flows and currency controls – all prohibited in the neoliberal playbook – were rampant.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protest against Nafta in Mexico City in 2008: since the reforms of the mid-90s, the country's economy has underperformed. Photograph: EPABy contrast, countries that stuck closest to the neoliberal model of globalisation were sorely disappointed. Mexico provides a particularly sad example. Following a series of macroeconomic crises in the mid-1990s, Mexico embraced macroeconomic orthodoxy, extensively liberalised its economy, freed up the financial system, sharply reduced import restrictions and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). These policies did produce macroeconomic stability and a significant rise in foreign trade and internal investment. But where it counts – in overall productivity and economic growth – the experiment failed . Since undertaking the reforms, overall productivity in Mexico has stagnated, and the economy has underperformed even by the undemanding standards of Latin America.
These outcomes are not a surprise from the perspective of sound economics. They are yet another manifestation of the need for economic policies to be attuned to the failures to which markets are prone, and to be tailored to the specific circumstances of each country. No single blueprint fits all.
A s Peters's 1982 manifesto attests, the meaning of neoliberalism has changed considerably over time as the label has acquired harder-line connotations with respect to deregulation, financialisation and globalisation. But there is one thread that connects all versions of neoliberalism, and that is the emphasis on economic growth . Peters wrote in 1982 that the emphasis was warranted because growth is essential to all our social and political ends – community, democracy, prosperity. Entrepreneurship, private investment and removing obstacles that stand in the way (such as excessive regulation) were all instruments for achieving economic growth. If a similar neoliberal manifesto were penned today, it would no doubt make the same point.
ss="rich-link"> Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world Read more
Critics often point out that this emphasis on economics debases and sacrifices other important values such as equality, social inclusion, democratic deliberation and justice. Those political and social objectives obviously matter enormously, and in some contexts they matter the most. They cannot always, or even often, be achieved by means of technocratic economic policies; politics must play a central role.
Still, neoliberals are not wrong when they argue that our most cherished ideals are more likely to be attained when our economy is vibrant, strong and growing. Where they are wrong is in believing that there is a unique and universal recipe for improving economic performance, to which they have access. The fatal flaw of neoliberalism is that it does not even get the economics right. It must be rejected on its own terms for the simple reason that it is bad economics.
A version of this article first appeared in Boston Review
Main illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Proportional representation is definitely the way to go. I am sick to death of the born-to-rule mentality of the major parties, and how they change the rules to benefit themselves and to exclude others.Bradtheunveiler -> BrianLC , 30 Oct 2018 22:36Minority government? There is no such thing - there is only 'government', and it is supposed to involve all members of parliament in the decision-making process. 'Majority' governments are an anathema to good governance. Every time I hear the likes of Tony Abbott claim they have a mandate to implement ALL their policies, even though they only receive around 35% of the primary vote, I want to throw something at the TV.
Bugger them! Make them work for a living - and make them consider ALL views, not just the ones from their own party.
Win the ALP will next election. By a huge majority too. Looking forward to neg gearing and CGT discount reform in particular.Onesimus_Tim -> StuartJJ , 30 Oct 2018 22:35Yes, its far better than the "first past the post" systems of the UK and the US where the number of votes split between two almost identical candidates can lead to a far different candidate winning with only a little over a third of the total vote.Preferences are an extremely good feature of our voting system
Preferential voting also makes it more possible for the major party duopoly being overturned, allowing people to vote for a good independent without taking the risk of helping a despised major party candidate from winning by default.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Territorian -> Hoskins50 , 30 Oct 2018 23:49
"The problem with representative democracy is that it represents the special interest groups far more than it represents the citizenry." You are spot on.DukeofWoyWoy , 30 Oct 2018 23:48Nigel Scullion: Minister for Handing out buckets of money to NT Country Liberal Party supporters. Scullion just happened to be a professional fisher before entering parliament.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/31/indigenous-advancement-funding-redirected-to-cattlemen-and-fishing-groupsBarnaby Joyce: Minister for Agriculture while his Department was too scared to report disgusting conditions in the live sheep export trade.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/31/agriculture-minister-promises-to-fix-live-export-regulation-after-damning-reportWhat a logical and stirring argument you put forward Richard Denniss, and a large majority of the electorate would have to agree.Hoskins50 , 30 Oct 2018 23:38
However there is also a large number of people in the electorate that cannot appear to rise from their nightly slumber without wearing their Blue, Red, Green or Orange tinted glasses before facing the new day.
And because of this, and preferential voting, sneaking in the background is a plethora of the wild mindless sub creatures called politicians who demand their rights to sit in the big white building on Canberra;s Capital Hill, just waiting to spoil not only the electorate's party but also known to prostitute the country's governance to their own advantage.
Richard, we desperately need a follow up stirring article on how to overcome this black menace to our country, for the sake of our country.If you think the public has an appetite for more bureaucrats, more rules and regulations to micromanage people's lives and even more political wheeling and dealing in Canberra, you should get out more.diggerdigger , 30 Oct 2018 22:12That the coalition government is on the slide is of no long term consequence. We'll get a Labor government next year and in a few years another coalition government and so on.
What is of long term significance is the loss of public trust in pretty much all of the institutions - including goverment and the various government agencies that would be more powerful under your scenario.
The problem with representative democracy is that it represents the special interest groups far more than it represents the citizenry. Perhaps the solution lies in more direct democracy.
The same sex marriage plebiscite demonstrated that we commoners can deliberate on a sensitive issue, and in doing so behave far better than our elected representatives in Parliament. And can make a sensible and progressive decision that our elected representatives could not - both coalition and Labor MPs had opposed same sex marriage when it was raised in th e Parliament.
The internet provides a platform for direct decision making by the citizenry. Perhaps we should try that instead of what you are suggesting.
It's been clear for years that proportional representation has progressively meant death to effective government, and that it forces major parties policy development further to the political fringes to appeal to the fruit loops on the periphery of their respective demographics. Time for a return to simple preferential voting (a-la-house of Reps) in the senate, and an overhaul of what's considered a valid ballot - if you want to only rank 1, 2, 3 or all candidates it should be entirely your choice.Hung parliaments, with diametrically opposed clumps of "independents" jointly holding the balance of power can only ever deliver legislative stasis and constant political turmoil (as we have experienced since 2010 and Europe and the US have suffered for the last decade).
Oh for the good old days when one or the other of the major parties held a working majority in both houses, and policy was targeted at the 'sensible centre" of the Australian electorate. At worst, they only had to deal with a couple of sensible Democrats, and the odd lunatic fringe-ist like Harradine.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
RonGlaeston , 31 Oct 2018 04:56
Yes, yes! MMP!!Having spent many years in a New Zealand under a First Past the Post system and then Mixed Member Proportional, I am an enthusiastic supporter of proportional systems.
I find the Australian electoral system very mediocre. All those people who vote but really don't get represented. All those votes that just get mopped up by the major parties. I really can't understand why Australians have put up with such a poor system for so long.
Hettie7-> melbournesam 31 Oct 2018 00:45
Proportional representation makes the most sense. Each party gets the same percentage of seats in the parliament as it received votes in the election. That really is fair.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
RonRabbit99 , 31 Oct 2018 01:17
Nationalisation of essential services is required to put this country back on an even keel. It was a stupid idea by governments (of all persuasions) to sell off monopoly essential service assets. The neoliberal experiment has failed.Carlosthepossum , 31 Oct 2018 01:15'Neoliberalism is dead.'economicalternative -> Bewareofnazihippies , 31 Oct 2018 01:03
However, we cannot rest until it is buried and cremated.Beware: Just build a HUGE worker owned, democratically run (by workers) sector to compete against privately owned concerns. If workers are (democratically) involved in running and managing their own workplaces that will give plenty of competition for private concerns. Workers will be involved in the 'politics' and economics of their local area as part of work. They'll have more control over the technologies they want to use, how much profit they want to make or not, wages, investment, working conditions and all aspects of their concern. Workers would 'participate' more and be more involved in thinking about larger concerns. This would make a nation/region more democratic on the 'ground'. Not just reliant on 'representative' democracy/voting. You'd still need over-arching government(s) but people would have more direct control over their livelihoods and work conditions. Such a BIG sector would give (I'm talking about Health, Education, manufacturing etc - not 'bread shop', basket-weaving coops/social enterprises) private enterprise some REAL competition on prices and services. It would deliver democracy to masses of people, some control over wealth generation/economy and on a large enough scale CHANGE society in terms of social justice and politics.Nintiblue , 31 Oct 2018 01:03You don't need to go to State control or Private control of 'the economy'. Just the right kinds of structures.
Its not dead yet.Dunkey2830 , 31 Oct 2018 01:00Neoliberalism is like a cancer on a health democracy. If we'd treated it in its early magnifications (when the Librerals and far right old version of Labor), first started selling off public assets (that are then charged back to citizens to use at increasing price rates etc), we would have been fine.
But now the cancer is deep in democracy's lymph glads ( in many of our public services) and so needs radical prolonged treatment and some surgery to assure the country's thriving democracy survives.
First surgically remove the source: cease (vote out always) all right wing conservative nutters from ever gaining power, or media mogul influence of government. Most but not all hide in the Coalition.
Then, begin the reconstruction surgery to re-assert public assets and services. This is a temporary but life saving cost.
Then, monitor and manage, (educate) the citizens about this scourge on democracy.
CaligulaMcNutt -> CaptnGster , 31 Oct 2018 00:54The death of neoliberalism means we can finally have a national debate about the size and role of government, and the shape of the economy and society we want to build.
Neoliberalism is far from dead Richard - neoliberalism is deeply entrenched in mainstream thinking its corporate enriching magic works insidiously - mostly subliminally under cover of 'sensible' free market self clearing 'orthodox' economics.
You and many others from 'progressive' TAI almost daily, unwittingly play a role in reinforcing and entrenching neoliberal ideology in the community by framing macroeconomic analysis/commentary in neoliberal terms.
Your oft repeated call for 'budget balance' over the business cycle is such an example. Only fiscal deficits can build a prosperous productive nation in the absence of consistent external surpluses - no government can ever build and expand a nation without permanently injecting more funds into the non government sector than (through taxation etc) it withdraws.Both our major parties of government espouse neoliberal economic orthodoxy as if there is no alternative - and no one calls them out - not even the quasi progressive TAI.
DSGE based 'orthodox' economics provides the lifeblood to neoliberalism - the myth of tax collections funding expenditure provides plausible cover to constrain spending on citizen/social services - but when it comes to war/corporate subsidy spending, such constraints are immediately abandoned.
Hetereodox MMT exposes the lie of such DSGE myths - but faithful Ptolemaic 'progressives' refuse to investigate or debate such Copernican macroeconomic sacrilege.The recent TAI 'outlook' economic conference (proudly sponsored by 'The Australian'!! ) was a classic progressive 'fail'; loaded with orthodox 'experts' like Bowen and Keating spouting austerity inducing neoliberal orthodoxy - not one heterodox economist was invited to present the unwelcome, uncomfortable truth of sovereign nation macroeconomic reality.
Prof Bill Mitchell is Australia's most widely & internationally respected REAL progressive heterodox academic - yet the TAI ignores him.Neoliberalism won't die until it extracts the last breath of available wealth from Australia's citizenry. It will die a savage death with the onset of the impending depression 'to end all depressions' when the collapsing housing bubble leaves citizens with a 'decades long' bubble of unpayable private debt.
Only then will people realise they have been elaborately 'conned' - too late.
P.S. For all TRUE progressives:
Some brilliant short videos here and here by Parody Project.That's really the point, much as you might expect government like the Howard and Abbott ones to have stuck to their claimed neo-liberal principles, neither substantially altered the compulsory nature of the scheme, despite the fact that it ran more or less completely contrary to Chicago School principles. Howard might have been fond of shouting "socialism" or "nanny state" when he felt the need to criticise something, but deeds speak stronger than words, and for all his p!ssing and moaning he was never going to do anything that stopped all those truckloads of money finding their way to his friends in the banking industry.Alltherage -> elliot2511 , 31 Oct 2018 00:51Yes historically high mass immigration in Australia has been used as a trojan horse by the adherents of neo-liberalism - to break down the pay and conditions of Australian workers and their rights and entitlements.Ozperson , 31 Oct 2018 00:48
By importing "ready made" skilled workers, neither the Government or the private sector have had to go to the trouble of training their workforce nor bear any of the costs of educating and training them.
As to the lower skilled imported workers, in the main, this is a crude device to cut out the locals so that accepted or legislated pay and conditions can be lowered. Most of those imported workers don't know their rights and are ripe for exploitation.
The shonks, rip off and quick buck merchants love neo-liberalism for the what it has done to the Australian labour market.
And the Labor party has been complicit in all this - when it should have been protecting Australians and Australian workers present and future from the ravaging impacts of neo-liberalism.For something that's supposedly dead, it still looks like neoliberalism is in charge to me. The relentless commodification of every aspect of life continues apace. Money is still the measure of everything and takes precedence over the environment, ethics, community, creativity, discovery, and virtually everything else you care to name. When water thiefs, big bankers, corrupt politicians, environmental despoilers, and those that start pointless wars are IN GAOL, then I'll start to believe things are changing.Saint-Just -> FelixKruell , 31 Oct 2018 00:47Neoliberalism is not simply an economic agenda. From the beginning it was conceived as and then constructed to be much more than that - it was in fact as much a pedagogical cum psychological operation to change minds across generations with regard to free-market capitalism and thus to orient all thinking to that, than it was a matter of simple monetary or trade policy. Of course, this had to be done with a good deal of repression and oppression backing it up, here and there - Chile e.g. Thus electing neoliberalism is an effect of this pedagogy over time - we are all schooled in its 'normality - and not a reflection of either some natural desire for it or an educated choice.Nicholas Haines , 31 Oct 2018 00:40I agree that we should be discussing fiscal policy but I suspect that Richard Denniss is using a false frame for this topic. He probably adheres to the claim made by the macroeconomic equivalent of pre-Copernican physics that a government that issues its own currency, enforces taxes in that currency, and allows the currency to float in foreign exchange markets can run out of its currency.economicalternative -> BlueThird , 31 Oct 2018 00:39The fiscal policy of the federal government should be to employ all available labour in socially useful and environmental sustainable productive activity, maintain price stability, minimize inequality of income and wealth, and fund public services and infrastructure to the maximum extent permitted by the resources that are available for sale in the government's currency.
If you think that the government's fiscal policy should be to reduce a fiscal deficit or deliver a fiscal surplus, you are a dill.
It makes no sense to target a particular fiscal balance because the outcome is driven largely by the aggregated spending and saving decisions of the domestic non-government sector and the external sector. The federal government does not control those variables.
The federal government needs to target economically, socially, and environmentally desirable goals and allow the fiscal balance to reach whatever level is needed at any given time to achieve those goals.
'Democracy' needs to be structural as well as a moral idea. Workers have been disempowered and impoverished and disenfranchished by neoliberalism. An answer to structurally improve the wealth AND democratic power of the workers is to build a HUGE co operative sector in each economy: worker owned workplaces/businesses/concerns AND democratically run. THAT will improve the situation for workers/punters: democracy where they live and work. Democracy rooted not in fine ideas only about rights but bedded down in economic livelihoods. People will take an interest in their local 'politics' and also understand more of the politics of the nation. You don't have to get rid of 'capitalism' just give it a 'good run' for it's money - some real COMPETITION. Cooperatively run Hospitals, owned by doctors and nurses and other stakeholders - not for profit - that'll soon see the 'private' for profit' health providers/rorters wind their prices and necks in. Socially owned, worker-owned, government/taxpayer supported enterprise, work places, democratically run will boot up the level of 'democracy' in our societies. We can still have voter style over-arching national government of course. If you don't root democracy where people actually can participate and which gives them a lot of control over their workplaces/livelihood, then it can all be hijacked by the greedy and cunning (see neoliberalism). OH, a large cooperative sector in the economy democratically run by workers won't deliver 'heaven on earth' - it'll still be run by people!slorter -> HauptmannGurski , 31 Oct 2018 00:37It is also a tool of the neoliberals along with the whole neoliberal trend in macroeconomic policy. The essential thing underlying this, is to try to reduce the power of government and social forces that might exercise some power within the political economy -- workers and others -- and put the power primarily in the hands of those dominating in the markets. That's often the financial system, the banks, but also other elites. The idea of neoliberal economists and policymakers being that you don't want the government getting too involved in macroeconomic policy. You don't want them promoting too much employment because that might lead to a raise in wages and, in turn, to a reduction in the profit share of the national income.Alltherage -> misterwildcard , 31 Oct 2018 00:29Austerity fits into the mix very well Keeping wages low, or debt pressure high, means workers will be less likely to complain or make demands. As workers struggle to provide their families with all the temptations that a capitalist society offers, they become far less likely to risk their employment, and less able to improve their situation.
At bottom, conservatives believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labour they depend on to make their fortunes.
It shows a great sense of inferiority and knowing our "proper"place, that the populace apparently accepted the colloquial term for neo-liberalism or economic rationalism, as being "trickle down economics" and that all that the populace deserved and was going to get was a trickle of the alleged wealth and benefits created.eerstehondopdemaan -> MikeSw , 31 Oct 2018 00:23
Why were most people so compliant and accepting of something that as a concept, from the outset, was clearly signalling it would economically completely discriminate against the 99% and was intended to provide such a meager share of the wealth and economic benefits generated?Excellent statement Mike.
A quick look around the world provides clear evidence that there really are a lot of alternatives.
That's the crux: many (western, developed) countries before us have proven over and over again that the best type of democratic government is one in which consensus is the basis for long-term decisions to the benefit of all. Is it tedious? Yes. Frustrating at times? You bet. Slow? Indeed, quite often so. But the point is, consensus-based decision making works and eventually is in everyone's interest (left, right and centre), resulting in better long-term outcomes. With the added benefit that new "majority" Governments won't throw out the children with the bathwater all the time.I'd add one aspect to the article though, and that is to combine a form of proportional representation with longer terms of Government. You won't get much meaningful done in 3 years, whatever form of representation you choose. 4 years, 5 years... whatever strikes the best balance between governments getting some runs on the board and voters feeling empowered to change government coalitions in the ballot box when they stuff up.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
regoblivion , 31 Oct 2018 00:08
I like Prof.Bill Mitchell's saying that most Progressives are Neo liberals in disguise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOMo3xuSyWM&t=66sianwford , 31 Oct 2018 00:02Until we ditch the Neo Liberal garbage about Deficits, Debt and their confusion about Monetary and Fiscal Policy, nothing can change.
meanwhile Tick Tock goes the Carbon Clock.
Neoliberalism clearly works for the interests of the minority and against the interests of the majority. Households are now worse off than they were 6 years ago and large businesses are enjoying record profits. It feels as if the australian economy is being run for the benefit of a small percentage of wealthy shareholders.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
CaligulaMcNutt , 30 Oct 2018 23:45
Speaking as no fan of neo-liberalism, but there is a risk that the term gets overused. Things that the right have embraced with open arms, like compulsory retirement savings (which have enriched the private sector, especially banks and their shareholders), would have caused sharp intakes of breath from the steely-eyed theorists who came up with the concept. While a purported devotion to the principles and precepts of neo-liberalism has been claimed by decades of right-wing politicians, businesses and bankers, drilling down deeper often reveals that what is really happening in favouring the economic interests of the few at the expense of the many, and very often involving compulsorily acquired public resources being re-directed to business, with barely even the thinnest veneer of genuine theoretical observance to the neo-liberal model. Both neo-liberalism itself, and bogus claims of its practical use and benefits, need to be dead and buried.LovelyDaffodils -> misterwildcard , 30 Oct 2018 23:45I really would love the rich and powerful who basically prey on the average person/worker/mums and dads, to be held accountable and penalised properly in relation to their deeds. These bastards destroy families in their grab for greed, and almost every time they are excused by their cohorts, and even go on to bigger and better opportunities to keep feeding their voracious greedy appetites. Basically they steal, so why isn't their proceeds of crime taken back by government; and why do they not do any jail time?GreyBags , 30 Oct 2018 23:36Natural monopolies like water and power, roads and public transport should be in public hands. All call centres dealing with government issues should be done by public servants, not outsourced to foreign corporations.slorter -> MachiavellisCat , 30 Oct 2018 23:20I'd start with a bank. Give people a non-greed infested alternative.
Under neo-liberalism we have gone from 1 person, 1 vote to $1, one vote. The con job that is 'small government and little or no regulations' is bad for society and the environment. Greed over need.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/30/why-a-neoliberal-society-cant-survive /Jakartaboy , 30 Oct 2018 22:42Dr. T. J. Coles is director of the Plymouth Institute for Peace Research and the author of several books, including Voices for Peace (with Noam Chomsky and others) and the forthcoming Fire and Fury: How the US Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia (both Clairview Books).
The current economic model being used by capitalist countries across the world is failing most of the people in these countries while enriching tiny elites. Unfortunately, politicians in these countries are often in the pockets of the elite or are themselves members of the elite.We need a new economic narrative which better reconciles the needs of the population with the directives of the market.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
diggerdigger -> everywhereman , 30 Oct 2018 23:41
Why not? Profits to the nation, not greedy corporates and their shareholders.
I think you will find there were no profits made that could be put "to the nation." When the wall came down, the USSR and the entire eastern bloc were completely bankrupt.
As was Mao's China prior to the emergence of Deng and his "to get rich is glorious" mantra, that set China on its current path. Of course his generally market-oriented approach has since been bastardised to one of One Party State-capitalism dominated by cronyism, corruption, and a perverted justice system.
Yes it has generated vast wealth, but it is an empire built on sand. As any analysis of its shadow banking system will show.
And while the legions of newly minted millionaires of party benevolence celebrate, the hundreds of millions stuck in poverty are left to fend for themselves.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
GreenExerciseAddict , 30 Oct 2018 23:29
The death of neoliberalism means we can finally have a national debate about the size and role of government, and the shape of the economy and society we want to build.Alpo88 -> Fred1 , 30 Oct 2018 23:26Unfortunately, I see lots of deaths but none of them is neoliberalism. I can see death of a decent safety net in Australia. Death of biodiversity. Death of ecosystems. Death of intelligent debate. Death of science.
You are completely delusional Freddie.Revenant13 , 30 Oct 2018 23:24Poverty rate in the USA has been increasing since about the year 2000. The international poverty trend has been decreasing over time only because the definition of poverty is to earn less than $1.25 per day..... So, if you earn $10/day you are well above the poverty line: Good luck living on that income in any OECD country!
Standards of living are decreasing in Australia... ever heard of the housing crisis? The household debt crisis?.... Paying for hospital and medicines, education, electricity and other services.... should I go on?.... ACOSS found that "there are just over 3 million people (13.2%) living below the poverty line of 50% of median income – including 739,000 children (17.3%)".
"The evil neo-liberalism" has delivered poverty, massive inequality, dissatisfaction, unemployment/sub-employment and casualization, collapse of public services, high costs of living.... and deterioration of the environment...
Why do you think that all around the world voters are going hard against Neoliberalism and why do you think that Neoliberals are desperately trying to save their bankrupt philosophy by hiding behind Nationalism and Racism?
While I would very much like to agree with the notion that neo-liberalism is dead, there's rather too much evidence that its pernicious influence lingers ghost-like and ghastly, having suffused far too many politicians of an ultra-conservative ilk.David Smith -> adamhumph , 30 Oct 2018 23:21The true believers in the neo-liberal faith, as it was never other than a creed espoused by Thatcher and Pinochet among others, are like those in the catholic church who continued to advocate an earth centric universe long after science proved them wrong.
It will be a long wait until these myopic adherents to the gospel of Hayek, Friedman and Buchanan, are consigned to the waste bin of history where they belong. Until then, it will remain a struggle to right the many wrongs of this mis-guided and shallow populism.
Abso-bloody-lutely! The neocons have had their day, though it'll no doubt take one hell of an effort to drag them out of their crony-capitalist, snouts-in-the-trough ways. The profit motive in the provision of essential services should be confined to covering costs, maintenance and associated investment. It's so painfully obvious that the market has not met the needs of the average citizen without absurd cost. Bring on the revolution!
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
misterwildcard , 30 Oct 2018 22:12
What made anyone think neo-liberalism was going to work? Why was this even tried or got past a focus group?
Only the Murdoch press ever dreamed this could have any merit and a few totally selfish and controlling wealthy people. 2008 and the GFC should have killed this idea instead it gained traction as the perpetrators not only were not prosecuted but were subsidised to create more havoc. Find the culprits and jail them ... it is not too late.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
All essential infrastructure should be Nationalised. Water electricity supply and generation, ports and railways, educational facilities, one major bank, one country wide telco and mail delivery. Remove the for profit aspect, and they become assets. In at least a few of these they also provide training opportunities across a wide spectrum of careersJoshua Tree , 30 Oct 2018 22:13Nationalise the banks and the Mining Industry . Take back control of outrageous wages in both these sectors and return profits to the taxpayer .Alpo88 , 30 Oct 2018 22:08Nationalise the State Governments in other words get rid of them and appoint federal controlled administrators same with local councils, sack the lot of them and appoint administrators.
Just like the AFP is "nationalised", or education is also to a big extent "nationalised", alongside a big chunk of the health system.... so we can nationalise other things, such as the modes of production and distribution of energy, major mineral resources, etc.JAKLAUGHING , 30 Oct 2018 22:08What about "competition", the God of Neoliberals?.... Competition can have some positive role in society only in an environment of Regulation. That's why the future is neither Neoliberal nor Socialist, but a Mixed Economy Social Democracy.
Which party is for a Mixed Economy Social Democracy?.... Labor and to some extent the Greens. A bunch of independents are also happy with the concept.... Together they are currently a majority, only waiting for a Federal election.
Bring back a Commonwealth Bank! In fact bring back State run Electricity, Gas and Water utilities...Joey Rocca , 30 Oct 2018 22:01The Coalition these days proudly subsidise their friends and regulate their enemies in order to reshape Australia in their preferred form.
Spot on Richard, excellent article. A Federal ICAC is a must.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
ElectricJolt , 31 Oct 2018 04:38
I don't like using the term "neo-liberalism" that much because there is nothing "new" or "liberal" about it, the term itself just helps hide the fact that it's a political project more about power than profit and the end result is more like modern feudalism - an authoritarian system where the lords (bankers, energy companies and their large and inefficient attendant bureaucracies), keep us peasants in thrall through life long debt-slavery simply to buy a house or exploit us as a captured market in the case of the energy sector.Friarbird , 31 Oct 2018 04:02Since the word "privatisation" is clearly no longer popular, the latest buzzword from this project is "outsourcing". If you've had a look at The Canberra Times over the last couple of weeks there have been quite a few articles about outsourcing parts of Medicare and Centrelink, using labour hire companies and so on – is this part of a current LNP plan to "sell off" parts of the government before Labour takes the reins in May?
As far as I can see "neo-liberalism", or what I prefer to call managerial and financialised feudalism is not dead, it's still out and about looking around for the next rent-seeking opportunity.
Neoliberalism "dead"? I think not. It is riveted on the country like a straitjacket.totaram -> JohnArmour , 31 Oct 2018 03:01Which is exactly what it was always intended to be, a system gamed and rigged to ensure the wage-earning scum obtain progressively less and less of the country's productive wealth, however much they contributed to it. The wage theft and exploitation Neoliberalism fosters has become the new norm. Neoliberal idealogues thickly infest Federal and State Treasuries.
In the political arena, is enabling porkies facilitate each other in every lunatic pronouncement about "Budget repair" and "on track for a surplus". And its spotty, textbook-spouting clones ("all debt is debt! Shriek, gasp, hyperventilate!") fall off the conveyor belts of tertiary education Australia-wide, then turn up on The Drum as IPA 'Research Fellows' to spout their evidence-free assertions.
The IPA itself has moles in govt at every level--even in your local Council. Certainly in ours.
Neoliberalism is "dead"? Correction. Neoliberalism is alive, thriving---and quick to ensure its glaring deficiencies and inequities are solely attributable to its opponents. Now THERE'S a surprise.....
Agree! And don't forget the handmaiden of neoliberalism is their macroeconomic mythology about government "debt and borrowing" which will condemn our grandchildren to poverty - inter-generational theft! It also allows them to continue dismantling government social programs by giving tax-cuts to reduce "revenue" and then claiming there is no money to fund those programs.exTen , 31 Oct 2018 02:30Neoliberalism will not be dead until the underpinning of neoliberalism is abandoned by ALP and Greens. That underpinning is their mindless attachment to "budget repair" and "return to surplus". The federal government's "budget" is nothing like a currency user's budget. Currency users collect in order to spend whereas every dollar spent by the federal government is a new dollar and every dollar taxed by the federal government is an ex-dollar. A currency cannot sensibly have "debt" in the currency that it issues and no amount of surplus or deficit now will enhance or impair its capacity to spend in future. A currency issuer does not need an electronic piggybank, or a Future Fund, or a Drought Relief Fund. It can't max out an imaginary credit card. It's "borrowing" is just an exchange of its termless no-coupon liabilities (currency) for term-limited coupon-bearing liabilities (bonds). The federal budget balance is no rational indicator of any need for austerity or for stimulus. The rational indicators are unemployment (too small a "deficit"/too large a surplus) and inflation (too large a "deficit"/too small a "surplus"). Federal taxation is where dollars go to die. It doesn't "fund" a currency issuer's spending - it is there to stop the dollars it issues from piling up and causing inflation and to make room for spending by democratically elected federal parliament. The name of the game is to balance the economy, not the entirely notional and fundamentally irrelevant "budget".Copperfield , 31 Oct 2018 01:51"Competition" as the cornerstone of neoliberal economics was always a lie. Corporations do their best to get rid of competitors by unfair pricing tactics or by takeovers. And even where some competitors hang in there by some means (banks, petrol companies) the competition that occurs is not for price but for profit.gidrys , 31 Oct 2018 01:34And changing the electoral system? Yes indeed. After years of observation it seems to me that the problem with our politics is not individual politicians (although there are notable exceptions) but political parties. Rigid control of policies and voting on party instruction (even by the Greens) makes the proceedings of parliament a complete waste of time. If every policy had to run the gauntlet of 150 people all voting by their conscience we would have better policy. The executive functions could be carried out by a cabinet also elected from those members. But not going to happen - too many vested interests in the parties and their corporate sponsors.
With the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil (even though nearly 30% of electors refused to vote) it may be a little presumptuous to dissect the dead corpse of neoliberalism, as Richard Denniss' hopes that we can.beeden , 31 Oct 2018 01:33What is absolutely gob-smacking is that Brazilians voted for him; a man that Glenn Greenwald describes as "far more dangerous than Trump" , that Bolsonaro envisages military dictatorships as "being a far more superior form of government" advocating a civil war in order to dispose of the left.
Furthermore, the election of this far-right neoliberal extremist also threatens the Amazon forest and its indigenous people; with a global impact that will render combatting climate change even more difficult.
Locally, recent Liberal Party battles over leadership have included the neolib factor, as the lunatic right in that party - who I suspect would all love to be a Bolsonaro themselves - aggressively activate their grumblings and dissension.
Oh, Richard how I wish you were right; but in the Victorian election campaign - currently underway - I have seen Socialist candidates behaving in a manner that doesn't garner hope in a different way of doing politics.
The fact that 'our' democracy is based on an adversarial, partisan system leaves me with little hope. Alain Badiou wrote that "ours is not a world of democracy but a world of imperial conservatism using democratic phraseology" ; and until that imposition is discarded 'our' democracy will remain whatever we are told it is, and neolibs will continue to shove their bullshit down our throats as much as they can.
There is no abatement to the wealthiest in the global communities seeking greater wealth and thus increasing inequality.Matt Quinn , 31 Oct 2018 01:32Taking a local example,
- "Branch stacking is one thing, but these are actual Nazis," the party member told AAP. "A lot of the names should be looked at more closely.
- "How else do you find 20 other people who believe that kind of stuff unless you yourself believe that kind of stuff?" .
We find a shift away from democratic processes and the rise of the "all new adulation of the so-called tough leader" factor, aka Nazism/Fascism. From Trump to Turkey, Netanyahu to Putin, Brazil to China, the rise of the "right" in Europe, the South Americas, where the leader is "our great and "good" Teacher", knows best, and thus infantalises the knowledge and awareness of the rest of the population. Who needs scientists, when the "leader" knows everything?
Have the people of the world abrogated their democratic responsibility?
Or is it the gerrymandering chicanery of US Republican backers/politicians( so long as you control the voting machines ) that have sent the ugly message to the world, Power is yours for the making and taking by any means that ignores the public's rights in the decision making process. Has the "neo-liberal" world delivered a corrupted system of democracy that has deliberately alienated the world's population from actively participating fully in the full awareness that their vote counts and will be counted?
Do we need to take back the controls of democracy to ensure that it is the will of the people and not a manipulation by vested interest groups/individuals? You're darn tootin'!!!
A thoughtful piece. Thanks. There are indeed alternatives to neoliberalism, most of which have been shown to lead back to neoliberalism. Appeals for fiscal and monetary relief/stimulus can only ever paper over the worst aspects of it's relentless 'progress', between wars, it seems.Neoliberalism seems vastly, catastrophically misunderstood. Widely perceived as the latest abomination to spring from the eternal battle 'twixt Labour and Capital, it's actual origins are somewhat more recent. Neoliberalism really, really is not just "Capitalism gone wrong". It goes much deeper, to a fundamental flaw buried( more accurately 'planted') deep in the heart of economics.
Instead of trying to understand Neo-Classical Economics it is perhaps more instructive to understand what it was built, layer by layer, to obscure. First the Land system, then the Wealth system, and finally the Money system (hived off into a compartment - 'macroeconomics'). Importantly, three entirely different categories of "thing" .
In 1879 an obscure journalist from then-remote San Francisco, Henry George, took the world by storm with his extraordinary bestseller Progress and Poverty . Still the only published work to outsell the Bible in a single year, it did so for over twenty years, yet few social justice advocates have heard of it.
George set out to discover why the worst poverty always seemed to accompany the most progress. By chasing down the production process to its ends, and tracing where the proceeds were going, he succeeded spectacularly. From Progress and Poverty , Chapter 17 - "The Problem Explained" :
Three things unite in production: land, labor, and capital. Three parties divide the output: landowner, laborer, and capitalist. If the laborer and capitalist get no more as production increases, it is a necessary inference that the landowner takes the gain.
George gravely threatened privileged global power-elites , so they erased him from academic history. A mind compared, in his time with Plato, Copernicus and Adam Smith wiped from living memory, by the modern aristocracy.
In the process of doing so, they emasculated the discipline of economics, stripped dignity from labour, and set in motion a world-destroying doctrine. Neo-Classical Economics(aka neoliberalism) was born , to the detriment of the working-citizen and the living world on which s/he depends.
Einstein was a fan of George, and used his methods of thought-experiment and powerful inductive reasoning to discover Relativity, twenty years later. Henry Georges brilliant insights into Land (aka nature), Wealth (what you want, need), and Money (sharing mechanism) are as relevant as ever, and until they are rediscovered, we are likely to re-run the 1900's over and over, with fewer and fewer resources.
~ How Land Barons, Industrialists and Bankers Corrupted Economics .
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Alan Ritchie , 31 Oct 2018 22:24
Neoliberalism, the economic stablemate of big religion's Prosperity Evangelism cult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology . Dual streams of bull shit to confuse the citizens while the Country's immense wealth is stolen.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Apologies, but Neoliberalism is far from 'dead'. But of course it should never have given 'life'. However, if it were 'dead' why did Labor vote with the Coalition to ratify the ultra-Neoliberal TPP??? The TPP is the penultimate wet dream of all neoliberal multinational vulture corporations. Why???? Investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) Under these rules, foreign investors can legally challenge host state regulations outside that country's courts. A wide range of policies can be challenged.Yeah! Philip Morris comes to mind. "The cost to taxpayers of the Australian government's six-year legal battle with the tobacco giant Philip Morris over plain packaging laws can finally be revealed, despite the government's efforts to keep the cost secret.
The commonwealth government spent nearly $40m defending its world-first plain packaging laws against Philip Morris Asia, a tobacco multinational, according to freedom of information documents.
Documents say the total figure is $38,984,942.97."
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Moron_Strictos_freed , 31 Oct 2018 00:00
Neo- liberalism is not dead its only just started. We are not in an era of democracy and freedom but of Oligarchy and governmental servitude.Bewareofnazihippies -> Fred1 , 30 Oct 2018 23:58
Less restrictions doesn't mean freedom it mean free booters, privateers , and plunderers are given government support and handouts the only thing free is their right to take.The pirates who plunder the most are given Hero status and those plundered are laughed at as losers.
Looks around you governments are becoming agents of theft find ways to channel money to those who don't need it . They say its right wing fascism but its not for all their evil the fascists were determined to improve the lot of the people, however perversely they went about it.
What we have today is legalised privateering.
None of the political parties today have the least intention to change a system that works for them.
Fred, I can't remember who said it, but an observer of human systems and institutions made the observation that unless the prevalent social, economic or political structures of the day was not either changed or renewed, then those within the system would 'game' it; corrupting it from within for personal benefit to the detriment of society as a whole.Bluetwo , 30 Oct 2018 23:54
This perfectly sums up neo-liberalism.
Whatever positive virtues were extolled when this ideology was adopted wholesale by so many governments and societies (and please spare me the '-we delivered billions out of poverty!' line, that was a positive byproduct, never the objective of neo-liberalism), it has since become thoroughly corrupted, serving an ever shrinking percentage of society - entrenching a super-wealthy 'ruling class' that makes a mockery of the idea of democracy.
It's time to ditch this 21st Century feudalistic construct, and replace it with something that serves the whole of society with more justice than this current gravy train for the one percenters.Fully agree with the things being said here. The privatisation of essential services has been a bloody disaster. Telecommunications, health, education energy production/distribution. Look at what the NSW conservatives are doing the the public transport or the feds have done to our communications, including Telstra the ABC and SBS.FelixKruell , 30 Oct 2018 23:50But the issue is that this will just turn into an ongoing political football with each successive conservative government trying to sell off the farm again.
These critical public services and infrastructure must be protected in law needing a referendum to make major changes. Also their funding must be guaranteed and they must be run at arms length from the government to reduce political interference and ensure they are delivering the best possible service and are competitive with the huge private sector operators.
There charter of operation and obligation to the public must be extremely robust and clearly outline their duties of care to operate in a transparent and open fashion putting the public interest as a priority.
The opposite of a neoliberal economic agenda isn't a progressive economic agenda, but democratic re-engagement.
You can have democratic engagement voting for a 'neo-liberal economic agenda'. In fact we've had it for decades.
But of course not even the Coalition believes that any more. These days they proudly subsidise their friends and regulate their enemies in order to reshape Australia in their preferred form.
They're politicians - they've never applied their ideological views in a pure way. This is nothing new.
Ironically, one of the major objections to proportional representation in Australia has been that it tends to deliver minority government, a situation that the major parties prefer to avoid.
There's a big difference between minority government by a major party + a handful of votes, versus a minority government by a handful of minority parties, or a major party + a minor party. They tend to lead to the kind of instability we'd prefer to avoid.
The death of neoliberalism means
I think you've called it a bit prematurely. Both major parties here are still peddling neo-liberalism, with policies which only differ on the margins.
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Dec 09, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
CatPerson420 , 30 Oct 2018 23:18
Never forget that fascism is the natural defence mechanism of capital. After it is accrued, it must be defended. The current trend in global politics is not an anomaly but an entirely predictable outcome.Rikyboy , 30 Oct 2018 23:07Neoliberal doctrine leads to skyrocketing inequality, a swelling in the desperate and forgotten poor who are vulnerable to populist messaging and the idea of a strongman peddling easy answers to keep people safe as civil unrest increases. Fascism seeks power for power's sake and total control over the populace, and always cruelty to the marginalised, the 'others'. How all the right wingers hand-wringing over the idea of 'socialist communisms!!1!' can't see that, I don't know.
It's too late for the US I fear, and time is rapidly running out for the UK if they don't pull their finger out and have another referendum before the self immolation of Brexit.
All over the world, failed neoliberalism is being replaced by right-wing populist nationalism & I don't think "repairing democratic institutions" is at the top of their to-do list.jclucas , 30 Oct 2018 23:02If Australia does swing the pendulum to the left, it, along with NZ, will be one of the few countries to do so. De-privatising will not be easy & will be met with a huge reactionary backlash. They'll need to tread very carefully if they want to stay in government.
Neoliberalism may be dead but the neoliberals in the government will never admit it as they seamlessly transition to authoritarian nationalism with populist promises - and failure to deliver on them.BlueThird , 30 Oct 2018 22:57The neoliberal project was always a philosophical cover for crony capitalism that betrayed the public interest by rewarding vested interests for their patronage, perverted democracy, and served as a mechanism for perverting the natural function of an economy - to fairly distribute goods, resources, and services throughout society - to favor the welfare of the few over the many.
The self-interested culture of neoliberalism - the cult of the individual that denies the common good - pervades every aspect of Australia's life as a nation - business, politics, sport, education, and health - denying and crowding out public spirit, selfless service, and societal wellbeing.
For meaningful change to occur there must be a rebirth of the conception of the public good, and the virtue and necessity of acting to realise it.
However at this stage there is not a communal recognition of what the problem is let alone how to go about repairing it. For that to happen there must be a widely accepted narrative that naturally leads to the obvious actions that must be take to redress the damage done by the neoliberal con job: decreasing economic inequality, restoring democracy, and rebuilding a sense of common cause.
Piecemeal change will not be sufficient to enact the the sweeping transformation that has to occur in every department of life. It is not enough to tax multinationals, to have a federal integrity commission, to build a renewable future, or to move to proportional representation.
Someone, some party, some coherent philosophical perspective has to explain why it must be done.
It's certainly the case that the Liberal party, in particular, are now using ideas that fall outside and to the right of neo-liberalism, but it's also obviously the case that neo-liberalism and current Liberal thinking share the same underlying goal. Namely, the transfer of wealth and power towards a narrower and narrower group of people and corporations.tolpuddler , 30 Oct 2018 22:28That suggests the death of neo-liberalism is coming about because – having done so much damage already – it's no longer capable of delivering the required results, and that we're moving into a new phase of the death spiral. I think that can also be seen in both the US (where Trump is using the identified problems of neo-liberalism to further the same basic agenda, but with less decorum and a larger cadre of useful idiots) and the UK (where there's still a very strong possibility that Brexit will be used as an excuse to roll back great swathes of social and democratic safeguards).
Perhaps even more worrying – given the latest reports on how we're destroying habitat as well as the climate, and how much of our biodiversity is in South America, particularly the Amazon – is that Brazil is how on a similar path.
The likelihood is that the Liberal party won't get away with what they have planned, but they – and the forces behind them – certainly won't stop trying. And unfortunately it's far from obvious that the Labor party will repudiate neo-liberalism anytime soon. That they signed up for the latest iteration of TPP is hardly a good omen.
Democratic re-engagement is the better way forward from neo-liberalism, but unfortunately I think it's unlikely to be the one that we end up taking.
All of that said, the deepest problem of all is the way in which democracy and government have been corrupted, often via the media, but typically at the behest of corporations, and if there is a way forward it has to be found in addressing those interactions
I'm certainly in favour of greater nationalisation, especially of essential services. But around the world, neo-liberalism has morphed into neo-fascism and this is where the next fight must be.slorter , 30 Oct 2018 22:19Well we have had 3+ decades of the dogma!In social systems, natural selection favours cooperation. In addition, we are biased toward ethical behaviours, so cooperation and sharing are valued in human societies.
But what happens when we are forced into an economic system that makes us compete at every level? The logical outcome is societal decline or collapse.
Perhaps the worst aspect of neoliberalism was its infection of the Labor party. This has left our social infrastructure alarmingly exposed.
The consequences of four decades of financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared. Internal and external class relations were made evident through narrowly distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts.
Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of differing ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity even when ideology would suggest the opposite.
No wonder you get fascist right wing insurgence in this climate!
Thank you Richard Denniss we need to highlight this more and more and start educating the dumbed down population saturated with neoliberal snake oil!
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.unz.com
...First, let's look at a concrete example of our system manufacturing official narrative (aka "official truth" or "truth" -- note quotes ). I'm going to use The Guardian 's most recent blatantly fabricated article (" Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy ") as an example, but I could just as well have chosen any of a host of other fabricated stories disseminated by "respectable" outlets over the course of the last two years. The " Russian Propaganda Peddlers " story. The " Russia Might Have Poisoned Hillary Clinton " story. The " Russians Hacked the Vermont Power Grid " story. The " Golden Showers Russian Pee-Tape " story. The " Novichok Assassins " story. The " Bana Alabed Speaks Out " story. The " Trump's Secret Russian Server " story. The " Labour Anti-Semitism Crisis " story. The " Russians Orchestrated Brexit " story. The " Russia is Going to Hack the Midterms " story. The " Twitter Bots " story. And the list goes on.
I'm not going to debunk the Guardian article here. It has been debunked by better debunkers than I (e.g., Jonathan Cook , Craig Murray , Glenn Greenwald , Moon of Alabama , and many others).
The short version is, The Guardian 's Luke Harding, a shameless hack who will affix his name to any propaganda an intelligence agency feeds him, alleged that Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, secretly met with Julian Assange (and unnamed "Russians") on numerous occasions from 2013 to 2016, presumably to conspire to collude to brainwash Americans into not voting for Clinton. Harding's earth-shaking allegations, which The Guardian prominently featured and flogged, were based on well, absolutely nothing, except the usual anonymous "intelligence sources." After actual journalists pointed this out, The Guardian quietly revised the piece ( employing the subjunctive mood rather liberally ), buried it in the back pages of its website, and otherwise pretended like they had never published it.
By that time, of course, its purpose had been served. The story had been picked up and disseminated by other "respectable," "authoritative" outlets, and it was making the rounds on social media. Nonetheless, out of an abundance of caution, in an attempt to counter the above-mentioned debunkers (and dispel the doubts of anyone else still capable of any kind of critical thinking), Politico posted this ass-covering piece speculating that, if it somehow turned out The Guardian 's story was just propaganda designed to tarnish Assange and Trump well, probably, it had been planted by the Russians to make Luke Harding look like a moron. This ass-covering piece of speculative fiction, which was written by a former CIA agent, was immediately disseminated by liberals and "leftists" who are eagerly looking forward to the arrest, rendition, and public crucifixion of Assange.
At this point, I imagine you're probably wondering what this has to do with manufacturing "truth." Because, clearly, this Guardian story was a lie a lie The Guardian got caught telling. I wish the "truth" thing was as simple as that (i.e., exposing and debunking the ruling classes' lies). Unfortunately, it isn't. Here is why.
Much as most people would like there to be one (and behave and speak as if there were one), there is no Transcendental Arbiter of Truth. The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.
Nor are there many "truths" (i.e., your truth and my truth). There is only one "truth" the "official truth". The "truth" according to those in power. This is the whole purpose of the concept of truth. It is the reason the concept of "truth" was invented (i.e., to render any other "truths" lies). It is how those in power control reality and impose their ideology on the masses (or their employees, or their students, or their children). Yes, I know, we very badly want there to be some "objective truth" (i.e., what actually happened, when whatever happened, JFK, 9-11, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Schrödinger's dead cat, the Big Bang, or whatever). There isn't. The truth is just a story a story that is never our story.
The "truth" is a story that power gets to tell, and that the powerless do not get to tell, unless they tell the story of those in power, which is always someone else's story. The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative. They either parrot the "truth" of the ruling classes or they utter heresies of one type or another. Naturally, the powerless do not regard themselves as heretics. They do not regard their "truth" as heresy. They regard their "truth" as the truth, which is heresy. The truth of the powerless is always heresy.
For example, while it may be personally comforting for some of us to tell ourselves that we know the truth about certain subjects (e.g., Russiagate, 9-11, et cetera), and to share our knowledge with others who agree with us, and even to expose the lies of the corporate media on Twitter, Facebook, and our blogs, or in some leftist webzine (or "fearless adversarial" outlet bankrolled by a beneficent oligarch), the ruling classes do not give a shit, because ours is merely the raving of heretics, and does not warrant a serious response.
Or all right, they give a bit of a shit, enough to try to cover their asses when a journalist of the stature of Glenn Greenwald (who won a Pulitzer and is frequently on television) very carefully and very respectfully almost directly accuses them of lying. But they give enough of a shit to do this because Greenwald has the power to hurt them, not because of any regard for the truth. This is also why Greenwald has to be so careful and respectful when directly confronting The Guardian , or any other corporate media outlet, and state that their blatantly fabricated stories could, theoretically, turn out to be true. He can't afford to cross the line and end up getting branded a heretic and consigned to Outer Mainstream Darkness, like Robert Fisk, Sy Hersh, Jonathan Cook, John Pilger, Assange, and other such heretics.
Look, I'm not trying to argue that it isn't important to expose the fabrications of the corporate media and the ruling classes. It is terribly important. It is mostly what I do (albeit usually in a more satirical fashion). At the same time, it is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution." People already know the truth the official truth, which is the only truth there is. Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
And this is why The Guardian will not be punished for publishing a blatantly fabricated story. Nor will Luke Harding be penalized for writing it. Luke Harding will be rewarded for writing it, as he has been handsomely rewarded throughout his career for loyally serving the ruling classes. Greenwald, on the other hand, is on thin ice. It will be instructive to see how far he pushes his confrontation with The Guardian regarding this story.
As for Julian Assange, I'm afraid he is done for. The ruling classes really have no choice but to go ahead and do him at this point. He hasn't left them any other option. Much as they are loathe to create another martyr, they can't have heretics of Assange's notoriety running around punching holes in their "truth" and brazenly defying their authority. That kind of stuff unsettles the normals, and it sets a bad example for the rest of us heretics.
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C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
Manufacturing Truth
James Forrestal , says: December 3, 2018 at 6:26 pm GMT
Good piece. I think there's another layer, though.Kratoklastes , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:17 pm GMTThe truth or falsehood of individual facts about the physical world can often be determined with near-certainty. But when it comes to history, or "news" about current events/ politics, reality is much too complex to address directly. Too many individual facts to be comprehensible, let alone useful.
We must pick, choose, emphasize, or ignore particular elements, and arrange them into some kind of structure, in order to form a useful narrative. Or in the case of "news," the legacy media oligarchy largely performs this function for us -- we simply passively accept/ adopt their narrative. Or, in many cases, "choose" between the closely-related variants of that narrative offered by the "liberal" vs. "conservative" press.
This process of abstraction, simplification, and organization inevitably involves data loss. So no narrative is "true" in the same sense that individual facts about the real world are true. But some narratives incorporate large amounts of "facts" that are demonstrably false, and some are more useful/ descriptive/ predictive than others. No one engaged in this process is "objective." They -- or we -- are all in some way part of the story. It should be self-evident that some narratives are more useful to the perceived interests of owners of major media outlets than others, and that these will assume a much more prominent place in their coverage than ones that are deleterious to those interests.
Ideally, most people would take these factors into account when evaluating the "news," and maintain a much more skeptical attitude than they typically do. But there are several factors that prevent this.
One is simply time/ efficiency. These individual narratives, taken together, support -- and are supported by -- our overall worldview. There aren't enough hours in the day to be constantly skeptical about everything, especially since the major tools of distortion involved in constructing mainstream narratives tend to be selection bias/ memory-holing, with obvious lies about known facts (like the Guardian story referenced here) used only sparingly. It's simply not practical to to constantly consider potentially "better" narratives, and to reevaluate one's worldview based on these.
And which narrative we believe often has more to do with perceived social pressure/ social acceptability than with "truth." As you put it,
Those who are conforming to it are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
Mass media pushing a common narrative creates an artificial perception of social consensus. Creating, or even finding, alternative narratives means fighting the inertia of this perceived consensus, and potentially suffering social costs for believing in the "wrong" one. The social role of narratives is largely independent of their "truth" -- if what you're "supposed" to believe is highly implausible, that actually gives it higher value as a signal of loyalty to the establishment.
It's probably best to maintain a resolutely agnostic attitude toward most "news" items, unless one is particularly interested in that particular event. " Why are they pushing this particular story?" "Why now ?" and " What are they trying to accomplish here?" are often more useful questions than "Is it true?"
It's not a new issue -- only exacerbated by the advent of mass visual media:
"Propaganda" -- Edward Bernays (1928)
"The Free Press"– Hilaire Belloc (1918)I get what Hopkins is trying to do here, but redefining terms (i.e., "truth") doesn't do what he thinks it does.Brabantian , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:18 pm GMTThe truth is not ' what most people think '; it's not ' what we are told to believe '; it's not ' the official narrative '.
There is a useful cautionary tale embedded in Hopkins' piece, but he doesn't tease it out properly.
Take this excerpt:
The truth is what whoever has the power to say it is says it is. If we do not agree that that "truth" is the truth, there is no higher court to appeal to. We can argue until we are blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. No evidence we produce will make the slightest difference. The truth will remain whatever those with the power to say it is say it is.
With significant caveats, it is a reasonable description of the way the political world works: if the political class decides that its interests are best served by declaring that a specific narrative X is 'true', it will obtain immediate compliance from about half the livestock, and can then rely on force (peer pressure; subsidy or taxation; state coercion) to get an absolute majority of the herd to declare that they accept the 'truth' of X .
If X is objectively false, too bad.
Try to run a legal argument based on the objective falsity of a thing that the political class has deemed to be true: you'll be shit outta luck.
This is highly relevant where I am sitting: here are two examples – one really obvious, one a bit less so (but far more important because of its radical implications).
Obvious Example: Drug Dogs
Recent research has shown that drug sniffing dogs give false positive signals between 60% and 80% of the time – i.e., in terms of identifying people who are in actual physical possession of drugs at any point in time, drug sniffing dogs perform worse than a coin toss.
Note that this is before considering that the dog's handler is often pointing the dog at a target that the handler thinks is likely to be carrying drugs. (Although in reality, drug dogs are paraded around at concerts and in public spaces, sniffing every passer-by).
However there is an Act of Parliament (capitalise all the magic words) that asserts that a signal from a drug sniffing dog is sufficient to qualify as what Americans call "probable cause" – i.e., reasonable suspicion for a search.
Does anyone think that evidence should be admissible if it results from a search conducted based on 'probable cause' derived from a method that produces worse outcomes than tossing a coin?
Judges will tie themselves into absolute epistemological knots to get that evidence admitted – and they will refuse to permit defence Counsel from adducing evidence about drug dog inaccuracy because since the defendant actually did have drugs in their possession, the dog didn't signal falsely.
In other words, the judge conflates posterior probability with prior probability; the prior probability that the dog is correct, is 10%-40%; this should not suffice to generate probable cause (or 'reasonable suspicion).
More Interesting Example: 'Representative' Democracy
In general, Western governments assert that their legitimacy stems from two primary sources: some founding set of principles (usually a constitution – written or otherwise), and 'representativeness' (including ratification of the constitution by a representative mechanism, for those places with written foundational documents).
The Arrow Impossibility Theorem [1,2] and the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [3,4], both show that there is no way of accurately determining group preferences using an ordinal voting mechanism.
What this boils down to, is that representativeness is a lie – and it's a lie before any consideration of voting outcomes ; it's a meta -problem (the problem that ordinal voting cannot do what it is claimed to do – viz ., accurately identify the 'will of the people'/'social preferences'/'what the people want').
Beyond the meta-problem, there is also the actual counting problem: no government has ever been elected having obtained the votes of an outright bare majority, i.e., 50%-plus-1 of the entire eligible franchise. (It's more like 25-35% for most parliamentary systems – for US presidential elections in the full-franchise period, the winner is voted for by 29% of the eligible population; you would be horrified to look at US Senate results).
So when the new unhappy lords (and their Little Eichmann bureaucrat enablers) promulgate laws based on assertions of legitimacy because of a constitutional Grundnorm and/or the representative nature of government both of those things are pretty obvious furphies; they are objectively not 'truth' and no amount of heel-clicking and wishing will make it so.
Which brings us to a key legal aphorism that has a jurisprudential history going back four centuries: Ratio legis est anima legis, et mutata legis ratione, mutatur ex lex – which dates from Milborn's case ( Coke 7a KB [1609]).
The reason for a law is the soul of the law, and if the reason for a law has changed, the law is changed .
What this means – explicitly – is that " no law can survive the [extinction of the] reasons on which it is founded ".
American courts re-expressed this as " cessante ratione legis, cessat ipsa lex " (the reason for a law having ceased, the law itself ceases) – e.g., in Funk v. United States , 290 US 371 (1933) in which Justice Sutherland opined –
This means that no law can survive the reasons on which it is founded. It needs no statute to change it; it abrogates itself . If the reasons on which a law rests are overborne by opposing reasons, which in the progress of society gain a controlling force, the old law, though still good as an abstract principle, and good in its application to some circumstances, must cease to apply as a controlling principle to the new circumstances.
(Emphasis mine)
Again: try running this argument in a court: " The asserted basis for all laws promulgated by the government, is provably false. Under a doctrine with a 4-century jurisprudential provenance, the law itself is void ."
See how far you get.
So Hopkins makes a good-but-obvious point – power does not respect either rights or truth; as such it does you no good whatsoever to have the actual truth on your side. He should have made the point better.
References (links are to PDFs of each paper)
[1] Arrow (1950). " A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare " Journal of Political Economy 58 (4): 328–346
[2] Geanakoplos, John (2005). " Three Brief Proofs of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem " Economic Theory 26 (1): 211–215
[3] Gibbard (1973). " Manipulation of voting schemes: a general result " Econometrica 41 (4): 587–601.
[4] Satterthwaite (April 1975). " Strategy-proofness and Arrow's Conditions: Existence and Correspondence Theorems for Voting Procedures and Social Welfare Functions " Journal of Economic Theory 10: 187–217.
C J Hopkins, despite some good quotes and insights above, regrettably falls into the trap of peddling Derrida-tier relativistic nonsense, playing a word game about 'truth', as if 'truth' was not real merely because most people have strong incentives to avoid being devoted to itKratoklastes , says: December 3, 2018 at 11:28 pm GMTWhere you stand depends upon where you sit, etc., Karl Marx's dictums about economic and power positions shaping consciousness, and of course the century-old classic:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
from Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Hopkins more or less repeats Sinclair when he says
Those who are conforming to [official truth] are doing so, not because they are deceived, but because it is safer and more rewarding to do so.
Despite selling-out truth to the relativism devil in some passages, Hopkins nevertheless creates some quotable, including the particularly insightful:
The powerless are either servants of power or they are heretics. There is no third alternative.
The following notion of Hopkins is seen now and then in the alt-sphere, but always bears repeating
It is important to realize that "the truth" is not going to "rouse the masses from their slumber" and inspire them to throw off their chains. People are not going to suddenly "wake up," "see the truth" and start "the revolution."
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@TulipRobinG , says: December 4, 2018 at 12:21 am GMTThe coin of truth is iron and blood.
That's absolutely, 100% wrong.
Iron and blood are the tools used to force people to accept what isn't true. (Another way to tell: it was uttered by a fucking politician – a cunt who wanted to live in palaces paid for by the sweat of other people's brows).
Truth does not need violence to propagate itself: in a completely-peaceful system of free exchange, bad ideas (of which lies are a subset) will get driven out of the market place because they will fail to conform to ground truth.
Falsehood requires violence (arguably it is a form of violence: fraud is 'violent' because it causes its victims to misallocate their resources or to deform their preferences and expectations).
In a very real sense, truth does not need friends: all it requires is an absence of powerful enemies.
@James ForrestalJett Rucker , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 3:04 am GMTOccupation of the American Mind: Israel's Public Relations War in the United States
This film shows a great example of propaganda in action. Free to watch now and this link also includes a short version and a trailer.
When I tell any Truth, it is not for the sake of Convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who Do.polistra , says: December 4, 2018 at 7:33 am GMT~ William Blake, 1810
The distinction is simple. We can't know the truth about distant and complex events like 9/11 or JFK unless we were directly involved, and those people are all dead. For big events we have to rely on, or ignore, the official accounts.The scalpel , says: Website December 4, 2018 at 1:07 pm GMTBut we CAN know the truth about our own situation, our own neighborhood, and our own families. The current riots in France are a concrete ASSERTION of local truth against the blatant and condescending official lies. The majority of France is getting poorer and suffering more from migrant crime. Macron insists that starvation is necessary to serve Gaia, and crime is necessary to serve Juncker. The people would prefer to have a leader that serves France.
@FB Scientific truth is limited by two factors – assumptions, and hidden variables. For example, we might drop a brick in a vacuum and believe that it falls at 9.8 m/s squared. Here, we make the assumption that the force of gravity is constant. And for most of history we were unaware of the hidden variable of relativity to the speed of light.DFH , says: December 4, 2018 at 4:05 pm GMTSo, assuming (LOL) that we are able to eliminate all assumptions and account for all hidden variables, there is a scientific truth. That is ASSUMING we are not just a simulation in someone elses computer!
Given all this, still, we can approach an approximation of truth that some can agree on. Here is where the trouble starts .
What is truth? – John 18:38FB , says: December 4, 2018 at 4:26 pm GMT@The scalpel LOL and then there is the 'observer effect' also especially in good old quantum mechanics in the end scientific truth does boil down to what 'some can agree on'Tulip , says: December 4, 2018 at 5:40 pm GMT@Kratoklastes Strength is the production of force over distance. That is to say, force is a quantifiable, physical phenomenon that, deconstruct it as much as you want, will hit you like a tsunami whether you believe it or not.TimothyPMadden , says: December 4, 2018 at 8:52 pm GMTForce only works because there is a real world that transcends philosophical bullshit and marketing.
The subjective piece is will: victory is attained when the enemies will to resist is crushed. Through the repeated use of physical force, eventually any enemy can be worn down and vanquished.
The world is finite, desire is infinite, and for every desire and appetite, there is a will. As multiple wills will that they attain their infinite desires in a finite world, there will always be a conflict of will, which will always ultimately be resolved by force. Which means ultimately, despite the rich imaginations and appetites of humans, and their related striving, physical force will ultimately rule the day, and conquer, condition, and constrain the mental life of mankind.
Of course, desire and appetite will not take no for an answer, and in their frustration, they will imagine, fantasize, and conceptualize rationales for why this is not so. This is the nature of our desires, and in good times of prosperity and peace, they may even bend our reason in the direction of these appetites and fantasies, until the instincts for self preservation and endurance rust, and are even forgotten. But like the moon revealed by a passing cloud, the perpetual war of human existence will inevitably reassert itself, and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream when they should have been preparing.
What is truth ?The Scalpel , says: Website December 5, 2018 at 12:34 am GMTTruth is a word .
After reading the article and the aggregate comments, I am strengthened in my belief that the physics analogy of Schrödinger's cat is among the most useful (and notwithstanding the otherwise valid criticism of it in the comments). In the same way that the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, does not purport to define a given word, per se , but rather gives a detailed description of how the word has in fact been used over the years and centuries.
I refer to my version of Schrödinger's cat as counter-sense words or oscillating-contradictions .
Oscillating contradictions and cogno-linguistic manipulation
The primary means by which corporate supremacy, for example, is achieved and maintained in practice is via the maintenance and use of a small arsenal of about two dozen critical counter-sense or yo-yo -like words/terms that are asserted or claimed to mean either "X" or "Minus-X" at the option of the decision-maker.
Among the most important and sui generis (in a class of its own) is the word person which is held to mean a living, breathing being of conscience (literally a being of equity) with the rights, powers and privileges of such being ("X"), or else it can mean a corporate entity which is a notional/inanimate item of property to be bought and sold and otherwise traded for profit in the stock and financial markets ("Minus-X").
By way of example/demonstration of the ongoing cognitive manipulation process, if someone had managed to hit the judges of the U.S. Supreme Court with a blast of truth-ray just before they announced their decision in Citizens United, here is what we may have got instead:
[MORE]We here at the Supreme Court are part of what can be fairly and broadly referred to as an arm of the entrenched-money-power.
At certain times and under certain circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the masses that corporations be natural-persons-in-law with the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person or living being of conscience.
At other times and other circumstances it is to our enormous advantage over you the masses that corporations be items of property that can be actively bought and sold and traded for profit in the stock and financial markets.
Your laughable naiveté is manifest in your expectation that you are going to receive a definitive answer from this Court, or even that it is possible for us to give you one. Among the foundational purposes of this Court is to actively prevent that question from being answered definitively at all. The instant we give a definitive answer, the game is over.
Whatever answer we give you must perpetuate the systematized delusion that the same concept (corporate personhood) can mean either X (a living being of conscience), or minus-X (an item of property), depending on the ever-changing needs of the decider.
So our current answer is that a corporation is a natural-person-in-law with the rights, powers and privileges of a natural person, except when it isn't. We'll let you know next time whether that situation has changed in the meantime.
Essentially all counter-sense words/terms follow that same template .
Notwithstanding that the respective concepts are logically and objectively mutually exclusive , the judges of the Courts (and the broadly-defined financial-world/social-control-structure) maintain that it can be either or both , and we'll let you know if and when it becomes important.
So a corporate person has a right of free speech when giving money to influence political parties, but not to object to itself being sold as a piece of property in the stock and financial markets or when it is acquired in a merger or takeover financed by its own assets. If a corporation has the legal capacity and rights of a natural person, then how can it be owned as the legal property of another? The purpose of the Courts is to ensure that that question is never presented in that way.
After person , the remaining most significant counter-sense or yo-yo -like words are (surprise surprise) essentially all money-and-finance-based, and the most important among these is the word principal and its role in facilitating illegal front-loading or ex-temporal fraud (interest illegally and unlawfully compounded in advance).
Is the amount of principal the actual or net amount advanced by the creditor and received by the debtor for their own use and control?
Or is it the amount that the debtor agrees that they owe regardless of the amount received?
Is the amount of principal a question of fact ? Or of the agreement of parties ?
[Here is the premise / offer that is referenced immediately below:]
Lender (e.g., typical second-mortgage lender): "I will loan you $10,000 at 20% per annum provided that you sign and give to me a marketable security that claims or otherwise purports to evidence that I have loaned you $15,000 at 10% per annum, plus an undisclosed and unregistered side-agreement and cheque (check) back to me for a bonus or loan fee of $5,000 as a payment from the nominal proceeds."
In the process example used above, what is the principal amount of the loan? Is it $10,000 because that is the factual net amount invested by the creditor and received by the debtor for their own use? Or is it $15,000 because that is the amount that the debtor is required to falsely agree that they have received and owe as a condition of the loan? Or is it $20,000 because that is the total cash-equivalent/money assets ($15,000 mortgage + $5,000 cheque) that the debtor has to give to the creditor?
Is it a noun/fact ? Or is it an adjective/opinion merely pretending to be a noun? All debt and therefore money in the world today depends on the answer to that question that theoretically cannot exist.
Principal is a special type (and most significant form) of counter-sense word or oscillating contradiction where dictionaries normally only give one sense, while commercial practice defines the contrary. It would be very difficult to put the Whatever-the-debtor-agrees-that-they-owe sense into a dictionary, because the fraud against meaning (as well as the criminal law) is manifest in spelling it out, and ever more so in more specialized financial dictionaries.
So virtually every legal, financial, accounting, and ordinary English dictionary and/or regulation defines it to the effect "The actual amount invested, loaned or advanced to the debtor/borrower net of any interest, discount, premium or fees", while virtually every financial security in the real world at least implicitly incorporates the fraudulent alternative/contrary meaning.
This in turn allows the academic world to function on the rational/factual definition, while the markets maintain a wholly contradictory deemed or pretended reality, while both remain oblivious to the contradiction.
Thus principal means the nominal creditor's actual and net investment, unless it doesn't .
With this class of counter-sense word where there is a necessary and definitive answer, the real job of the judges of the Courts becomes to make certain that the question is never officially asked, and under no circumstances is it to be definitively answered.
With just one of these words you can theoretically steal the Earth . With a financial system that is relatively saturated with them, such becomes child's play . With these rules a group of competently-trained chimpanzees otherwise pulling levers at random could do as well as the so-called wizards of Wall Street .
And significantly, these oscillating contradictions enable the judges to be self-righteous in the extreme on behalf of the entrenched-money-power, while looting the little people of the product of their labour.
As in: You have received the principal amount ($10,000) and you are going to pay back the principal amount ($15,000) plus the ever-accumulating (and super-leveraged) interest upon it according to your contract, while the meaning of the word oscillates between fact and opinion – between a noun and an adjective – according to what the judge needs it to mean (or accommodate) at any given instant in time.
It seems impossibly obvious in this simple example, but with several of them orchestrated simultaneously or sequentially, anything can truly be made to mean anything .
A partial list of the most critical oscillating-contradicitions includes: loan, credit, discount, interest, rate-of-interest, agreement, contract, security, repay, restitution, etc., all of which mean either "X" or its conceptual opposite "Minus-X" at the option of the entrenched-money-power whose vast financial fortunes are founded on such cogno-linguistic arbitrage .
Here are what I believe to be four essential tools needed to triangulate reality via congo-linguistic parallax . The first two are mine, and the last two are from the American and English Courts, respectively.
1. Humans are highly cogno-linguistic . We perceive reality very largely as a function of the language that we use to describe it. Most everyone inherently believes and presumes that you have to be able to think something before you can say it. The greater reality is that, above a certain base level of perception and communication, you have to have the words and language by which to say something before you can think it .
2. The world is ever-increasingly controlled and administered by people who genuinely believe whatever is necessary for the answer they need. Administrative agents of the entrenched-money-power have solved the criminal-law enigma of mens rea or guilty mind by evolving or devolving (take your pick) into professional schizophrenics who genuinely believe whatever they need to believe for the answer they need, and who communicate among themselves subconsciously by how they name things. They suffer a cogno-linguistically-induced diminished capacity that renders them incapable of perceiving reality beyond labels .
3. Their core business model or modus operandi is the systematized delusion :
"A "systematized delusion" is one based on a false premise, pursued by a logical process of reasoning to an insane conclusion ; there being one central delusion, around which other aberrations of the mind converge." Taylor v. McClintock, 112 S.W. 405, 412, 87 Ark. 243. (West's Judicial Words and Phrases (1914)).
4.
One must not confuse the object of a conspiracy [to defraud] with the means by which it is intended to be carried out. Scott v. Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1974] 60 Cr. App. R. 124 H.L.
I have long since abandoned my search for truth, per se, since I came to realize that the best I can ever do is to constantly strive to move closer to it. With apologies to the physicists, Truth is the Limit of Infinite Good Faith .
@Tulip " which will always ultimately be resolved by force."redmudhooch , says: December 5, 2018 at 2:15 am GMTRight there is where you lost the plot. That statement is just your opinion and it cannot be proven true. The rest of your argument falls victim to this logical error.
" and those that have prepared for the inevitable will vanquish those who were content to daydream when they should have been preparing."
Also, just your opinion. For example, the "dreamer" might die still comforted by his/her dreams, while the "prepper" might waste his life witing for the "inevitable' that never arrives.
Truth shall set you free.For the First Time Since 9/11, Federal Gov't Takes Steps to Prosecute the Use of Explosives to Destroy WTCs
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/911-lawyers-petition-grand-jury-explosives/
In what can be described as a monumental step forward in the relentless pursuit of 9/11 truth, a United States Attorney has agreed to comply with federal law requiring submission to a Special Grand Jury of evidence that explosives were used to bring down the World Trade Centers.
The Lawyers' Committee for 9/11 Inquiry successfully submitted a petition to the federal government demanding that the U.S. Attorney present to a Special Grand Jury extensive evidence of yet-to-be-prosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World Trade Center Towers on 9/11 (WTC1, WTC2 and WTC7).
After waiting months for the reply, the U.S. Attorney responded in a letter, noting that they will comply with the law.
Some good documentary films here to watch for free:
http://metanoia-films.org/psywar/
Heres a couple more. Occupation of the American Mind is very good. All of John Pilgers films are great.
James Forrestal , says: December 5, 2018 at 3:58 am GMT
@Wizard of OzMy question/quibble relates to your objection to the use of sniffer dogs to establish probable cause for search because it is no better than a coin toss. That seems fallacious if, according to your figures, the dogs sniff 500 people and get excited by 10 of them of which 3 are correctly identified and 7 are false positives.
Yeah. The concepts of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value might be very helpful in assessing this.
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Jun 08, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe
he IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr.
The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.
Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in "the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF, put the interests of the Eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State.
Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralized and faceless, to be efficient and responsive. I agree.
The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda. But how can the privatization of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer un-sustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister, Anna Soubry , suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up. It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead of waking up, smelling the coffee and realising that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
'Neoliberalism' is just a sanitised-sounding expression, to cover-up the fact that what we are really seeing here is re-branded, far-right, corporatist ideology.NotAgainAgain -> EllisWyatt , 8 Jun 2013 04:15"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini@EllisWyatt -Uncertainty -> RedHectorReborn , 8 Jun 2013 04:09There is a major dividing line. There are those who recognise the abuses of the system and lobby for changes and there are those who lobby for further exploitation.
So on the one hand there are relatively rich philanthropists who are quietly supporting campaigns to redistribute wealth and our abstaining, and on the other you have people arguing for repealing employment legislation.Worst of the lot are people who pretend to care about the poor but then proceed to fill their own boots.
As consequence people like Warren Buffet should perhaps be among the good guys, whilst people like Tony Blair are the worst of lot.
@RedHectorReborn - The rich have extracted all of the wealth from the wells and is now turning to fracking, regardless of the cost to us all.thenardiers , 8 Jun 2013 04:08All very true. The failures of markets are well documented in economics: the tendency towards monopoly, the failure to value social goods etc.1nn1t -> EllisWyatt , 8 Jun 2013 04:06In addition, it is ironic that the arch advocates of the 'free market' came begging ( read lobbying) to their governments insisting upon public financial bailouts for themselves or their counter parties. It was the 'free markets' failure to correctly price 'risk' that was the route of the economic collapse.
As regards access to 'free markets' it seems patently obvious that if you extract the most money from that market (Amazon et al), you should contribute a fair share towards the infrastructure of that market: roads, educations, health care etc.
marienkaefer , 8 Jun 2013 04:00@EllisWyatt - ... we have a real problem with corporations that have a default setting of minimize taxes through ever more complex structures. It can't be beyond the wit of HMRC to reduce the complexity of the tax legislation and make it harder to avoid? The prize is continued access to the UK market
We also have the problem that for half the households in the land the level of welfare and benfits rather than wages is the major determinant of their disposable income and general prosperity.
The welfare code is now comparable in size to the tax code. The tax-benefit affairs of the working poor in the UK are now becoming as complex as those of the companies that employ them.
The welfare rights industry, which is essentially tax-benefit-lawyering for claimants, is now as large and complex as the tax-lawyering industry for companies.
It really is insane that we set the minimum wage so low that it attracts income tax, and then attempt to collect tax from the employing company to fund a tax credit to top up the same low wages that the same company is paying.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a marketgyges1 , 8 Jun 2013 03:59Does it? where does it say that? An article which as usual blanket condemns "financial institutions" but actually means banks.
The West became over-indebted when it embraced globalisation which necessarily impoverishes the Middle and Working Classes of the developed nations. A chap called Jimmy Goldsmith warned of this and was widely condemned for it. There is another issue Guardianistas would rather not confront : you can a welfare state or you can have open borders. But you can't have both.JamesValencia , 8 Jun 2013 03:59Most interesting.Rochdalelass , 8 Jun 2013 03:57Though I'd say private enterprise is capable of building markets - but not of sustaining them. Take books: If few people know how to read, someone will start a fee paying school to teach those who can pay for it. Then books will take off. And that will generate money for some, who'll send their kids to school.
However it will always, inevitably, crash at some point: Business can build up, but will always do it in destructuve cycles - exactly like the brush fires that destroy and regenerate the savannas. As somebright spark once said: Capitalism contains the seeds of it's own destruction, or something along those lines.
And we don't want to live like that - so we have regulation, and the state.And the state fertilises, and safeguards, by cutting the grass, making mulch, and spreading the rich gooey muck all over the nice, green, verdant, state controlled pampa.
The cowboys, now, they prefer no cutting of grass, and letting their cattle chomp away undistrurbed. And now my analogy is starting to wear thin.
The bottom line: Private enterprise is inefficient because at it's heart it rules out cooperation. Being happiest if it's a monopoly, there's nothing a business would like better than wipe out all competition.
Hence, the necessity for state spending, and state regulation, which the private sector is blind to, because it can't look ahead.
Well said Deborah!EllisWyatt -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 03:56People are members of families, and are employers and workers, who are customers or clients, and part of their local communities and professions and trades and hobbyists/clubs who are large scale wholesale consumers who create the markets that provides employment and income to individuals who are workers. And, and, one big circle.
Right now, the neoliberals think that those in the Far East are the workers and those in the West are the consumers, until the Far East becomes the market and wages so low in the West that they become the workers, unless of course some kind souls decide to invest money in Education, Health and infrastructure in Africa on a huge scale, so we then have Africa as the workers and the far East as the market, and the West, apart from those who own large numbers of shares or business outright, presumably either starve to death or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and start all over again, inventing and setting up completely new industries, providing the newly universally educated and healthy Chinese and Africans and South Americans haven't done it first.
OK. I was against it for a long time, but go ahead. There's no way of avoiding it. Eat the Rich. Apart from the fact that ultra thin is fashionable, and with all that dieting and exercising, they are the only people who actually get the time for lots of exercise these days, and they'll taste incredibly tough and stringy.
@CaptainGrey - Ssshhh not on CiF, we all know that capitalism has failed its just that we can't point to a successful alternative model because such a thing has never existed, its just that this time its different and the model I advocate will lead us all to the sunny uplands of utopia.CaptainGrey -> emkayoh , 8 Jun 2013 03:55Obviously there will be a little bit of coercion and oppression to get us to those sunny uplands, but you can't make an omlette etc. plus don't worry that stuff will only happen to "bad people"
@emkayoh -bluebirds -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 03:55Except it's not. It is still very much alive and growing. The "alternatives" have crashed and burned save Cuba and North Korea. Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and countless people have gained as a result.The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes
@CaptainGrey - deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20 years. The pure market is a fantasy just as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed the false value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed.MylesMackie , 8 Jun 2013 03:55In the 19th century based on experience the public services became part of the public sector to avoid corruption and corporate blackmail. The neoclassical revolution of the late 20th century has pushed us back to days when elites regarded the state as their property. Democracy was a threat which won out either through the British model or violent revolution. A small elite cannot endure if the majority feel exploited.1nn1t -> UnevenSurface , 8 Jun 2013 03:53The Bilderberg Conference should look to the past and learn from the mistakes committed. Neoclassicism will eventually impoverish them
EllisWyatt -> UnevenSurface , 8 Jun 2013 03:52"Multinationals need to recognise that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will slowly evaporate." However, the gains for the transnational rich are immediate and enormous, while the failure of their markets is slow and, so far, almost entirely painless.@UnevenSurface - Multinationals need to recognise that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will slowly evaporate.
@UnevenSurface - I think corporation tax is becoming obsolete given globalization and the increasing dominance of online / global distribution.bluebirds , 8 Jun 2013 03:42Amazon, Starbucks (and to a lesser extent Google) need to have people on the ground in their market, for customer service, distribution, warehouse staff, baristas etc. So they'll pay employer taxes etc.
The question is is that enough? I think we are missing a trick with the UK market due to outdated tax legislation that hasn't really changed in 30 years.
After the US the UK is arguably the most attractive market in the world. Large, homogenous, wealthy with a low propensity to save and a rapid rate of adoption of new technology / products. We need to think about how we can exploit this in relation to corporate taxes because even though I am far from left wing, we have a real problem with corporations that have a default setting of minimise taxes through ever more complex structures.
It can't be beyond the wit of HMRC to reduce the complexity of the tax legislation and make it harder to avoid? The prize is continued access to the UK market
Accountants now hold the whip hand in government and business. They know the price of everything but the value of nothing. They advocate selling off industries, outsourcing to low wage economies, zero hours contracts and deregulation (under the bogus campaign line of cutting red tape).Willsmodger , 8 Jun 2013 03:42All of these policies will ultimately end up with capitalism destroying itself. Low wage stagnation will result in penniless consumers which results in no growth which results in cuttin wages to maintain shareholder returns which results in penniless consumers etc etc etc. All our institutions are gradually eroded and life for the average citizen will become more and more unpleasant.
Profit share may be a way forward, it's not perfect, companies can effectively use it to freeze wages and benefit from unpaid overtime, that creates unemployment as four people working a couple of hours extra ever day are denying someone else a job, but used in the right way it could ensure people get a share in the wealth they help create.peterfieldman , 8 Jun 2013 03:42At the sharp end it's tough, at the company I worked at, all the managers were summoned to a meeting in September and told they had until Christmas to increase turnover and profits, or they would be out of a job.
At the same company, one of my managers complained that a successful manager at another branch was a crook. The CEO replied 'Yes, but he's a crook that makes a million pounds in profit every year'. I wonder how Deborah's article would have gone down with him?
Everything was easier when the U S and Europe ran the world's economies with Bank regulations, currency controls and only the establishment could avoid income, capital gains and IHT taxes and grow wealthy generation after generation. Today there are simply too many players in the global arena and the rules have been torn up. We are in a jungle where greed is rife and only the powerful and corrupt survive, shipping and burying their loot in offshore havens.Febo , 8 Jun 2013 03:41We need a new global order with a change of mentality and more morality among the world's politicians, banking and corporate leaders. Unless we end corruption and exploitation of natural resources in the poor nations and a fairer distribution of the economic wealth the world faces economic and social collapse
Liquidity Jones -> NicholasB , 8 Jun 2013 03:35Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can , because they are more powerful than governments.
Is it beyond the wit of government to close these (perfectly legal) loopholes? Otherwise, what you are asking for is for these companies to make charitible donations to government - nothing wrong with that per se, but let's not hide behind the misleading term 'tax avoidance' - companies are obliged to minimise taxes within the law, face it.
@NicholasB -NotAgainAgain -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 03:32It is perfectly clear that in much of the EU public expenditure has been horribly inefficient and far too high
If you invent a set of rules that says a country that deficit spends above an arbitrary percentage of its GDP is horribly inefficient and far too high then it should not be a surprise that when that happens, it is described as such.
Whether that has any basis in reality or, as I suspect, is only relevant within its own ridiculous framework, is surely the question.
@Fachan -finnkn , 8 Jun 2013 03:31Deborah Orr is established writer for the Guardian and Married to a Will Self whose is almost certainly a millionaire. She is one of the rich. The idea that envy is driving her politics is just utterly absurd, and suggests a total lack of reflection.
NotAgainAgain -> NicholasB , 8 Jun 2013 03:24But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people
Not really; Amazon is just as happy to sell us trashy films, multipacks of chocolate, obesity drugs and baseball bats to stove our neighbour's head in. There's certainly an argument to be made that companies should have a duty to invest in the infrastructure that enables their product to be transported, stored etc...but they shouldn't be expected to give a toss if their customers are unhealthy ignoramuses. A market's a market.
@NicholasB -Liquidity Jones , 8 Jun 2013 03:23But some countries manage to do this much more efficiently and effectively than others.
In Europe it would appear to be the Social Democratic Nordic countries and Germany which has very strong employment rights. Korea's economic growth was based on government investment and a degree of protectionism. These are precisely the ideas that neoliberalism opposes.
If they had adopted The Keynes Plan at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference then the IMF and the World Bank would never have been set up. We most likely would not have had the euro crisis and the problem of trade imbalances between counties would most likely have gone away.kingcreosote , 8 Jun 2013 03:19Now that is what I call 'Keynesian'. Feel free to continue to make up your own definitions though.
Socialism for the 1% with the rest scraping around for the crumbs in an ever more divided world run by The Bilderbergers who play the politicians like puppets.RedHectorReborn -> emkayoh , 8 Jun 2013 03:18@emkayoh - I am not sure its in its death throes, I think what we are seeing is capitalism attempting to transform itself again. The success of that transformation will depend on how willing people across the western world to put up with reduced welfare, poverty pay and almost no employment rights. If we say no and make things too hot for the ruling class we have a chance to take control of the future direction of our world, if not then what's the point.NicholasB , 8 Jun 2013 03:16This is a strange rant. Everyone agrees that free markets need to be nurtured by appropriate state institutions. But some countries manage to do this much more efficiently and effectively than others. It is perfectly clear that in much of the EU public expenditure has been horribly inefficient and far too high.UnevenSurface , 8 Jun 2013 03:10There is no contradiction between being in favour of free markets and believing that markets and societies should be nurtured appropriately. We think people should be free and all accept that they should be nurtured.
emkayoh , 8 Jun 2013 03:09So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"?
Corporate taxation is best explained as the license that business pays to access the market -- which is in turn created through the schools, hospitals, roads, etc. that the tax pays for. Unfortunately the new Corporate Social Irresponsibility being acted out by multinationals today neatly avoids paying that license, and sooner or later will damage them. Multinationals need to recognize that paying tax is an investment. Without that tax, their markets will slowly evaporate.
The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes is gobbling up the last scintilla of surplus that can be extracted from the poor ( anyone not independently wealthy).
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Dec 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
szwalby , 8 Jun 2013 06:03This private good, public bad is a stupid idea, and a totally artificial divide. After all, what are "public spends"? It is the money from private individuals, and companies, clubbing together to get services they can't individually afford.TedSmithAndSon , 8 Jun 2013 06:01What sticks in the neoliberalism craw is that the state provides these services instead of private businesses, and as such "rob" them of juicy profits! The state, the last easy cash cow!
Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers. It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.fr0mn0where -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 05:51Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church.
It's subsumed the entire planet, and waiting for them to see sense is a hopeless cause. In the end it'll probably take violence to rid us of the Neoliberal parasite... the turn of the century plague.
@CaptainGrey -jazzdrum -> bullwinkle , 8 Jun 2013 05:51"Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and countless people have gained as a result."
I agree with you and it was this beneficial version of capitalism that brought down the Iron Curtain. Working people in the former Communist countries were comparing themselves with working people in the west and wanted a piece of that action. Cuba has hung on because people there compare themselves with their nearest capitalist neighbor Haiti and they don't want a piece of that action. North Korea well North Korea is North Korea.
Isn't it this beneficial capitalism that is being threatened now though? When the wall came down it was assumed that Eastern European countries would become more like us. Some have but who would have thought that British working people would now be told, by the likes of Kwasi Kwarteng and his Britannia Unchained chums, that we have to learn to accept working conditions that are more like those in the Eastern European countries that got left behind and that we are now told that our version of Capitalism is inferior to the version adopted by the Communist Party of China?
@bullwinkle - No , when Thatcher and Reagan deregulated the financial markets in the 80s, that's when the trouble began which in turn led to the immense crash in 2008.Eddiel899 , 8 Jun 2013 05:51Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs with a veneer of democracy.WilliamAshbless -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 05:49This type of government began in America about 150 years ago with the Rockefellers, Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Ford etc who took advantage of new inventions, cheap immigrant labour and financial deregulation in finance and social mores to amass wealth for themselves and chaos and austerity for workers.
All this looks familiar again today with new and old oligarchs hiding behind large corporations taking advantage of the invention of the €uro, mass immigration into western Europe and deregulation of the financial "markets" and social mores to amass wealth for a super-wealthy elite and chaos and austerity for workers.
So if we want to see where things went wrong we need only go back 150 years to what happened to America. There we can also see our future?
@CaptainGreycpp4ever -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 05:41The beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won
Free education and the NHS are state institutions. As Debbie said, Amazon never taught anyone to read. Beneficial capitalism is an oxymoron resulting from your lack of understanding.
@CaptainGrey -ATrueFinn -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 05:41especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won and countless people have gained as a result.
At one and the same time being privatized and having their funding squeezed, a direct result of the neoliberal dogma capitalism of austerity. Free access is being eroded by the likes of ever larger student loans and prescription costs for a start.
@ SpinningHugo 08 June 2013 10:02am .succulentpork , 8 Jun 2013 05:36Nah. They achieved this by copying the west.
I would not go that far. The Western Capitalist Party is only now getting to be as powerful as CCP and China started the "reforms" in the late 1970s.
generalelection , 8 Jun 2013 05:26they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments
Let's not get carried away here. Let's consider some of the things governments can do, subject only to a 5 yearly check and challenge:
- force people upon pain of imprisonment to pay taxes to them
- pay out that tax money to whomever they like
- spend money they don't have by borrowing against obligations imposed on future taxpayers without their agreement
- kill people in wars, often from the comfort of a computer screen thousands of miles away
- print money and give it to whomever they like,
- get rid of nation state currencies and replace them with a single, centrally controlled currency
- make laws and punish people who break them, including the ability to track them down in most places in the world if they try and run away.
- use laws to create monopolies and favour special interests
Let's now consider what power apple have...
- they can make iPhones and try to sell them for a profit by responding to the demands of the mass consumer market. That's it. In fact, they are forced to do this by their owners who only want them to do this, and nothing else. If they don't do this they will cease to exist.
The state has merged with the corporations so that what is good for the corporations is good for the state and visa versa. The larger and richer the state/corporations are, the more shyster lawyers they hire to disguise misdeeds and unethical behavior.finnkn -> NeilThompson , 8 Jun 2013 05:20If you support a big government, you are supporting big corporations as well. The government uses the taxpayer as an eternal fount of fresh money and calls it their own to spend as they please. Small businesses suffer unfairly because they cannot afford the shyster lawyers and accountants that protect the government and the corporations, but nobody cares about them. Remember, that Green Energy is big business, just like Big Pharma and Big Oil. Most government shills have personally invested in Green Energy not because they care about the environment, only because they know that it is a safe investment protected by government for government. The same goes for large corporations who befriend government and visa versa.
... ... ...
@NeilThompson - It's all very well for Deborah to recommend that the well paid share work. Journalists, consultants and other assorted professionals can afford to do so. As a self-employed tradesman, I'd be homeless within a month.finnkn -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 05:17@SpinningHugo - Interesting that those who are apparently concerned with prosperity for all and international solidarity are happy to ignore the rest of the world when it's going well, preferring to prophesy apocalypse when faced with government spending being slightly reduced at home.sedan2 -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 05:11@Fachan -KingOfNothing -> 1nn1t , 8 Jun 2013 05:03Dont see a lot of solutions in this article - as long as our sentiments revolve around envy of the rich, we wont get very far
Yeah, there actually wasn't anything in this article which even smelled of "envy of the rich". Read it again.
@1nn1t - That is a point which just isn't made enough. This is the first group of politicians for whom a global conflict seems like a distant event.REDLAN1 , 8 Jun 2013 05:03As a result we have people like Blair who see nothing wrong with invading countries at a whim, or conservatives and UKIP who fail to understand the whole point of the European Court of Human Rights.
They seem to act without thought of our true place in the world, without regard for the truly terrible capacity humanity has for self destruction.
Deborah's point about the illogical demands of neoliberalism are indeed correct, which is somewhat ironic as neoliberalism puts objective rationality at the heart of its philosophy, but I digress...Herbolzheim , 8 Jun 2013 04:49The main problem with replacing neoliberalism with a more rational, and fairer system, entails that people like Deborah accept that they will be less wealthy. And that my friends is the main problem. People like Deborah, while they are more than happy to point the fingers at others, are less than happy to accept that they are also part of the problem.
(Generalisation Caveat: I don't know in actuality if Deborah would be unhappy to be less wealthy in exchange for a fairer system, she doesn't say)
Good critique of conservative-neoliberalism, unless you subscribe to it and subordinate any morals or other values to it. She mentions an internal tension and I think that's because conservatism and neoliberal market ideology are different beasts.NotAgainAgain -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 04:47@CaptainGrey -DavidPavett , 8 Jun 2013 04:45There are different models of capitalism quite clearly the social democratic version in Scandinavia or the "Bismarkian" German version have worked a lot better than the UKs.
EllisWyatt -> NotAgainAgain , 8 Jun 2013 04:43Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem.
How is it a sign of that? We are offered no clues.
What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return;
Try reading a history of financial crashes to dislodge this idea.
... even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely.
This may or may not be true but here it is mere assertion.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt.
At this point I start to have real doubts as to whether Deborah Orr has actually read even the Executive Summary of the Report this article is ostensibly a response to.
All the comments that follow about the need for public infrastructure, education, regulated markets and so on are made as if they were a criticism of the IMF and yet the IMF says many of those same things itself. The IMF position may, of course, be contradictory - but then that is something that would need to be demonstrated. It seems that Deborah has not got beyond reading a couple of Guardian articles on the issues she discusses and therefore is in no position to do this.
Thus, for example in its review of world problems of Feb 2013 the IMF comments favorably that in Bangladesh in order to boost competitiveness
Efforts are being made to narrow the skills gap with other countries in the region, as the authorities look to take full advantage of Bangladesh's favorable demographics and help create conditions for more labor-intensive led growth. The government is also scaling up spending on education, science and technology, and information and communication technology.
Which seems to be the sort of thing Deborah Orr is calling for. She should spend a little time on the IMF website before criticising the institution. It is certainly one that merits much criticism - but it needs to be informed.
And the solution to the problems? For Deborah Orr the response
... from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.
Does anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean? There are certainly no leads on this in the link given to "the philosopher" John Gray. And what a strange reference that is. John Gray, in his usual cynical mode, dismisses the idea of progress being achieved by the EU. But then I suppose that is consistent from a man who dismisses the idea of progress itself.
... Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic.
The first step in serious political analysis is to understand that the people one opposes are not crazy and are not devoid of logic. If that is not clearly understood then all that is left is the confrontation of assertion and contrary assertion. Of course Conservative neoliberalism has a logic. It is one I do not agree with but it is a logic all the same.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this [the need for public investment and a recognition of the multiple roles that individuals have].
Wrong again.
It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market.
And again.
This stuff can't be made up as you go along on the basis of reading a couple of newspaper articles. You actually have to do some hard reading to get to grip with the issues. I can see no signs of that in this piece.
@NotAgainAgain - We are going off topic and that is in no small part down to my own fault, so apologies. Just to pick up the point, I guess my unease with the likes of Buffet, Cooper-Hohn or even the wealthy Guardian columnists is that they are criticizing the system from a position of power and wealth.NotAgainAgain -> mountman , 8 Jun 2013 04:43So its easy to advocate change if you feel that you are in the vanguard of defining that change i.e. the reforms you advocate may leave you worse off, but at a level you feel comfortable with (the prime example always being Polly's deeply relaxed attitude to swingeing income tax increases when her own lifestyle will be protected through wealth).
I guess I am a little skeptical because I either see it as managed decline, a smokescreen or at worst mean spiritedness of people prepared to accept a reasonable degree of personal pain if it means other people whom dislike suffer much greater pain.
Again off topic so sorry about that
@mountman -ATrueFinn -> SpinningHugo , 8 Jun 2013 04:42The critical bit is this
"There is a clear legal basis in Germany for the workplace representation of employees in all but the very smallest companies. Under the Works Constitution Act, first passed in 1952 and subsequently amended, most recently in 2001, a works council can be set up in all private sector workplaces with at least five employees."
The UK needs to wake up to the fact that managers are sometimes inept or corrupt and will destroy the companies they work for, unless their are adequate mechanisms to hold poor management to account.
@ SpinningHugo 08 June 2013 9:26amATrueFinn -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 04:40More people lifted out of poverty in China over the last 25 years than the entire population of South America.
Maybe we need the Chinese Communist Party to take over the world?
@ CaptainGrey 08 June 2013 8:43amirishaxeman , 8 Jun 2013 04:40Capitalism, especially the beneficial capitalism of the NHS, free education etc. has won
There would not be NHS, free education etc. without socialism; in fact they are socialism. It took the Soviet-style socialism ("statism") 70 years to collapse. The neoliberalistic capitalism has already started to collapse after 30 years.
I'm always amused that neoliberal - indeed, capitalist - apologists cannot see the hypocrisy of their demands for market access. Communities create and sustain markets, fund and maintain infrastructure, produce and maintain new consumers. Yet the neolibs decry and destroy. Hypocrites or destructive numpties - never quite decided between Pickles and Gove, y'see.EllisWyatt -> JamesValencia , 8 Jun 2013 04:38@JamesValencia - Actually on reflection you are correct and I was wrong in my attack on the author above. Having re-read the article its a critique of institutions rather than people so my points were wide of the mark.bullwinkle -> bluebirds , 8 Jun 2013 04:38I still think that well heeled Guardian writers aren't really in a position to attack the wealthy and politically connected, but I'll save that for a thread when they explicitly do so, rather than the catch all genie of neoliberalism.
@bluebirds -snodgrass , 8 Jun 2013 04:36@CaptainGrey - deregulated capitalism has failed. That is the product of the last 20 years. The pure market is a fantasy just as communism is or any other ideology. In a pure capitalist economy all the banks of the western world would have bust and indeed the false value "earned" in the preceding 20 years would have been destroyed.
If the pure market is a fantasy, how can deregulated capitalism have failed? Does one not require the other? Surely it is regulated capitalism that has failed?
97% of all OUR money has been handed over to these scheming crooks. Stop bailing out the banks with QE. Take back what is ours -- state control over the creation of money. Then let the banks revert to their modest market-based function of financial intermediaries.EllisWyatt -> 1nn1t , 8 Jun 2013 04:35The State can't be trusted to create our money? Well they could hardly do a worse job than the banks! Best solution would be to distribute state-created money as a Citizen's Income.
@1nn1t - Some good points, there is a whole swathe of low earners that should not be in the tax system at all, simply letting them keep the money in their pocket would be a start.1nn1t -> Uncertainty , 8 Jun 2013 04:34Second the minimum wage (especially in the SE) is too low and should be increased. Obviously the devil is in the detail as to the precise rate, the other issue is non compliance as there will be any number of businesses that try and get around this, through employing people too ignorant or scared to know any better or for family businesses - do we have the stomach to enforce this?
Thirdly there is a widespread reluctance to separate people from the largesse of the state, even at absurd levels of income such as higher rate payers (witness child tax credits). On the right they see themselves as having paid in and so are "entitled" to have something back and on the left it ensures that everyone has a vested interest in a big state dipping it hands into your pockets one day and giving you something back the next.
Broken system
BruceMullinger , 8 Jun 2013 04:31The only group of people in he UK to see that need were the generation that faced WW2 together. It's no accident that, joining up at 18 in 1939, they had almost all retired by 1984.@Uncertainty - Which is why the people of the planet need to join hands.
To promote the indecent obsession for global growth Australia, burdened with debt of around 250 billion dollars, is to borrow and pay interest on a further 7 billion dollars to lend to the International Monetary Fund so as it can lend it to poorer nations to burden them with debt.It is entrapment which impoverishes nations into the surrender of sovereignty, democracy and national pride. In no way should we contribute to such economic immorality and the entire economic system based on perpetual growth fuelled by consumerism and debt needs top be denounced and dismantled. The adverse social and environmental consequence of perpetual growth defies all sensible logic and in time, in a more responsible and enlightened era, growth will be condemned.
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Jun 08, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
JFBridge , 8 Jun 2013 08:21Virtually everyone knows what went wrong, with the exception only of uncontrollable ultra-right neoliberal buffs who try and put the blame on everyone else with various out and out lies and deceptions, and they are thankfully petering and dying out by the day, including deluded contributors to CiF, who seem to be positively and cruelly reveling in the suffering their beloved thesis has and is causing.MatthewBall -> emkayoh , 8 Jun 2013 08:20So, now that we know the symptoms, what about the cure? The coalition want to make the poor and vulnerable suffer even more than they have done over the last three decades or so while still refusing to clamp down and wholly regulate the bankers, corporates and free markets, who still hold too much power like the unions in the 70's,while Ed Miliband and 'One Nation Labour' merely suggest in mild, diffident terms about financial regulation and a more balanced economy, while still not wanting to upset those nice bankers too much.
It's time they were upset though, and made to pay for their errors and recklessness; while they still award themselves bonuses and take advantage of Gideon's recent tax cut, the poor and vulnerable who were never responsible for the long recession now have money taken off them and struggle to feed, pay bills and clothe themselves and their families, supported by the Daily Fail and co. who look on them as scrounging, lazy, criminal, violent, drunken, drug addicted and promiscuous sub-humans, who deserve their fate.
There's quite a few in the middle/professional classes (many bankers) if they didn't know, but they don't bother with such, do they?
@emkayoh -jazzdrum -> Uncertainty , 8 Jun 2013 08:12The economic model we have is bankrupt and in its death throes
I am not sure if this is true. We have the same economic system (broadly speaking, capitalism) as nearly every country in the world, and the world economy is growing at a reasonable rate, at around 3-4% for 2013-14 (see http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2013/01/pdf/c1.pdf for more details).
We perceive a problem in (most of) Europe and North America because our economies are growing more slowly than this, and in some cases not at all. The global growth figure comes out healthy because of strong growth in the emerging countries, like China, Brazil and India, who are narrowing the gap between their living standards and ours. So, the world as a whole isn't broken, even if our bit of it is going through a rough patch.
This is pertinant to a discussion of Deborah Orr's article, because in it she calls for global changes:
The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.
My point is: I don't think this argument will work, because I don't see why the emerging countries would want wholesale change to what, for them, is quite a successful recipe, just because it going down badly in Europe. Instead, European countries need to do whatever it takes to fix their banking systems; but also learn to live within their means, and show some more of the discipline and enterprise that made them wealthy in the first place.
@Uncertainty - I`m not defending philanthropy, i am saying in answer to some personal attacks on Miss Orr below the line, that her status as either rich or poor is irrelevant, it is her politics that count .00000010 -> colonelraeburn , 8 Jun 2013 08:10
Tony Benn and Polly Toynbee both receive much abuse in this manner on Cif.@colonelraeburn - You really are under the quaint illusion you are in a democracy...MickGJ -> kingcreosote , 8 Jun 2013 08:08Uncertainty -> jazzdrum , 8 Jun 2013 07:57And yet the rest have more crumbs than under any other conceivable system. Look at the difference that even limited market liberalisation has made to poverty in China. No loaf, no crumbs. You can always throw the loaf out of the window if you don't like the inequality and then no-one can have anything.@kingcreosote - Socialism for the 1% with the rest scraping around for the crumbs
That's fair, isn't it?
@jazzdrum - I don't have much time for those rich who feel guilty about their greed and do 'charity' to salve their souls. Oh and get a Knighthood as a result.Uncertainty -> CaptainGrey , 8 Jun 2013 07:54The more honest giver is the person who gives of what little they have in their purse and go without as a result. Not a tax dodge re-branded as philanthropy.
Also, such giving from the rich often has strings and may be tailored to what they think are the 'deserving poor'. I don't like that either.
@CaptainGrey - That is not capitalism. You cannot point to the benefits of socialism and call it capitalism.liberalcynic -> Herbolzheim , 8 Jun 2013 07:52Don't you think a global recession and massive banking collapse should be classified as 'crash and burn'?
@Herbolzheim - It's one of the major contradictions of modern conservatism that the raw, winner-takes-all version of capitalism it champions actually undermines the sort of law abiding, settled communities it sees as the societal ideal.Rainborough , 8 Jun 2013 07:51"Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?"liberalcynic -> szwalby , 8 Jun 2013 07:50- asked the journalist employed by an organ of the capitalist press, with an implausible air of puzzlement.
@szwalby -AndyPerry , 8 Jun 2013 07:39Damn, you've just revealed Richard Branson's secret business plan.The state, the last easy cash cow!
More and more people are beginning to understand this as a fundamentally political problem ( ref. @XerXes1369). The 'left' prefers to concentrate on the role of a financial elite (which is supposed to be exerting some kind of malign supernatural force on the state), to divert attention from what mainstream 'left' poltics in this society has turned out to be.szwalby -> colonelraeburn , 8 Jun 2013 07:26@colonelraeburn -outragedofacton , 8 Jun 2013 07:23I would query where you get these figures from, but where it not for the state, do you really think that somebody on the minimum wage, keeping 100% of their wages, would be able to afford, out of these wages, health care, schooling for their children, infrastructure maintenance, their own police force and army, their own legal system? This from an article in the Independent:When the state is taking over 60% of the income of even those on minimum wages we se how, from the very top to the very bottom, that the state is the problem.
It's become a monster that will destroy us all.
So the state, although not perfect benefit all of us, get over it!Rich people have benefited from this more than most: they need workers trained by a state-funded education system and kept healthy by a state-funded healthcare system; they depend on lending from banks rescued by the taxpayer; they rely on state-funded infrastructure and research, and – like all of us – on a society that does not collapse. Whether they like it or not, they would not have made their fortunes without the state spending billions of pounds.
You have to be careful when you take on the banksters. Abe Lincoln John Kennedy and Hitler all tried or (in Kennedy's case planned) on the issuance of money via the state circumventing the banks. All came to a sticky end. No wonder politicians run scared of them.CaptainGrey -> WilliamAshbless , 8 Jun 2013 07:04@WilliamAshbless -ATrueFinn -> fr0mn0where , 8 Jun 2013 07:02Yes they are state institutions and the tax system should be changed to prevent Amazon et al from avoiding paying their fair share. But beneficial capitalism is not an oxymoron, it is alive and present in virtually every corner of the world. Rather than accuse me of not understanding, I think you would do well to take the beam out of your eye.Free education and the NHS are state institutions. As Debbie said, Amazon never taught anyone to read. Beneficial capitalism is an oxymoron resulting from your lack of understanding.
@ fr0mn0where 08 June 2013 10:51ams0lar1 -> colonelraeburn , 8 Jun 2013 06:33I agree with you and it was this beneficial version of capitalism that brought down the Iron Curtain. Working people in the former Communist countries were comparing themselves with working people in the west and wanted a piece of that action.
Now, that's a novel interpretation! The working people in "Communist" countries had free healthcare and education, guaranteed employment and heavily subsidized housing. The reason we have healtcare and free education is that working people in Capitalist countries would otherwise have revolted to have Socialism. In the absence of competition, there is no benefit for the Capitalist to be "beneficial".
@colonelraeburn -The banks couldn't stop property hyperinflation, at 20% a year for well over a decade.
The banks could plainly see that they were stoking a bubble, but chose not to pass on the increased risk of lending to consumers by raising their interest rates and coolling the market. Why? Because they were making a handsome short-term profit. The banks put their own short-term interests above their long-term interests of financial stability. When the house of cards came tumbling down - we bailed them out. It was idiotic banks who failed to properly control their risk of lending that caused the crash, not interventionist politicians.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MysticFish -> gbru2505 , 8 Jun 2013 16:23
@gbru2505 -gbru2505 , 8 Jun 2013 16:13Last week there was a story where HSBC have taken on a senior ex-MI5 person to shore up their money laundering 'problems'. They're being fined over a billion dollars by the fed for taking blood money from murderers, drug dealers and corrupt politicians.
Not the Security Services' Director General by any chance?
-- In a filing to the Bermuda Stock Exchange ("BSX"), HSBC Holdings plc (Ticker: HSBC.BH), announced the appointment of Sir Jonathan Evans to the Board of Directors.
The filing stated:
Sir Jonathan Evans (55) has been appointed a Director of HSBC Holdings plc with effect from 6 August 2013. He will be an independent non-executive Director and a member of the Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee.
Sir Jonathan's career in the Security Service spanned 33 years, the last six of which as Director General. During his career Sir Jonathan's experience included counter-espionage, protection of classified information and the security of critical national infrastructure. His main focus was, however, counter-terrorism, both international and domestic including, increasingly, initiatives against cyber threats. As Director General he was a senior advisor to the UK government on national security policy and attended the National Security Council.
He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2013 New Year's Honours List and retired from the Service in April 2013.
I think there's some really good points in the article.Last week there was a story where HSBC have taken on a senior ex-MI5 person to shore up their money laundering 'problems'. They're being fined over a billion dollars by the fed for taking blood money from murderers, drug dealers and corrupt politicians.
Their annual fee for this guy with 20 years experience to tackle a billion dollar fine and the disfunction in their organisation? A lousy 100 k. Fee to UK for training him? 0.
Ridiculous! It should have been 10 times that for him and a finders fee of perhaps 10 million to the state.
Realistically, the state has NO clue about it's real value, or the real value of the UK population. And the example above, I think, demonstrates banks' attitude to the global demand that they clean up their act. We neef to take this lot to the cleaners before the stench gets any worse.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
TedSmithAndSon -> theguardianisrubbish , 8 Jun 2013 12:24@theguardianisrubbish -Jacobsadder , 8 Jun 2013 11:35There is not a shred of logical sense in neoliberalism. You're doing what the fundamentalists do... they talk about what neoliberalism is in theory whilst completely ignoring what it is in practice.Unless you are completely confused by what neoliberalism is there is not a shred of logical sense in this.
In theory the banks should have been allowed to go bust, but the consequences where deemed too high (as they inevitable are). The result is socialism for the rich using the poor as the excuse, which is the reality of neoliberalism.
Savers in a neoliberal society are lambs to the slaughter. Thatcher "revitalised" banking, while everything else withered and died.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought of personal freedom, communism is definitely not. Neoliberalist policies have lifted millions of people out of poverty in Asia and South America.
Neoliberalism is based on the thought that you get as much freedom as you can pay for, otherwise you can just pay... like everyone else. In Asia and South America it has been the economic preference of dictators that pushes profit upwards and responsibility down, just like it does here.
I find it ironic that it now has 5 year plans that absolutely must not be deviated from, massive state intervention in markets (QE, housing policy, tax credits... insert where applicable), and advocates large scale central planning even as it denies reality, and makes the announcement from a tractor factory.
Neoliberalism is a blight... a cancer on humanity... a massive lie told by rich people and believed only by peasants happy to be thrown a turnip. In theory it's one thing, the reality is entirely different. Until we're rid of it, we're all it's slaves. It's an abhorrent cult that comes up with purest bilge like expansionary fiscal contraction to keep all the money in the hands of the rich.
Bloody well said Deborah!iluvanimals54 , 8 Jun 2013 07:58Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
We all probably know the answer to this. In order to maintain the consent necessary to create inequality in their own interests the neoliberals have to tell big lies, and keep repeating them until they appear to be the truth. They've gotten so damn good at it.
Today all politicians knee before the Altar that is Big Business and the Profit God, with his minions of multinational Angels.TedSmithAndSon , 8 Jun 2013 06:01Neoliberalism is a modern curse. Everything about it is bad and until we're free of it, it will only ever keep trying to turn us into indentured labourers.It's acolytes are required to blind themselves to logic and reason to such a degree they resemble Scientologists or Jehovah's Witnesses more than people with any sort of coherent political ideology, because that's what neoliberalism actually is... a cult of the rich, for the rich, by the rich... and it's followers in the general population are nothing but moron familiars hoping one day to be made a fully fledged bastard.
Who could look at the way markets function and conclude there's any freedom? Only a neoliberal cult member. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be dissuaded. They cannot be persuaded. Only the market knows best, and the fact that the market is a corrupt, self serving whore is completely ignored by the ideology of their Church.
It's subsumed the entire planet, and waiting for them to see sense is a hopeless cause. In the end it'll probably take violence to rid us of the Neoliberal parasite... the turn of the century plague.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MatthewBall -> Rainborough , 8 Jun 2013 14:19
@Rainborough -How many alternative economic systems would you say have been given a fair trial under reasonably favorable circumstances?
A good question. Answer: admittedly, not a huge number - but not none either. Feudalism held sway in the middle ages and mercantilism in the 18th century, before both fell out of fashion. In the 20th century Russia stuck with communism for 74 years, and many other countries tried it for a while. At one time (around 1949-89) there were enough countries in the communist block for us to be able to say that they at least had a fair chance to make it work - that is, if it didn't work, they can't really blame it on the rest of the world ganging up on them.
Lately, serious challengers to the global economic order have been more isolated (Venzuela, Cuba, North Korea?) - so maybe you could argue that, if they are struggling, it is because they have been unfairly ganged up on. But then again, aren't they pursuing a version of socialism that has close affinities to that tried in the Soviet Union?
The problem with giving any novel political idea a really extended trial is that you have to try it out on live human beings. This means that, once a critical mass of data has built up that indicates a political idea doesn't work out as hoped, then people inevitably lose the will to try that idea again.
So my question is: are critics of the current world economic order able to spell out exactly how their proposed alternative would differ from Soviet-style socialism?
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Rainborough -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 10:24
@Fachan - " Just as democracy is the worst system of government except for all other, so capitalism is the worst economic model except for all other."How many alternative economic systems would you say have been given a fair trial under reasonably favorable circumstances?
epinoa -> Fachan , 8 Jun 2013 10:19
@Fachan -MickGJ -> 00000010 , 8 Jun 2013 09:51Shame we only have bastardized forms of them.Just as democracy is the worst system of government except for all other, so capitalism is the worst economic model except for all other.
Eddiel899 -> colonelraeburn , 8 Jun 2013 06:48I'd tend to agree with you but in that case it's not an ideology, merely pragmatism. The convergence of the parties merely reflects the wider consensus in society.@00000010 - Neo-Liberalism is the only choice.
@colonelraeburn -colonelraeburn -> Eddiel899 , 8 Jun 2013 06:06But you haven't got any alternative
The alternative is simple but people have become so wedded to the libertarian parts of liberal democracy that it will be some time before they are ready to contemplate the alternative, a return to the Judaeo/Christian version of human rights - an absolute right to God who made us, to the truth, to life, to a natural family, and to own the means of earning a living - to which all should be entitled and all should be held to account.
These are rights that any sensible person will tell you that we should be entitled to but believe it or not they are anathema to liberal democracy which is based on exploiting the selfishness of the individual to the detriment of the common good and the good of society at large.
@Eddiel899 - Neo-liberalism is just another symptom of liberal democracy which is government by oligarchs with a veneer of democracy.But you haven't got any alternative.
What are we supposed to do elect you Guardian Occupy lot on the promise you will come up with something.
You will have to do better than that.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
OneCommentator -> ATrueFinn , 8 Jun 2013 12:21
@ATrueFinn -OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 12:04No, it was as recently as WW2 more or less. After that it followed a confusing period where social and political freedoms darted ahead up to the '80s when the economic freedoms started being championed by the right: Thatcher, Reagan, etc.Indeed. That was in the time of feudalism and mercantilism.
That saw a liberalisation of trade and an explosive growth in international trade with huge benefits for the whole world: developing countries like the Asian dragons have seen their standards of living skyrocket and practically they can't get up with the developed countries in one generation. China, and India to an extent, is following on that path with pretty good results.
As the same time the developed countries saw a huge improvement in their standard of living with products and services available at incredible prices. Even the countries that did not get on this yet are benefiting and the fact that starvation in the world is less of a problem is the proof of that for example.
ATrueFinn -> OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 12:00But we know already how that is done: voluntary transactions among free agents. That's called a free market and it is by far the most efficient way to produce wealth humanity has ever known. Sure, we tried other methods (slavery, forced labour, communal entities, government controlled economies, tribal economies, etc.) but nothing worked as well as free markets.The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe
The calls for governments' intervention in the economy is misguided and counterproductive. They already extract about 50% of all wealth created in this country. That's way too much since most of the money taken by governments is money diverted from productive use.
@ OneCommentator 08 June 2013 4:46pmSpinningHugo -> jazzdrum , 8 Jun 2013 05:59Wrong. Traditional liberalism supported both social and economic freedoms. That included support for most of the civil rights and freedoms we enjoy today AND free trade and free investments.
Indeed. That was in the time of feudalism and mercantilism.
I take this opportunity to draw everyone's attention to a Finnish theorist and proponent of liberal economical and political thinking, whose treatise on liberal national economy preceded Adam Smith by 11 years: Anders Chydenius (1729-1803).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius
I have the feeling that he and Smith are rolling in their graves seeing what is done under the auspices of "liberalism".
@ jazzdrum 08 June 2013 10:51am . Get cifFix for Chrome .Margaret Thatcher left office 23 years ago. The de-regulation of the City occurred in 1986, 27 years ago. Since then UK GDP has more than doubled, inflation and unemployment are far lower, and the numbers living in extreme poverty have fallen dramatically.
And yet in CiF world it is all Thatcher's fault.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
OneCommentator -> dmckm , 8 Jun 2013 13:03
@dmckm - Nobody is owed a good living in this world. That's what freedom means: one is free to chose the best way to make a living. Are you saying that by forcing people to pay you something they don't want to is freedom?
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
No market is 'Free'. Free markets do not exist. Markets are there for those with a vested interest. i.e. the banksters. Note the growth of Hedge funds or slush funds for the rich.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
LiberteEgalite1 -> taxhaven , 8 Jun 2013 13:31
@taxhaven - I love this "free markets" expression, but can we really have free markets please then? This means that no taxpayer money is to be spent to bail out the capitalist bankers when things so sour.PointOfYou , 8 Jun 2013 13:37It also means that there is completely free movement of labor so I as an employer should be able to hire anyone I like for your job and pay the wage that the replacement is willing to take i.e. tough luck to you if the person is more qualified and is willing to work for less but does not have the work visa because in free markets there will be no such things as work permits.
TedSmithAndSon -> taxhaven , 8 Jun 2013 13:25Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom
Neoliberalism? This is not just a financial agenda. This a highly organized multi armed counterculture operation to force us, including Ms Orr [unless she has...connections] into what Terence McKenna [who was in on it] termed the `Archaic Revival'. That is - you and me [and Ms Orr] - our - return to the medieval dark ages, if we indeed survive that far.
The same names come up time and time again. One of them being, father of propaganda, Edward Bernays.
Bernays wrote what can be seen as a virtual Mission Statement for anyone wishing to bring about a "counterculture." In the opening paragraph of his book Propaganda he wrote:
".. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organised. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind..."[28]
Bernays' family background made him well suited to "control the public mind." He was the double nephew of psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud's sister Anna, and his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife Martha Bernays.
@taxhaven -And if we ever had that, would it make the ideal society?about being permitted to engage in voluntary exchange of goods and services with others, unmolested.
A free market larger than a boot fair has never existed. A market can never have power, it's just a market after all. It's the people in the market that have power... or some of them... the few... have it disproportionately compared to others, and straight away the market isn't free.
It's only even approximately free when properly regulated, but that's anathema to market fundamentalists so they end up with a market run for the benefit of vested interests that they will claim is "free" until their dying breath.
Power belongs with democratically elected governments, not people in markets responsible only to themselves. Amazing that people still think as you do after all that's happened.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MickGJ -> MysticFish , 8 Jun 2013 09:44
MysticFish -> MickGJ , 8 Jun 2013 09:24How is that corporatism?@MysticFish - If these are completely different things, why has the austerity-stricken tax-payer been co-opted into paying for events like Thatcher's funeral
How is that corporatism?Bilderberg policing,
Are they?corporate funded think-tanks are having their non-mandated corporatist policies prioritized over government election pledges on policy?
@MickGJ -Neo-liberalism and fascist corporatism are completely different things.
If these are completely different things, why has the austerity-stricken tax-payer been co-opted into paying for events like Thatcher's funeral and Bilderberg policing, and why is it that corporate funded think-tanks are having their non-mandated corporatist policies prioritised over government election pledges on policy?
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
OneCommentator -> petercs , 8 Jun 2013 11:46@petercs -OneCommentator , 8 Jun 2013 10:49Wrong. Traditional liberalism supported both social and economic freedoms. That included support for most of the civil rights and freedoms we enjoy today AND free trade and free investments. It used to be that liberals were practically unpopular with right wing (traditional conservative for example) parties but more or less on the same side as left wing parties, mainly because of their social positions. More recently the left wing parties became more and more unhappy with the economic freedoms promoted by liberals while the right wing parties embraced both the economic and social freedoms to a certain degree...."neoliberal", concept behind the word, has nothing to do with liberal or liberty or freedom..
So, the leftists found themselves in a bind practically having reversed roles which the the conservatives as far as support for liberalism goes. So, typically, they're using propaganda to cover their current reactionary tendencies and coins a new name for liberals: neoliberals which, they say, are not the same as liberals (who are their friends since liberal means freedom lover and they like to use that word a lot).
Austerity is caused by incompetent governments unable to balance their budgets. They had 60 years to do it properly after ww2 and the reconstruction that followed but many of them never did it. So now it is very simple: governments ran out of money and nobody wants to lend them more. That's it, they hit the wall and there is nothing left on the bottom if the purse."austerity" is the financial sectors' solution to its survival after it sucked most the value out of the economy and broke it.
It is a bit more complicated than that. Developed countries like Greece are supposed to run more or less balanced budgets over longer periods. Sure, they need to borrow money on a regular basis and may that is supposed to be done by issuing bonds or other forms of government debt that investors buy on the open market. For such governments the IMF is supposed to just fill in in a minor way not to provide the bulk of all the loans needed on a temporary basis. Because of incompetent governments Greece is practically bankrupt hence it is not going to be able to pay back most of the existing debts and definitely not newer debts. So practically the IMF is not, ending money to them, it is giving them the money. So, I would say that they have a good reason to wag its finger.The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt.
LOGIC 101: Introductory Course of Studypetercs , 8 Jun 2013 10:44If private, stockholder-held central banks such as the FED and the FED-backed ECB were not orchestrating this depression, and anybody who believed they were was a "wacko-nutcase conspiracy theorist", then why do they keep repeating the same mistakes of forcing un-payable bailout loans, collapsing banks, wiping out people's savings and then imposing austerity on those nations year after year – when it is clearly a failed policy?
Possible Answers :
1. Bank presidents are all ex-hippies who got hooked on LSD in the 70's and have not yet recovered fully as their brains are still fried!
2. Central bankers have been recruited from insane asylums in both Europe and America in government-sponsored programs to see whether blithering idiots are capable of running large, international financial institutions.
3. All catastrophic events in the banking/business world, such as the derivative and housing crash of 2008, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and The Great Depression of 1929-40 were totally random events that just occurred out of nowhere and central banks were caught off guard – leaving them no option but to play with their willies for years on end until a major war suddenly happened to pull the whole world out of "bad times"!
4. As central banks such as the FED and the ECB operate with insatiable greed and cannot be audited or regulated by any government body anywhere in the world, due to their charters having been set up that way, then bankers are free to meet secretly and plot depressions so as to gain full control over sovereign nations and manipulate markets so that their "chums and agents" in business can buy up assets and land in depressed economies – while possible wars could also make corporations and banks more money as well!
Please choose one of the possible answers from above and write a short 500 word essay on whether it may or may not true – using well-defined logical arguments. I expect your answers in by Friday of this week as I would like to get pissed out of my mind at the pub on Saturday night!..."neoliberal", concept behind the word, has nothing to do with liberal or liberty or freedom...it is a PR spin concept that names slavery with a a word that sounds like the opposite...if "they" called it neoslavery it just wouldn't sell in the market for political concepts.The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
..."austerity" is the financial sectors' solution to its survival after it sucked most the value out of the economy and broke it. To mend it was a case of preservation of the elite and the devil take the hindmost, that's most of us.
...and even Labour, the party of trade unionism, has adopted austerity to drive its policy.
...we need a Peoples' Party to stand for the revaluation of labour so we get paid for our effort rather than the distortion, the rich xxx poor divide, of neoslavery austerity.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MickGJ -> outragedofacton , 8 Jun 2013 08:50
I hadn't realised the John WIlkes Booth and Lee Harey Oswald were bankers.@outragedofacton - You have to be careful when you take on the banksters.
Abe Lincoln, John Kennedy and Hitler all tried or (in Kennedy's case planned) on the issuance of money via the state circumventing the banks.But I do always enjoy the scenes in Saving Private Ryan when thousands of heavily-armed Goldman Sachs employees land on Omaha beach.
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
LOGIC 101: Introductory Course of StudyIf private, stockholder-held central banks such as the FED and the FED-backed ECB were not orchestrating this depression, and anybody who believed they were was a "wacko-nutcase conspiracy theorist", then why do they keep repeating the same mistakes of forcing un-payable bailout loans, collapsing banks, wiping out people's savings and then imposing austerity on those nations year after year -- when it is clearly a failed policy?
Possible Answers :
1. Bank presidents are all ex-hippies who got hooked on LSD in the 70's and have not yet recovered fully as their brains are still fried!
2. Central bankers have been recruited from insane asylums in both Europe and America in government-sponsored programs to see whether blithering idiots are capable of running large, international financial institutions.
3. All catastrophic events in the banking/business world, such as the derivative and housing crash of 2008, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and The Great Depression of 1929-40 were totally random events that just occurred out of nowhere and central banks were caught off guard -- leaving them no option but to play with their willies for years on end until a major war suddenly happened to pull the whole world out of "bad times"!
4. As central banks such as the FED and the ECB operate with insatiable greed and cannot be audited or regulated by any government body anywhere in the world, due to their charters having been set up that way, then bankers are free to meet secretly and plot depressions so as to gain full control over sovereign nations and manipulate markets so that their "chums and agents" in business can buy up assets and land in depressed economies -- while possible wars could also make corporations and banks more money as well!
Please choose one of the possible answers from above and write a short 500 word essay on whether it may or may not true -- using well-defined logical arguments. I expect your answers in by Friday of this week as I would like to get pissed out of my mind at the pub on Saturday night!
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Dec 03, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Itsrainingtin -> crinklyoldgit , 8 Jun 2013 10:30
@ crinklyoldgitToo right, I've spat my tea every time I hear some non-Brit brag of their freedom from royal tyranny. They are blissfully unaware they have created/inherited such in all but name. Fat Cat Bastard or Henry the Eighth, try to spot the difference in style or attitude.Still it is surprising that they have gone so quickly from their stated position at the start of the republic of a rejection of kings and emperors to their position now of corruption so ingrained it is impossible to make distinctions.
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Dec 01, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
RobGehrke -> MonaHol , 30 Aug 2012 06:12
"What do you mean by claiming Hersh "cozys up" to MIC ppl? And what would be a specific example of a story he broke after doing that?"
Our Men in Iran?
"We did train them here, and washed them through the Energy Department because the D.O.E. owns all this land in southern Nevada," a former senior American intelligence official told me. ... In a separate interview, a retired four-star general, who has advised the Bush and Obama Administrations on national-security issues, said that he had been privately briefed in 2005 about the training of Iranians associated with the M.E.K. in Nevada
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/mek.html
His conversations with Lieutenant Calley are apparently what allowed him to break the My Lai massacre story as well, even though members of the military had already spoken out about it, and there had been already been charges brought. It just revealed the story to the general public, which prompted a fuller investigation and courts martial. I'm sure there are others.
So, obviously Hersh's "cozying up" (surely not the right term for it, though) is in the interests of raising public awareness of nefarious deeds, and is not scared of painting these organizations in a bad light, whereas Mazzetti's goal here seems to be to maintain his privileged access by providing favors - totally different motivations. It's rather easy to contrast the two, which "smartypants54" has even stated here.
Whatever the case, it's true that elements of the NYT have been mouthpieces more or less for government and corporate power for a long time. While I agree with Glenn about the faux cynicism perpetuating this kind of activity - "don't be naive, this is done all the time" - I can understand that it exists.
Such cynicism on the part of the public, rather than being an acknowledgment of acceptance and approval of such practices, can also be seen as part of a more radical critique of the corporate media in general, and the NYT particularly, in that such organizations - not that I totally agree with this - , by their very nature, can't be reformed and can never be totally effective checks on power because of the way they're structured, and who they answer to.
That's definitely not a reason to stop pointing it out, though.
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Nov 27, 2018 | www.unz.com
Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish Still More Blatant MI6 Lies
The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding of the Guardian.
Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian, this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified "Russians" to the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that Manafort's plea deal was over.
The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these "Russians" are in the visitor logs.
This is impossible. The visitor logs were not kept by Wikileaks, but by the very strict Ecuadorean security. Nobody was ever admitted without being entered in the logs. The procedure was very thorough. To go in, you had to submit your passport (no other type of document was accepted). A copy of your passport was taken and the passport details entered into the log. Your passport, along with your mobile phone and any other electronic equipment, was retained until you left, along with your bag and coat. I feature in the logs every time I visited.
There were no exceptions. For an exception to be made for Manafort and the "Russians" would have had to be a decision of the Government of Ecuador, not of Wikileaks, and that would be so exceptional the reason for it would surely have been noted in the now leaked supposed Ecuadorean "intelligence report" of the visits. What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged "Russians".
Previously Harding and the Guardian have published documents faked by the Moreno government regarding a diplomatic appointment to Russia for Assange of which he had no knowledge. Now they follow this up with more documents aimed to provide fictitious evidence to bolster Mueller's pathetically failed attempt to substantiate the story that Russia deprived Hillary of the Presidency.
My friend William Binney, probably the world's greatest expert on electronic surveillance, former Technical Director of the NSA, has stated that it is impossible the DNC servers were hacked, the technical evidence shows it was a download to a directly connected memory stick. I knew the US security services were conducting a fake investigation the moment it became clear that the FBI did not even themselves look at the DNC servers, instead accepting a report from the Clinton linked DNC "security consultants" Crowdstrike.
I would love to believe that the fact Julian has never met Manafort is bound to be established. But I fear that state control of propaganda may be such that this massive "Big Lie" will come to enter public consciousness in the same way as the non-existent Russian hack of the DNC servers.
Assange never met Manafort. The DNC emails were downloaded by an insider. Assange never even considered fleeing to Russia. Those are the facts, and I am in a position to give you a personal assurance of them.
I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services.
I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But to see the partisans of the defeated candidate (and a particularly obnoxious defeated candidate) manipulate the security services and the media to create an entirely false public perception, in order to attempt to overturn the result of the US Presidential election, is the most astonishing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Plainly the government of Ecuador is releasing lies about Assange to curry favour with the security establishment of the USA and UK, and to damage Assange's support prior to expelling him from the Embassy. He will then be extradited from London to the USA on charges of espionage.
Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the "liberal media" no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of the people, they are an instrument of elite control.
Assange Never Met Manafort
SporadicMyrmidon , says: December 1, 2018 at 7:47 am GMT
My opinions are conflicted, but I'd rather give Assange a Nobel Peace Prize than a criminal conviction. He definitely deserves a Nobel Prize more than Obama. I was in an eatery in Cambridge, MA, when I heard Obama's prize announced, and even there people where aghast and astounded.jilles dykstra , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:25 am GMTThe Guardian was bought by Soros, a few years ago.Bill Jones , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:33 am GMT
Washpost, NYT and CNN, Deep State mouthpieces.
That the USA, as long as Deep State has not been eradicated completely from USA society, will continue to try to get Assange, and of course also Snowdon, in it claws, is more than obvious.
So what are we talking about ?
Assange just uses the freedom of information act, or how the the USA euphemism for telling them nothing, is called.
How Assange survives, mentally and bodily, being locked up in a small room without a bathroom, for several years now, is beyond my comprehension.
But of course, for 'traitors' like him human rights do not exist.I tried this in the Grauniad search boxanon [271] Disclaimer , says: December 1, 2018 at 10:38 am GMTTerm: "Far Right" result: "About 1,400,000 results (0.23 seconds)"
Term : "Far Left" result: "About 7,310 results (0.22 seconds) "
Only Pol Pot is to the Left of that bird-cage liner.
"I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services."Altai , says: December 1, 2018 at 11:38 am GMTThese outfits are largely state-run at this point. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, a man with deep ties to the CIA through his Amazon company (which depends upon federal subsidies and has received security agency "support") and the Guardian is clandestinely funded through UK government purchases, among other things. MI6 has also effectively compromised the former integrity and objectivity of that outlet by threatening them with prosecutions for revealing MI6 spy practices. And the NYT has always been state-run. See their coverage of the Iraq War. The Israelis have bragged about having an asset at the Times. The American government has several.
It's amazing to see the obvious progression of the lies as they take hold in an anti-Trump elite who seem completely impervious to understanding his victory over Clinton. All these people who claim to be so cosmopolitan and educated seem to think Assange or Manafort would have any interest in meeting each other. (Let alone in the company of unspecified 'Russians'.)Che Guava , says: December 1, 2018 at 11:51 am GMTAt first it was that Assange was wrong to publish the DNC leaks because it hurt Clinton and thus helped Trump.
Then it was that Assange was actively trying to help Trump.
Now it's that Assange is in collusion with Trump and the 'Russians'.
The same thing happened with the Trump-Russian nonsense which goes ever more absurd as time goes on. Slowly boiling the frog in the public's mind. The allegations are so nonsensical, yet there are plenty of educated, supposedly cosmopolitan people who don't understand the backgrounds or motives of their 'liberal' heroes in the NYT or Guardian who believe this on faith.
None of these people will ever question how if any of this is true how the security services of the West didn't know it and if they supposedly know it, how come they aren't acting like it's true. They are acting like they're attempting to smear politicians they don't like, however.
Luke Harding is particularly despicable. He made his name as a journalist off privileged access to Wilkileaks docs, and has been persistently attacking Assange ever since the Swedish fan-girl farce.Che Guava , says: December 1, 2018 at 12:05 pm GMTAssange did make a mistake (of which I am sure he is all too aware now) in the choice to, rather than leave the info. open on-line, collaborate with the filthy Guardian, the sleazy NYT, and I forget dirty name of the third publication.
Big tactictal error.
@anon Since you are posting as Anon coward, I am not expecting a reply, but would be interested in (and would not doubt) state funding of the 'Guardian'?mike k , says: December 1, 2018 at 12:33 pm GMTAs for the NYT, they are plainly in some sense state-funded, but the state in question is neither New York nor the U.S.A., but the state of Israel.
Only the thoroughly brainwashed can doubt the truths in this article. Unfortunately that includes a huge number of Americans.Bill Jones , says: December 1, 2018 at 1:05 pm GMT@Altai The one lesson that the left has learned is to double downin perpetuity.Simon Tugmutton , says: December 1, 2018 at 1:23 pm GMTTheir invincible arragance is matched only by their stupidity.
@Che Guava Perhaps he is referring to the sheer volume of ads the British government places for public sector appointments. As for the paper edition, most of it seems to be bought by the BBC!
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Dec 01, 2018 | www.unz.com
Rational , says: November 29, 2018 at 7:51 pm GMT
"ALL LIES, ALL LIES, ALL LIES"So he screamed in the cafeteria and spilled his morning coffee. We all wondered what happened to him and so we looked at his friend, and he told us that he must have read the NYT, as that was his common reaction, a cry of pain and anguish and screams of "all lies, all lies, all lies" whenever he reads the newspaper or watches the TV, esp. NYT.
Your article and the previous news about Manfort visiting Assange and the funny timing of the same reminded me of this story.
The Western MSM is a lying scamming neoliberal propaganda machine.
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
Zilchnada -> TerryMKl , 31 Aug 2012 09:47...this is the norm not the exception. It's also representative of a very significant cross section of the State Department/CIA/Pentagon/DC Beaurcratic Machine, made up of various Leftists, Statists, academia, and privileged youth with political science degrees from east coast/DC/Ivy League schools.TerryMKl , 31 Aug 2012 08:44I am having a very difficult time wrapping my mind around this story.....we have an alleged CIA spokesperson purportedly attempting to engage in damage control with a prominent national newspaper regarding the flow of information between the CIA and film-makers doing a story on the Bin Laden raid. Ostensibly, the information provided, regarding the raid, was to help secure the President's reelection bid?zany12 , 31 Aug 2012 08:31I note that the logo on the phone of the published photo of CIA spokesperson Marie Harf looks remarkably similar, if not identical, to the Obama campaign logo. A "Twitter" account profile for M's. Harf references that she is a "National Security Wonk at OFA...." . Could the "OFA" she makes reference to possibly be "Obama for America"? Her recent tweet history includes commentaries critical of Romney and his supporters, which appear to be in response to her observations while watching Republican Convention coverage.
My understanding heretofore was that those engaged in the Intelligence Community, particularly spokespersons, preferred to keep a low profile and at least appear apolitical. Based upon the facts as presented, one must reexamine whether a US intelligence agency is engaging in the most blatant form political partisanship to unduly influence a US Presidential election.
You might like to report on the recent bill in Congress giving broadcasters "immunity" for spying. The New York Times acquires information from spying on citizens by the CIA twenty four hours a day - aa CIA Wire Service which is unconscionable for a newspaper. Such information allows the Times to keep competitors out of favored industries, scoop other news groups, and enhance revenues by pirated material. The Times isn't a newspaper at all but a clandestine operation run by intelligence units.TheCharlatone , 31 Aug 2012 07:23I'm surprised by the pettiness of it all. And it's this pettiness that makes me think that such data exchange is not only routine, butFranklymydear0 -> JET2023 , 31 Aug 2012 04:26
an accepted way to enhance a career. After all, who really cares what Dowd writes? I believe Chomsky called her 'kinda a gossip columnist'. And, that's what she is.That anyone would bother passing her column to the CIA is, on the face of it, a little absurd. I don't say she is a bad columnist, she's probably quite good, but hardly of interest to the CIA, even when she is writing about the CIA. So basically, someone passed her column along, because this is normal, and the more ambitious understand that this is how you 'get along'.
This kind of careerism is something I see, on some level, every day: the ambitious see the rules of the game, and follow them, and the rationale comes later. For most of us, this doesn't involve the security services. However, the principle that the MSM is, at the least, heavily influenced by state power is fairly well understood by now in more critical circles: all forms of media are subject to unusual and particular state pressures, due to their central import in propaganda and mass-persuasion. The NYT is, in short, an obvious target for this kind of influencing. And as such should really know much much better.
Sadly, I have come to the conclusion that most of what I read, or see on the nightly broadcasts, is essentially bullshit. I could switch to RT, and in a way its counter-point would be useful in stimulating my own critical thinking, but much of what RT broadcasts is also likely to be bullshit. We have a world of competing propaganda memes where nobody knows the truth. It's like we are all spooks now, each and every one of us. An excellent article, again.
gibbon22 , 31 Aug 2012 03:57Interestingly, the NYT revelation itself was illegal, a felony under the Intelligence Act of 1917.
Which, ipso facto, makes at least that part of the Intelligence Act of 1917 unconstitutional: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" ( US. Constitution, Amendment I ). This perhaps explains why no newspaper has ever been prosecuted under the Intelligence Act of 1917. Prosecutors would rather have it available as a threat rather than having it thrown out as unconstitutional, and of course the Supreme Court can't rule on its constitutionality unless someone has standing to bring a case against it before them.
Excellent article, but it's not necessarily a surprise to see a reporter who has developed a relationship with his source do that source a favor in hopes that the favor will some day be returned with greater access.marjac , 31 Aug 2012 02:27It's also not surprising that the CIA would take an interest in how it is perceived. I would argue that the CIA was actually preventing or controlling the flow of info the WH was giving to filmmakers.
This story only scratches the surface on the extent of corruption in US media and journalism in general over the last 10-15 years. The loss of journalistic integrity and objectivity in US media is on display as many media outlets showcase their one-sided liberal or conservative views. Sadly, the US media has become just as polarized as the government. However, the greatest corruption is not with the govt-media connection; the greatest corruption involves the lobbyists - foreign and domestic. Lobbying groups exert an enormous influence on politicians and the media and it extends to both sides of the aisle.
Obama's CIA leaking to anyone, including the NY Times and colluding? I'm shocked do your hear, shocked..........Zilchnada , 31 Aug 2012 01:02What the commoners fail to understand is that the Public Relations (PR) industry controls 75% of the information that you are fed from major media outlets. It's an industry that has artfully masked everything you thought you knew. It's no secret that the CIA and State Department have colluded with media since 1950. Public relations is nothing more than propaganda. And if you think the CIA doesn't have it's own PR department, with *hundreds* of employees, dedicated to misinformation, spin, half-truths, and psychological operations, well, consider this your wake-up call.jaydiggity , 30 Aug 2012 22:30"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - William Colby - Former CIA DirectorChristopher Tucker , 30 Aug 2012 21:52"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William Casey, CIA Director 1981
Glenn, thanks for illuminating the insidious, dangerous cynicism pervading American media & culture, which have become so inured to hypocrisy, corruption & desecration of sacrosanct democratic values & institutions that has been crucial to the normalization of formerly intolerable practices, laws & policies eating away at the foundations of our constitutional democracy. The collective moral, principled "lines in the sand" protecting us from authoritarian pressures are steadily being washed away, compromised, thanks to media obsequious complicity.Grizz Mann , 30 Aug 2012 21:34While you rightly characterize this case as indicating the "virtual merger" of government and media "watchdogs," I think a meta-theme running through your writings illuminates the "virtual merger" of both corporate & state power (esp. after Citizens United), and all the "checks & balances" enshrined in our constitution after 9/11 (e.g. deferential judiciary, bi-partisan Congressional consensus on increasingly authoritarian, secretive US executive, propagandistic media, etc.). At least that's my thinking, and I see no significant countervailing pressure capable of slowing- let alone reversing- this authoritarian re-ordering of our constitutional order & political culture, though a few exceptions exist (e.g. Judge Forrest's suprising courage to suspend NDAA provision 1021), and rare journalists like yourself.
One astounding example of this widespread cynicism facilitating this authoritarian trend, was the media's rather restrained response to the revelation that elements in the massive Terrorist/Military Industrial Complex (HBGary) had been plotting military-style social-engineering operations to discredit & silence progressive journalists, specifically naming YOU, who I see as one of the rare defenders of the constitutional/democratic "lines in the sand" under relentless attack. Where was the overwhelming collective shock & outrage, or media demanding criminal investigations into US taxpayer-funded attacks on our so-called "free press?"
The paucity of outrage, outraged- but did not surprise- me, and neither does this revelation of a cozy relationship between censored/propagandistic media, CIA, White House, etc., as indicated by my articles about the " War on Whistleblowers, " " Where's the Free Press, " & " NDAA 2013 Legalizing US Propaganda Could Make Americans Less Gullible. "
My question for Glenn, is whether he thinks it would be possible for him to get legal standing to sue the private (& US??) entities, which proposed the covert discrediting/repression operations targeting you specifically?
I'm no lawyer, but it seems the documents published by Anonymous, reveal actions constituting criminal conspiracy. Given the proposed methods included forms of politically-motivated military warfare & coercion, the guilty parties would likely be aggressively investigated and charged with some terrorist crimes, if they had been busted planning attacks on people/entities that trumpeted Obama administration policies or its corporate backers (i.e. if they were Anonymous). The HBGary proposal to discredit/silence Wikileaks defenders strongly indicated they had experience with- & confidence in- such covert operations. Requiring a journalist/academic to be covertly discredited/destroyed/silenced before they get legal standing would be as absurd as the Obama administration's argument that Chris Hedges & Co. plaintiffs lack standing because they hadn't yet been stripped of their rights & secretly indefinitately detained without charges or trial.
I thought you might be in the unique position to use the US courts to pry open & shine some light upon the clearly anti-democratic, authoritarian abuses of power, & virtual fusion of corporate & state powers, which you so eloquently write about.
Is the CIA stuff in with the FAST AND FURIOUS files?kschroder , 30 Aug 2012 20:26I glad that foreign journalism is available for me to read our the internet, it's the only way i can find truthful information about what's going on in my own country (USA). I've known the liberal media bias was a problem for a long time, but articles like this continually remind me that things are far worse than they appear.JRobinetteBiden , 30 Aug 2012 20:08State-run media; right along with Apie-See, Empty-See and See-BS...Steven Kingham , 30 Aug 2012 20:02This is hilarious - even the left-wing Guardian is contemptuous of the lap-dog relationship the US press has with the Obama administration.SmirkingChimp , 30 Aug 2012 19:09All the actions surrounding the NY Times and the CIA on this issue are atrocious. With this type of "journalistic independence", why am I paying for a Times account??Intercooler , 30 Aug 2012 18:16As a favor to all readers, following is a summation of all past, present, and future ideas as articulated by the Fortune Cookie Thinker, John Andersson:kerrypay , 30 Aug 2012 18:00
- A certain amount of genocide is good because the world is overpopulated.
- You should never question authority; after all, you are not an expert on authority.
- Everyone wins when we kill terrorists; the more we kill, the more we generate, thus the more we kill again, which makes us win more.
- It is not possible to have absolute power; therefore, power does not corrupt.
- Drones kill bad people. Only bad people are killed by drones. Thus, drones are good. We should have more drones. That is all.
I secretly think he's the real "Jack Handy" from the Deep Thoughts series on SNL.
In my high school history class in 1968 I learned all about how newspapers printed propaganda stories before WWI and Spanish American war in order to influence the public so they would want to go to war and it was called "yellow journalism". I also had an English teacher that taught us about "marketing" and how they use visuals and printed words and film to make us want to buy a product. My father taught me to NOT BELEIVE everything you read. Now it is called "critical thinking" and has been added as a general education class in college that you have to take for a college degree. Critical thinking about what you read and see and hear should be taught as early as 10 year olds so people can think for themselves. I do not read main stream newspapers in America but read news sites all over the world.JohnAndersson , 30 Aug 2012 17:47THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET THAT YOU CAN READ WHAT OTHER NEWSPAPERS. I discovered Glenn on Democracy Now and they are my go to place to read about what is really happening.
the real issue is not personalities or trivial post deletions, the real issue is that the CIA is tightly bound to the institutions of America ... and that this is not a good thing for everyone
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
jayant , 30 Aug 2012 11:17If we thought the public trust in journalism is low, then this news only pushes it down further. Do people in journalism care? Some do very much but for the most the media and the power-holders are in collusion.SeminoleSky , 30 Aug 2012 11:11We should not even talk about "conflict of interest" anymore. It is a collusion all the way. We saw it in the phone hacking scandal here, now at the New York Times. I have always wondered about these white tie dinners in Washington DC and how chummy and cozy the reporters looked mingling with the power-holders and -brokers.
The critical articles are nothing more than smokescreens. We are led to believe how hard-hitting the newspapers are and how they hold the politicians and other power-brokers to fire. All hogwash. It is better we recognize that the citizens are merely props they need to claim legitimacy.
Not till this moment did I realize that we are under siege. I thought Julian Assange was the one under siege but he was just trying to offer us a path to freedom. With Assange neutralized and The New York Times and its brethren by all appearances thoroughly compromised, how can any one of us stand for all of us against government malfeasance let alone tyranny?BillOwen , 30 Aug 2012 11:00Where would you go if you had dispositive proof of devastating government malfeasance? In what is turning out to be the CIA Century, the American President and major news outlets seem to operate under CIA authority and in accordance with CIA standard operating procedures.
It would actually be foolish to take evidence of horrific government behavior to the titular head of the government {who'd likely persecute you as a whistleblower} or the major news organizations supposedly reporting to us about it {they'd bring it right back to the government for guidance on what to do}.
Without safe and reliable ways to stand and speak for and to each other on a large scale about the foul deeds of our government, we are damned to live very lonely vulnerable lives at the mercy of an unrestrained government.
Excerpt from script of Three Days of the Condor --
- Higgins: I can't let you stay out, Turner.
- Turner slowly stops, leans back against a building, shakes his head sadly.
- Turner: Go home, Higgins. They have it all.
- Higgins: What are you talking about?
- Turner: Don't you know where we are?
- Higgins looks around. The huge newspaper trucks are moving out.
- Turner: It's where they ship from.
- Higgins' head darts upward and he reads the legend above Turner's head. THE NEW YORK TIMES. He is stunned.
- Higgins: You dumb son of a bitch.
- Turner: It's been done. They have it.
- Higgins: You've done more damage than you know.
- Turner: I hope so.
- Higgins: You want to rip us to pieces, but you damn fool you rely on us. {then} You're about to be a very lonely man, Turner.
- ***
Higgins: It didn't have to turn out like this.- Turner: Of course it did.
- Higgins: {calling out as they depart separate ways} Turner! How do you know they'll print it?
- Turner stops. Stares at Higgins. Higgins smiles.
- Higgins: You can take a walk. But how far? If they don't print it.
- Turner: They'll print it.
- Higgins: How do you know?
Several commenters have pointed out that the NYT does do "good" journalism. That is true. It is also true that they tell absolute lies. See Judith Miller. The best way to sell a lie is to wrap it in the truth.OnYourMarx -> avelna2001 , 30 Aug 2012 10:57Or Afghanistan. Many of the cruise missile libs supported the invasion of Afghanistan but not Iraq.Intercooler , 30 Aug 2012 10:56I know it's late in the comments thread by the time anyone bothers to read THIS minor contribution, but I think it worth mentioning how this article from Glenn proves just how important are outlets like Democracy Now, RT, Cenk Uyger, Dylan Ratigan, et al. You really have to turn away from the mainstream media as a source of anything. Far too compromised, by both their embeddedness with the government, and their for-profit coroporate owners.Franklymydear0 -> rransier , 30 Aug 2012 10:08Note CNN's terrible ratings problems as of late, and the recent news that they are considering turning to more reality-type shows to get the eyeballs back. If that isn't proof positive of the current value of corporate news, I don't know what is.
DemocracyNow.org. I think I'm going to donate to them today....
Ahzeld , 30 Aug 2012 10:07i'm do not understand why so many people are against authority in general, even when the legal & enforcement system is there to protect your property, life and rights. i understand when corruption exists, it should be seriously addressed, but why throw out a whole system that is "somewhat working"? why blindly call for revolution?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
– The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
Do you understand now?
This is a political officer acting as editor of a major newspaper. I agree this has been going on for some time. Here is my analysis of that. The press is managed on behalf of what I will call US powers. Those powers seem to be high level military, clandestine agencies, financial industry "leaders", and war contractors. The political parties and the faces they present to the public (with some few exceptions) act as functionaries to keep up the illusion that the US is a democracy.evenharpier -> MonotonousLanguor , 30 Aug 2012 09:16Romney and Obama are functionaries. They do as they're told. Obama is the more useful of the two as fewer people seem able to look honestly at his policies. They will not oppose Obama for doing the same things and worse as Bush. It is why all stops are being pulled out to get him, rather than Romney elected. The policies will be the same but the reaction of our population to each man is vastly different.
So yes, the capture of the media has been going on for quite some time. It appears nearly consolidated at this time. Instead of using this as a reason to ignore the situation, it is more important than ever to speak out. History is helpful in learning how to confront injustice. It is not a reason, as I see many use it, to say; "well it's always been that way, so what?" In history, we learn about corruption but we also learn that people opposed corruption. Is there some reason why we cannot also oppose corruption right now?
"During the Vietnam War the Military Briefings were Derisively called the Five O' Clock Follies."IgAIgEIgG , 30 Aug 2012 08:32... ... ...
I though Michael Wolff's recent analysis of Apple (here in the Guardian) was in many ways metaphorical for Western leadership, his article acting in some ways to explain the behavior we see in cultural "elites."BaldieMcEagle , 30 Aug 2012 08:15Worth the read.
And somehow, after reading this article, all I can think of is the Wizard of Oz and a dancing midget army singing in repetitive, high-pitched tones.
And I am not sure why I associate Washington's bureaucratic CIA with dancing midgets.
Who will be the first commenter to leave the classic devastating critique: "The author fails to present a balanced view, showing only one side. The author's argument has no substance and is not really worth anything."thedark , 30 Aug 2012 08:09Don't forget this one: "The author just complains and complains without ever offering a solution or a better approach."
Also, can anyone 'splain me how to do a "response"?
I think Glenn Greenwald would be better off concerning himself less with matters below the ads and more with researching interesting stuff.
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
DuErJournalist , 29 Aug 2012 17:42The New York Times: Burn after reading!JinTexas , 29 Aug 2012 16:02" The New York Times-all the news the CIA decided is fit to print. "
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Aug 30, 2012 | www.theguardian.com
Here's a wonderful example of the NYT's propensity for re-writing history: http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/30/ny-times-scrubs-mention-cia-arming-syrian-rebels-177311/ Long live the memory hole.BillOwen , 30 Aug 2012 13:15The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence Victor Marchetti"It is the first book the federal government of the United States ever went to court to censor before its publication. The CIA demanded the authors remove 399 passages but they stood firm and only 168 passages were censored. The publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, chose to publish the book with blanks for censored passages and with boldface type for passages that were challenged but later uncensored."
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult -- the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance, and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence -- the academic world and the communications media.
The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.
The purpose of the cult is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. government by covert and usually illegal means, while at the same time containing the spread of its avowed enemy, communism. Traditionally, the cult's hope has been to foster a world order in which America would reign supreme, the unchallenged international leader.
Today, however, that dream stands tarnished by time and frequent failures. Thus, the cult's objectives are now less grandiose, but no less disturbing. It seeks largely to advance America's self-appointed role as the dominant arbiter of social, economic, and political change in the awakening regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And its worldwide war against communism has to some extent been reduced to a covert struggle to maintain a self-serving stability in the Third World, using whatever clandestine methods are available.
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Nov 28, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
Greenwald Goes Ballistic On Politico "Theory" Guardian's Assange-Manafort Story Was Planted By Russians
by Tyler Durden Wed, 11/28/2018 - 20:25 105 SHARES
After The Guardian attempted to shovel what appears to be a wholly fabricated story down our throats that Trump campaign manager met with Julian Assange at the London Embassy - Politico allowed an ex-CIA agent to use their platform to come up with a ham-handed cover story ever; Russia tricked The Guardian into publishing the Manafort-Assange propaganda.
To that end, The Intercept 's Glenn Greenwald (formerly of The Guardian ) ripped Politico an entirely new oriface in a six-part Twitter dress down.
Greenwald also penned a harsh rebuke to the Guardian 's "problematic" reporting in a Tuesday article titled: "It Is Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other Evidence Showing This."
In sum, the Guardian published a story today that it knew would explode into all sorts of viral benefits for the paper and its reporters even though there are gaping holes and highly sketchy aspects to the story.
It is certainly possible that Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself "secretly" visited Julian Assange in the Embassy. It's possible that Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un joined them.
And if any of that happened, then there will be mountains of documentary proof in the form of videos, photographs, and other evidence proving it . Thus far, no such evidence has been published by the Guardian. Why would anyone choose to believe that this is true rather than doing what any rational person, by definition, would do: wait to see the dispositive evidence before forming a judgment?
The only reason to assume this is true without seeing such evidence is because enough people want it to be true. The Guardian knows this. They knew that publishing this story would cause partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news outlets would hyperventilate over it , and that they'd reap the rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or false. It may be true. But only the evidence, which has yet to be seen, will demonstrate that one way or the other. - Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
In short, The Guardian tried to proffer a load of easily disprovable claims - which if not true, are pure propaganda. Once it began to blow up in their face, Politico let an ex-CIA operative try to save face by suggesting Russia did it . Insanity at its finest.
zerofucks , 20 minutes ago link
CatInTheHat , 20 minutes ago linkloving the lies being drug into the light
anyone who believes the MSM about anything is a fool
and i am shocked an ex-CIA guy was behind the fake news
nidaar , 25 minutes ago linkGG neatly tied in the nefarious connection between the CIA and the media together
This CIA a criminal organization that has lied us into every single war. Yet the Resistance upholds the CIA as beyond reproach.
TODAY THEY LOOK AS FOOLS.
Chuckster , 30 minutes ago linkThey jumped the shark. This show has its days numbered.
Hippocleides , 34 minutes ago linkWe don't need the Russians re-chewing our cabbage. We have enough natural born idiots to screw the facts up.
The Terrible Sweal , 38 minutes ago linkSomeone ate my sandwich out of the work fridge, God damn Russians!
Alternative , 42 minutes ago linkIt looks like Greenwald is just about at the point of capitulation and accepting that the entire MSM is utterly fraudulent.
Badsamm , 45 minutes ago linkUp next: Guardian journos suffer from Novichik poisoning but survive this lethal nerve gas.
xrxs , 39 minutes ago linkThat still doesn't clear the Guardian from lawsuits.
Jung , 46 minutes ago linkMaybe discovery will reveal their 'sources.'
Captain Nemo de Erehwon , 49 minutes ago linkEver since Alan Rusbridger. left the Guardian as Chief Editor and made room for Assange and Snowden etc., it seems that they have been infiltrated by the CIA and Luke H. gets attention for his stories and Russia-hatred. The ENglish have been conditioned to hate Russia and the Guardian will do anything to discredit Russia with whatever silly stories. Now they are begging for money to survive: well, NO, because you went along with fake news to get some money: corrupt, unlike Alan Rusbridger, Assange, Manning and Snowden.
BankSurfyMan , 48 minutes ago linkUp next: The Russians put up the Guardian to launch a slimy and obviously stupid defence to discredit them.
Later: The Russians are making my hands move on the keys and making me type this nonsense.
5onIt , 50 minutes ago linkwhen you masturbate on the HEDGE...
BankSurfyMan , 50 minutes ago linkDoesnt matter, 1/2 of our population is convinced, that our governmemt would never do to the USA. what they do to other countries for the past 60 years.
bluebird100 , 54 minutes ago linkAssange took another dump today, he is full of **** just like the rest of us ??? Doom 2019! Your *** is on FIRE! neXT!
JimmyJones , 34 minutes ago linkWow Glenn is discovering that the Fake News is real after all! He's such a hack
Yep, the Russian Collusion / interference is so weak. Look at this story, it's breaking and will be huge. Epstine's dirty details released, Muller looks pretty bad.
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
thesingingdetective -> ABasu , 11 Jun 2013 05:38
@ABasu - My comment was not in direct agreement with the article, it was a critique of the first comment above.I won't even begin with the welfare debate in which you somehow think that 'welfare' and its relatively recent introduction is somehow anti neo-liberal because that is nothing other than newspeak...
The point I was making (with perhaps a less than perfect example) is that language is political and therefore it matters greatly what we call things.
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
restructuring
And that bloody word...'modernisation' (Moderni- z -ation - for the management speak geeks). Why is it every time I come across that word in meetings, it means some worker is either losing money or losing their job? Or some manager is about to award themselves a bonus?thesingingdetective -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 04:22@gyges1 - No, she is surely railing against the monetisation of everything and the use of language to make the neo-liberal nightmare through which we are living seem, not only the norm, but the only way.michaelsylvain , 11 Jun 2013 04:17Social security becomes welfare and suddenly masses of society (the majority of benefit claimants being in work) are not drawing on an insurance policy but are in receipt of 'welfare' subject to the largesse and judgements of an ever more cruel and avaricious 'elite'.
Language matters and its distortion is a political act.
But without these Exciting New Word Uprating Initiatives, we can never win The Global Race... or something.I'm a big fan of Steven Poole's Unspeak , which looks at the way in which terms and terminology have been engineered precisely to hollow out meaning and present an argument instead. A kind of Neoliberal Emperor's New Clothes, the problem is that, obviously, if your vocabulary and your meanings become circumscribed, it limits what can be said, and even how people think about what's being said.
(By the way, the link's to Amazon, but, obviously, you may find you have a better "Customer Experience" if you get from somewhere less tax-dodgy.)
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Quite. Language is the first victim of any hegemonic project. Examples abound in communism, fascism and neoliberalism. There's nothing to argue with in this article yet, unsurprisingly, the usual swivel-eyed brigade seem to have popped up. Perhaps your discussion of work strays a little too close to philosophy for the unthinking. I don't know why I'm disheartened by some of the responses, as the same voices appear btl in almost ever CIF article, but I am somehow. Perhaps because the point of the article - the hijacking of language - is so obviously true as to be uncontroversial to any but the ideologically purblind, yet still....ABasu -> thesingingdetective , 11 Jun 2013 05:28@thesingingdetective - what is an insurance policy other than a financial product where in return for payments over a period of time a claim can be made in certain circumstances?OberynMartell , 11 Jun 2013 05:22If anything, particularly given that the link between contributions and claims is now nugatory, describing welfare as welfare is much more honest and much less "neoliberal". It is a set of payments and entitlements society has agreed upon to ensure a level of welfare for all rather than an insurance policy which each individual may claim against if they've kept up their payments.
If an anti-neo-liberal, supportive of the article can get this so back to front, perhaps the "debate" being posited is an empty one about language.
If you changed a few words from the Communist Manifesto, it could easily be about neo-liberalism and leftist attitudes towards it.Sidfishes , 11 Jun 2013 05:19"A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of neo-liberalism. All the leftists of old Europe have entered into a Holy Alliance to exorcise this spectre; Toynbee and Loach; Redgrave and Harris.
Where is the party in power that has not been decried as neo-liberalistic by its leftist opponents on the sidelines?"
Take FE as a case study on how the coin counters have taken over the world.Damntheral -> roachclip , 11 Jun 2013 05:18Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, the maths department had 7 lecturers (2 part time) and two people to look after the admin - there was also the Department Head (who was a lecturer) and a Head of School. They had targets, loosely defined, but it was a rare year when there wasn't a smattering of A grades at A level...
Then along came the coin counters, the target setters, with their management degrees and swivel eyed certainty that 'greed is good... competition! competition! competition!' and with them came the new professionals into the department... the 'Quality Manager'... the 'Curriculum Manager' the 'Exams Manager' the 'Deputy Exams Manager'... and the paperwork increased to feed the beast that counts everything but knows nothing... and targets were set.... 'Targets! Targets! Targets!... and we were all sent in search of excellence... 'teach to the exam' 'We must meet our targets'... 'we won't use exam board 'A' because they're tough' and the exam boards reacted to their own target culture by all simplifying. The universities began to notice the standard of 'A' grade students (who increased) was equivelant to a C grade of 5 years ago. However, targets were being met (on paper) quality was maintained (on paper) we were improving year on year (on paper). However, what was going on in the real world is that our students were being sold a pup - their level of competence and of knowledge was very much inferior to their same grade fore bearers of just 5 years previous
Eventually, the department became 1 full time lecturer and 4 on 'zero hour contracts' and the Head of School became 'Chief Executive' the 'Head of Department' became 'Department Manager' and a gap developed between those who taught and those who 'managed'... not just a culture gap... a bloody big pay gap...
Who benefited from all this marketisation?
Not the lecturers... not the students... not the universities... not industry...not the economy...
Who benefited? Work it out for yourselves (as I used to tell my students)
@roachclip - I am familiar with the numerous wiki sites including Wikipedia, thank you very much. If you read the article yourself you would see it supports my point of view here.retro77 , 11 Jun 2013 05:17Mark Taylor , 11 Jun 2013 05:11There are loads of other examples of rarely scrutinised terms in our economic vocabulary, for instance that bundle of terms clustered around investment and expenditure – terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Expenditure, on the other hand, seems merely an outgoing, a cost, a burden.
This is absolute nonsense...the terms "investment" and "expenditure" carry no moral connotations that I can determine. Does the author accept that we need to have terms to express each of these concepts? Perhaps she would like to come up with some alternative suggestions for the notions of "contributing money" and "spending money"?
Seconded, its uses and abuses of the English Language second only that of the Church. A fitting comparison in my book because they both have much in common. Both are well aware that it is through language and the control of which that true cultural change is achieved.Themiddlegound , 11 Jun 2013 05:11
Both know that this new language must be propagated as far and as wide as possible, with saturation coverage. Control of information is a a must, people must see and they must know only things of your choosing.
For example, back in the 4th Century AD (which is incidentally an abbreviation of the Latin 'Anno Domini', which means 'in the year of our Lord'), the church became centralised and established under the patronage of the Roman Emperor Constantine. Part of this centralising mission was the creation of a uniform belief system. Those that 'chose' to believe something else were branded 'heretics'. The word 'heresy' coming from the Greek 'αἵρεσις' for 'choice'. Thus to choose to have your own opinions was therefore deemed to be a bad thing.
As a quick aside, 'Pagan' comes from the Latin 'paganus' which means 'rural dweller'. I.e. those beyond the remit of the urban Christian elites. 'Heathen' on the other hand is Old English (hæðen). It simply means 'not Christian or Jewish.
When you have complete control over the flow of information, as the Church did by the 5th Century, then you can write practically anything. This doesn't mean just writing good things about yourself and bad things about your enemies. Rather it means that you can frame the debate anyway you wish.
In modern times, I would argue that you can see similar things happen here. As the author suggests, terms like 'Wealth Creator', 'Scrounger', 'Sponger', 'living on welfare', 'Growth', 'progress' and my personal favourite, 'reform', take on a whole new meaning.
Their definition of the word 'reform' and what we would see it to mean are two totally different things, Yet since it is they that has access to the wider world and not us, then it is their definition that gets heard. The same could be said for all the other words and their latter day connotations.
Thus when you hear the news and you hear what passes for debate, you hear things on their terms. Using their language with their meanings. A very sad state of affairs indeed.Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.Wastoid , 11 Jun 2013 05:05You'll notice I've highlighted the word freedoms. Freedom is a word they hijacked right from the start of the process and how they hijacked the Republican party in the USA.
For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not open to question. The founding figures of neoliberal thought took political ideals of human dignity and individual freedom as fundamental.
Concepts of dignity and individual freedom are powerful and appealing in their own right. Such ideals empowered the dissident movements in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union before the end of the Cold War as well as the students in Tiananmen Square. The student movements that swept the world in 1968––from Paris and Chicago to Bangkok and Mexico City––were in part animated by the quest for greater freedoms of speech and of personal choice.
More generally, these ideals appeal to anyone who values the ability to make decisions for themselves.The idea of freedom, long embedded in the US tradition, has played a conspicuous role in the US in recent years. '9/11' was immediately interpreted by many as an attack on it. 'A peaceful world of growing freedom', wrote President Bush on the first anniversary of that awful day, 'serves American long-term interests, reflects enduring American ideals and unites America's allies.' 'Humanity', he concluded, 'holds in its hands the opportunity to
offer freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes', and 'the United States welcomes its responsibilities to lead in this great mission'. This language was incorporated into the US National Defense Strategy document issued shortly thereafter. 'Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world', he later said, adding that 'as the greatest power on earth we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom'.When all of the other reasons for engaging in a pre-emptive war against Iraq were proven wanting, the president appealed to the idea that the freedom conferred on Iraq was in and of itself an adequate justification for the war. The Iraqis were free, and that was all that really mattered. But what sort of 'freedom' is envisaged here, since, as the cultural critic Matthew Arnold long ago thoughtfully observed, 'freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to
ride somewhere'.To what destination, then, are the Iraqi people expected to ride the horse of freedom donated to them by force of arms?As Hayek quoted....
Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free
enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essentials of freedom.
No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free.
The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice, liberty and welfare it offers are decried as a camouflage of slavery.The Neoliberal idea of freedom 'thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free
enterprise. It helps explain why neoliberalism has turned so authoritarian, forceful, and anti-democratic at the very moment when 'humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to offer freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes'. It makes us focus on how so many corporations have profiteered from withholding the benefits of their technologies, famine, and environmental disaster. It raises the worry as to whether or not many of these calamities or
near calamities (arms races and the need to confront both real and
imagined enemies) have been secretly engineered for corporate advantage.Political slogans can be invoked that mask specific strategies beneath vague rhetorical devices. The word 'freedom' resonates so widely within the common-sense understanding of Americans that it becomes 'a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses' to justify almost anything.
Appeals to traditions and cultural values bulked large in all of this. An open project around the restoration of economic power to a small elite would probably not gain much popular support. But a programmatic attempt to advance the cause of individual freedoms could appeal to a mass base and so disguise the drive to restore class power.
Fascinating article, thanks for publishing. It goes some way to explaining, not only the tenacity of neo-liberalism, but also its ability to consolidate its power, even at the moment when it seemed weakest. Its ability to rearticulate language and to present as natural law what is socially constructed, shows the depth of its hold on society, economics, politics, culture and even science.There is a neat cross-over here between neo-liberal discourses and the use of language by the military. Not only does this extend to the general diffusion of certain key phrases, but I think it also runs deeper. Just as the elision of meaning in the language of war facilitates the perpetuation of abuses and war crimes, so the neo-lib discourse permits the perpetuation of questionable economic activity, even as this presents itself in the unquestionable guise of "common sense".
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
KingOfNothing -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 07:22
@gyges1 - The idea of language is very important in the production of a way of thinking which closes down other alternatives and futures. One which leaves neoliberal globalisation as 'the only game in town'.I worry that the very term 'neoliberalism' is one not used by the political classes and much of the media, I don't think I've ever heard the world 'neoliberalism' used on the BBC.
This unwillingness to even call a spade a spade has political consequences . For example, I had an online discussion with someone over Thatchers death a little while ago. He called me 'comrade' and then questioned the very existence of the term Neo-liberalism. At the time I thought this was a bit of a cheap shot, but if you can quite cheerfully label someone a 'socialist' and then refuse to accept that neo-liberalism exists, you are well on your way to making people believe that the current set of social relations are indeed completely normal and that there are few, if any, alternative ways of rewiring the world which can create a better world.
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
maxfisher -> finnkn , 11 Jun 2013 07:45@finnkn - Apologies. I was, of course, referring to the families of the disappeared in Chile. They are, of course, relevant and should not be excluded from any arguments about neoliberalism and its effects. Nor should the families of the disappeared in Argentina, though it is less well known, the junta was entrusted with the introduction of neoliberal policies in Argentina.maxfisher -> finnkn , 11 Jun 2013 07:04The Argentinian military coup, like those in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Nicaragua, was sponsored by the US to protect and further its interests during the Cold War. By the 1970s neoliberalism was very much part of the menu; paramilitary governments were actively encouraged to practice neoliberal politics; neoliberalism was at this stage, what communism was to the Soviet Union; the ideological wing of the Cold War. You may be familiar with Operation Condor?
To be clear: I am arguing that the direct effects of 'actually existing neoliberalism' are very far from benign. I do not argue that the militarisation of Central and South America are the direct consequence neoliberal theory.
@finnkn - Well I think many would. It has been pretty firmly established that the Allende regime was victim of US sponsored military coup and that said coup was sponsored to protect US interests. The Chicago boys then flew into Chile to use the nation as a laboratory for the more outlandish (at the time) neoliberal policies they were unable to practice at home.Neoliberalism was first practiced in authoritarian states; the states in which neoliberalism is most deeply embedded are (surprise, surprise) increasingly authoritarian, and neoliberalism solutions are regularly imposed on client/vulnerable states by suprastructures such as the IMF, the EU, and the World Bank. Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith were very clear that the potential for degeneracy existed. We have now reached that potential; increasingly centralised authority, states within states, the denuding of democratic institutions and crony capitalism. Neoliberalism in practice is very different to neoliberalism in practice. Rather like 'really existing socialism' and Marxism.
works best in authoritarian states because (in practice, if not in theory
finnkn -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 07:41
@BaronessHawHaw - Simply untrue.retro77 -> anonid , 11 Jun 2013 07:10http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/end-of-communism-cheered-but-now-with-more-reservations/
As the statistics on that link show, there are certain countries (notably Russia and the Ukraine) where the +65 age group disapprove of the change to democracy and capitalism. In the majority, however, people of all ages remain in favour.
@anonid -BobJanova , 11 Jun 2013 07:09For 'job' read 'bribe' (keep your mouth shut or lose it), for 'management' read 'take most of the interest out of the job for everybody else and put them on a lower scale', etc. I guess you get my drift.
It's sad that you have such a negative, self-hating attitude towards your work.
retarius , 11 Jun 2013 07:07Spoken like a true champagne socialist in a creative industry. How do you find meaning and fulfillment, or creative values, in emptying bins, cleaning offices, sweeping the streets and a whole load of other work which needs doing but which is repetitive, menial and not particularly pleasant?Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core
There are two ways to get people to do work that needs doing but wouldn't be done voluntarily: coercion or payment. I think the second is a more healthy way to run a society.
I've thought pretty much the same myself. Democracies can be good or bad (as the Greeks knew well)...but in our politic-speak it is used to denounce and make good; as in "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East"...it is intended to make us feel something good about Israel, as it humiliates the Palestinians and steals their land.Antiquarian , 11 Jun 2013 07:06In ancient Greece....'tyrant' simply meant 'usurper' without any neccessary negative association....simply someone who had usurped political power...they recognized that tyrannies could be good, bad or indifferent.
In Rome, dictator simply meant the cahp that took over fpr periods of six months at a time, during times of crisis.
I used to vacation in Yugoslavia in Marshall Tito's time....it was a wonderful place, beautiful, inexpensive and safe...very very safe. What came into the power vacuum after he died in 1980...what happened to the country? I'd argue that his was a good dictatorship or tyranny....
I'm also not too sure what the 90% of people unaffected by and uninterested in power politics in any given country feel about the 'liberation' of Libya and Iraq from their prior dictatorships...I'm sure that plenty of people whose previously steady lives have been wrecked, are all that thrilled.
I have recently been exercised by the right's adoption of "Social Justice". In the past it was the left and churches who talked of social justice as a phenomenon to empower the poor and dispossessed, whether in this country or the developing world. Social Justice was a touchstone of Faith in the City, for example, but it seems now to be the smoke screen behind which benefits are stipped from the "undeserving poor".BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 06:59Most of this crap comes from America. Crappy middle-management bureaucrats spouting "free-market" bollocks.BlankReg -> joseph1832 , 11 Jun 2013 06:56
The efficiency of the private sector - some nob with a name badge timing how long you've been on the toilet.
Freedommm!!!!@ joseph1832 11 June 2013 9:24am . Get cifFix for Firefox .Arabica Robusta -> Obelisk1 , 11 Jun 2013 06:55It is not just neoliberalism. Everyone is at it - sucking the meaning out of words. Corporate bullshit, public sector bullshit. Being customers of your own government is a crime that everyone is guilty of. This is what Orwell railed against decades ago, and it has got worse.
Case in point; just look at the way in which the Cameron set about co-opting words and phrases justifiably applied to his own regime and repurposed them against his detractors.
For example, people who took a stand against the stealth privatisation of the NHS were branded as "vested interests", quite unlike the wholesome MPs who voted for the NHS bill who, despite the huge sums of money they received from the private healthcare lobby, we are encouraged to believe were acting in our best interests by selling our health service to their corporate paymasters. Or the farcical attempt to rebrand female Tory MPs as "feminists" despite their anti-social mobility, anti-equality, anti-human rights and anti-abortion views.
The political class, with the aid of their subservient corporate media quislings, have taken our language apart and used it against us. We have been backed into a corner, we are told, by both Labour and Tories, that there is no choice, either rabid profiteering or penury and we have, to our everlasting shame, lapped up every word of it.
@Obelisk1 - You have single-handedly proven Massey's argument. We have become so embedded in the language of individuals, choice, contracts and competition that we cannot see any alternative. Even Adam Smith understood the difference between "economy" and "society" when he argued that labor is directly connected to public interest while business is connected to self-interest. If business took over the public sphere, Smith argued, this would be quite destructive.Snapshackle , 11 Jun 2013 06:50Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.
But in the eyes of the economic right, that is precisely the case. Adjectives like altruistic, caring, selfless, empathy and sympathy are simply not in their vocabulary. They are only ever any of those things provided they can see some sort of beneficial payback at the end.
maxfisher -> Venebles 11 Jun 2013 06:20
Liquidity Jones, 11 Jun 2013 06:04@Venebles - I was simply joining many commentators in the mire. Those that dispute the neoliberal worldview are routinely dismissed as marxists. I thought I'd save you all the energy, duck.
I'm not sure that the families of the disappeared of Chile and Argentina would concur with you benign view of neoliberalism and its effects.
Might as well define it.Neoliberalism framework vs Full employment framework
Full employment. The 3 pillars
- Economic pillar.
- Commitment to full employment.
- Fiscal & Monetary demand management. Public sector employment. Employer of last resort. Government mediates the class struggle.
Redistributive pillar
- Intervention to ameliorate market outcomes
- Transfer payments. Redistributive taxation. Services to enable participation.
- Regulation, conciliation & arbitration via specialist tribunals.
Collective pillar
- Rights of citizenship
- Uniform services. Pursuit of collective will. Professional administration.
- Services delivered by the State. Rights embodied in legislation.
_______________________________________________________________________________Neo-liberalism. The 3 pillars
Economic pillar
- Primacy of market based outcomes
- Inflation targeting. Fiscal drag. Full employability and compliance programmes.
- Government as agent for business.
Redistributive pillar
- Intervention to stimulate market outcomes
- Compliance tests and penalties mediating welfare payments.
- Taxation advantages for high incomes.
- Policies to force participation.
- Deregulation. Welfare to work.
Individuality pillar
- No intrinsic right of citizenship
- Non-uniform services. Individuals responsible for their own outcomes.
- Mutual reciprocal obligation.
- Outsourcing of public services.
- Privatised service delivery.
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Nov 27, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Fascinating article, thanks for publishing. It goes some way to explaining, not only the tenacity of neo-liberalism, but also its ability to consolidate its power, even at the moment when it seemed weakest. Its ability to rearticulate language and to present as natural law what is socially constructed, shows the depth of its hold on society, economics, politics, culture and even science.There is a neat cross-over here between neo-liberal discourses and the use of language by the military. Not only does this extend to the general diffusion of certain key phrases, but I think it also runs deeper. Just as the elision of meaning in the language of war facilitates the perpetuation of abuses and war crimes, so the neo-lib discourse permits the perpetuation of questionable economic activity, even as this presents itself in the unquestionable guise of "common sense".
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Nov 25, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The Implant Files investigation reveals damage caused by poor regulation and lax testing rules• Why we're examining the implants industry
Patients around the world are suffering pain and many have died as a result of faulty medical devices that have been allowed on to the market by a system dogged by poor regulation, lax rules on testing and a lack of transparency, an investigation has found.
Pacemakers, artificial hips, contraceptives and breast implants are among the devices that have caused injuries and resulted in patients having to undergo follow-up operations or in some cases losing their lives.
In some cases, the implants had not been tested in patients before being allowed on to the market.
In the UK alone, regulators received 62,000 "adverse incident" reports linked to medical devices between 2015 and 2018. A third of the incidents had serious repercussions for the patient, and 1,004 resulted in death.
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has collected 5.4m "adverse event" reports over the past decade, some from manufacturers reporting problems in other parts of the world.
These included 1.7m reports of injuries and almost 83,000 deaths. Nearly 500,000 mentioned an explant – surgery to remove a device.
The figures come from research by 252 journalists from 59 media organisations in 36 countries, which has uncovered a litany of problems in the global $400bn (£310bn) industry.
Examples of failure in the market include:
Replacement hips and vaginal mesh products sold to hospitals without any clinical trials. Patients relying on faulty pacemakers when manufacturers were aware of problems. Complications with hernia mesh that ruled one of Britain's top athletes out of competing for years. Regulators approving spinal disc replacements that later disintegrated and migrated in patients. Surgeons admitting they were unable to tell patients about the risks posed by implants because of a lack of central registers. Patients in Australia being given devices that the regulator has approved on the basis they have been approved in Europe.The findings raise concerns about the level of scrutiny devices undergo before and after they go on the market, and whether regulators detect and act upon findings quickly enough.
Information about problems with devices is, in many countries, kept under wraps, making it difficult for patients to research procedures that have been recommended to them.
Interviews with patients and doctors have revealed flaws in how the medical devices industry is regulated.Prof Derek Alderson, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said there had been enough incidents involving flawed devices to "underline the need for drastic regulatory changes", including the introduction of mandatory national registries for all implantable devices.
"In contrast to drugs, many surgical innovations are introduced without clinical trial data or centrally held evidence," he said. "This is a risk to patient safety and public confidence."
The Guardian and organisations including the BBC , Le Monde and Süddeutsche Zeitung, coordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), have trawled through thousands of documents, many obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests, to unearth some of the biggest problems.
Alongside interviews with patients and doctors, these have revealed flaws in the way the industry is regulated that are unlikely to be fixed by rules due to come into force in Europe.
Among the concerns raised by the Implant Files project are that manufacturers are in charge of testing their own products after faults have developed – and are allowed to shop around for approval to market their products, without declaring any refusals.
The Guardian has also heard about doctors who have close industry ties or seem eager to be early adopters of the latest devices to enhance their professional standing.
Plans for tougher EU rules have been watered down after industry lobbying, according to a huge trove of documents uncovered by the project.
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Nov 26, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
She thought the investigation might have about six months left, although if Trump refuses a face-to-face meeting, Mueller could seek a subpoena to put him before the grand jury. That could be fought all the way to the supreme court.
There is a precedent, US v Nixon, when the justices ruled that the president must deliver subpoenaed materials to a district court. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned.
If Mueller decides not to have that fight, he could write a report saying he believed the president obstructed justice. If he does not reach that conclusion, the Democratic-led House could issue its own subpoenas.
"It is a chess match," said Milgram. "We'll have to see how it plays out in the next year."
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Nov 26, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 13:13
Term abuse didn't arrive with neoliberalism; it's been around since forever. Also, the fact that most of our daily transactions might be commercial is a reflection of our own habits as much as the changing use of language.Nostradamus333 , 11 Jun 2013 13:08If a person is employed by a commercial gallery, they are effectively working in a shop, and the people who visit these galleries are potentially customers. No surprise there. Just like a person who uses transport can be a customer. Of course, there are public services where commercial terms such as customer make little sense.
Marxism has hijacked our vocabulary for a 150 years. Nice to have a change for awhile.MartynInEurope -> bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 13:06@bongoid -dourscot , 11 Jun 2013 13:00Sure, it isn't that important who is making the point, even if the point is made by reference to questionable and contentious examples.
I also think that any even bigger influence on meaning / lack of meaning / interchangeable meaning etc.has been postmodernity far more than neoliberalism.
All true but the left is just as bad as coining its Orwellisms. Witness the way nobody has to use an approved vocabulary to talk about every and any group on fear of moral ridicule or worse. Language is a mental battlefield.LondonPhil -> RClayton , 11 Jun 2013 12:57@RClayton - Can I suggest resurrecting William Morris's distinction between "work" (ie labour that is moral, creative, aesthetic or, at least, hygienic - ie intrinsically worth doing) and "toil" which is work done only because of the necessity to earn money to buy the means of existence?KingOfNothing -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 12:45Having words that distinguish between these two ideas is useful. The 'work' you talk about is 'toil' and most of it is done simply to service the money/capitalist system.
As an example, I have in front of me a rubber 'stress reliever' in the shape of PacMan. It was given to me as a gift.
Presumably, somewhere in the world there is a factory full of people turning out this rubbish. It adds nothing to the world's beauty, nor its ability to support the people living on it. Its only uses are in providing paid 'toil' to support the factory workers and to enable someone to give me something I don't need as a token of their friendship, probably paid for from the fruits of their own toil.
Changing the words we use will not change this, but it does give us a framework in which to think about how it might be changed.
@Yorkied24 -bill4me -> darylrevok , 11 Jun 2013 12:10Strange then, that you can buy a book called: "Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton University Press".
What were Friedrich Heyek and Milton Friedman: lollypop salesmen?
If I can repeat what I said at the top of this thread - The denial of the economic ideology of Neo-liberalism is nothing more than a cheap debating point. If you pretend something doesn't exist then you make it difficult to attack.
Sorry, but it just won't wash with me.
@darylrevok - Well, perhaps you might describe the sweet smell of success as 'funny', but I don't.MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 12:08The biggest problem isn't so much that people use the language of commercial business and are free and easy with their abuse of terms (there's a new one), but that people treat government and politics as a service, and see their relationship with governance as akin to a client/customer relationship, to that end we elect politicians who tell us what we want to hear, even if what we hear can be, all to often, somewhat meaningless or trite.makingtime -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 11:55@TheRealCmdrGravy - There's nothing vague about it, It represents the whole of UK and US government economic policy for the last thirty years with the happy outcomes that we enjoy today.darylrevok -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 11:49But now you know what a neoliberal is, perhaps you can reread the excellent article above with added relish and understanding. Glad to be of assistance. If you want anything else looking up I suggest using a search engine before posting here that a particular word is too difficult for you.
@bill4me - And Capitalism is not dead, it just smells funny.MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 11:40According to Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley economic historian, neoliberalism has two main tenets:Justthefactsman , 11 Jun 2013 11:36"The first is that close economic contact between the industrial core and the developing periphery is the best way to accelerate the transfer of technology which is the sine qua non for making poor economies rich (hence all barriers to international trade should be eliminated as fast as possible).
The second is that governments in general lack the capacity to run large industrial and commercial enterprises. Hence, [except] for core missions of income distribution, public-good infrastructure, administration of justice, and a few others, governments should shrink and privatize)."
Such a long article.ascania , 11 Jun 2013 11:34All one needs to know is that English language is being manipulated just as it always has been by those that have the power to do it. Today the main manipulators are, Madison Avenue, agencies and departments the United States government, Wall Street, US television media. Most people don't realize that the language is being manipulated, when they hear or see in print words being used in unusual ways they just go along with it.
Example:
A couple of years back a motormouth U.S TV show host used the word "impact" in place of the word "affect". He did so simply because "impact" seemed more dramatic. Now it is almost impossible to hear or see the word "affect" used anywhere.
Now there are some of you that will say that language and usage of words change over time, and I would agree with you, but when you see a word used in a context that is completely inappropriate and that use is adopted in general you have to ask yourself questions like who benefits from this.
Remember when Bush wanted to increase troop levels, he refered to the increase as a "surge". "Surge" until then had a distinct meaning it was not associated with any meaning of permanence, and that is why it was used.Advertising frequently refers to things being "better" with no explanation of what it is better than.
"Underpriviliged" to describe people living in poverty but no explanation of the privileges that people have who are not poor.
I could go on and on, but I am sure that you scribblers who do not indulge in "confuse speak" know exactly what I am trying to explain.
Best example I can give is "The free world" which by latest check includes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and sundry other brutal regimes and one time actually included outright fascist countries.Enough said.
Now all London Underground passengers are 'customers', which implies you are buying the travel experience rather than paying for transportation. When misused it suggests to me lack of strength and self-belief from the organization concerned.bill4me -> callaspodeaspode , 11 Jun 2013 11:31@callaspodeaspode - Gosh - an excellent example of how to get things completely wrong. Just because a firm has the government for a customer does not mean it is a public sector business.makingtime -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 11:15Note the word 'customer'. In the case of the FE college, who is the customer - the government or the students? Are the students just incidental fodder?
Your contract with the government will be for a certain job done in a certain for a certain sum of money. In FE, the government has a sum of money which gets paid out irrespective of the outcome. Indeed, how do you measure the 'outcome' of an FE college? In your case, it's easy - either the software works or it doesn't.
Your company no doubt is either owned by an individual, or has shareholders. Those people live on the profits of the company, or lose their money if it goes bust. What is the profit made by an FE college? Who are the shareholders? Who goes broke if the college folds? Still think an FE college is the same as private company?
@TheRealCmdrGravy - No definition is a distinct improvement on your deliberate distortion. I was assuming you had the sense to find a definition on the internet for yourself, since you managed to find your way here.callaspodeaspode -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 11:13I do not consider alternative viewpoints brainless, i consider a refusal to even engage in debate brainless, pretending that a word is undefined when there's reams of literature as well as concise definitions freely available from any number of sources. That might reasonably be construed as brainless.
Here, fill your boots, then if you have an actual argument instead of a crude attempt to derail the debate it can be considered.
Neoliberalism is a political philosophy whose advocates support economic liberalization, free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and decreasing the size of the public sector while increasing the role of the private sector in modern society. (From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism)
I'm convinced you had the brains to look it up yourself, that's why I suspect your agenda. Now please stop wasting everyone's time unless you have something to contribute. I even looked it up for you.
@bill4me - That's an excellent point.seanmatthews , 11 Jun 2013 11:06And I can give a further example. I used to work in a Private Equity-owned firm, which happened to have some contracts to provide software support to the government. Thus, in your conceptual framework, it was a public sector business. Indeed, by your reasoning, Lockheed Martin is a state-owned company as well.
I agree that 'Neoliberalism' has hijacked our vocabulary, but that is about the limit of our agreement. People fling the word 'neoliberalism' around these days as a synonym for 'anything I and my friends have decided is politically-economically objectionable' ('have decided', not 'think'). In the old days, 'fascist' served the same purpose in all those late-night student flat discussions. I assume, until proven otherwise, that people who talk about 'neoliberalism', fall into the same category as those people who had so much difficulty distinguishing between 'liberal democracy' and 'fascism'.HarryTheHorse -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 11:03I can actually think of liberal left-leaning intellectuals who I can recall having self-described as neoliberal. They, however, are distinctive for the sort of nuanced understanding of political economy you are unlikely to find represented around the candles in the kitchen on a Friday night when the world's problems are being discussed and solved.
@TheRealCmdrGravy -pagey23 , 11 Jun 2013 10:57First of all I am impressed by the psychic ability which enables you to deduce my "closed political agenda", very impressive
Not really. It is transparently obvious when you declare that neo-liberalism is "vague stuff which I don't like" when there are cogent definitions of it, to which you have been referred in the past.
this is not the kind of liberalism we needed it needed to be socially liberal but not economically liberal. How dare people become entrepenurial or take the thatcherite tax cuts, or buy goods made from slave labour. Some seriously sick yuppies out there.PointOfYou , 11 Jun 2013 10:54Yes - the person who said language was mankind's first technology were absolutely correct. I expect language was invented by those who invent all technology to be just out of reach of the general public until the inventers decide they can do business for themselves out of it.Claire75 -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 10:22@gyges1 - doesn't say that though, does it?Snapshackle -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 10:12She says that we need to look at the language as it says a lot about how we think. Sounds about right to me. It's hardly arguing white means black, just that the words we choose say something about what we mean.
Then she says that what we talk about isn't the stuff we need to concentrate on. That's a matter of debate and opinion.
@ Yorkied24 11 June 2013 12:57pm . Get cifFix for Firefox .TheRealCmdrGravy -> makingtime , 11 Jun 2013 09:58Except that preference theory does not take into account causality. In any event we have the evidence, there are those who are perfectly happy to cast others to the wall just so long as they do OK and even benefit from it.
@makingtime - Really ? Some very interesting points you've made there ...makingtime -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 09:45your closed political agenda may make it impossible for you to understand without a brain transplant.
First of all I am impressed by the psychic ability which enables you to deduce my "closed political agenda", very impressive. Secondly though it's interesting that you think a "closed political agenda", which I am taking to mean a concrete political viewpoint, can only be remedied with a "brain transplant" rather than through discussion. It's almos as though you're saying "those with political views different to mine are brainless" which is quite a bigoted point of view.
No definition from you regarding the word neo-liberal though so all in all not a very helpful or insightful post. Disappointing.
@TheRealCmdrGravy -tiojo , 11 Jun 2013 09:41..the word "neo-liberal" which, so far as I can see, simply means "vague stuff which I don't like".
Is it possible that you can't see very far because you're deliberately not looking? There are perfectly adequate and precise definitions. I quite liked 'A Brief History of Neoliberalism' by Prof D.Harvey as a long form definition, but since it's rather critical of 'vague stuff which I don't like', your closed political agenda may make it impossible for you to understand without a brain transplant.
It is exasperating when political discussion is reduced to which foghorn can generate the loudest interference. I suppose it's a mistake to waste time on correcting this rubbish
Doreen Massey is an academic. It shows in the way she writes. It's good that she raises fundamental questions about society and the way it is managed. It has traditionally been the role of academics to play that role.Damntheral -> roachclip , 11 Jun 2013 09:40The disappointing feature of the debate however is the absence of input from our politicians. All our leading politicians have essentially the same view of our society and economy. One in which, as Ms Massey indicates, choice exercised through market based mechanisms is the key principal. There is no view of progress towards a good society. There is no view of co-operation rather than competition. The only option is for us to measure ourselves by what we consume.
Our political system and its parties have failed us. In particular it is the left that has failed. It has accepted the social and economic arguments of the right and contented itself with suggesting minor variations on the same theme. Activists on the left need to re-gather their strength and more forcefully put forward a better alternative.
@roachclip - The fact that you refer to "neoliberalism" as "they" in a comment below speaks volumes about the mental fog behind that term.Eddiel899 -> retarius , 11 Jun 2013 09:34@retarius - Any government is only as good as the human rights it upholds.Pagey -> TobyLatimer , 11 Jun 2013 09:33Neoliberalism is the final stage of liberal democracy which has been around for 60-70 years, the most destructive form of government the world has ever seen, based on deregulation for the wealthy oligarchs and debt and debauchery for the poor .............. which is rapidly taking us back to feudal times.
@TobyLatimer - See also: "hardworking famiies/taxpayers"OneCommentator , 11 Jun 2013 09:15Barry1858 -> gyges1 , 11 Jun 2013 09:05Wishful and naive thinking. Most work is very unfulfilling and even in cases where it is meaningful the day to day grind and intensity required by a job is making it a chore. There are very few people who have a job that is really a pleasure. There are many people though who have empty lives and were brainwashed into believing that their job is the most important part of their existence.This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives.
@gyges1 - " This is playground level debating. You are just saying the meaning you give to words is to be preferred to that of your opponents."natedogg -> RClayton , 11 Jun 2013 09:01Ah, I see the problem - a narrow mind with a broad-brush tendency.
I prescribe a course of Orwell, Start, perhaps, with short stories...... Politics and the English Language, Why I Write, Notes on Nationalism, for example. And then a full dose of Nineteen Eighty-Four. That should do the trick!
@RClayton - But if we start to think about work differently - which then gets its expression with the words we use - maybe it can change. Your Bangladeshi example is interesting because it assumes they need to work in that way to exist. Should we not try and change the system so a Bangladeshi can harness his or her creativity to connect their creative ideas to a global market and earn money in this way, rather than selling their physical labour to connect someone else's t-shirt to a global market?MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 08:48Good grief, how many more times will Adorno be plagiarised?bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 08:38It's not just vocabulary, its demeanor, etiquette and peoples entire self perception that has been usurped by the skewed modern logic of markets and the service industry.BobJanova -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 08:37People are preempting the technological singularity by rendering themselves robotic in a quite tragic struggle to perpetually remain relevant and employable in the form that the whims of the dictatorship of the market see fit to determine.
Some nationalities even have an intrinsic advantage, their national character tending rather to the robotic from the outset. What remains of human expression, of impulsivity, of spontaneity, of charisma, of originality is up for question, but the paucity of modern life, of human expression and interaction, will increase in direct relation to the increases in efficiency and productivity that will be demanded of citizens. And this despite the fact that we are suffering under the weight of massive over production, and the excessive demand on resources that this entails.
Nothing has been learnt from the crash of 2008 beyond "get rich even quicker", or as its more commonly known, economic and ecological suicide.
@BaronessHawHaw - Working class pride in their jobs came from being highly skilled – for example riveting in shipyards was difficult and you really were adding value there, so was assembling a car and so on. Also, didn't most of their 'meaning and fulfilment' come from the community, not really the work they were doing, except in so far as most of the people in the community would be doing the same work so it gave them something to talk about?Giggidy -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 08:30I've never heard a modern person saying how much any of the jobs I listed give them meaning or fulfilment. The kind of jobs that gave working class people a meaningful identity have pretty much all gone.
@BaronessHawHaw - most? You are kidding right?Venebles -> BaronessHawHaw , 11 Jun 2013 08:25Just looking at the Governments of Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Hungary as an example seems to indicate centrist and centre-right parties in power.
@ BaronessHawHawGiggidy -> Sidfishes , 11 Jun 2013 08:24Most want socialism back. Socialism with the freedom to travel and the ability to buy a nice pair of jeans to look cool in.
May I suggest that you look up the meaning of the word "patronising"?
@Sidfishes - does your FE College pay tax, then?As I'm reading the annual report of my old sixth form college - which also operate adult learning courses - and they're an exempt charity and therefore not liable for corporation tax. They have an operating surplus (read: profit) on which no tax is paid, quite unlike a private sector company.
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Jun 11, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
'Customer'; 'growth'; 'investment'. We should scrutinise the everyday language that shapes how we think about the economy
'We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work''.'
A t a recent art exhibition I engaged in an interesting conversation with one of the young people employed by the gallery. As she turned to walk off I saw she had on the back of her T-shirt "customer liaison". I felt flat. Our whole conversation seemed somehow reduced, my experience of it belittled into one of commercial transaction. My relation to the gallery and to this engaging person had become one of instrumental market exchange.
The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity.
This is a crucial part of the way that neoliberalism has become part of our commonsense understanding of life. The vocabulary we use to talk about the economy is in fact a political construction, as Stuart Hall, Michael Rustin and I have argued in our Soundings manifesto .
Another word that reinforces neoliberal common sense is "growth", currently deemed to be the entire aim of our economy. To produce growth and then (maybe) to redistribute some of it, has been a goal shared by both neoliberalism and social democracy. In its crudest formulation this entails providing the conditions for the market sector to produce growth, and accepting that this will result in inequality, and then relying on the redistribution of some portion of this growth to help repair the inequality that has resulted from its production.
This of course does nothing to question the inequality-producing mechanisms of market exchange itself, and it has also meant that the main lines of struggle have too often been focused solely on distributional issues. What's more, today we are living with a backlash to even the limited redistributional gains made by labour under social democracy. In spite of all this, growth is still seen as providing the solution to our problems.
The second reason our current notion of wealth creation, and our commitment to its growth, must be questioned is to do with our relationship with the planet. The environmental damage brought about by the pursuit of growth threatens to cause a catastrophe of which we are already witnessing intimations. And a third – and perhaps most important – defect of this approach is that increased wealth, especially as measured in the standard monetary terms of today, has few actual consequences for people's feelings of wellbeing once there is a sufficiency to meet basic needs, as there is in Britain. In pursuing "growth" in these terms, as a means to realise people's life goals and desires, economies are pursuing a chimera.
Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"
Our current imaginings endow the market and its associated forms with a special status. We think of "the economy" in terms of natural forces, into which we occasionally intervene, rather than in terms of a whole variety of social relations that need some kind of co-ordination.
Thus "work", for example, is understood in a very narrow and instrumental way. Where only transactions for money are recognised as belonging to "the economy", the vast amount of unpaid labour – as conducted for instance in families and local areas – goes uncounted and unvalued. We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming.
This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core. A rethinking of work could lead us to address more creatively both the social relations of work and the division of labour within society (including a better sharing of the tedious work, and of the skills).
There are loads of other examples of rarely scrutinised terms in our economic vocabulary, for instance that bundle of terms clustered around investment and expenditure – terms that carry with them implicit moral connotations. Investment implies an action, even a sacrifice, undertaken for a better future. It evokes a future positive outcome. Expenditure, on the other hand, seems merely an outgoing, a cost, a burden.
Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic "common sense" needs to be challenged root and branch.
• Doreen Massey will be discussing Vocabularies of the Economy at a Soundings seminar on 13 June, 6.30-8.30pm, at the Marx Memorial Library, London. More information [email protected]
KingOfNothing -> Yorkied24 , 12 Jun 2013 13:06
@Yorkied24 - Well, I just don't accept that. I agree that monetarism is a major part of Friedman's legacy (as incorporated into neo-liberal doctrine). But, neo-liberalism is what is says on the tin. It is a 'new' version of the liberalist free trade agenda of the past, modified to take into account the welfare state.Eddiel899 , 12 Jun 2013 12:12I guess what I'm most interested in is how you can disentangle and separate politics from economics, since they are two sides of the same coin (where does 'science' fit in, by the way).
it seems that the political side of Neo-liberalism (or liberal democracy) has come up with a new definition of the word "Catholic".Ronpert -> NeverMindTheBollocks , 12 Jun 2013 07:22The Irish Prime-minster stated with a straight face in the Irish parliament today ........ that he is a "Catholic" outside parliament but when he enters parliament he is not a "Catholic"........ in relation to a bill allowing for abortion to be legalized in Ireland.
@NeverMindTheBollocks - when you criticise the author of "nonsensical thinking", this suggests to me that you are uncomfortable with ideas that question "common sense". Rather than engaging with the arguments, you are simply dismissing them as somebody's arbitrary opinion. You seem to be suggesting that Massey is forcing her opinion on you - but surely, like any good academic, she is really asking critical questions, rather than providing answers and solutions. That's what academia is for. Why does that seem to make you so angry?MagicRusski , 11 Jun 2013 19:44Add "development" to that list.bongoid -> Pumplechook , 11 Jun 2013 19:24@Pumplechook - Enterprise culture is a fine emboldening phrase to describe the sinking of society casting citizens adrift with nothing but what nature gave them to keep them afloat. Some might suggest we need to concentrate on mono platform non deliverables going backwards. Or on a fleet of very cheap rubber dinghies.Pumplechook , 11 Jun 2013 18:48Ms Massey clearly fails to see importance of remaining customer/client-focused in our modern enterprise culture. It is crucial in terms of achieving outcomes-based win-win solutions, as well as assisting in the interation of leading-edge opportunities and leveraging cross-platform deliverables going forward.Yorkied24 -> KingOfNothing , 11 Jun 2013 17:44@KingOfNothing - No, what I said was that neoliberalism is not an economic theory. For a start, Milton Friedman's work has its own name in economics, which is monetarism. Neoliberalism is a made up political word only used by those who are more interested in politics and rhetoric than economics and science.bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 17:08Neoliberalism is bankrupt, it isn't even a philiosophy its simple social nihilism. The proof is in the get rich quick, or short term profit mentality of those at the top. Get rich quick is tantamount to jumping the ship, its the economic equivalent of deserting a sinking vessel. Until people recognise the destructive cynical nature of the current economic philosophy and cast out those that are steering the ship, we are all doomed.darylrevok -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 17:02@bill4me - 'Sweet smell of success'?bongoid -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 16:59
No, it's just that your shit-detector is so absent or degraded that you can no longer smell the stink of 'filthy lucre'.@Yorkied24 - I disagree. There is only one writer that deserves volleys of ad hominem attacks and cheap insults and thats Julie Burchill. I know she's about as relevant as a horse drawn carriage but nevertheless I think we need to keep criticism of journalists in proportion.maxfisher -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 16:07@bill4me - The US under the aegis of freedom and capitalism sponsored paramilitary regimes in Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile and Argentina. Not to mention Greece and Iran. It continues to sponsor repressive regimes in the middle east and is about to make peace with the Taliban.MartynInEurope -> maxfisher , 11 Jun 2013 16:05You mistake capitalism as it exists in theory, or in your head with 'actually existing capitalism' which is often red in tooth and claw. The bloody history of the 20th century (particularly world war one, without which no world war two) was in many ways a consequence of imperialism which was a consequence of capitalism.
Theories are all very well, but they run into problems called people. This applies equally to Marx, Smith and Hayek.
@maxfisher -ascania -> bongoid , 11 Jun 2013 16:01True.
@bongoid - I'd like to see the second sentence of your comment engraved above a University Sociology Department office. Quite brilliant!maxfisher -> Yorkied24 , 11 Jun 2013 15:57@Yorkied24 - But they don't do they? They don't engage in cowardly and anonymous ad hominem attacks. They are professional journalists. The Guardian pays them to write articles. They then put their name to said articles. It's a transparent process. They are infinitely better than people who anonymously insult them without engaging in debate.maxfisher -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 15:40@bill4me - No, but it rather skews the data doesn't it? The Soviet Union lifted more people out of extreme poverty than perhaps any society before or since. But I wouldn't advocate Stalinism. I'm sure Pinochet's supporters could point to a growth in prosperity during his reign, but I shouldn't imagine many Chileans would favour a return to authoritarian rule.Yorkied24 -> maxfisher , 11 Jun 2013 15:40Headline date is often meaningless, for example George Osborne may be able to argue that more people are employed than ever before, whilst the opposition may be able to argue that more people are unemployed than ever before. Bo
Both statements my be true, but what do they tell us in isolation?
Does it not occur to you that appalling governance may be a consequence of the form capitalism takes right now?
@maxfisher - Most of them aren't ad homs. They're just insults.Yorkied24 -> KingOfNothing , 11 Jun 2013 15:25And the pair of them deserve it. They're embarrassing enough for all of us.
@KingOfNothing - Oh, and no, it's not difficult to attack at all - you just attack something that exists. Like capitalism.Yorkied24 -> KingOfNothing , 11 Jun 2013 15:24Keynes has already done the work for you. You're crying about nothing.
@KingOfNothing -maxfisher -> bill4me , 11 Jun 2013 15:09Strange then, that you can buy a book called: "Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. By Daniel Stedman Jones. Princeton University Press".
What were Friedrich Heyek and Milton Friedman: lollypop salesmen?
So, someone writes a book calling two economists 'neoliberals', so that makes it so? By that argument, it also calls them Masters of the Universe, so they're fucking He-Man too.
Is this how logic works in your world?
@bill4me -maxfisher -> Justthefactsman , 11 Jun 2013 14:40If you think capitalism is all winners and no losers you're either tremendously naive or a bit thick.
I wouldn't rely on headline figures on Wikipedia to support your argument. Drill down a little, find the data, look at individual countries, see what type of regimes operate in said countries. And imagine, for a second, that the stats are meaningful, then imagine what responsible capitalism could achieve.
@Justthefactsman - Slightly off topic, but I hanker for obliged rather than obligated. Also, most of the time I just feel ok, sometimes good, sometimes bad. Fair to middlin' you might say. I seldom feel awesome.maxfisher -> natedogg , 11 Jun 2013 14:34@natedogg - Of course. Francis Fukuyama told us so in the 80s. Oh....maxfisher -> MartynInEurope , 11 Jun 2013 14:33@MartynInEurope - Well it could be argued that postmodernism is the necessary condition for neoliberalism.maxfisher -> Damntheral , 11 Jun 2013 14:29@Damntheral - No, it means this:JTStone -> TheRealCmdrGravy , 11 Jun 2013 14:27Go on, read it. Then come back to me.
@TheRealCmdrGravy -darylrevok -> Ken Terry , 11 Jun 2013 14:01No definition from you regarding the word neo-liberal though so all in all not a very helpful or insightful post. Disappointing.
It's sometimes worth having a debate about what particular words mean, but all debate rests on certain presumptions, a foundation on which the argument is built, and in this case, Massey counts on her audience sharing her understanding of the term 'neoliberal', which many of us do. Anyone who doesn't can very easily look it up online and quickly find a definition which sits well with Massey's points.
Your and others' approach to rejecting her argument is ungracious cavilling. It's easy to do this in response to any argument, and make no mistake - anyone with intelligence and an open mind can recognise it very clearly.
@Ken Terry - Chomsky is right, ("The Manufacturing of Consent") 'At the head of it is the Military\Industrial Complex, coining the euphemisms of war to make the unthinkable palatable.maxfisher -> Giggidy , 11 Jun 2013 14:00On a localised scale, consider the Coalition who have done a similar job on the word, "Reform". If you look at history's most accurate and honorific incidences of political and parliamentary Reform look at the two Reform Acts which extended the franchise to adult male suffrage, 1832 and 1867, under Peel and Disraeli, Tories FFS, opposed to the Liberal's merciless free market obsessions.
What is "reforming" about stripping poor, ill and vulnerable people of their material support?
Pure Deformation.
I'm not a Tory, (Lifelong Socialist) but I think it's important to reconnect the Conservative Party with some of its avowed traditional self-definitions. "Maintaining continuity with past institutions, and a 'gradualism', if change is necessary." (Henry Cecil, I think).
Where has been the 'gradualism' in this Govt's' sudden and relentless pace of forcing change on the mass of its people by Bill after Bill restricting our aspirations and well-being?
We are governed by political liars who see this state of affairs as a triumph for their expertise. Any criticism is dismissed as not being able to accept the world 'as it is.'
@Giggidy - You've got it. Except that you haven't. 'Trickle up' would be more accurate though a little illogical: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/truth-richard-branson-virgin-rail-profitsr0ssa -> Giggidy , 11 Jun 2013 13:55@Giggidy -r0ssa -> joseph1832 , 11 Jun 2013 13:50The irony, of course, is that neoliberalism has *always* been coupled by high state spending. I know they say different, but that doesn't make it a reality. Stop showing your ignorance of the subject and go and delve in to some of the vast literature on the subject.
@joseph1832 - I think this misses the point though. You're trying to claim there can be words that are neutral, a language without a political dimension. This is besides the point, it's certainly not feasible in a society constructed as it is now.maxfisher -> DemocracyNever , 11 Jun 2013 13:45The real point is that language is itself a field of struggle. It's a terrain on which neoliberalism must be fought. In doing so we need not pretend to be doing anything less than entering a political fight. In combating neoliberalism no claim to be 'neutral' is necessary, that would be precisely to do what it does from the opposite direction - claim universality, eternalisation etc. The left does need to assert interrogate the language of neoliberalism and assert its own. Not becuase this is less political (I think "manipulation" is too strong a word here, the matter is somewhat more complex than that) but becuase it can offer a better future.
@DemocracyNever - I should think the first two responses illustrate how and why debate is increasingly meaningless. Neither of you engage with the argument or posit an alternative; hence no debate.Ken Terry , 11 Jun 2013 13:34That debate should be meaningful is given, that it should be an art form is, frankly, silly.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
Noam Chomsky
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Nov 25, 2018 | russia-insider.com
- Show more replies
AM Hants • 2 days ago ,
AM Hants AM Hants • 2 days ago ,Who is spinning the conspiracies? This is part of the UK section:
Inside The British Army's Secret Information Warfare Machine... https://www.zerohedge.com/n...
Not forgetting the US have their battalions of cyber trolls, together with the EU. Then look into the media branches of cyber trolls. Ironic, when the UK Government is so focused on Russia Today and the few funds they receive from the Russian Government.
Psychological operations (United States)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
AM Hants Simulacra • 2 days ago ,Good point, with regards 'news' via social; media.
I do like the George Eliason articles, which explain intelligence agencies reliance on social media. Including the US outsourcing 80% of it's intelligence to the social media. Not just the US, when you look at the similarities with UK Media.
The Private Contractors Using Vault 7 Tools for US Gov: Testimony Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild Part 1... https://www.opednews.com/ar...
Why Vault 7 Tools Used by Private Contractors Shows US Intel Needs a Ground-Up Rebuild- It's the News- Part 2... https://www.opednews.com/ar...
..........................
So what is with the timing? Is it to take attention away from BREXIT?
Or is it owing to MI5/MI6 desperation, with how Trump will handle their involvement in the US Presidential Campaign. James Bond never had those types of problems, in the days when UK intelligence was not run by social media outlets.
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Nov 25, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
6 Nov, 2018 in Uncategorized by craig | View Comments
I have never managed fully to understand the mechanism by which the media and political class decide when to leave a fact, a glaringly obvious and vital fact, completely excluded from public debate. That process of exclusion is a psychological, not an organisational, phenomenon but extremely effective.
Brexit continues to dominate mainstream political discussion, and the Northern Ireland border issue remains at the centre of current negotiations, forced there by the London government's reneging on the agreement it signed almost a year ago. But there is a secret here, hidden in plain sight, the glaring fact driving the entire process, but which the media somehow never mention.
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Mar 24, 2017 | off-guardian.org
In March 23rd, Gallup headlined "South Sudan, Haiti and Ukraine Lead World in Suffering" , and the Ukrainian part of that can unquestionably be laid at the feet of U.S. President Barack Obama, who in February 2014 imposed upon Ukraine a very bloody coup (see above), which he and his press misrepresented (and still misrepresent) as being (and still represent as having been) a 'democratic revolution', but was nothing of the sort, and actually was instead the start of the Ukrainian dictatorship and the hell that has since destroyed that country, and brought the people there into such misery, it's now by far the worst in Europe, and nearly tied with the worst in the entire world.America's criminal 'news' media never even reported the coup, nor that in 2011 the Obama regime began planning for a coup in Ukraine . And that by 1 March 2013 they started organizing it inside the U.S. Embassy there . And that they hired members of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties, Right Sector and Svoboda (which latter had been called the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine until the CIA advised them to change it to Freedom Party, or "Svoboda" instead). And that in February 2014 they did it (and here's the 4 February 2014 phone call instructing the U.S. Ambassador whom to place in charge of the new regime when the coup will be completed), under the cover of authentic anti-corruption demonstrations that the Embassy organized on the Maidan Square in Kiev, demonstrations that the criminal U.S. 'news' media misrepresented as 'democracy demonstrations,' though Ukraine already had democracy (but still lots of corruption, even more than today's U.S. does, and the pontificating Obama said he was trying to end Ukraine's corruption -- which instead actually soared after his coup there).
The head of the 'private CIA' firm Stratfor said it was "the most blatant coup in history" but he couldn't say that to Americans, because he knows that our press is just a mouthpiece for the regime (just like it was during the lead-up to George W. Bush's equally unprovoked invasion of Iraq -- for which America's 'news' media suffered likewise no penalties).
When subsequently accused by neocons for his having said this, his response was "I told the business journal Kommersant that if the US were behind a coup in Kiev, it would have been the most blatant coup in history," but he was lying to say this, because, as I pointed out when writing about that rejoinder of his, he had, in fact, made quite clear in his Kommersant interview, that it was, in his view "the most blatant coup in history," no conditionals on that.
Everybody knows what Obama, and Clinton , and Sarkozy, did to Libya -- in their zeal to eliminate yet another nation's leader who was friendly toward Russia (Muammar Gaddafi), they turned one of the highest-living-standard nations in Africa into a failed state and huge source of refugees (as well as of weapons that the Clinton State Department transferred to the jihadists in Syria to bring down Bashar al-Assad, another ally of Russia) -- but the 'news' media have continued to hide what Obama (assisted by America's European allies, especially Poland and Netherlands, and also by America's apartheid Middle Eastern ally, Israel) did to Ukraine.
I voted for Obama, partly because the insane McCain ("bomb, bomb, bomb Iran") and the creepy Romney ("Russia, this is, without question, our number one geopolitical foe") were denounced by the (duplicitous) Obama for saying such evil things, their aggressive international positions, which continued old Cold-War-era hostilities into the present, even after the Cold War had ended long ago (in 1991) ( but only on the Russian side ). I since have learned that in today's American political system, the same aristocracy controls both of our rotten political Parties, and American democracy no longer exists. (And the only scientific study of whether America between the years 1981 and 2002 was democratic found that it was not, and it already confirmed what Jimmy Carter later said on 28 July 2015 :
Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members."
But yet our Presidents continue the line, now demonstrably become a myth, of 'American democracy', and use it as a sledgehammer against other governments, to 'justify' invading (or, in Ukraine's case, overthrowing via a 'democratic revolution') their lands (allies of Russia) such as in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and maybe even soon, Iran.
Here are some of the events and important historical details along the way to Ukraine's plunge into a worse condition than most African nations:
"Yanukovych's Removal Was Unconstitutional" "Obama Definitely Caused The Malaysian Airliner To Be Downed" "War on Donbass was planned to ignite a major war in Europe." "Our 'Enemies' In Ukraine Speak" "Meet Ukraine's Master Mass-Murderer: Dmitriy Yarosh" "Ukrainian Soldier Explains Why He Enjoys Killing Russians" "Russia's Leader Putin Rejects Ukrainian Separatists' Aim To Become Part Of Russia" "Gallup: Ukrainians Loathe the Kiev Government Imposed by Obama"Please send this article to every friend who is part of the majority that, as a Quinnipiac University poll published on March 22nd reported, "A total of 51 percent of voters say they can trust U.S. intelligence agencies to do what is right 'almost all of the time' or 'most of the time'" (and that level of trust was far higher than for the rotten press and for the rotten politicians), even after the CIA's rubber-stamping Bush's lies to invade Iraq, and after the FBI's shameless performance on Hillary Clinton's privatized State Department emails even after her smashing their cell-phones with hammers , etc., and all the other official cover-ups, with no American officials even so much as being charged for their rampant crimes against the American public. Besides: ever since the CIA's founding, it has had an "Operation Gladio" that specializes in organizing terrorist acts so as for them to be blamed on, first, communist countries when they existed; and, then, after the end of communism, on allies of Russia. Did the American dictatorship begin right after FDR died in 1945? How much longer will these lies succeed?
For the people of Iraq , and of Syria , and of Ukraine, and many such countries, this dictatorship has destroyed their lives. Trusting the 'intelligence' services of a dictatorship doesn't make any sense at all. They're all working for the aristocracy, the billionaires -- not for any public, anywhere; not here, not there, just nowhere. Should the cattle trust the feedlot-operator? Only ignorance can produce trust, under the conditions that actually exist.
So, unless the idea is that ignorance is bliss, pass along the truth, when you find it, because it is very rare -- and the system operates to keep it that way.
Farrier says Nov, 14, 2017
Overthrowing Ukraine was an attempt to end Russia being the major power on the Black Sea and establish it as a NATO lake to stop Russia from using the sea to aid Syria or Iran. That was ruined when Putin seized Crimea, keeping the Russian naval base.Frank says Mar, 25, 2017In fact, the destabilization of the Ukraine occurred at the dawn of the new century in 2004. The Presidential election of that year between Victor Yuschenko and Victor Yanukovich resulted initially in the victory of Yanukovich. However serious allegations regarding electoral fraud were raised. This resulted in mass demonstrations in Kiev and other cities throughout Ukraine.leruscino says Mar, 24, 2017A re-run was ordered and the second time around Yushchenko took the Presidency with 52% of the vote to Yanukovich's 44%. Suffice it to say that prior to the re-run a number of shadowy foreign NGOs – including the National Endowment for Democracy – were active in promoting civic disobedience in a number of Ukrainian cities in west and central Ukraine. Independence Square in the middle of Kiev was occupied after the first election which was declared invalid. These events became known as the 'Orange Revolution'.
It would be misleading to assume that significant numbers of the protestors did not have a valid case against Yanukovich in terms of corruption and self-serving. However, it was equally true that many of the demonstrators' motives were somewhat less noble. Prior to the election Yushchenko had promised his running mate Yulia Tymoshenko the position of Prime Minister should he win the election. Thus throughout, the disturbances were a struggle between the eastern and western oligarchs.
On the crucial question of the nature of these events, 'Peoples power' or 'revolutionary coup' the issue remains undecided.
This notwithstanding the British historian David Lane of Emmanuel College Cambridge argued that"The 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine was widely considered to be an instance of the 'coloured revolutions' of 1989 engendered by democratic values and nascent civil societies in the process of nation building. The extent to which the 'Orange Revolution' could be considered a revolutionary event stimulated by civil society, or a different type of political activity (a putsch, coup d'état), legitimated by elite-sponsored 'soft' political power. Based on public opinion poll data and responses from focus groups, the author contends that what began as an orchestrated protest election fraud developed into a novel type of political activity -- a revolutionary coup d'état. It is contended that the movement was divisive rather than integrative and did not enjoy widespread popular support."
Which is about the nearest we will get to an authentic answer.
What followed, however, was a complete and corrupt shamble of opportunism, corruption and self-serving misrule of Yuschenko and Tymoshenko who, after becoming involved in some dubious energy deals was to become known as the 'Gas Princess'. These two paragons of democracy eventually became bitter enemies and saw the return of Yanukovich after the Presidential contest between her and Yanukovich in 2010 which Yanukovich narrowly won.
Wanted Dead or Alive !mohandeer says Mar, 24, 2017BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA – AKA 'Barry Soetoro'
Crimes:
Mass Murder (c) 600,000+ Killed, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Yemen.
&
WiretappingReward : Clear Conscious, Service to Humanity.
Loading...Reblogged this on wgrovedotnet and commented:It's long been a truth that democracy in the US died a long time ago and the wealth and power behind the POTUS, irrespective of who that might be, are mere puppets. Obama won his presidency on outright lies and the crooked Clintons and Sarkozys of the US corrupt elite serve no-one's interests but their own at the cost of the lives of Ukrainian Russian ethnics and the Libyan, Iraqi and Syrian people. "Saving Syria's children" would require the removal of the source of their suffering, which can be firmly laid at the door of murderous Washington War Hawks, rent-a-gobs like Samantha Powers and Victoria Nuland(nee Kagan)and corrupt MSM supporting the rogue state that is the USA.
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Nov 05, 2018 | www.unz.com
With Jair Bolsonaro's victory in Brazil's presidential election at the weekend, the doom-mongers among western elites are out in force once again. His success, like Donald Trump's, has confirmed a long-held prejudice: that the people cannot be trusted; that, when empowered, they behave like a mob driven by primitive urges; that the unwashed masses now threaten to bring down the carefully constructed walls of civilisation.
The guardians of the status quo refused to learn the lesson of Trump's election, and so it will be with Bolsonaro. Rather than engaging the intellectual faculties they claim as their exclusive preserve, western "analysts" and "experts" are again averting their gaze from anything that might help them understand what has driven our supposed democracies into the dark places inhabited by the new demagogues. Instead, as ever, the blame is being laid squarely at the door of social media.
Social media and fake news are apparently the reasons Bolsonaro won at the ballot box. Without the gatekeepers in place to limit access to the "free press" – itself the plaything of billionaires and global corporations, with brands and a bottom line to protect – the rabble has supposedly been freed to give expression to their innate bigotry.
Here is Simon Jenkins, a veteran British gatekeeper – a former editor of the Times of London who now writes a column in the Guardian – pontificating on Bolsonaro:
"The lesson for champions of open democracy is glaring. Its values cannot be taken for granted. When debate is no longer through regulated media, courts and institutions, politics will default to the mob. Social media – once hailed as an agent of global concord – has become the purveyor of falsity, anger and hatred. Its algorithms polarise opinion. Its pseudo-information drives argument to the extremes."
This is now the default consensus of the corporate media, whether in its rightwing incarnations or of the variety posing on the liberal-left end of the spectrum like the Guardian. The people are stupid, and we need to be protected from their base instincts. Social media, it is claimed, has unleashed humanity's id.
Selling plutocracy
There is a kind of truth in Jenkins' argument, even if it is not the one he intended. Social media did indeed liberate ordinary people. For the first time in modern history, they were not simply the recipients of official, sanctioned information. They were not only spoken down to by their betters, they could answer back – and not always as deferentially as the media class expected.
Clinging to their old privileges, Jenkins and his ilk are rightly unnerved. They have much to lose.
But that also means they are far from dispassionate observers of the current political scene. They are deeply invested in the status quo, in the existing power structures that have kept them well-paid courtiers of the corporations that dominate the planet.
Bolsonaro, like Trump, is not a disruption of the current neoliberal order; he is an intensification or escalation of its worst impulses. He is its logical conclusion.
The plutocrats who run our societies need figureheads, behind whom they can conceal their unaccountable power. Until now they preferred the slickest salespeople, ones who could sell wars as humanitarian intervention rather than profit-driven exercises in death and destruction; the unsustainable plunder of natural resources as economic growth; the massive accumulation of wealth, stashed in offshore tax havens, as the fair outcome of a free market; the bailouts funded by ordinary taxpayers to stem economic crises they had engineered as necessary austerity; and so on.
A smooth-tongued Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were the favoured salespeople, especially in an age when the elites had persuaded us of a self-serving argument: that ghetto-like identities based on colour or gender mattered far more than class. It was divide-and-rule dressed up as empowerment. The polarisation now bewailed by Jenkins was in truth stoked and rationalised by the very corporate media he so faithfully serves.
Fear of the domino effect
Despite their professed concern, the plutocrats and their media spokespeople much prefer a far-right populist like Trump or Bolsonaro to a populist leader of the genuine left. They prefer the social divisions fuelled by neo-fascists like Bolsonaro, divisions that protect their wealth and privilege, over the unifying message of a socialist who wants to curtail class privilege, the real basis of the elite's power.
The true left – whether in Brazil, Venezuela, Britain or the US – does not control the police or military, the financial sector, the oil industries, the arms manufacturers, or the corporate media. It was these very industries and institutions that smoothed the path to power for Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the US.
Former socialist leaders like Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela were bound to fail not so much because of their flaws as individuals but because powerful interests rejected their right to rule. These socialists never had control over the key levers of power, the key resources. Their efforts were sabotaged – from within and without – from the moment of their election.
Local elites in Latin America are tied umbilically to US elites, who in turn are determined to make sure any socialist experiment in their backyard fails – as a way to prevent a much-feared domino effect, one that might seed socialism closer to home.
The media, the financial elites, the armed forces were never servants of the socialist governments that have been struggling to reform Latin America. The corporate world has no interest either in building proper housing in place of slums or in dragging the masses out of the kind of poverty that fuels the drug gangs that Bolsonaro claims he will crush through more violence.
Bolsonaro will not face any of the institutional obstacles Lula da Silva or Chavez needed to overcome. No one in power will stand in his way as he institutes his "reforms". No one will stop him creaming off Brazil's wealth for his corporate friends. As in Pinochet's Chile, Bolsonaro can rest assured that his kind of neo-fascism will live in easy harmony with neoliberalism.
Immune system
If you want to understand the depth of the self-deception of Jenkins and other media gatekeepers, contrast Bolsonaro's political ascent to that of Jeremy Corbyn, the modest social democratic leader of Britain's Labour party. Those like Jenkins who lament the role of social media – they mean you, the public – in promoting leaders like Bolsonaro are also the media chorus who have been wounding Corbyn day after day, blow by blow, for three years – since he accidentally slipped past safeguards intended by party bureacrats to keep someone like him from power.
The supposedly liberal Guardian has been leading that assault. Like the rightwing media, it has shown its absolute determination to stop Corbyn at all costs, using any pretext.
Within days of Corbyn's election to the Labour leadership, the Times newspaper – the voice of the British establishment – published an article quoting a general, whom it refused to name, warning that the British army's commanders had agreed they would sabotage a Corbyn government. The general strongly hinted that there would be a military coup first.
We are not supposed to reach the point where such threats – tearing away the façade of western democracy – ever need to be implemented. Our pretend democracies were created with immune systems whose defences are marshalled to eliminate a threat like Corbyn much earlier.
Once he moved closer to power, however, the rightwing corporate media was forced to deploy the standard tropes used against a left leader: that he was incompetent, unpatriotic, even treasonous.
But just as the human body has different immune cells to increase its chances of success, the corporate media has faux-liberal-left agents like the Guardian to complement the right's defences. The Guardian sought to wound Corbyn through identity politics, the modern left's Achille's heel. An endless stream of confected crises about anti-semitism were intended to erode the hard-earned credit Corbyn had accumulated over decades for his anti-racism work.
Slash-and-burn politics
Why is Corbyn so dangerous? Because he supports the right of workers to a dignified life, because he refuses to accept the might of the corporations, because he implies that a different way of organising our societies is possible. It is a modest, even timid programme he articulates, but even so it is far too radical either for the plutocratic class that rules over us or for the corporate media that serves as its propaganda arm.
The truth ignored by Jenkins and these corporate stenographers is that if you keep sabotaging the programmes of a Chavez, a Lula da Silva, a Corbyn or a Bernie Sanders, then you get a Bolsonaro, a Trump, an Orban.
It is not that the masses are a menace to democracy. It is rather that a growing proportion of voters understand that a global corporate elite has rigged the system to accrue for itself ever greater riches. It is not social media that is polarising our societies. It is rather that the determination of the elites to pillage the planet until it has no more assets to strip has fuelled resentment and destroyed hope. It is not fake news that is unleashing the baser instincts of the lower orders. Rather, it is the frustration of those who feel that change is impossible, that no one in power is listening or cares.
Social media has empowered ordinary people. It has shown them that they cannot trust their leaders, that power trumps justice, that the elite's enrichment requires their poverty. They have concluded that, if the rich can engage in slash-and-burn politics against the planet, our only refuge, they can engage in slash-and-burn politics against the global elite.
Are they choosing wisely in electing a Trump or Bolsonaro? No. But the liberal guardians of the status quo are in no position to judge them. For decades, all parts of the corporate media have helped to undermine a genuine left that could have offered real solutions, that could have taken on and beaten the right, that could have offered a moral compass to a confused, desperate and disillusioned public.
Jenkins wants to lecture the masses about their depraved choices while he and his paper steer them away from any politician who cares about their welfare, who fights for a fairer society, who prioritises mending what is broken.
The western elites will decry Bolsonaro in the forlorn and cynical hope of shoring up their credentials as guardians of the existing, supposedly moral order. But they engineered him. Bolsonaro is their monster.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
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Oct 11, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com
moscowexile
October 10, 2018 at 6:20 pmA suspected third member of the Kremlin hit squad behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack has been named, according to a respected Russian news website.Sergey Fedotov, 45, travelled to the UK on the same day as the two assassins already charged by British authorities – and boarded the same flight home.
The Telegraph had previously reported the existence of a third member of the Russian intelligence hit squad and a trawl of flight records by the Fontanka news agency matched it to Fedotov.
According to Fontanka, Fedotov flew to the UK on a passport whose number differs by only a few digits from those used by the two GRU military intelligence agents officially wanted for the nerve agent attack.
It is almost certain Fedotov is not the passenger's real name but an alias. No traces of Sergei Fedotov have been found in documentary databases or on social media. He has no property, vehicles or telephone numbers registered to his name in Russia, according to Fontanka.
No "alleged"in "Kremlin hit squad behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack but It is almost certain Fedotov is not the passenger's real name but an alias.
Highly likely indeed!
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Oct 08, 2018 | www.rt.com
An intelligence service given free rein to commit 'serious crimes' in its own country is an intelligence service that is the enemy of its people. The quite astounding revelation that Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has enjoyed this very freedom for decades has only just been made public at a special tribunal in London, set up to investigate the country's intelligence services at the behest of a coalition of human rights groups, alleging a pattern of illegality up to and including collusion in murder.
The hitherto MI5 covert policy sanctioning its agents to commit and/or solicit serious crimes, as and when adjudged provident, is known as the Third Direction. This codename has been crafted, it would appear, by someone with a penchant for all things James Bond within an agency whose average operative is more likely to be 5'6" and balding with a paunch and bad teeth than any kind of lantern-jawed 007.
The Pat Finucane Centre , one of the aforementioned human rights groups involved in bringing about this tribunal investigation (Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to give it its Sunday name) into the nefarious activities of Britain's domestic intelligence agency, issued a damning statement in response to the further revelation that former Prime Minister David Cameron introduced oversight guidelines with regard to the MI5 covert third direction policy back in 2012.
Cameron's decision to do so, the group claims, was far from nobly taken:
"It can be no coincidence that Prime Minister David Cameron issued new guidelines, however flawed, on oversight of MI5 just two weeks before publication of the De Silva report into the murder of Pat Finucane. The PM was clearly alive to the alarming evidence which was about to emerge of the involvement of the Security Service in the murder. To date no-one within a state agency has been held accountable. The latest revelations make the case for an independent inquiry all the more compelling."
Pat Finucane, a Belfast Catholic, plied his trade as a human rights lawyer at a time when the right to be fully human was denied the minority Catholic community of the small and enduring outpost of British colonialism in the north east corner of Ireland, otherwise known as Northern Ireland. He was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1989, back when the decades-long conflict euphemistically referred to as the Troubles still raged, claiming victims both innocent and not on all sides.
Unlike the vast majority of those killed and murdered in the course of this brutal conflict, Finucane's murder sparked a long and hard fought struggle for justice by surviving family members, friends and campaigners. They allege – rather convincingly, it should be said – that it was carried out with the active collusion of MI5.
Stepping back and casting a wider view over this terrain, the criminal activities of Britain's intelligence services constitute more than enough material for a book of considerable heft. How fortunate then that just such a book has already been written.
In his 'Dead Men Talking: Collusion, Cover Up and Murder in Northern Ireland's Dirty War', author Nicholas Davies "provides information on a number of the killings [during the Troubles], which were authorized at the highest level of MI5 and the British government."
But over and above the crimes of MI5 in Ireland, what else have those doughty defenders of the realm been up to over the years? After all, what is the use of having a license to engage in serious criminal activity, including murder and, presumably, torture, if you're not prepared to use (abuse) it? It begs the question of how many high profile deaths attributed to suicide, natural causes, and accident down through the years have been the fruits of MI5 at work?
And what about the possibility of MI5's involvement in, dare we use the term, false flag operations?
As someone who abhors the premise of conspiracy theory on principle, the fact that more and more are turning to its warm embrace as an intellectual reflex against what is politely described as the 'official narrative' of events, well this is no surprise when we learn of the egregious machinations of Western intelligence agencies such as Britain's MI5.
What we are bound to state, doing so without fear of contradiction, is this particular revelation opens up a veritable Pandora's Box of grim possibilities when it comes to the potential crimes committed by Britain's domestic intelligence agency, ensuring that a full and vigorous investigation and public inquiry is now both necessary and urgent.
If any such investigation is to be taken seriously, however, it must include in its remit the power to investigate all possible links between Britain's intelligence community and organisations such as, let's see, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group ?
The deafening UK mainstream media and political class silence over the trail connecting 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi and MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence agency, leaves a lingering stench of intrigue that will not out. The work of investigative journalist Mark Curtis on this sordid relationship is unsurpassed.
As Curtis writes,
"The evidence suggests that the barbaric Manchester bombing, which killed 22 innocent people on May 22nd, is a case of blowback on British citizens arising at least partly from the overt and covert actions of British governments."
In the same report he arrives at a conclusion both damning and chilling:
"The evidence points to the LIFG being seen by the UK as a proxy militia to promote its foreign policy objectives. Whitehall also saw Qatar as a proxy to provide boots on the ground in Libya in 2011, even as it empowered hardline Islamist groups."
Finally: "Both David Cameron, then Prime Minister, and Theresa May – who was Home Secretary in 2011 when Libyan radicals were encouraged to fight Qadafi [Muammar Gaddafi] – clearly have serious questions to answer. We believe an independent public enquiry is urgently needed."
In words that echo down to us from ancient Rome, the poet Juvenal taunts our complacency with a question most simple and pertinent: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who will guard the guards themselves?
Edward R Murrow puts it rather more bluntly: "A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."
Sooner or later, people in Britain are going to have to wake up to who the real enemy is.
Read more
- UK spies go on the offensive with yet another costly intelligence agency
- 'Murder, torture, sexual assault' - MI5 & informants authorized to commit crimes in UK, court hears
- Wilderness of mirrors: MI6, the Cold War, spies and traitors from Gordievsky to Skripal
John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and Foreign Policy Journal.
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Oct 05, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Accountability is for the little people, immunity is for the ruling class. If this ethos seems familiar, that is because it has preceded some of the darkest moments in human history
'If there are no legal consequences for profiteers who defrauded the global economy into a collapse, what will deter those profiteers from doing that again?' Illustration: Mark Long/Mark Long for Guardian US W hen the former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was released from prison a few weeks ago, the news conjured memories of a corporate scandal that now seems almost quaint – and it was also a reminder that Enron executives were among the last politically connected criminals to face any serious consequences for institutionalized fraud.Since Skilling's conviction 12 years ago, our society has been fundamentally altered by a powerful political movement whose goal is not merely another court seat, tax cut or election victory. This movement's objective is far more revolutionary: the creation of an accountability-free zone for an ennobled aristocracy, even as the rest of the population is treated to law-and-order rhetoric and painfully punitive policy.
Let's remember that in less than two decades, America has experienced the Iraq war, the financial crisis, intensifying economic stratification, an opioid plague, persistent gender and racial inequality and now seemingly unending climate change-intensified disasters. While the victims have been ravaged by these crime sprees, crises and calamities, the perpetrators have largely avoided arrest, inquisition, incarceration, resignation, public shaming and ruined careers.
That is because the United States has been turned into a safe space for a permanent ruling class. Inside the rarefied refuge, the key players who created this era's catastrophes and who embody the most pernicious pathologies have not just eschewed punishment – many of them have actually maintained or even increased their social, financial and political status.
The effort to construct this elite haven has tied together so many seemingly disparate news events, suggesting that there is a method in the madness. Consider this past month that culminated with the dramatic battle over the judicial nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.
September began with John McCain's funeral – a memorial billed as an apolitical celebration of the Arizona lawmaker, but which served as a made-for-TV spectacle letting America know that everyone who engineered the Iraq war is doing just fine.
The event was attended by Iraq war proponents of both parties, from Dick Cheney to Lindsey Graham to Hillary Clinton. The funeral featured a saccharine eulogy from the key Democratic proponent of the invasion, Joe Lieberman, as well the resurrection of George W Bush. The codpiece-flaunting war president who piloted America into the cataclysm with "bring 'em on" bravado, "shock and awe" bloodlust and "uranium from Africa" dishonesty was suddenly portrayed as an icon of warmth and civility when he passed a lozenge to Michelle Obama. The scene was depicted not as the gathering of a rogues gallery fit for a war crimes tribunal, but as a venerable bipartisan reunion evoking nostalgia for the supposed halcyon days – and Bush promptly used his newly revived image to campaign for Republican congressional candidates and lobby for Kavanaugh's appointment .
The underlying message was clear: nobody other than the dead, the injured and the taxpayer will face any real penalty for the Iraq debacle.
Next up came the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis – a meltdown that laid waste to the global economy, while providing lucrative taxpayer-funded bailouts to Wall Street firms.
To mark the occasion, the three men on whose watch it occurred – Fed chair Ben Bernanke, Bush treasury secretary Hank Paulson and Obama treasury secretary Tim Geithner – did not offer an apology, but instead promised that another financial crisis will eventually occur, and they demanded lawmakers give public officials more power to bail out big banks in the future.
In a similar bipartisan show of unity, former Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn gave an interview in which he asked "Who broke the law?" – the implication being that no Wall Street executives were prosecuted for their role in the meltdown because no statutes had been violated. That suggestion, of course, is undermined by banks ' own admissions that they defrauded investors (that includes admissions of fraud from Goldman Sachs – the very bank that Cohn himself ran during the crisis). Nonetheless, Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder – who has now rejoined his old corporate defense law firm – subsequently backed Cohn up by arguing that nobody on Wall Street committed an offense that could have been successfully prosecuted in a court of law.
Meanwhile, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon garnered non-Onion headlines by floating the idea of running for president – a reminder that a decade after his firm played a central role in destroying countless Americans' economic lives, he remains not only unincarcerated and gainfully employed, but so reputationally unscathed that he is seen as a serious White House candidate.
Again, the message came through: nobody who engineered the financial crisis will pay any real price for wreaking so much havoc.
Then as Hurricane Florence provided the latest illustration of climate change's devastation, ExxonMobil marched into the supreme court to demand an end to a state investigation of its role denying and suppressing climate science. Backed by 11 Republican attorneys general , the fossil fuel giant had reason to feel emboldened in its appeal for immunity: despite investigative reporting detailing the company's prior knowledge of fossil fuel's role in climate change, its executives had already convinced the Securities and Exchange Commission to shut down a similar investigation.
Once again, the message was unavoidable: in the new accountability-free zone, companies shouldn't be bothered to even explain – much less face punishment for – their role in a crisis that threatens the survival of the human species.
... ... ...
The answer is nothing – which is exactly the point for the aristocracy. But that cannot be considered acceptable for the rest of us outside the accountability-free zone.
David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an investigative journalist at Capital & Main. His latest book is Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now
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Oct 02, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The #MeToo movement hits a block when it gets reduced to party politics, as we are witnessing...
... ... ...
A young woman marching in support of Kavanaugh put it this way: "This could be our brother, our dad, our boyfriend "
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Sep 21, 2018 | www.zerohedge.com
by Tyler Durden Fri, 09/21/2018 - 22:25 1 SHARES Authored by John Pilger via ConsortiumNews.com,
So much of mainstream journalism has descended to the level of a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is 'perception'...
The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was "a trailblazer for independent journalism", wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.
Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.
Driven from the "mainstream", Hersh must publish his work outside the United States. Parry set up his own independent news website Consortium News, where, in a final piece following a stroke, he referred to journalism's veneration of "approved opinions" while "unapproved evidence is brushed aside or disparaged regardless of its quality."
Although journalism was always a loose extension of establishment power, something has changed in recent years. Dissent tolerated when I joined a national newspaper in Britain in the 1960s has regressed to a metaphoric underground as liberal capitalism moves towards a form of corporate dictatorship.
This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new "groupthink", as Parry called it, dispensing its myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.
Witness the witch-hunts against refugees and immigrants, the willful abandonment by the "MeToo" zealots of our oldest freedom, presumption of innocence, the anti-Russia racism and anti-Brexit hysteria, the growing anti-China campaign and the suppression of a warning of world war.
With many if not most independent journalists barred or ejected from the "mainstream", a corner of the Internet has become a vital source of disclosure and evidence-based analysis: true journalism sites such as wikileaks.org, consortiumnews.com, wsws.org, truthdig.com, globalresearch.org, counterpunch.org and informationclearinghouse.com are required reading for those trying to make sense of a world in which science and technology advance wondrously while political and economic life in the fearful "democracies" regress behind a media facade of narcissistic spectacle.
Propaganda BlitzIn Britain, just one website offers consistently independent media criticism. This is the remarkable Media Lens -- remarkable partly because its founders and editors as well as its only writers, David Edwards and David Cromwell, since 2001 have concentrated their gaze not on the usual suspects, the Tory press, but the paragons of reputable liberal journalism: the BBC, The Guardian , Channel 4 News.
Cromwell and Edwards (The Ghandi Foundation)
Their method is simple. Meticulous in their research, they are respectful and polite when they ask why a journalist why he or she produced such a one-sided report, or failed to disclose essential facts or promoted discredited myths.
The replies they receive are often defensive, at times abusive; some are hysterical, as if they have pushed back a screen on a protected species.
I would say Media Lens has shattered a silence about corporate journalism. Like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent, they represent a Fifth Estate that deconstructs and demystifies the media's power.
What is especially interesting about them is that neither is a journalist. David Edwards is a former teacher, David Cromwell is an oceanographer. Yet, their understanding of the morality of journalism -- a term rarely used; let's call it true objectivity -- is a bracing quality of their online Media Lens dispatches.
I think their work is heroic and I would place a copy of their just published book, Propaganda Blitz , in every journalism school that services the corporate system, as they all do.
Take the chapter, Dismantling the National Health Service, in which Edwards and Cromwell describe the critical part played by journalists in the crisis facing Britain's pioneering health service.
The NHS crisis is the product of a political and media construct known as "austerity", with its deceitful, weasel language of "efficiency savings" (the BBC term for slashing public expenditure) and "hard choices" (the willful destruction of the premises of civilized life in modern Britain).
"Austerity" is an invention. Britain is a rich country with a debt owed by its crooked banks, not its people. The resources that would comfortably fund the National Health Service have been stolen in broad daylight by the few allowed to avoid and evade billions in taxes.
Using a vocabulary of corporate euphemisms, the publicly-funded Health Service is being deliberately run down by free market fanatics, to justify its selling-off. The Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn may appear to oppose this, but is it? The answer is very likely no. Little of any of this is alluded to in the media, let alone explained.
Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.
Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to "providing a breadth of view" and to properly inform the public of "matters of public policy," the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation's most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: "Bill which gives power to GPs passes." This was pure state propaganda.
Media and Iraq InvasionBlair: Lawless (Office of Tony Blair)
There is a striking similarity with the BBC's coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair's lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line "overwhelmingly" while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation's much-vaunted "principle" of impartiality was never a consideration.
One of the most telling chapters in Propaganda Blitz describes the smear campaigns mounted by journalists against dissenters, political mavericks and whistleblowers.
The Guardian' s campaign against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the most disturbing. Assange, whose epic WikiLeaks disclosures brought fame, journalism prizes and largesse to The Guardian , was abandoned when he was no longer useful. He was then subjected to a vituperative – and cowardly -- onslaught of a kind I have rarely known.
With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The book's authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously described Assange as a "damaged personality" and "callous." They also disclosed the secret password he had given the paper in confidence, which was designed to protect a digital file containing the U.S. embassy cables.
With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, standing among the police outside, gloated on his blog that "Scotland Yard may get the last laugh."
The Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, "I bet Assange is stuffing himself full of flattened guinea pigs. He really is the most massive turd."
Moore, who describes herself as a feminist, later complained that, after attacking Assange, she had suffered "vile abuse." Edwards and Cromwell wrote to her: "That's a real shame, sorry to hear that. But how would you describe calling someone 'the most massive turd'? Vile abuse?"
Moore replied that no, she would not, adding, "I would advise you to stop being so bloody patronizing." Her former Guardian colleague James Ball wrote, "It's difficult to imagine what Ecuador's London embassy smells like more than five and a half years after Julian Assange moved in."
Such slow-witted viciousness appeared in a newspaper described by its editor, Katharine Viner, as "thoughtful and progressive." What is the root of this vindictiveness? Is it jealousy, a perverse recognition that Assange has achieved more journalistic firsts than his snipers can claim in a lifetime? Is it that he refuses to be "one of us" and shames those who have long sold out the independence of journalism?
Journalism students should study this to understand that the source of "fake news" is not only trollism, or the likes of Fox News, or Donald Trump, but a journalism self-anointed with a false respectability: a liberal journalism that claims to challenge corrupt state power but, in reality, courts and protects it, and colludes with it. The amorality of the years of Tony Blair, whom The Guardian has failed to rehabilitate, is its echo.
"[It is] an age in which people yearn for new ideas and fresh alternatives," wrote Katharine Viner. Her political writer Jonathan Freedland dismissed the yearning of young people who supported the modest policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as "a form of narcissism."
"How did this man .," brayed the Guardian 's Zoe Williams, "get on the ballot in the first place?" A choir of the paper's precocious windbags joined in, thereafter queuing to fall on their blunt swords when Corbyn came close to winning the 2017 general election in spite of the media.
Complex stories are reported to a cult-like formula of bias, hearsay and omission: Brexit, Venezuela, Russia, Syria. On Syria, only the investigations of a group of independent journalists have countered this, revealing the network of Anglo-American backing of jihadists in Syria, including those related to ISIS.
Leni Riefenstahl (r.) (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
Supported by a "psyops" campaign funded by the British Foreign Office and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the aim is to hoodwink the Western public and speed the overthrow of the government in Damascus, regardless of the medieval alternative and the risk of war with Russia.
The Syria Campaign, set up by a New York PR agency called Purpose, funds a group known as the White Helmets, who claim falsely to be "Syria Civil Defense" and are seen uncritically on TV news and social media, apparently rescuing the victims of bombing, which they film and edit themselves, though viewers are unlikely to be told this. George Clooney is a fan.
The White Helmets are appendages to the jihadists with whom they share addresses. Their media-smart uniforms and equipment are supplied by their Western paymasters. That their exploits are not questioned by major news organizations is an indication of how deep the influence of state-backed PR now runs in the media. As Robert Fisk noted recently, no "mainstream" reporter reports Syria.
In what is known as a hatchet job, a Guardian reporter based in San Francisco, Olivia Solon, who has never visited Syria, was allowed to smear the substantiated investigative work of journalists Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett on the White Helmets as "propagated online by a network of anti-imperialist activists, conspiracy theorists and trolls with the support of the Russian government."
This abuse was published without permitting a single correction, let alone a right-of-reply. The Guardian Comment page was blocked, as Edwards and Cromwell document. I saw the list of questions Solon sent to Beeley, which reads like a McCarthyite charge sheet -- "Have you ever been invited to North Korea?"
So much of the mainstream has descended to this level. Subjectivism is all; slogans and outrage are proof enough. What matters is the "perception."
When he was U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus declared what he called "a war of perception conducted continuously using the news media." What really mattered was not the facts but the way the story played in the United States. The undeclared enemy was, as always, an informed and critical public at home.
Nothing has changed. In the 1970s, I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's film-maker, whose propaganda mesmerized the German public.
She told me the "messages" of her films were dependent not on "orders from above", but on the "submissive void" of an uninformed public.
"Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie?" I asked.
"Everyone," she said. "Propaganda always wins, if you allow it."
Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell is published by Pluto Press.
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Sep 19, 2018 | thesaker.is
I gave up on the Guardian's comment site myself, 10 years ago, as the censorship on there made it pointless. Has something changed?
There was one prolific commenter there, MrPikeBishop, who was so popular, he was even commissioned to write articles above the line. Then one day, bam, he is banned, and his entire posting history gone. That did it for me; little emperors not fit to clean his boots, just rubbed him out. I spat on the site that day and never went back. Proclaiming themselves the bastion of free speech, when they actually the enemies of it.
Actually, I was caught out here in the UK, by the demise of the old five pound note, and then the ten pound note, because I stopped reading and watching MSM years ago. It's worth it, to get their irritating buzzing out of my head.
Back to the linked Guardian article; this is indeed interesting – these questions asked by the journalist:
– Who really did shoot down this plane? Was it an accident or did France and/or Israel attack?
– Are Russia publicly accepting a false narrative to avoid having to retaliate?
– Do they even understand how close we're coming to global war, whenever a NATO country operates in Syria?
– How long can we rely on Russian common sense to avoid WWIII?
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Sep 19, 2018 | off-guardian.org
The questions raised: Who really did shoot down this plane? Was it an accident or did France and/or Israel attack? If France are attacking Russia/Syria what prompted this? What do they have to gain? Is it possible for Syria to "accidentally" bring down an allied plane? Don't they have IFFs? Are Russia publicly accepting a false narrative to avoid having to retaliate? Will Russia retaliate against Israel? They have claimed that right already. What will they expect to extract as a quid pro quo on this issue? How will the media report this? Will they call it a "near miss"? That's surely what it was. Do they even understand how close we're coming to global war, whenever a NATO country operates in Syria? How long can we rely on Russian common sense to avoid WWIII?
Admin says September 19, 2018
What do you think Putin should have done?Admin says September 19, 2018Your reply needs to acknowledge the following:
1) the neocon hardline and Israel are currently trying to manufacture an excuse for a massive attack on Syria, aimed at widening the war.
2) the Israeli action was aimed at provoking a military response from Russia/Syria that could be used as such an excuse.
3) a widened war would play into western hands and destroy Russia's current ascendancy
What action should Russia take that would punish Israel but avoid giving the neocon hardliners exactly what they wanted?
Try to remain calm.ragheadthefiendlyterrorist says September 19, 2018I notice you don't advocate that Russia should have immediately retaliated militarily. All the things you do advocate (well, most) – quite rationally – would not have shown any results as yet, so we don't know they haven't been done, do we?
But, to repeat, you don't defeat a man who is trying to lure you into a fight by punching him in the face. Intelligence is underrated by the non-intelligent. Subtlety is unappreciated by the crass. The Russian govt's actions tend to be both subtle and intelligent – whether you approve of them or not, and so can go unappreciated by many on all sides of the debate.
As to ascendancy – Syria was intended to be a new Libya by now. That this has been avoided, that the various terrorists are in retreat, that the country remains largely functional, and all without direct confrontation between east and west (so far), is an achievement anyone with any intelligence should recognise, and which the Russia government has every right to be proud of.
Forgive me, but people have been saying variants of "if Putin doesn't DO SOMETHING HUGE right now he's going to burn" for at least the last four years, and they are still saying it, despite the fact he hasn't burned (and neither have we), and, if their sage advice had been followed, we might all be cinders on a dead and cindered planet right now.
The only reason it hasn't come to that yet is that the ground was not prepared fully before. Russia is slowly being pushed back to the ropes, the average Western citizen is being conditioned to racially hate Russians (did you read Nikki Haley's comment today that Russians are culturally conditioned to lie and cheat?) and the consent is being steadily manufactured. As I said in my original comment, by showing "restraint" and not that he has teeth, Putin is encouraging his country's enemies. Personally, I don't give a damn about what he does about people he doesn't like, but he's not a private citizen; he is in control of Russia, for good or ill. Most of my Russian friends, all of the far left variety, despise him, incidentally, but that's neither here nor there. The simple fact is that if Russia is to avoid a big war it has to actively deter one, not act like someone attempting to disarm an armed drunk by logical words and sweet reason. That is not going to work.Paul X says September 19, 2018If the Russians got a cruise missile down the funnel of the French frigate Auvegne (assuming there is a funnel) what do you think NATO would do? Would they shrug and say it serves Macron right or would they take off the safety locks and blast Russia from every direction in order to protect their partner who had been so 'wrongly' attacked? Haven't they been waiting for the chance for years? Aren't they already loaded up expecting the 'chemical weapons' shout to go up this very week? It would be vey foolish of Russia to take the bait of these provocations and it makes for uneasy reading when Westerners, sitting comfortably in safety, complain that Russians aren't prepared to die for us in large enough numbers to keep them safe. You first guy!Paul X says September 19, 2018When provoked so blatantly you need to look to see what the guy is hiding behind his back. In this case the West had built up their forces for a full scale attack on Syria as soon as the White Helmets released their video of choking children filmed a week or so ago. Putin disappointed them by coming to an agreement with Turkey that means the jihadis are further isolated and pushed into possible conflict with radicals.Admin says September 19, 2018The time scales of the agreement are vague/unknown but it's unlikely we will see a Jihadi Caliphate set up under Turkish protection.
Like the Syrians it's the crazy foreign fighters that alarm the Turks, the Chinese especially of whom there are 6000 heavily armed in the South. Turkey is keen to see the extremists pushed South making it difficult for them to enter Turkey. Putin's reaction is far more sensible than firing the gun for a major conflict which Russia is most unlikely to win.
Russia is still on track to squeeze the jihadis into smaller and smaller areas where they might be eliminated. It might make liberals happy to see Russia sacrifice herself a la 1941 but it's not going to help anybody except their enemies.
You can't help thinking Putin knows exactly what he's doing.
There can never be a non-nuclear war between the US and Russia. Every strategist worth anything knows this. It's the belief – created by the PNAC neocons – that this isn't true that drives the hardcore nuts in Washington and London and elsewhere.白矛 says September 19, 2018This is the problem. They are delusional and believe they can fight a limited war with Russia. Those who know they are wrong, and that any such war would go nuclear very very fast are stuck in a profound dilemma. – How to defend oneself and one's interests while avoiding the conflict the lunatics want, which will destroy life on earth?
Answers on a post card please for anyone who thinks they can do better than the current Russian govt is doing.
It's a complex web.. one has to bear this in mind.. the inter-relationships.. the connections.. Putin for example has to tread the razor edge and fight with one hand tied behind his back due to the Zionist influence atop the Russian hierarchy .Matt says September 19, 2018S-200 uses the SAHR guidance system. The radar signal is fairly wide, and if multiple objects fall within the signal, the one with the largest cross-section will be targeted. The Russian IL is much larger than the American F-16. Larger missiles like the 200's 5V21 also tend to hit from above (they come down in a parabolic arc after the motors burned out). So if the F-16's stayed a little behind and below the IL they'd basically guarantee the IL get's killed.grandstand says September 19, 2018As "Partisangirl" claims, but does not properly understand, Russia integrated Syrian AD into their network some time ago. The purpose of such a integration was to avoid similar accidents.
One problem: That was only for the newer stuff.
A Pantsir, for example, can be told where targets are and what to shoot at by a larger system (they work in a pyramid hierarchy). S-200s are older than h*ll though. It's basically a dumb system from the 60's. (even dumber than a BUK)
What it'll do is spot a target, fire the missile and then when the missile "thinks" it's in the right area (the kill box), it's seeker head goes active (it's a semi active seeker). It starts looking for radar 'reflections' and then homes in on the biggest one it can see. It doesn't actually know what it's looking at and doesn't care. Just goes for the shiniest thing it can detect.My favourite part is how all these lies are held up as if they merit discussion and as if they deserve to be given equal treatment with what actually happened. It's like holding a "discussion" as to whether or not Aliens rule the Earth.
I tend to agree with you, on the whole, Mulga, about issues to do with Israel, though perhaps not so stridently. But on this occasion I think Matt is honestly telling things how he sees it.grandstand says September 19, 2018On the other hand, one should ask why Israel is arbitrarily attacking targets in a sovereign country that is not threatening it. Of course, the answer is that this is what Israel does with impunity – witness USS Liberty among many others. On this occasion, it appears, from what I have read, that Israel was targeting the delivery of Iranian S300 copies to Syria – that is weapons to defend from this kind of attack in future. In reality, far from attacking Israel, Syria has even done nothing about recovering territory lost to Israel in 1967, though in international law Israel – that Israel signed up to – it should be given back to Syria. A few days ago, Israel attacked Damascus airport during an international fair with many visitors and potential for massive loss of life. It seems clear that Israel is trying (probably with US approval) to provoke a response.
Putin always keeps his eye on the long term view but it is time for him to put a stop to this activity if he is to maintain credibility with his allies and his voters. This attack will serve to weaken Putin's hitherto Israel friendly stance unless he wants to lose support in Russia. Putin is the best friend Israel has in Russia. It seems that Russian military is saying that there will be a response – much stronger than Putin.
On the other hand – re my previous comment, Matt, IAF was clearly using the Russian ELINT plane as cover. It is tantamount to using civilians as human shields. Though the crew were Russian military, they were not involved in the action, apparently, and Israel had agreed not to target Russian assets in Syria. One cannot absolve Israel on this and the Russian military know it. They will be looking to Putin to permit a response.Jen says September 19, 2018Then you surely would not object if Russia were to ask Israel to hand over the pilots involved so they can explain in a Russian military court or a similar setting their actions and the thinking and expectations that motivated them to hide their jets in the Ilyushin transport plane's radar shadow.Yarkob says September 19, 2018israel is breaking international law (again) its pilots, and their commanders and any FAO they use, are criminals. plain and simpleGuest Columnist says September 19, 2018Yes, there is a large element of theatre at play in this conflict. What many people don't want to accept is that they have no way of knowing what the entire truth is. All the information about situations and events comes from partisan organizations with vested interests. Expecting the side one personally favours to present objective truths is wishful thinking at best, downright delusional at worst.Harry Law says September 18, 2018The post-truth era means everybody walks around believing they have 'figured out' the truth, no hard evidence required, but they can't all be right can they?
It's neoliberal individualism gone mad.
Not so long ago Netanyahu was pleading with Putin [successfully] not to supply the S300 anti aircraft system [defensive] to Syria, at the same time Israel was the first country to get a fleet of F35's [offensive] from the US. Putin defers far to much to the US/Israel, we now see the results. Incidentally how come Saudi Arabia can buy the S400 system, when they were one of the instigators of Syrian regime change. Russia's "partners" want Syria destroyed, the warmonger McCain always said the US should take on Syria and that Russia would 'do nothing', was he right?Admin says September 18, 2018Let's recall the realities here and not succumb to hysteria. One of the reasons these provocations are happening is that Russia is winning in Syria, militarily and politically. Loading...Big B says September 18, 2018What are the realities: we are not being told?Frankly Speaking says September 18, 2018Harry has touched on an important point: that Russia and Israel are becoming closer and closer strategic Russophone partners. Russia was the first country in the world to recognise W Jerusalem as Israel's capital (before even Trump). There was only one foreign dignitary at the May 9th Victory Parade their growing economic, military and cultural ties (Customs Union negotiations and visa free travel for instance) cannot be ignored.
The IDF's 200 strikes in 18 months must lead to serious consideration of tacit Russian approval because they could be quite quickly stopped without it? But that would escalate the situation. Where does Iran stand in this, because VVP made quite clear to Netanyahu that Iran was Russia's principle strategic partner in the region. Is that set to change?
Netanyahu has met VVP what, three times this year, behind closed doors. What was said, and what agreements were made? It is also reputed that they have a direct one-to-one encrypted comms network (though I can't confirm it was activated). But that they are in regular contact is undoubted.
There is a lot more going on beneath the surface than first meets the eye. VVP's relations with Netanyahu blurs the boundaries and greys the narrative. The fact that VVP is saying it "looks accidental" doesn't ring true it looks anything other than accidental to me. Was there a communication breakdown as VVP is in Hungary?
I do not know, and based on what we have been told, neither does anyone else. The FS Auvergne fired missiles just as the Il-20 HQ went off screen. They weren't firing at the IDF, I wouldn't be too sure they were "window dressing" for them either. Whatever went on, we are being kept in the dark. Not precipitating WW3 is a good thing. Other than that, Russia's foreign policy and ME relations are a 3D chess game that we know little of the motivation behind: but I can infer that Russia's strategic needs are primary. At what point can that be labelled imperialist?
"What are the realities: we are not being told?"Big B says September 18, 2018Are you expecting to be spoon fed? And by the biased BBC, Guardian, etc!
It's pretty clear that Assad has won with Putin's support. China is on side too as evidenced by recent military manoeuvres. What is happening now is the US, UK, France, Israel, Turkey, Saudi just saving face and been allowed the odd small success or two.
However, Israel royally fucked up last night and Netanyahu will lose a plane or three if he tries it again.
You didn't really read my comment: this "odd small success " has happened 200 times in the last 18 months with the downing of how many IDF planes 1? Russia providing S-300s, or S-400s, or upgrading the 1960's SAM 2s would secure Syrian airspace. But these supplies are not forthcoming. Because Israel will not allow them.Big B says September 19, 2018The situation is a lot more complex: and no, I don't want to be spoonfed by the BBC. The Saker posits a "Zionist 5th Column" in Russia that VVP has to accommodate. You seem to want a simplistic ZioNATO v Russia narrative, all I am saying it is a lot more nuanced than that. And I didn't get that from the Graun!
200 IDF strikes in 18 months, that could be stopped by turning on their S-400s, would be an instance.. Israel has lobbied successfully to prevent Syria from securing its own airspace. The majority of these attacks are to prevent Assad acquiring what Haaretz terms "lethal weaponry" a euphemism for Iranian supplied air defences that could secure Syrian airspace. As could a Russian declared NFZ (though the IDF would just standoff over Lebanon or the Med, and not penetrate Syrian airspace). Or Russian supplied S-300s.Admin says September 19, 2018So my answer is yes and no. The Russophone alliance of Russia and Israel seems to be ascendant over Syrian sovereignty. Or it was, until Monday. There appears to have been a breakdown in the de-confliction agreement, or a deliberate misuse and provocation by Israel. The jury is out on that one for the moment. If the attacks are stopped, I would tend to agree with you.
There is the small matter of the international silence surrounding the FS Auvergne firing missiles concurrent with the downing of the Il-20 HQ. These either hit the Il-20 or Latakia. Has anyone considered the Il-20 WAS the target? That there was no accident, but a deliberate targeting? Did the IDF or French take out the Russian early warning system and electronic warfare capability to leave Latakia vulnerable? I don't know, and Rothschild Macron said no! It is worth considering though, I feel.
Integrated into the systems view of militaristic, imperialistic, and sub-imperialistic, and extractivist proliferation: it hardly matters who did what when. They are not giving us an insight into their collective insanity and power games, where the stakes are humanities very survivability. Russia only seemed to remember on Monday that the serial numbers on the MH-17 BUK, means it was made in 1986. What else have they forgotten? What else do they not know?
Humanity has no strategic allies within the global neoliberal ruling class. Arming the world is a "pro-conflict policy", wouldn't you agree? Where militaristic proliferation can't facilitate peace: the only possible de-confliction becomes system change? There are good and bad actors within the current globally hegemonic cultural system: VVP is possibly the best, so it would be unfair to heap the woes of an essentially evil system upon him especially in isolation. So it must fall to those outside the transnational globally integrated system to call out where this insanity will lead. That's you and me?
What I am suggesting is rather than the inevitably favourable comparison of VVP, and well, just about anyone else let's look at the bigger picture. International World Capitalism, as Guattari termed it, has faced us with the choice of three suicides. Without a radical transformation of the oppressed consciousness (a la Guattari, Deleuze, Freire, Bookchin, Naess, but better still the secular Buddha) there will soon enough come the day that does not dawn Monday night was a foreshadowing of that very day?
The idea a head of state can function as a moral paragon is naive of course. Putin pursues Russia's interests, not world peace and brotherhood. But at the same time we can't ignore the fact he does so while adhering to the requirements of international law far more than the west does. In that sense, he has some claim to respect from those who value ethical conduct. Whatever his motives may be this fact deserves to be stated and made clear.manfromatlan says September 18, 2018Ronald Reagan and the US were complicit in the downing of KAL Flight 007. Similar moves afoot again to build up military race between Russia and US and bog Russia in Syria https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1985/09/26/the-fate-of-ke007-an-exchange/vexarb says September 18, 2018BTL SyrPer, vot tak on September 18, 2018 · at 12:22 pm EST/EDTMulga Mumblebrain says September 19, 2018Interesting take from an israeli.
Israel Unlikely to Fly Freely Over Syria After Il-20 Incident – Ex-Official
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201809181068132500-israel-syria-il-20-incident-airspace/
"Israel is unlikely to freely use Syrian airspace in the wake of the crash of a Russian Il-20 military aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea, Yakov Kedmi, a former high-ranking Israeli intelligence official, told Sputnik.
"There was an agreement between Israel and Russia that the actions of Israel in Syria's airspace would not endanger lives of Russian troops. Israel breached this commitment What happens next will depend on the position of Israel. Most likely, Israel will no longer be able to enjoy the same freedom in the sky of Syria as it did before the incident," Kedmi said.
"Israel's attack in itself, regardless of the consequences, was an irresponsible step, because there is not a single facility on the territory of Syria that might have been used by Iran and whose destruction would have justified an attack on it, which could endanger the Russian troops," Kedmi said."
The idea that Israel would honour ANY 'agreement' made with anyone is quite mirth-inducing.archie1954 says September 18, 2018The US must be the worst nation on the face of the Earth. Everywhere it goes, death and destruction follow. To top it all off, the blatant hypocrisy is too much to handle. America is treacherous and duplicitous in the extreme. It has supported terrorists of all stripes in the Middle East and elsewhere for its own selfish geopolitical reasons. It is an entity not to be trusted, ever!Cassandra says September 18, 2018admin you might find some answers to your questions here:John Gilberts says September 19, 2018http://www.voltairenet.org/article202998.html
Regarding (the long tradition of ) British-French-Israeli collusion
"Not only Russian and (allegedly) Israeli and French aircraft and missiles were in the air. Civilian radar also tracked British Royal Air Force aircraft, which, unusually, had switched on their transponders and gone into holding patterns – most likely to avoid being somehow involved in the exchange of fire over Latakia." (source: Haaretz)
we should remember Sykes-Picot and "Operation Revised" (the 1956 Suez-deception)
"The documentary evidence does not leave any room for doubt that at Sèvres, during the three days in late October 1956, an elaborate war plot was hatched against Egypt by the representatives of France, Britain and Israel. The Protocol of Sèvres is the most conclusive piece of evidence for it lays out in precise detail and with a precise time-table how the joint war against Egypt was intended to proceed and shows foreknowledge of each other's intentions .
The central aim of the plot was the overthrow of Gamal Abdel Nasser. This aim is not explicitly stated in the protocol but it emerges clearly and unambiguously from all the records of the discussions surrounding it. Yet each of the three partners had a very different perspective on this war plot, and it was not at all clear how even the agreed aim was to be achieved.
The French were the most straight-forward, unwavering and unabashed advocates of military force. As far as they were concerned, Colonel Nasser supported the Algerian rebels and that, along with his nationalization of the Suez Canal Company, was enough to justify a war to overthrow him. For their part, the French did not need any further pretext for taking military action. It was the British, unwilling to incur Arab hostility by appearing as ally of Israel, who needed a pretext and Israel was able and willing to provide it but only at a price. Israel also required the elimination of Nasser's air force, for which task Britain alone had the heavy bomber bases sufficiently near at hand."https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/chp1_p2.html (Col.Fletcher Prouty's insights into the engineered "Suez Crisis")
MI6, the CIA the long history of covert ops in Syria
I was also struck by the Haaretz report that "Something strange was definitely in the air over Syria on Monday night with British and French forces reportedly present." I hope this open thread may bring more information on this alleged NATO involvement. I am beginning to think this incident may have rather more actors than we've been told. Loading...grandstand says September 19, 2018Yes – agreed. FUKUS ships have moved closer to the Syrian coast in the last few days, presumably in anticipation of an attack (chemical or otherwise) that they could justify a response to. The Russians have been doing a great job in the (non-Western) media of predicting potential chemical fake attacks and thereby defusing them. The one minute warning from Israel suggests the possibility (no more than that) that the Israelis saw the ELINT plane approaching the airfield and quickly decided to use it as cover for whatever reason.Paul X says September 19, 2018As I've said in other posts, the Israelis have narrowed Putin's options. Of FUKUS +I they are the easiest to pick off.
A very different and is some ways attractive theory is presented here:
I am not totally convinced – Matt's view on the capability of the Syrian SAMs seems more convincing and it is not clear that Russian fighters could have scrambled in time, especially as the Israelis had agreed not to target Russian assets, but if true it perhaps is a clever – nay Machiavellian – way of opening up options for Putin vis-a-vis his Israeli/Russian Jewish oligarchs and hanging the Israelis out to dry.
Is there any information about whether the Auvergne did or didn't fire missiles? The Syrians (and Russians?) said they had witnessed the firing of missiles which seemed to be aimed at the same government buildings as that being attacked by Israel which suggests collusion. Loading...Admin says September 19, 2018Apparently France is denying itPhilpot says September 18, 2018The US and NATO's compliant poodles are clearly willing to risk WWIII as they think Russia will simply back down when they instigate open warfare and regime change in Syria. My own belief is that poor honest broker Russia has been left to decide the fate of world peace. Personally, for all our futures, I believe Russia must declare a no fly zone over Syria – anyone entering to bomb will be at mercy of S400. Otherwise this will continue and if the US gets Syria it will be Iran next and WWIII – that is, armageddon.Gary Weglarz says September 18, 2018The entire of the West has now become simply a huge collective criminal enterprise operating completely outside the bounds of international law and threatening to bring about armageddon in the process. Of course one would never know this by reading or watching Western media where our clueless psychopathic leaders are portrayed as gallantly fighting for "human rights" and "democracy" through "regime change" and endless slaughter.vexarb says September 18, 2018BTL SyrPer Auslander on September 18, 2018 · at 7:54 am EST/EDTeuropeannewright says September 18, 2018Israeli plane apparently passed just in front of the plane, SAA got a lock, Israeli doglegged left, missile lost lock and chose the biggest target ..our plane. Israel violated protocol, called one minute before the attack, not enough time for our bird to get out of the way. The french frigate was window dressing.
It was a setup.
Interesting that both Trump and Macron involved both stooges is the Israel military trying to trigger the third European War ? Loading...Rigged Democracy says September 18, 2018Here are a couple of quotes that show how far the system has been rigged/corrupted:Paul X says September 18, 2018"one of the things we need to do is give young Jewish people the confidence to be proud of their identity – as British, Jewish and Zionist too .. There is no contradiction between these identities and we must never let anyone try to suggest that there should be ..
"You can also count on my commitment to Israel's security .. I am clear that we will always support Israel's right to defend itself."
– UK Prime Minister Theresa May, at the United Jewish Israel Appeal"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them (Israel). It just boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip these people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on."
– U.S. Navy Admiral and former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas MoorerThe BBC report no longer mentions the French frigate. Vanished!0use4msm says September 18, 2018The significance of direct military involvement by Israel and France is that the facade of a "civil war" (albeit by proxy) can no longer be maintained. The only thing that prevents it from being a regular war between nations is the omission of a declaration.SO. says September 18, 2018BigB says September 18, 2018Is it possible for Syria to "accidentally" bring down an allied plane? Don't they have IFFs?
Yup, and kinda. It's perfectly possible to do it and IFF doesn't really work the way a lot of people think. (IFF transponder beacon works by transmitting a signal to the ground station or launcher).
If the ground station recognises the beacon it labels the aircraft as friendly and either denies launch permission or warns the operator beforehand.
However with a system like the S-200 that will not actually matter. The SA-5 (S-200) is an old system from the 60's which uses a semi active radar homing missile and how it works is quite simple.
When the ground system detects a target it illuminates the target with it's radar like a torch and launches the missile.
The missile then follows the radar reflection from the target until it gets close enough to detonate, goes bang, shoots plane down.
However the beam from the radar 'torch' can be quite wide (miles wide), F-16's are quite small, IL-20's quite big.. and the missile itself is pretty dumb.
As such by hiding in behind the larger aircraft the smaller aircraft can almost guarantee an incoming missile will prioritise the large aircraft reflection and kill that instead. It doesn't actually matter if the missile was launched against the smaller target in the first instance or if IFF came into play. The missile itself is too dumb to care. It just goes for the largest thing it can see.
Thanks for clearing that up: but it raises the question that the Il-20 was on a pre-planned flight path known in advance to both Russian and Syrian air traffic control (whom I believe are sitting next to each other?) Knowing what you have just posted (which I do not doubt) it can hardly be termed "accidental"?SO. says September 18, 2018I suspect the FS Auvergne fired its Aster missiles, but I'm not expecting a clarification of that. The situation is greyed by the burgeoning Russian-Israeli Russophone alliance. A simple narrative will not be forthcoming, I suspect.
The IL-20's been on station flying figure 8's on constant rotation for months so it's flight and landing path would be known to everyone with half assed radar or even functional eyeballs.Paul X says September 18, 2018Putin can't afford to get it wrong – for everybody's sake. His power is limited. He has done an excellent job in defeating the West in Syria but how could he react to missiles from the French frigate without triggering a massive NATO attack not just on Syria but Russia? In the current climate and the West's readiness it could happen in hours. He has always emphasised he puts Russian interests first – and those included eliminating thousands of Russian Jihadis before they returned home to create mayhem. He has never said he'll take on the World. So the French missiles were a mirage and the plane an accident? Well that's better than an even bigger war maybe?vexarb says September 19, 2018@BigB. Igor Bundy ABTL SyrPer supplies additonal info plus timeline, concludes that attack from only 4 planes is not lkely.Paul X says September 18, 2018Russia not received data from #Israel on situation with IL-20 in #Syria – Peskov
https://sptnkne.ws/j9ce-#Russia launched an S-400 missile/s against the Israeli jets which were dropping bombs 100Km away, so we're kept in the dark for now.
-#Russia responded immediately to the attack before the il-20M was lost Because the S-200 missiles were launched 20 min after the first wave.
-The attack lasted about 50 min, so only 4 F-16 doing the bombing is unlikely
If the French and Israeli's attacked at the same time then they must have liased with each other. Or conspired is another way of putting it. Shades of 1956? But nowadays there wouldn't be the slightest outrage at such a collusion; it's oar for the course. And where is the missing partner, the UK? "No longer up to it" the French would say. "Too busy" say the Brits. NB which bit of Syria are the French after this time? Or do they see it descending into the chaos of a Libya, their last successful destabilisation.Jo says September 18, 2018Note Russian and IDF planes in direct line from s-200 being fired ..with French frigate ..looks like deliberate coordination to provide cover for each .but if frigate attacked then IDF planes available to directly attack Bashir in Damascus .and frigate to provide a source of provocation for excuse for Nato forces to launch their massive attack they desparately wish to do .especially as Putin agreed no military attack in Idlib ..and Russian MoD presentation yesterday it was a Ukraine BUK .in fact it is tempting to say Nato did this to get back at Russian MoD and punish them for this and expose in any way Russia's belief in trust and agreements and hotlines as a laughing stock ..and they have succeeded .a Russian plane shot down by an outdated Russian missile launched by Syria and Russia failing to supply s-300 but Turkey and everyone else can have s-400 which might ? have not ended up like this.Paul X says September 18, 2018
And did not Russia promise to deal with the "launch source" of any more missiles against Syria since the previous lot? Surely their are Russians in LatakiaBut you seem to be expecting or encouraging Russia to take on the World when in fact it's resources are limitedJo says September 19, 2018The elephant in the room is Iran .no responses from them yet even though Israel uses excuses to say it is defending itself from them and continues to attack what tjey call Iranian assets or anything they might vaguely claim have any connections to Iran ..does Iran follow Putins example to keep calm and carry on .thinking their"partnership" is being put to the test as of course it is in order to provoke it to invite a response by usa and associates .does it say to Putin enough is enough we are going to do our thing as you have said Russia is only in Syria to protect its own interests so cannot we do the same ..what options covert or overt does Iran have one wonders ..David Macilwain says September 18, 2018One question you didn't ask is whether this act, which appears to be an Israeli provocation assisted by the French, is related to the Sochi talks/agreement? Seems that supporters of the Syrian Opposition, of which France is right behind Turkey, might not like the agreement, partly because it stalls the plans for a "Syrian gas attack" by removing the pretext.Paul X says September 18, 2018
However I think the wider question is why and how has France been involved in this, described on SBS as "Israeli and French forces conducting aerial attacks on Syrian State assets"? Israel is a law unto itself, but France's intervention without any pretext whatsoever is a blatant war crime and escalation. The whole thing looks like a provocation, and one wonders when Russia will break. If Putin was unhappy having to make a peace agreement with the psycho Erdogan, he will be more unhappy now.If Russia was 'obliged' to retaliate to Israeli or French attacks its inherent weaknesses would be exposed. It remains a relatively poor country and Putin must be well aware it can't take on the US, Israel, the KSA and the other Gulf Emirs as well as France and the UK. It's done a fantastic job saving Syria but it can't take on The Rest of the World. If it has accepted Syrian missile defences brought it down that may well be the way out of a bigger war – this time.manfromatlan says September 18, 2018Putin's main interest is preserving Russian interests. Here, turning the other cheek likely is the best course. Loading...writerroddis says September 18, 2018I agree, Paul X. These are not only perilous waters, but untested to boot. In fact not one of the military powers you cite has had its strength tested against a non third world adversary. I know there are infantile tendencies crying "bring it on!" – as though speaking of a long awaited prize fight involving their heavyweight boxer of choice – but saner voices can only express alarm and profound dismay at what Western rulers seem bent on dragging us into. I say enough of this macho nonsense about who would prevail. I do take some comfort in the possibility – https://www.unz.com/tsaker/book-review-losing-military-supremacy-the-myopia-of-american-strategic-planning-by-andrei-martyanov/- that US military power is overstated, but it is comfort of the bleakest possible kind. Loading...archie1954 says September 18, 2018The point is this, Russia can take on the whole World if it had to, but it would be a pyrrhic victory, because to do so would require nuclear weapons which no nation could survive. However, Russia has many allies, the largest of which is China, so it probably would only be taking on one major opponent, the US and a few of its erstwhile allies (France, Britain etc.), not by any stretch of the imagination, the whole World!Paul X says September 18, 2018China is even weaker than Russia and not long ago said it was 10 years behind the US in military terms and it's hard to see they'd welcome a bit of sacrifice to pull Putin's chestnuts out of the fire. That Alliance is for the future. Right now a full blooded NATO response would be quite enough. Many in America would be delighted if Russia used a nuke; total annihaltion of Russia would follow, something they've been dying to do for 75 years. And of course they might go for the First Strike.
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Sep 16, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Den Lille Abe , Sep 16, 2018 12:47:49 AM | 49 ">link
Thank you b, for yet another good article!
Your article made me reflect the situation in general. While it is good the The White Frauds have been called out as an Empire front and as Western propaganda psy-op, I do thing the real Enemy is the MSM. These crimes by our governments, the White Frauds, Isil, ect,ect, would not be possible without the control of the MSM. But I am completely at a loss how to fight them, or just diminish their influence.
The Guardian s a blatant example, and its turnaround from "reasonable reliable" to "paid shill" was clumsily and obviously executed. Looking at the UK for real news , there is only the blogoshere left, all opposition has been subverted. And it is not only in the UK.
Another example is the Danish newspaper "Information" founded during WWII, as very leftist it has today morphed, in the dark, into a center right neo- liberal rag, full of no- news and idiotic scribbles by irrelevant formerly known peoples talent-less sons and daughters.
The situation in Sweden is even more depressing (it is!) the newspapers here are on level with the Sun and the Daily Heil.
Wel thanks b, for telling the truth and letting me start my Sunday moderately depressed, I guess news that Washington D.C had been swallowed by a giant sink-hole, would cheer me partly up.
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Aug 30, 2018 | craigmurray.org.uk
Dave , August 28, 2018 at 17:41
Xavi , August 28, 2018 at 18:40BBC is skanky state propaganda. The myth of BBC being some standard for news reporting died with the advent of the availability of international and independent news in Western countries. The main thing that BBC used to have which propped up the illusion of it being a respectable news source is that there was no competition or alternative to compare its narratives against. Since that time is over, so is BBC's masquerading as an impartial or accurate news source.
Ken Kenn , August 28, 2018 at 21:49Agree, Dave. That's what's informing the push to rubbish dissenting sites as fake news and eventually have them removed.
Ironic when the BBC has been ceaselessly pushing fake news for at least 15 years, with disastrous results. (Iraq; Libya; what caused the deficit and who should be forced to pay it down; Russia/Syria false flags; Corbyn A/S.)
Deb O'Nair , August 28, 2018 at 00:52Well I was convinced of fake BBC news during 9/11 and not for the reasons of building 7 coming down too early but the fact that the female journalist was facing a camera standing in front of a glass window and there was no reflection of her or the camera person from the glass. Not even a faint shadow.
That's when I knew the BBC were employing vampires and have been ever since.
Green Screen technology I discovered later. All the On the spot reporters are at it apparently. Or repeating Reuters or PA.
frankywiggles , August 28, 2018 at 09:48I find it impossible to watch BBC News, primarily because most of the editorial staff and senior correspondents seem to be working for MI5/6 and are more interested in disseminating Geo-political propaganda than upholding their journalistic responsibilities as defined in the BBC charter. People should not only boycott the BBC but refuse to pay the license fee on the grounds that it's a compulsory political subscription.
D_Majestic , August 28, 2018 at 14:35Careful, Craig
BBC world affairs editor 'fed up' with complaints directed at the corporation's news output
Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:34Of course BBC News is not biased. Most of the time it is not even factual.
ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 11:00Dear Mark,
In a BBC article on 4 July 2018, you wrote: "I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion."Could you please explain that comment? I do not see why your acknowledgement of your meetings with Sergei Skripal should be delayed until your book is nearing completion.
If you felt that it was right to reveal those meetings in July, then why was it not right to do so in March, soon after the poisoning occurred? What difference would it have made if you had done so four months earlier?
I cannot think of any negative consequences of an earlier acknowledgement of the meetings. In fact, disclosures of any possible conflict of interest are generally considered to be desirable in journalism, regardless of whether the conflict of interest is real.
Kay , August 28, 2018 at 14:42The book is obviously part of a propaganda campaign. It seems hugely fortuitous that Mark Urban should have had "hours" of interviews with Skripal before the poisoning incident.
Isn't it much more likely that the Urban "interviews" would have happened after the event? But Urban can't say that because that would lead to demands from other journalists or news bodies to have access to Skripal.
And that can't happen because either Skripal would be asked about what happened on the day of the poisoning, or can't be guaranteed to stick to the script, or is no longer alive. And that leads to a suspicion that whatever Skripal is supposed to have said in his interviews with Urban has really just been made up by the British security services.
ADHD , August 28, 2018 at 15:59I'm open to alternative hypotheses but right now I think the most likely explanation for Urban's pre-poisoning contact with Sergei Skripal is that, at the time, it was assumed the Orbis dossier would be a key component of the successful takedown of Trump and Urban was putting together a mutually flattering account by interviewing the main players.
Tongue in cheek, it'd be worth asking Urban if his decision to cover the Skripal poisoning in his new book was made before or after the Skripals were actually poisoned.
Brendan , August 28, 2018 at 10:37The consensus seems to be that it was an anti-Russia book, but that doesn't conflict with what you say (there is overlap, your view is just more specific). But, I just find it hard to believe that Urban and the conspirators would waste their time "counting their chickens ". Not least because such a book would form a handy list of traitors (together with confessions) if Trump were to prevail and it fell into the right hands. This is "101 – How to Organise a Revolution" (secrecy / don't put anything in writing); surely British security services know that?
With regard to your tongue-in-cheek point. Urban could have interviewed Skripal anytime after Trump was gone, unless he believed Skripal might be unavailable (for some reason). The fact he interviewed Skripal before does indicate foresight. If Urban really did interview Skripal before the event then he would be wiser to pull the book and burn every copy in existence (as well as all his notes).
Regardless, it looks like the master of the universe are losing their ability to create reality.
Tom , August 28, 2018 at 10:38Last month, Mark Urban was promoting the reports that the Russian assassins had been identified from CCTV footage:
"There are now subjects of interest in the police Salisbury investigation. ( ) analytic and cyber techniques are now being exploited against the Salisbury suspects by people with a wealth of experience in complex investigations."
https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/1020366761848385536That story originated with a report by PA, which Security Minister Ben Wallace called "ill informed and wild speculation". https://mobile.twitter.com/BWallaceMP/status/1019906962786484225
Or as Craig Murray put it, "Unnamed source close to unnamed British police officers tells unnamed Press Association journalist Britain knows the unnamed Russian agents ".
https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1019854966327005184Even Urban's colleagues had to admit that "The BBC has not been able to independently confirm the story."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44883803Still, that didn't stop Mark Urban from reporting the story almost as fact.
Ian Fantom , August 28, 2018 at 10:41The BBC relies on it's interpretation of the Act because it is held for the purposes of 'journalism, art or literature.' but this relies on a usually unrelated precedent and the opinions of a number of Judges which contradict this view. I'm in the process of challenging this with ICO but don't expect anything will change until another supreme court ruling:
Made By Dom , August 28, 2018 at 11:04I've put in a Freedom of Information request regarding meetings with Skripal other than any that were for the purpose of BBC news journalism. (https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/mark_urbans_non_journalistic_mee )
craig Post author , August 28, 2018 at 11:18Can I play Devil's Advocate ?
I can see the value in asking writers, journalists and artists to pose exactly the same questions as Eccles' original letter but I'm not convinced about Craig's email.
A quick google shows me that a man named Mark Urban has written a book on the Skripals. Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?
It wouldn't surprise me if Urban cares far more about his writing career than his job at the BBC. I'm sure most journalists would rather be authors. He's written a number of books on war and military intelligence. If his sources have nothing to do with the BBC then why should he answer to an on line mob?
SA , August 28, 2018 at 11:29" Isn't it likely that Urban was keeping the interviews to himself in order to keep his book alive?"
No, entirely unlikely. a chance to plug his forthcoming book and his Skripal contacts to a massive worldwide televion audience was eschewed.
The book is now about the Skripal attack. Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet. The book will just be a rehash of the "noble defector – Putin revenge" line and none of the questions I asked about the genesis of his involvement will be answered in it.Chris Hemmings , August 28, 2018 at 14:41"Presumably that was not the original subject he was researching, as it hadn't happened yet." Or it was prescience ie that it was part of the planning for the incident?
giyane , August 28, 2018 at 11:46@BBC, Summer 2017, in an executive office:
"Hey Mark, why don't you go down to have a chat with this guy in Salisbury. I have a hunch that a story might be going to happen involving him, you know, as an ex-Soviet spy. Spend time with him, get to know him, be able to write in depth about him. Say it's for a book ."ZigZag Wanderer , August 28, 2018 at 12:26Urban is never one-sided in his BBC reports on the Middle East. I would rather have him as Foreign Secretary than a bumbling idiot like Hubris Johnson or a Tory racketeer Hunt, because however clunky the formula of BBC balance Urban is at least pretending to be governed by normal rules. After Thatcher went anyone with half a brain left the Conservative party, leaving dolts like Johnson and nasties like May and Cameron to pick up the pieces after Blair and Brown.
There's money to be made from Russian billionaires and tory shit will follow the money like flies on d**t**d.
Urban pretends to research a book exposing Russia and part of his research is to interview Skripal. His objective is to find dirt on Putin in order to swing the war in Syria in favour of USUKIS bombing Assad to smithereens, bayonets bums etc.
Tory shit Hubris Johnson finds this political research floating around the Foreign Office and decides to twist it into Russia murders Skripal by Novichok. Unfortunately Johnson is already known to be a liar and gravy-trainer Tory and nobody believes him at all. Mrs May , realising that Johnson, Fox, Rees-Mogg and Hunt are completely bonkers, does Chequers her own way.
Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:16Interestingly Mark Urbans' book on Sergei Skripal was available to purchase on Amazon in July. I added it to my Amazon wishlist on 28/7/18. I've just looked at my wishlist and was rather surprised to find it is no longer available. It has been pulled.
From memory the books description said that Mark had interviewed Skripal 'extensively' during 2017 and also mentioned the 'new' spying war now happening between Britain and Russia.
A quick search revealed a new version of the book ( with an altered title ) will be available in early October .. details here. https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/mark-urban/the-skripal-files
Oh dear . panic stations !
Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:27Salisbury poisoning: Skripals 'were under Russian surveillance'
Mark Urban Diplomatic and defence editor, Newsnight4 July 2018
'My meetings with Sergei Skripal
I met Sergei on a few occasions last summer and found him to be a private character who did not, even under the circumstances then prevailing, wish to draw attention to himself.
He agreed to see me as a writer of history books rather than as a news journalist, since I was researching one on the post-Cold War espionage battle between Russia and the West.
Information gained in these interviews was fed into my Newsnight coverage during the early days after the poisoning. I have not felt ready until now to acknowledge explicitly that we had met, but do now that the book is nearing completion.
As a man, Sergei is proud of his achievements, both before and after joining his country's intelligence service.
He has a deadpan wit and is remarkably stoical given the reverses he's suffered in his life; from his imprisonment following conviction in 2006 on charges of spying for Britain, to the loss of his wife Liudmila to cancer in 2012, and the untimely death of his son Alexander (or Sasha) last summer.'
...
KEVIN GLENNIE , August 28, 2018 at 11:18Laughable given that the whole world and virtually all heads of State were under US surveillance by the NSA – at least until Edward Snowden made all his revelations.
Niki Henry , August 28, 2018 at 11:21I have pasted and copied your Email regarding the above with a few slight alterations, it will be interesting to see the response I receive if any being just a concerned citizen of the U.
Paul Baker , August 28, 2018 at 11:28Is this not a matter for the Police? (Even if you're not too sure if they'd do anything about it) These would be files that are to do with an attempted murder case. And definitely not Journalism if the story is fabricated.
Sharp Ears , August 28, 2018 at 11:39It feels as if you are moving in the right direction in linking Sergei to Steele. I'm intrigued by the very early media references to Sergei wanting to return home to see his elderly mother for perhaps the last time. He had apparently written to Putin making his request but again according to newspapers hadn't received a reply.
I would suggest Julia was bringing the answer via her own secret services contacts, her boyfriend and his mother, apparently Senior in the Russian Intelligence Agency. Perhaps a sentimental man Sergei was aware his mother couldn't travel so the plea to Putin was his best bet.
Such a request must have disturbed MI6 if Sergei had anything at all to do with the Steele dossier because inevitably if he returned to Russia he'd be debriefed by his old colleagues. But how can you rely on a mercenary double agent? If he decided he might want to stay in Russia with his family that might well have been attractive, away from the lonely existence in a Salisbury cul de sac with only spies for company. But the Steele dossier has great potential to turn sour on the British.
It's author was a Senior spy and Head of the Russian Desk for some years. It is – perhaps you'd agree? – inconceivable that he didn't require permission to prepare it, especially as much of it was based on his experience as a spy in Russia. Yet it's equally inconceivable that the Agency bosses didn't know the identity of the commissioners or the use to which it would be put in the US election – to boost Clinton's bid. If she'd won everything would have been fine but as it is any discussion of foreign interference in that election would have to include MI6 leading the list (they probably didn't tell any politician?) To have Sergei supporting and highlighting that embarrassment would be problematic for US-UK relations. Of course Sergei may have had other nuggets to expose as well as Steele.
Soon after Julia's arrival the pair fell ill. They both survived but are now locked away, presumably for life and never able to explain their side of the story.
It was a bodged job with a poor cover story from the start and could only be carried because of D Notices and media complicity. Is his mother still alive? Would he still like to see her before she dies? Would Russia allow it? Would MI6 allow it? I think that's 3 yeses and a resounding No.
Charles Bostock , August 28, 2018 at 15:58Following the deaths of 55 Palestinians on the Gaza 'border' and the wounding of thousands, in this video, Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas.
Gaza deaths: Who's to blame? – BBC Newsnight
Published on 15 May 2018
Subscribe 256K
Fresh protests against Israel are expected in the Palestinian territories, a day after Israeli troops killed 58 people in the Gaza Strip.
David Keyes is the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mark Urban asked him whether it was appropriate for the US to open their embassy on the 70th anniversary of Israel's creation, a day that is hugely controversial for the Palestinian people.Newsnight is the BBC's flagship news and current affairs TV programme – with analysis, debate, exclusives, and robust interviews.
Website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsnight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1dec5XO53kMr Keyes' pronounced American accent was heard. The Occupation was not mentioned. A Palestinian voice was not heard.
This is another of his videos. On the same subject and on the opening of the Israeli Embassy in Jerusalem. This time, Jonathan Conricus spoke for the IDF.
Israel says. Same old. Same old. BBC. ZBC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdqoPKKkD8Peter , August 28, 2018 at 11:39"Urban asks the questions but the Israeli government spokesman, David Keyes, is allowed to spout all the usual propaganda against Hamas."
Yes indeed : Urban asked the questions and allowed the interviewee to answer. Perhaps you would have preferred him to interrupt the interviewee continually 'a la Today programme, or to have shouted at him similarly to the way I understand some people shout at customers inside or outside supermarkets?
Jeremn , August 28, 2018 at 11:42This may or may not be relevant regarding Russia, chemical weapons and BBC/MSM bovine effluent:
"US Poised to Hit Syria Harder: The Russian Defense Ministry issued a statement on Aug. 25 stating that the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham militants had brought eight containers of chlorine to Idlib in order to stage a false-flag attack with the help of UK intelligence agencies. A group of Tahrir al-Sham fighters trained to handle chemical warfare agents by the UK private military company Olive arrived in the suburbs of the city of Jisr ash-Shugur, Idlib, 20 km. from the Turkish border."
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/08/27/us-poised-to-hit-syria-harder.html
Paul Greenwood , August 28, 2018 at 12:00Can't help thinking that the answer to all this lies in Estonia. Sergei went to Estonia in June 2016, Pablo was in Estonia, the Estonians passed on sigint about Trump-Russian collusion in the summer of 2016. A Guardian article of 13 April 2017 said:
"Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump's inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland."
Perhaps not the Dossier, as such, but some material on collusion?
wonky , August 29, 2018 at 10:29John Paul Jones also fought for the Russians and was a Rear-Admiral. He was buried in Paris 1792 and disinterred 1905 and relocated to USA
Agent Green , August 28, 2018 at 12:11..then he met Jimmy Page in the 1960s and the rest is history..
Paul Carrom , August 28, 2018 at 12:12No doubt in my mind that the Skripal affair is a planned operation carried out by US/UK intelligence. What has actually taken place is still to be determined, but the propaganda operation itself is clear.
Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 14:53Definitely done by the UK.
mark golding , August 28, 2018 at 17:40What did the UK have against Dawn and Charlie? (Please don't say you subscribe to all that bottle-finding bullshit).
Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 18:06Catch my last post Doodlebug, sadly MI6 diabolical elements can be traced back to Ireland in the 70's early 80's assassinations theRealTerror (theRealElvis) understands.
Jo , August 29, 2018 at 11:59I know about Ireland, and I agree, it was NOT a nerve agent. That said, I don't believe anyone was 'attacked', including the Skripals.
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:24Being used as practice and to establish more "evidence"
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:20Often it's been open. There was the BBC monitoring station at Caversham Park. The BBC's Foreign Broadcast Information Service split the world into two parts with the CIA.
All foreign correspondents of major newspapers too work with MI6. Nobody who is close to them has any kind of doubt about this.
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:38Theresa May says a no deal Brexit "wouldn't be the end of the world".
- This is not a negotiating strategy. This is not a pantomime where one giant on the stage can wink to his supporters (using the British media) without his opponent (EU27) noticing.
- The subconscious doesn't work well with negation. Whatever you do, please DON'T imagine an elephant at this time.
- I would love to know what the preparations are at Trinity College, Cambridge, for food shortages. They own the port of Felixstowe, which handles more than 40% of Britain's containerised trade. They also own a 50% stake in a portfolio of Tesco stores. Soon food distribution will be what everyone is talking about. I am never going to stop making the point that the god of the Tory party is Thomas Malthus.
Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:43Oh dear.. Theresa May in Africa:
" As a Prime Minister who believes both in free markets and in nations and businesses acting in line with well-established rules and principles of conduct, I want to demonstrate to young Africans that their brightest future lies in a free and thriving private sector. "
I despise everyone who says that free markets are the solution for the problems of the third world. What they mean is mass starvation and an enormous population cull. There are international "foundations" that pay academics and politicians large amounts of money to spout this obscene line. One of them is called the John Templeton Foundation. They have had their fangs in to British universities for a long time.
They are keen on Prince Philip, the guy who said he wanted to come back as a virus so he could kill a large part of the population. Never trust anyone who has received a Templeton scholarship or prize or who has anything to do with these people or with the message that free markets and the private sector are the key to "development"
Ros Thorpe , August 28, 2018 at 12:30When the Tories talk about 'free markets', they are talking about markets free from democracy.
May's rhetoric is laughable .basically all her speeches read : 'the sky is green, the snow is black etc etc' -- totally detached from reality and a spent political force, as their recent membership numbers showed, with more revenues from legacies left in wills than from actual living members.
N_ , August 28, 2018 at 12:47I agree with the Skripal relatives that Sergei is dead. He hasn't been seen or heard of and would have called his mother. Mind boggling deception at all levels and I struggle to believe any of it.
Nuno Strybes , August 28, 2018 at 12:38Sergei Skripal could be in US custody, either in the US itself or in a US facility somewhere.
If he is dead, then the rehospitalisation of Charlie Rowley may be to assist with the narrative. "Once you've had a drop of Novvy Chockk, you may recover but you can fall down ill at any time, and here's an Expert with a serious voice to confirm it."
Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 13:08I follow this blog closely, particularly in relation to the Skripal case, but this is my first comment. I just watched Sky News piece on 'super recognisers' and couldn't help but wonder why, in an age of powerful facial recognition technology, the police and security services seem to have drawn such a blank. The surveillance state in the UK is known to be one of the most advanced in the world but when it comes to this highly important geopolitical crisis our technological infrastructure seems to be redundant to the point where 'human eyes' are deemed to be more accurate than the most powerful supercomputers available. Psychologically, all humans have an inherent facial recognition ability from a very young age, but the idea that some police officers have this ability developed to such an extent that they supercede computer recognition is, i feel, laughable. To me this announcement through the ever subservient Sky News reeks of desperation on the part of the ;official story'. Are we about to be shown suspects who, although facial recognition technology fails to identify them, a 'super recogniser' can testify that it actually is person A or person B and we are all supposed to accept that? Seems either a damning indictment of the judicial process, or a damning indictment of the £££££'s of taxpayers money that is spent on places like GCHQ etc whose technology is now apparently no better than a highly perceptive human brain. Give me a break !
giyane , August 28, 2018 at 13:49Why no interest in how the Coopers died in Egypt? We will soon be told by HMG that the Russians somehow dd it too., thanks to Urban's research?
Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 14:16People do die Trowbridge. I know you haven't, but you have the motivation of outliving your persecutors. With Muckin about with Isis gone and covert operations isn't social work Kissinger looking as though he's on daily blood transfusions, you have rejected Trump for some reason. But Trump has undone much of John McCain's worst mischief in one year. If McCain was an example of a politician, we don't need politicians.
Trowbridge H. Ford , August 28, 2018 at 15:03Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals.
And while i tried on another site to be generous about McCain. he got Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. to scare the Soviets for prevailing in the Vietnam War so much about what NATO was up to in the fallout from shooting Swedish PM Olof Palme that Moscow gave up the competition for fear that it would blow up the world, helping bring on the crappy one we have.
McCain was a continuing Cold Warrior who we don't need since we still have Trump who is just trying to do it another way.
Doodlebug , August 28, 2018 at 15:26Oh, I forget that couple in Amesbury. Looks like the Porton Down Plague is spread overseas.
Posting on this site in like playing bridge online – the cards are stacked against you.
"Give me an example, other than the Coopers. of a healthy couple one day that is found dying the next day like the Skripals."
Will a 17 year old and his step-father do?
They both survived, but one or other (quite possibly both) would have died without medical intervention.
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Sep 14, 2018 | off-guardian.org
intergenerationaltrauma says February 11, 2018
The rather obvious suppression of the English version of what was a "best seller" in Germany suggests that the Western system of thought manipulation and consent manufacture sees itself as weaker and more vulnerable than one might at first imagine.Google Talpiot Program says January 30, 2018We can see from a year+ of "Russiagate" that Western media is a clown-show, much of so called "alternative media" included.
My guess is that this book is just too dangerous to allow it to become part of the debate on "fake news" and "Russiagate." Of course now the CIA doesn't even have to exclusively – "own"- journalists as fronts when ex-CIA heads are being hired outright by MSM as pundits. I just wish someone with access would post an English language PDF version online. It would be a real contribution to free thought and free speech to do so.
Just like "200 years together" by Solzhenitsyn which was never officially published in English despite Andrei having authored many works which were big sellers. Just an example of other private business and corporations are often fully responsible for pro-establishment censorship.Harry Stotle says January 15, 2018The treatment of the book aroused suspicion because of its content – ie supine news outlets forever dancing to the tune of western military imperatives.Marcus says January 20, 2018Ongoing support for illegal wars tell us that the MSM has hardly been at the forefront of informing readers why war criminals like Hilary and Obama keep getting away with it. In fact Obama, just like Kissinger was awarded a peace prize – so obviously something has gone very wrong somewhere.
It may be, although it seems unlikely that the mis-handling of an important theme like this is simply due to oversight by the publisher (as Matt claims) but neither is it beyond the realms of possibility that somebody has had a word with someone in the publishing world, perhaps because they are not overly keen on the fact Udo Ulfkotte has deviated from the media's mono-narrative about why it is necessary for the US to destabilise countries and kill so many of their citizens.
Lets face it – it would be harder for the pattern to be maintained if the MSM was not so afraid of telling the truth, or at least be more willing to hold to account politicians as the consequences of their disastrous policies unfold for all to see.
Maybe you want to have a go at answering the obvious question begged by such self evident truths – why are the MSM usually lying?
The book was never published in English. It was advertised, and then withdrawn. That is suppression...Michael McNulty says January 14, 2018Somebody said banning books is the modern form of book burning, and like Heinrich Heine said two centuries ago, "Where they burn books, in the end, they start burning people."jones says January 12, 2018Western elites realize what they could have, what they could do and what they could get away with, but only if they reinvent the political system Hitler created. If they defeat every enemy abroad who might stop them, next they'll do to their own people what the Nazis did to those they didn't want alive. If enough water sources are lost to fracking, and enough food sources lost through poisoned seas and forest fires, many people will go to their camps as refuge but few will survive them. This ecological destruction is for future population reduction.
In the US they use newspeak to say what the Nazis described with more honesty. Their master race became the indispensable nation, their world domination became full spectrum dominance, and Totalerkrieg became the global war on terror. There will be others.
Farzad Basoft anyone ? Journos have long been pliant enablers for Intel agencies. It's strange how Dr. Ulfkotte's revelations have been taken as some signifier of further Western moral decay/decadence.summitflyer says January 15, 2018Maybe I am taking what you wrote out of context but I don't find it strange at all .It is just that someone, Udo, on the inside has become a whistle blower , and confirmed what most suspected .The establishment can't have that.Connect says January 12, 2018See John Swinton on the independence of the press at http://constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm
As the economy growth has this so-called invisible hand, journalism also has an 'invisible pen'. One of the questions that need an answer: how come feminists are so anti-Putin and anti-Russia? Easy to connect to dots?bevin says January 11, 2018The real story here, which the media pretends not to notice, is that if Intelligence services and corporations did not finance newspapers they would cease to exist. The old business model whereby newspapers covered their costs by selling advertising and paid circulation is finished. Under that model there were, to an extent, incentives for the publisher to preserve a modicum of credibility in order to keep readership, as well as reasons to publish sensational stories to beat competition.Serge Lubomudrov says January 11, 2018Those days are gone: none of the newspapers make financial profits, they now exist because they have patrons. They always did, of course, but now they have nothing else- the advertisers have left and circulation is diminishing rapidly.
The days that Ulfkotte recalled were times when it took lots of money and careful preparation to put spooks into the newsroom, nowadays the papers are only too happy to publish the CIA's PR and very grateful if the government pays their journalists' salaries.
As to competition that is restricted to publishers competing to demonstrate their loyalty to the government and their ingenuity in candy coating its propaganda.
Anyone doubt that Luke Harding will be in the running for a Pulitzer? Or perhaps even the Nobel Prize for Literature?
For those whose German is not good enough (like me, unfortunately), but know Russian, there's a Russian translation: https://www.litres.ru/udo-ulfkotte/prodazhnye-zhurnalisty-lubaya-pravda-za-vashi-dengi/vexarb says January 9, 2018For what it's worth, I skimmed through this very long link by Matt, and could find no mention of poison gas -- certainly no denunciation -- just horrific conventional arms : Der Spiegel 1984: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13508659.htmlGeorge Cornell says January 9, 2018Also for what it's worth, the German publisher's blurb which I got Google to translate above, says there is much more to the book than old Soddem: the author names names and points to organizations.
Now, without any evidence, based only on my faulty memory and highly biased interpretation of events strung together on a timeline, here is my conspiracy story about a very nice country called Iraq and a very nasty Iraqi called Saddam who came to a very nasty end at the hands of his much more nasty friends, who first gave him a boost and then put in the boot.
- 1914 Great Britain invades Iraq and BP takes over the Iraqi oilfields.
- 1968 Iraqi govt member under Yaya wants to nationalize the oil. CIA coup replaces Yaya with Saddam as a safe pair of hands.
1970 Saddam the dirty dog does the dirty on the friends who put him in power; he nationalizes Iraqi oil. And nationalizes Iraqi banks. From now on Saddam is a dead man walking. Like Mossadeq in Iran whom the US-UK replaced with the Shah- 1978 But in Iran the Shah is replaced by the Islamic Socialist Republic -- who again nationalize Iranian oil. Saddam's friends now face a dilemma: kill him first, or kill the Ayatollah's first? They decide to first go for the Ayatollahs -- with Saddam's help.
- 1980 Saddam invades Iran with help from US and Germany -- including, strangely enough, generous supplies of poison gas.
- 1984-1989 Saddam's invasion of Iran flops. Reports about use of poison gas by Saddam begin to emerge, first in German newspapers then even debated US govt.
- 1990 Saddam thinks he has restored credit with the US & Germany by using their weapons against Iran, and now has the green light to invade another country. Finds out his mistake in the Gulf War. He is once again, a dead man walking. So is his country.
- 2001 Saddam is accused of harbouring Islamic terrorists who knocked down 3 skyscrapers by flying 2 passenger planes into them. The idea of Secular Baathist Saddam in league with religious fanatics is ridiculous, but what the heck it's a story.
- 2003 Saddam hanged for, inter alia, use of chemical weapons; likewise his minister whom the MSM have a field day comically calling "Chemical" Ali.
- 2017 Who's next? The Ayatollahs, of course. And anyone else who dares to nationalize "our" oil. Or "our" banks.
That is more than plausible. Unfortunately. Hard not to sympathize with the Iraqis and feel shame for what has been done in the name of the US and UK. Rotten to the core, and sanctimonious to boot.rtj1211 says January 9, 2018To understand how journalism is bought, go analyze the output of the Uk's Daily Telegraph. They literally sell space to lobbyists and for several years outraged BTL comment would tear the articles to shreds. The whole UK Press prostitutes itself whenever there is a US war on i.e. all the time. It really is about time the CIA were unmasked – they do not serve our interests, they serve only their own .Carrie says January 9, 2018The Guardian sells space to lobbyists too. Not ad space – article space. It's literally hiring itself out to whomever wants to buy the right to publish an article under its name.Brian Steere says January 8, 2018Well one things stands out in bold and that is the fear that such a revelation is associated with. 'Broad spectrum dominance' of a central intelligent agency is a reversal of the wholeness of being expressing through all its parts.candideschmyles says January 8, 2018Fake intelligence is basically made up to serve a believed goal. The terrorism of fear generates the goal of a self-protection that sells true relationship to 'save itself'.
This goes deep into what we take to be our mind. The mind that thinks it is in control by controlling what it thinks.
If I can observe this in myself at will, is it any surprise I can see it in our world?
What is the fear that most deeply motivates or drives the human agenda?
I do not ask this of our superficial thinking, but of a core self-honesty that cannot be 'killed' but only covered over with a thinking-complex.And is it insane or unreal to be moved by love?
We are creatures of choice and beneath all masking, we are also the creator of choice.
But the true creative is not framed into a choosing between, but feeling one call as the movement of it.When the 'intelligence' of a masking narrative no longer serves, be the willingness for what you no longer claim to have, and open to being moved from within.
I am so tired of the simmering fury that lives inside me. This bubbling cauldron brim full of egregious truths, images and accounts accumulated over nearly 40 years of looking behind the headlines. I disagree that the usurpation of journalists and media organisations is in any way a recent phenomena. It certainly predates my emergent mind. And even the most lauded of anti-establishment hacks and film makers self-censored to some degree. True, the blatant in your face propaganda and thought control agenda has accelerated, but it was always there. I do not believe Chomsky, Oliver Stone, Pilger and their like could have done much more than they have, that is to guide us in a direction counter to the official narrative. And to insinuate they are gatekeepers, when our heads never stretch above the parapet, is really just a reflection of our own frustration that despite their work the only change remains for the worse.Serge Lubomudrov says January 8, 2018
Yet I fear worse is to come. Our safe bitching in glorious anonymity has been all that we have had as solace to the angst that pervades us, the other 1%. But the the thumbscrew is tightening. We may be as little as months away from any dissent being entirely removed from the internet by AI algorithms. I have already been receiving warnings on several sites anyone here would call legitimate that have had their security certificates removed and the statement that the site may contain malicious code etc. How prepared are we for blackout?The publisher even removed the 2 year old news announcement about the book! Though the twit is still there. Probably, overlooked.summitflyer says January 8, 2018A foundation should be set up in remembrance of Udo and sponsored by all true journalists and truth seekers. Maybe some day there will be a Udo Ulfkotte award to the bravest journalist of the year .Wouldn't that be something .Udo's work would not have been in vain . That would throw a monkey wrench into orgs like the Guardian and their ilk .Just dreaming out loud maybe , but with good intentions.Alun Thomas says January 8, 2018Original German version can be found here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=ABA05365ABE35FD446D6F83B149A32A2Chris G says January 8, 2018
Unfortunately no english version, but other controversial texts have sometimes been crowd-translated, maybe something like this may happenThank you Alun for the link to the German edition, which I have managed to download (naughty me!) I think the suggestion of retranslating important sections and dressing these in some commentary for (presumably legitimate) publication on e.g. Off-G would be a good idea. I'm quite fluent in German and would be glad to help.Admin says January 8, 2018
Mods: do you see any legal pitfalls?That depends on who holds the rights to the English language version and the original and whether they would want to take issue. If it's Ulfkotte's family they may be happy to see his work get some sort of airing in English. If it's his publishers we can imagine they will see things differently – as indeed would whoever it is that seems to want the book buried.Martin Read says January 8, 2018Tried to get to that site and was told that I couldn't via my Virgin provider because of a High Court order. Somebody moved a bit quickly.Carrie says January 8, 2018Me too! My Broadband provider is blocking access due to a High Court injunction.Alun Thomas says January 8, 2018@ChrisG & @Alun Thomas – can you guys still get there? It might be a country or region thing.
I heard it is blocked in many western countries, as the site is well known for its disregard for copyright. Fortunately not the case where I am (NZ). If you're technically inclined, a VPN or anonymising application may help, although a VPN that 'exits' in a western area won't get you any further ahead.George Cornell says January 8, 2018I had no problem, but provider in CanadaArrby says January 11, 2018One hopes. I also hold out hope for F. William Engdahl's "Geheimakte NGOs." Here's a Dissident Voice article in which Engdahl discusses the role of NGOs in aiding and abetting the US regime change program:Frank says January 8, 2018https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/07/the-us-empire-the-cia-and-the-ngos/
I also recommend, highly, Stephen Gowans's article about social networking in the service of the US regime change program:
"Overthrow Inc.: Peter Ackerman's quest to do what the CIA used to do, and make it seem progressive" by Stephen Gowans
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/overthrow-inc-peter-ackerman%E2%80%99s-quest-to-do-what-the-cia-used-to-so-and-make-it-seem-progressive/Yes, it has also been interesting to note that in 2015 the Guardian published a review of Richard Sakwa's book 'Frontline Ukraine' in which the author was critical of both NATO and the EU, in fomenting this crisis. The 2014 'coup' which was carried out in February 2014 was, according to the independent geopolitical publication, Strator, 'the most blatant in history.' The appraisal which was carried out by Guardian journalist Jonathon Steele was generally favourably disposed to Sakwa's record of events; however, Mr Steele now rarely publishes anything in the Guardian. Read into this what you like.Hugh O'Neill says January 8, 2018As to Sakwa's latest book,'' Russia Against the Rest'', – nothing, not a peep, it doesn't exist, it never existed, it never will exist. It would appear to be the case that the Guardian is now fully integrated into the military/surveillance/media-propaganda apparatus. The liberal gatekeeper as to what is and what isn't acceptable. Its function is pure to serve the interests of the powerful, in much the same way as the church did in the middle ages. The media doesn't just serve the interests power it is also part of the same structure of dominance, albeit the liberal wing of the ruling coalition.
During the British war against the Boers in South Africa, at the turn of the 19/20 century, the then Manchester Guardian took a brave and critical stand against the UK government. This lead to its offices in Manchester being attacked by jingoistic mobs, as was the home of the then editor C.P.Scott, whose family needed police protection. In those days 'Facts were Sacred', unlike the present where opposing views are increasingly ignored or suppressed.
Having just watched the documentary film tribute to I.F. Stone, "All Governments Lie", I was struck by the fact that no-one mentioned Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone journalist (who outed General McChrystal, but whose Mercedes went mysteriously out of control, hit a tree and exploded, throwing the engine 200 yards clear of the wreck ). Here was a film about control and self-censorship, yet no-one even breathed the acronyms C.I.A. or FBI. Matt Taibbi referred to a silent coup, but none dared to mention the assassinations of JFK, MLK and RFK. These doyens of Truth included the thoroughly dodgy Noam Chomsky. Finally, the Spartacus website suggests that the saintly I.F. Stone was in the pay of the CIA. Other terms unspoken were CIA Operation Mockingbird or Operation Northwoods. There was a clip of 9/11, but zero attempt to join up all the dots.Harry Stotle says January 8, 2018
RIP Udo Ulfkotte. CIA long ago developed a dart to induce all the signs of a heart attack, so one is naturally somewhat suspicious. Lies and assassinations are two sides of the same coin.The only thing harder to find than Udo Ulfkotte's book is a Guardian review of it.Harry Stotle says January 8, 2018I daresay any mention of this book, BTL, would immediately be moderated (i.e censored) followed by a yellow or red card for the cheeky commentator.
The level of pretence on this forum has now reached epic proportions, and seems to cuts both ways, ie. commentators pretending that there are not several subjects which are virtually impossible to discuss in any depth (such as media censorship), and moderators pretending that 'community standards' is not simply a crude device to control conversational discourse, especially when a commentators point of view stray beyond narrow, Guardian approved borders.Books, such as 'Bought Journalists' (which expose the corruption at the heart of western media) are especially inconvenient for the risible 'fake news' agenda currently being rammed down the readerships throat – some of these people at the Guardian have either absolutely no insight, or no shame.
This piece put me in mind of Daniele Gansers seminal book, 'NATOs secret armies' Of course Off-G picked up on it but I can't find any commentary from the GuardianGeorge Cornell says January 8, 2018
https://off-guardian.org/2015/07/17/natos-secret-armies-gladio-in-western-europe/Ulfkotte and Ganser in their ways are both telling a similar story – NATO, i.e an arm of the US military industrial complex are mass murderers and sufficiently intimidating to have most western journalists singing from the same hymn sheet.
Since the Guardian follows the party line it is only possible to send coded or cryptic messages (BTL) should commentators wish to deviate from the approved narrative.
For example, I was 'pre-moderated' for having doubts about the veracity of the so called 'Parsons Green tube bomb', especially the nature of the injuries inflicted on a young model who looked like she was suffering from toothache.
https://www.thenational.ae/image/policy:1.628812:1505494262/wo16-web-parsons-green.JPG?f=16×9&w=1024&$p$f$w=e135edaMy guess is NATO's secret army are still in full swing but there is no chance the Guardian will pick up on it – they're too busy whipping up antipathy towards Iran.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/05/west-ignores-iranian-people-power-peril#commentsBeen there, done that. What ordinarily happens if the submission is proper and cannot be censored on the basis of impropriety or foulmouthedness or any other good reason, but exposes a Guardian sacred cow in an embarrassing light, is that it is said to be off topic. Now this is really unaccountable, and truly subjective.The community in community standards is "them" and has close ties to the 1%, if I hazard a guess.
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Sep 12, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
jayc , Sep 12, 2018 5:33:25 PM | link
... hilariously, UK security minister Wallace asserted the Novichok was assuredly in a perfume bottle, got into the country because of poor baggage checks, had the capability "to kill or injure hundreds and hundreds of people", but was not a health risk to persons on the plane or public transit used by the suspects. ????
TJ , Sep 12, 2018 6:10:54 PM | link
@jayc 28Tom , Sep 12, 2018 8:28:39 PM | link...yes, HMG is a source of continuing amusement, assuming they don't get us all killed in a Global Thermonuclear war.
Article over at the Stalker Zone on the forged letter that brought down the first UK Labour government of Ramsey McDonald in 1924."The frank forgery that is the "Zinoviev's letter" came to London from the Riga department of the Secret Intelligence Service of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office of Britain (or SIS, nowadays better known as MI-6) with an assurance that the authenticity of the document "does not raise doubts" (the most ancient form of "highly likely") The Labour government was doomed. Rectifying the situation in such a short period of time before elections didn't seem to be possible."
Mark Twain's truism still holds today, "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." And the media is little different except for sites like this. Thanks B and keep up the good fight. Don't let the bastards get you down.
Vladimir Kornilov: The Prequel to the Skripal Affair – Britain Investigates the "Great Forgery"
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Vermithrax , 13 Apr 2018 15:39
Freedland recently put this argument on Newsnight.thousandautumns -> balancedman , 13 Apr 2018 15:39It is flawed to the point of dishonesty.
He talks of removing assets as if the process was being conducted under laboratory conditions. There are ten nations enmeshed in a warzone with numerous factions under no one's control. It is magical thinking that cannot be achieved and will only result in rapid, uncontrolled escalation. The idea that there will be no collateral damage is laughable and I regret to suggest that it is deliberately misleading.
Moreover, in engaging Assad when he is on the brink of victory, the Syrian Civil War will be extended. The Syrian people will then pay the price.
Should Assad subsequently fall - and that is the actual aim of intervention - then Syria will become another anarchic wasteland ruled over by fundamentalist warlords. The spiral of migration will be renewed bringing loons wrapped in the dispossessed to our own streets. Worse, the militants next stop will be Lebanon and then Israel will be directly involved. Freedland advocates acting against Assad without even attempting to predict the consequences. At the very least I would expect the usual misdirection 'of course this time we must have a plan for rebuilding Syria', secure in the knowledge that by that time there will be another crisis and Syria can be left in entropy.
No good can come from military intervention. The satisfaction of commentators that the right thing has been done is an irrelevance. The right thing is always just public relations. Every bit of ruthless geopolitics has to have a casus belli to make the killing all righteous and unavoidable. It has always been thus. For resources to be expended on this kind of scale there has to be a rock solid bit of bankable realpolitik. In this case its the struggle for regional hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Syria can either be part of a supply chain selling Sunni gas/oil to Europe or Shi'a gas/oil to Europe. This is about killing Syrians for the glory of Saudi Arabia. You can see why there has to be a casus belli because thats not something that can be sold. We know the proceeds will go unmentioned into offshore havens and the London property market. Britain would derive no geopolitical benefit as a whole. The benefits would accrue only to a kleptocracy who think they have a right to use our country as a loan shark's leg-breaker.
It is therefore my contention that Freedland is promoting an immoral act that will have serious consequences without offering any serious improvement in the situation. This is arguably the most dangerous situation since the Cuban Missile crisis and an analysis that advocates pouring oil on the flames is either ridiculously stupid or calculatedly duplicitous.
"Up to" 13,000 "opponents" killed over five years during a period of war. I'm assuming that number of "opponents" includes a large number of out and out terrorists who have thrown the country into chaos.Brianto , 13 Apr 2018 15:39What is Porton Down manufacturing?oldeborr , 13 Apr 2018 15:38The UK and France bares a heavy responsibility for the current situation in Syria. The cavalier attitude that the ConDems took to international law during the Arab spring encouraged the Saudi s and their proxies to distablise the recognised Govt. Assad is no paragon of virtue, but prior to the insurgency steps were in place to make the country a better place for its citizens, and whilst its true political dissent was not allowed, people could live their lives and go about their business in safety.
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off-guardian.org
Max Parry
An 'Immortal Regiment' march celebrating Victory Day in Riga, Latvia.
It has been nearly three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite Russia's reemergence on the world stage as a respected power after market-oriented 'reforms' destroyed its economy for the duration of the nineties, the breakup of the USSR is an event regarded by an increasing amount of Russians as a catastrophic tragedy rather than a triumph of 'freedom and democracy.'
In recent years, there have been numerous polls showing that more than half of Russians not only regret the collapse of the Soviet Union but would even prefer for its return . However, the nostalgia only comes as a surprise to those who have forgotten that not long before the failed August Coup that led to its demise, the first and only referendum in its history was held in March of 1991 which polled citizens if they wished to preserve the Soviet system.
The results were more than three quarters of the population in the entire socialist federation (including Russia) voting a resounding yes with a turnout of 80% in the participating republics. In Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan the outcome was more than 90% voting for renewal. Even the country with the lowest amount of support, the Ukraine, was still 70% in favor. While the measure was officially banned in six republics -- Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and the three Baltic states -- despite being unrecognized by their local governments the vote was still organized and the outcomes were all over 90%.
Ironically, the union dissolved five months later under the pretext of establishing 'democracy' in Eastern Europe just as it ignored the very wishes of Soviet citizens. After more than 25 years of suffering at the hands of economic and trade liberalization, gutting of state subsidies and mass privatization of the former state-run industry, is it any wonder that Russians are yearning for a return to socialism?
The consequences of the disintegration are still felt in the relations with the United States today. It planted the seeds for the carefully arranged revival of the Cold War that was hiding in plain sight until it surfaced with 'color revolutions', proxy wars and dubious spy poisonings. One source of the strained relations between the West and Russia has been the Baltic states, which burgeoned following their integration into the European Union and enrollment in NATO membership in 2004 during its enlargement. NATO continues its provocations with massive war games bordering Kaliningrad, while Moscow is painted as the aggressor even though the U.S. defense spending increase this year alone surpasses Russia's entire military budget.
The antagonism between Latvia, Estonia and(to a lesser degree) Lithuania with Moscow stems partly from from the cessation of the USSR itself. The conclusion of the Cold War resulted in more than 25 million Russians instantly discovering themselves living abroad in foreign countries. For seventy years, fifteen nations had been fully integrated while Russians migrated and lived within the other republics. The Soviet collapse immediately reignited national conflicts, from the Caucasus to the Baltics. While the majority of the ethnic Russian diaspora live in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, nearly 1 million reside in the post-Soviet Baltics and since 1991 they have been subjected to a campaign of forced assimilation, discrimination and exclusion.
The Baltic republics made nationalism their official state policy while moving away from Russia's sphere of influence into a closer relationship with the West. Boris Yeltsin's subservience to Washington eclipsed any concern for the fate of captive Russians as the Soviet Bloc was herded into the EU, but his administration did quarrel with the new Baltic authorities and accused them of creating an anti-Russian 'apartheid.'
As geopolitical tensions have increased under his successor, Vladimir V. Putin, who has embarrassed Western imperialism in the international arena, so has Moscow's disapproval of the treatment of its minority held hostage in the Baltic Rim. Is a comparison to South Africa warranted? Even if the similarities are only partial, the three states show evidence of deep ethnocracy.
While less than 10% of Lithuania is ethnically Russian, in Latvia and Estonia the number is much higher at a quarter of their entire populations. The three governments have passed laws promoting their official languages and restored citizenship requirements that existed up until 1940, demanding that their Russian minorities apply or risk losing basic rights and guarantees. Russia has interpreted these measures as a form of slow-motion ethnic cleansing intended to coerce Russians to immigrate elsewhere.
When the three states first became independent, in an act of systematic discrimination they distributed non-citizen 'alien' passports to ethnic Russians and excluded them from obtaining citizenship automatically, even if they had lived and worked in a Baltic state for their entire life. In fact, citizenship was not immediately granted to anyone whose ancestry arrived after 1940, a policy that specifically targeted ethnic Russians who without naturalization are left stateless.
For example, when Estonia first declared its independence more than 30% of its population (or every third person) did not have citizenship of the country of residence. This inscribed ethnic division into their society and although many Russians have become naturalized over the last two decades, there are still more than 80,000 in Estonia without determined status who are mostly former Soviet citizens and their descendants. In Latvia, segregation runs even deeper where more than 250,000 Russians (15% of the population) remain stateless. Even when they do become citizens, the parliaments have attempted to pass laws banning non-EU immigrants (predominantly Russians) from possessing voting rights on several occasions. Polls also show the prejudice within their societies, with many Balts indicating they would prefer their Russian-speaking neighbors to repatriate.
Meanwhile, the Russian population has expressed concern about the reemergence of neo-Nazism. The authorities have nurtured holocaust denial, such as the Latvian government objecting to an UNESCO Holocaust exhibition of the Salaspils concentration camp on the basis it would 'tarnish the country's image.' No kidding.
Children held in Salaspils concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Latvia during WWII.
One criteria for the naturalization exams is based on language where in order to become citizens Russians must become fluent in Latvian and Estonian, even though they are such a large minority that in larger cities they often constitute 50% of the population and Russian may be the most spoken language. Simultaneously, any attempt to make Russian a second official language have been struck down. It is a deliberate effort to assimilate the Russian-speaking minority and erase remnants of Soviet culture.
In order to obtain basic entitlements, Russians have to pass the tough naturalization tests which many fail several times (especially the elderly), facing fines and risking losing their employment in the process. The tests are notoriously difficult as Latvian and Estonian languages bear little resemblance to Slavic Russian and are much closer to Finnish.
Apart from ethnicity, 40% of Latvia as a whole identifies as Russian-speaking and have been accustomed to schooling in their native tongue where they already have low career prospects and income rates. Rather than inclusion, they have been mandated to adopt the Baltic languages. Beginning in 2019, the Russian language education options in Latvia will be discontinued altogether in higher education at colleges and universities as well as many secondary schools, which has sparked demonstrations in protest .
Russian-speakers protesting Latvia's language reform laws
It should be made clear that what ethnic Russians experience in the Baltics has its own particularities that make it significantly different from the institutionalized racism and violently enforced segregation that existed in South Africa (or what many believe is applicable to the Palestinians under Israeli occupation). The word apartheid itself originates from the Afrikaans word for 'separateness' (or apart-hood), but an exact comparison is not the real issue. There are many overlapping characteristics that make an analogy arguable.
For instance, the use of an ID system denoting ethnicity and alien status with the inability of Russians to participate in the democratic process or politics. Their reduced standing contributes to a society where ethnic groups often do not intermingle and are concentrated in particular areas with Russians mostly residing in urban cities. Yet even Israel recognized Arabic as a second official language (until 2018), while none of three Baltic states do so for Russian. When referendums have been held on whether to adopt Russian as a second language, the non-citizen communities are excluded from voting, ensuring its inability to pass.
The exams also coerce Russians to accept a nationalist and historically revisionist account of the last century where the Soviet Union is said to have "occupied" the Baltics. A history lesson is needed to understand how this is untrue and based on pure Nazi mythology. During the Romanov dynasty, the Baltic states had been part of the Russian Empire but became independent for the first time in centuries following the February Revolution in 1917.
Along with Belarus and Finland, the Bolsheviks were unable to regain the three republics during the Russian Civil War. During the 1930s, the three nations were officially sovereign states but under their own brutal nationalist regimes. The Soviet liberation of the Baltics can hardly be seen as a 'forceful incorporation' considering what they replaced were not democracies themselves and they were absorbed in order to block Hitlerite expansionism.
Since the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe, the Baltic states have waged a campaign of diminishing and obscuring the Holocaust into a 'double genocide' of equal proportions , conflating the Nazis and the Soviets as twin evils. Western 'democracies' have helped obfuscate the truth about the widely misunderstood Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the treaty of non-belligerence between Germany and the USSR. The 1939 non-aggression pact has been painted as a 'secret alliance' between the Nazis and the Soviets, disregarding that France and Great Britain had done the same with the Germans the previous year with the Munich Agreement.
Only the Soviets are said to have 'conspired' with Hitler, just as when the West fought the Germans it was for 'liberal values' but when the USSR did so it was for competing 'dominion' over Europe. In order to mask their own fascist sympathies, the West has falsified the historical reasons for the accord. In reality, there were measures incorporating the Baltic states into the USSR as part of a mutual defense and assistance against German imperialism and their 'master plan' for the East.
The truth is that the ruling class in the West feared the spread of communism much more than fascism, and actually viewed the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe as an opportunity to crush the Soviet Union. Leading up to WWII, not only was it Western capital investment which financed the rapid buildup of Germany's armed forces, but the U.S., Britain and France did everything within their power to encourage Hitler's aggression toward the USSR. More than once they collectively refused to sign any mutual security alliance with Moscow while appeasing Hitler's expansionism in Czechoslovakia, with the British in particular guilty of sabotaging negotiations to isolate the Soviets and pit them into a war against Germany.
Stalin was well aware the Nazis planned to expand the Lebensraum further East, but the Soviets were in the midst of a rapid industrialization process that accomplished in a single decade what took the British more than a century. They needed time to guarantee they could defeat an offensive by the Wehrmacht, the most powerful and developed military force in the world at the time. It provided an additional year and ten months of further buildup of Soviet armaments -- if not for this move, it is possible the Germans would never have been stopped twenty kilometers short of Moscow and turned the outcome of the war in their favor. The real reason the pact infuriated the West was because it obligated them into having to fight the Germans, something the imperial powers had hoped to avoid altogether.
More disturbingly, the Baltic governments have drawn from the traditions of the far right by whitewashing the local nationalists that sided with Germany during their invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 which broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. The Nazi collaborators have been restored and normalized as 'freedom fighters' who fought solely for Baltic independence.
The Estonian parliament has even adopted resolutions honoring the Estonian Legion and 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) without any such equivalent measure for the more than 30,000 Estonians who courageously fought in the Red Army.
To most Russians, it is an absolute insult to the 27 million Soviets who died defeating the Nazis, including the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians who did so as well. Today, if they wish to become citizens they must swear an oath of allegiance to this rewriting of history which has been made a precondition for obtaining citizenship. The three states also do not recognize the May 9th Victory Day as a holiday, forcing the Russian minority to celebrate it informally.
20th Estonian SS Division
The rehabilitation of the local nationalists who fought alongside the Germans has been done under the false premise that the collaboration was a purely strategic alliance. The Soviets are portrayed as equal to or worse than Nazi Germany, a false equivalency between fascism and communism that is a ubiquitous trait among ultra-rightists today. Tens of thousands of Latvians and Estonians volunteered and were conscripted into legions of the SS which participated in the Holocaust, as did Lithuanians in the Nazi-created Territorial Defense Force and their Security Police.
They did not simply coordinate on the battlefield with the Germans, but directly participated in the methodical slaughter of Jews, Roma and others because they shared their racism. In Lithuania, for example, quislings welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators and for the next three years under Nazi occupation helped murder 200,000 Jews, nearly 95% of the country's Jewish population, a total which exceeded every other European country in terms of percentage of extermination. It is certain that the only thing that prevented Lithuania's Jews from extinction was the heroism and sacrifice of the Red Army.
Latvians greeting the Red Army after the liberation of Riga
During the Cold War, the US and NATO sought to whitewash certain Nazi war criminals when it suited its strategic interests against the Soviets. This went beyond the Germans themselves, whether it was recruiting their spies for espionage, atomic scientists in Operation Paperclip , or making Hans Speidel the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Central Europe.
The Nuremberg Trials had ruled the entire Waffen SS as an organization to be guilty of war crimes during the holocaust, but the US chose to make a distinction between the 15th and 19th SS divisions in Latvia (Latvian Legion) and 20th division in Estonia from the German divisions of the SS. In 1950, the US Displaced Persons Commission determined:
The Baltic Waffen SS Units are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the Government of the United States under Section 13 of the Displaced Persons Act, as amended."
While the displaced persons laws let Jewish refugees into the United States, it also provided cover for the reserved spaces for thousands of Nazi collaborators in an open-door policy providing them safe harbor. Following the end of WWII, many of the former members of the Baltic SS units became anti-Soviet partisans known as the Forest Brothers who carried on a guerilla campaign against the Soviets with the assistance of the CIA and MI6 until it was defeated in mid-50s. Unfortunately, Nikita Khruschev then made one of a series of colossal mistakes by permitting the exiled Baltic nationals to return as part of the de-Stalinisation thaw.
Latvian Legion
The idea that regiments of the Schutzstaffel were fighting purely for Estonian and Latvian independence is a horrifying fabrication in defiance of the overwhelming evidence documented by holocaust historians. The West has exploited this sanitizing of history that reappeared following the reinstatement of free enterprise in eastern Europe which has proliferated the far right in the EU as a whole. Why? It serves their cynical immediate interests in undermining Moscow. The same manipulations are occurring in the Cold War's sequel. Last year, NATO even produced a short film and a-historical reenactment entitled Forest Brothers: Fight for the Baltics , glorifying the anti-Soviet partisans as part of its propaganda effort against Russia.
Any crimes that were committed by the Soviet NKVD during the war are dwarfed by the tens of thousands of Jews and Roma which were exterminated on an industrial level by the Nazis and their co-conspirators using the race theory -- there is no comparison. Not to mention that the reintroduction of the free market to Eastern Europe killed more people than any period in Soviet history, reducing life expectancy by a decade and undoing seventy years worth of progress. We only ever hear of the faults of socialism and the inflated numbers of losses of life attributed to its failure, never the daily crimes of capitalism or the tens of millions lost in the wars it produces.
he Soviet brand of socialism was far from perfect, but nevertheless a model for what humanity can achieve in the face of tremendous adversity without being shackled by the contradictions of capitalism -- an industrial society with relative equality in education, wealth, employment and basic necessities. Now that Western capitalism is once again collapsing, it is making friends with nationalists to revise its ugly history and the Russian minority in the Baltics are suffering the consequence. It will continue to apportion blame on the up-and-coming power in Moscow, no longer the quasi-colony of the Yeltsin era, for its soon-to-be expiration. Let us hope it does not start another World War in the midst of it -- for all our sake.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in publications such as The Greanville Post, Global Research, CounterPunch and more. Read him on Medium . Max may be reached at [email protected]
20 Comments
Thomas Prentice says September 7, 2018
I did not know about the vote in 1991. Thank you for exposing yet another example of US meddling in elections, i.e. not recognizing the results and essentially forcing a coup via Yeltsin. The war crimes of the US and Israel are beyond comprehension. Loading...Francis Lee says September 7, 2018Yes, the Baltics, like the western Ukraine, rolled out the red carpet to the German invaders in 1941. The Nazi genocide was outsourced from Waffen SS and Einsatzgruppen to Baltic Nazis since the numbers involved were too big to handle for the Germans alone.mark says September 7, 2018The Arajs Kommando death squad (also: Sonderkommando Arajs), was led by local SS and collaborators Viktors Arājs, Franz Stahlecker and Robert Stieglitz and a unit of Latvian Auxiliary Police (Lettische Hilfspolizei) which was subordinated to the German Sicherheitsdienst (a special security branch of the German SS). It was a notorious killing unit during the Holocaust. Stahlecker instructed Arajs to set up a commando unit that obtained an official name Latvian Auxiliary Security Police or Arājs Kommando.
The following day on July 2 1941 Arajs learned from Stahlecker during a conference that the Arajs commando had to unleash a pogrom that looked spontaneous and these pogrom-like disorders were to break out before German occupation authorities had been properly established. The Einsatzkommando a sub-group of the SS death squads, belonging to the larger Einsatzgruppen) influenced mobs of former members of Pērkonkrusts (Latvian ultra-nationalists and other extreme right-wing groups) began mass arrests, pillaging and murders of Jews in Riga, which led to death of between 300 to 400 Jews.
Killings continued under the supervision of SS Brigadeführer Walter Stahlecker and ended when more 2,700 Jews had been murdered. The activities of the Einsatzkommando were constrained after the full establishment of the German occupation authority, after which the SS made use of select units of native recruits. German General Wilhelm Ullersperger and Voldemar Weiss, a well known, Latvian nationalist, appealed to the population via a radio address to attack "internal enemies".
During the next few months, activities of the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police was primarily focused on killing Jews, Communists and Red Army stragglers in Latvia as well as in neighbouring Belorussia. The group alone murdered almost half of Latvia's Jewish population, about 26,000 Jews, mainly in November and December 1941. The creation of the Arajs Kommando was "one of the most significant inventions of the early Holocaust", that marked a transition from German organised pogroms to systematic killing of Jews by local volunteers (former army officers, policemen, students, Aizargi).
This helped resolve a chronic problem with German personnel shortages, and provided the Germans with relief from the psychological stress of routinely murdering civilians. By the autumn of 1941, the SS deployed Latvian 'Police Battalions' to Leningrad, where they were consolidated as Latvian Second SS Volunteer Brigade.
In 1943, this brigade, which would later become the Latvian Nineteenth SS Volunteer Division, was consolidated with the Latvian Fifteen SS Volunteer Division to become the Latvian Legion. Although formally the Latvian Legion (Schutzmannschaft or Schuma) was a volunteer Waffen-SS military formation; it was voluntary only by name, because approximately 80-85% of personnel were conscripted into the legion.
Yes lovely people these Batlics. They are now among the poorest countries in Europe and are suffering massive demographic problems as anyone who can, leaves. As my old mother used to say. "God pays debts without money..
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"People of Russian heritage are denied passports, the right to vote, and any official employment, amongst other forms of discrimination and persecution.kevin morris says September 7, 2018
These are sh***y little Nazi countries, with their big annual SS parades. They desecrate war memorials and the graves of Russian soldiers who died liberating the Baltic countries in the war. Many Baltic politicians are US dual citizens, neocons parachuted in after 1991 by the State Department. They are ideologically driven and lose no opportunity to vent their spleen against Russia. They are constantly foolishly provocative towards a neighbour that could be a valuable economic partner. We see the same pattern in Ukraine. The US pulled off a stunt where 10,000 US troops in 1,000 tanks and vehicles drove up and down the Latvian border just a few yards from Russian territory, through communities of predominantly Russian heritage.
Part of this hostility to Russia is probably contrived by the political class to cover up their abject failures since independence. Their economies were looted and hollowed out by western finance capital over the past few decades. They were previously highly developed parts of the Soviet Union with industries like machinery, vehicles and shipbuilding. That is now ancient history. The economy has collapsed, and 25% of the population of Latvia has emigrated, scratching a living doing menial jobs or working as prostitutes in the EU, the only future those countries have. Riga was a natural transit hub for Russia, but faced with official visceral hatred from that quarter, the Russians expanded and developed their own port facilities in the Baltic. Riga has been left as a ghost town. That is why Nordstream has been developed, to replace unreliable partners in neighbouring countries who are always ready to cut off their noses to spite their face and please their US neocon masters. Their loss – they could have made billions from energy transit fees. It's the same story with sanctions, for which the Baltic states were enthusiastic cheerleaders. Russia's counter sanctions against agricultural imports have hit them hard. In the course of events, these countries and Russia would be economic partners for their mutual benefit.
As NATO members, these countries believe they can be as foolishly provocative and offensive to Russia as they wish, like the obnoxious kid in the school playground who spits in somebody's face and runs and hides behind his big brother. Small countries like this can cause a disaster, like Serbia and WW1. They are now failed states, like Ukraine. They are just pawns in a neocon game against Russia. They have no future. Loading...'The Baltic republics made nationalism their official state policy while moving away from Russia's sphere of influence into a closer relationship with the West.'manfromatlan says September 7, 2018I strongly supported the Soviet Union and likewise I support the CIS, but this article, frankly, is so partial that it misrepresents the reasons why the Baltic States behaved as they did following the Nazi invasion of 1941 and following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
There is no mention of Staln's takeover of the Baltic States in 1940. It is clear that Stalin needed those states as a buffer against Germany, but that said, it is fully understandable that many Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians would see the Nazis as liberators and would resent their countries' reabsorption into the Soviet Union in 1944, followed by settlement by Russian nationals including members of the Soviet state apparatus including the KGB. Of course, we may all deplore collaboration with Nazi race policies, especially in Lithuania, but to ignore factors such as Russia's takeover of the Baltic states ignores a major factor at the heart of those countries' treatment of Russians to this day.
The author explains Stalin's wish to forestall the inevitable war with Nazism because the Soviet Union was involved in industrialisation. This is true, but the article ignores the purges that had led to the Red Army being so ineffectual in its war with Finland that Hitler believed that Barbarossa would be a pushover. When one considers that when the Baltic States became part of the Soviet Union, this will have included the apparatus of state terror that Stalin had been visiting upon the rest of the Soviet Union for several years. Contrary to the above whitewashed view of history, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had strong grounds for resenting the presence of Russians in their erstwhile independent nations.
I deplore the Baltic States' treatment of ethnic Russians since they gained their independence in September 1991, but ignoring the follies of their Soviet past will do nothing to alleviate their plight.
Loading...I appreciate the historical background, but the treatment of Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians by Stalin might explain their actions in WWII; doesn't excuse them, sorry. Loading...bevin says September 7, 2018"erstwhile independent nations."Big B says September 7, 2018
To be clear these former provinces-highly favoured provinces- in the Russian Empire had been 'independent' since 1921.And thanks in part too to the Bolshevik doctrine that the Czarist Empire was a 'prison house of peoples.'
No doubt many in the Baltic states resented the invasion of the Red Army but it was only a small minority which celebrated by killing Jews and enrolling in the siege of Leningrad.
In more modern terms there is no reason why these three states, and Ukraine, could not thrive independently without setting themselves up as bases for provocations against Russia and convenient locations for US torture chambers.
The people of Ireland suffered far more under the British Empire than the Balts did under St Petersburg but that did not lead to more than a handful of Irishmen, if that many, in the Second World War joining the SS. Loading...This article takes no account of the threat posed to our allies in NATO, Eastern Europe, and to the security of the world due to the rising tensions of recent years. Now, more than ever, in the wake of Salisbury attack, we need to stress to our European counterparts in the governments of the Baltic States, that we wish to work with them to maximise the power of collective sanctions against violations of international law – whether by Russia or anyone else. I think we should make clear that our UK commitment to such collective action will not be diminished by Brexit. Similarly, now more than ever, it is vital that the UK and all other NATO members make it clear to all our allies in the Baltic States, and elsewhere, that we want to protect peace and security on the borders, without ramping up tensions unnecessarily, and that such a commitment is not conditional on their levels of defence spending.FS says September 7, 2018Tory defence spending cuts have put Britain's security at risk.. I think the next Labour government should commit to boost our military obligations, above the benchmark of 2% GDP, in line with the last Labour government's commitment to NATO.
Loading...Who are you and what have you done with Big B? Loading...vexarb says September 7, 2018This is the second parody posted by BigB. A parody so skilful, such inane stringing together of non-sequiturs to an insane c,nclusion, it might have come from the very lips of blessed Theresa of Westminster. Loading...Big B says September 7, 2018Very close, Vex: St Jeremy of Islington North. Most of it is verbatim, with some reworded conjunctions. The source text is from Hansard 26/03/18. The last para is a reword taken from quote in John Pilger's excellent article about Labour's non-existent foreign policy which would likely be imperialistic. Or the vague platitude of a return to 'Robin Cook ethical diplomacy' of starting three wars in two years and selling Hawk aircraft to Mugabe.mog says September 7, 2018https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/06/the-rise-of-britains-new-politics/
It struck me recently when I point out the actual words that JC says, I take the flak. To prove a point (if only to myself) I posted his own (disguised) words to see how people would react. The source text for yesterday was his reply to Treason May, when she announced the two counterfeit suspects for the fabricated Novijoke crime against the intelligence.
It is my supposition that very few know the full context of what is said, relying on media soundbites instead. The media pick a single phrase – such as only saying "evidence points strongly" – and contrast with Bojo's "weaselly words" to construct an entirely inauthentic narrative. It is a pseudo-oppressor/oppressed narrative that creates a false sense of pity and invokes an invented victim mentality (we all know how Brit's love an underdog!).
Anyway, I surmised his words were weaselly, though not in the context of the received culture machine narrative but in themselves, taken in their given context (in Parliament and later in Hansard). They amount to a servile connivance with power (a power that provides the testimony and meaning to the hollow phonemes).
I could have just said that, but I decided to post the slightly disguised text to make a point. Point made.
Loading...we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. Loading...manfromatlan says September 7, 2018I thought I recognized those words from JC. In fact, I tweeted it! Big disappointment then https://twitter.com/manfromatlan/status/1033028635651788800 Loading...JudyJ says September 7, 2018Karen Pierce's utterances could come across as masterful parody but unfortunately she's deadly (literally and metaphorically) serious. Loading...Frankly Speaking says September 7, 2018Do they pay you per comment or per word? Loading...Big B says September 7, 2018Both! And I get a double for replying to replies! Loading...curri says September 7, 2018Soviet "Communism" was de facto never more than a branch of Anglo-American bourgeois progressivism. A geopolitical rivalry developed between the two factions after the defeat of Germany. Note that Western capitalists built the Soviet industrial base in the 1920s and 1930s, so it was obvious they were not seen as a threat then:vexarb says September 7, 2018
http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Others/Others-Doc-ConspiracyTheory&NWO/+Doc-ConspiracyTheory-FalseEnemies/TheWestFinancedSoviets.htm
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American technical leadership began to replace German leadership in rebuilding the Soviet Union."Of the agreements in force in mid-1929, 27 were with German companies, 15 were with United States firms and the remaining ones were primarily with British and French firms. In the last six months of 1929, the number of technical agreements with U.S. firms jumped to more than 40." (Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917-1930, pp. 346-347).
The new program was announced, however, only "after a sequence of construction and technical-assistance contracts with Western companies had been let. The Freyn-Gipromez technical agreement for design and construction of giant metallurgical plants is economically and technically the most important." (Ibid., p. 347).EXTENT OF AID "ALMOST UNBELIEVABLE"
During the early thirties, the amount and type of "aid and comfort" to the Soviet Union was almost unbelievable. In 1930 the Ford Motor Company established the Russian motor car industry by constructing a factory "capable of turning out 140,000 cars a year." By the end of the decade the factory, at Gorki, was one of the largest in the world. Ford also provided training for the Russians in assembling automobiles "plus patent licenses, technical assistance, and advice," and "an inventory of spare parts." (Keller, East Minus West Equals Zero, pp. 208-209, 215-216). Americans also built, in the Soviet Union, the largest iron and steel works in the world; patterned after the city of Gary, Indiana. The huge steel complex, built at Maginitogorsk, was constructed by a Cleveland firm. (Ibid., pp. 209-210).LARGEST TRACTOR FACTORY IN THE WORLD
The largest tractor factory in the world was another American contribution to Soviet technology."Tractors were a necessity to modernize Soviet agriculture. A Detroit engineer designed and constructed a tractor factory without parallel in any other country. The assembly works were 2,000 feet long and 650 feet wide, covering an area of thirty acres. Twenty-one American football fields would fit into just one building, with locker rooms for the players. The tractors produced were copies of the American Caterpillar Company, but there were no arrangements made for payment for use of the patent. Russia merely bought one sample and copied it. The factory was so designed that production could be adopted almost overnight to the production of another less innocuous commodity – tanks." (Ibid., p. 213).
( )Russia today is clearly not seen as a partner of Western neoliberalism/progressivism. Therefore, Putin (along with Trump) has become the new Hitler.
Loading...Curri, thank you for presenting that healthy corrective to my previous one-sided view; up till now I had read only of US aid to Nazi Germany. Loading...bevin says September 7, 2018To put these observations into context it must be understood that the Soviet government-obsessed with a crude mechanistic theory of economic development and desperately trying to reproduce all of the 'stages' of economic progress into a succession of Five Year Plans- bled the peasantry and working class dry in order to pay for what Curri calls a partnership. The industrialists, largely Anglo Saxon, who jump started Russian industry after the catastrophes of war and civil war extorted a heavy price, in hard currency, for their 'aid.'candideschmyles says September 7, 2018
The notion that the Soviet Union, even under Stalin, was accepted as a partner by the west is historically illiterate. The record is clear. And clarified further by the continuity in Foreign Policy which was (and is) the Cold War. Loading...200,000 Jews in Lithuania alone! And they give all this fuss over Corbyns reluctance to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.bevin says September 7, 2018
I knew there was prejudice in these northern Baltic states but this piece has shocked me. I now understand the self deprecating remarks made to me recently by a supermarket cashier over her being a Russian speaking Lithuanian. Next time I see her I will make a point of offering her my solidarity.
I meet many of these northerners in my work. Now I have some of this background I can ask pertinent questions. Loading...It would be a mistake to discover the cause for this discrimination in popular prejudice. The actual reason lies in the determination of the ruling class to maintain fascist-collaborationist successor politicians in power.
These politicians, many of whom had origins in expatriate communities in the west, after fleeing their homelands in the baggage of the Wehrmacht and SS, have been finding it very difficult to survive after leading their countries into economic disaster mitigated only by the welcome boost that NATO bases bring to countries in which unemployment rates are at levels not seen since the 1930s.
Like their predecessors they have turned to racism and fascism to prop themselves up.
What is true of the Baltic states is even truer of Ukraine, where Russian speakers constitute a persecuted majority, and where the Speaker of the Rada is on record, this past week, as being inspired by the Fuhrer who he sees as the greatest democrat of the C20th.
As racism and fascism spread westwards into Austria, Germany and elsewhere the complacence of western 'liberals' in cosseting and subsidising the sources of infection is largely to blame. It is of course history repeating itself: the fascism of eastern europe in the 1930s was also sponsored and armed by the 'democracies' of the west. And for the same reason: to keep Russia at bay.
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Sep 07, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
During an interview with Fox and Friends, conducted onstage prior to Trump's rally and set to air on Friday, the president called the paper's decision to publish the column "very unfair".
"When somebody writes and you can't discredit because you have no idea who they are," Trump said. "It may not be a Republican, it may not be a conservative, it may be a deep state person that's been there a long time.
It's a very unfair thing, but it's very unfair to our country and to the millions of people that voted really for us."
Since the editorial was published, the highest-ranking officials in Trump's administration have come forth to publicly deny any involvement. Those distancing themselves from the column have included the vice-president, Mike Pence, and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, along with much of Trump's cabinet. The first lady, Melania Trump, also condemned the author and called on the individual to come forward.
"You are not protecting this country, you are sabotaging it with your cowardly actions," she wrote.
The editorial was published as the White House was contending with yet another firestorm.
A book authored by the famed journalist Bob Woodward , poised for release next week, chronicles the chaos and dysfunction within the Trump administration.
Excerpts released on Tuesday provided an unflattering portrait of the president, who was described by aides in disparaging terms that included being likened to a schoolchild.
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Sep 07, 2018 | off-guardian.org
Originally from: Skripal Case Luke Harding's latest work of fiction OffGuardian
uke Harding likes writing books about things that he wasn't really involved in and doesn't really understand. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, that covers pretty much everything. His book about Snowden, for example, was beautifully taken down by Julian Assange – a person who was actually there.He's priming the traumatised public for another of his works, this time about Sergei Skripal. This one will probably be out by Christmas, unless he can find someone else's work to plagiarise , in which case he might get it done sooner.
It will have a snide and not especially clever title, perhaps a sort of pun – something like "A Poison by Any Other Name: How Russian assassins contaminated the heart of rural England" . It will relate, in jarring sub-sub-le Carre prose, a story of Russian malfeasance and evil beyond imagining, whilst depicting the whole cast as bumbling caricatures, always held up for ridicule by the author and his smug readership.
There's an extract in The Guardian today. It's not listed as one, but trust me, it will be in the book. It's title, as predicted above, is sort of a pun (and will probably be a chapter heading):
Planes, trains and fake names: the trail left by Skripal suspects
You see? Like that film? I don't really get it either but until someone else comes up with something clever he can copy, Luke is left to his own rather meagre devices.
It starts off surprisingly strong, waiting three whole sentences before lurching violently into totally unsupported conjecture:
The two men were dressed inconspicuously in jeans, fleece jackets and trainers as they boarded the flight from Moscow to Gatwick. Their names, according to their Russian passports, were Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Both were around 40 years old. Neither looked suspicious.
This is, as far as we know so far, true.
The plane trundled down the icy runway. In Moscow the temperatures had fallen below -10C, not unusual for early March. In Britain it had been snowing.
and so is this. In fact, in googling "Moscow weather March 2018" Harding has displayed an uncharacteristically thorough approach to research that was rarely (if ever) evidenced in his previous works.
They had also packed a bottle of what appeared to be the Nina Ricci perfume Premier Jour. The box it came in was prettily decorated with flowers, it listed ingredients including alcohol and it bore the words "Made in France".
This is where truth ends and guesses take over: there is no evidence, at all, that these two men had anything to do with the "perfume bottle" allegedly found by Charlie Rowley on June 27th and allegedly containing a powerful nerve agent. There is (as far as we know) no fingerprint or DNA evidence on the bottle, nobody saw them with the bottle, and there's no released CCTV footage of them holding or carrying the bottle. Saying "it's in their backpack" is meaningless without any evidence to back it up.
According to the Metropolitan police, the bottle in fact contained novichok, a lethal nerve agent developed in the late Soviet Union. The bottle had been specially made to be leakproof and had a customised applicator.
Note he doesn't feel the need to examine, question or even verify the words of the Metropolitan Police. This is a recurring theme in Harding's works – there are people who tell the truth (US) and people who lie (RUSSIANS). Evidence is a complication you can live without.
Moscow's notorious poisons factory run by the KGB made similar devices throughout the cold war.
Did they? Because he doesn't show any evidence this is true. One thing you can be sure of, if there had ever been even a whisper about a "modified perfume bottle" in any Soviet archive or from any "whistleblower currently living in the United States", it would be on the front page in big black letters.
Petrov and Boshirov were aliases, detectives believe. Both men are suspected to be career officers with the GRU, Russia's powerful and highly secretive military intelligence service.
Note use of the word "believe", it makes regular appearances alongside it's buddies: "suspect" and "probably".
And yes, they "believe" they are aliases because IF they were assassins then obviously they used aliases. There's no evidence taken from their (currently totally theoretical) visa applications that point to forgery, nobody at the time questioned their passports. As of today, we have been given no reason to think they were aliases, except reasoning backwards from assumed guilt which isn't how deduction works.
In fact, there's more than enough reason to assume they aren't aliases – Firstly, they passed the visa check, secondly their passports were never questioned, thirdly they've used them before (see below), and finally just WHY would a Russian spy-come-assassin use a fake Russian name and a fake Russian passport? That's ridiculous.
The officers' assignment was covert. They were coming to Britain not as tourists but as assassins.
[citation needed]
Their target was Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who spied for British intelligence, got caught and was freed in a spy exchange in 2010. They were heading for his home in provincial Salisbury.
Luke doesn't feel the need to dig down into the nitty gritty here – motive is a trifle, to be added in the footnotes or made up on the spur of the moment when asked at a book signing. I'm a bit more fussy than that – I feel the need to ask "Why did they release him in 2010 and then try to kill him in 2018?" If they had wanted to kill him, why not just do it when he was in prison in Russia between 2006 and 2010? If they wanted to kill him why do it just weeks before the World Cup? What could they possibly have to gain?
Luke doesn't know, and neither do I.
Their Aeroflot flight SU2588 touched down at 3pm on Friday 2 March. They were recorded on CCTV going through passport control, Boshirov with dark hair and a goatee beard, Petrov unshaven and wearing a blue gingham shirt. Both were carrying satchels slung casually over the shoulder.
This is all true, and completely unnecessary. It's what we in the industry call "filler" or "padding". Totally meaningless and useless words that do nothing but take up space. Without it, a lot of Luke's books would only be about 700 words long.
According to police, the pair had visited the UK before.
Way to bury the lead there, Luke.
This is actually quite important isn't it? I mean, when did they visit the UK before? Did they visit Salisbury then too? Did they have any contact with Sergei Skripal? Were they travelling under the same names? Were these visits linked with other intelligence work? Were they just holidays? What kind of assassins would use the SAME FAKE IDS ON TWO DIFFERENT OCCASIONS?
These are all very important questions, but Luke doesn't ask them. Because Luke is a modern journalist, and they don't interrogate the claims of the state, just report them. To Guardian reporters a question mark is just that funny squiggle next to the shift key.
From Gatwick they caught the train to London Victoria station and then the tube to east London, where they checked in to the City Stay hotel in Bow. It was a low-profile choice of accommodation. The red-brick Victorian building is next to a branch of Barclays bank, a busy train line and a wall daubed with graffiti. Across the road is a car pound and a Texaco garage.
This just more filler. Totally meaningless packaging material. The prose equivalent of All-Bran.
On hostile territory, Boshirov and Petrov operated in the manner of classic intelligence operatives.
In this instance "the manner of classic intelligence operatives" means, flying direct to London from Moscow, using Russian names and Russian passports (which you've used before), checking into a hotel with a CCTV camera on the front door, going straight to the hometown of an ex-double agent, leaving a Russian poison his front door even though he's already gone out, dumping your unused poison in a charity bin on the high street, going back to your hotel, smearing poison around that too even though you already dumped it, and then flying directly back to Moscow without even waiting to see if the plan worked and the target is dead.
This, in Luke's head, is ace intelligence work.
On the day of the hit, according to detectives, the pair made a similar journey, taking the 8.05am train from Waterloo to Salisbury and arriving at 11.48am.
Yes, they arrived at 11.48, making it absolutely pointless to put poison on the Skripal's door, as they had already gone out.
The perfume bottle was probably concealed in a light grey backpack carried by Petrov.
It was "probably concealed" in that backpack because, as I said above, there's no evidence either of those men ever knew the perfume bottle existed. You never see it in their possession.
Oh, and the backpack would have to contain TWO bottles of perfume – because the police aren't sure the bottle Rowley found 3 months later was the same bottle, and Rowley reported it was unopened and wrapped in cellophane. Perhaps Luke should have read the details of the case instead of trolling IMDB looking for movie titles with "plane" in them or googling "insouciant" to see if he was using it right.
From Salisbury station the two men set off on foot. It was a short walk of about a mile to Skripal's semi-detached home in Christie Miller Road.
which doesn't matter, because the Skripals weren't there. They left at 9.15 and there is no evidence they ever returned.
At Skripal's house the Russians smeared or sprayed novichok on to the front door handle, police say.
which doesn't matter, because the Skripals weren't there. They left at 9.15 and there is no evidence they ever returned.
It doesn't matter if Borishov and Petrov re-tiled the bathroom with novichok grouting or hid novichok in the battery compartment of Sergei's TV remote or replaced all his lightbulbs with novichok bombs that explode when you use the clapper .according to everything we've been told so far Sergei and Julia were literally never in that house again.
Luke seems to write a lot about this case, considering he is barely acquainted with the most basic facts of it.
The moment went unobserved
True. There is not a single piece of footage, photograph or eyewitness placing these men within a hundred feet of the Skripals, or their house. The "moment went unobserved" is an incredibly dishonest way of phrasing this, "the moment is entirely theoretical" is rather fairer. Or, if you want to be honest "it's possible none of this happened".
At some point on their walk back they must have tossed away the bottle, which at this point was too dangerous to try to smuggle back through customs.
It's all falling into place perfectly isn't it?
At some point the two men, who we never see holding or carrying the bottle, must have thrown it away because three months later someone else found it.
They took it through customs once but couldn't a second time, because reasons.
Also one of them was smiling a sort of "I just poisoned somebody" smile:
At 1.05pm the men were recorded in Fisherton Street on their way back to the station. They appeared more relaxed, Petrov grinning even.
Those evil bastards.
By the time Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found collapsed on a park bench in the centre of Salisbury later that afternoon, the poisoners were gone.
No Luke: By the time Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found collapsed on a park bench in the centre of Salisbury later that afternoon, the ALLEGED poisoners were gone.
Alleged is an important word for example, there is a marked difference between being an ALLEGED plagiarist, and being a plagiarist .
The visitors were captured on CCTV one more time, at Heathrow airport. It was 7.28pm and both men were going through security, Petrov first, wheeling a small black case. In his right hand was a shiny red object, his Russian passport. Police believe the passport was genuine, his name not. In other words, that it was a sophisticated espionage operation carried out by a state or state entities.
You see? Nobody thought the passport was fake, which means it was a really good fake . So the Russian state must have been in on it. This is known as an unfalsifiable hypothesis. If the passport did look fake, that would be evidence that the men were spies and therefore the Russian state was in on it.
Harding has created a narrative where there is literally no development that could ever challenge his conclusions.
Seemingly, the GRU plan – executed two weeks before Russia's presidential election – had worked perfectly.
This is an example of the cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy – two things happen at the same time, therefore they happen for the same reason. It's a maneuver we at OffG refer to as "the Harding", where you state two separate assertions or facts one after the other in such a way as to imply a relationship, without ever making a solid statement. I'll give you an example:
Luke Harding was born in 1968, mere weeks before the brutal assassination of Robert Kennedy.
Harding is suggesting some sort of connection between the election and the poisoning. He can't STATE it, because then he has to explain his reasoning – and there isn't any. Putin, and Russia as a whole, had nothing to gain from poisoning an ex-spy they had released nearly a decade earlier, especially on the eve of a Presidential election and mere weeks before the World Cup. There's no argument to be made, so he doesn't attempt to make one, he just makes a snide and baseless insinuation.
In his defense, Luke might genuinely believe it, cum hoc ergo propter hoc is a favorite amongst paranoid personalities , of which Luke is definitely a prime example .
Vladimir Putin, the man whom a public inquiry found in 2016 had "probably" signed off on the operation to kill Litvinenko. The UK security services say a "body of evidence" points to the GRU.
"Probably" is also a big word. For example, there's a marked difference between "probably being a plagiarist" and "being a plagiarist" .
It seems clear that Moscow continues to view Britain as a playground for undercover operations and is relatively insouciant about the consequences, diplomatic and political. The Skripal attack may have misfired. But the message, mingling contempt and arrogance, is there for all to see: we can smite our enemies whenever and wherever we want, and there is nothing you can do about it.
This is the second time Luke has used the word "insouciant" in two days, which means that word of the day calendar was a probably sound investment, but he forgot to flip it over this morning.
Other than that, this final paragraph is nothing but paranoia.
The Russians were TRYING to make it obvious, to send a message. But were also lazy and arrogant. And yet also left no solid evidence because they are experts at espionage. They had no motive except being mean, and couldn't even be bothered to make sure they did it right. They want us all to know they did it, but will never admit it.
The actual truth of the situation can be summed up in a few bullet points. Currently:
There is no evidence these men were using forged documents. There is no evidence these men were travelling under aliases or assumed names. There is no evidence these men ever had any contact with Sergei Skripal's house. There is no evidence these men ever had any contact with Sergei Skripal or his daughter. There is no evidence these men were Russian intelligence assets or had any military training. There is no evidence these men ever possessed or had any contact with the perfume bottle found by Charlie Rowley on June 27th. They have visited the UK before, not on intelligence business (as far as we know). Their movements don't align with the timeline of Skripal's illness.The entire narrative is created around half a dozen screen caps of two (allegedly) Russian men, not behaving in any way illegally or even suspiciously. All the rest is fiction, created by a hack to service an agenda. This isn't one of those "You couldn't make it up" stories, it's not that incredible. It's just insulting and stupid.
You could make it up, and he did.
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Sep 07, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The madness is pouring out of the White House now, for all to see Richard Wolffe
... ... ...
If you really believe your boss is a threat to the constitution which you've taken an oath to protect, perhaps you should consider quitting or going public. As in: going on Capitol Hill to hold a press conference to urge impeachment.In this regard, and only in this regard, our anonymous whistleblower has handed the crazy boss a degree of righteous indignation.
"If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist," tweeted the madman in the attic, "the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!"
Donald, we feel your pain, albeit briefly. Your internal enemies are indeed gutless, and if you feel better putting that in ALL CAPS, that's fine. Let it out.
But that bit about turning people over to you for national security reasons is kind of the point here. If you'll allow us to summarize the GUTLESS person's arguments: you are fundamentally a threat to democracy and national security yourself. You are indeed, as your lawyers have pointed out repeatedly, your own worst witness.
This much we know from this week's other bombshell in the shape of Bob Woodward's latest book. Woodward has cornered the panicked Trump rats into screeching about all the ways they prevented World War Three , or a massive trade war, by ignoring the ranting boss or snatching papers off his desk.
... ... ...
Mr or Ms GUTLESS describes Trump's decisions as "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless", while chief of staff John Kelly says Trump is "an idiot" living in a place called "Crazytown". This revelation led to the priceless statement from Kelly where he had to deny calling the president an idiot.
Somewhere in Texas, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson is swirling a glass of bourbon muttering that he lost his job for calling Trump a moron.
Second, Trump's staffers are enabling the very horrors they claim to hate, while grandiosely pretending to be doing the opposite.
Mr or Ms GUTLESS says there were "early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th amendment" in what he imagines is a clear sign they can distinguish reality from reality TV.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Trump cabinet: please know that you will not be accepted into the next edition of Profiles in Courage for your early whispers. If you truly believe the president is incapacitated, you should perhaps consider raising your voice to at least conversational level, if you're not inclined to bellow from the mountaintops. Library rules are inoperative at this point.
Given the weight of evidence, even the most diehard Trump defenders are now conceding the obvious, by signing up to the GUTLESS gang's self-promotion. Brit Hume, a Fox News veteran, let the cat out of the bag when he tweeted that it was a "good thing" they were restraining Trump "from his most reckless impulses".
This is how the pirate ship Trump eventually sinks to the ocean's floor. You can fool some of Fox News's viewers all of the time, and you can fool all of them some of the time.
But no fool wants to drown with the captain we all know is plain crazy.
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
MoonlightTiger -> MoonlightTiger , 6 Sep 2018 10:02
It's someone high up that makes policy decisions, brags about everything they have done to help America despite Cheetos interfering. Why now? Pence wants it known that he is running the government not useless trump whom has passed nothing. Pence will come out as the author when Don is removed from office. Which could be nearing since this OPED is likely to expose him. Maybe he planned it that way.Carl123 -> MuttPretty , 6 Sep 2018 10:00Brutus is close now.
MuttPretty , 6 Sep 2018 09:58What's most remarkable to me is how closely the Michael Wolff's White House, Omarosa's White House, Bob Woodward's Whitehouse, and Anonymous Staffer's White House reflect each other.
Clearly a massive conspiracy. And one which Trump is helpfully participating in by constantly saying and doing stuff which accords with the pictures they're all painting.
What's most remarkable to me is how closely the Michael Wolff's White House, Omarosa's White House, Bob Woodward's Whitehouse, and Anonymous Staffer's White House reflect each other. All these sources come together to display a rather coherent image of a chaotic White House led by a man who's not bright enough to realize he's in over his head.Alun Jones , 6 Sep 2018 09:53The New York Times attack piece was anonymous. It is therefore completely unverifiable and could have been written by anyone, including any of the politically biased NYT editorial team, or by Bob Woodward to publicize his new book. It's junk news.OrangeLagoon -> JozzaBoy , 6 Sep 2018 09:49I'm firmly convinced that when it's all said and done we'll be able to represent his presidency as an MMO boss fight. This is the bit where everyone concentrates fire on the glowy spot until the enrage mechanic kicks in. In fact it looks like the mad flailing has started and now everyone will try not to stand in the AoE as they DPS him down.moranet , 6 Sep 2018 09:43Mussolini was in power for twenty years before his functionaries deposed him to keep the regime intact while removing its newly-a-liability head. Mussolini was the legal (if abhorrent) premier of a coalition government in a liberal-democratic (both words with a pinch of salt) regime for his first two years, until winning a parliamentary majority of his own; indeed, after the leader of the Socialist Party was killed by his supporters, his coalition partners almost pulled out of government: that's not a totalitarian dictatorship, but what was then called "pre-fascism", and today we'd call it an 'illiberal democracy'. The dictatorship was informal (result of a supportive majority) until the constitional reform of 1928 - five years into his government.Carl123 -> Finisterre , 6 Sep 2018 09:40Thinking that all will turn out fine because American democracy is under strain but generally intact, is a dangerous complacency. All interwar autocrats went through a transition of first governing under the old constitution, slowly undermining opposition, then installing a new organic law. Perhaps all will turn out well in the US, and Trump will leave office with the old 'rules of the game' untouched - but that can't be assumed, and we won't know until after he is gone.
JozzaBoy , 6 Sep 2018 09:40Pepperoni Pizza is absolutely correct. We DON'T know his staff are going behind his back - we have this anonymous bollocks as the totality of our evidence.
Truckloads of "anonymous bollocks" reported by credible, highly respected journalists with excellent reasons to protect their sources.
"Anonymous" bollocks" which syncs perfectly with events and pronouncements by the president himself - including numerous firings of so many of the "best people" he hired.
"Anonymous bollocks" confirmed in evidence/testimony presented publicly and under oath in court.
Otherwise, great point.
this is desperate stuff. Is this the thing that is finally going to bring down Trump?babyboomer63 , 6 Sep 2018 09:38The media cycle wrt Trump;
1. Trump is Crazy
2. Trump is Hitler
3. Trump is Losing
4. Go To Line 1.Nothing proved, unnamed sources, claims about this, claims about that. Until someone is prepared to step forward and reveal themselves this is a non story. Still, it gives the Trump haters comfort.imperious -> BLACKCAT66 , 6 Sep 2018 09:36There is a segment of this country that is willfully ignorant because a con man told them to be. We really need to ignore this shrinking number of fuck-nuts and just out vote them.Cascais99 , 6 Sep 2018 09:36
We live in a democracy. If you choose to use facebook as your only source of news about the world, it is not because a con man told you to, it is because you are just too plain stupid to go looking elsewhere.I'm surprised that no one has compared the author of the anonymous article in the New York Times with "Deep Throat", who anonymously met Bernstein and Woodward in an underground parking garage in Washington to spill the beans about Watergate. Deep Throat turned out to be Mark Felt, a high-ranking official in the FBI who kept working against Nixon under cover and whose name was revealed only a few years ago.FeliciorAugusto , 6 Sep 2018 09:31Personally, I am not surprised or impressed by this White House insider's account. Nothing he or she has said should be a real revelation to anyone who has cast a critical eye on the Trump presidency. And whoever it is, this person is so enamored with tax cuts, deregulation, ramping up military spending and the usual Republican horse shit that he or she does not seem prepared to risk further discrediting the administration by identifying him/herself and resigning publicly.James Steel , 6 Sep 2018 09:31Screw whoever it is, they are obviously no hero to the American people.
Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo have denied writing the op-ed -- but that's exacta guilty person would say :)
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Sep 07, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Red1729 -> mattblack81 , 6 Sep 2018 09:16
Nice post and well put.MonsieurPumpernickel -> teppictoo , 6 Sep 2018 09:16
I am currently sitting in an office where 30% are blaggers of the highest order. They talk and kiss ass - but ultimately - deep down - know they cannot do they do not know the job. The responsibiltiy they have will make you shudder. I have told friends and they are visibly shaken that this can happen. But I think it is the way of the world at the moment. They dare not argue with me for full knowledge they will be sent packing, they already have been but on "minor" non work related items."Fake it til you make it" is the slogan they clutch tight to their heart the consequences however are far far reaching. My only hope is that should any of them leave here - they will get found out in a week.
Yes the likes of Trump are a reflection of just that.
The mad thing is - I now am of the belief that I could do that job ie President of the US. That is madness.
HiramsMaxim -> SolentBound , 6 Sep 2018 09:16to foil the wishes of the elected members of government.
No. Just one member. And that one member isn't a supreme leader. You need to look elsewhere for those types of leaders - they're usually standing next to Trump while he fawns over them.
Personally I'm grateful for a bureaucracy that frustrates bad ideas - wherever they come
from. That's part of their role."If the author of the Op-Ed piece is telling the truth,"HiramsMaxim -> aussieinjapan , 6 Sep 2018 09:15Ay, there's the rub. But, still no existential threat.
Yes, I do read The Guardian, and I never watch Fox (cut the cable years ago)Gojettgo , 6 Sep 2018 09:15Everything, with the exception of Steve Bannon in Michael Wolf's book, has been anonymous. These people write things, attribute them to, say, John Kelly, then Kelly says I NEVER SAID THAT and we're left to believe whom?Daniel Ferris -> bonhiver , 6 Sep 2018 09:15If there is genuine resistance inside the White House to Trump- If it is at all like anybody says- then I would imagine that a genuine top level appointee would go on camera, throw themselves on their sword, and speak to the American people. Until such a time I question what is Woodward's agenda? Do I trust Omarosa? Is Michael Wolf credible? What are their goals? I'm not blind but I want to see more than anonymous. And until then... I don't believe it.
When the crowd screams, just join them. It's tremendous fun!MoonlightTiger , 6 Sep 2018 09:15Its Pence and trump can't fire himimperious -> Nialler , 6 Sep 2018 09:15I'm not going to attempt to defend Trump.CaptainHogwash , 6 Sep 2018 09:14I agree, I'd hate to defend him either, but you can't help thinking he has a point by calling this person gutless. Either stand up in public and say it or, if s/he really is working in the background to save us from Trump's excesses, then surely you're better off (and the country as a whole) staying there and not alerting him?
In any functioning household the adults would have sent Trump to his (preferably padded) roomKevinFinn -> Nepochtitelnikov , 6 Sep 2018 09:14"Maybe electing a big stupid toddler as president was a bad idea after all you guys"AbFalsoQuodLibet -> John Edwin , 6 Sep 2018 09:13Still better than the alternative!!
Take a look at how the donations to the Clinton Foundation have dried up since they no longer have any influence to peddle.
It's the New York Times, and no, they certainly haven't been against Trump since his election.charlieblue -> John Edwin , 6 Sep 2018 09:13Their lead White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman, still writes extremely understanding pieces of Trump. And she's been covering the man for almost 15 years, so one would think she had the measure of the man long ago.
More importantly, the NYT threw the election for Trump by first exonerating Trump of any Russian collusion - which was false - and by covering the last-minute Comey statements on the Clinton emails in the worst negative light possible for the Democratic candidate. The NYT turned out to be wrong, but the damage was done.
The NYT even tried to put new faces on their opinion staff with close connections to actual American neo-Nazis (!) and only failed when old tweets came to light.
I'm not quite sure what the NYT is playing at - I guess it's easy to play the devil's advocate in artsy-fartsy, liberal New York - but they most certainly have not been against Trump from January 2017 at all.
Does that tinfoil hat pinch?Daniel Ferris -> bonhiver , 6 Sep 2018 09:13Trump is not a freedom fighter, he is not your Great White Messiah, he's not an advocate for blue collar American citizens. Trump is a stupid, vulgar, greedy old fat racist who conned his way into the White House. There has been a lot of talk in all mediums about his unsuitability for the office, and his obvious ties to the Kremlin, but there has been no organized effort to remove him from office, no matter what you might have read on Qanon.
His deregulation tendencies clinch it. No one could deregulate like Hitler!Sixp__ -> teppictoo , 6 Sep 2018 09:12Garbage.cacaMBa -> ctdahle , 6 Sep 2018 09:12Treason is defined as "The betrayal of one's own country by waging war against it or by consciously or purposely acting to aid its enemies".
Mueller should be considering indicting Trump for treason.
You think the entire population is incapable of thinking about serious issues because there's some tittle-tattle on twitter? When did that happen? No-one would work because there's always fluffy kittens on YouTube.Pushk1n , 6 Sep 2018 09:12Its Probably Donald himself, he has form on spoofing , pretending to be someone else.PaulBowyer -> Graeme48 , 6 Sep 2018 09:12The giveaway is the bit where it says a lot of good stuff has been done.
It could also be Giuliano creating a myth that Donald is such a muddle head he could not possibly have conspired with anyone about anything .
But not when Russia (who back Assad) retaliated.And Putin has the nuts on Trump.
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Sep 07, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
SteveofCaley , 6 Sep 2018 09:29
Right, then. Solved it. Easy puzzle, really. Mods, you can close the comments now.Clues: Republican? Check. Strongly motivated by morality? Check. Unlimited White House access? Check.
It's written by the Ghost of Abraham Lincoln, last moral Republican President.
(Carter wasn't a Republican. Eisenhower, only by accident. )
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Sep 07, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
charlieblue , 6 Sep 2018 09:20Fascinating to see the tinfoil hat brigade turn out in such numbers to rant and rave about the "Deep State!" and poor, honest Donald Trump as a freedom fighter who is daily sacrificing himself for the good people of America.Why do bullies always pretend to be victims?
As with science, human nature can usually boiled down to the most likely answer, the simple observable truth. Such as; Donald Trump's entire life is a story of greed, vulgarity and self promotion to the exclusion of all else. He did not, in his 8th decade, suddenly develop a desire to serve the American people at his own expense. He is in the White House doing exactly what he has always done, he is pursuing whatever makes him happiest in the moment with no regard to consequences, morality or even common sense.
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Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
"Every nation gets the government it deserves."
Joseph de Maistre, Letter 76, on the topic of Russia's new constitutional laws (27 August 1811)
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Sep 06, 2018 | theguardian.com
Michronics42, 6 Sep 2018 06:46
Sounds like a palace coup to me: first, news of the forthcoming Woodward book (and excepts); then-coincidentally-today's "anonymous" and 'Gutless' article in the Times.TheChillZone , 6 Sep 2018 06:36As far as I'm concerned, this entire hellish administration is sheer "madness" and a very clear indication that this country is in its agonizing twilight.
Each and every senior official in this administration is an enabler of this "shithole" human being and current president, so there is no such thing as bravery here, just covering one's tail if a coup were to occur.
Not once, as has been mentioned here and elsewhere, has this 'Gutless' wonder decried the immorality of family separation, employing white racists as policy makers, shredding the social safety net for millions of this nation's most vulnerable; an outlandish Pentagon budget and etcetera.
What is solidly on display in this unfolding miasma is a firmly entrenched kleptocracy, enabled and supported by U.S. corporations and the death of democracy.
The Woodward book seems to me just more kiss and tell stories of the Michael Wolff ilk (remember him?). The juiciest quotes - Trump being called an idiot by Kelly - is denied by Kelly himself and most of the others are ex-employees.SolentBound -> uncleike , 6 Sep 2018 08:26A better - more objective - book would get past the unconventional, apparent chaos of the Whitehouse and perhaps investigate whether Trumps methods have or will bear fruit.
That perhaps, as David Lynch said, traditional politicians can't take the country or the world forward - they can't get things done anymore because they are afraid of political consequences or media backlash. Trump and his ego doesn't seem to care about that - is that a good thing or a bad thing? Trump has turned everything on it's head and liberals find themselves allying with establishment politicians and business groups. It is a fascinating period of political change and time - and better journalism - will eventually judge Trump more objectively.
TezB -> HippoMan , 6 Sep 2018 08:22"The point of the op-ed is to continue to build popular support for removal of Trump by confirming the more detailed account of Woodward."It was submitted to the Times before info on Woodward's book came out.
Meerkatz , 6 Sep 2018 08:17'Pence... not a dangerous, mentally ill megalomaniac'
Pence is more dangerous – make that outright terrifying – than Trump. Yes. Trump is a senile vulgarian oaf – but he doesn't really believe in anything and is motivated only by his greed and pathological need for self-aggrandizement. He's mentally incompetent in a very obvious way, which renders him laughably inept at trying to bring his more odious policy objectives to fruition (in fact, inept at everything, pretty much).
Pence is far more sinister, because he's a dementedly fanatical believer in a fundamentalist and authoritarian mutation of religion – a crazed zealot. While sometimes able to imitate the superficial demeanour of a person of sound mind, he is in truth utterly deranged.
While Trump lies and denies obvious specific facts almost as a reflex, he doesn't really sustain his warped world view consistently or with conviction that lasts longer than it takes to play his next round of golf.
Pence vehemently espouses a whole alternative reality based upon his religious fantasies, and believes he has a mission to impose his delusional ideas in a punitive and repressive manner on his country's entire population, permanently. He may have the cunning to be chillingly effective at realising his most ghastly ambitions.
Trump represents a temporary aberration; a collective brain fart. Pence could be the instigator of a new dark age for the USA
Having seen this type of character assassination visited on Bill and Hillary Clinton, character assassination before any reported crimes have been proven against them or for that matter any sexual misdemeanors as president are proven, what exactly is going on here?Jessp , 6 Sep 2018 08:13I totally disagree with this type of thing even if the person is someone I don't understand much. The world has come to a dangerous place where digital lynching without reference to law seems to be the prevailing modus operandi.
A little word of warning. Be careful what you wish for. If Don can be removed prior to the next election, (and I don't believe that would happen), then Mike Pence takes the reins. He has just as many crazy notions as his current boss, but is an experienced politician who knows the ins and outs of Congress. He may get more of the programme through than little Don can. And that would not be good.BritinNormandy -> NameIcallme , 6 Sep 2018 08:12He's done it before. Lots of times. Example: one of his posts back in April: "Trump is a genius. Nobody can take him down, the man is a fighter, you punch him and he'll punch you back 10 times harder. The FBI, Democrats and MSM have tried to take him down since he decided to run for president, yet he's standing tall and with a 50% approval rating."malibudebumbum , 6 Sep 2018 08:09There's no point in engaging in discussion with folks like that ...
Welcome to postmodernist politics folks. It will continue to degenerate until, in despair, people turn toward an orderly system of politics; the Chinese system, the Russian system or even a coherent religious system. Counsellors will be on hand for those who feel hurt or upset by the return to authoritarianism -- they will be able to get great treatment in re-education centres. Just a matter of time before our current system just crumbles from within.sl0thp0pe -> littlepump , 6 Sep 2018 08:08Yeah they're sucking it direct from Ayn Rand's teat. Bunch of sociopaths. And I think most political scientists are well aware that citizens united was the death of American democracy as a representative political system. The illusion of functionality has collapsed under the weight of corruption. Trump is really just a symptom of that. A giant orange enema of the state.ID3866144 -> stuart255 , 6 Sep 2018 07:51LOL. The west is about to collapse. There is no more money to finance the Ponzy Scheme of the everlasting growth you seem to think is natural. while everyone is distracted in this dualistic BS, the planet is slowly shutting down her ressources.stuart255 -> HippoMan , 6 Sep 2018 07:47The Russia after years of sanctions have developed an economy that make them less dependant on other countries. So They will probably less affected by what is coming.
Unless you live in you own bubble, maybe you noticed that Occidental countries have become empty shells...gutted from their skills at making stuff. It is all virtual production now...all banking stuff, numbers insurance...most skilled stuff are either in Germany or in Asia...what is going on?
Trump is a megalomaniac I agree, but he is not dangerous and is not mentally ill. Mental illness is a real thing and you shouldn't casually trivialize it in this way.Finally anyone who runs for office as President of the USA is by very definition a pretty extreme megalomaniac. So you have two points that are not real and/or could be considered erroneous discrimination and one point that is a prerequisite for any POTUS candidate.
Looking for a reason to impeach him is a ridiculous back to front thing to do and is itself proof that any impeachment will fail. To impeach someone you must first start with a very obvious reason.
It's simply not possible to impeach a president because you don't like their politics or their personality. This whole searching for a reason to impeach is itself evidence that any impeachment is politically motivated and the very optics of this serve only to strengthen Trump's own political support in direct opposition.
Trump is President because the DNC was captured by very stupid and deeply corrupt people.
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Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
j. von Hettlingen , 6 Sep 2018 07:16
Many say Mike Pence could have been the one behind the op-ed, because the unidentified author singled out the late John McCain as "a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue." The word isn't that commonly used. But Pence has used the word with some regularity. Yet the word could have been a ploy to divert attention from the real author, who claimed to support many of the GOP policies – "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more."Finisterre -> Carl123 , 6 Sep 2018 06:53
No doubt the current crisis works for Pence: "Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president." Of course he and the GOP didn't want to "precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until -- one way or another -- it's over." But they don't want Trump to finish his term and hope that he'll soon be gone.Pepperoni Pizza is absolutely correct. We DON'T know his staff are going behind his back - we have this anonymous bollocks as the totality of our evidence.CharlieApples -> solarights , 6 Sep 2018 06:48This op-ed is going to absolutely confirm, in the eyes of Trump supporters, all his whines about being thwarted by the Deep State. It's going to increase his support among the crazies, and it's also useful for the Republicans who want to ditch him in favour of Mike Pence.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven and for the Democrats or the 'resistance' to see it as some kind of bonus is insane. Even if you take it at face value it's a disgusting piece of authoritarian, we-know-best hypocrisy. If you look at its actual effects, the net result is not likely to benefit the forces of sanity in any way.
The media's complacency about all of this, and their failure to actually report on the Republican trajectory and the bigger picture, is criminal. Instead we get YET ANOTHER bit of 'oh look the wheels are just about to come off the bus!', and all the while the Republicans are gerrymandering and purging voter rolls like crazt before the midterms, and of course refusing to change their unaccountable electronic voting machines and - did you read THIS one in the news? - blocking a bill which would have audited the election results.
Tl;dr: The US, and by extension the planet via environmental destruction and possibly war on top, is utterly fucked.
I think you've confused whose side the CIA are on :-)
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Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Mr anonymous also concedes that the administration has done some good things .. like .. a robust military. Now call me old fashioned, but having a military with twice(three times .. four times) the capability of the rest of the world put together and spending enough yearly to run the whole of Africa .. probably India too, just on a means of killing .. and this even before the US military became .. robust?..CosmoCrawley , 6 Sep 2018 05:56What is wrong with you people .. national security?.. Laughable .. when is your security ever, ever, ever threatened! And yet people starve, people don't have clean water to drink ..
Perhaps were the US to help lift the basic burdens of millions who have bugger all, then there wouldn't be so many suposed 'enemies'. I do believe film maker Michael Moore has voiced this very same thing .. but then, what purpose all those shiny new expensive killing machines?..
Something is seriously wrong in America .. and it ain't just Trump!This is a very poor op-ed piece. Simply calling the President "a crazy loon " isn't political analysis, or at least not the sort of political analysis I would be willing to pay for. Nor do I think the thesis that certain members of the administration are busy trying to shore up their reputations in the face of a sinking presidency holds water. Firstly, unless the current investigations provide incontrovertible evidence that the President was engaged in criminal activity I don't think there is any change that he will be impeached. Secondly, if you wanted to protect your reputation surely the thing to do would be to resign and maintain a dignified silence while you are writing your memoirs. Or if you really were part of a secret clique protecting the American constitution against a reckless President you would keep quiet and get on with your important business. It seems to me that this anonymous piece was either a clumsy attempt to further damage the President or a sophisticated attempt to galvanise his support base by "proving" that the President is being undermined by unelected traitors. Or something else completely might be going on. That's why I would like to read a thoughtful opinion piece by an informed observer.StGeorge , 6 Sep 2018 05:51Sounds like there's a treasonous public servant there, doing their best to subvert the will of the people. And of course loudly supported by the squealing hard left guardian mob. Looking at the type of far left fascists crawling out of the woodwork, I would say Trump is provoking utter derangement in all the right people.Densher -> kent_rules , 6 Sep 2018 05:45"the corrupt metropolitan elites have swindled them again"Throwawaythekey , 6 Sep 2018 05:44
-Who appointed these 'corrupt metropolitan elites' if it was not Trump himself? Who are these people-Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin- quite apart from Jeff Sessions and the now disgraced Michael Flynn? Trump appointed them, they weren't forced on him by the "corrupt metropolitan elites". Is Trump to be given a free pass for his own mistakes?What many commentators here seem to fail to recognise, because of their political bias I suppose, is that there is a ground swell of dissatisfaction with the political consensus that has seen the working class and lower middle class disenfranchised or at least their perceived interests ignored. As a result, populist ideologies, as espoused by Steven Bannon, and others, and exemplified by leaders like Donald Trump have thrown away the rule book with all its aims to support the extremely wealthy and have reached out to those that want jobs before green policies, law and order before gender diversity programs and so on.Stone Jones , 6 Sep 2018 05:43
I doubt that many of the readers here will receive the message but we are witnessing a revolution that I see as significant as the rise of the sans-culottes in the early part of the French Revolution. That didn't end well for the sans-culottes or their aims but we can hardly blame them for trying. Today the retrenched car worker in the US can hardly be blamed for being unhappy that the CEO of a car company receives a huge pay rise and bail outs from the government and similar stories in other areas.
Vive la revolution.Some of this stuff is clearly nonsense. Example: the insider claimed Trump is an admirer of dictators:"In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations."
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And yet the forthcoming Bob Woodward book claims Trump told his defence secretary he wanted to kill Assad:
Donald Trump ordered his defence secretary to assassinate Syria's president Bashar al-Assad and "kill the f****** lot of them" in the leader's regime, in the wake of a chemical attack against civilians, according to a new book.
Defence secretary James Mattis is said to have told the president during a phone call he would "get right on it" before hanging up the phone and instead telling an aide: "We're not going to do any of that. We're going to be much more measured." In the wake of the chemical attack in April 2017, the president's national security team developed options that included the more conventional airstrike that Mr Trump eventually ordered.
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The anti-Trump lot can't have it both ways. He can't be a fan of dictators but also want to kill them! It's clear there is lying or exaggeration on both sides. The people out to impeach Trump (or sell books!) will lie too.
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Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
pretzelattack -> Densher , 6 Sep 2018 05:38
he reversed the war in afghanistan? drones? did he prosecute bankers? does he favor increasing offshore drilling? now it looks like he's renegotiating clinton's nafta and pushing for some version of obama's trade treaties. trump is the invading python, and the democrats and establishment republicans are the alligators; whichever wins, the small furry animals get eaten. i just hope they don't start world war 3 while they're settling things--trump looks to be doubling down on obama's syria policy too, and support of the current ukrainian government.Bazster -> ImMovedToAdd , 6 Sep 2018 05:33'Fraid so. Every new generation of neocons regurgitates the same discredited lies from the previous generation, and suckers believe them all over again. Even the title "neocon" or "neoliberal" is a lie: there's nothing new about them.Densher -> simonsaint , 6 Sep 2018 05:25Trump was not only openly attacked during the nomination process, the Republican Party nominee who was selected to fight Obama in 2012 -Mitt Romney- delivered a savage attack in which he described Trump as a con-man and a chronic liar -yet the same people who could, there and then have told Trump to get lost backed him. Trump has been attacked from the start and every time and all of the time said to his attackers: so what? I dare you to remove me from the nomination, I dare you to remove me from the Office of President. This is a man who is challenging the governance of the US in a manner no other President has done before, and so far, he is still winning. That is the scary part.Freedom4UK2019 -> Jessie Welsh , 6 Sep 2018 05:24Well of course you could list other benefits in addition to some I listed like. "transform the economy, get people back in work.RichWoods -> raindancer68 , 6 Sep 2018 05:24Peace on the Korean peninsula, end of US involvement in SYRIA etc...
" You could get a nice big house like Obama got. Or $500K for doing speeches for Russian companies like Bill Clinton did.
Trump is threatening Deep State corruption by placing his own family members in positions of power and profiting from charging the nation for his and his staff's repeated use of Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago? That's a bizarre way of draining the swamp.ID6314850 -> raindancer68 , 6 Sep 2018 05:19The US political system has many flaws, not least that the President can be elected on an apparent electoral college landslide while losing the popular vote. But then again no country's political system is perfect, human nature being what it is.
However, Trump is clearly not up to the job. Not by intellect, understanding of world affairs, honesty, temperament, respect for the law, nor constitution. The list goes on frankly.
The system has gone bad. Trump hasn't "drained the swamp", he's made it far deeper. That said, "the system" such as it is should work in the hands of honest men and women of integrity. The trouble is they're few and far between in the GOP as it wilfully ignores issues in which they would be clamouring for a Democrat president to be impeached.
I sincerely hope the GOP get a thrashing in the mid-terms which may, just may, give them pause for thought. A Democrat Congress might also actually hold Trump to account. The only danger there is that he lashes out with even less self control.
Dangerous times.
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Sep 06, 2018 | profile.theguardian.com
charlieblue -> Johnstu9876 6 Sep 2018 09:08
I assumed it was an effort at creating some sort of record of resistance. Does anybody really believe Paul Ryan is retiring from the 3rd most powerful position in the US Government to "spend more time with family"? The rats are fleeing a sinking ship. Even if Trump serves out a full four years, anybody too closely tied to this stupid shit-storm of an Administration will be tarred in public eyes. But, American voters are notoriously forgetful, and getting out before the ship goes down will probably work.charlieblue -> John Edwin , 6 Sep 2018 09:00Funny shit. "the mole" wrote an Op/Ed piece, that contains no information of a sensitive nature. S/he wrote of their own personal observations working in the White House. There is nothing illegal in that.Jonathan Bailey , 6 Sep 2018 08:54I get that you might not have any functional understanding of US law, but it is deeply disturbing that the President of the United States is calling for the arrest of a citizen exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights.
The op-ed piece being anonymous makes me wonder if Mr Trump himself put someone up to do it. What better way of stirring up the base ahead of the mid-terms than talk of undemocratic factions within the administration and fifth columnists to be rooted out for the cause. It also offers the president another cudgel against the press that will appeal to his core constituencies.crossedseven , 6 Sep 2018 08:27Even if Mr Trump isn't capable of coming up with such a scheme, there are certainly those around him who are.
The statements in the opinion piece are horribly anti-pluralist anti-democratic in themselves. The writer's nationalist appeal to 'American' unity at the end is based on everyone uniting around US Republican principles of neo-liberalism, inequality and militarism. S/he would use a false unity against Trump to impose the worst kind of conservative fundamentalism and eliminate anything more progressive from the political spectrum.Maybe this is mainstream neo-liberal thinking but it's the end of a plural, democratic state. There would be no more room to discuss inequality, climate change, race or gender discrimination or new welfare provisions. Just an offer of false unity around hard neoliberal principles. I guess it's a very similar game to Brexit, which is a choice between life-threatening asset striping of the UK or May's 'hard right soft Brexit' super Thatcherism.
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Sep 06, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The op-ed represents a shocking critique of Trump and is without precedent in modern American history. Former CIA Director John Brennan , who has sparred fiercely with the president, called the op-ed "active insubordination born out of loyalty to the country, not to Donald Trump".
"This is not sustainable to have an executive branch where individuals are not following the orders of the chief executive," Brennan told NBC's "Today" show. "I do think things will get worse before they get better. I don't know how Donald Trump is going to react to this. A wounded lion is a very dangerous animal, and I think Donald Trump is wounded."
In it, the anonymous author describes Trump as amoral, "anti-trade and anti-democratic" and prone to making "half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions".
The writer claims aides had explored the possibility of removing Trump from office via the 25th amendment , a complex constitutional mechanism to allow for the replacement of a president who is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office", but had decided against it.
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Sep 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Paul Jordan , 6 Sep 2018 07:45I am outraged at describing Trump's administration as a "pirate ship"!Pirate ships were in reality the most egalitarian institutions that existed in the 17th century. Their articles laid out that both the captain and quartermaster (who divided the spoils) served at the pleasure of their crew, and that the entire crew had rights to a fair portion of the proceeds.
On a real pirate ship, Captain Trump would have lost his job long ago and been abandoned on some tiny island with a single shot in his pistol.
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Aug 28, 2018 | www.unz.com
Deschutes , says: Next New Comment August 28, 2018 at 12:22 pm GMT
@Digital SamizdatI stopped reading the Guardian full stop 4-5 years ago, back when they launched their "Russia is evildoer!!" shrill campaign of propaganda -- also about the time the Ukraine civil war got into gear. Never looked back, the Guardian is a steaming pile of US/NATO/Atlantic Council bullshit.
I'll never understand why so many fixate on it, such as the Off-guardian.org bloggers who've devoted an entire blog for years on end to criticising Guardian journos, 'comment is free', comment mods, etc. All fine and good, but why?
With so many other better news sources is there a need? No, there isn't. Just move on. The Guardian is not a relevant news outlet. I mean, why keep going there to read pro-Israeli/pro-US government articles which make you angry? Doesn't make any sense.
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Aug 24, 2018 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com
ET AL August 24, 2018 at 9:53 am
MARK CHAPMAN August 24, 2018 at 6:40 pmSpotted this via al Beeb s'Allah piece
Groaning Man: BBC's long struggle to present the facts without fear or favour
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/aug/18/-sp-bbc-report-facts-impartial
BBC in conflict with New LabourAccording to Richard Sambrook, who was the BBC's director of news from 2001, trouble between the BBC and New Labour brewed when Britain intervened in Kosovo in 1999: Alastair Campbell, then Blair's press secretary, accused the media of being too much in thrall to Slobodan Milosevic's "lie machine". After 9/11, the stakes became much, much higher .
The crux came at 6.07am on 29 May 2003, when Andrew Gilligan reported on the Today programme that, according to a source, the joint intelligence committee report on Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons capability had been "sexed up" by the government with a claim that such weapons could be activated within 45 minutes of an order. That there had been any deception was fiercely denied by the government and it was amid the ensuing maelstrom that the story's source, Dr David Kelly, took his own life. Lord Hutton's controversial and contested report into the death of the Ministry of Defence weapons expert was deeply critical of the BBC and precipitated the resignation of both the director general, Dyke, and the chairman, Gavyn Davies. That simultaneous toppling of the twin titans of the BBC was an unprecedentedly traumatic event in the history of the corporation. It was made all the more bitter by the fact that the struggle was fratricidal: Dyke's appointment as DG had been controversial because he had been a donor to New Labour .
Sambrook continued: "I suppose in a sense what I'm saying is that Kelly was a kind of mini-Edward Snowden story. He was saying that actually this intelligence has been completely misused, and many people inside the tent knew it and were uncomfortable about it
"If Edward Snowden had contacted Panorama or Newsnight could they have done what the Guardian did? No. No, they couldn't," he said.
"They might have been able to do a piece at a meta level, a headline level, but they could not have done what the Guardian did with Snowden. I find it uncomfortable to say that, but it's the truth. So what does that tell you about the BBC? It tells you that in the end there is a limit to its independence – some would call that public accountability. It is a wonderful news organisation. It does fantastic journalism every day. But there is a limit to it. And I think in the end that was part of a miscalculation in the Kelly story. We thought we were genuinely independent. And we weren't."
But how far is the BBC willing to take its journalism up against the establishment – and the government, which in the end seals the BBC's fate? Other journalists I spoke to within the BBC were much less sanguine. "The BBC is at its highest levels concerned with not offending the establishment, not making enemies in important places. Its core purpose – independent and impartial journalism – clashes with its survival instincts, and that goes back to the beginning," said one senior journalist.
'Senior people at the BBC see themselves part of the establishment'
Another took an even bleaker view. "Newsgathering – covering the stuff that is happening in the world – we do that brilliantly. The BBC newsgathering operation is genuinely a wonder to perceive. But digging out original stories? No, sorry. Nor has it ever done. When push comes to shove, senior people at the BBC consider themselves part of the establishment."..
The employee called such managers, as well the departments in charge of editorial policy and compliance, "journalism deterrent squads" who were strangling the efforts of colleagues "like Japanese knotweed". Journalists are afraid of not being backed up by the BBC, added the employee, when the pressure is on – and compared the corporation's approach with the much more bullish, confident and "cheeky, risk-taking" stance of Channel 4 News. "The BBC always buckles, always folds. You feel that as a journalist, they will abandon you; if you take a risky story to them it's as if you are actively trying to get them into trouble. There is an institutionalised anxiety and mistrust."
Peston said: "There is a risk-averse culture that means when the BBC wants people who can break stories it has to look to recruit from outside. When the BBC is training young journalists, it starts by telling them about the regulatory restraints: it starts with the rules and says: 'Don't you dare break them'."
####Plenty more at the link.
The simple fact is that s/he who holds the purse strings, holds the power – regardless of how often or how rarely it is used. It casts a long shadow. And that's even before you look at the size and scale of such organizations. Self-censorship? Certainly. Admitting it publicly? Never.
There was no danger that I would mistake the BBC for an impartial and unbiased investigative news source. However, Channel 4 with its 'cheeky, risk-taking stance' is no better, as 'cheeky risk-taking' in British journalism still means backing establishment positions when it comes to foreign policy. They might contribute to the odd cabinet minister's sacking, but I could give a toss about Britain's internal politics, and it is only its foreign-policy machinations I care about . And those are pretty much unvarying – Uncle Sam, boffo. Putin, evil.
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Aug 14, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
s this a security risk?Moss also told the Guardian that Manigault Newman's use of a recording device presented counterintelligence risks. "All it takes is one foreign agency hacking [the recording device], and setting it to passive record mode," said Moss. The result would mean all conversations, not just those Manigault Newman chose to record, would be "accessible to foreign entities".
This concern was shared by Kayyem. "There might be the perception, particularly by our enemies, that the entire White House might be compromised, and that's kind of scary," she said, adding: "The audience isn't just us and Omarosa and Trump. It's the Chinese and the Russians."
Is recording in the Situation Room a crime?Moss said, however, that just because the conversation occurred in the Situation Room, which is actually a secured series of connected rooms, there is "no real obvious criminal liability". All staffers entering the area must lock away their cell phones and other insecure electronic devices. But he noted the violation would likely be enough to deny Manigault Newman a security clearance if she ever wishes to work for the federal government in the future.
What has the White House said?"The very idea a staff member would sneak a recording device into the White House Situation Room shows a blatant disregard for our national security," said White House press secretary Sarah Sanders. She added: "Then to brag about it on national television further proves the lack of character and integrity of this disgruntled former White House employee."
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
SwingingVoter, 3 Jun 2018 19:43
sierrasierra, 3 Jun 2018 19:21"neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests"Its almost impossible to talk about a mining economy and a "free market" in the same sentence, Richard. a mining economy is is synonymous with corruption, Dutch disease and political grabs for cash etc. In the height of the 2009 GFC announced by kev07, unskilled labourers in the pilbara were still earning $100/hr. Real estate prices for 3 bed shacks in karratha were starting at $1million plus. The blue collar dominated pilbara area was overwhelmed with greed fed by left politicians hiding behind socialist ideals. The reality was that left wing economists recognized the "dutch disease" problem and their solution was to flood the area with greedy blue collar workers who were blowing their enormous salaries on prostitutes, alcohol and gambling in the hope that profits from the mining boom would be flushed into other parts of the economy.
The solution? partially transition Australia's economy to an innovation driven economy because innovation is linked to learning which is linked to stronger self esteem and self efficacy in the community. an innovation driven econmy is the better way of promting social development in the community and an innovation driven economy is the most effective way for politicians to transition to the benefits of a "free market" driven economy.... the reality is that transitioning to an innovation would require smacking the socialists over the back of the head in the hope that aspiring socialists will respect the ideas and intellectual property of others as opposed to continue to assimilate intellectual property in the name of employment generation and the common good
I dont fear the potential rise of neoliberalism, although i understand that spruiking a free market whilst talking about mining is ridiculous.
I fear the individuals who are have been talking about mining, and targeting/victimising the non politically active conservatives for more than 2 decades in the name of socialism"While much of neoliberalism's rhetorical power comes from the assertion that "there is no alternative," the simple fact is that the world is full of alternatives. Indeed, even the so-called free marketers in Australia can see alternatives."Excellent article Richard, you have captured the ideology and its dogma quite specularly.
It's dogma is nothing but empty lies held up as flawed truth's and full of scoundrels who profit from its concomitant pain.
Examples from today's headlines and a few from last week:
- https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2018/06/02/turnbull-follows-indigenous-lead /
- http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-02/australian-medical-association-endorses-uluru-statement/9827626?pfmredir=sm
- https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/netflix-urged-to-pull-pete-evans-documentary-20180531-p4zim2.html
- https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/one-in-five-rooftop-solar-units-deficient-official-figures-show-20180601-p4zixo.html
- https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-live-exports-review-recommended-an-immediate-ban-20180529-p4zi34.html
- https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/barnaby-joyce-lobbied-the-pm-before-receiving-40-000-cheque-20180603-p4zj7a.html
- https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2018/06/03/whale-dies-eating-80-plastic-bags/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%2020180604
- https://thenewdaily.com.au/money/finance-news/2018/06/03/break-up-the-banks-apra/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%2020180604
- https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/white-collars-dirty-secrets-20180531-p4zimj.html
- https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/police-breath-test-scam-goes-back-at-least-15-years-20180531-p4zir8.html
- https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/the-religious-minority-seizing-power-in-the-liberal-party-20180601-p4ziyq.html
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Aug 10, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Russian officials reacted with outrage and markets slumped on Thursday morning following the announcement of tough new US sanctions over Russia's alleged use of a nerve agent in the Salisbury attack.
President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the sanctions were "absolutely unlawful and don't conform to international law", as politicians vowed to respond with countermeasures, which could include bans on the exports of rockets or resources for manufacturing.
"The theatre of the absurd continues," tweeted Dmitry Polyanskiy, first deputy permanent representative of Russia to the UN. "No proofs, no clues, no logic, no presumption of innocence, just highly-likelies. Only one rule: blame everything on Russia, no matter how absurd and fake it is. Let us welcome the United Sanctions of America!"
One senior Russian MP called the US a "police state".
A member of the Duma's foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, said Russia could block exports of RD-180 rocket engines to the US as a potential countermeasure, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
The United States announced on Wednesday that it would impose restrictions on the export of sensitive technology to Russia because of its use of a nerve agent in the attempted murder of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain.
The State Department said the new sanctions would come into effect on 22 August and would be followed by much more sweeping measures, such as suspending diplomatic relations and revoking Aeroflot landing rights, if Russia did not take "remedial" action within 90 days.
Moscow is not expected to agree to the response required by US legislation, which includes opening up Russian scientific and security facilities to international inspections to assess whether it is producing chemical and biological weapons in violation of international law.
"Certainly it is really up to Russia to make that decision, whether they meet this criteria," a senior administration official said. "The second round of sanctions are in general more draconian than the first round."
Another senior state department official said the US received in March "persuasive information" from the UK that Russia was behind the attack. It made its own determination last weekend and was now acting on the basis of "objective facts" and "legal requirements".
Russian markets took the news poorly. Stocks in Aeroflot, the country's national carrier, fell by 12% in trading before lunchtime on Thursday over concerns that its direct flights between Russia and the US could be halted entirely.
Russia's currency, the rouble, fell to below 66 to the US dollar, a 4% slide from Wednesday morning that began with the leak of a separate draft sanctions bill that could see Russia named a state sponsor of terror.
The US has already expelled 60 suspected Russian spies as part of a global response to the March attack in Salisbury against Sergei Skripal , a former colonel in Russian military intelligence, and his daughter, Yulia , in which a rare and potent Russian-made nerve agent, novichok, was found to have been used.
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Aug 08, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
DancehallStyle -> AgainstDarkness , 6 Aug 2018 20:02
US corps have bought out UK and EU corps and then outsource the work to India and China. US Corps = Globalisation.DancehallStyle -> AnthonyFlack , 6 Aug 2018 19:57IT tech and even intricate clothing are too fiddly for automata.ID4355982 , 6 Aug 2018 19:52Americans view is if other countries like China make too much money and will overtake them then they will take it all back.
They did that with Japan. They also destroyed Soviet's economy.
trump has wrecked environmental policy, trade policy and domestic social policy....the upshots will be: 1- a much more toxic environment & much higher level of respiratory disease and cancerous related ailments; overall poorer health & health care for the average citizen 2- higher prices for imported goods, lower level of trade exports, fewer US based jobs and more off-shoring of US jobs 3- a substantial increase in the homeless population in the urban areas of this country; increased rates of poverty for the poor, lower economic prosperity for the lower and lower middle class income brackets; wage stagnation for the middle & upper middle income brackets; less advanced education & lower worker productivity and innovation to name just a few of the impacts created by this idiot....in simple in English, Trump and his so-called initiatives are shafting this country in almost every way possibleIlya Grushevskiy -> RepaTea , 6 Aug 2018 19:17What part of international law is not just pissed on toiler paper strewn over the floors of a urinal? Which post WWII president respected this law?Brian Black -> bobthebuilder2017 , 6 Aug 2018 19:13None.
International law, since WWII failed. It failed in '47 when no referendum was held in Palestine - against Chapter 1, Article 1 paragraph 2 of the UN Charter. It failed in Crimea, when the results of such a referendum was spat on by the previous war criminal to sit in the Oval Office. It fails now as sanctions are used unilaterally - being equivalent to the use of force in result, they should be
But then let's not stop at after the war. The US is the only country to nuke civilians. 6/7 US four star generals at the time said the action had no strategic or tactical purpose whatsoever.
The US is what ISIS dreams to be, the sooner it falls into obscurity the better.
Pure nonsense. The Great Depression began on October 29, 1929. FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933 nearly 4 years after it began. Hoover had actually only been in office for just over 6 months before Black Tuesday. GDP began growing and unemployment began falling in 1933 shortly after FDR took office. The Depression officially came to an end in 1939 when GDP returned to pre-Depression levels.Ilya Grushevskiy , 6 Aug 2018 19:09There is no long term US growth. There is a debt default after people realize the fact that the top of the whole US government is incompetent. That it has chained itself to such astronomic liabilities for useless wars (as the Empire has not succeeded in world hegemony), is even sadder. It coould have spent the $5tn of Iraq and Afghanistan on building shit, but instead it bombed shit.gmiklashek950 , 6 Aug 2018 17:59Trump doesn't matter for US long run - in 5-10 years time the country will be only found in history books.
Remember Kruschev's (sp?) last words on leaving office, and I'm paraphrasing: "Don't worry about America, they'll spend themselves to death (just like we have)". Continued economic growth is a wet dream of Wall Street origin. We are massively overpopulated and rapidly using up earth's natural resources at an increasingly unsustainable rate. We must begin to reduce our growth, not keep increasing it. Population density stress is killing us now and only increasing every day along with the 220,000 new mouths to feed that we are turning out into a world that has no room for 28,000,000 homeless migrants already. Just how crazy are we really. If this article is to be believed, we are nuts. E.F. Schumacher is rolling in his grave! Stress R UsAgainstDarkness , 6 Aug 2018 16:56Trump/the US is attempting to renegotiate globalisation.Levente Tanka -> plakias , 6 Aug 2018 16:34It is time for the rest of the western world to follow suit.
The contribution of a president to the national debt depends a bit on how you calculate it. You could simply look at rhe dates of inauguration or go a step further and look at the fiscal years. For the latter see :https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
In absolute terms Obama is indeed at the top of the list, percentagewise his predecessor played a larger part. No matter how you look at it or what the causes were, under Bush and Obama the U.S. debt seems to have spiralled out of of control and Trump is doing bugger all to stop that trend.
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Aug 08, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
RepaTea -> plakias , 6 Aug 2018 14:56
Why quote figures without context?plakias -> RepaTea , 6 Aug 2018 14:49Obama came to power January 2008.
Financial crisis hit 2007/8
So he gets the blame for the cost?
Conservative estimate is it added some $12.8 Trillion Dollars to the debt.
Now please grow up and compare apples with apples and be honest about the context....
On January 20, 2009, when he was sworn in, the debt was $10.626 trillion. On January 20, 2017, when he left, it was $19.947 trillion. Most people would calculate Obama added $9 trillion to the debt, more than any other president. But then Tom Eleven isn't "Most people".
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Aug 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
At very least, a leader should be able to tell right from wrong... and sadly, too often in this world, "nice guys finish last".
"There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain."
Plato
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Jul 23, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities.
Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you're reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won't really be noticed.
It's important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you've got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That's why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.
On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won't be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare , the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.
This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.
Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it's known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.
Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the "infantilisation of the workers". Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities ("She got a new office chair and I didn't"), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.
More important, though, is the serious damage to people's self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being "Who needs me?" For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.
Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.
A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: "Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless." We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.
Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, "make" something of ourselves. You don't need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master's degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?
There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.
Panic attacks, anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, depression, suicidal thoughts alienation, cancers, withdrawal are all symptoms of the de-humanizing aspects of a market-driven life. In its worst forms it manifests periodically in mass shootings at strangers. So what do people do to cope? Drugs, pain killers, shrinks, alcohol, potato chips and soda. They then develop obesity, diabetes and heart diseases and cancers. How to save a human species terminally intoxicated with technology and enslaved by the market while the inner spirit is running empty may not be possible given the advanced nature of the disease.Gary Walker -> NotForTurning , 7 Aug 2014 19:59...what?zii000 , 7 Aug 2014 18:25
You fail to really acknowledge that time and again we've failed to exercise constrain within the capitalist models. The the meritorious are often inadequately rewarded - when any person in work cannot afford to home and feed themselves and their family then a reasonable balance has not been struck - in that sense at no time in history has capitalism functioned adequately.
To suggest that socialism is anti-human is to ignore how and why as a species we formed societies at all, we come together precisely because there is a mutual benefit in so doing; to help another is to help oneself - the model itself fails to operate in practice for the same reason that capitalism does - the greed of the power holder.You reserve your sharpest barbs for socialism, but at least within the socialist agenda there is a commitment to the protection of the citizen, whoever they are, even the 'unmerited' as you describe them - a capitalist's paraphrase for 'those that create no value'.
The socialist at least recognises that whilst the parent may be 'unmerited' their dependants should be entitled to receive equality of opportunity and protection from the 'law-of-the-jungle' i.e., the greed of others.
The ability to generate wealth, simply by already having wealth and therefore being able to thrive off the labour of others carries little merit as far as I can tell and does indeed create the soul-crushing command-and-control empires of the capitalism that millions around the world experience daily.
Neoliberalism is indeed a huge self-serving con and ironically the Thatcher/Regan doctrine which set out to break the status quo and free the economy from the old elitist guard has had exactly the opposite effect.camllin , 7 Aug 2014 17:58Capitalism cannot differentiate between honest competition and cheating. Since humans will cheat to win, capitalism has become survival of the worst not the best.TheBBG , 7 Aug 2014 17:51The bottom line is the basic human condition prizes food, shelter, sex, and then goes directly to greed in most modern societies. It was not always that way, and is not that way in ever fewer societies. As it is, greed makes the world go around.Jon Allan , 7 Aug 2014 17:44In capitalistic societies greed has been fed by business and commerce; in communist societies it has been "some pigs are more equal then others"; and in dictatorships or true monarchies (or the Australian Liberal Party) there is the born to rule mentality where there are rulers and serfs.
Nobody ever seems to address the paradox of the notion of an absolute free market: that within a free market, those who can have the freedom to exploit do exploit, thereby thus eliminating the freedom of the exploited, which thence paradoxically negates the absoluteness of the free market. No absolute freedom truly exist in a free market.Colin Bennett , 7 Aug 2014 17:06As such, the free market is pipe dream - a con - to eliminate regulations and create economic freedoms only where they benefit the elite. The free market does not exist, is impossible, and therefore should cease to be held as the harbinger of a progressive socio economic reality.
If we are to accept the Christian assumption that we, humans, are all self-serving and acquisitive, then we must, therefore, negate the possibility of an absolutely "free" market, since exploitation is a naturally occurring byproduct of weak-strong interactions. Exploitation negates freedom, and therefore, it must be our reality, as it is in all peoples' best interests, to accept directly democratic regulations as the keystone to any market.
It sounds very like the Marxist critique of capital. And similarly, points to real problems, but doesn't seek evidence for why such a sick situation not only persists, but is so popular - except by denigrating 'the masses'.pinkrobbo -> Jim Greer , 7 Aug 2014 16:06Surely what is particular about our time, about industrialisation generally, is the fragmenting of long term social structures, and orientation around the individual alone. It seems to me the problem of our times is redeveloping social structures which balance the individual and the socials selves, as all not merely stable but thriving happy creative societies, have always done.
Their propaganda is the same- an obsessive hatred of the state in any form, a semi-religious belief in the power of the individual operating in the free-market to solve humanity's ills.makingtime -> YoungPete , 7 Aug 2014 13:28Granted, they aren't social libertarians, but then, in the US, libertarians don't seem to be either.
Richard McDonough , 7 Aug 2014 13:20Pretty typical that the assumption is the Marx "nailed it" and any dissenters are just "scared".
I'm scared by it too, as I said, it's a sensible fear of change. The question remains. What if Marx's analysis, just the analysis, is broadly correct? What if markets really are the road to ruination of our planet, morality and collective welfare in roughly the way that he explained?It's not a trivial question, and clearly the current economic orthodoxy has failed to explain some recent little problems we've been having, while Marx explains how these problems are structurally embedded and only to be expected. It is intellectual cowardice to compulsively avoid this, in my view. Better minds than ours have struggled with it.
So beware of the fallacious argument from authority - 'You are stupid while I am axiomatically very clever, because I say so, hence I must be correct and you must shut it.' It goes nowhere useful, though we are all prone to employing it.
But it is not 'sixth form' thinking, surely, to consider these problems as being worth thinking about in a modern context. It is a plain fact that Stalinism didn't work as planned. We know it, but it doesn't make the problems it was intended to solve disappear to say so.
If you believe human nature can be changed by enforcing your interpretation of Marx's road to human freedom (a quasi-religious goal) you condemn millions to starvation, slaughter, gulags, misery etc.
Please read what I actually wrote about that. I'm not remotely quasi-religious, nor do I seek to enforce anything. My intention is only to expose a particularly damaging mythology. The extent of my crimes is persuasion as a prelude to consensual change before necessity really bites us all.Markets conjure up the exact forms of misery you describe. Totalitarians of the right are highly undesirable too. I am against totalitarians, as are you, but an admirer of Marx's work. Do I fit into your simplistic categories? Does anyone? The freedoms we are permitted serve the market before they serve people. Markets are a social construct, as is capital, that we can choose to modify or squash. A child starving in a slum for lack of competitiveness, for its inability to serve the interests of capital, is less abstract perhaps.
Clintons are neoliberalss and about to be embraced by the neocons in foreign policy.Serpentsarecreeps , 7 Aug 2014 12:15
Reagan lives in a pan suit.The thing about selfishness and a brutal form of dog eat dog capitalism.yourmiddleclassfarce , 7 Aug 2014 11:46You see, it is a truth axiomatic that we human beings, as all living beings, are fundamentally selfish. We have to be in order to survive, and excel, and advance and perpetuate.
It is not theory but hard biology. You breathe for yourself, eat for yourself, love for yourself, have a family for yourself and so on. People are most affected and hurt if something happens to something or someone who means something to them personally. This is why concepts such as religion and nationality have worked so well, and will continue to even if they evolve in different ways, for they tap into a person's conception of theirself. Of their identity, of their self-definition. People tend to feel worse if something bad happens to someone they know than to a stranger; people tend to feel less bad when something happens to a cockroach than to a dog, simply because we relate better to dogs than to insects...So even our compassion is selfish after a fashion.
Capitalism and Socialism are two ends of the the same human spectrum of innate and hardwired selfishness. One stresses on the individual and the other on the larger group. It's always going to be hard to find the right balance because when you vest excessive power in any selfish ideology, it will begin to eat into the other type of selfishness..
The world revolves around competing selfishnesses...
The global economy is based upon wasting lives and material resources.Serpentsarecreeps , 7 Aug 2014 11:34Designer landfill is no longer an option and neo-liberalism, which places importance of the invention called money over that of people (which is a dehumanising process), was never an option.
It is time for the neo-liberal fake politicians (that is 99.99% of them) to take up politics.
It really is, as ever since it is only another word for change, time for revolution.
Excellent article by one of my favourite writers on this site! :)steverandomno -> richterscalemadness , 7 Aug 2014 11:32LastNameOnTheShelf , 7 Aug 2014 11:27By extension, moving away from a system the shuns those who 'fail' people would be emotionally better off, and with the removal of the constant assessment and individualistic competition, people may feel better able to relate to one another. This would imply that healthy communities would be more likely to flourish, as people would be less likely to ignore those on lower income or of 'lower status'.
Move to what system? What system would achieve this?
Whether you agree or not, it is pretty clear what was being said.
Of course it's clear. George and his followers dislike market based systems. It couldn't be clearer. Even when the subject has little to do with the market, George and his followers always blame it for everything that is wrong with this world. That's pretty much the whole point of this article.
What's never clear is what alternative George and his followers propose that wouldn't result in all of the same flaws that accompany market driven systems. How can they be so sure some of those problems won't be worse? They always seem a bit sketchy, which is remarkable given the furor with which they relentlessly critique the market. We are told of alternatives concepts painted in the broadest of brushes, rich with abstract intangible idealism, but lacking in any pragmatism. We are invited to consider the whole exercise simply as academically self-indulgent navel gazing by the priviledged overeducated minority that comprise much of the Guardian's readership. It's quite disappointing. This article correctly details much of the discontent in the world. But this isn't a revelation. Where are the concrete ideas that can actualy be implemented now?
frontalcortexes at least makes a stab at something a bit more practicle than a 17 paragraph esoteric essay citing ancient Greek.One of the worst thing is that the winners in the market race are showered with things which are fundamentally valueless and far in excess of what they could consume if they weren't, while bare necessities are withheld from the losers.fractals -> Guardiansofwhatnow , 7 Aug 2014 11:12of course, the nature of 'the market' means that all of our ipads and television sets will be obsolete within a year or 2.
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Jul 23, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, just published in English, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.
We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identities are shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality – and its own abnormality – according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don't.
Today the dominant narrative is that of market fundamentalism, widely known in Europe as neoliberalism. The story it tells is that the market can resolve almost all social, economic and political problems. The less the state regulates and taxes us, the better off we will be. Public services should be privatised, public spending should be cut, and business should be freed from social control. In countries such as the UK and the US, this story has shaped our norms and values for around 35 years: since Thatcher and Reagan came to power. It is rapidly colonising the rest of the world.
Verhaeghe points out that neoliberalism draws on the ancient Greek idea that our ethics are innate (and governed by a state of nature it calls the market) and on the Christian idea that humankind is inherently selfish and acquisitive. Rather than seeking to suppress these characteristics, neoliberalism celebrates them: it claims that unrestricted competition, driven by self-interest, leads to innovation and economic growth, enhancing the welfare of all.
At the heart of this story is the notion of merit. Untrammelled competition rewards people who have talent, work hard, and innovate. It breaks down hierarchies and creates a world of opportunity and mobility.
The reality is rather different. Even at the beginning of the process, when markets are first deregulated, we do not start with equal opportunities. Some people are a long way down the track before the starting gun is fired. This is how the Russian oligarchs managed to acquire such wealth when the Soviet Union broke up. They weren't, on the whole, the most talented, hardworking or innovative people, but those with the fewest scruples, the most thugs, and the best contacts – often in the KGB.
Even when outcomes are based on talent and hard work, they don't stay that way for long. Once the first generation of liberated entrepreneurs has made its money, the initial meritocracy is replaced by a new elite, which insulates its children from competition by inheritance and the best education money can buy. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied – in countries like the US and UK – social mobility has greatly declined .
If neoliberalism was anything other than a self-serving con, whose gurus and thinktanks were financed from the beginning by some of the world's richest people (the US multimillionaires Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others), its apostles would have demanded, as a precondition for a society based on merit, that no one should start life with the unfair advantage of inherited wealth or economically determined education. But they never believed in their own doctrine. Enterprise, as a result, quickly gave way to rent.
All this is ignored, and success or failure in the market economy are ascribed solely to the efforts of the individual. The rich are the new righteous; the poor are the new deviants, who have failed both economically and morally and are now classified as social parasites.
The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness.
The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers . It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear. Through a magnificent paradox, it has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta . It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.
The same forces afflict those who can't find work. They must now contend, alongside the other humiliations of unemployment, with a whole new level of snooping and monitoring. All this, Verhaeghe points out, is fundamental to the neoliberal model, which everywhere insists on comparison, evaluation and quantification. We find ourselves technically free but powerless. Whether in work or out of work, we must live by the same rules or perish. All the major political parties promote them, so we have no political power either. In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy.
These shifts have been accompanied, Verhaeghe writes, by a spectacular rise in certain psychiatric conditions: self-harm, eating disorders, depression and personality disorders.
Of the personality disorders, the most common are performance anxiety and social phobia: both of which reflect a fear of other people, who are perceived as both evaluators and competitors – the only roles for society that market fundamentalism admits. Depression and loneliness plague us.
The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our success, we blame ourselves for our failure, even if we have little to do with it .
So, if you don't fit in, if you feel at odds with the world, if your identity is troubled and frayed, if you feel lost and ashamed – it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.
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Jul 23, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.
We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.
Never mind structural unemployment: if you don't have a job it's because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you're feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it's your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.
Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.
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Jun 08, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe
he International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in "the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF, put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless, to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured, law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda. But how can the privatisation of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister, Anna Soubry , suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up. It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead of waking up, smelling the coffee and realising that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
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Submitted by Amanda Matthews on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 9:50pm When political life is reduced to @WinkJul 11, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
After another week saw leading Republicans accosted in public places, many on the left are arguing that harassment is legitimate
The day after Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia, Maxine Waters, the representative for the California 43rd who has become a leader of the anti-Trump resistance within Congress, addressed a rally in Los Angeles. Up until that point, national Democratic leaders had mostly urged respectful protest in response to the Trump administration.
"Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up," she said to cheers from the crowd. "And if you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome any more, anywhere."
In the days that followed, other leading Democrats, among them Nancy Pelosi and David Axelrod, distanced themselves from the comments and called for civility. Trump personally attacked Waters, calling her an "extraordinarily low IQ person". But Waters gave voice, and perhaps legitimacy, to what has become a prominent form of activism since Trump took office: accosting members of his team in public places.
Over the weekend, Steve Bannon was called "a piece of trash" by a heckler at a bookstore; a bartender gave Stephen Miller the middle finger, apparently causing Miller to throw away $80 of sushi he'd just bought in disgust; and Mitch McConnell was chased out of a restaurant in Kentucky by protesters, who followed him to this car yelling "turtle head" and "we know where you live".
These follow similar encounters for other members of Trump's top team. The homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was confronted by protesters chanting "shame" while she ate at a Mexican restaurant. Last week, Scott Pruitt was accosted by Kristin Mink while he was eating lunch. Mink, a teacher, held her two-year-old child as she asked him to resign "before your scandals push you out". Days later, Pruitt did resign, and although he was probably asked to do so by Trump, in his letter he cited "the unrelenting attacks on me" as his reason for leaving.
After each case, the merits of such an approach have been debated – many have called for civility or argued that protesters leave themselves open to attack if they pursue Trump-like techniques. There has been some consensus that encounters like Mink's, which are eloquent and non-aggressive, are more acceptable than when protesters chant personal attacks or use threatening language
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Submitted by edg on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 2:08pmIf you stand with Markos ... @WinkSubmitted by snoopydawg on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 1:37pm Would that have gone for shaming members of Obama's @Wink... you don't stand with most of C99 and most of progressive society. He is wrong, on this and many other things. Where was his (and your) outrage when Obama was droning American citizens, destroying Libya and creating Europe's current refugee crisis, and helping Saudi Arabia wreak havoc on Houthi civilians? How many pies did he throw then? How many Obama administration officials did he publicly shame?
administration too? He did many of the same things that Trump is doing to immigrants. He deported more of them then any president including 56% of them who hadn't committed any crimes. How about shaming them for his drone policies, killing 3 Americans without due process, bombing wedding parties and then the people who came to their rescue? Or the many, many other things he and his admin members did that were absolutely heinous?
Should we have done that to the people in the Bush administration too or how far back should we have been shaming people who worked in a president's administration?
Maybe we should be shaming the democrats who have been voting with the republicans to pass Trump's legislation, cabinet picks and justices? Where would it stop?
Submitted by thanatokephaloides on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 5:49pmwhere it stops @snoopydawgMaybe we should be shaming the democrats who have been voting with the republicans to pass Trump's legislation, cabinet picks and justices? Where would it stop?
Where it should -- with the non-voluntarily-complicit.
the publicly harassing, embarrssing, and running off the oposition then we're really fucked. Or do you seriousy think those tactics won't be repaid in kind?
on public shaming.
#7
Especially in public restaurants.
There is no better way to protest this admin than to shame them in a public place, confront
them while they attempt to swallow a bite of pork chop.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa Submitted by gulfgal98 on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 12:00pm Critical thinking skills seem to be non-existent over there.
Again, Markos and his staff refuse to discuss policy from a positive perspective. Instead, they focus their readers on the outrage de jour and tribalism. The entire purpose of that site is a massive propaganda push designed to keep us divided. And the narrative they keep pushing are not only divisive, but extremely dangerous.
I rarely go there any more, mostly because I would like to keep as many of my remaining brain cells intact. But when I have visited that place, it is a very frightening place to see how Markos (post purge) has herded the remaining members into a small corral, all of them nodding in agreement with whatever gruel Markos and his front pagers are serving up. Submitted by snoopydawg on Thu, 07/19/2018 - 6:29pm Daily Kos should change its name to @gulfgal98
The Daily Tabloid. Or The Daily Gossip because of some of the topics covered there. The new McCarthyism will destroy this country even more:
BAR Book Forum: Jeremy Kuzmarov's and John Marciano's "The Russians are Coming, Again"
"The American people have been constantly manipulated and made to fear the Russian threat when it is the United States that has been the aggressive power."In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week's featured authors are Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano . Kuzmarov is Jay P. Walker Assistant Professor of American History, University of Tulsa. Marciano is Professor Emeritus at SUNY Cortland. Their book is The Russians Are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano: Our book provides a historical perspective on contemporary affairs by showing how the Russo-phobia that has been prevalent in our political discourse over the last four to five years has deep and long historical roots, and has often been used by government leaders to turn public attention away from domestic inequalities by channeling societal resources towards the military sector. During the early Cold War, a period of labor militancy and momentum for the expansion of the New Deal was destroyed by McCarthyism and the Cold War.The Korean War brought on huge military budgets that have never left us and an expansion of the U.S. overseas military base network. These policies were underlain by exaggerated views about the Soviet Union which were stoked by political elites, who had worked for companies that reaped enormous profit from the permanent warfare state. The same forces are behind the renewed efforts to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin and exaggerate the Russian threat, with serious adverse consequences for society that have already been evident. The consequences include a revitalization of the arms race, waging of proxy wars, and a further poisoning of the domestic political culture through the reinvigoration of a McCarthyist discourse and tactics.
"During the early Cold War, a period of labor militancy and momentum for the expansion of the New Deal was destroyed by McCarthyism and the Cold War."
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Jul 18, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
ill-gotten goods are undeserving of protection of law. The DNC and Podesta had no legitimate expectation of privacy in their combinations to defraud the public and steal elections.
It's been imputed that the Russians did this to damage the reputation of Hillary Clinton. To take the alleged damage to reputation angle to its conclusion, truth is an entirely sufficient defense to any charge of libel. What was revealed by an alleged hack was the truth, something that is entirely lacking in the rest of this affair.
As for the alleged theft and public release of email, ill-gotten goods are undeserving of protection of law. The DNC and Podesta had no legitimate expectation of privacy in their combinations to defraud the public and steal elections.
The Russian GRU is accused of revealing that the people who run the DNC and Clinton campaign committee colluded with each other to steal the nomination. The allegedly hacked emails show what they really did and thought during the fraudulent nomination of Hillary Clinton. It might be argued, that whomever revealed the truth actually did a public service for the American people. An odd sort of "act of war," that.
Finally, individual officials and military officers have a limited immunity and are not normally indicted by foreign states for intelligence activities such as electronic surveillance and hacking across borders. That is where the element of harm comes in. The only real precedent for this is the Rainbow Warrior case. In 1985, French intelligence officers blew up and sank a Greenpeace ship by that name anchored in Auckland, NZ harbour, killing a passenger, a Dutch photographer. A UN arbitrator held in that case the French agents were not immune under customary international law to prosecution in a New Zealand court and could be individually tried and jailed, but only because of the death of the victim as part of "a criminal act of violence against property in New Zealand . . . done without regard for innocent civilians." Greenpeace was additionally awarded damages in the UK under international Maritime Law because the vessel was a British-flagged ship.
Also bear in mind, the US and UK both provide immunity to their own intelligence officers and law enforcement officers for hacking and related computer crimes committed against foreign powers. The UK takes that a step further and exempts police officers for domestic hacking:
See, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/15/intelligence-officers-ha...
This is a dangerous precedent, and the likely result is to ignite retaliation and further exacerbate U.S.-Russian tensions. The entire staffs of the NSA, GCHQ and GRU could be similarly "prosecuted," but what will that accomplish? Even if every word of the indictment is fact, the indictment itself violates the norms of international law and this latest "Russiagate" escalation by Mueller seems intended to ratchet up the New Cold War.
That is why "Russiagate" is a legal sham, in my opinion. Even if the alleged Russian hack of the DNC email actually happened as claimed, and even if the hack was with bad intent, there was no real crime or harm in the release of that information. That information was no more the private property of the DNC and Clinton Campaign than a plan to rob a bank belongs to the robbers. Isn't that so, Mr. Mueller?
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Jul 09, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Daniel , Jul 8, 2018 2:07:03 PM | 53
LOL. I see BBC is today reporting:
"Almost all the Syrians who fled to the border with Jordan from an army offensive have now returned to their homes, a top UN official says."
Just days ago they reported that "The offensive in Syria's south-west had earlier forced more than 320,000 people to flee," and were bleating that Jordan should open their border and let them all in.
Today "Anders Pedersen, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Jordan, said that "around 150 to 200 people (are) right now at the border".
320,000 became <200 in a matter of days. LOL
So, once again we see that the civilians were fleeing the fighting, NOT the Syrian government. And once the SAR regains control of an area, almost everyone returns.
Well, at least BBC online did sort of admit it.
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Jul 08, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Syria - OPCW Issues First Report Of 'Chemical Weapon Attack' in Douma
On April 7 2018 Syrian 'rebels' claimed that the Syrian government used chlorine gas and Sarin in an attack on the besieged Douma suburb near the Syrian capital Damascus. They published a series of videos which showed the dead bodies of mainly women and children.
During the night the incident allegedly happened Douma was hit with artillery and air strikes in retaliation for earlier deadly attacks by some 'rebels' splinter groups on Damascus city. Jaish al-Islam, the main 'rebel' group in Douma, had already agreed to leave towards Idleb governorate.
The claim of the 'chemical attack' was made shortly after U.S. President Trump had announced that he wanted U.S. troops to leave Syria. It was designed to "pull him back in" which it indeed did.
Moon of Alabama published several pieces on the issue:
- April 8 - Syria - Timelines Of 'Gas Attacks' Follow A Similar Scheme (Update II)
- April 9 - Syria - Any U.S. Strike Will Lead to Escalation
- April 11 - Syria - A U.S. Attack Would Be Futile - But Serve A Purpose - by M. K. Bhadrakumar
- April 11 - Trump Asks Russia To Roll Over - It Won't
- April 12 - Syria - Threat Of Large War Recedes But May Come Back
- April 13 - Syria - Manipulated Videos Fail To Launch World War III - Updated
- April 14 - F.U.K.U.S. Strikes Syria - Who Won?
- April 16 - Syria - Pentagon Hides Attack Failure - 70+ Cruise Missiles Shot Down
- April 19 - Syria - Who Is Stalling The OPCW Investigation In Douma?
It seemed obvious from the very first claims of the 'gas attack' that it did not happen at all. The Syrian government had no motive to use any chemical weapon or an irritant like chlorine in Douma. It had already won. The incident was obviously staged, like others before it, to drag the U.S. into a new attack on Syria.
Even a prominent opposition outlet said that no 'chemical attack' had taken place. As noted on April 9:
Interestingly the MI6 outlet in Coventry, the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights (SOHR), does not confirm a 'gas' incident. In its version of events some 40 people died after their shelter collapsed:
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights issued a higher death toll, saying at least 80 people were killed in Douma, including around 40 who died from suffocation. But it said the suffocations were the result of shelters collapsing on people inside them.Main stream media, which have quoted SOHR for years, now ignore it and report of a 'chemical attack' as if it were a proven reality.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) send a Fact Finding Mission (FFM) to Douma and investigated the incident. Today it published an interim report and some technical results:
OPCW designated labs conducted analysis of prioritised samples. The results show that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties. Along with explosive residues, various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples from two sites, for which there is full chain of custody. Work by the team to establish the significance of these results is on-going. The FFM team will continue its work to draw final conclusions.The "Sarin" organophosphate use the 'rebels' claimed is thereby debunked. No degradation products of such chemicals were found. The "various chlorinated organic chemicals" are unsurprising. Chlorine is widely used for water purification and cleaning and "chlorinated organic chemicals" will be found in any household.
In the technical notes of the OPCW report note that one of its laboratory found "dichloroacetic acid", "trichloroacetic acid", "chloral hydrate", "trichlorophenol" and "chlorphenol" in some of the samples its fact finding mission took at the claimed incident sites. These are all substances that are no surprise in any upbuild environment and especially within any home. Dichloroacetic acid" is for example "a trace product of the chlorination of drinking water". Chloral hydrate is likewise "a minor side-product of the chlorination of water when organic residues such as humic acids are present". The other substances are also not uncommon and of various household uses.
The other OPCW laboratory found only "No CWC-scheduled chemicals" and "2,4,6-trinitrotoluene" residues in the samples. Trinitrotoluene, also known as TNT, is an explosive widely used in military ammunition. The second laboratory does not report the chlorinated organic chemicals the other laboratory found.
The preliminary OPCW report says nothing about the concentrations in which these substances were found. Without knowing the concentrations, which may may be extremely low, one can not come to further conclusion. The report includes none of the witness statements the fact finding mission took. In various TV reports the medical personal of the one hospital involved in the stunt said that none of their patients were affected by chlorine or chemical weapons.
After the 'rebels' claimed the 'chemical attack' and published their staged videos of stacked bodies U.S. President Trump tweeted that he would retaliate for the strike. Politically he could not pull back from that even when Secretary of Defense Mattis voiced his doubts about the 'rebel' claims. Trump attacked Syria with a series of cruise missiles most of which were shot down by the Syrian air defense. A civil chemical laboratory was destroyed during the attack but no one was hurt.
The now published preliminary OPCW report reinforces the doubts about the 'rebel' claims. There was no 'chemical attack' in Douma. The incident was staged.
One hopes that Trump has learned from this episode and will in future refrain from violent threats over incidents for which no plausible and vetted evidence is provided.
Posted by b on July 6, 2018 at 03:23 PM | Permalink
Comments
Zanon , Jul 6, 2018 3:57:54 PM | 1
Remember the propaganda in the western media and among politicians, they lied and lied, and people like us here were right in our doubts.Ort , Jul 6, 2018 4:03:05 PM | 2Western media again act as warcriminal psyop agent, not to mention a useful idiot for the terrorists!
Thanks for this report, even though in my case you're "preaching to the choir".psychohistorian , Jul 6, 2018 4:13:31 PM | 3I wish I could share your closing optimism: "One hopes that Trump has learned from this episode and will in future refrain from violent threats over incidents for which no plausible and vetted evidence is provided."
Hope springs eternal. But even though I'm not rabidly anti-Trump, I think he will remain unwilling to refrain, or is incapable of refraining, from impulsively responding with bluster, bombast, and chauvinistic bumptiousness when his buttons are pushed, regardless of the validity of the stimulus.
Trump, whose narcissism is second to no one's, is devoid of the introspective humility contemplated by the axiom "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me"; his ego will not process the possibility that he can ever be fooled.
Alas! Trump is definitely a "Threaten first and ask questions later" kind of guy.
Thanks for the report b. I was surfing the net as I prepared a meal and saw that the BBC is pushing this hard.Yag , Jul 6, 2018 4:24:04 PM | 4The BBC is even writing about the April chemical weapon scam as being added proof.....sad
The elite keep trying to start a war with anyone to keep the focus off their failure as the "leaders of the free world" BS. When are the elite going to realize their temper tantrums aren't working?
I hope they don't get their shooting war and I hope their economic war provides their final undoing.....think of the waste of human and other resources over the past 70 years.....let alone the centuries that the private finance/property scam has been going on.
And liquid chlorine (household bleach) combined with another common household chemical used around the world will release chlorine gas.Pnyx , Jul 6, 2018 4:38:34 PM | 5Still, Ard-Tagesschau says the following (originally in German): "In the battles for the Syrian rebel stronghold Duma, chlorine gas was apparently used in April. The OPCW found traces of this in gas cylinder residues."b , Jul 6, 2018 5:04:07 PM | 6Sure enough I agree with you B, but for the MSM the OPCW report reads different.
They cannot admit everything was staged. And the report is not at all clear, so anyone can give it the desired spin.
"The OPCW found traces of this in gas cylinder residues." Claiming that the OPCW found "traces of chlorine" is like claiming one found "traces of oxygen" or "traces of hydrogen" when one found water (H2O).Hmpf , Jul 6, 2018 5:14:09 PM | 7The occurrence of a basic element in a compound is not a "trace" of the basic element. That's chemistry 001. Journalists nowadays seem to lack most basics of higher education.
@5 PynxJen , Jul 6, 2018 6:06:36 PM | 8They didn't find anything relevant. See Appendix 3 of the report. There's no mention of traces of chlorine which I would find hard to believe anyway, they refer to chloride Cl- as in NaCl (table salt) or organic chlorides, of which they do name at least one.
What to expect from the 'Tagesschau' - same old, same old. They're making stuff up again, almost certainly out of willful ignorance and bias.
@6 b
I figure it's even worse than that. They're not even asking the most basic question: Am I a competent person?
My guess is a great many of these folks avoid asking that question on purpose.Pnyx @ 5, B @ 6, Hmpf @ 7:Daniel , Jul 6, 2018 6:35:53 PM | 9It would seem that a common (and deliberate) ploy used by the MSM these days is to use journalists with no particular knowledge, experience or insight in an area to write articles that need that knowledge or experience.
The Guardian employs Olivia Solon, a digital journalist (whose specialty is in writing about and recommending particular IT consumer hardware or software products) based in California, with no knowledge or access to knowledge about Syria, its politics or history, to write an article defending the White Helmets and defame the investigative journalists Eva Bartlett and Vanessa Beeley. That practice seems to be par for the course for The Guardian and other print and online newspapers.
Plus The Guardian and others rely on dubious sources like Bellingcat and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose credentials are laughable at best, as "experts" in their chosen areas of reporting.
All the Western MSM are now entirely driven by the pursuit of sales revenue and profit and are now no different from outlets peddling entertainment. No surprise really when news media outlets are now owned by the same individuals or corporations that own film studios, TV stations, online media and TV channels, book and comics publishers, and games publishers.
Jen @8. Great point on the strategy of using "journalists" with no background in the topic they're tasked to 'report."Pft , Jul 6, 2018 6:56:32 PM | 10And yes, the corporate MSM is definitely profit-driven. When "news" was separate from "entertainment," there was some free press possible, but once they were combined, any imaginary wall between sponsors and newscasters was removed.
Still, considering who owns the MSM, I'd say their main purpose is not to sell commercials, but to sell the most profitable "products" of their owners.
Here in the US, CBS was founded by William Paley, who had been in charge of radio propaganda for the US Army Office of Psychological Warfare. CBS was owned by Westinghouse, which became the world's largest military contractor during WW II.
NBC was owned by GE, which was also one of the largest military contractors in the world.
Neither CBS and NBC ever generated even 5% of their parent companies revenues. The real profits were in consumer products and war. And so, not just their news, but all of their programming promoted world views that encouraged consumption and war.
Ian , Jul 6, 2018 7:01:03 PM | 11Almost all reporters covering international news are working for the various government and private intelligence agencies/think tanks and many domestic reporters as well.
This has been the case for over 50 years if not a century. Many of the critical reports are likely written by the agencies/think tanks. Many CIA interns work at MSM for example and reporters are recruited as early as college if not high school through thr corporate government education system.
Everyone likes to supplement their income and many are convinced its their patriotic duty to disseminate propaganda. For some its a chance to join the elite class, even at a low level. Obviously getting the 6-8 corporate entities that own 80% of the media to go along is not difficult especially as those who go rogue will be punished by members of the business roundtable responsible for most advertising , which would of course dry up as punishment
Now monitoring the internet and social media with big data analytics allows almost Total Information Awareness. They can see in real time whats working and to what extent and what is not. They can then fill holes or modify the story as needed. They know they dont need to get 100% believability. This is why they have not shut down dissenting comments. They are useful, for now.
I suspect some of the stupidest staged events are just experiments to monitor how many people will simply buy anything. At some point they will feel confident enough to simulate an alien invasion of beings capable of taking human form. This will necessitate martial law which thw fearful will gladly accept, and a global governement led by the countries with the largest space force. Funny how the US still needs Russian Rockets to launch satellites so its Space Force has a way to go yet. I guess I wont be around for the fun since time is not a friend of old men
Timothy Hagios , Jul 6, 2018 7:05:17 PM | 12Regarding comments of journalists, the problem may not always be with them. There have been countless discussions on the influence of intelligence agencies. Most people would choose to do the right thing when given the choice. However, if the choices are following orders or "suicide by nailgun", most people would choose to live another day.
Pft @ 10james , Jul 6, 2018 7:06:44 PM | 13Speaking of experiments to monitor how many people will believe anything, some good claims from the MSM come to mind: 40% of North Koreans are on crystal meth, the Russians killed the last clown in Aleppo, and the Breatharians (people who purportedly survive on only air and sunlight).
thanks b... unfortunately, i tend to see it much like what @8 jen says... these folks are unsure about their next pay check and are happy to write with a chatham house /scl / cambridge analytica slant knowing what is expected of them.. they ask no questions and are unwilling to articulate the false flags that have shaped all this discussion of opcw and chemical attacks in syria.. in this respect i also agree with @5 pnyx... they are unwilling or unable to raise these questions for fear of dismissal.. more and more people recognize what a poor state the msm is in today.. that is my hope anyway..ben , Jul 6, 2018 7:47:04 PM | 14b said:"One hopes that Trump has learned from this episode and will in future refrain from violent threats over incidents for which no plausible and vetted evidence is provided."Mark2 , Jul 6, 2018 8:19:28 PM | 15Unfortunately, probably no one here in the land of theater, will ever hear about this report. As to DJT, he'll do whatever it takes to enhance his appearance with the morons. His learning curve only bends toward his own enhancement. To him and his minions, truth doesn't matter...
There's unlikely to be any real investigative journalism regarding opcw reports, considering the papers in uk are owned by mega millionaires who profit from war and the Middle East land grab.oil ect. Plus the owners featured largely in the off shore tax haven leaks- relavent here not so much regarding tax, but what that hidden money is invested in, Gun running, slave labour, buying rebels? It's a small world, media moguls own it.bevin , Jul 6, 2018 8:33:50 PM | 16
Try these Mark2Ghost Ship , Jul 6, 2018 8:43:25 PM | 17https://skwawkbox.org/2018/07/07/bbcs-outright-fake-news-tonight-on-douma-chlorine-attack/
https://skwawkbox.org/2018/07/07/video-bbc-news-joins-fake-news-scandal-over-opcws-douma-chlorine-report/The British-created Anglo-American funded black propaganda organisation, the so-called White Helmets were the primary source for the claims of Sarin use by the SAG in Douma. In as just world, the White Helmets as proven liars would now become international pariahs. That they will still be hailed as heroes in the West and western MSM so just how sick the West and western MSM really are. Perhaps now that the OPCW is free to cast blame for "chemical weapons incidents", they should name and shame the United Kingdom for its black propaganda.Mark2 , Jul 6, 2018 8:55:31 PM | 18Thanks Bevin @ 16fast freddy , Jul 6, 2018 9:01:43 PM | 19
I do follow that site, but had'nt looked recently. Really Good, no doubt your aware of 'the canary ' good article on this subject! Both sites I recommend to one and all.Well, we all knew a false flag op was pending. So here it is. Also Trump is a POS.Daniel , Jul 6, 2018 9:24:19 PM | 20Thanks, bevin for the links to yet another site I'll be trying to find the time to visit. :-)Virgile , Jul 6, 2018 10:12:59 PM | 21Both of those articles lay out the BBC BS succinctly and clearly.
james , Jul 6, 2018 10:40:08 PM | 22When the White Helmets and the rebels staged the 'Douma' chemical attack they were probably expecting that Douma would not be liberated and that no serious inspection would take place to debunk the 'fake' attack. That was bad luck for them. Contrary to the other chemical "attacks" locations, an inspection on location has taken place early enough and the masks may be falling.
@21 virgile... exactly.... all the money the usa/uk have sunk into the white helmets and etc - and very little to nothing to show for it..chet380 , Jul 6, 2018 10:59:46 PM | 23@3 Psychohistorian --adamski , Jul 7, 2018 12:19:58 AM | 24Your early call that the MSM would go with the chlorine findings to support the attack is proving true across the board -- there is not a chance that an admission of having been mistaken is going to happen.
Chloral Hydrate...?! This was an old school sedative medication. Seems appropriate somehow.V , Jul 7, 2018 12:36:26 AM | 25Finally, straight shooting from the OPCW. About time...Red Ryder , Jul 7, 2018 1:20:06 AM | 26It is Highly Likely that all the gas attacks were staged as false flags. Exceedingly Likely.fairleft , Jul 7, 2018 1:37:18 AM | 27james @13 I think it's clearly true, not just a hope, that fewer and fewer people take the media seriously. Those who still watch mainstream and cable 'news' programs are a pretty small minority, and the MSNBC/FOX side of that is probably acknowledged even by most of its consumers, as 'my side' comfort food rather than 'news' as we used to understand it.BM , Jul 7, 2018 2:00:06 AM | 28The media's lock-step Western-Empire perspective _is_ frightening, but we also need to remember recent election results that have gone against the empire's wishes. Just a couple days ago in Mexico, for example. Real alternative and real (whether socialist, left, right, or libertarian) populist media is having an impact, I think, and we may be able to turn things around in the West before the next world wars start.
BM , Jul 7, 2018 2:20:22 AM | 29There are critically important information here from Vanessa Beelley False Flag Fail: How Syrian Civilians Derailed White Helmet 'Chemical' Stunt in Eastern Ghouta that Bernhardt has not mentioned.
Vanessa Beeley interviewed at least two witnesses who - seeing that the government forces were about to liberate Hamouriya village in Douma from the terrorists under whose control they had suffered for 6 years and thereby feeling empowered - on 6th March at 3pm decided to publicly protest against the terrorists by marching through Hamouriya carrying Syrian national flags. They were met by members of the White Helmets and the terrorists, who blamed them explicitly for ruining their chemical weapons false flag.
Critically importantly, the White Helmets had already released news for the claimed false flag that morning and the night before, and they had already collected 30 dead bodies from all over Douma and brought them to the hospital, and had already started filming.
The protest critically negated the propaganda message of the false flag chemical attack - if the Syrian Army had really been dropping chemical weapons on Hamouriya the night before with intent to kill civilian women and children, why would the civilians immediately afterwards start marching through the city carrying Syrian national flags, and having raised the flag at key points in the city? It makes the whole flase flag [even more] implausible. The White Helmets then wrapped one hostage in a Syrian flag and shot him dead as a warning. Fortunately the two witnesses interviewed (and hopefully most of the protesters) were able to escape soon afterwards with the help of the nearby Syrian Army.
The White Helmets specifically stated that the protesters had ruined their chemical attack and ruined their communications with the UN, and that the Americans would not come to their assistance because of it. This incident explains important aspects of the false flag:
1) So close to impending defeat, the terrorists were really desperate to induce the Americans to save them, and really believed they would do so;
2) Having already announced the false flag the previous night and having collected so many dead bodies in preparation, the existence of the protest creates a credibility problem for the terrorists and White Helmets, to which they seem to have responded with various conflicting signals;
3) In particular, the conflicting signals given out by the MI6 proxies SOHR I would read as a damage limitation act specifically in response to the civilian protest;
4) It would appear that MI6 feared news of this protest would be spread, so that they needed to protect their proxies.
Unfortunately, despite this information being published by Vanessa Beeley, I haven't seen any other mention of it. The protesters endangered their lives by this protest, at least one of them [or another hostage? - this is not clear] was shot dead for it, and all of them were sentenced to death. They deserve due publicity for it and it is really important to an understanding of the incident as a whole.
Bernhardt, I hope you will update the article above to include some of Vanessa Beeley's reporting on this incident.
Bernhardt, I am afraid I don't share your apparent confidence in this OPCW report. It is far too little and lopsided after months of investigation, and appears to be designed to test the waters for a decision confirming that chlorine was used as a weapon, and to coordinate with the MSM to prepare the ground for such a decision. In that case, the MSM reaction to the report is highly consistent with such an objective.V , Jul 7, 2018 2:31:49 AM | 30Why did the the report make no caveats about the chlorine compounds, why did they include no data about concentrations, why did they emphasise the chain of custody of the (probably trivial) chrorine compound samples (and only those samples), why no information on witness testimony, why no mention of the witness testimony in the Hague, why mention (totally irrelevant) testimony of alleged witnesses in Turkey and biological samples taken in Turkey for which no plausible chain of custody exists?
Posted by: V | Jul 7, 2018 12:36:26 AM | 25
Finally, straight shooting from the OPCW.
About time...This report is a scandal, an outrage. This report itself is a false flag, it is designed to appease those observers who know the incident was a false flag by using carefully ambiguous wording, while preparing the ground for a full-blown 99% dishonest and 100% misleading report condemning the Syrian government.
The correct response to this report is very loud and active and persistent protest against it.
The Russians should make very strongly worded complaints and criticisms about it both at the OPCW and at the UN (maybe they have, I wouldn't know).
BM | Jul 7, 2018 2:20:22 AM | 29Kalen , Jul 7, 2018 3:09:25 AM | 31You may be correct; we'll see...
For Trump self inflicted ego wound somebody will pay.V , Jul 7, 2018 7:09:29 AM | 35Mark2 | Jul 7, 2018 6:29:06 AM | 34dfnslblty , Jul 7, 2018 9:25:39 AM | 39So, following your logic (which I mostly agree); what value/good are elections?
None, near as I can tell.
Time for something new?
But then I digress; what to do about false flag chemo attacks?If the OPCW can no longer be trusted; then what? The U.S. has done an admirable job of destroying trust between countries.
¿Has anyone here read Peter Ford's piece on OPCW? I believe it fits somewhere in the discussion. Unfortunate this choir is so small. Keep writing and Protest Loudly!Mike , Jul 7, 2018 9:29:28 AM | 40HiMike , Jul 7, 2018 9:35:41 AM | 41
Nice article, however I tend to disagree partially on the last part, the US administration and the alleged rebels are two faces of the same coins, rebels are funded by the administration from various sources and they acr in response to commands from it, see the southern command operations where this approach of command was openly divulged by various reports and accounts. The reason for the Administration to get into Syria was to further weaken the middle eastern countries for a specific and obvious reason, and each strike and wall destroyed goes into this direction..the bigger picture explains it all..... to clarify , every "regime" that threatens Israel openly is to be brought down ... Libya, Iraq,, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iran , Egypt's Nasser and the list goes on..bevin , Jul 7, 2018 10:22:39 AM | 42More on the BBC and this story:james , Jul 7, 2018 10:50:35 AM | 43
https://skwawkbox.org/2018/07/07/bbc-forced-to-correct-douma-gas-story-after-skwawkbox-exposes-fake-news/And Craig Murray too:
"Yesterday the OPCW reported that, contrary to US and UK assertions in the UN security council, there was no nerve agent attack on jihadist-held Douma by the Syrian government, precisely as Robert Fisk was execrated by the entire media establishment for pointing out. The OPCW did find some traces of chlorine compounds, but chlorine is a very commonly used element and you have traces of it all over your house.
The US wants your chicken chlorinated. The OPCW said it was "Not clear" if the chlorine was weaponised, and it is plain to me from a career in diplomacy that the almost incidental mention is a diplomatic sop to the UK, US and France, which are important members of the OPCW.
"Trump's reaction to yet more lying claims by the UK government funded White Helmets and Syrian Observatory, a reaction of missile strikes on alleged Syrian facilities producing the non-existent nerve agent, was foolish. May's leap for British participation was unwise, and the usual queue of Blairites who stood up as always in Parliament to support any bombing action, stand yet again exposed as evil tools of the military industrial complex.
"Hillary Clinton, true to form, wanted more aggressive military action than was undertaken by Trump. Hillary has been itching to destroy Syria as she destroyed Libya. Libya was very much Hillary's war and – almost unreported by the mainstream media – NATO bombers carried out almost 14,000 bombing sorties on Libya and devastated entire cities...."
If you put Murray, MoA, The Skwawkbox, Strategic Culture, Dissident Voice and a few of the better aggregators together you've got a better Daily Newspaper than The Guardian or Le Monde ever was, far better.
By the way, unless I'm mistaken (it wouldn't be a first!) Ghandi was asked what he thought about Western Civilisation when he replied that "It would be a good idea". It still is an idea worth looking into. It would look just like socialism.
@27 fairleft.. i hope you are correct on that..et Al , Jul 7, 2018 10:53:24 AM | 44@28 BM... i think it was daniel who left that link here at moa a few days ago.. i read it..
@29 BM.. i tend to agree with you, but see @6 b for more clarity...
@32 pft... it is my observation that the msm in the usa is so usa centric, they know shit about canada, or the rest of the world.. i could be wrong, but that is my general view on what ''americans'' consume for news in the usa.. the indoctrination is heavy.. i would like to think people like @33 V are the norm, but i mostly think people are tuned out of the news - excluding the older generation - above 60 or 70 especially - who still consume the shit via the tv..
@41 mike.. in other words, the usa foreign policy is built around looking after israel.. most here at moa would agree with that.. will the usa ever get it's head out of israels ass? one can hope, lol..
craig murrays post from today that bevin quotes @42.. good comments bevin!
Motherboard.com: Japan Just Executed the Leaders of an LSD-Fueled Doomsday Science CultNoirette , Jul 7, 2018 11:00:54 AM | 45
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gy3xex/what-is-aum-shinrikyo-sarin-attack####
This one was real, but even the Aum Shinrikyo sect showed all those years ago how how difficult it is to pull off an effective chemical weapons attack, requiring an enclosed space like the metro system. But that's never the point. Instilling mass fear and panic, not to mention being 'news friendly' is what makes such attacks, sponsored proxy false-flag or not, so enduringly popular . To borrow a well known ad phrase ' Once you pop, you can't stop '
Journalists nowadays seem to lack most basics of higher education. b.Curtis , Jul 7, 2018 11:10:52 AM | 46Yes + they have zero comprehension of basic numbers. Amazing. (Nobody wants to read my exs..) Nowadays, they are not supposed to have any knowledge whatsoever; they have become scribal hacks, merely write, film, show, expose, what they are told or do haphazard copy-pasta.
They are bought servants, nah compradors, and their presence is completely useless (A.I. and some guidance, input from above by 7 -say- very smart ppl would do the job faster and cheaper, for the whole W world) they are actors whose function is to pretend that a 'fourth estate' is necessary to uncover facts, inform the populace, air dissenting points of view, have debates, and so on Lies.
(comes to mind, book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udo_Ulfkotte)
Aware they are past their sell-date, one can smell the desperation. The reaction is to become more subservient, toe the line, preserve what can be, become more in-groupy and shaft colleagues who might stray away from the prescribed hyper-rigid guide-lines. Collectively, they have fantastic potential power and means of control (network savvy, present at the switches, etc.) but they are so dumbed down and terrified of status and monetary loss they are like deer caught in the headlights, to stay on track they secretly pray at dawn, conjure the fates, or whatever. The mansion with pool, the ginormous mortgage, Junior, etc. in the US. In France, the monetary aspect is less vital; being excluded from the movers and shakers, the in-ppl, the heady, sexy, wonderful Parisian life.. no.. no.. help
Part of how a 'post-truth' environment comes about. The other driver is the underlying aim, i.e. the imposition of one narrative over another, the Rovian creation of realities which can only be managed by wielding power violent enough to make the 'other - the people - the adversary' accept and bow down to the proffered narrative, and never object, call out the lies. Using this template requires careful calculations which, it appears, have gone off kilter in the US.
Maybe one should consider that there were never any Chem-WMD attacks in Syria at all (pace Seymour Hersh, heh, but that is a personal beef of mine..) - there are always limited hangout ppl who try to cobble up one narrative with another and make a living out o that.
So far, I'm seeing BBC (as above), al Jazeera, ABC, Reuters, Qatar Tribune twisting the report to say it was a Chlorine attack. PressTV, RT, and Sputnik News say the report clears SAA.Rob , Jul 7, 2018 1:36:25 PM | 50And then there's this: https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/07/06/world/europe/06reuters-syria-crisis-chemicalweapons.htmlMark2 , Jul 7, 2018 2:24:33 PM | 55
and this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/25/world/middleeast/syria-chemical-attack-douma.html
both from the New York Times.The latter is an absurd "virtual crime scene" in which crack reporters claim to prove that the Syrian government used chemical weapons on their own people.
So, as expected, this latest OPCW report will have no effect on the establishment narrative. The good guys vs bad guys scenario is the only approved version, and with no alternative versions being offered in the MSM, it is the one that the most people will believe.
Den Kelley Abe @ 53Patrick Armstrong , Jul 7, 2018 7:14:13 PM | 61O k see if I can help, kind of kill or cure! The shock to us all may be to much ! There is no squirrel ! They made it up, yes I know it's kind of tuff !we all looked for a squirrel they distracted us. There was no people poisoned by Russians in Salisbury, Amesbury the chlorine attack in Syria yes made up.What the tv and papers said was a lie, to program us all like a laptop !!!
Whilst we were out squirrel huntin, they got through half of world 3 we never noticed. They formed a dictatorship. Sold all your urban buildings services and council houses to one an other. And devalued us all by about 60% But i'l go easy for now. Couse from there on things went down hill !!! Warm regards
By the way, I read somewhere recently that Chlorine rapidly degrades Sarin and therefore no one would use them together. But I can't find the reference now. Can anybody help?fast freddy , Jul 7, 2018 8:12:38 PM | 6247. hrc = Bloodthirsty killer; sociopath coming out the gate. Likewise. POS. Trump was not a mass murderer until a couple months in. Didn't take him long to join the club.Guerrero , Jul 7, 2018 8:43:14 PM | 63Posted by: Jen | 8Pnyx @ 5, B @ 6, Hmpf @ 7:It would seem that a common (and deliberate) ploy used by the MSM these days is to use journalists with no particular knowledge, experience or insight in an area to write articles that need that knowledge or experience.I wonder if these "news reporters" were not selected based upon their "sex appeal" to a superior?
Posted by: Pft | @10
I suspect some of the stupidest staged events are just experiments to monitor how many people will simply buy anything.I agree. These zany false flag events might be designed to map the approach to an asymptote .
(In analytic geometry, an asymptote (/ˈæsɪmptoʊt/) of a curve is a line such that the distance between
the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the x or y coordinates tends to infinite stupidity)
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Jun 26, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
The World Cup proceeds as if carried along by an unstoppable force, pouring very positive concrete into foundations somewhere, giving ordinary people another vision of a country that has always fascinated me.
Graham Phillips, an Englishman and journalist, who joined with the Donbass people in their resistance to the coup in Ukraine made an interesting podcast echoing b.'s piece about Shaun Walker, my particular enemy. He quietly demolishes Walker's claims that Russians were singing Nazi songs in a nightclub.
All in all there is a feeling of tensions subsiding a little, a feeling that one can carry on a bit with one's life. The only thing I have learned is to enjoy such moments even if stuff like Yemen is agonizing. Agonizing but not existential as Syria is. But is that not just a bit cynical?
Posted by: Lochearn | Jun 24, 2018 6:05:53 PM | 25
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Jun 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Daniel | Jun 20, 2018 11:53:53 PM | 34
When I saw that Shawn Walker Tweet, and the mostly brilliant take-down responses, I hoped b would mention it. I can think of no one better suited to address this particularly putrid propaganda. Bravo! And to the (almost) universally excellent barfly commentariat.
BBC created a whole genre of Russian World Cup scare mongering. One they did was on the deadly threat of "Russian Football Hooligans." RT did an excellent 4 minute job of combining journalism with humor to expose that bit of 100% Fake News.
They also expanded it into a full set-piece. Here's the trailer:
Red Ryder , Jun 20, 2018 11:57:21 PM | 35
The Media is a complete weapon for propaganda. The "writers" are propagandists. There never is a report on Russia from the Western media that does not vilify or demonize Russia or Russians in some way.The World Cup is experienced by hundreds of thousands of tourists in Russia. They are going to be the truth-tellers.
The event, like Sochi Winter Olympics will stand for itself. It will be splendid.And the lies will die.
Never expect the truth from the Media.
Always expect the Russian people to be extraordinary. They have demonstrated it for a century.
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Jun 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
The Guardian's Moscow Bureau Chief joined in and also retweets the Walker claim spreading it further and further:
Andrew Roth @Andrew__Roth - 14:37 UTC - 19 Jun 2018Andrew Roth Retweeted Shaun Walker
Absurd the responses to this incident that multiple correspondents saw. And their point is that it was an outlier in what sounded like a fine night at the football. Context is all here, should they ignore it instead?If two British scribes say they heard something, which each describes differently, then it must be true. "Evidence? We don't report with evidence. Trust us."
This morning a Russian blogger posted some evidence (machine translated from Russian):
Borisenko @amdn_blog - 7:58 UTC - 20 Jun 2018Remember yesterday there was a lot of talk about the English journalist who wrote about the alleged Russians who sang Nazi songs in a bar in Volgograd? They found them. But they were not Russian, but... British. Actually, for that, it's e... Lo must be beaten. This is Volgograd! Stalingrad!
The attached a video shows three drunk British blokes in an 'Irish' pub where the menu is written in Cyrillic letters and World Cup flags hang from the ceiling. The blokes sing a line about putting someone to Auschwitz, give the Hitler salute and shout "Sieg Heil!" The pub where the video was taken seems to be a different one than the Harat's Walker and Luhn visited. But the point was made.
Fact is that the Guardian and the Telegraph are full of anti-Russian propaganda. There is no piece in them about Russia or Putin that does not include snide and fear mongering or repeats long refuted claims about this or that incident for which Russia is claimed to be responsible. The military industrial complex gave order to condemn Russia and the "western" main stream media follow through.
Both of the scribes quoted English fans who lament about the false picture they had when they arrived in Russia. Might that have something to do with the constant stream of russophobe trash the British media provides? Should a British correspondent in Russia take some time to reflect upon that?
But the two scribes go off to have lots of beer to then send spurious, late-night, anti-Russian claims to their 100,000 followers without providing any evidence. Then they lament about being called out for that.
They are mediocre propagandists who's words no one trusts or believes. One must truly pity these guys.
Posted by b on June 20, 2018 at 04:14 PM | Permalink
FHTEX | Jun 20, 2018 7:20:21 PM | 11
Pity these guys? Not really. Remember, they are not journalists. They are propagandist, hired mouthpieces. They say what they are scripted to say by their corporate bosses, it doesn't matter how absurd, the point is to just hammer and hammer and hammer away and mold public opinion via brute force. The old Soviet Union had more subtle liars.
But don't pity them. They made their choice, and are well rewarded for their services. With respect, I would rather despise them.
Vitor Vieira , Jun 20, 2018 7:43:08 PM | 16
And Shaun is trying to sneak out: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/20/police-england-fans-russia-nazi-salute-world-cupPhilK , Jun 20, 2018 8:00:26 PM | 17RT's coverage of the Nazis:Lochearn , Jun 20, 2018 8:11:39 PM | 19England fans give Nazi salutes, sing Hitler song in World Cup city invaded during WWII (VIDEO)
I can't prove Shaun Walker and Luke Harding are MI5 operatives but I feel it in my gut. I got banned from the Guardian for contrasting Walker's article on the supposedly insanely loud, strident music in hotels at the Sochi Olympics with a real journalist who said the music was quiet and varied between classical and soft pop.Mischi , Jun 20, 2018 8:17:25 PM | 20Most people are reading the sports journalists, thankfully, and watching them...
@Peter 2 - I was going to write the same thing about Shaun Walker. He tried to start a war singlehandedly. I am amazed he still has a job!PhilK , Jun 20, 2018 8:54:03 PM | 21@20 I am amazed he still has a job!Bart Hansen , Jun 20, 2018 9:04:03 PM | 22Trying to start a war IS his job.
Every day the NYT has one or two op-ed pieces critical of Putin/Russia. Today it was by Alexey Kovalev, and titled "The World Cup Is Fun. Except for the Russians Being Tortured." I'm still waiting for a mention that the host team scored 8 goals in their two matches.Patrick Armstrong , Jun 20, 2018 9:12:16 PM | 24Shawn Wanker personally witnessed Russian AFVs invading Ukraine when he was 1) too far away from the border to see them 2) had amazingly forgotten to bring his smart phone so he could take a geolocated photo. So his credibility is low. As in lower than snake shit.Den Lille Abe , Jun 20, 2018 9:34:59 PM | 25Aaaaaaaaaand in the meantime, people around the world are are amazed at the beautiful stadiums, the fantastic atmosphere, the great welcome from local people who ar suddenly "invaded", they wonder at the well functioning machine behind it all, the wonder at the tight security and safety of spectators and sport stars.Jen , Jun 20, 2018 11:04:49 PM | 31Congratulations Russia and Russian people, well done! You are doing this exceptionally well. The World Cup, will be billions of dollars worth in positive reviews.
Great to see that Brit fans laid a wreath at the memorial. Shows May and Johnson are not connected to the public,
Seeing that the homophobia and racism claims are not sticking well in their relentless anti-Russian narrative, the MSM has dug up the case of the Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov who is currently on hunger strike while in jail in Labytnangi, in northern Siberia, for planning to carry out terrorist acts on public infrastructure and a statue in Crimea and to set fire to government office buildings in Simferopol in 2014, and is flaying it for all it's worth.Grieved , Jun 20, 2018 11:28:38 PM | 32
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/ukrainian-film-director-on-hunger-strike-in-a-russian-prison-casts-dark-cloud-over-world-cup-20180620-p4zmmr.htmlThe sports writers are the truth, while the established anchors are the party line. It was never any different.We forget the upside. We forget how much energy it takes to keep a lie believable. We forget how the west has to strain against incredulity itself in order to counter the random and unschooled manifestations of the truth.
What a tangled web the west has woven for itself through its deceits. How these presstitutes had to work through the night, and sweat the details, to try to patch the holes in the sinking ship - while those who were part of the truth of discovering the reality of Russia slept soundly, and probably with a great beer buzz, and the ring of real people in their ears.
We have to do something, but we don't have to do everything, in order to counter the lies of the liars. The universe itself - the very nature of reality - abhors untruth, and causes the truth to show the shallowness of lies on countless, unscripted occasions.
And these occasions are usually a party. A celebration by ordinary people, joining in common understanding.
What the rulers most fear.
Because all it takes is a small consensus of 10-15 percent of any population and you have an activist force. They know this. Minions like the presstitutes mentioned here probably don't understand this in words, but in their bowels they know.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
meticulousdoc , 3 Jun 2018 16:16Just as conservative Christian theology provides an excuse for sexism and homophobia, neoliberal language allows powerful groups to package their personal preferences as national interests – systematically cutting spending on their enemies and giving money to their friends.
And when the conservative "Christians" form a neoliberal government, the results are toxic for all, except themselves and their coterie.
Nothing short of a grass roots campaign (such as that waged by GetUp!) will get rid for us of these modern let-them-eat-cake parasites who consider their divine duty to lord over us.
An excellent article, we need more of them.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Alpo88 -> DesignConstruct , 3 Jun 2018 17:20
A "legal system of tax evasion", written like that, in quotes, is obviously a metaphor with an intended sarcasm. Clearly, logically, if a taxation system is legal, by using it you are not "evading" taxes, which is an illegal act.... Anyway, everybody seems to have understood my intention but you. Well, now you also know.DesignConstruct -> Alpo88 , 3 Jun 2018 16:52The magic of Neoliberalism is to transform acts that should be illegal into legal ones. In fact they do so explicitly as their argument for reducing taxation is exactly that of getting rid or decreasing the problem of illegal tax evasion.... so they say. Their problem is that we have no evidence that tax evasion decreases under Neoliberalism on top of the legal tax minimisation already provided. The only thing that happens under Neoliberalism is that the Tax Office tends to be under-resourced and everybody likes to conveniently look somewhere else.
A "legal system of tax evasion" is a non sequitur, what they have done is create a set of tax laws that enable more opportunities for tax avoidance by the well off, and Kerry very correctly took advantage of it. If you can, get a copy of the Senate hearing - it's gold.Splatgadget -> NME765 , 3 Jun 2018 16:51Agreed, but I'll raise you Kleptocracy.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Carlosthepossum -> innercity leftie , 3 Jun 2018 19:10
Economics has a lot of similarities with Theology.
People can believe whatever interpretation fits with their own indoctrination.
The difference being there is a truth to economics that seems to be invisible to most people, major economists included.
Your post highlights some of the stark realities that people just refuse to accept for some inexplicable reason.
Maybe the better economic managers will come to the rescue or maybe there will be a collective awakening when in a moment of clarity we start to realise how badly we have been conned.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Janeee -> Jas636 , 3 Jun 2018 21:52
There are many societies that tolerate a certain degree of economic inequality, but still provide decent living conditions, services and infrastructure for most citizens. The notion that we either have extreme inequality or extreme poverty is empirically and morally empty.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Further down the thread, 'Weakaspiss' makes a pertinent observation; " government has forgotten they govern for all, and have a primary duty for those who are least able to prosper."In fact, they've "forgotten" nothing.
Instead, they've fallen for the self-serving blandishments of Libertarian dogma.
Where have I learned of these ?
By reading the posts of GA's resident Libertarians.
The sub-texts of which are wonderfully instructive.1. Nothing is more important than the individual.
2. And as an individual and a Libertarian, I am infinitely superior to you.
3. Plus I resent paying taxes, which are outright theft.
4. Since I believe, utterly without basis in reality, that taxes levied on hard-working, wonderful freedom-loving ME, sustain the likes of lazy, parasitical YOU.
5. Meanwhile, govt, if it cannot be destroyed, must always be demonised and underfunded. And so-called 'programs of public benefit' for the parasites--like Medicare, or the ABC-- must be sold outright to the private sector.
6. No I don't want to debate about it, if there's a chance I'll lose the argument.
My ego demands I win every time..
7. Certainly not with losers of lower social status, who were 'educated' in a union-run public school.
8. And don't even come near me, losers. Yuk ! You're probably not even white !
9. Because I socialise only within my own tribe, thank you very much.
10. Besides, you're probably living off my taxes.
11. Did I mention taxes somewhere ?
12. Taxes are theft.Our conservatives have "forgotten" NOTHING.
Instead, they've fallen for a sociopathic ideology which tells them their least attractive impulses are positively praiseworthy.
Hence the nasty, ego-driven tone of current political life.
Injected directly into the bloodstream of our body politic by a Lying Rodent.
Its philosophy may be simply statedDoes your policy shit all over people you never cared for anyway ?
THEN DO IT.
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Jun 06, 2018 | profile.theguardian.com
This message is clear and concise. It is however never going to be heard beyond the 'Guardian'.jclucas , 3 Jun 2018 23:25The MSM are hardly going to publish this article, nor are they going to reference it, why should they? It goes against everything they have been fighting for and the tin ear of their readership are unwilling to change teir views.
The only thing that they understand is money and the concentration of wealth. This misonception as Dennis So far this has been handed to them on a plate, the taxation system has enabled them to manipulate an multiply their earnings. So much of money the has nothing to do with adding value to this countries economy but is speculative in nature based on financial and overseas instruments.
No is the time for our government to take the lead and start as the Victorian ALP have done and invest in people and jobs on the back of strategic investment. It is a fallacy that governments don't create jobs they, through their policies do just that.
Friends of mine who make a living out of dealing both in stock and wealth creating schemes have no loyalty to this country, they are self motivated and libertarian in persuasion. "Government should get out of the way!" This is nothing short of scandalous.
Unless we stand up for our rights and a civil society that provides adequate provision for fair and balanced policy making,xwe will continue until we will see an implosion. History is littered with examples of revolution based on the kind of inequality we are seeing happen in this country. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
It is indeed important to make the distinction between the ideology of neoliberalism - the ideology of private enterprise is good, and public spending is bad - and the operational system of crony capitalism - the game of mates played by government and the special interests.Aldeano , 3 Jun 2018 23:20And it is certainly equally important to call out the monumental hypocrisy involved in the government's application of the ideology's set of rules to the powerless and public and the government's application of corrupt practice rules to the special interests.
The system is destroying the egalitarian character of Australia and fanning the flames of nativist authoritarianism here.
But what's even more dangerous is the fundamental dishonesty that the system necessitates, and the alienating influence it has - on top of the growing economic inequality.
The system has destroyed the economic and environmental viability and sustainability of the planet on which human civilization depends.
What is becoming increasingly clear to more and more of the public is that - simple put- the system cannot be allowed to go on as it has been proceeding because it threatens the future of civilization on earth.
Change is imperative now. However, how that will unfold is unclear, as well as, the toll the destruc5turing system will take.
What is clear is that a great restructuring must happen - and soon.
The neo liberals are intent on defacing Australia. Their pusstulant tentacles stretch into our classrooms forcing our kids to believe in their god. They tell us that white millionaire farmers deserve refugee status and all the benefits bestowed on poor persecuted minorities. They tell us that the disgustingly rich deserve tax relief. Their's is a world where their children are entitled to safe electoral sets. But they can be defeated and sent to misery. We did it in the Same Sex Marriage fiasco and we can do it to their more insidious behaviours. Write to your local member. Barrage them with emails. Write to their propaganda Letters to the Editor. Donate to GetUp. Keep on keeping on.Alan Ritchie -> Paul Felix , 3 Jun 2018 23:02Neoliberalism, the dogma was was sourced from Milton Freidman's Monetarism economic theory. When it morphed into the 'Greed is Good' credo is unclear.familygardener , 3 Jun 2018 20:37
Guess you have to call the disease something, so Neoliberalism it is.So anyway.https://theaimn.com/day-to-day-politics-is-capitalism-stuffed/Is capitalism stuffed?
There is much debate at the moment about which Party has the best economic plan going forward. The Coalition maintains that the best way is by giving large tax breaks to business.
This is currently being called 'Pre GST theory or old style trickle down economics'.
Lenore Taylor writes:
"The investment bank once chaired by Malcolm Turnbull has backed the view that much of the benefit from the Coalition's company tax cuts could flow to offshore investors, as the prime minister insisted his plan was the best way to ensure continued economic growth".
"The domestic benefits would be far bigger if companies used the tax cut to grow their business, but according to Goldman Sachs "survey evidence suggests that companies are less likely to voluntarily lower the dividend payment ratio", in other words, the real-world impact was likely to be closer to the scenario where 60% of the benefit flowed offshore"
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Friarbird -> 64newc , 3 Jun 2018 17:56
"Neoliberalism will literally be the death of democracy."Scryboy -> spharks , 3 Jun 2018 17:55In fact, that's the plan.
Openly alluded to by the IPA's Gary Johns;".... a cardinal tenet of libertarianism is to keep democracy in its place, to regard it as an activity of limited application. Government's role is to depoliticise much of life, to make it less amenable to public dispute....."
From Margo Kingston's 'Not happy, John !' (2005).
Get on to the 'Catallaxy' site.
You'll soon find out what Libertarian sociopaths think of democracy.I actually think many people go along with neoliberalism because they perceive it will turn out well for them. It's the every man for himself Darwinian approach to life, but the LNP reflects that view most closely. It's the one where everyone is a welfare scrounger, but if for some reason you end up needing welfare, you deserve it because of all the tax you paid, even though you've been minimising your tax for decades.64newc , 3 Jun 2018 17:44Neoliberalism will literally be the death of democracy.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
The other great con is convincing the public that voting for anyone but the two major parties is "wasting your vote". This political duopoly means only those interests are ever represented and that has also led to Australia's systematic decline. Yes it's true that the majors hold majority in parliament but we've already seen that voting below the line can work- Labour had to take notes from the Greens last time they held power. Despite how hopeless it all seems we do still have the power to affect change as long as we- all of us- stop swallowing the lies.BobsWorth2 , 3 Jun 2018 17:35The current two party system is like a coin. On one side we have the head of Malcolm Turnbull and on the other Bill Shorten. When it comes to the toss up the corporations and wealthy get to call heads.BelindaJonas -> Tom Dalyell , 3 Jun 2018 17:30There is perhaps more honour amongst thieves? Hard to imagine there being less.
B.J.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Alan Ritchie , 3 Jun 2018 21:58
For that last 40 years some variant of neoliberalism has been the predominant dogma. Unfortunately once we moved on from hunter gatherer to an agriculture supported society we lost the connections to each other that existed at the tribal level. That sense of community does not flourish in our eight thousand year experiment with city based civilisation. It seems to only do so during times of disruption and war.1MadUncle , 3 Jun 2018 21:51Personally my experience of living in a socially cohesive society was the 30 year period leading up to the reinfestation of the neoliberal curse that started in the 80's with Reagan and Thatcher.
So neoliberalism is the norm, socialism requires more work. We can't take it for granted that society will naturally gravitate towards egalitarianism.
Turnbull and his LNP cohort can openly mock the population with impunity safe in the knowledge that a small but powerful and rich minority, joined by group think and supported by exclusive membership institutions, schools, corporations, have a shared goal of controlling the monetary, economic system and government.
It's apparent that elections can be won by throwing enough resources into well aimed propaganda, (cue Murdoch). Cambridge Analytica was brutally effective at the last elections in the US and UK. Anyone who believes a similar scam won't be tried in Australia is being naive.
So people will still vote against their long term interests and we will likely still get another dose of self inflicted neoliberalism at the next election.The real problem will be that no where near enough voters will read this article or pieces like it. The Murdoch press for example would never publish it and the content won't be seriously discussed on morning TV. The ABC wouldn't dare mention a word of it.PDGFD1 -> sarkany , 3 Jun 2018 21:39I don't think it is all doom and gloom. I have 12 grandchildren, some now teenagers. They and their kind are smarter than we give them credit for and they won't put up with the crap we have bequeathed them. They don't get information from main stream media and although their social media contains an enormous amount of rubbish, embedded are real grievances about their lot in life. Soon they will vote. Goodbye and good riddance to the conservatives.
nogapsallowed , 3 Jun 2018 21:26Worthy of repetition since I'm not able to give you more than one 'uptick'.It is actually just a pan-national oligarchy, where legislatures and media are compromised into acceptance of destructive and unethical policies by Big Money.
In this instance, I very much suspect it will be the staggering load put on the natural environment that will spin the current "Eternal Empires" "down the sinkhole of history".
Sadly for everyone and everything else.Neoliberalism wins by manipulating public distraction. The so-called reality shows of mainstream media are the furthest flight imaginable from lived experience, and even the serious news outlets succumb to the Peyton Place of Barnaby's baby and a disappeared Melania Trump. All of which makes a considered analysis such as the one republished here such a notable exception.BlackAbbott -> familygardener , 3 Jun 2018 21:22That man has the real meaning of neoliberalism. Neoliberal way is not incompatible with unions, wages, social services or governments that protect their citizens.
His way there should be no division and no angst of politics. Maybe that's where the problem is/ His way is not the way of modern politics and greed. Being rich does not mean being greedy. But that is what modern neoliberam with its free markets mantra have come to be seen as.My Grandfather and Great Grandfather, would see this man as being correct with a very good attitude. He would see Wall St and many financial businesses as greedy and managed by bullies and tyrants.
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Jun 06, 2018 | profile.theguardian.com
Half the population prefers a politics that is racist and unethical, that demonises the poor and idolises the rich, that eschews community and embraces amoral individuality. These people don't care about the economic inconsistencies of neo-liberalism, they are far more attracted to the divisive societal aspects of free market fundamentalism.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Like Joe Hockey, Rinehart saw the problem of inequality as having more to do with the character of the poor than with the rules of the game:
They don't "see" it this way. They just say they see it this way to perpetuate that inequality. They know that their wealth depends on the labour of the other 95-99%.
To keep us all working and voting for their lackeys, they make promises of wealth if you are a persistent hard worker, never mentioning that the entire game depends on only a tiny minority ever reaching the top. No, the real people holding them back are those who don't work hard. Who don't contribute to the game. They're the ones to blame for why you're not levelling up. The true scapegoats.
It's one giant con and they know it.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
reinhardpolley , 3 Jun 2018 17:18
Victim blaming is a classic neo-con tactic, they seek to deflect from the impact of their heartless policies by demonising the victims, from the unemployed and those stuck in the welfare cycle to refugees trapped in offshore detention, indefinitely . We've all seen how appalling their commentary can get, from Abbott and Hockey's "lifters and leaners" to Gina Mineheart's "two dollars a day" & "spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising" they show just how out touch they are. They honestly believe that people can lift themselves out of poverty if only they "spent more time working", ignoring the fact that many are working two jobs just to stay ahead.OrwelHasNothingOnLNP -> w roberts , 3 Jun 2018 17:00
Seems that on planet RWNJ there are more than 24 hours in a day..Half the population need welfare to survive.
1% have 90% of all the toys in the sandpit and won't share. They feel that they are entitled to all the toys.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
This piece is well worth the reading particularly in light of the trashing of society's values we see played out in Trump's America. However, the writer's definition of "ideology " as a "system of ideas and ideals" even though it accords with the OED's, fails to take into account the current pernicious influence of the ideologue who distorts "ideology" into the "rationalisation of a suppression" as Joseph Dunne noted in his book, " Back to the Rough Ground" .This is the most apt description of the modus operandi of today's neoliberalists - the justifying of their project to maximise wealth accumulation in their own self-interest by promoting the propaganda that we are powerless cogs in the machine of the economy , slaves to the whim of the omnipotent market, rather than active agents who wish to contribute to a flourishing society .
Neoliberalism idealises competition against each other to ensure the rights of the few, by suppressing our capacity to take responsibility together through cooperation and collaboration with each other.
This classic divide and conquer tactic will prevail only as long as we permit it.
Time to take a stand and be counted.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
I'm a conservative and I have an good economics degree. I have to say though that I don't understand neoliberalism at all.As a example, when I was doing economics it was made very clear to me that natural monopolies (such as electricity and water) cannot be made into a competitive market (rather like trying to put lipstick on a pig). Similarly oligopolies introduce opportunities for price manipulation (e.g. the banks). The neoliberal mantra that "markets are always right" is just rubbish. Markets work well only when certain criteria are met.
Secondly, the right of workers to collectively bargain is fundamental to a well functioning market economy. Labour is one of the inputs to production and the workers have a right to a proper return on their labour. Individual workers have no real bargaining power and can only act collectively through unions.
Finally, the related casualisation of the workforce is a disaster for workers and the long-term interests of the economy. The stagnation of wages (and inflation) is one of the products of this strong trend to casualisation (my blood boils when I hear of examples of wage theft affecting vulnerable workers).
Income inequality is a product of a capitalist system. However, when the distribution of wealth becomes very badly skewed (such as in the USA) then the political system starts to break down. Trump was a beneficiary of this flawed income distribution. All Hillary Clinton was promising was "more of the same". In short, Bernie Sanders was right.
Walter Schadel, in his book, The Great Leveler (see below), points to the role of income inequality in driving revolutions and disruptions. There are lessons in this book for our current crop of politicians both on the left and the right.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Beekeeper49 , 3 Jun 2018 19:32
Wow! Richard Denniss says it like it is, neatly summing up "the big con".I believe Australia is being sold from under our feet. The big asset-strip is on. Why are we not benefiting from the mining boom? The answer lies in the way Rinehart companies and others like hers have been permitted to use Singapore or other low-taxing countries to minimise taxes. That these large companies should have the gall to demand large tax cuts as well is preposterous.
When headlines indulge in fear-mongering about China, why is angst directed at Dastyari for taking a relatively small donation, whilst at the same time the Australian government has approved a joint purchase of large swathes of the Australian outback by Rinehart and Chinese interests? Have we already forgotten the Darwin port deal? Why were Robb, Bishop and the Liberal Party allowed to benefit from deals or large donations from "Chinese interests"? Yet Bob Carr is being slammed for trying over many years to develop a more harmonious relationship with China?
Australians have told federal and state governments that they hate privatisation. Not content with selling off profitable businesses such as Medibank Private, the Liberal/National Party federal government is privatising its services. Detention centres and prisons acted as a stalking-horse for the creeping privatisation of jobs. Politicians assume most voters don't notice or care when government jobs in those sectors are privatised, but other government departments are following suit.
By permitting the Future Fund and superannuation funds to invest in tax havens, the federal government has opened the door to a growing trend. If my super fund uses the Cayman Island tax haven, it is easier to justify everyone else from the PM down to evade Australian taxes as well. More insidiously, tax havens make it easier to cheat creditors in bankruptcy cases, launder dirty money, break trade sanctions and much more. We aren't even aware of how these may be playing out behind closed doors in our name. The problem with allowing Rinehart to use Singapore or Turnbull to use the Cayman Island is that other companies and individuals will increasingly Do so, and in the end, everyone is doing it. And when will we take note of cryptocurrencies and how they can act like tax havens?
Our participation in wars not of our own making is also having dire results. Think of all the money spent and lives of servicemen destroyed by serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine if that money had instead been invested wisely in defence capabilities. And yet there we are, interfering in the South China Sea, trying to provoke China at Trump's behest, and it is not clear whether the Phillipines wants us there now anyway. And all the while, the cost of our participation in war games is crippling our ability to acquire defence assets, making us more reliant on the US.
The banking enquiry has only scratched the surface of how voters are being ripped off with impunity. There are growing demands that the superannuation industry, in particular retail funds, be subject to greater transparency and regulation. Yet Turnbull, Cash and colleagues prefer to direct their scorn at industry funds, simply because they are controlled by workers, via their unions.
We can sense "the big con" is all around us. We can almost smell it, so pungent is the air of exploitation, corruption and fraud. Hopefully Denniss will join others in focussing us more clearly on how we are being cheated of our birthright.
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Despite the huge changes in communication in the last several decades and the ever increasing levels of education in our society, politics have failed to engage the vast majority and that cohort of the cynical, the alienated, the disinterested, the lazy, the simply care less continues to grow.In the last decade the only cause that evoked passion and engaged a larger number, finally forcing our elected members to act was same sex marriage .....a crescendo that took years to generate.
With the complicity of our media and the decline of that part of education that teaches analysis, social psychology and political philosophy (let alone teaches about basic political structures and mechanisms) our level of disengagement from the political process appears to be at an all time high. The performance of our legislators has become increasingly unaccountable and purely self interested .... we have re-created the "political class" of pre-war times where alienation was based on a lack of education and awareness and a sense of inferiority and powerlessness DESPITE our vastly improved communication, access to information and educational standards (not to mention affluence).
Basically, we have "dumbed down" to the extent where passion and ideology in politics is now the preserve of fewer and fewer. In a democracy this trend is of massive concern and a threat to its sustainability.... it also completely suits those that are focused on concentrating power and wealth... the more that don't give a toss the less likely you are to be encumbered by limitations, social considerations, ethics and morality.
Until we re-engage far larger numbers into the political process, raise the levels of awareness of political thought and choices, stop dumbing down and re-inject some broader passion and participation into our political processes then vested interests will continue to dominate.....and democracy will become increasingly undemocratic !
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
I knew this government contained idiots, ne'er do wells, compulsive liars, misfits, childish imbeciles, ego maniacs, sociopaths, psychopaths, bigots, rorters, drunks, fascists, intransigents, ideologs, religious nutters, dullards, dunces, dickheads, shonks, spivs, lairs, carpetbaggers, rent seekers, lobbyists, conmen, urgers, scammers, ratbags and people unable to get work in any other field of endeavour....but Neoliberals?Well, I never!
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Jun 06, 2018 | profile.theguardian.com
Coded language:
or,
how we bade farewell to publicly-owned electricity.Part 1
The perceptions of George Orwell seem as valid now as then
Since he dealt with sly deceptions of tyrannical men
So 'Orwellian language', though imprinted on a page
Now has impacts universal, which resound in every age
And in ours, language functions like a fingerprint-free glove
To absolve of guilt the guilty as, imposed from up above,
Has come theft of public assets, for the benefit of those
To whom money by the truckload only ever upward flows.By subversion of our usage may such larceny be won
And I speak as a Victorian, so know how it is done.
It begins when greedy forces, with a nose for seeking rent
Need to seize and reshape language to conceal true intent
So collusion is essential, 'twixt such forces and the man
Who will slake their gross desires. He's a poll-i-tish-i-an
It is he who'll grasp the nettle, perform tasks of Hercules
Telling punters it is raining, while upon their backs he peesYet his task is mitigated. Because, what should hove in sight,
But the money-driven think-tanks of the predatory Right
Which have spent long hours fixated by their loathing of the State
So won't even wipe their bottoms, unless at an outsourced rate.
Now the think-tanks wunderkinden turn to '1984'
Where they find therein a tactic once employed in days of yore
It's to pick out words and phrases from contemporary use
Then submit their basic meanings to an arse-about abuseYet an overarching irony attends this tour de force
Since there's precedents in stating that a cart is now a horse.
For who bastardised a language, drawing from their bag of tricks ?
It was Stalin and Vyshinsky, back in 1936
O the horror ! O the shamefullness ! That, Sons Of Liberty
Must resort to basing tactics on the Kremlin's tyranny !
It's a classic situation when rent-seeking runs amuck
But there's easy money looming, so who gives a flying f**k ?So consumers are persuaded, via mantra-laden talk
That they come before big shareholders in London or New York
Thus, a host of euphemisms sugar-coat the bitter pill
To the melodies seductive of a loudly-ringing till
Hark to incantantions joyous and of outcomes bound to please !
'Competition', 'lower prices', 'market-based efficiencies'!
(Though their very warmth and fuzziness will reinforce the fact
They've dragooned the highest language to describe the lowest act.)Part 2 to follow........
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Helicalgroove -> RangerX , 3 Jun 2018 17:03
"Karl Marx exposed the peculiar dynamics of capitalism, or what he called "the bourgeois mode of production." He foresaw that capitalism had built within it the seeds of its own destruction. He knew that reigning ideologies -- think neoliberalism -- were created to serve the interests of the elites and in particular the economic elites, since "the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production" and "the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships the relationships which make one class the ruling one." He saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse. He did not know when that day would come. Marx, as Meghnad Desai wrote, was "an astronomer of history, not an astrologer." Marx was keenly aware of capitalism's ability to innovate and adapt. But he also knew that capitalist expansion was not eternally sustainable. And as we witness the denouement of capitalism and the disintegration of globalism, Karl Marx is vindicated as capitalism's most prescient and important critic."
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Jun 06, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
DesignConstruct -> quintal , 3 Jun 2018 17:39
We need a Nationalist government, which will automatically see itself as the mortal enemy of the primary Internationalist (there used to be a song about that) force in the world today, and which affects us greatly in terms of resource exploitation: Globalisation, or what we used to call 'multi national corporations' or 'international capital'.DesignConstruct -> Alpo88 , 3 Jun 2018 17:24Nationalism is a decision-making tool as it always poses a question; what is good for this country ?
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/we-need-real-leadership-and-real-democracy-from-our-politicians/news-story/f37a3a3951aa78df86892c71166fdbb5quintal -> DesignConstruct , 3 Jun 2018 17:16When/if he mentions de-Globalisation, an Aus-Indonesian defence alliance, citizen initiated referenda, and a Constitutional ban on donations and parties , then people may listen, however he cannot be accused of being too imaginative or bright. He is however advocating authoritarianism not fascism.
Hi DCAlpo88 -> DesignConstruct , 3 Jun 2018 17:11I halfway agree
We're not there yet
But .......
Fascism doesn't require a state sanctioned religion or suppression of religion
That said the Catholicism/fundamentalist Christian bent of the present cabinet and the demonisation of any green beliefs is uncomfortably close to what you describe
And the nexus between big business and govern, the destruction of public institutions, the reduction in the capacity of media to report truth and the vitriolic attacks on opponenents are straws in an ill wind
Cheets
You are right, it's not "fascismmmmmmmmmmmmmm".... it's Fascism. Which brings back to my memory what Tom Elliott (the son of Liberal Party former president John Elliott) wrote in the Herald Sun on 6 February 2015: "It's time we temporarily suspended the democratic process and installed a benign dictatorship to make tough but necessary decisions."
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Jun 05, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
he first page of Tim Winton's new essay collection, The Boy Behind the Curtain , sets a disturbing scene. A 13-year-old boy stands at the window of a suburban street, behind a terylene curtain, training a rifle on passersby.
"He was a fraught little thing," says Winton of that boy – the boy he used to be. "I feel related to him but I'm no longer completely him, thank god."
The passage opens a surprisingly intimate essay about the role of guns in Australian life, setting the tone for a collection being billed as Winton's most personal yet.
In spite of his inclination for solitude, Winton has spent much of his life in the spotlight. His first novel, An Open Swimmer, catapulted him into the public eye when it won the Vogel literary award in 1981, but it was his 1991 novel, Cloudstreet, that cemented his place in Australian letters. Winton has won the Miles Franklin award four times and been shortlisted twice for the Booker. His books have been adapted for film, TV and even opera .
ss="rich-link"> Island Home by Tim Winton review – a love song to Australia and a cry to save it Read more
The contradictions of having such a high-profile career while working in a quintessentially solitary artform are not lost on him. "I spend all day in a room with people who don't exist, and I'm not thinking about any public – but once the thing's done it goes out there and it has a public life over which I have no, or very little, control," he says.
On one reading, the boy with the rifle lurking out of sight, watching the world go by, could be a metaphor for the life of a reclusive writer. But Winton is quick to distinguish himself from such a reading. "I wouldn't like to see myself as somebody who was just cruelly observing the world behind the terylene curtain of art."
For Winton, the perceived lives of other writers always seemed completely unrelated to his own experience. "I grew up with a kind of modernist romantic idea of the writer as some kind of high priest, someone who saw themselves as separate and better, which I now find a bit repellent," he says. "I think that was something that was sold to us at school and certainly at university that writers were somehow aloof from the ordinary business of life; they didn't have to abide by the same rules as other people. The worse their behaviour off the page, the more we were supposed to cheer them on. Once I woke up to that idea as a teenager, I think I consciously resisted it."
Winton's own background was characterised by a working class sensibility and evangelical religion. His parents converted to the Church of Christ when he was a small boy, the circumstances and his experiences of which form the basis of a number of the previously unpublished essays in The Boy Behind the Curtain. As a result, when he finally did start writing, it was with a particularly industrious work ethic.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tim Winton: 'There wasn't a lot of romance in my view of what writing was about.' Photograph: Hank Kordas"I approached it like I was a tradesperson," he says. "It didn't necessarily involve FM radio played very loudly on a worksite; it didn't always require plumbers' crack or a hard hat and there was certainly no catcalling, but for the rest of it I went a different route. There wasn't a lot of romance in my view of what writing was about."
ss="rich-link"> A fish called Tim Winton: scientists name new species after novelist Read more
Yet it was finding words, what Winton calls "the enormous luxury of language", that took him from being a 13-year-old boy who watched strangers through the eye of a rifle – a boy who was "obviously insecure and feeling threatened and probably not quite one with the world" – to a well-adjusted adult.
The "emotional infancy of men" has a lot to answer for, he says, suggesting that it's something society would do well to pay more attention to in its early stages. "The lumpiness and surly silence of boys is not something we're sufficiently interested in. They're not sufficiently attractive to us until they become victims or dangerous brutes and bullies."
ass="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon ">
I think it's a mistake to think someone who doesn't say much doesn't have strong feelings
Tim WintonConflicted masculinity is recurring theme throughout Winton's fiction, and his characters often suffer as a result of their inability to articulate their feelings. "I think it's a mistake to think someone who doesn't say much doesn't have strong feelings," he says. "I think we stifle people's expression or we ignore people's signals of wanting to express things at our peril."
The distinct tenor of Winton's prose, a lyricism which manages to turn even the Australian vernacular into a kind of rough poetry, lends itself to the intimacy of the personal essay. The Boy Behind the Curtain contains a number of vignettes that reflect the imagery and landscape that characterises his fiction: hot bitumen roads through the desert; the churning ocean.
But there is also a clear political streak to Winton's nonfiction, and the inclusion of a number of more direct essays in this collection mean it's difficult to collapse the work under the category of memoir. Stones for Bread, for example, calls for a return to empathy and humanity in Australia's approach to asylum seekers. The Battle for Ningaloo Reef is a clear-eyed account of the activism that prevented a major commercial development from destroying a stretch of the Western Australian coastline. And Using the C-Word concerns that other dirty word that Winton believes we are avoiding: class.
"I think there are people talking about class but they're having to do that against the flow," Winton says. "We're living in a dispensation that is endlessly reinforcing the idea that we are not citizens but economic players. And under that dispensation it's in nobody's interest, especially those in power, to encourage or foster the idea that there's any class difference."
The market doesn't care about people, Winton argues, and neither is there any genius in it. "There's no invisible hand," he says. "And if there is one, it's scratching its arse."
It's clear to Winton that neoliberalism is failing, but not without casualties, two of which are very close to his heart: the arts and the environment.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cover image for The Boy Behind The Curtain by Tim Winton. Photograph: Penguin
"People in the arts are basically paying the price for this new regime where we pay no tax and where we get less public service and more privatised service," he says. "The arts are last on, first off in people's minds and I think that's not just sad, it's corrosive. They're just seen as fluff, as fripperies, as indulgence, as add-ons and luxury. And I don't think the arts are luxury; I think they're fundamental to civilisation. It's just that under our current dispensation, civilisation is not the point; civilisation is something that commerce has to negotiate and traduce if necessary."
Winton is one of a number of high-profile critics of the Productivity Commission's proposals to allow the parallel importation of books , and a signatory to petitions opposing funding cuts to the Australia Council . But he has also been a grassroots activist in the area of marine conservation for over 15 years.
"I don't know if I'm an activist writer or just a writer who has an activist life on the side," he says.
ass="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon ">
I don't know if I'm an activist writer or just a writer who has an activist life on the side
Tim WintonYears of lobbying by conservation groups and the general public contributed to the Labor government announcement in 2012 of 42 marine reserves in Australian waters , including over the entire Coral Sea. The Abbott government, however, implemented a review which, in September this year, recommended significantly scaling back those reservations . It was, says Winton, an act of cowardice.
"The Abbott review was basically all about applying inertia to imminent progress," Winton says. "We've gone from world leaders [in conservation] to being too frightened to lead."
When asked what role writing fiction plays in his activist work, Winton says it comes back to the idea of "keeping people's imaginations awake".
"Imagination is the fundamental virtue of civilisation. If people can't imagine then they can't live an ethical life."
• The Boy Behind the Curtain is published by Penguin Books and is available now
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May 21, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Bevin Kacon | May 20, 2018 1:50:01 PM | 12
There's no real Left in the UK anymore, either. The Blairites are still a force with the Labour party and that party is known as The Red Tories - especially in Scotland - for the obvious reason!
Even the old Left newspapers - The Guardian, The Observer - are no longer such, as has been evidenced of late. I no longer read the UK press - Private Eye is my 'paper' reading - and would not trust one word broadcast by the BBC and, I am sorry to say, Channel 4.
bevin , May 20, 2018 3:04:03 PM | 16The Guardian and The Observer have never been socialist papers. They were liberal, just like the democrats in the United States were liberal. And liberals, who are the advance guard of capitalism, can hardly be called 'of the left'.
The only opponents of capitalism and imperialism are socialists or nationalists, of a kind rarely seen outside the third world periphery of the system since 1917.
Anyone who sees the fascists and crooks surrounding Trump as being opponents of anything except the human race is almost as daft as someone who sees the Democrats as part of the left.
But the real prize for idiocy goes to those sad souls who see the FBI, CIA, MI6 and their clones as anything but- deepest apologies here to the Mafia and their ilk- criminal gangs, of the worst kind.
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May 14, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The UK's obsession with the Russian bogeyman doesn't stack up Mary Dejevsky The head of MI5 has joined the security establishment's anti-Putin onslaught. But his organization agrees that Moscow is not the greatest threat
Today's speech by the head of MI5 , Andrew Parker, has been presented as a first – the first time the head of the UK's domestic intelligence service has delivered a speech abroad, specifically at a conference of security heads in Berlin. But this is the only respect in which it is a first. It might as accurately be described as the latest in a series of public utterances by UK intelligence chiefs and top brass, which began last autumn and continued with the head of GCHQ addressing a cybersecurity conference in Manchester last month.
"MI5 chief: Kremlin is 'chief protagonist' in campaign to undermine west" Read more
In part, this reflects a deliberate decision by the intelligence services and the government that they should be more open about what they do, with a view to gaining greater public understanding – and expanding recruitment at a time when they face competition for tech-savvy graduates from richer and less restrictive employers. But this season of intelligence and military speeches has also facilitated the communication of an apparently co-ordinated message. As a country, the UK now sees Russia as its prime adversary.
The poisoning of Sergei Skripal , the former Russian spy, and his daughter in Salisbury took the UK's official anti-Russia stance to new heights. And its diplomatic success in persuading so many other countries to expel Russian diplomats in protest – the biggest ever "collective expulsion of security agents", we were told – seems to have emboldened London to view itself as the potential leader of an international anti-Russia front, as the Guardian recently reported .
The invective produced by Parker today – and heavily sold to the media – was, in its way, extraordinary. In tone, it was quite different from the cold war register, which was formal and, well, cold. This attack was populist, direct, and far outside the diplomatic register. Here is just a sample.
The Kremlin was engaging in "deliberate, targeted, malign activity intended to undermine our free, open and democratic societies". The west had to "shine a light through the fog of lies, half-truths and obfuscation that pours out of their propaganda machine". Russia, he said caustically, had as one of its "central and entirely admirable aims to build Russian greatness on the world stage". But it had repeatedly chosen "to pursue that aim through aggressive and pernicious actions by its military and intelligence services". In so doing, it risked becoming "a more isolated pariah".
So long as the UK refuses consular access to Yulia Skripal, Russia can – with some justification – ask just who has a monopoly on a fog of lies.'
Now, it is hard to know what to make of all this, other than to point out that he was speaking to fellow security chiefs. Maybe, among themselves, they find it more morale-boosting to demonise an old enemy than to take on adversaries that have emerged more recently, are more complicated and against which they have so far perhaps had less success. There is a sense too, for the UK at least, that relations with Russia have been so bad for so long that magnifying the supposed Russia threat is a cost-free enterprise in diplomatic terms.
It might also be worth considering whether there are budgetary and Brexit angles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US and the UK, in particular, scaled back their government-backed research on Russia and lost a great deal of expertise, which they are now trying to rebuild. That means they have to make a case for more taxpayers' money, and scare tactics are one way to do that. For the UK, there may also be the fear that it will find the European Union less inclined to keep London in the intelligence loop, and – at a time when the US is looking a far less reliable ally – it might make sense to play up the Russian bogeyman, not least as Vladimir Putin begins his fourth term in office. Nothing like starting as you intend to go on.
Yet it is still difficult to see the sense in this. Russia has become inured to UK scolding of this kind, and treats it with contempt – as its social media response to Parker's speech shows. What is more, so long as the UK maintains its silence on the Skripals' fate and refuses consular access to Yulia Skripal, Russia can – with some justification, I would argue – ask just who has a monopoly on a "fog of lies".
Nor will the tone necessarily chime well with official views of Russia in Germany and France, which are not necessarily less tough in practice, but certainly more nuanced, and better informed. The UK seems intent – despite recent legislation about dubious money in London – in keeping its diplomatic and business relations with Russia in separate boxes. Germany, for one, does not have that luxury.
The conclusion has to be that Russia is considered a 'safe', useful, and almost eternal enemy by the UK's powers-that-be
The UK's rhetorical onslaught on Russia is even more puzzling when you examine the security services' own priorities. "Is terrorism the biggest threat facing the UK?" visitors to the MI5 website are asked in a pop-up called "fact or fiction". Click no, and this is the response: "The biggest threat we currently face comes from international terrorist groups and individuals inspired by them. Terrorist organisations in Northern Ireland also continue to pose a serious threat."
Now it is true that the threat from terrorism and Islamic State was also broached by Parker in his speech, but this was not the section spun in advance to the media; it was not the aspect MI5 wanted above all to be noticed. So the conclusion has to be that Russia is considered a "safe", useful, and almost eternal enemy by the UK's powers-that-be. Some of us may hope for something better, but it seems a long way away.
• Mary Dejevsky is a former foreign correspondent in Moscow
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May 18, 2018 | theduran.com
Alex Christoforou with Alexander Mercouris discuss a recent Guardian post that claims 100 police have received psychological help after Salisbury attack.
Fake news, trying to create false connections between police psychological issues and a rather dubious UK poisoning false flag. Via The Guardian
Almost 100 Wiltshire police officers and staff have sought psychological support after the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the Guardian can reveal.
Among those who have asked for help were officers who initially responded to the collapse of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, and those who were at or close to the various investigation sites in subsequent days and weeks.
Some reported feeling disorientated and anxious while others were concerned about the possible long-term health effects on the public.
While the Skripal poisoning story has faded from much of the mainstream media news cycle, as it was increasingly exposed as a complete hoax and embarrassment for the May government, the Guardian appears to be trying to resurrect "the Russians did" Novichok narrative.
louis robert • 13 hours ago ,It is about time your stupid leader and her clown were put on the stage to explain to all the world why they chose to defame the integrity of Russia in such an unbelievable set of circumstances that only children under the age of ten would not understand !! How can any Nation since this demonic happening , ever trust this self - centred Bozo from ever making a sensible judgement for the future of mankind !
André De Koning • an hour ago ,What a shameful staging! At the very least, try and respect children!... Keep them away from all that nonsense, Ms May!
Wesa F. André De Koning • 35 minutes ago ,UK has lost it completely and the Guardian has fallen prey to the CIA Mockingbird Operation (infiltration and manipulation of media). Used to be a good paper under Alan Rushbridger and protection of Snowden, Assange etc. Now it has lost it altogether with useless editorial board. The woman in charge must have something in common with Nikki Haley: incapable of nuance and irrationally convinced of her being right (without research lots of claims about Assad, Putin etc.).
When ever I read such nonsense it always brings a smile as I think of what Clint Eastwood said in his summing up of Politicians and not in General.
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May 04, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
The Grauniad is slipping deeper into the disinformation business: Revealed: UK's push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance is the headline of a page one piece which reveals exactly nothing. There is no secret lifted and no one was discomforted by a questioning journalist.
Like other such pieces it uses disinformation to accuse Russia of spreading such.
The main 'revelation' is stenographed from a British government official. Some quotes from the usual anti-Russian propagandists were added. Dubious or false 'western' government claims are held up as truth. That Russia does not endorse them is proof for Russian mischievousness and its 'disinformation'.
The opener:
The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin's aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
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"The foreign secretary regards Russia's response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more," a Whitehall official said. "The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons."There is a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons. It is the Chemical Weapon Convention and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). It was the British government which at first rejected the use of these instruments during the Skripal incident:
Early involvement of the OPCW, as demanded by Russia, was resisted by the British government. Only on March 14, ten days after the incident happened and two days after Prime Minister Theresa may had made accusations against Russia, did the British government invite the OPCW. Only on March 19, 15 days after the incident happen did the OPCW technical team arrive and took blood samples.Now back to the Guardian disinformation:
In making its case to foreign ministries, the UK is arguing that Russian denials over Salisbury and Douma reveal a state uninterested in cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth , but instead using both episodes to try systematically to divide western electorates and sow doubt.A 'common understanding of the truth' is an interesting term. What is the truth? Whatever the British government claims? It accused Russia of the Skripal incident a mere eight days after it happened. Now, two month later, it admits that it does not know who poisoned the Skripals:
Police and intelligence agencies have failed so far to identify the individual or individuals who carried out the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, the UK's national security adviser has disclosed.Do the Brits know where the alleged Novichok poison came from? Unless they produced it themselves they likely have no idea. The Czech Republic just admitted that it made small doses of a Novichok nerve agent for testing purposes. Others did too.
Back to the Guardian :
British politicians are not alone in claiming Russia's record of mendacity is not a personal trait of Putin's, but a government-wide strategy that makes traditional diplomacy ineffective.Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, famously came off one lengthy phone call with Putin – she had more than 40 in a year – to say he lived in a different world.
No, Merkel never said that. An Obama administration flunky planted that in the New York Times :
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. "In another world," she said.When that claim was made in March 2014 we were immediately suspicious of it:
This does not sound like typically Merkel but rather strange for her. I doubt that she said that the way the "people briefed on the call" told it to the Times stenographer. It is rather an attempt to discredit Merkel and to make it more difficult for her to find a solution with Russia outside of U.S. control.A day later the German government denied (ger) that Merkel ever said such (my translation):
The chancellery is unhappy about the report in the New York Times. Merkel by no means meant to express that Putin behaved irrational. In fact she told Obama that Putin has a different perspective about the Crimea [than Obama has].A McClatchy journalist investigated further and came to the same conclusion as I did. The 'leak' to the New York Times was disinformation.
That disinformation, spread by the Obama administration but immediately exposed as false, is now held up as proof by Patrick Wintour, the Diplomatic editor of the Guardian , that Russia uses disinformation and that Putin is a naughty man.
The British Defense Minister Gavin Williamson wants journalists to enter the UK reserve forces to help with the creation of propaganda:
He said army recruitment should be about "looking to different people who maybe think, as a journalist: 'What are my skills in terms of how are they relevant to the armed forces?'Patrick Wintour seems to be a qualified candidate.
Or maybe he should join the NATO for Information Warfare the Atlantic Council wants to create to further disinform about those damned Russkies:
What we need now is a cross-border defense alliance against disinformation -- call it Communications NATO. Such an alliance is, in fact, nearly as important as its military counterpart.Like the Guardian piece above writer of the NATO propaganda lobby Atlantic Council makes claims of Russian disinformation that do not hold up to the slightest test:
By pinning the Novichok nerve agent on Sweden or the Czech Republic, or blaming the UK for the nerve gas attack in Syria, the Kremlin sows confusion among our populations and makes us lose trust in our institutions.Russia has not pinned the Novichok to Sweden or the Czech Republic. It said, correctly, that several countries produced Novichok. Russia did not blame the UK for the 'nerve gas attack' in Syria. Russia says that there was no gas attack in Douma.
The claims of Russian disinformation these authors make to not hold up to scrutiny. Meanwhile there pieces themselves are full of lies, distortions and, yes, disinformation.
The bigger aim behind all these activities, demanding a myriad of new organizations to propagandize against Russia, is to introduce a strict control over information within 'western' societies.
Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
That scheme will be used against anyone who deviates from the ordered norm. You dislike that pipeline in your backyard? You must be falling for Russian trolls or maybe you yourself are an agent of a foreign power. Social Security? The Russians like that. It is a disinformation thing. You better forget about it.
c1ue , May 4, 2018 2:27:27 PM | 1
Excellent article, in an ongoing run of great journalism.Mike Maloney , May 4, 2018 2:44:12 PM | 3
I am curious - have you read this? https://ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
It purports to be a book by an American military man intimately familiar with the covert ops portion of the US government. The internal Kafka-esque dynamics described certainly feel true.One of the reasons newspapers are getting worse is the economics. They aren't really viable anymore. Their future is as some form of government sanctioned oligopoly. Two national papers -- a "left" and a "right" -- and then a handful of regional papers. All spouting the same neoliberal, neoconservative chicanery.CD Waller , May 4, 2018 2:57:20 PM | 4Genuine journalist Matt Taibbi warned of this sort of branding of disparate views as enemy a month ago. He was also correct. Evil and insidious. The enemy of a free society.chet380 , May 4, 2018 2:58:22 PM | 5Wait for an outbreak of hostilities on the Ukraine-Donbass front shortly before the beginning of the World Cup competition which is as internationally important as the Olympic Games -- as they did in 2014 with Maidan and 2016 with the Sochi Winter Olympics drug uproar, the CIA will create chaos that will take the emphasis off any Russian success, since as to them, anything negative regarding Russia is a positive for them.WJ , May 4, 2018 3:02:57 PM | 6The later history of the 20th century will one day be read as the triumph and normalization of the Nazi state through liberal democratic capitalism.Laguerre , May 4, 2018 3:07:19 PM | 7I agree that it's difficult to see how the drive to renew the Cold War is going to be stopped. I presume that, with the exception of certain NeoCon circles, there isn't a desire for Hot War. Certainly not in the British sources you quote. Britain wouldn't want Hot War with Russia. It's all a question of going to the limit for internal consumption. Do a 1984, in order to keep the population in-line.james , May 4, 2018 3:11:05 PM | 8thanks b... i can't understand how any intelligent thinking person would read the guardian, let alone something like the huff post, and etc. etc... why? the propaganda money that pays for the white helmets, certainly goes to these outlets as well..mk , May 4, 2018 3:31:41 PM | 9the uk have gone completely nuts! i guess it comes with reading the guardian, although, in fairness, all british media seems very skewed - sky news, bbc, and etc. etc.
it does appear as though Patrick Wintour is on Gavin Williamson's propaganda bandwagon/payroll already... in reading the comments and articles at craig murrays site, i have become more familiar with just how crazy things are in the uk.. his latest article freedom no more sums it up well... throw the uk msm in the trash can... it is for all intensive purposes, done..
Meanwhile, OPCW chief Uzumcu seems to have been pranked again, this time by his own staff (this is how I interpret it):b , May 4, 2018 3:49:03 PM | 10He claimed that the amount of Novichok found was about 100 g and therefore more than research laboratories would produce, i.e. this was weaponized Novichok.
However, the story is being retracted right now because OPCW staff says it was only 100 mg .
Uzumcu looks like a fool.
The Russian embassy in the UK must be reading MoA. It just now tweeted this press release: Embassy press officer comments on the Guardian article concerning a new British anti-Russian strategykarlof1 , May 4, 2018 3:52:31 PM | 11Q: What is our reaction to the Guardian article on a "comprehensive strategy" to "deepen the alliance against Russia" to be pursued by the UK Government at international forums?A: Judging by the publication, the main current challenge for Whitehall is to preserve the anti-Russian coalition that the Conservatives tried to build after the Salisbury incident. This task is challenging indeed. The "fusion doctrine" promoted by the national security apparatus has led to the Western bloc taking hasty decisions that, as life has shown, were not based on any facts.
No traces of chemical weapons have been found in Douma. This means that not only the US/UK/French airstrikes were illegal under international law but even their political justification was inherently flawed. Similarly, in the Salisbury affair, no evidence of Russian involvement has been presented, while the two myths on which the British case was built (the Russian origin of the chemical substance used and the existence of proof of Russian responsibility) have been shattered.
Given the lack of facts, the Tory leadership seems to be adopting a truly Orwellian logic: that the main proof of Russian responsibility are the Russian denials! It is hard to see how they will be able to sell this to their international partners. Self-respecting countries of G20 would not be willing to risk their reputation.
Hmmm... My reply to c1ue went sideways it seems. Yes, The late Mr. Prouty's book's the real deal and the website hosting his very rare book is a rare gem itself. Click the JFK at page top left to be transported to that sites archive of writings about his murder. The very important essay by Prouty's there too.WJ , May 4, 2018 3:53:30 PM | 12The detail of b's analysis that stands out to me as especially significant and brilliant is his demolition of the Guardian's reuse of the Merkel "quote."Jose Garcia , May 4, 2018 3:56:03 PM | 13This one detail tells us so much about how propaganda works, and about how it can be defeated. Successful propaganda both depends upon and seeks to accelerate the erasure of historical memory. This is because its truths are always changing to suit the immediate needs of the state. None of its truths can be understood historically. b makes the connection between the documented but forgotten past "truth" of Merkel's quote and its present reincarnation in the Guardian, and this is really all he *needs* to do. What b points out is something quite simple; yet the ability to do this very simple thing is becoming increasingly rare and its exercise increasingly difficult to achieve. It is for me the virtue that makes b's analysis uniquely indispensable.
Related to the above, consider the nature of the recently christened thought-crime, "whataboutism." The crime may be defined as follows: "Whataboutism" is the attempt to understand a truth asserted by propaganda by way of relation to other truths it has asserted contemporaneous with or prior to this one. It is to ask, "What about this *other* truth? Does this *other* truth affect our understanding of *this* truth? And if so, how does it?"
Whataboutism seems to deny that each asserted truth stands on its own, and has no essential relation to any other past, present, or future asserted truth.
1984, anyone?john wilson , May 4, 2018 4:03:04 PM | 14The absurd story that the OPCW says there was a 100gm/100mg who knows which on the door and other sites is just so stupid its painful. This implies that the Skripals both closed the door together and then went off on their day spreading the stuff everywhere, yet no one else was contaminated (apart from the fantasy policeman).ken , May 4, 2018 4:03:13 PM | 15Presumably the Skripals touch the cutlery, plates and wine glasses in the restaurant, so why weren't the staff there infected as they must have had to pick up the plates etc after the meal. Even the door to the entrance of the restaurant should be affected as they would have to push it open, thus leaving the chemical for other people to touch. Nope, nothing in this stupid story adds up and the OPCW can't even get the amounts of the chemical right.
The problem is,,, most know it's all BS but find it 'easier' to believe or at most ignore, as then there is no responsibility to 'do something'. Biggest problem with the world today is lazy insouciant citizens. (Yes,,, I'm a PCR reader) :))karlof1 , May 4, 2018 4:05:15 PM | 16b @10--Ort , May 4, 2018 4:22:35 PM | 17Did you catch the Lavrov interview I linked to on previous Yemen thread? As you might imagine, the verbiage used is quite similar. One very important point Lavrov made was the anti-Russian group consists of a very small number of nations representing a small fraction of humanity; and that while they have some economic and military clout, it's possible for the rest of the world's nations to sideline them and get on with the important business of forming a genuine Multipolar World Order, which is what the UN and its Charter envisioned.
I won't omit linking to Craig Murray's conclusion :
"I cannot sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it is right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers, because it is questioning the government and establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead."
Passer by , May 4, 2018 4:24:44 PM | 18Anything that may not confirm to the 'truth' as prescribed from above must be overwhelmed with an onslaught of more lies or, if that does not work, be discredited as 'enemy' disinformation.
_______________________________________Yes, exactly. The Western hegemony, i.e. the true "Axis of Evil" led by the US, and including the EU and non-Western allies, have invented the Perpetual Big Lie™.
This isn't a new insight, but it's worth repeating. It struck me anew while I was listening to a couple of UK "journalists" hectoring OPCW Representative Shulgin, and directing scurrilous and provocative innuendo disguised as "questions" to Mr. Shulgin and the Syrian witnesses testifying during his presentation.
It flashed upon me that there is no longer a reasonable expectation that the Perpetual Big Liars must eventually abandon, much less confess, their heinous mendacity. Just as B points out, there are no countervailing facts, evidence, rebuttals, theories, or explanations that can't be countered with further iterations of Big Lies, however offensively incredible and absurd.
Witnesses? They're either confederates, dupes, or terrified by coercion. Evidence and/or technical analysis? All faked! A nominally reliable party, e.g. the president of the Czech Republic, makes statements that undermine the Big Lie Nexus? Again-- he's either been bought off or frightened into making such inconvenient claims. Or he's just a mischievous liar.
And, as I seemingly never get tired of pointing out, the Perpetual Big Lie™ strategy arose, and succeeds, because the "natural enemies" of authoritarian government overreach have been coerced or co-opted to a fare-thee-well. So mass-media venues, and even supposedly independent technical and scientific organizations, are part of the Perpetual Big Lie™ apparatus.
Even as the Big Liars reach a point of diminishing returns, they respond with more of the same. I wish I were more confident that this reprehensible practice will eventually fail due to the excess of malignant hubris; I'm not holding my breath.
Formerly T-Bear , May 4, 2018 4:57:25 PM | 21Is Putin capitulating? Pro US Alexei Kudrin could join new government to negotiate "end of sanctions" with the West.
Former finance minister Alexei Kudrin will be brought back to "mend fences with the West" in order to revive Russia's economy. Kudrin has repeatedly said that unless Russia makes her political system more democratic and ends its confrontation with Europe and the United States, she will not be able to achieve economic growth. Russia's fifth-columnists were exalted: "If Kudrin joined the administration or government, it would indicate that they have agreed on a certain agenda of change, including in foreign policy, because without change in foreign policy, reforms are simply impossible in Russia," said Yevgeny Gontmakher . . . who works with a civil society organization set up by Mr. Kudrin. "It would be a powerful message, because Kudrin is the only one in the top echelons with whom they will talk in the west and towards whom there is a certain trust."
Putting Kudrin -- an opponent of de-dollarization and an upholder of the Washington Consensus -- in charge of Russia's international outreach would be equal to putting Bill Clinton in charge of a girls' school.
It would mark Putin's de facto collapse as a leader. We shall know very soon. Either way, if anyone wondered what the approach to Russia would be from Bolton and Pompeo, we now know: they will play very hard ball with Putin, regardless of what he does (or doesn't do), and with carefree readiness to risk an eventual snap.
@ 20 LaguerrePeter Schmidt , May 4, 2018 5:08:52 PM | 23Certainly looks like @ 18 is a fine example of what b is presenting.
A good way to extract one's self from the propaganda is to refuse using whatever meme the disinformation uses, e.g. that Sergei Skripal was a double agent -- that is not a known, only a convenient suggestion.
Military intelligence is far better described as military information needed for some project or mission. Not surreptitious cloak and dagger spying. This is not to say Sergei Scripal was a British spy for which he was convicted, stripped of rank and career and exiled through a spy swap. To continue using Sergei Scripal was a double agent only repeats and verifies the disinformation meme and all the framing that goes with it. Find some alternative to what MSM produces that does not embed truthiness to their efforts.
In the Guardian I only read the comments, never the article. Here, I read both. That is the difference between propaganda and good reporting.Emily Dickinson , May 4, 2018 5:09:00 PM | 24@Michael Weddington 19karlof1 , May 4, 2018 5:12:57 PM | 25I realize it's from one of the biggest propaganda organs in the world... take this New York Times report of the OPCW's retraction with a 100 grams -- 100mg? -- of salt:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/world/europe/opcw-skripal-attack.html
Passer by @18--jalp , May 4, 2018 5:30:35 PM | 26This same narrative was put forth in 2016 and is just as false now as then. As I posted on Yemen thread earlier, Putin on 5 May is likely to announce the formation of a Stavka.
Kudrin is a neoliberal and as such is an enemy of humanity and will never again be allowed to hold a position of power within Russia's government. Let him emigrate to the West like his fellow parasites and teach junk economics at some likeminded university.
Anyone seen this reported elsewhere? https://www.rt.com/news/425810-white-helmets-us-funding-freeze/
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May 03, 2018 | sputniknews.com
... ... ...
1. The presumption of innocence doesn't apply to NeoCon targets.
The Skripal and Douma Incidents Are Parts of One Plan to Bring Russia Down – Chemist Innocent until proven guilty? Not if you're in the line of fire of the Endless War Lobby, comrade. Russia was accused of trying to poison the Skripals before a proper criminal investigation had even begun. The Syrian government was blamed for a chemical weapons attack, before we had independently verification that a chemical weapons attack had even taken place. The 'Official Narrative' on both cases has unravelled spectacularly. No 'smoking gun' evidence of either Russian involvement in the Skripal case or of the Douma CW attack has been produced. On the contrary, witnesses testified last week at The Hague that the Douma attack didn't happen.
But we're expected not to notice -- as the news cycle -- conveniently for the accusers- moves on to other stories.
2. Rupert Murdoch's Times newspaper plays an utterly pernicious role in British public life.
It was the Times which demanded action from Theresa May against Russia. It was the Times which has demanded (repeatedly, and again after the Skripal incident) that Ofcom acted against Russian media in the UK, such as RT. It was the Times, which accuses Russian media of peddling 'fake news', which reported Sergei Skripal as dead on its 12th March front page .
It was The Times which, on 14th March, falsely reported that 'almost 40' people had needed treatment in Salisbury, prompting Dr Stephen Davies, Comsultant in Emergency Medicine to write to the paper stating 'May I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning.'
It was The Times, which on the day the US/UK and France launched illegal attacks on Syria in response to the unverified chemical weapons attack at Douma, carried a front page attack on British academics who dare to challenge the War Party line on Syria. It was The Times which smeared other critics of western foreign policy as 'Russian trolls', including a peace campaigner from Finland who had been battling cancer.
John Wight has called the Times, the in-house organ of the neocon Henry Jackson Society. Its days as Britain's respected newspaper of record have certainly long gone.
3. Britain is only what is called a 'Democracy'.
Labour Leader Under Fire From Party MPs for Stance on Skripal PoisoningJust think back to that Parliamentary debate on 14th March. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was attacked from his own side, for his cautious approach towards the government's unproven claims about the Skripal case. To add insult to injury a number of Labour MPs then signed Early Day Motion 1071 - which stated 'This House unequivocally accepts the Russian state's culpability for the poisoning of Yulia and Sergei Skripal'. Labour's Shadow Defence Secretary Nia Griffith showed her support for Theresa May by saying 'We very much accept what the Prime Minister said.'
Corbyn, coming under enormous Establishment pressure did buckle, saying the Russian authorities 'needed to be held to account', even though later he still quite rightly insisted that 'absolute evidence' was needed.
READ MORE: UK Shouldn't 'Rush Ahead of Evidence' in Skripal Investigation -- Jeremy Corbyn
In bombing Syria on 14th April, Theresa May not only refused to recall Parliament, she also ignored public opinion which showed only 20% in favour of air strikes. In a genuine democracy that would have ruled out action. But May treated public opinion with utter contempt. That wonderful passage from 'The Comments of Moung Ka' by the Edwardian comic writer Saki springs readily to mind.
'The people of Britain are what is called a Democracy' said Moung Ka. 'A Democracy?' questioned Moung Thwa. What is that?'
'A Democracy' broke in Moung Shooglay eagerly, 'is a community that governs itself according to its own wishes and interests by electing accredited representatives who enact its laws and supervise and control their administration. It's aim and object is government of the community in the interests of the community'.
'Then', said Moung Thwa, turning to his neighbour, 'If the people of Britain are a Democracy-'
'I never said they were a Democracy', interrupted Moung Ka placidly.
'Surely we both heard you!', exclaimed Moung Thwa.
'Not correctly, said Moung Ka; 'I said they are what is called a Democracy'.
4. The 'free press' doesn't act as you'd expect a 'free press' to act.
The striking thing about the Skripal case and Syria bombings from a journalist's point of view has been the uniformity of the media coverage.
Right-wing papers like the Telegraph and liberal ones like The Guardian have taken exactly the same stance ie anti-Russian and anti-Syrian government. Whether its because of DSMA-Notices (see 6, below), or not, there's been no proper questioning of the UK government's claims about Salisbury -- and not much on Syria either. Investigative journalism? What's that?
The mainstream media is actually less diverse in its opinions now (on the things that really matter) than at the time of the Iraq war where publications like the New Statesman (now a 'centrist' Blairite organ), spoke out strongly against intervention. If you want a different perspective on Skripals and Syria you have had to tune in to Russian media, such as Sputnik and RT, and that of course is threatened by the NeoCon Thought Police, who want everyone to be singing from the same pro-war hymn sheet.
5. The role of the security services in the promotion of 'official narratives' is very important.
Every time a wheel has come off the Skripal narrative, we've been fed information to bolster it from 'official sources'. After the head of Porton Down said that the laboratory there was unable to confirm that the nerve agent allegedly used to poison the Skripals came from Russia, the line was pushed that 'intelligence-led assessments' pointed to Russian guilt. Could we see these 'assessments'? Of course not! We just have to believe that they're there. Then as the 'nerve handle placed on the door' theory began to gain a head of steam we were told that 'British Intelligence' had 'evidence' that Russia had been testing the nerve agent on door handles prior to 3rd March. Could we see this 'evidence'? No, of course not.
Alex Thomson of C4 News reported on 12th March that a 'D-Notice' had issued by the UK authorities to stop the media from fully identifying Sergei Skripal's MI6 handler who lived nearby.
Were other DSMA-Notices issued too regarding the reporting of Salisbury? If it was so clear that Russia did it, why would they bother?
6. The British public aren't mugs (or sheep).
Despite all the propaganda, all the hysterical headlines, all the blatantly biased coverage, the British haven't bought it. Literally or metaphorically. Inside the Tent gatekeepers have relentlessly attacked those brave individuals who have questioned the official narratives, but its these
individuals- smeared as 'crackpots' and 'conspiracy theorists' who the public are turning to for their analysis. Compare the number of retweets the former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray gets when he publishes on the Skripal case, with those who try and denigrate him. My own Twitter following has increased by several thousands since early March. Citizen Halo got a big boost in followers after she was smeared by The Times. After the lies told about Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya people no longer tamely accept what the NeoCon Establishment tells us. We're at an 'Emperor's New Clothes' moment in British politics where more and more people have found the courage to say out loud 'The Emperor has no clothes!'. The elite have been lying to us and they know that we know they've been lying. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
Support his AntiStalker Legal Fund (vs. a Times journalist)
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
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Apr 29, 2018 | www.moonofalabama.org
Posted by: Quentin | Apr 22, 2018 12:29:41 PM | 7
The Carla Ortiz and Jimmy Dore exchange is fascinating. Each in her/his own way is superb. The Guardian has become boulevard press = tabloid. Nearly every day before and even after the US election Mrs. Clinton gloated on the front page. Bernie Sanders was no where to be seen nearly until the election. Now the Guardian is priming its readers for the stomach-churning royal wedding coming up. No, no more Guardian for me. And they have the gall to ask for money to turn out articles praising the White Helemts. No! Curtis , Apr 22, 2018 12:32:23 PM | 8
Anonymous 4Curtis , Apr 22, 2018 12:49:24 PM | 9
BBC took on Vannessa Beeley recently, too. Will NYT and WaPo be next? The anti-Russia agenda continues along with the anti-truth-in-Syria agenda.AriusAmerican 5
During the Bush II fiasco, there were anti-war protests. The protests disappeared after Obama took office. And he was given a Nobel Peace Prize for talking about peace. But everyone went along with Obama's wars. No protests. And that's how they like it. They want support and tend to get it from the MSM and party lackeys. And if they don't get support, the one thing they don't want are massive protests, calls to congress, etc. As long as there's little to no resistance their war agenda continues.PS
The HuffPoUK article tears into Beeley but at the bottom has a Russian submission to the Security Council of a report she did of the White Helmets. That report negates the article/story! HuffPoUK claims this is part two of a series and that part three will "look at evidence presented against the White Helmets." That should be interesting.Anonymous2 | Apr 22, 2018 1:50:23 PM | 12
Curtis
"The anti-Russia agenda continues along with the anti-truth-in-Syria agenda."
I dont get it why these journalists are against finding out what happend (since we dont know that yet)? Most of these morons have no idea about the conflict at all, and all of a sudden start writing like they are veteran journalists and have profound knowledge about Syria.
Why is there such a hatred? Is it brainwashing?
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Apr 29, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
cynical_bystander -> StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 05:41
If you are saying that their expertise lies elsewhere, that is surely self-evident?Crazymoomin , 24 Apr 2018 05:37Ron Jackson -> CharlesBradlaugh , 24 Apr 2018 05:30Working-class white people may claim to be against identity politics, but they actually crave identity politics.
I think they probably see it more of a "if you can't beat them, join them" scenario. They see the way the wind is blowing and decide if they want representation, they have to play the game, even if they don't really like the rules.
No sloth will make you live in poverty, unless you are actually the animal the sloth.StevoT -> cynical_bystander , 24 Apr 2018 05:28The detail. They don't know the detail. They don't have the expertise. Which is what this article is about.cynical_bystander -> StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 05:22They don't know what they're talking about, even if they do know what they want.
.... but see my previous post.CharlesBradlaugh -> Ron Jackson , 24 Apr 2018 05:15They know enough about the EU to know that it isn't one of their patrons and sponsors. They also know that Westminster have been systematically misrepresenting the EU for their own purposes for decades, and they can use the same approach.
What more is required?
are we supposed to be impressed by your middle income? Poverty is not caused by sloth.CharlesBradlaugh -> Ron Jackson , 24 Apr 2018 05:12This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards . Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs .Ron Jackson -> CharlesBradlaugh , 24 Apr 2018 05:08Not a fool and I don't hate anyone at 55 I have 1.2M in investments, I make 165k a year and pay 40k+ a year in taxes. I to come across people who live off of we everyday and expect to free load. I am not a blowhard just an engineer who pays for sloth.KeyboardChimp , 24 Apr 2018 05:07Non expert berating non experts. The Michael Massing paradox.CharlesBradlaugh -> Ron Jackson , 24 Apr 2018 04:57I've met many fools like you in my over 50 years on the planet, blowhards parading their ignorance as a badge of pride, thinking that their hatred of anyone not exactly like them is normal, mistaking what some cretin says on the far right radio for fact.Monkeybiz -> SteveofCaley , 24 Apr 2018 04:51You people would be comical if not for the toxicity that your stupidity engenders.
It's a play on the motto "One country under God". Rather clever, I thought.Monkeybiz -> Andrew Nichols , 24 Apr 2018 04:50Yes, there is a deep lack of context and hence dilution of meaning as a resultMonkeybiz -> Navarth , 24 Apr 2018 04:48Al Jazeera tries to do a better job, at least providing a spectrum of opinion and a lot of depth in quite a few issues, something most other networks fail to do these days.StevoT -> cynical_bystander , 24 Apr 2018 04:48Don't think I am confusing anything.Monkeybiz -> breitling1884 , 24 Apr 2018 04:47My point was about expertise. Brexiteers have goals about which I agree with you.
My point is that they don't know about the subject, the EU, which they are using to achieve their goals.
Really? Were they repeated?cynical_bystander -> StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 04:37Don't fall into the associated trap either, of the false equation between STATED and ACTUAL goals.StevoT -> cynical_bystander , 24 Apr 2018 04:31Fox and Hunt are fully aware that to actually admit their actual goal, would be (probably) just about the only thing which would provoke an electoral backlash which would sweep the Conservatives from office. The NHS is proverbially "the nearest thing the English have, to a religion" and is a profoundly dangerous subject for debate.
Fox and Hunt may be weaving an incomprehensible web of sophistry and misdirection, but no part of it is accidental.
Don't disagree with this. Doesn't mean they know what they are talking about.cynical_bystander -> StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 04:12Please, please don't make the unfounded assumption that people like Fox, Johnson, Cameron et al are as stupid as they sometimes appear.cynical_bystander -> aurelian , 24 Apr 2018 04:06Fox and Hunt, in particular, know exactly what they are engaged in - a hard-right coup designed to destroy government control over the NHS and route its enormous cash flows into the pockets of their private, mostly American sponsors. It isn't necessary to look far, to discover their connections and patronage from this source.
Johnson is consumed by ambition, as was Cameron before him; like Cameron, he makes much of his self-presumed fitness for the role, whilst producing no supporting evidence of any description.
Brexit, as defined by its advocates, CANNOT be discussed precisely because no rational debate exists. It hinges upon the Conservative Party's only fear, that of disunity leading to Opposition. They see that Labour are 50-odd seats short of a majority, and that's ALL they see.
What in God's green world are you talking about? Did you read that before pressing "Post"? It's obvious that you have no knowledge whatsoever of the subject.sgwnmr -> SteveofCaley , 24 Apr 2018 03:50The "race riots" of the 1940s and 1950s were essentially about employment protection (the first, regarding the importation of Yemeni seamen into the North-East of England). The mostly Pakistani influx into the North-West of England was an attempt to cut labour costs and prop up a dying, obsolete industry, mortally wounded by the loss of its business model in the aftermath of Empire; an industry whose very bricks and mortar are long since gone, but the imported labour and their descendants remain... the influx of Caribbean labour into London and the South-East was focussed around the railways and Underground, to bolster the local labour force which had little interest in dead-end shift-work jobs in the last days of steam traction and the increasingly run-down Underground.
Labour, in those days, was strongly anti-immigration precisely because it saw no value in it, to their unionised, heavy-industry voter base.
Regarding the ideological, anti-British, anti-democratic nature of Labour's conversion to mass immigration, you need only read the writings and speeches of prominent figures of the day such as Roy Hattersley and Harriet Harman, who say exactly this, quite clearly and in considerable detail. Their ideological heirs, figures like Diane Abbot (who is stridently anti-white and anti-British), Andrew Neather and Hazel Blears, can speak for themselves.
I guess you're of the "when I'm doubt talk gibberish" school of argument capitulation.StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 03:17I was recently struck by this part of the Guardian obituary of Lady Farrington of Ribbleton:SteveofCaley -> sgwnmr , 24 Apr 2018 02:37' she possessed the important defining characteristic that, above others, wins admiration across all the red leather benches in the House of Lords: she knew what she was talking about'
Too often these days we are governed by people who don't know what they are talking about. Never has this been truer than the likes of Fox, Davis, Johnson, and other Brexiteers.
But this doesn't seem to matter much anymore. At times it seems that anyone can make generised assertions about something, without having to back them up with evidence, and then wave away questions about their veracity.
Opinion now trumps evidence regularly, even on the BBC where Brexit ideology is often now given a free pass. The problem for those of us who value expertise is that with the likes of Trump, and some EU Leavers, we are up against a bigotry which is evangelical in nature. A gospel that cannot be questioned, a creed that allows no other thinking.
The best you can do is complain about "this?" This WHAT? Try a noun. You're being an embarrassment to troglodytes everywhere. Don't just point and leap up and down. Your forefathers died in bringing you a language. Be an expressive hominid and name the thing that hurts.gilstra , 24 Apr 2018 02:29It seems at the moment the Guardian also suffers from a glut of experts without expertise. Not a day goes by that my jaw doesn't drop at some inane claim made by what seems to be a retinue of contributors who have neither good writing skills nor a particularly wide look on things. An example today: "Unlike Hillary Clinton, I never wanted to be someone's wife". How extraordinary. Who says she ever 'wanted to be someone's wife'? Maybe she fell in love with someone all those years ago and they decided to get married? Who knows. But sweeping statements like that do not endear you to quite a few of your once very loyal readers. It's annoying.aurelian -> cynical_bystander , 24 Apr 2018 02:03I think this posits an overriding explanation for people's actions that doesn't exist. Even the idea that immigration is a new liberal plot. Take the wind rush generation of immigrants while there was a Tory government at the time I think the idea this was an attempt to undermine white working class gains is provably nonsensicalcynical_bystander , 24 Apr 2018 01:21The problem with this article, and the numerous other similar pieces which appear in the various editions of the Guardian on a "regular-and-often" basis, is that it completely avoids a very basic point, because it has no answer to it.RalphDemming , 24 Apr 2018 01:00It is this.
The white British (and by extension, Western) populations never wanted mass immigration because they knew from the outset, that its purpose was to undermine the social and political gains they had wrested from the political and financial elite after 1945. They cared not at all for the fratricidal conflicts between alien religions and cultures, of which they knew little and regarded what they did know as unacceptable.
The US achieved a huge economic boom without it. Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the USA were popular destinations for the British population whose goal and mantra was "no return to the thirties" and who emigrated in large numbers.
White semi-skilled and unskilled (and increasingly, lower middle class) populations everywhere reject, and have always rejected third world mass immigration (and more recently, in some areas, mass emigration from the former Soviet Union) for the simple, and sufficient reason that they have no possible reason or incentive to support or embrace it. It offers them nothing, and its impact on their lives is wholly negative in practical terms - which is how a social group which lives with limited or no margins between income and outgoings, necessarily
perceives life.Identity politics has no roots amongst them, because they correctly perceive that whatever answer it might produce, there is no possible outcome in which the preferred answer will be a semi-skilled, white family man. They inevitably pick up a certain level of the constant blare of "racist bigot, homophobe, Islsmophobia" from its sheer inescapability, but they aren't COMPLETELY stupid.
Dumb and dumber writers...
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Apr 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
cynical_bystander -> StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 05:41If you are saying that their expertise lies elsewhere, that is surely self-evident?cynical_bystander -> StevoT , 24 Apr 2018 04:37Don't fall into the associated trap either, of the false equation between STATED and ACTUAL goals.Fox and Hunt are fully aware that to actually admit their actual goal, would be (probably) just about the only thing which would provoke an electoral backlash which would sweep the Conservatives from office. The NHS is proverbially "the nearest thing the English have, to a religion" and is a profoundly dangerous subject for debate.
Fox and Hunt may be weaving an incomprehensible web of sophistry and misdirection, but no part of it is accidental.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
wheelbarrow1 , 13 Apr 2018 14:37
Why is the prime minister of the United Kinkdom on the phone discussing whether or not to bomb a Sovereign country with the highly unstable, Donald Trump?I_Wear_Socks , 13 Apr 2018 14:37Can she not make up her own mind? Either she thinks it's the right thing to do or it isn't. Hopefully, the person on the other end of the phone was not Trump but someone with at least half a brain.
Proof, let's have some proof. Is that too much to ask? Apparently so. Russia is saying it's all a put up job, show us your facts. We are saying, don't be silly, we're British and besides, you may have done this sort of thing before.
It is perfectly possible that the British government manufactured the whole Salisbury thing. We are capable of just as much despicable behavior and murder as the next.
Part of the Great British act's of bravery and heroism in the second world war is the part played by women agents who were parachuted into France and helped organize local resistance groups. Odette Hallowes, Noor Inayat Khan and Violette Szabo are just a few of the many names but they are the best known. What is not generally know is that many agents when undergoing their training in the UK, were given information about the 'D' day landings, the approx time and place. They were then dropped into France into the hands of the waiting German army who captured and tortured and often executed them.
The double agent, who Winston Churchill met and fully approved of the plan was Henri Dericourt, an officer in the German army and our man on the ground in France. Dericourt organized the time and place for the drop off of the incoming agents, then told the Germans. The information about the 'D' day invasion time and place was false. The British fed the agents (only a small number) into German hands knowing they would be captured and the false information tortured out of them.
Source :- 'A Quiet Courage' Liane Jones.
It's a tough old world and we are certainly capable of a Salisbury set-up and god knows what else in Syria.
From The Guardian articles today that I have read on Syria, it makes absolutely clear that if you in any way question the narrative forwarded here, that you are a stupid conspiracy theorist in line with Richard Spencer and other far-right, American nutcases.ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:37A more traditional form of argument to incline people to their way of thinking would be facts. But social pressure to conform and not be a conspiratorial idiot in line with the far-right obviously work better for most of their readers. My only surprise it that position hasn't been linked with Brexit.
Did anyone see the massive canister that was shown on TV repeatedly that was supposed to have been air-dropped and smashed through the window of a house, landed on a bed and failed to go off.MartinSilenus -> ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:36The bed was in remarkable condition with just a few ruffled bedclothes considering it had been hit with a metal object weighing god knows what and dropped from a great height.
"More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate"120Daze , 13 Apr 2018 14:36The Defoliant Agent Orange was used to kill jungles, resulting in light getting through to the dark jungle floors & a massive amount of low bush regrowing, making the finding of Vietcong fighters even harder!
It was sprayed even on American troops, it is a horrible stuff. Still compared to Chlorine poison gas, let alone nerve gases, it is much less terrible. Though the long term effects are pretty horrible.
"Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin"
http://theconversation.com/agent-orange-exposed-how-u-s-chemical-warfare-in-vietnam-unleashed-a-slow-moving-disaster-84572Who needs facts when you've got opinions? Non more hypocritical than the British. Its what you get when you lie and distort though a willing press, you get found out and then nobody believes anything you say.anymore. The white helmets are a western funded and founded organisation, they are NOT independent they are NOT volunteers, The UK the US and the Dutch fund them to the tune of over $40 million. They are a propaganda dispensing outlet. The press shouldn't report anything they release because it is utterly unable to substantiate ANY of it, there hasn't been a western journalist in these areas for over 4 years so why do the press expect us to believe anything they print? Combine this with the worst and most incompetent Govt this country has seen for decades and all you have is a massive distraction from massive domestic troubles which the same govt has no answers too.LiviaDrusilla -> Bangorstu , 13 Apr 2018 14:36LOL are you having a larf?Dominique2 , 13 Apr 2018 14:32The same organisation that receives millions of quid in funding from USAID?
Whose 'executive director' used to work for USAID?
Who have campaigned for 'no fly zones' (ie US bombing)?
Who are affiliated to the Iranian terrorist group MEK?
Who only happen to run hospitals in 'rebel' held areas?
You have a strange idea of 'politically neutral'. Your 'NGO' are fighting for an Islamist state. Enjoy them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/sep/01/winston-churchill-shocking-use-chemical-weaponsCaptTroyTempest -> StoneRoses , 13 Apr 2018 14:27""I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes," [Winston Churchill] declared in one secret memorandum."
The current condemnation by the international community and international law is good and needs enforcement. But no virtue signalling where there is none.
But we're still awaiting evidence that a chemical attack has been carried out in Douma, aren't we? And if an attack was carried out, by whom. But before these essential points are verified, you feel that a targeted military response is justified. Are you equally keen for some targeted military response for the use of chemical weapons, namely white phosphorus, in Palestine by the Israaeli military? Unlike Douma, the use of these chemical weapons in the occupied territories by the IDF's personnel is well documented. But we haven't attacked them yet. Funny that.CMYKilla , 13 Apr 2018 14:26Instead of "chemicals" why not just firebomb them - you know like we did to entire cities full of women and children in WW2?Tom1982 , 13 Apr 2018 14:24Hamburg 27 July 1943 - 46,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Kassel 22 October 1943 - 9,000 civilians killed 24,000 houses destroyed in a firestorm
Darmstadt 11 September 1944 - 8,000 civilians killed in a firestorm
Dresden 13/14th February - 25,000 civilians killed in a firestormObviously we were fighting Nazism and hadn't actually been invaded - and he is fighting Wahhabism and has had major cities overrun...
Maybe if Assad burnt people to death rather than gassing them we would make a statue of him outside Westminster like the one of Bomber Harris?
Remember the tearful Kuwaiti nurse with her heartrending story of Iraqi troops tipping premature babies out of their incubators after the invasion in 1990? The story was published in pretty much every major Western newspaper, massively increased public support for military intervention............................and turned out to be total bullshit.BlutoTheBruto , 13 Apr 2018 14:21Is it too much too ask that we try a bit of collective critical thinking and wait for hard evidence before blundering into a military conflict with Assad; and potentially Putin?
Didn't General Mattis quietly admit at there was no evidence for the alleged Sarin attacks last year by Assad?AwkwardSquad , 13 Apr 2018 14:19Hmmmm.... call me skeptical for not believing it this time around.
Well, this is the sort of stuff that the Israelis would be gagging for. They want Assad neutralised and they are assisting ISIS terrorists on the Golan Heights. They tend to their wounded and send them back across the border to fight Assad. What better than to drag the Americans, Brits and French into the ring to finish him off. Job done eh?dannymega -> fripouille , 13 Apr 2018 14:18Are you sure you are not promoting an Israeli agenda here Jonathan?
Incidentantally what did we in the west do when the Iraqis were gassing the Iranians with nerve agents in the marshes of southern Iraq during the Iran Iraq War? Did we intervene then? No, we didn't we allowed it to happen.
I say stay out it.
Come on frip, you have to admit there was absolutely no motive for Assad's forces to carry out this attack. Why do you think the Guardian and other main stream media outlets are not even considering the possibility the Jihadi rebels staged it to trigger western intervention? I know, I know.. it's all evil Assad killing his own people for no other reason than he likes butchering people... blah blah. The regime change agenda against Syria has been derailed, no amount of false flag attacks can change the facts on the ground.Preshous , 13 Apr 2018 14:18Tucker Carlson of Fox News has it nailed down.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M28aYkLRlm0ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 14:16More than 40 years after the US sprayed millions of litres of chemical agents to defoliate vast swathes of Vietnam and in the full knowledge it would be have a catastrophic effect on the health of the inhabitants of those area, Vietnam has by far the highest incidence of liver cancer on the planet.CodeNameTwiglet , 13 Apr 2018 14:15Then more recently we have the deadly depleted uranium from US shells that innocent Iraqis are inhaling as shrill voices denounce Assad.
The Syrian people are heroically resisting and defeating western imperialism. This "civil war" has been nothing but a war for Syrian resources waged by western proxies.So now, In desperation borne out of their impending defeat, the imperialists have staged a chemical attack in a last throw of the dice to gain popular support for an escalation in military intervention. Like military interventions of the past, it is being justified in the name of humanitarian intervention.
But if we have a brief browse of history we can see that US & UK governments have brought only death, misery and destruction on the populations it was supposedly helping. Hands off Syria.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
David williams , 13 Apr 2018 15:23
dannymega , 13 Apr 2018 15:22Not a supporter of any of the criminal operations that masquerade as governments worldwide, but it's way past the time when I can believe a word the Western powers utter in their quest to spread their vile economic doctrine.
For me the biggest question now is how best to avoid financing the evil they perpetrateSo the Russian military claimed a month ago that Syrian rebels were planning a chlorine chemical weapon attack somewhere in Syria, three weeks later a chemical weapon chlorine attack happens in Douma... but the UK government along with all the UK mainstream media do not question perhaps it's the Jihadi/rebels who staged this attack, they ALL automatically blame Assad? Stinks to high heaven.TrickleDownClowns , 13 Apr 2018 16:18
I think the most amazing thing to come from this is that nobody believes politicians or the papers say, listen to any phone in radio show or read the comments below articles, nobody believes the government or msm. I wouldn't go to war for these fuckers.Canajin , 13 Apr 2018 16:09GLT24 , 13 Apr 2018 16:09The media proclaimed the overthrow of the Mosadegh government in Iran as 'popular', the overthrow of Allende in Chile as legitimate, the Gulf of Tonkin affair as real, the WMDs of Iraq as existing, the evil of Qaddafi as intolerable, etc.
So, why is the media surprised when people lack trust in them about Syria?
Everywhere on the web the vast majority are vehemently opposed to military involvement .MayThisBeLove -> zinopus , 13 Apr 2018 16:09Yet we have a PM and at least 300 MPs champing at the bit to get involved in military conflict that could obliterate these islands in a few minutes.
We are not under threat there might not have been a chemical attack and if there was we have no idea who the perpetrators were but it almost certainly was not Assad he had nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Trump announced he wanted the US out of Syria a couple of weeks ago not good news for the military industrial complex.
There is significant evidence that through the internet and social media the population are no longer fooled by the false flag operations of the deep state.
We in the U.K. have a significant problem who is a threat to all of us and that is the PM she was exposed during the election and over Brexit this must be the end it is totally unacceptable that we could get involved in an attack on another sovereign state who are no threat to us on the say so of a small number of MPs in a minority Government.
The duty of the Government is to protect its citizens not put their lives at risk to engratatiate themselves to a Foreign Power with a deranged egomaniac as it's President
Because they are mostly Blairite warmongers who just repeat government press releasesID5996032 , 13 Apr 2018 16:04Assad's not your puppy. Mohammed Bin Salman is. BAE re-arms his jets between crop-burning sorties in Yemen. When you've stopped the Saudi starvation and brutalization of Yemen -which you can because your gavernment facilitates it - come back and we'll talk about Syria. Until then we'll assume that your lachrimose offerings on gassed babies is propaganda. And that's because it is.algae64 -> rustledust74 , 13 Apr 2018 16:04MayThisBeLove , 13 Apr 2018 16:04Tehran has churches and synagogues all over the city. Riyadh does not. Religious tolerance is better than religious intolerance, IMO.the Iranians are just as bad as the Saudis
I don't have a problem with anyone talking to anyone about anything, as long as Britain hasn't declared war on the country they are talking to.If its down to believing Assad and common sense over Trust me Theresa and her unwillingness to refer the matter to Parliament and democracy ... then its Assad and common sense every time ... he may be a dictator but he's no idiotPeterMarkham , 13 Apr 2018 16:03What makes chemical weapons so much worse than any others? If we go into military action over this we will kill people but we won't use chemical weapons. Will that be alright then?georgina45 -> anothernorthernmonke , 13 Apr 2018 16:03Some think this is about oil and a pipeline going through the Middle East states and if it goes through the heart of Syria then Russia and Syria of control of the oil flow going into Europe.Terry Haller -> 1of9monkeys , 13 Apr 2018 16:01Any involvement Iran has in the region good or bad is at least understandable , it's their neighborhood and they were invited . It is more difficult to understand the presence or involvement of Britain or America or France or that other country we are not allowed to talk about.Kokkos -> Brexshit , 13 Apr 2018 16:01Money, Oil, Carving Land Territory.Muphrid33 , 13 Apr 2018 16:01What many people do not fully realize is that no leader, no matter how harsh or strong would have been able to survive the destruction that has overtaken Syria if he was considered responsible for it. His own people and armed forces would have thrown him out if he did not have their support.MayThisBeLove , 13 Apr 2018 16:01" And yet what was originally billed as a discrete military action to prevent an impending civilian slaughter in Benghazi escalated into a bombardment that led to regime change and mayhem. 'LiviaDrusilla -> Fomalhaut88 , 13 Apr 2018 15:52No , Johnathan , it was planned .. see the PNAC etc ...
Why the obsession with Corbyn? He's the leader of the opposition. He's not the one clamorouring to send Britain to war on an extremely dodgy pretext.yemrajesh -> LouisConn , 13 Apr 2018 15:52But if you're going with that line of argument, why not send all the hacks cheerleading for war to do some 'behind the front lines' reportage with the Army of Islam? Always good to see things from different perspectives, though they might not survive to tell the tale.
Bombing a sovereign country without UN mandate is a war crime. It applies to UK and USA as well. But Brexit obsessed Brits think UK is above the International law.leftylass62 -> diddoit , 13 Apr 2018 15:52She knows many of her own party won't back her and the DUP voted against bombing Syria last time. Where's the millions it's going to cost coming from when we can't afford to give school kids a free dinner or pay for the NHS?Patrick Moore , 13 Apr 2018 15:51I really struggle to see to understand the argument for military action in Syria.Squiddlywidget , 13 Apr 2018 15:51Firstly every time we intervene militarily we stuff it up and make matters ten times worse.
- Gulf War 1 - left Sadam in power, tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, pushed Sadam into being a major sponsor of anti Weatern terrorism and then the Kurds were abandoned to Sadam at the end of the war and massacred.
- Afghanistan - what the hell was that about? Trillions spent and it descended into Islamist anarchy within 5 minutes of us keaving.
- Gulf War 2 - set the Middle East on fire, total disintegration of Iraq, the death of millions of Iraqis and the rise of ISIS.
- Libya - failed state, massive refugee crisis.
But even if you assume that for once we can act militarily in a way that doesn't make the situation worse - what is it that we are trying to achieve?
Assad has won. The opposition has been killed or expelled from the country and the resistance is down to a few villages which are being mopped up.
The time for a military response was 7 years ago - it is an absolutely pointless waste of time now - unless the point is just to make us feel better about ourselves by "doing something".
Kokkos -> LouisConn , 13 Apr 2018 15:50Has anyone asked.. why would Russia allow a chemical weapons attack in Syria only a few weeks after apparently launching a chemical weapons attack in Britain?.. something is not right here.
The Putin regime may be nasty..but are they really that thick?? Remember remember 45 minutes to launch...(?) Tony Bliar is haunting me..and I suspect..the entire nation
There seem to be lot of deformed babies born in Iraq and Afganistan.BoomersStealingMoney , 13 Apr 2018 15:50In the 1980s we sided with the jihadists and bin laden in Afghanistan. Which then was repaid with 9/11. Now we are siding with the jihadists in Syria. The blowback will be bigger than 9/11.zinopus , 13 Apr 2018 15:49You either don't get it Jonathan, or you bury your head in the sand. WHO do you want to get rid of first: the head chopping thugs or someone else you can deal with later? This is not about who is the most desirable but who is for the time being the least worst? For a start you are ASSUMING that the now completely unproven "evidence" about chemical attacks is a given. IT IS NOT.ben_k11 , 13 Apr 2018 15:47Almost every single point you make is based upon speculation, mainstream media assumptions or downright lies. Wake up please. For goodness sake why doesn't your newspaper have a single journalist who actually knows what is really going on in Syria?
It is hard to be pro interventionist after the epical f up in Iraq and Libya, but it seems to me that Assad should and must get a hard punishment. Assad should not have WMDs since those weapons were handed over to be destroyed in Russia in 2014. Russia is a guarantor of this deal. Yet, Assad has and continues to use WMDs in the presence and I believe advice from the Russian military.StephenDaedalus -> JackDowland , 13 Apr 2018 15:47As for the military intervention itself I think Israeli's deep incursions in Syria and the bombing of military bases also used by Russian military have provided a lot of information about the capabilities and limitations of the Russian military technology deployed in Syria.
I couldn't find the paragraph which directly blames Assad's forces.Sure, here's the UN OPCW investigation report which directly blames the Assad forces for chemical attacks. Take as much time as you need.
I note it does refer (at para 44) to Assad's allegation that a video had been staged. It concludes that the patients on the video "appear relatively unaffected by the typical symptoms. No red eyes, tearing, paleness, sweating, cyanosis or breathing difficulties can be observed ....
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
What Freedland and others are advocating is illegal. They have no moral or legal authority.
For the avoidance of any doubt or confusion, attacking a foreign country without legal basis under international law represents the "supreme international crime". The launching of an "aggressive war" is the "supreme crime" because it is the overarching offense which contains within itself "the accumulated evil of the whole" (e.g. rape, torture, murder, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, etc).
People were tried, convicted and hung at Nuremberg for the crime of waging wars of aggression (as well as crimes against humanity).
Regardless of how unpalatable we may find it, even the verified use of chemical weapons -be they by state or non-state actors - is not a legal basis to attack a country, any country.
As Phyllis Bennis, Fellow and Director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., clearly explained (following the last alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, and subsequent military strike on the Syrian air base ordered by President Trump):
"The UN Charter is very vague about a lot of things, but it's very clear about one thing, and that is, when is it legal to go to war? When is it legal to use a military strike? There's only two occasions according to the UN Charter The UN Charter says, "A country can use military force under two circumstances: Number one, if the Security Council authorizes it." Number two, Article 51 of the UN Charter, which is about self-defence. But it's a very narrowly constrained version of self-defence It says very explicitly, "If a country has been attacked." "until the Security Council can meet, immediate self-defence is allowed." Neither of those two categories applied here. So, it was clearly an illegal act."
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
GuardianFodder -> LeftOrRightSameShite , 13 Apr 2018 15:36
This guy skipped past the censors.He explains how there has been lots of Western intervention against Syria.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Read Robert Fisk in the Independent. He, as always, has nailed it. The Brits and the US have no authority to take action with their past record of use of Chemical and Atomic weapons.Celtiberico , 13 Apr 2018 15:42Krautolivier , 13 Apr 2018 15:40The Syrian Negotiation Commission has called for action to deter Assad from killing civilians. What they envisage is that each time Assad launches a deadly attack on noncombatants, allied forces reply by taking out one of the strategic assets he uses to kill civilians. It could be an airfield, it could be a command centre. If the target were aircraft, that would simultaneously inflict a cost on the regime and deprive it of the means of dropping its barrel bombs and toxic, yellow cylinders. The objective would be to make Assad pay a price for killing his own people, a price he has not paid until now. Eventually, or so runs the hope, he would be deterred.
That kind of reminds me of when Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were explaining how to get rid of Saddam without plunging Iraq into mayhem and destabilising the wider region.
If the price of selling arms to Saudi Arabia is having to stage nerve agent attacks in the UK and in Syria, one has to ask: Is it really worth it?oldeborr , 13 Apr 2018 15:38The UK andcFrance bares a heavy responsibility for the current situation in Syria. The cavalier attitude that the ConDems took to international law during the Arab spring encouraged the Saudi s and their proxies to distablise the recognised Govt. Assad is no paragon of virtue, but prior to the insurgency steps were in place to make the country a better place for its citizens, and whilst its true poltical dissent was not allowed, people could live their lives and go about their business in safety.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
harveybrown , 13 Apr 2018 15:37
In an interview on BBC 1 on 8 February 2004, UN Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix accused the US and British governments of dramatizing the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the government of Saddam Hussein.
Ultimately, no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were ever found.In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Blix said, "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media."
[ It is interesting to note that Allan Ramsay likewise deplored "a friendly alliance between the camp and the counting-house" for exactly the same reasons (Letters on the Present Disturbances, p.34). Ramsay maintained that of the evil consequences of such alliance "the two last wars carried on by England against France and Spain, furnish a most melancholy illustration. To obtain the sole and exclusive commerce of the western world, in which the French and Spaniards were their rivals, was the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits, a more expeditous one was devised; which was that of driving their rivals entirely out of the seas, and preventing them from bringing their goods at all to market. For this purpose, not having any fleets or armies of their own, the powers of the State were found necessary, and they applied them accordingly" (ibid., pp.32 f.).
Knorr, K. E. 'Ch02-Part2 British Colonial Theories 1570-1850'. In British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850. The University of Toronto Press, 1944. ]
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
OlivesNightie , 13 Apr 2018 15:46The notion of inaction, of standing by and watching as Assad kills and kills and kills, racking up a death toll in Syria of 500,000
On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright defended UN sanctions against Iraq on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."'
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
StephenDaedalus -> JackDowland , 13 Apr 2018 15:47
I couldn't find the paragraph which directly blames Assad's forces.Sure, here's the UN OPCW investigation report which directly blames the Assad forces for chemical attacks. Take as much time as you need.
https://undocs.org/S/2016/738
I note it does refer (at para 44) to Assad's allegation that a video had been staged. It concludes that the patients on the video "appear relatively unaffected by the typical symptoms.
No red eyes, tearing, paleness, sweating, cyanosis or breathing difficulties can be observed from the footage. The patients interviewed in the video show little or no signs of having been exposed to a toxic chemical".
This is also consistent with other documented attempts of video-making to trigger the western bombs.
Surely you can see why people might at least reserve judgment about the latest video emanating from Jaish al-Islam controlled territory?
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
LiviaDrusilla -> Bopstar, 13 Apr 2018 16:17
"Charities"? Lol. I'll bet money nearly all of those 'charities' are actually PR fronts for thuggish Islamist rebels.brambalus -> 1liesalot , 13 Apr 2018 16:16A bit like how all the Syrians the Guardian manages to reach for 'skype interviews' are positively desperate for massive aeriel bombardment of their own country, chastising the west for not supplying the bearded types with anti-aircraft missiles and even suggesting targets for American bombs.
I have recently taught two Syrian professionals. Of course Assad is evil, but they tell me that some of the rebel militias are much more brutal and intolerant than Assad and if they win Syria will go the way of Libya.They also told me (which shocked me somewhat) that the White Helmets tend to be hard line Islamists and send out propaganda videos which Western media fail to question thoroughly.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Sky News cuts of British General. https://southfront.org/sky-news-cuts-off-former-british-general-while-he-questiones-douma-chemical-attack /TheKingOfHate , 13 Apr 2018 15:41JBigglesworth , 13 Apr 2018 15:41"Russian claims that UK staged Syria gas attack 'a blatant lie'"When the FO is headed by Boris 'Serial liar' Johnson it becomes very hard to know who to believe.
Further to my post on Russell-Moyle's Tweet:Lloyd Russell-Moyle
(@lloyd_rm)
It is worth noting that the British Government approved exports of dual use precursors for chemical weapons including sarin to Syria between 2004 and 2012, after the civil war began and after Assad was accused of using gas. CAEC report (2015): pic.twitter.com/TsvthAcZRRApril 13, 2018
Further down his thread is a tweet where someone has a screen-grab of a Mail Online story from 2013. It talks about leaked information about clearance given by the US Government for a British security company to stage a chemical weapons attack in Syria in order to provide a pretext for bombing.
I have no idea whether this is true or whether it was genuinely from Mail Online, perhaps someone with more know-how than me could find out.
At first, I laughed at the Russian suggestion that the attack on Douma had been staged. Now I'm not so sure.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Your article appears to apportion blame solely to Assad and you don't even attempt to address the opposition in Syria. Nobody seriously questions that the Syrian governments war has killed many thousands and thousands of civilians. How can you not refer to the international jihad and the make up of these fighters, as well as the sieges they laid on villages, town and cities and the cruelty they inflicted upon the people?BoomersStealingMoney , 13 Apr 2018 15:32The Syrian Arab Army is a composite of Sunni, Shia, Christians, and different ethnicity's, what convinces you that they have in any way wantonly killed civilians? The soldiers have family all over Syria, plus no mention of the 300,000+ civilians that have been liberated from Eastern Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta in the last several months.
I find this article very bizarre indeed. The most simple explanation for the disaster in Syria is that a sovereign state protected its national interest from an international contingent of mercenaries. There are Moroccans and Chechnyans, Uighurs and Brits, Saudis as well as Syrians in this armed army. What other options did a state such as Syria have when fighting against ISIS, Al Qaida, Al Nusra and 'The Army of Islam', Jaysh Al-Islam? All have which have direct connections to our major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong but I can not find any reference at all to the enemy in this article. It's written as if the 8 year war has simply been an extermination war against civilians and completely out of context with reality.
Check out Operation Timber Sycamore for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
The west stoked and funded the Wahabists. Secular Asad is our buffer against the Saudi version of Islam.Justin Thyme , 13 Apr 2018 15:31Whatever happens we cannot let the Saud version of Islam win.
The Sauds have spread their Wahabi version of Islam using oil money. And we have armed the Sauds.
The USA and WMD@SUS Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped Saddam Hussein build up his arsenal of deadly chemical and biological weapons. As an envoy from President Reagan 19 years ago, he had a secret meeting with the Iraqi dictator and arranged enormous military assistance for his war with Iran. Mr Rumsfeld, at the time a successful executive in the pharmaceutical industry, still made it possible for Saddam to buy supplies from American firms. They included viruses such as anthrax and bubonic plague, according to the Washington Post.
The USA provided $1.5 billion worth of Pathogenic, toxigenic and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq; 1985-89.1) US based company, Alcolac International exported mustard gas to Iraq; 1987-88.
2) Almost 150 foreign companies supported Saddam Hussein's WMD program; 1975-
3) US directly attacked Iran by hitting Iran's oil platforms; 1987.
4) US directly attacked Iran's navy in unproportioned and unreasonable war; 1988.
5) US shot down Iranian civilian airliner in the Iranian territory; 1988.This is the equivalent of a pathological paedophile giving a sermon against child abuse when the US preaches its corrupt moral practices regarding Syria!!!
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Russia has transferred forty Pantsir-S1 air defense systems to Syria' Air Defence.
This is the latest air defence technology (the system is in service since 2012) - a combined short to medium range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon system against aircrafts, helicopters, precision munitions, cruise missiles and UAVs.https://southfront.org/russia-delivered-40-pantsir-s1-air-defense-systems-to-syria-state-media /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir-S1
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Apr 21, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
e are caught between a rock, in the form of the recklessness of Donald Trump, and a hard place, shaped by the cruelty of Bashar al-Assad. This is the choice that now confronts citizens and their representatives in Britain, France and the US. The reasons to resist signing up for any project led by Trump should be obvious, with the newly published testimony of James Comey, the FBI director he fired, providing a fresh reminder.
Trump is a congenital liar who is devoid of empathy, a narcissist with a nihilist's view of the world. These are not mere character defects; they have a bearing on the decisions the de facto leader of any action in Syria would take. Among the reasons I opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq was my fundamental distrust of George W Bush and his circle, especially on the matter of motive. Trump, with his tweeted mood swings – first, vowing to withdraw from Syria altogether, then threatening an imminent missile bombardment, then signalling a delay – makes Bush look like a statesman.
But even if a moral paragon were sitting in the Oval Office, there would be grounds for restraint. The record of past western military interventions in the Middle East is bloody and shaming, as the peoples of both Iraq and Libya can testify. Barack Obama, no gung-ho cowboy, was the commander-in-chief in the latter case. And yet what was originally billed as a discrete military action to prevent an impending civilian slaughter in Benghazi escalated into a bombardment that led to regime change and mayhem. It stands as a textbook illustration of western bombs' ability to make a bad situation worse.
LiviaDrusilla -> BullNakano , 13 Apr 2018 16:26
dannymega -> mjlnkc , 13 Apr 2018 16:26It's clear now that although Assad has 'won' the war a status quo of him ruling a predominately Sunni country can't be returned to. He seeks to terrorise and punish the Syrian people under the protection of Russia and Iran.
Even though the army which has made such huge sacrifices for the Syrian state is about 70% Sunni?
The US and her allies have to intervene, otherwise the rule of international law is worthless.
Why? Even if your premise above were true, which it isn't, why is it our job to intervene in every country with an imperfect system? Or are you proposing we bomb every Middle Eastern country where people are privileged and granted citizenship merely on account of their religion?
Yes, because Assad wants to be bombed by the West just as he is winning, I know - makes perfect sense.solidstae -> John Favre , 13 Apr 2018 16:25I love these guys who won't do their own research. Why not? Axe to grind? This is just one example from 2013. There's more but I'm too busy to look up public shit for you.GLT24 -> Squiddlywidget , 13 Apr 2018 16:18https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/6/syrian-rebels-used-sarin-nerve-gas-not-assads-regi /
Spot on look what happened to Sadaam after he switched to the Euro for Iraq oil sales.Squiddlywidget , 13 Apr 2018 16:10
Ghaddafi had similar plans.
Without reserve currency status and petrodollar with US economy will collapse under the $21T dollar debt.
Russia and China have recently agreed a bilateral trade agreement which cuts out the dollar.
The US cannot permit this ...as always follow the money.
Some people murder others for political and ideological reasons the military industrial complex starts wars and conflicts ,murdering millions for profit....evil personifiedCould this whole drama be because China and Russia are ditching the petrodollar?
I watched the video of the attack and it looks fake to me.. those children are not crying because of chlorine.. they have their eyes wide open..first thing you do when you have chlorine in your eyes is touch your face and close your eyes..whole thing looks dodge..just my opinion. Those children are wide eyed and looking at the camera..something you wouldn't do if you'd just been gassed.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
dumbwaiter -> Kevin Watson , 13 Apr 2018 15:50
I'm going to post a comment by another user posted yesterday as he said it far more eloquently than I couldR Reddington InterestedReader2 1d ago
Your just another armchair warrior.So you think going to war is a good idea well you first then and don't forget your flack jacket and rifle.
The media onslaught has moved past the attack in Salisbury by a "weapon of mass destruction" (quoting Theresa May) which could only be Russian, except that was untrue, and was extremely deadly, except that was untrue too. It now focuses on an attack by chemical weapons in Douma which "could only be" by the Russian-backed Assad regime, except there is no evidence of that either, and indeed neutral verified evidence from Douma is non-existent. The combination of the two events is supposed to have the British population revved up by jingoism, and indeed does have Tony Blair and assorted Tories revved up, to attack Syria and potentially to enter conflict with Russia in Syria.
The "Russian" attack in Salisbury is supposed to negate the "not our war" argument, particularly as a British policeman was unwell for a while. Precisely what is meant to negate the "why on earth are we entering armed confrontation with a nuclear power" argument, I do not know.
Saudi Arabia has naturally offered facilities to support the UK, US and France in their attempt to turn the military tide in Syria in favor of the Saudi sponsored jihadists whom Assad had come close to defeating. That the Skripal and Douma incidents were preceded by extremely intense diplomatic activity between Saudi Arabia, Washington, Paris and London this year, with multiple top level visits between capitals, is presumably supposed to be coincidence.
I am not a fan of Assad any more than I was a fan of Saddam Hussein. But the public now understand that wars for regime change in Muslim lands have disastrous effects in dead and maimed adults and children and in destroyed infrastructure; our attacks unleash huge refugee waves and directly cause terrorist attacks here at home. There is no purpose in a military attack on Syria other than to attempt to help the jihadists overthrow Assad. There is a reckless disregard for evidence base on the pretexts for all this. Indeed, the more the evidence is scrutinised, the dodgier it seems. Finally there is a massive difference between mainstream media narrative around these events and a deeply sceptical public, as shown in social media and in comments sections of corporate media websites.
The notion that Britain will take part in military action against Syria with neither investigation of the evidence nor a parliamentary vote is worrying indeed. Without Security Council authorisation, any such action is illegal in any event. It is worth noting that the many commentators who attempt to portray Russia's veto of a Syria resolution as invalid, fail to note that last week, in two separate 14 against 1 votes, the USA vetoed security council resolutions condemning Israeli killings of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza.
The lesson the neo-cons learnt from the Iraq war is not that it was disastrous. It was only disastrous for the dead and maimed Iraqis, our own dead and maimed servicemen, and those whose country was returned to medievalism. It was a great success for the neo-cons, they made loads of money on armaments and oil. The lesson the neo-cons learned was not to give the public in the West any time to mount and organise opposition. Hence the destruction of Libya was predicated on an entirely false "we have 48 hours to prevent the massacre of the population of Benghazi" narrative. Similarly this latest orchestrated "crisis" is being followed through into military action at a blistering pace, as the four horsemen sweep by, scything down reason and justice on the way.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
, 13 Apr 2018 16:13Orwell certainly chose his words well when he called the UK 'Airstrip One' in his book 1984. The UK government, the US neocons yapping little poodle. All cheered on by our always on message main stream media.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
junglecitizen -> LeftOrRightSameShite , 13 Apr 2018 15:44
We, along with the US, France and Gulf states have supported, armed and trained "rebels" in Syria the whole time. We've had, as have others, special forces operating inside Syria
So, there would never be rebellions against totalitarian dictators if it weren't for the CIA and MI6.I don't buy this. It's very convenient if you're an anti-war person who doesn't want to face an ethical dilemma. But it's not real.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
CaptainBrown , 13 Apr 2018 16:07
Syria is surrounded by wealthy gulf countries, many of whom frequently buy weapons from the US and UK. They have the money, the firepower, and the space to not only house fleeing refugees, but also bomb Assad back to the stone age. They haven't, because they lack testicular fortitude and are always looking west for solutions.
The US, UK and France act like they own the world. Iran vs Iraq, the creation of Israel, and Saudi Arabia, Sykes-Picot - western countries played a major part in all of this. In the absence of evidence, it's about time we kept out of it.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
georgina45 -> Squadra , 13 Apr 2018 15:45I watched RT for the first time last night and it was interesting.But right now its like we are being ruled by lunatics. It is absolutely sickening. Quite literally some moron in the White House is tweeting, 'My bombs are bigger than yours' and 'The missiles are coming.'
And they still let him in rule one of the most powerful countries on the Earth with a vast mass of WMD and Theresa May is trying reason with a fucking moron. Hey Guardian if Trump is talking like this my swearing is the least of our problems, so please don't moderate. We need someone to Moderate the madmen.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
LiviaDrusilla -> SummerPatch , 13 Apr 2018 15:47
As I've said , I consider the term 'putinbot' - infantile and indicative of a lack of logical argumentation as it is - as a compliment, since it appears to be code for those who retain the ability to think for themselves and not fall glumly for the latest official line.
since the OPCW proved it was Putin who tried to murder British civilians with nerve agents.Actually, they proved no such thing, but in any case it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Squadra -> georgina45 , 13 Apr 2018 15:36
I'd never really watched much RT news, but intersting to see their extensive coverage of their diplomats who, despite not speaking English as native, can conduct hours of press conference in a civil and diplomatic fashion.DemocraticFacade , 13 Apr 2018 15:36May weeping for the innocents of Syria as she signs off on a conveyor belt of bombs to be dropped on innocents in Yemen. She's being raised up by the British media alongside Blair and Cameron as one of the greatest humanitarian of modern times.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MartinSilenus -> imperium3 , 13 Apr 2018 14:13
"Remarkable how Saddam Hussein gassing Iranian troops by the thousand, while world powers helped him do it and covered for him at the UN is treated as a minor exception to non-use of chemical"LiviaDrusilla -> Bangorstu , 13 Apr 2018 14:12He also used poison gas to kill thousands of his own Kurdish civilians, the Reagan administration was in many ways a moral cesspit. They knew exactly what he was doing. A spokesman said the Iranians - who never used Chemical Weapons on principle - used the poison gas, on Iraqi Kurds. I think Reagan never really understood this, that is my assessment of his character, he saw what reality he wanted to see, but nothing else.
There has been no independently gathered or assessed medical evidence. None.wryape , 13 Apr 2018 14:12What is this 'NGO' you speak of? The vast majority of supposed 'NGO's' are fronts for jihadists 'rebels' who want an Islamist state.
" Back then the death toll in Syria stood at around 100,000. More than 400,000 have died since that day. The proof is there if we can bear to look at it. Inaction, too, can be deadly"NHSmonami -> Laurence Bury , 13 Apr 2018 14:12And how many died after the war was "won" in Iraq. And how many would have died trying to remove assad. Toppling assad would almost certainly not have brought peace. Your analysis is simplistic and blinkered and definately doesn't contain any proof of anything. Sometimes there's just not a solution. The current proposed bombing campaign smacks of somethingmustbedoneism. Those responsible for the gas attacks must face justice. But it might have to be further down the line.
Western countries have been guilty of mudering hundreds of thousands in starting Middle East wars.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
creelo -> sejong , 13 Apr 2018 14:57
We're now in a strange position where the media is actually behind the government. May is doubtful about bombing because she's a politician and so has to constantly monitor her popularity, but the only people left still writing in 'newspapers' are still programmed to want war and bombing because it always used to sell.HarrytheHawk -> JackDowland , 13 Apr 2018 14:56"Since you're here..."
'There is overwhelming evidence...'Jazzfunk23 , 13 Apr 2018 14:56Where?
Let's see it.
You might want to show it to James Mattis while you're at it as he doesn't seem to be willing to settle for accusations.
The UN duly investigated and in October concluded unambiguously that the Assad regime had used sarin gas.thatotherbloke , 13 Apr 2018 14:54You omitted to mention that the same report also concludes that ISIL deployed Sulphur Mustard, isn't this the same gas that France claims to have evidence regarding the recent incident?
Besides, how much evidence do we need? Even before Douma, Assad's use of chemical weapons had been documented seven times this year alone.
The link you provided to back-up this claim contains no substantiative evidence to attribute those incidents to Assad.
Clearly both sides in this conflict appear to have used chemical weapons, making assumptions or false accusations of blame at this stage is incredibly dangerous. I'm in total agreement with Jeremy Corbyn, we need a solid investigation on which the international community can act. Any potential escalation of this awful conflict must be avoided at all costs, particularly when it involves a nuclear armed superstate, considering the on-going humaitarian crisis in Syria and how it has already affected the world. Furthermore we must not allow a cabinet of a minority government to make any final decisions on the UK involvement in further militrary action, our elected representatives MUST be allowed to debate and decide a course of action, otherwise our democracy is in a far worse state than I could have possibly imagined.
Theresa May leads a minority government propped up by an unlawful bung to a right wing extremist group. May, her Cabinet of half wits and her self serving party have a mandate for sweet FA, and that includes killing people in our name.sejong , 13 Apr 2018 14:52MSM has gone full neocon on Syria.psoptim11 , 13 Apr 2018 14:52Bomb like it's 2003.
There is massive, overwhelming opposition in the UK to May's attempt to join Trump & Macron in bombing Syria and to by-passing our democratic parliament, but who would have thought it?dumbwaiter , 13 Apr 2018 14:52The media are generally presenting Theresa May with a free ride to cause death and destruction on a massive scale. Claiming she's joining an international coalition (even though it consists of only 2 other countries) and having the backing of the Cabinet and therefore possessing the authority to go to war.
The reality is that she's virtually politically isolated and working in defiance of the British people. Labour - and most other opposition parties, including the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid, and the Greens are totally against military intervention and calling for a full, democratic debate in Parliament.
Then the Conservative Party itself is bitterly divided over the issue.
And only 22% of British people would support the war effort, according to a poll in the Times.
The timing is being forced by Donald Trump and the US, so where's the substance in the Conservative claim that they're 'taking back control'?
And then any intervention is likely to cost billions, so what about The Deficit? And what about that magic money tree?
Moreover, the Government maintain we cannot allow such inhumanity in Syria to go unchallenged. So where is the outcry at defenceless citizens being killed in Gaza? And in Yemen? And in Saudi Arabia? What accounts for the blatant double standards? What are they not telling us?
And why does the British Goverment justicfy selling all these lethal and inhumance weapons to these countries in the first place?
Where is the media reminding the Government of what happened in Iraq, in Libya and in Afghanistan?, whenever we intervened?
Where is the media remembering the findings of the Chilcott Report?
If this was Labour nationalising the railways or expropriating land in an emergency bill to launch a massive house-building programme, the BBC and mass media would quote every adversary and critic they could muster and express total outrage at any attempt to by-pass Parliament.
The Syrian conflict is a hugely complex quagmire and we enter it at our peril. We need a much more objective Press to scrutinise Government policy, before this lunacy unravels and triggers a seriously calamitous hot war between the Superpowers, from which we'd all be losers.
Jeremy Corbyn is often mocked and scorned by the media for his measured reactions, but his call for the UK to use its influence to defuse tensions makes him one of the only responsible and mature political leaders around right now!!
The government and the BBC have been using the words "suspected chemical attack" in Syria and that Russia is "highly likely" to be responsible for the Salisbury affair.Now if that isn't official doubt I don't know what is.
Still May happy to drop bombs on this basis without parliamentary approval (if Donald says so that is)!
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
bubmachine , 13 Apr 2018 14:39
OK - its the We Cannot Do Nothing, Therefore We Must Do Something, Therefore We Must Bomb Them argument.DZ76 , 13 Apr 2018 14:39Convinced? No.
This is pathetic. The mouthpieces of the British government (Guardian and BBC) have spent the last week on a steady pendulum of demanding war, shitting themselves, then when the rhetoric calms down a bit, demanding war again. The U.K., its security agencies and its house-trained media are destabilising the world.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
HoublaHoubla , 13 Apr 2018 14:44
Here's an idea Jonathan for another solution. How about some basic honesty about the role the US and it's allies have played in fostering and continue if this civil war. That, coupled by a complete retreat of US imperial neoliberal ambitions across the entire region, you know, might just be incredibly effectivenotndmushroom , 13 Apr 2018 14:42fishandart , 13 Apr 2018 14:42Why not? We're watching Israelis shoot and kill unarmed Palestinians, we're watching our favourite Saudis bomb and kill Yemeni civilians, we're watching our Nobel-winning inspirational Myanmar leader oversee the persecution, massacre and forced displacement of an entire people, we're watching the North Korean leader oppress and starve his people while stepping closer to a nuclear war against a currently volatile superpower, we're watching the Philipino head of state launching a literal war against low-level drug dealers and junkies, we're watching several central Asian dictators imprison and torture dissidents and oppress their people while robbing them of their national wealth, we're watching the Chinese and Russian leaders do pretty much the same, we're watching the Turkish leader kidnap dissidents from EU countries, imprison thousands of alleged dissidents and invade a neighbouring country to fight against part of said countries' inhabitants, we're watching corrupt politicians, media and judges completing the final touches of a coup in the fifth largest country in the world, and then there's Africa, which is a whole other chapter.But nor can we watch the brutal dictator slaughter his own people
What specifically is it about Syria that made you decide that yeah, all these things are pretty bad, but that's the one thing we really have to do something about?
Perhaps that was why, five years ago, the House of Commons voted to leave the Assad regime untouched. Back then the death toll in Syria stood at around 100,000. More than 400,000 have died since that day. The proof is there if we can bear to look at it. Inaction, too, can be deadly.
Inaction? Really? Are we seriously going to pretend we and our allies haven't provided financial, technological, diplomatic, political and military support to this extremely heterogenous group of rebels, without which the whole uprising (a legitimate uprising, sure, but certainly not a viable one) would have been over in a few months, without any of the atrocities, tragedies and destruction of the past 6 years?
For Europe and the US to have any credibility the double standards applied has to come to an end. Israel has to comply with UN resolutions and the US has to stop using its veto to block those resolutions that seek to make Israel comply to international standards of acceptable behaviour.Ziontrain , 13 Apr 2018 14:41If we can't do that we can forget getting Assad or Putin or anyone else to respect anything we have to say. As it stands the so called West has no moral authority in the Middle East.
But nor can we watch the brutal dictator slaughter his own people
Why is this supposed slaughter such an imperative when we seem to approve of and even profit from selling weapons to slaughters elsewhere in the region
- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/opinion/the-slaughter-of-children-in-yemen.html
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-saudi-un/u-n-blacklists-saudi-led-coalition-for-killing-children-in-yemen-idUSKBN1CA2NI
- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/adil-e-shamoo/the-saudi-slaughter-in-ye_b_9281112.html
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/02/saudi-arabia-beheadings-reach-highest-level-in-two-decades
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-executions-the-political-protesters-who-were-killed-and-those-still-on-death-row-a6795016.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/world/middleeast/saudi-executions-seen-as-sending-message-to-all-dissenters.html
- https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/uk-israel-arms-deals-gaza-strip-palestinian-protests-killing-a8298026.html
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/israeli-forces-kill-3-palestinians-land-day-protests-180330100034136.html
Sorry but the arguments in the article don't hold water. Reeks of the longstanding agenda of the war profiteers and the Clinton gang to invade this country. On hypocritical reasons.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
MightyBuccaneer , 13 Apr 2018 14:14
Conveniently missing from this short history of Syria: That the US was actually heavily involved using the CIA in getting rid of Assad. Had that not been the case, perhaps there would have been no prolonged civil war.NewWorldOutOfOrder , 13 Apr 2018 14:14It would be just another dictator, the likes of which can be found all over the world without columnists noticing it.
Strangely though, all that is deplored is that the US didn't do even more. That they didn't also do a full blown invasion.
"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorshipBriar , 13 Apr 2018 14:14Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
– Hermann Goering (as told to Gustav Gilbert during the Nuremberg trials)
Pay for what? Be President of a country marked out for regime change by the West and successfully managing to fight off the West's proxy armies of terrorists over seven years in defence of that country?solidstae , 13 Apr 2018 14:14Oh, I know challenging the holy West and its exceptional leading nation is verboten nowadays, but can we at least be honest about what is really going on today? Syria is being punished for not joining the coalition of the willing in 2003 by being subjected to the same illegal war by false claim as Iraq was then.
Assad has always acted in this like any other authoritarian government anywhere in the Middle East would, fighting a civil war. Israel is just as ruthless when facing a threat to its authority.This mess was financed, planned, egged on and armed by the U.S., it's junior partners and its clients in Turkey and the Gulf. And it goes back years before the rebellion against Assad. The Wahabbi rebels have been given billions in cash, arms and training, funneled through Turkey and the Gulf states.
Now we have Washington, London and Paris shrieking outrage and promising revenge against a strongman they unleashed as the result of yet another regime change adventure. And then there's the incredible hypocrisy and cynicism of using Al-Qaeda affiliated actors to do it.
Assad's wartime iteration, like ISIS, is the result of American greed, ambition, pride and the old imperialist bent for aggression as a way of imposing its geopolitical will.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Watch the Unbearable video gain. The children are no foaming at the mouth, their colouration is not cyanotic, they do not appear to be in respiratory distress. The premise of the argument is not based on fact. These children are not the casualties of a gas attack. GROW UP and recognize the propaganda.minutehands , 13 Apr 2018 13:38The article takes a self-righteous moral high ground while calling for some vague affair of violence. I can't help but notice that these articles by people who pretend to be moderates and centrists have a habit of turning reality and morality on their head. It's dangerous and very Orwellian stuff.entropyrules , 13 Apr 2018 13:44The question that I struggle to answer is, "Are journalists like this actually duped by propaganda themselves, or are they knowingly part of the process of dissemination?"ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 13:36
What I do not struggle to see is that they are undoubtedly part of the prevailing neolib/neocon philosophy which we rapidly need to dismantle.Cui bono?Who would gain by getting the US back on the ground in Syria?
Who would gain from Russia and the US coming into conflict?Rogue elements in the US?
Israel certainly
ISIS terrorists?
Saudi Arabia?
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
ChairmanMayTseTung , 13 Apr 2018 13:27
In another development (probably to run with the Syria script) the UK announces it has a dossier that proves Russia was experimenting with delivering nerve agents from door handles.Not as hilarious as breathlessly closing a children's playground near the Skripal's days after the event for "contamination checks" even though it had been raining in the days in between (the narrative was presumably the dastardly Russian agents planned to kill a few innocent kids for good measure).
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
andersen100 -> zardos , 13 Apr 2018 14:05
We are absolutely being lied to, left right and centre.honestjohn -> SummerPatch , 13 Apr 2018 14:00People who actually know what is happening are being gagged, which is ironic in this digital age.
Time was that we kind of trusted our politicians- to some extent, anyway.
No longer, and especially when information is conveyed by tweets by possibly the most important person in the world.
We also have a Prime Minister who would like to bypass parliament at any given time.
'No one is suggesting they want to become new parties in the war.'fakeamoonlanding , 13 Apr 2018 14:02They have been involved from the start:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/29/syria-crisis-where-do-the-major-countries-stand
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23849587
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/world/middleeast/brutality-of-syrian-rebels-pose-dilemma-in-west.html ?
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/16/middleeast/syria-al-assad-interview/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Syrian_Civil_WarAs usual, our wise men are busy preparing the evidence dossier for this gas attack. Hacking someone's phone is now evidence of you delivering chemical weapon. I wonder how many doses of novichok NOTW managed to deliver to its phone hacking victims.Анатолий Ямсков , 13 Apr 2018 14:01Hope everyone understands that telling lies is not good, and it is especially disgusting when lies form the basic argument for launching a war or some prolonged military assaults.NoLivesMatter , 13 Apr 2018 13:59
Please, compare the articles, this one and those mentioned below, and judge for yourself whether J. Freedland can be trusted.
1. J. Freedland, about the West: "The notion of inaction, of standing by and watching as Assad kills and kills and kills, And yet that's what we've done".
O. Jones: "The US has been bombing the country and supplying arms to rebels for some time. Our client states ... have funnelled weapons and billions of dollars into the conflict, backing extremist groups responsible for multiple atrocities". https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/13/attack-syria-disastrous-warmongers-middle-east-unjust
2. J. Freedland: "The taboo on the use of such (chemical) weapons held, with exceptions, for nearly a century. It meant there was a limit".
For the actual details of such "limit" see: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-syria-war-uk-chemical-weapons-attack-iran-iraq-thatcher-russia-a8300881.html
3. It looks like J. Freedland is sure only Assad "kills and kills and kills" in this civil war. Does anyone believe this, i.e. that the opposing jihadists have never killed during the war?Why the automatic evidence-free assumption that Assad must be responsible?LiviaDrusilla -> ID9265089 , 13 Apr 2018 13:58According to the New York Times, Islamic State have been behind 52 chemical attacks in Syria and Libya:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/world/middleeast/isis-chemical-weapons-syria-iraq-mosul.html
HerbGuardian , 13 Apr 2018 13:55they're quite happy to gloss over the absolutely vile nature of Assad's regime.
Strawman. It's a nasty regime in all sorts of ways but no more so - probably less so - than many regimes enthusiastically supported and armed by the British government.
If we're talking about culpability, it's worth noting that the rebel groups have become radicalised over time -That old fib! This was an Islamist uprising from day one. How does a liberal pro-democracy type suddenly morph into a bearded Islamist overnight?
And yes, we gave aid to the rebels. Did it prolong the war? Possibly.Possibly? It didn't prolong the war, it pretty much caused the war.
Should we have done nothing? Possibly yes, but hindsight is always a wonderful thing.Hindsight eh? So you thought "Yup, let's join in with the Saudis and other Gulf dictatorships in arming extremist Islamist rebels in a crucial Middle Eastern country. Nothing could possibly go wrong! That sort of thing has been a roaring success everywhere it's been tried."
Seriously. Talk some sense.
Make Assad pay ?.......pay for what Johnny .... for defending his people from murderous insurgents who are being constantly ferried into and supplied by hostile countries with the intent of horrifically slaughtering anyone they can get their claws on in order to initiate a reign of terror that they hope will weaken the moral of the people and the government? ......Jesus, I don't think I've read such a nastier piece of pure propaganda than this in the Guardian ever before.imperium3 , 13 Apr 2018 13:55Remarkable how Saddam Hussein gassing Iranian troops by the thousand, while world powers helped him do it and covered for him at the UN is treated as a minor exception to non-use of chemical weapons, whereas Assad's is some unprecedented crime.OldDevil , 13 Apr 2018 13:54And let's not pretend that Saddam paid for his use of chemical weapons - the West punished him for the transgression of threatening Saudi Arabia, nothing more.
In August 2012, as reported by the Times , William Hague writes that discussions are taking place with the Free Syrian Army:SMKirov , 13 Apr 2018 13:52"This week, on my instructions, my ambassador-level representative to the Syrian opposition has contacted and is meeting political elements of the Free Syria Army."
"We want to deter those committing war crimes by making it possible for them to be held to account. We will provide urgent training and equipment to Syrian human rights activists, including cameras, video recorders and forensic equipment.
The aim is to help them to document human rights violations, identify the military commanders responsible and gather medical forensic evidence to be used in trials. Britain has already trained more than 60 Syrian human rights activists to collect information to support criminal investigations. This new assistance will enable others to do the same."The Guardian headline on this subject reads: "Syria: UK to give £5m to rebels":
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/aug/10/syria-aleppo-live
Cameras, video recorders and forensic equipment.
Why are the Guardian and its writers continuing to peddle the lie that the Syrian Government has been proved to have used chemical munitions? For seven long years now the Syrian people and their government have had to fight off a jihadi onslaught armed and financed by NATO and the Gulf autocracies. With help from Russia and Iran, they are winning: they have no need to use chemical weapons and they know that doing so is to invite intervention on the side of the Islamist terrorists. The terrorists, by contrast, know that their only chance lies in such intervention and that convincing the World that the Syrian Government has used chemical weapons is the best way to bring it about.kenna , 13 Apr 2018 13:41It is also obscene for Mr Friedland to ascribe all of the casualties of the Civil War to the Government while ignoring the terrorist tactic of occupying and defending populated areas. The Syrian Arab Army is no more responsible for the resulting casualties than were the pro Western forces for the destruction of Mosul during its liberation from ISIS. I am sick to the teeth of formerly respectable media like the Guardian and the BBC functioning as propagandists for jihadi murderers and terrorists, particularly now that doing so is pushing us towards a very dangerous international conflict.
I watched that idiot Jo Johnson last night going on about how the international community had banned chemical weapons in 1925 and no one pulled him up on it. Britain developed and stockpiled chemical weapons all through the 20th Century- the 'greatest' Britain of all time Churchill regularly argued for their use on 'lesser' races. The US (our allies in this) is the same US that dumped unbelievable amounts of agent orange on Vietnam at the same time it bombed a poor undeveloped country 'into the stone age'.diddoit , 13 Apr 2018 13:36A woman in the audience pointed out the sheer hypocrisy of abhorring Asssad's actions (quite rightly) but at the same time arming the Saudis to kill more civilians and supporting the Israeli government (which whilst clearly not in the same league as Assad or the Saudis is still a major human rights violater). Unsurprisingly she was cut off and the 'left-wing' BBC moved on and ignored her points
We went into Iraq because Blair warned, in the sternest terms, British cities could be under imminent attack from Iraqi WMD. How ridiculous do those grave statements, made to a hushed HoC, look today?q321gg8cla -> tomprice129 , 13 Apr 2018 13:33£35 billion arms contracts overseen by May,Johnson and Cameron to Saudia Arabia who are in Syria!Think about it !Tom1982 , 13 Apr 2018 13:31Graun, genuinely bugger off with this drumbeat for war. Seriously, hasn't the current murderous anarchy in Libya given you pause for thought?Denis61 , 13 Apr 2018 13:31There's no definitive evidence yet available that proves Assad's forces carried out a chemical attack. Furthermore, whilst it's not inconceivable that he did, it does seem to defy logic. Why invite Western intervention when you're winning the war? The Syrian opposition had far more to gain from the deployment of chemical weapons than Assad did.
Assad is a loathsome individual, but he's probably the only thing standing in the way of a Jihadist Theocracy being established in Syria. To put in bluntly, it's in our interests that he wins this war. The alternative is worse.
I wish I could say I was shocked by the latest pro war tub thumping by this increasingly unrecognisable paper. Sadly it's has become all too synonymous with its support for Theresa May and its attempts to persuade an unwilling public to join the hysteria. Freedland says that Assad's guilt is beyond doubt; no it isn't. He talks of the effectiveness of bombing in the Balkan conflict, conveniently ignoring Iraq and Syria. He ignores the obvious incentive for ISIS or perhaps he would prefer "rebels", to launch an attack in a a desperate attempt to recover a war they are losing. He ignores the war in Yemen and the murderous regimes around the world that we seem totally uninterested in putting right. No, Mr Freedland, I and I think many others are not giving Mrs May her Falklands moment at your behest.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
RudolphS 13 Apr 2018 16:17
Most baffling is is French president Emmanuele Macron's fierce reaction. There's no other nation which has suffered so much from terrorist attacks as France. And yet now its president is determined to use his fighter planes as the de facto airforce for the the jihadi extremists. Macron went even as far as making his statements with the Saudi prince at his side, the leader of a country which is known for funding the jihadis!
Weird times.
Jay_Q123 -> RudolphS 13 Apr 2018 16:25
Macron just got back from a few days hanging on out with the Saudi Arabian elite, who have
- been the most destructive force in the Syrian war and spreads terrorism all over the world
- guaranteed to spend tens of billions on French weapons.
AndiMcDodle -> ManUpTheTree , 13 Apr 2018 14:51
Agreed Macron is so proud about the weapons Saudi Arabia bought of him. And strangely enough Saudi Arabia supports the ISIS head choppers in Syria, I think of a coincidence. And I didn't mention the gaz pipeline crossing Syria, that if Russia/Assad win, will be beyond the control of Europeans, a real bummer, given that Russia controls the supply east of Germany. I guess civilian death, is the only thing in the forefront of the France/UK/US preoccupations. Surely, they wouldn't condone civilians dying for geo-political reasons?NapoleonXIV -> Richmar , 13 Apr 2018 14:48Yes, I remember Rice, Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld telling the world that they had evidence that Saddam was hoarding WMD. I'm still waiting to hear what it was. Now M. Macron spouts the same ambiguous nonsense expecting us to take his word for it.Ziontrain -> rustledust74 , 13 Apr 2018 14:47Trump publicly states that US troops are being withdrawn from Syria. The next thing you know, Assad is allegedly gassing civilians. That makes a whole lot of sense doesn't it? If there's a sure-fire way of making sure you're on the wrong end of a bit of American 'shock and awe,' it's gassing innocents. Assad must have a death wish; or so they'd have us believe. The more I read about this fiasco, the more I think David Icke is the most rational man on the planet.
From Pinochet to Mobuto, Kagama and many more, I'd think you'd better to review what the policy of the west actually IS.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
But where is the incontrovertible proof that the regime is in fact responsible for the attack rather than 'rebel groups' now on the point of final defeat, who'd wish to draw in the major NATO powers? Why would the regime afford the US, France and UK the pretext to do one thing that'd undermine Assad's otherwise certain victory? The timing seems odd indeed while Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel act with impunity against minority populations. Each of the latter has form and interest the destruction of Syria in this proxy war.comrade1 , 13 Apr 2018 14:50Let me see if I have this right....SMKirov -> ID9265089 , 13 Apr 2018 14:46The UK thinks it's "highly likely" Assad is to blame for the chemical attack. France says it has evidence Assad is responsible but won't say what it is. US Secretary of Defence Mattis believes a chemical attack took place but says there's no evidence. And depending on the day of the week, Russia believes there was either no chemical attack or if there was then it was staged by the UK.
And for good measure we appear to be going headlong into war on the basis of all this.
The UN investigations concluded that the chemicals had come from Syrian Army stocks which there wasn't much doubt about to start with. Where they were less conclusive was the matter of who had deployed them given the capture of large stocks of munitions by the terrorists early in the war. On the basis of cui bono? it seems more likely that it was the terrorist side who sought to provoke Western intervention by staging chemical incidents rather than the Syrian Government who had little to gain and much to lose from the use of any kind of WMD.ReLuke631 , 13 Apr 2018 14:45We never learn.solidstae , 13 Apr 2018 14:45First Blair holding onto an idiot's shirt tails to attack a Middle Eastern country based on hearsay and no coherent withdrawal policy. Now we have May and Macron holding the hands of an even bigger idiot whose populist thoughts change by the minute so no hope of any withdrawal plan.
Does May and her hawks (Gove, Johnson) really want to be compared with Trump, Kim, Putin, Assad, W Bush, Blair et al in the history books?
The rebels in Syria have a history of using sarin, chlorine and mustard gas against troops and civilians. But Washington, London and Paris are completely dummy on this. Not a whisper. Rather straight to accusations and threats against the regime they have been trying to overthrow for years.irishinrussia , 13 Apr 2018 14:45I don't know who did it. But I know who lies every time they take a breath if they consider it in their interests. Truth is the first casualty. I don't believe any of them.
Noticeable that the Guardian live coverage provides Western refutations of Russia's claims of evidence regarding a staged false attack, but doesn't actually cover the evidence the Russians have provided - testimony from medical staff who claim to be witnesses. Now I'm not so stupid as to take these claims as gospel, the Russians are just as capable as anyone of finding a couple of fake or pressured witnesses. However the failure of the Western press to even elaborate on the evidence, even just to ridicule and debunk it, is suspicious.
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Apr 21, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Amaranthus_ , 13 Apr 2018 15:04
It is getting very tiresome tying to read between the lines of what Britain, America, Russia, etc, etc, etc spin to us in a constant barrage of disposable half truths. The worrying part is that it is now harder then ever to gauge if these 'bastions of truth' really believe their own bullshit or not and end up dropping us all into a war of no return.tomspen -> dannymega , 13 Apr 2018 15:02"Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."
The White Helmets were set up by a Briton (I can't remember exactly but I think he was ex intelligence services). They've consistently been shown to have links with extremists. It wouldn't surprise me at all if what the Russians are claiming is accurate.AndiMcDodle -> bobthebuilder234 , 13 Apr 2018 15:02Well the problem is that the vast majority of Syrians support Assad. This chemical attack, if it is confirmed by the OPWC investigation, could have been staged by the ISIS head choppers, or it was Assad. Nobody has a clue, so we need an investigation and see, whether, this is just propaganda bullshit from the head choppers. One thing is sure, if you care about civilian life, the best option is to accept that Assad and Russia won. Else, well you a hypocrite, and you don't care about civilian lives at all, but care more about the UK/US and France gaining the geo-political upper hand, without a care in the world about civilian life. Hence, you just as big a sociopath than Assad.diddoit , 13 Apr 2018 15:02Tony Blair is still laughing at everyone too.carlevans -> tomspen , 13 Apr 2018 15:01Ultimately, that is the problem. There is no mechanism in the UK to hold such people to any sort of account. No checks and balances.
Yes Millions of Gallons of Chemicals were rained down on Vietnam including Agent Orange and Napalm during the war.120Daze -> GuardianOfTime , 13 Apr 2018 15:00
Plus White Phosphorous was used by the US in Iraq as an "anti-personnel" weapon.Look, the Russians have a microscopic force in Syria, about 30 jets, very low army presence, usually one soldier per SAA Unit. The West and especially that inadequate May can look good by bombing some camels and then letting the Daily Mail and the BBC do the rest. Yes the Russians have S400 missiles in Syria but only to protect important targets and they simply don't have enough missiles to shoot down 100+ allied cruise missiles. The Russkies will just have to take the hit (again) but it will change nothing in the long run, except relations will deteriorate even further.Anyman , 13 Apr 2018 15:00One has the impression poodles Macron and May, in their ridiculous eagerness to assist Trump with his nice new smart shiny social media bombing of Syria, appear pathetic, even stupid, for their precipitate grandstanding now that the USA has, for the time being, reigned back from an immediate punishing strike on Syria.Cousin_Jack -> Etagere , 13 Apr 2018 14:59The "slaughter his own people" phrase is western spin; even the anti-government SOHR quotes a more or less even split between government forces, rebels and civilians, which means as civil wars go, this one is comparatively humane.Compare the death toll of hundreds on the final assault on Aleppo with that on Raqqa (thousands) or Mosul (tens of thousands) or the civilian toll in Indo-China and Korea (>10 million) and you'll realise the identity of the greatest war criminal of them all
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Apr 21, 2018 | theguardian.com
MetellusScipio, 13 Apr 2018 13:23
Ultimately Trump is a typical playground bully, he's a bullshitter, a blowhard. All talk. Trump was the same with Kim, and is the same with Putin and Assad.Like all bullies underneath he is a coward, he threatens Putin with ridiculous teenager Tweet threats, but as soon as Putin but back Trump backpeddles.
Don't look to Trump for solutions.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
I've just stumbled on this absolute gem, from the New York Times, 17/1/2003:"Analysis of thousands of captured Iraqi secret police documents and declassified U.S. government documents, as well as interviews with scores of Kurdish survivors, senior Iraqi defectors and retired U.S. intelligence officers, show
(1) that Iraq carried out the attack on Halabja [a 1988 chemical attack on Kurdish villages that killed 5000 civilians], and
(2) that the United States, fully aware it was Iraq, accused Iran, Iraq's enemy in a fierce war, of being partly responsible for the attack. The State Department instructed its diplomats to say that Iran was partly to blame."
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
dumbwaiter -> Kevin Watson , 13 Apr 2018 15:31
How about the West which has been trying to build a gas pipeline through Syria into Turkey to supply Europe with gas and break Russia's monopoly of European gas supplies. Don't believe me read the Doha agreement where the west recognised the Syrian rebels, this pipeline was a pre requisite for that recognition.Israel? which is not happy with Iran and Lebanon having a presence in Syria, worried that America was withdrawing.
AlQaeda or the Syrian Rebels, many are both who are losing the war and this is a last desperate attempt to drag in America and the west?
You've also got Turkey and the Kurds (the Kurds were abandoned by the West after they had fulfilled their useful purpose), both also players in the region but I can't see a motive here.
And why would Assad who is winning the war do the one thing that would give America and other western countries the chance to get involved because of outrageous moral indignation. Assad and Outing really aren't that stupid.
Any or all of the above could be the true motivation. I am no fan of Assad, Putin, or Trump or May (or the Blair clone Macron) but the question you have to ask yourself is who gains from this? And is. this in the interests of a resolution to a conflict, to your safety or is it something else?
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
harveybrown , 13 Apr 2018 15:37
In an interview on BBC 1 on 8 February 2004, UN Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix accused the US and British governments of dramatizing the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the government of Saddam Hussein.Jay_Q123 , 13 Apr 2018 15:36
Ultimately, no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were ever found.In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, Blix said, "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media."
[ It is interesting to note that Allan Ramsay likewise deplored "a friendly alliance between the camp and the counting-house" for exactly the same reasons (Letters on the Present Disturbances, p.34). Ramsay maintained that of the evil consequences of such alliance "the two last wars carried on by England against France and Spain, furnish a most melancholy illustration. To obtain the sole and exclusive commerce of the western world, in which the French and Spaniards were their rivals, was the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits, a more expeditous one was devised; which was that of driving their rivals entirely out of the seas, and preventing them from bringing their goods at all to market. For this purpose, not having any fleets or armies of their own, the powers of the State were found necessary, and they applied them accordingly" (ibid., pp.32 f.).
Knorr, K. E. 'Ch02-Part2 British Colonial Theories 1570-1850'. In British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850. The University of Toronto Press, 1944. ]
Your article appears to apportion blame solely to Assad and you don't even attempt to address the opposition in Syria. Nobody seriously questions that the Syrian governments war has killed many thousands and thousands of civilians. How can you not refer to the international jihad and the make up of these fighters, as well as the sieges they laid on villages, town and cities and the cruelty they inflicted upon the people?The Syrian Arab Army is a composite of Sunni, Shia, Christians, and different ethnicity's, what convinces you that they have in any way wantonly killed civilians? The soldiers have family all over Syria, plus no mention of the 300,000+ civilians that have been liberated from Eastern Aleppo and Eastern Ghouta in the last several months.
I find this article very bizarre indeed. The most simple explanation for the disaster in Syria is that a sovereign state protected its national interest from an international contingent of mercenaries. There are Moroccans and Chechnyans, Uighurs and Brits, Saudis as well as Syrians in this armed army. What other options did a state such as Syria have when fighting against ISIS, Al Qaida, Al Nusra and 'The Army of Islam', Jaysh Al-Islam? All have which have direct connections to our major ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.
Somebody correct me if I am wrong but I can not find any reference at all to the enemy in this article. It's written as if the 8 year war has simply been an extermination war against civilians and completely out of context with reality.
Check out Operation Timber Sycamore for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Vermithrax , 13 Apr 2018 15:39
Freedland recently put this argument on Newsnight.thousandautumns -> balancedman , 13 Apr 2018 15:39It is flawed to the point of dishonesty.
He talks of removing assets as if the process was being conducted under laboratory conditions. There are ten nations enmeshed in a warzone with numerous factions under no one's control. It is magical thinking that cannot be achieved and will only result in rapid, uncontrolled escalation. The idea that there will be no collateral damage is laughable and I regret to suggest that it is deliberately misleading.
Moreover, in engaging Assad when he is on the brink of victory, the Syrian Civil War will be extended. The Syrian people will then pay the price.
Should Assad subsequently fall - and that is the actual aim of intervention - then Syria will become another anarchic wasteland ruled over by fundamentalist warlords. The spiral of migration will be renewed bringing loons wrapped in the dispossessed to our own streets. Worse, the militants next stop will be Lebanon and then Israel will be directly involved. Freedland advocates acting against Assad without even attempting to predict the consequences. At the very least I would expect the usual misdirection 'of course this time we must have a plan for rebuilding Syria', secure in the knowledge that by that time there will be another crisis and Syria can be left in entropy.
No good can come from military intervention. The satisfaction of commentators that the right thing has been done is an irrelevance. The right thing is always just public relations. Every bit of ruthless geopolitics has to have a casus belli to make the killing all righteous and unavoidable. It has always been thus. For resources to be expended on this kind of scale there has to be a rock solid bit of bankable realpolitik. In this case its the struggle for regional hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Syria can either be part of a supply chain selling Sunni gas/oil to Europe or Shi'a gas/oil to Europe. This is about killing Syrians for the glory of Saudi Arabia. You can see why there has to be a casus belli because thats not something that can be sold. We know the proceeds will go unmentioned into offshore havens and the London property market. Britain would derive no geopolitical benefit as a whole. The benefits would accrue only to a kleptocracy who think they have a right to use our country as a loan shark's leg-breaker.
It is therefore my contention that Freedland is promoting an immoral act that will have serious consequences without offering any serious improvement in the situation. This is arguably the most dangerous situation since the Cuban Missile crisis and an analysis that advocates pouring oil on the flames is either ridiculously stupid or calculatedly duplicitous.
"Up to" 13,000 "opponents" killed over five years during a period of war. I'm assuming that number of "opponents" includes a large number of out and out terrorists who have thrown the country into chaos.Brianto , 13 Apr 2018 15:39What is Porton Down manufacturing?oldeborr , 13 Apr 2018 15:38The UK andcFrance bares a heavy responsibility for the current situation in Syria. The cavalier attitude that the ConDems took to international law during the Arab spring encouraged the Saudi s and their proxies to distablise the recognised Govt. Assad is no paragon of virtue, but prior to the insurgency steps were in place to make the country a better place for its citizens, and whilst its true poltical dissent was not allowed, people could live their lives and go about their business in safety.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
'.....Given Russia's presence, it would not be easy...... 'MartinSilenus -> Norman_Finklesteen , 13 Apr 2018 15:50Understatement of the century. If you start bombing strategic military targets you are quite, likely to hit Russian planes and troops.
As I said yesterday - What is the point ? Assad ( helped by his ally Russia ) has all but won the war ( which makes his use of chemical weapons surprising / a big mistake ) - The best solution being that he defeats all rebel forces as quickly as possible. The UN Chemical Weapons people can then go in ( or even before ) and try to collect some evidence.
Meanwhile, the Saudis are bombing Yemeni children with UK manufactured bombs.
The Syrian situation was made far worse by the USA / France and the UK arming extremist Islamic groups during the ' Arab Spring ' in an attempt to depose the legitimate ruler of a sovereign nation.
We don't say much about China's interference in Tibet these days, do we ?
Or the effect of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War ?
"here are many, many notable historians who state the death toll as high as 135,000 "mudlark123 -> BoomersStealingMoney , 13 Apr 2018 15:50The biggest single death toll in WWII was the low level firebombing of Tokyo, large areas of Japans capital city were wiped out. With houses as flammable as you can ever imagine, an unimaginably horror filled event. The Japanese death toll was around 100,000 dead. You are saying more died in Dresden?
"On this day, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the worst single firestorm in recorded history."
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/firebombing-of-tokyoIt is all about oil and supremacy in the region. Since when has our government or that of any western Country - cared about their people. Canon fodder - that is what we are.rockyrex -> LordThumpworthy , 13 Apr 2018 15:50OK so let's attack Saudi for what they are doing in Yemen. And Myanmar for their behaviour. Then there's Mexico, where the cartels keep murdering people. Really, let's apply the same standards everywhere.How will this proposed action change anything? The Syrians have hidden everything that matters, the Russians will get 90 minutes warning of the targets .... It's a PR exercise on the usual lines of "Something must be done .... this is something ..... "
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
, 13 Apr 2018 15:50Russia has transferred forty Pantsir-S1 air defense systems to Syria' Air Defence.
This is the latest air defence technology (the system is in service since 2012) - a combined short to medium range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery weapon system against aircrafts, helicopters, precision munitions, cruise missiles and UAVs.https://southfront.org/russia-delivered-40-pantsir-s1-air-defense-systems-to-syria-state-media /
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir-S1
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
dumbwaiter -> Kevin Watson, 13 Apr 2018 15:50
I'm going to post a comment by another user posted yesterday as he said it far more eloquently than I couldR Reddington InterestedReader2 1d ago
Your just another armchair warrior.
So you think going to war is a good idea well you first then and dont forget your flack jacket and rifle.
The media onslaught has moved past the attack in Salisbury by a "weapon of mass destruction" (quoting Theresa May) which could only be Russian, except that was untrue, and was extremely deadly, except that was untrue too. It now focuses on an attack by chemical weapons in Douma which "could only be" by the Russian-backed Assad regime, except there is no evidence of that either, and indeed neutral verified evidence from Douma is non-existent. The combination of the two events is supposed to have the British population revved up by jingoism, and indeed does have Tony Blair and assorted Tories revved up, to attack Syria and potentially to enter conflict with Russia in Syria.
The "Russian" attack in Salisbury is supposed to negate the "not our war" argument, particularly as a British policeman was unwell for a while. Precisely what is meant to negate the "why on earth are we entering armed confrontation with a nuclear power" argument, I do not know.
Saudi Arabia has naturally offered facilities to support the UK, US and France in their attempt to turn the military tide in Syria in favour of the Saudi sponsored jihadists whom Assad had come close to defeating. That the Skripal and Douma incidents were preceded by extremely intense diplomatic activity between Saudi Arabia, Washington, Paris and London this year, with multiple top level visits between capitals, is presumably supposed to be coincidence.
I am not a fan of Assad any more than I was a fan of Saddam Hussein. But the public now understand that wars for regime change in Muslim lands have disastrous effects in dead and maimed adults and children and in destroyed infrastructure; our attacks unleash huge refugee waves and directly cause terrorist attacks here at home. There is no purpose in a military attack on Syria other than to attempt to help the jihadists overthrow Assad. There is a reckless disregard for evidence base on the pretexts for all this. Indeed, the more the evidence is scrutinised, the dodgier it seems. Finally there is a massive difference between mainstream media narrative around these events and a deeply sceptical public, as shown in social media and in comments sections of corporate media websites.
The notion that Britain will take part in military action against Syria with neither investigation of the evidence nor a parliamentary vote is worrying indeed. Without Security Council authorisation, any such action is illegal in any event. It is worth noting that the many commentators who attempt to portray Russia's veto of a Syria resolution as invalid, fail to note that last week, in two separate 14 against 1 votes, the USA vetoed security council resolutions condemning Israeli killings of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza.
The lesson the neo-cons learnt from the Iraq war is not that it was disastrous. It was only disastrous for the dead and maimed Iraqis, our own dead and maimed servicemen, and those whose country was returned to medievalism. It was a great success for the neo-cons, they made loads of money on armaments and oil. The lesson the neo-cons learned was not to give the public in the West any time to mount and organise opposition. Hence the destruction of Libya was predicated on an entirely false "we have 48 hours to prevent the massacre of the population of Benghazi" narrative. Similarly this latest orchestrated "crisis" is being followed through into military action at a blistering pace, as the four horsemen sweep by, scything down reason and justice on the way.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Justin Thyme , 13 Apr 2018 15:31
The USA and WMD@S
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped Saddam Hussein build up his arsenal of deadly chemical and biological weapons. As an envoy from President Reagan 19 years ago, he had a secret meeting with the Iraqi dictator and arranged enormous military assistance for his war with Iran. Mr Rumsfeld, at the time a successful executive in the pharmaceutical industry, still made it possible for Saddam to buy supplies from American firms. They included viruses such as anthrax and bubonic plague, according to the Washington Post.
The USA provided $1.5 billion worth of Pathogenic, toxigenic and other biological research materials were exported to Iraq; 1985-89.1) US based company, Alcolac International exported mustard gas to Iraq; 1987-88.
2) Almost 150 foreign companies supported Saddam Hussein's WMD program; 1975-
3) US directly attacked Iran by hitting Iran's oil platforms; 1987.
4) US directly attacked Iran's navy in unproportioned and unreasonable war; 1988.
5) US shot down Iranian civilian airliner in the Iranian territory; 1988.This is the equivalent of a pathological paedophile giving a sermon against child abuse when the US preaches its corrupt moral practices regarding Syria!!!
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
"Trump is a congenital liar who is devoid of empathy, a narcissist with a nihilist's view of the world. These are not mere character defects; they have a bearing on the decisions the de facto leader of any action in Syria would take. Among the reasons I opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq was my fundamental distrust of George W Bush and his circle, especially on the matter of motive. "That is why Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Alistair Campbell fought so hard to oppose invasion of Iraq. In the end they had to resort an academic paper to do it. I feel terrible for them.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
ChairmanMayTseTung, 13 Apr 2018 13:18
A briefing room somewhere in DamascusAssad: So tell me, what is the military situation?
Generals: We are winning and winning decisively Mr President and the terrorists are pulling out of East Ghoutta
Assad: Excellent news. I suggest we kill a few dozen innocent civilians in a gas attack to celebrate.
Generals: Mr President, this would be utter folly. It would serve no possible military purpose and would risk catastrophic air strikes against our military assets.
Assad: Do it anyway! ** strokes fluffy white cat with a Mwwahh, mwah, mwah. **
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
beingsentient , 13 Apr 2018 13:12
The situation in Syria is more nuanced than just calling out Assad as a butcher of his own people. For one, he is a butcher of some of his own people, for many others he must seem like a saviour as without his regime's resistance it's pretty obvious what the likes of Isis would have done to the non-extremists in Syria - the Christians and anyone not of their puritanical strain.Andersie , 13 Apr 2018 13:12The real issue is that the established powers are struggling to cope with a multi-polar world. It was only a few decades ago that the world's capitalists were looking forward to a 'new world order' without any serious opponents. But then things went wrong, and countries refused to lay down for their new masters. Not only that, but Russia re-awoke and rejected the funnelling of its wealth into the coffers of the West via a few carefully selected oligarchs. Putin is undoubtedly not to liberal tastes, but he is the kind of leader Russians are historically used to and who has put Russia back on the map as a world power.
Striking Syria now will not halt the suffering of the Syrian people, and it will place the whole world in jeopardy. The potential price is too high. The best thing that could happen now is that Trump is removed from office and replaced by a sane politician intelligent enough to look after America's interests peacefully. Would the Syrian rebels have even started their uprising if they hadn't thought that they would be backed-up by the liberal West? We should withdraw from Syria and allow history and the Syrian people to make their own peace from the rubble.
The two main points of this argument are so hypocritical that I want to start yelling at the screen.HellHoundOnMyTrail -> radical , 13 Apr 2018 13:10First, that Assad is a butcher because the war made half a million victims. No, Assad is no more a butcher than the countries that armed, trained and financed the rebels, the USA prominent among them. If they hadn't done that to advance their own strategic objectives and to topple dictator they didn't like (because there's a lot of dictators that they like), the war wouldn't have even started. The 500000 victims are on the US's conscience, not Assad's.
Second, the idea that "It is indeed strange, but the extra revulsion at the use of chemical weapons is not groundless. The taboo on the use of such weapons held, with exceptions, for nearly a century."
Respectfully, it's bullshit. It emerged in 2013 that Saddam was helped by the USA gassing 50000 Iranians, both soldiers and civilians, in the 1980s- with chemical weapons developed with the help of American, British and French companies, among others. Exactly those that find unacceptable now the idea that 40 civilians *might* have been killed in a chemical attack by the "butcher" Assad. So tell us, when are these countries going to bomb themselves, as a just retribution for their heinous crimes?
But there is *no* evidence that Assad has even done this. On the contrary, Russia has even accused the U.K government of being complicit in Douma.supercool , 13 Apr 2018 13:10Just apply logic to this: why would Assad do this? He has, buttressed by Russia, all but 'won' this wretched, heartbreaking civil war. So, on the cusp, he decides do use chemical weapons which all but guarantees the U.S will stay in Syria funding the 'rebels' that he's fighting. Sorry, it's just ludicrous to think he would do this.
The problem with Syria is from the start the West saw Assad as an easy domino that will fold like Saddam and Gadaffi, but with one subtle difference Syria is a government that has the backing of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah from the start. That they will not let Assad fall easily to have a puppet regime installed in Damascus that will do the West's bidding. No way that was going to happen. Iran saw it as a chance to consolidate itself as a hegemon in he Middle East and Russia as chance for payback time for their humiliation in Iraq and Libya, they were treated as an irrelevant country.CanWeNotKnockIt -> Etagere , 13 Apr 2018 13:09Assad is lucky and knows it, the West does not seem to learn that their interventions are resented around the world and smacks of neo-colonialism. Syria is third time unlucky, Russia, Iran and Syria are goading the West. It is your move and one false move they will be laughing for a long time. Lesson in this is let countries resolve their problems by themselves, Syria will not be the first or last country to see the use of Chemical weapons. It is vile & disgusting way to attack civilians but remember we supplied Saddam the same weapons to attack Iran in the 1980's and the world did nothing then. The West is not part of the solution in Syria neither from the start or now. Read the history books on who put the Alwaites and Assad's in power. It was France, the same France claiming they have evidence against Assad now. Please!
What is your plan?ManUpTheTree -> LeftOrRightSameShite , 13 Apr 2018 13:09
What is your aim?
Has recent history taught you nothing?Something I also notice not mentioned is the amount of billions that weapons manufacturers and their lackeys in the foreign office make out of these destabilized countries.jane carter , 13 Apr 2018 13:03The West is capable of lying and fabricating reasons to go to war. The lies told to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003 are evidence enough of that.HelenWilsonMK , 13 Apr 2018 12:46When Hitler launched his V1 cruise missiles us killing 5,000 Londoners we called them a vengeance weapon... But somehow 70 years later cruise missiles are liberators when deployed by us. The war crime committed by Bommer Harris on the people of Dresden shows you cannot bomb people into peace... So why are we still trying?
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
David williams , 13 Apr 2018 15:23
Not a supporter of any of the criminal operations that masquerade as governments worldwide, but it's way past the time when I can believe a word the Western powers utter in their quest to spread their vile economic doctrine.dannymega , 13 Apr 2018 15:22
For me the biggest question now is how best to avoid financing the evil they perpetrateSo the Russian military claimed a month ago that Syrian rebels were planning a chlorine chemical weapon attack somewhere in Syria, three weeks later a chemical weapon chlorine attack happens in Douma... but the UK government along with all the UK mainstream media do not question perhaps it's the Jihadi/rebels who staged this attack, they ALL automatically blame Assad? Stinks to high heaven.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
harveybrown , 13 Apr 2018 15:29
President Assad and his wife, daughter of a UK BP man lived comfortably near my brother in London's Chelsea for several years.This all reminds me that the roles may have reversed nowadays but otherwise not much has changed:
[ It is interesting to note that Allan Ramsay likewise deplored "a friendly alliance between the camp and the counting-house" for exactly the same reasons (Letters on the Present Disturbances, p.34). Ramsay maintained that of the evil consequences of such alliance "the two last wars carried on by England against France and Spain, furnish a most melancholy illustration.
To obtain the sole and exclusive commerce of the western world, in which the French and Spaniards were their rivals, was the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans.
The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits, a more expeditous one was devised; which was that of driving their rivals entirely out of the seas, and preventing them from bringing their goods at all to market. For this purpose, not having any fleets or armies of their own, the powers of the State were found necessary, and they applied them accordingly" (ibid., pp.32 f.).
Knorr, K. E. 'Ch02-Part2 British Colonial Theories 1570-1850'. In British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850. The University of Toronto Press, 1944. ]
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
ISON2015 -> uncommodified , 13 Apr 2018 15:25
As much bad as Assad did, nothing is more worse than the killings on civilians done my the "freedom fighters". Why is it for us Syria so important? How come other countries are not getting involved in a Iraq 2.0 just the same warmongers who want to test their new toys... USA, France and us... fighting a fight that costs us so much, plus the Brexit, plus the eventual payment afterwards , I really do not understand. What the frick are we doing in Middle East? Is there a English colony that we have forgotten? Or a France colony or even a USA colony? This strikes me as a fight for either resources or for influence or for pleasing the master Israel. I am clear of how this White Helmets operate , Eva Bartlett told us, and do not forget that there are plenty of vids on the whole internet of how they operate "Lights camera action" actors.
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Labour calls for the attack on Douma to be "fully investigated". That sounds unarguable. But then what? Jeremy Corbyn issued the same call after the chemical attack that killed at least 74 at Khan Sheikhoun a year ago: demanding there be a "UN investigation and those responsible be held to account". The UN duly investigated and in October concluded unambiguously that the Assad regime had used sarin gas. But Corbyn greeted that verdict with silence.
The report that Mr Freedland provides a link to, actually says:
"5. While the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in the Syrian Arab Republic works to establish the facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals for hostile purposes in the country, it is not mandated to reach conclusions about attributing responsibility for chemical weapons use. 1 Following a determination by the FactFinding Mission that a specific incident in the Syrian Arab Republic involved or likely involved the use of chemicals as weapons, the Mechanism conducts an investigation to identify, to the greatest extent feasible, the perpetrators, organizers, sponsors or those otherwise involved. In conducting its investigation, the Mechanism relies on findings of the Fact-Finding Mission regarding the use of chemicals as weapons in each incident and pursues a rigorous independent examination of the available information surrounding such use so as to identify, to the greatest extent feasible, those responsible."
It doesn't appear to be claiming to be concluding "unambiguously that the Assad regime had used sarin gas." Am I missing something here?
Mr Freedland's allegation that "Corbyn greeted that verdict with silence" is highly suspect:
"RT:Today, Moscow says it has evidence that rebels have used sarin gas. Earlier Britain said that Assad forces were behind the chemical attack. But why didn't Britain and the US come forward with the same sort of hard evidence that Russia has come forward with?
JC: That's an interesting question. I can't speak for the British or the US governments, but they made these allegations about the use of chemical weapons – and there are apparently stocks of chemical weapons being held in Syria, which may well have fallen into opposition hands, or may still be in government hands, or maybe both – but the assertion was made that they had been used. But no hard evidence came up, and indeed, there was a great deal of skepticism surrounding the evidence that was never presented. And the Russian evidence today appears much stronger, and they said they were going to put that evidence in the hands of the United Nations - that has got to be a good thing. However, proving or not proving this doesn't end the crisis, there has to be the rapid resumption of talks by Geneva too, all parties must be involved – including Iran. If we're to bring about a settlement, there's got to be involvement of Iran, as well as all the different parties in Syria."
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/syria-chemical-weapons-evidence-926 /
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Metreemewall , 13 Apr 2018 15:27
This post by Just in Thyme has just been mode rated:"As the British government release shedloads of crocodile tears over their paid for White Helmet video footage, and moan like spiteful children how they want to bomb more people, let look at some other inconvenient facts.
The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced on March 25 that the Saudi-led war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured since March 2015. The United Nations says a record 22.2 million Yemenis are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger. Meanwhile the Saudis shovel their bits of silver into the empty coffers of the NATO warmongers.
Who said money cannot buy influence, Its was the UK that backed Britain backed Saudi Arabia's election to the United Nations top human right's body as part of a vote trading deal – despite the Gulf State's appalling abuse record. Secret cables reportedly show that Britain approached Saudi Arabia about the trade ahead of the 2013 election for membership of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The Saudi regime has executed 135 people since January on charges ranging from murder to witchcraft.
The lynch mob government, we all voted for, and this is what democracy is really all about???"
Would anyone like to say why?
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
denzel185 -> Guimard , 13 Apr 2018 15:29
Iran didn't instigate the Twin Towers or the London attacks, didn't instigate the invasion of Iraq, didn't instigate the overthrowing of Libya, didn't instigate the war in Syria, didn't instigate the war in Yemen and didn't fund and arm ISIS.The gave support following US intervention. Mmm, I wonder why they have such an issue with the US?
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Apr 20, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Patrick Ryan , 13 Apr 2018 13:28
In an age of fake news and endless propaganda it's very difficult these days to see the woods from the trees... The words butcher and thug are easily thrown around in the Syrian civil war.jparmetler , 13 Apr 2018 13:27
It appears some people have short memories as it wasn't that long ago when we were witnessing the alternative world of Islamic State in Syria. Head choppers running amok and anyone suspected of being gay being chucked off tall buildings. Women being flogged to death for trumped up charges of adultery. Kids having their hands cut off for stealing apples.
To make matters worse these sadistic psychopaths were armed and driving around in vehicles supplied by the West... It had developed into a living hell for many as the death cult of Isis took hold.
I remember the so called thug Putin saying someone had to take on these terrorists...
The West were reluctant to do the dirty work required... So it came down to Russia to get boots on the ground to help defeat Islamic State.Why does the UK supply the terror supporters of the Arabian Peninsula with weapons while fighting and vilifying Assad? This is real hypocrisy. Yemenis suffer horrendously from Saudi attacks, the UK's close friends. Assad always guaranteed religious freedom and Syrians enjoyed much more freedom than any of the Middle Eastern countries.Karega , 13 Apr 2018 13:23What's actually is disconcerting is the fact that mainline media have taken the alleged chemical attack as a fact. They don't have their reporters on the ground or even Western military personnel in the area. But a claim and some unauthenticated videos from headchoppers are taken as a fact. A fact which is not allowed to be tested or critiqued. Does it mean they just want more bombs and missiles to hammer Syria and any reason/justification would do?
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Apr 17, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Theresa May's decision to authorise British military action over the skies of Syria by royal prerogative rather than obtaining the backing of parliament was the wrong thing to do. Even if the prime minister thinks it was done for the right reasons. It was wrong because the government's plans should have been articulated so that MPs could have had a chance to endorse – or reject – a motion to bomb Bashar al-Assad's weapons factories. It was wrong because there was no emergency – an exception used when after a debate MPs retrospectively endorsed action against Muammar Gaddafi's Libya . It was wrong because only prime ministers can recall parliament – and there was time to do so. It was wrong because decisions about how to police the unlawful use of weapons of mass destructive terror in Syria turn upon judgment rather than available facts.
Parliament is the best place to assess whether the use of military force serves the overall interests of a nation in such cases. This is especially true of a government without a majority of its own. Jeremy Corbyn's resurrection of an old idea for a war powers act , which would force the PM not to authorise the active and large-scale deployment of British forces overseas without the approval of the House of Commons, ought not to be dismissed.
But it should be accompanied by a wider recognition that the days of self-regulation of cabinet government are over. Observing the parliamentary convention would be better than creating an act where fractious disagreements over the precise nature of the circumstances in which the law is to be applied – especially in a situation as fluid and volatile as war – prevail.
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Apr 16, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Russia and the Syrian regime have been accused by western diplomats of denying chemical weapons inspectors access to sites in the town of Douma, where an attack killed dozens and prompted US-led missile strikes over the weekend.Russia and Syria had cited "pending security issues" before inspectors could deploy to the town outside Damascus, said Ahmet Üzümcü, the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, at a meeting of the OPCW's executive council.
Syrian authorities were offering 22 people to interview as witnesses instead, he said, adding that he hoped "all necessary arrangements will be made to allow the team to deploy to Douma as soon as possible".
Meanwhile, the Trump administration delayed action on sanctions against Russians suspected of helping Syria's chemical weapons programme, contradicting remarks on Sunday by the US envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley.
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Apr 16, 2018 | www.strategic-culture.org
When it comes to creating bogus news stories and advancing false narratives, the British intelligence services have few peers. In fact, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6) has led the way for its American "cousins" and Britain's Commonwealth partners – from Canada and Australia to India and Malaysia – in the dark art of spreading falsehoods as truths. Recently, the world has witnessed such MI-6 subterfuge in news stories alleging that Russia carried out a novichok nerve agent attack against a Russian émigré and his daughter in Salisbury, England. This propaganda barrage was quickly followed by yet another – the latest in a series of similar fabrications – alleging the Syrian government attacked civilians in Douma, outside of Damascus, with chemical weapons.
It should come as no surprise that American news networks rely on British correspondents stationed in northern Syria and Beirut as their primary sources. MI-6 has historically relied on non-official cover (NOC) agents masquerading primarily as journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers, Church of England clerics, international bankers, and hotel managers, to carry out propaganda tasks. These NOCs are situated in positions where they can promulgate British government disinformation to unsuspecting actual journalists and diplomats.
For decades, a little-known section of the British Foreign Office – the Information Research Department (IRD) – carried out propaganda campaigns using the international media as its platform on behalf of MI-6. Years before Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir became targets for Western destabilization and "regime change." IRD and its associates at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and in the newsrooms and editorial offices of Fleet Street broadsheets, tabloids, wire services, and magazines, particularly "The Daily Telegraph," "The Times," "Financial Times," Reuters, "The Guardian," and "The Economist," ran media smear campaigns against a number of leaders considered to be leftists, communists, or FTs (fellow travelers).
These leaders included Indonesia's President Sukarno, North Korean leader (and grandfather of Pyongyang's present leader) Kim Il-Sung, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Cyprus's Archbishop Makarios, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Chile's Salvador Allende, British Guiana's Cheddi Jagan, Grenada's Maurice Bishop, Jamaica's Michael Manley, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, Guinea's Sekou Toure, Burkina Faso's Thomas Sankara, Australia's Gough Whitlam, New Zealand's David Lange, Cambodia's Norodom Sihanouk, Malta's Dom Mintoff, Vanuatu's Father Walter Lini, and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah.
After the Cold War, this same propaganda operation took aim at Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Somalia's Mohamad Farrah Aidid, and Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Today, it is Assad's, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's, and Catalonian independence leader Carles Puigdemont's turn to be in the Anglo-American state propaganda gunsights. Even Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, long a darling of the Western media and such propaganda moguls as George Soros, is now being targeted for Western visa bans and sanctions over the situation with Muslim Rohingya insurgents in Rakhine State.
Through IRD-MI-6-Central Intelligence Agency joint propaganda operations, many British journalists received payments, knowingly or unknowingly, from the CIA via a front in London called Forum World Features (FWF), owned by John Hay Whitney, publisher of the "New York Herald Tribune" and a former US ambassador to London.
It is not a stretch to believe that similar and even more formal relationships exist today between US and British intelligence and so-called British "journalists" reporting from such war zones as Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, and the Gaza Strip, as well as from much-ballyhooed nerve agent attack locations as Salisbury, England.
No sooner had recent news reports started to emerge from Douma about a Syrian chlorine gas and sarin agent attack that killed between 40 to 70 civilians, British reporters in the Middle East and London began echoing verbatim statements from the Syrian "White Helmets" and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
In actuality, the White Helmets – claimed by Western media to be civilian defense first-responders but are Islamist activists connected to jihadist radical groups funded by Saudi Arabia – are believed to have staged the chemical attack in Douma by entering the municipality's hospital and dowsing patients with buckets of water, video cameras at the ready. The White Helmets distributed their videos to the global news media, with the BBC and Rupert Murdoch's Sky News providing a British imprimatur to the propaganda campaign asserting that Assad carried out another "barrel bomb" chemical attack against "his own people." And, as always, the MI-6 financed Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an anti-Assad news front claimed to be operated by a Syrian expatriate and British national named Rami Abdel Rahman from his clothing shop in Coventry, England, began providing second-sourcing for the White Helmet's chemical attack claims.
With President Trump bringing more and more neo-conservatives, discredited from their massive anti-Iraq propaganda operations during the Bush-Cheney era, into his own administration, the world is witnessing the prolongation of the "Trump Doctrine."
The Trump Doctrine can best be explained as follows: A nation will be subject to a US military attack depending on whether Trump is facing a severe political or sex scandal at home.
Such was the case in April 2017, when Trump ordered a cruise missile attack on the joint Syrian-Russian airbase at Shayrat, Syria. Trump was still reeling from the resignation of his National Security Adviser, Lt. General Michael Flynn, in February over the mixing of his private consulting business with his official White House duties. Trump needed a diversion and the false accusation that Assad used sarin gas on the village of Khan Sheikoun on April 4, 2017, provided the necessary pabulum for the war-hungry media.
The most recent cruise missile attack was to divert the public's attention away from Trump's personal attorney being raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a sex scandal involving Trump and a porn actress, and a "tell-all" book by Trump's fired FBI director, James Comey.
Although these two scandals provided opportunities for the neo-cons to test Trump with false flag operations in Syria, they were not the first time such actions had been carried out. In 2013, the Syrian government was blamed for a similar chemical attack on civilians in Ghouta. That year, Syrian rebels, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency, admitted to the Associated Press reporter on the ground in Syria that they had been given banned chemical weapons by Saudi Arabia, but that the weapons canisters exploded after improper handling by the rebels. Immediately, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Syrian rebel organizations operating out of Turkey claimed that Assad had used chemical-laden barrel bombs on "his own people." However, Turkish, American, and Lebanese sources confirmed that it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that had badly bungled a false flag sarin nerve agent attack on Ghouta.
Few Western media outlets were concerned about a March 19, 2013, sarin nerve agent by the Bashair al-Nasr Brigade rebel group linked to the US- and British-backed Free Syrian Army. The rebels used a "Bashair-3" unguided projectile, containing the deadly sarin agent, on civilians in Khan al-Assal, outside Aleppo. At least 27 civilians were killed, and scores of others injured in the attack. The Syrian Kurds also reported the use of chemical weapons on them during the same time frame by Syrian rebel groups backed by the United States, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The usual propaganda operations – Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Doctors Without Borders, the BBC, CNN, and Sky News – were all silent about these attacks.
In 2013, April 2017, and April 2018, the Western media echo chamber blared out all the same talking points: "Assad killing his own people," "Syrian weapons of mass destruction," and the "mass murder of women and children." Western news networks featured videos of dead women and children, while paid propagandists, known as "contributors" to corporate news networks – all having links to the military-intelligence complex – demanded action be taken against Assad.
Trump, now being advised by the notorious neocon war hawk John Bolton, the new National Security Adviser, began referring to Assad as an "animal" and a "monster." Bolton, along with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby, helped craft similar language against Saddam Hussein prior to the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was not coincidental that Trump – at the urging of Bolton and other neocons – gave a full pardon to Libby on the very same day he ordered the cruise missile attack on Damascus and other targets in Syria. Libby was convicted in 2005 of perjury and illegally disclosing national security information.
The world is being asked to take, at face value, the word of patented liars like Trump, Bolton, and other neocons who are now busy joining the Trump administration at breakneck speed. The corporate media unabashedly acts as though it never lied about the reasons given by the United States and Britain for going to war in Iraq and Libya. Why should anyone believe them now?
Tags: UK al-Assad PropagandaWayne MADSEN Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club
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Apr 15, 2018 | off-guardian.org
Harry Stotle says April 14, 2018
Wonder how Monbiot feels now Syrians are being killed by western bombs?Francis Lee says April 14, 2018Will he be slightly suspicious about the urgency of the attack (which took place just before the inspectors were due to go in) or indeed lack of parliamentary scrutiny about the necessity for such extreme measures, not to mention the potentially catastrophic consequences of provoking Russia?
The US is not under threat and neither is the UK – the Syrians have not asked for bombs to be dropped on them.
The information sources alleging the use of chemical weapons come from the same tainted Sunni extremists using weapons supplied by the west to destroy Yemen.
Yep, those Jihadi pals of Monbiot and co, need all the help they can get now that they are losing the war against the legitimate government of Syria. Next time there is a jihadi outrage against London, Manchester, Paris or St.Tropez, let's see what the likes of Monbiot and the rest of the liberal-imperialist scum at the Guran has to say. This is Iraq all over again. Every time the US-NATO wants to bomb a recalcitrant country they invent a pretext. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, Saddams fabled WMDs and now the fake chemical attack in Syria. Is there anything worse than liberal imperialism? This has been a political game changer. It is now apparent beyond doubt that the liberals are on the side of the most vicious ultra-right warmongering crazies.Jen says April 14, 2018What I find troubling about George Monbiot's opinions on President Assad and his supposed habit of celebrating SAA victories by gassing the very people who voted him back as President in 2014 (maybe they can't get enough of being gassed by sarin and chlorine, eh, George?) is his use of strong and often bullying language towards critics like Tim Hayward, Patrick Henningsen and Vanessa Beeley. He has the hide to question Beeley on who funds her work and insinuates that she is in the pay of the Russian government. If he only stuck to his opinion and dubious Just War reasoning – he would be all for invading Syria if, say, Denmark or Sweden were in charge of leading the cavalry – at least he would be tolerable. But to tell Hayward that he should listen to a suspicious and sinister character like Oz Katerji – who openly flaunts his friendship with takfiris – "for [his own] sake" amounts to harassment.writerroddis says April 14, 2018Such behaviour seems borderline psychotic.
Quite.vexarb says April 14, 2018Meanwhile, back in the real Syria:intergenerationaltrauma says April 14, 2018Briefing by official representative of Russian Defence Ministry Major General Igor Konashenkov Full Transcript
http://eng.mil.ru/en/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12171238@egNews
The Russian Centre for Reconciliation jointly with the Syrian authorities is completing the large-scale humanitarian operation in the suburbs of Damascus – the Eastern Ghouta. In total, 170,152 people have been evacuated during the operation, including 63,117 militants with their families.
All the settlements in the Eastern Ghouta are currently under the control of the Syrian government.
The Russian military police has been deployed in the Eastern Ghouta in order to monitor situation and maintain law enforcement.
As environment in the suburbs of Damscus stabilizing, people are making their way back home. In total some 63,000 people have return to their homes now. It makes a half of those who had left the area.
The Syrian government working on rehabilitation of destroyed civilian infrastructure. Power and water supply systems have been recovered; reconstruction is underway in the area. People are provided with medical assistance.
Thus, the present-day Eastern Ghouta is far from a "black hole" where no one could get to, but a capital suburb returning to peaceful life.
Excellent article. I suppose I shouldn't be too terribly surprised by Monbiot's irrational and immoral stance on Syria, as it's lack of logic and ethical coherence dovetails nicely with his new found support for nuclear power as a solution to climate change – inspired no less by the events at Fukishima. Quite amazing actually!Kev says April 14, 2018https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
I used to respect Monbiot Silly meKathy says April 13, 2018If Monbiot wanted to find out what was happening he could find out just as easily as we found out. Hes a fake, a traitor and a supporter of the destruction of a securer democracy by British backed Al Qaeda terrorists on the orders of the zionist state.. There are no excuses.
I have nothing but contempt for Monbiot or the people he works for and nothing but respect for the Syrian people who stand against Monbiots head chopping, child killing, family burning, evil cannibalistic scum
Some times people become so lost in their own ego through education and privilege that they no longer have capacity to recognize anything but hubris. The whole education system pushes this mindset through reward and accolade to the most susceptible students. This system encourages a level of blind faith in the theories that are taught to them to the the point that the student forgets that what they are being taught is only theory and indoctrination that they should have learned to question. These students are the ones that life opens up for. They are afforded the best jobs, high life styles, nice houses with big mortgages effectively trapping them in a spiders web that becomes difficult to escape from even if they do wake up. Deep down they realize that they are out of their depth but keep up the pretense. These people become the perfect mouth pieces for the state and don't even necessarily realize they have been hijacked and compromised by their status. This makes it difficult for them to recognize others opinions and to question them selves or the narrative they hold. To query there stance unhinges them. This is the point that they often become dogmatic, dismissive and angry . The worst ones are often the ones who see them selves as liberal as they really do believe that they have got where they are by being intelligent and informed. Guardian journalists seem particularly susceptible to this belief. The most sinister part about these journalists is they do manage to manipulate their readers on an insidious level lulling them with their {liberalism}.Paul says April 13, 2018I appreciate the force and elegance of Prof. Hayward's argumentation. I'm not sure, though, why he would stop at (or, for that matter, start with) the loyalty of the Syrian army. He was, after all, elected and even after several years of violence, it could probably be fairly plausibly confirmed (or disconfirmed), in principle at least, that he has majority (indeed increased) support among the population. Another argument subject to (dis)confirmation would be that a very significant number of the "rebels" and the vast bulk of their funding, training, weapons and diplomatic / media cover are not Syrian. They would not, then, be part of a rebellion but foreign mercenaries or (largely Salafist) fundamentalist legions in a regime change operation that happens to be consistent with American policy towards Syria since the 1940s.Harry Law says April 13, 2018During the time [around 2011] Monbiot was asking people about their opinions on Syria an opinion poll on Syria was published, "According to the latest opinion poll commissioned by The Doha Debates [ the sponsors of the debate no supporters of Assad by any means] Syrians are more supportive of their president with 55% not wanting him to resign". One of the main reasons given by those wanting the president to stay in power was fear for the future of the country". Then in the 2016 presidential election Assad won gaining 88% of vote. Followed by Parliamentary elections when the Ba'ath party won 200 out of 250 seats. The Syrian army is majority Sunni and the majority of the Government is Sunni. He has overwhelming support inside and outside Syria, in Lebanon for instance there was a huge turnout for Assad with tens of thousands queuing up to vote for him.Harry Law says April 13, 2018
How anyone can voice support for the "rebels" is beyond me, since they are made up mostly of Jihadis who want to slaughter any opposition to themselves. They say so themselves.Sorry Presidential elections were in 2014, the Parliamentary elections were in 2016.Mulga Mumblebrain says April 13, 2018Very early on in the jihadist attack on Syria, there was a massive demonstration in Damascus of two million, where a huge Syrian flag was held aloft by the crowd, in support of the Government. It was broadcast on the Austfalian SBS 'multicultural' TV as an 'ANTI-Assad' demonstration ie a complete LIE, but one as far as I know never acknowledged or retracted.writerroddis says April 13, 2018
Thereafter, until today, the SBS, has been the vilest of all our filthy fakestream propagandists working for a takfiri victory. The Syrian Government is 'the regime'. The salafist child crucifiers 'rebels', the favoured media source the al-Jazeera sewer controlled by the vile Wahhabist Qatar regime, one of the prime sponsors of the death-squad butchers. The SBS even has a coterie of female voice-over operatives, whose histrionic utterances, spitting out the hate propaganda, often verge on hysteria.
I've often wondered why they took this position. I suspect Zionist influence, all pervasive in this country, but NEVER dared to be mentioned (the PM Turnbull represents the richest electorate in the country with a large Jewish constituency, and his groveling is epic)and Saudi. For decades the Sordid Arabians have been allowed to finance Wahhabist proselytisation in this country, including in Moslem schools, a decision of bizarre stupidity. As a result we sent scores of enthusiastic wannabe head-loppers to Syria, one of whom was photographed grinning as his seven year old son held up a severed head. While these butchers were used in Islamophobic hate propaganda, the scum death-squad army they were members of, was still afforded TOTAL support by the local fakestream as 'rebels' against 'animal Assad'.This is excellent. Far from being 'too kind' to Monbiot, its restraint, both in tone and in substantive argument – not making claims that can't be defended, and being precise on such as the difference between high probability and empirical or logical certainty – is a great strength. Hayward stands head and shoulders above Monbiot not just in his arguments but in his scrupulous manner of advancing them.stevehayes13 says April 13, 2018Monbiot is a fake. His role is to help maintain the fiction that there is a diversity of opinions in the corporate media, which enables them to pretend there is no rational dissent from the official narrative when the pretend left and the centre and the right all agree, such as when they all say: Assad is bad.Etegere says April 13, 2018This is a very well put together piece on a very troubling individual. Monbiot has always been deeply suspicious in my view. He issues his statements (often lies) and never engages his critics, evidently viewing criticism as an intolerable offense. Not the behaviour of an honourable man.Binra (@onemindinmany) says April 13, 2018I would very much like to see a follow-up piece similar to this but that looks wider and takes apart his deception on issues other than Syria.
Ultimately, he should not be working as a so-called journalist. His ability to push lies is deeply offensive to those of us with an interest in truth and integrity. He is truly a stain.
The feeling I get from Tim Hayward's article is of lost love – but not in the romantic sense – for Monbiot – who he used to feel part of, believe in, stand side by side with? Is this a long letter TO G.M?Mulga Mumblebrain says April 13, 2018There's another feeling I get over the incitement to war on Syria – and that is of the many being forced, terrorized, or convinced at least that going along with the pressure to act out the line or at least not challenge it – is the choosing of a lesser evil.
However I do not see any convincing actors on the stage in the 'case' for making war on Syria. Only of assets by one means or another.
We may be misled about most everything, perhaps because the mind from its earliest adaptations to sense of loss of love, support and connection, learns to mask pain and seek protection in strategies of self justification.
Since the earliest catastrophic beginnings of the development of this peculiarly split human consciousness, the gods that terrorised us from above were sacrificed to in supplication of appeasement. So that which sends fire and plague is entreated to save us from it. Nothing has changed but the costumes of its human reenactments.
I feel it is time for a New Story.
Don't fight over narrative – just read where it comes from with some compassion. The promise of 'power and protection' reveals a hollow and pathetic dependency. We feed a monster as if to 'survive'.The capacity for introspection is also the capacity to uncover a fundamental humanity within even the worst of times. Everyone acts in self interest as in that moment they define themselves to be in relation to it. The lie is considered bad to be exposed in – but necessary to hide by.
But if everything is subjugated to serve a lie (too big to fail) then there is nothing true – excepting the power to say so and enforce it, and is that not the 'thinking' to which we have been trained to suckle?
I cannot make another man (or woman's) choices. I can only live my own and by tasting the results, learn to make better choices. But this absolutely depends on self-honesty. We cannot lie to others and be true to ourself nor lie to ourself and be true to others. And if we try to make the lie true – we will project the mind of it into the perceptions of others – whether they extend a true willingness or a deceit – we wont be able to tell.
That is the recipe for hell – because everything reflects a hidden hate that 'threatens' to destroy or violate our defences. But the enemy is not 'OUT THERE!' – even if there are many with grievance.The lie and the father of the lie sets us against our Self – each other and our world.
"No it doesn't – it protects me from chaos, powerlessness, humiliation and loss of self!"
Yet all these things has it delivered while pointing the finger away.
There is a heart prayer from Hawaii
The mind is erected against saying it:"I'm sorry, please forgive me, I love you , thank you".
Monbiot sold out to protect his well-paying sinecure. Old story. Alternative possibility-blackmail or some other form of coercion.Toby says April 14, 2018[My first comment at this site.]jag37777 says April 12, 2018This is an excellent article among many here, but Binra's comment really resonates with me.
I see a direct link between:
unconditional love (love is unconditional, or it isn't love),
learning how to become part of love's continuing evolution,
learning how to avoid war.For me, the quality of being that is love is the nature of the personal choices we each must make if we are to learn – both as individuals and by extension as larger groups – how to navigate the sinister and deceptive propaganda this article addresses, and hopefully put an end to it one day. We otherwise fall prey to its machinations and are lost to history's darker forces.
"I'm sorry, please forgive me, I love you , thank you".
Humility, love and gratitude are strong when undertaken with courage, perseverance and patience. This is not easy to do. But we know that. The right way is the hard way.
This article is too kind to Monbiot. He's a fake, always has been. And a nasty piece of work with it.physicsandmathsrevision says April 12, 2018Monbiot is, like Naom Chomsky, a Khazarian Jew. His (and Chomsky's) preferences are so defined.writerroddis says April 13, 2018Their sophistry and faux-empathy works endlessly towards a single end.
Support for the globalist finance plutocracy nexus that, like Monbiot and Chomsk, is (whatever their poses) the real enemy of all.
Congratulations! I've always argued for OG removing the 'dislike' button. You made a convincing case for keeping it.Admin says April 13, 2018to everything there is a seasonmohandeer says April 14, 2018Well sai Philip.Mulga Mumblebrain says April 13, 2018
I wish he would revise something other than physics and maths – he's got a serious problem.Cobblers. Probably hasbara to discredit this place.Susanna Farley says April 14, 2018"Monbiot is, like Noam Chomsky, a Khazarian Jew " What the hell has this to do with the point you are trying to make?Mulga Mumblebrain says April 14, 2018Are you trying to say that all Khazarian Jews (or all Jews?) "support the globalist finance plutocracy." etc.? Unlike the very justified condemnation of the massacre of unarmed Palestinian protesters at the Gaza/Israel border by the Israeli army, this is genuine anti-semitism.
It's fine to criticise Monbiot and Chomsky as individuals, however harshly. but there should be zero tolerance for attributing the "sophistry and faux-empathy" you see them exhibiting to their ethnicity.
The global capitalist elite are indeed our enemy. They are mostly white and male but share few other characteristics.
Susanna, that type of idiot with their stupid stereotyping of whole groups, are often, I suspect, frauds, sent to discredit those around them. So, some Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Khazars who converted to Judaism. So what-as Shlomo Sand shewed, a number of groups over time converted to Judaism, when it was more proselytising than now, just as groups converted to Islam or Christianity. That makes no difference to how Chomsky acts (pretty well as far as I can see) or Monbiot (increasingly very badly, and shamefully).alan moore says April 12, 2018Page not Found ???Vaska says April 12, 2018Fixed. [A technical glitch we couldn't find an explanation for.]Mulga Mumblebrain says April 12, 2018Monbiot's arrogance is innate. It got him into strife when he tackled the formidable Edward S Herman over the phony Srebrenica 'genocide' and was savagely mauled, but, as expected, he declared himself the victor and retreated to smear his adversaries from the sidelines.vexarb says April 13, 2018
He propagandises as he must, or he'd get the Pilger treatment, and his nice sinecure at the Fraudian would disappear. And since the Sorosification and the other measures taken to turn the Fraudian into the sewer of disinformation and hate-mongering that it is today, working so frantically for a jihadist victory in Syria and Syria's vivisection, to the greater glory of Eretz Yisrael, Monbiot has simply goose-stepped ever further Right, as scores of his type have done, over the years.Polonius: This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!vexarb says April 14, 2018I have been thinking lately this might apply even to villains, as in Peer Gynt. Then if you are really strong black and white but sincere, the Divine Photographer has a chance to season you in acid gall and reduce you in sulfite until your positive emerges Lily White. But if you are just a misty inbetween maundering Boyg of a man, you have to resort to Photoshop to provide a fake identity.
"Those who were neither for God nor for Devil but only for themselves . So many, I had not thought Death had undone so many". -- Dante, The First Circle
Sorry, the above post should have been addressed to Binra who said something similar to the advice Polonius gave Laertes. Ibsen's Peer Gynt goes further: even a villain who is true to himself may be valuable in the scheme of things; but people like the Fraudian journoes who just drift the way the wind blows are puffballs that carry no seed.Mulga Mumblebrain says April 14, 2018Puff-balls carry spore, not seeds. Fraudian presstitutes as a species of toadstool? I like it, very much.
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Apr 15, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The US-led barrage shows just how little interest the global powers have in ending Syria's ghastly war
Contact author
@BayoumiMoustafaSat 14 Apr 2018 10.42 EDT Last modified on Sat 14 Apr 2018 13.52 EDT
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via EmailView more sharing options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Close 'Regional and global powers now exploit Syria for their own advantage and apportion out its territory for repeated bombing.' Photograph: Giuseppe Lami/EPA The bombing of Syrian government targets by the United States, Britain, and France is a disgraceful and ineffectual act masquerading as a noble gesture. Far from preventing a more vicious war, the bombing instead legitimizes the continuation of the conflict. In fact, what this barrage of weapons really reveals is how little interest the global powers have in ending Syria's ghastly war.
ss="rich-link"> Syria: who are the key players in the conflict? Read more
Similar to the attacks on Syrian government targets that Donald Trump ordered just over a year ago, the airstrikes this time will not seriously damage Bashar al-Assad's larger military capacity, nor are they intended to. Instead, we're told that the western bombing campaign has specifically aimed munitions at locations where the storage and testing of chemical weapons occurs.
But wasn't last year's attack meant to put an end to Assad's use of chemical weapons, and aren't these the weapons that he was supposed to have destroyed under international auspices in 2014? At this rate, should we expect that an aerial bombing mission to finally and completely destroy Assad's chemical weapons will be launched every April?
The question is ridiculous, of course, but so is the idea that this attack will accomplish anything beyond boosting the war-making egos of its protagonists and enabling Assad, his reprehensible regime, and his allies to complain of being the perpetual victims of western aggression. Beyond the bombast on both sides, Syria's daily misery will continue.
These strikes mark the first timeTheresa May of Britain and Emmanuel Macron of France have committed their respective militaries into combat, and they have done so, according to May, "to protect innocent people in Syria from the horrific deaths and casualties caused by chemical weapons, but also because we cannot allow the erosion of the international norm that prevents the use of these weapons."
May's words might sound more intelligent than those of Donald Trump, who in his statement about the attacks told the American people: "Hopefully, someday we'll get along with Russia and maybe even Iran, but maybe not." But what May's words really reveal is not the ethical reasoning of a head of state but the devastating lack of moral concern by the international community when it comes to the people of Syria.
The fact that three of the world's most powerful militaries have now been mobilized into action, even for a limited campaign such as this one, to prevent "the erosion of the international norm" of using chemical weapons is far from comforting. Since the war began, Assad's regime has engaged in the repeated and dreadful use of barrel bombs and mass starvation, the systematic torture of thousands of citizens and the laying siege to multiple cities, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of more than half the population. Yet, all of this horror does not seem to "erode an international norm" and certainly has not motivated these western leaders to any meaningful action to end the war.
On the contrary, regional and global powers now exploit Syria for their own advantage and apportion out its territory for repeated bombing. At this point, the country has been bombed by the Assad regime, the United States, Britain, France, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, and the UAE.
Rather than limiting war, this latest bombing of Syria normalizes the war's ongoing brutality. Forget the chemical weapons for a moment. The bombing of Syria by the western powers essentially and unconscionably establishes near total warfare on civilians as an acceptable "international norm." Our politicians will wallow in their most recent action, calling the bombing a great success for our civilization. In fact, it's much more akin to our demise.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
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Apr 10, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
"There was no chemical weapons attack," Nebenzia told the council. "Through the relevant channels we already conveyed to the US that armed forces under mendacious pretext against Syria – where, at the request of the legitimate government of a country, Russian troops have been deployed – could lead to grave repercussions."
A few hours earlier, Donald Trump said his administration was on the brink of deciding its response to the Douma attack. "We are meeting with our military and everybody else, and we'll be making some major decisions over the next 24 to 48 hours," he said at a cabinet meeting. "We are very concerned when a thing like that can happen. This is about humanity and it can't be allowed to happen."
Pressed by reporters, Trump went further, saying: "We'll be making that decision very quickly, probably by the end of today. But we cannot allow atrocities like that. Cannot allow it."
Trump ordered airstrikes against a Syrian airbase after a previous chemical weapons attack, in April last year. The latest use of poison gasprovoked from Trump unprecedented direct criticism of Putin, something he had previously been at pains to avoid.
... ... ...
In his address, Nebenzia suggested a visit to Douma by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) might be possible under Syrian and Russian military protection. The UK envoy to the UN, Karen Pierce, said the Russian proposal was "an offer worth pursuing" but she added that OPCW inspectors would have to have complete freedom of action and of access.
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Nov 18, 2017 | www.theguardian.com
Originally from: Putin accuses British anti-corruption campaigner Browder of three murders World news The Guardian
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has accused prominent British businessman Bill Browder of being a "serial killer" – the latest extraordinary attempt by the Kremlin to frame one of its most high-profile public enemies.
Court documents seen by the Observer reveal that Russian state investigators have named Browder, a London-based hedge fund manager, as the suspect behind the mysterious murders of three men.
All three deaths are linked to a £174m fraud believed to have involved Russian officials -- a crime that was uncovered by Browder's Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, in 2008. Magnitsky was subsequently imprisoned on charges widely considered to be false, and died in jail amid claims he was tortured.
Browder, once the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia, has infuriated Putin by lobbying western governments to punish those responsible for Magnitsky's death. A number of countries have imposed sanctions on individuals believed to be involved.
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Apr 07, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
An alarming projection produced by the House of Commons library suggests that if trends seen since the 2008 financial crash were to continue, then the top 1% will hold 64% of the world's wealth by 2030. Even taking the financial crash into account, and measuring their assets over a longer period, they would still hold more than half of all wealth.
Since 2008, the wealth of the richest 1% has been growing at an average of 6% a year – much faster than the 3% growth in wealth of the remaining 99% of the world's population. Should that continue, the top 1% would hold wealth equating to $305tn (£216.5tn) – up from $140tn today.
The population of third world countries is skyrocketing. The population of developed countries, outside the importation of poor immigrants, is static. The top 1% of world population will continuously become comparatively richer as long as this is the case.feliciafarrel -> apaliteno , 7 Apr 2018 14:50Landlord52 -> Whattayagonnado huh , 7 Apr 2018 14:46but there's no way the UK has 10 million of the world's richest 75 million.
You need £550,000 to be in the top 1% in the world.
In the UK there are 27m households with an average of 1.94 adults per household.
25% of households have £550,000 or more.
That means 6.75m households are in the top 1% of the world, At 1.94 adults per household, that's 13,000,000 people.
However, assuming households are not 'legal people' but the adults within them are, then you'd have to divide household income by the number of adults (1.94) to get the wealth per person. So to reach £550,000 per person, a household would have to have net wealth of £1.067m, and only 10% of households have that wealth.
10% of 27m is 2.7m and that equates to only 5,240,000 people.
So in terms of households we easily reach 10m mark, but in terms of individual people, you are correct, it is 'only' 5.24m. Still and awful lot of people though.
A single mother get £20k on benefits per years. Over 18 years that is £360,000. She has two kids, so that iwill cost £3,000 in education per years. 2 kids x 14 years x £3,500 per years = £98,000. We pay for child birth costs, free vaccinations, anti-natal care, free prescriptions, free eye care, free dental care, free school meals, we pay her countal tax bil. Plus if she is lucky, she get a free £450,000 council home.PotholeKid -> counttrumpage , 7 Apr 2018 14:45Even if she works for a few years, it will never be enough to pay what she has received from the state. PLus we have to make provisions for her pension and her elderly care, meals on wheels, elderly health care etc...
That is easily £1m to £2million per single mother....
yeah... we are such a terrible society....
The plebs are well on the way to figuring it out alright and so have the 1%. That's we now live under a militarized surveillance state which serves the elites.. Think again if voting will ever change this.. Bernie was doomed from the getgo.hundredhander , 7 Apr 2018 14:42I think the principle here is that the longer this goes on and the greater inequality becomes then the more extreme will be the countervailing force.DogsLivesMatter , 7 Apr 2018 14:41It is in everybody's interest that the world becomes fairer. That governments govern in the interests of as many people as possible. That public services like health and education are available to all regardless. That taxes are progressive and that governments have international treaties to deal with tax avoidance and evasion. That our democratic processes are as robust as possible and that all our organs of state are as transparent as possible and open to scrutiny to the public.
If the accumulation of wealth on this scale continues unabated it will end in tears... inevitably.
Furthermore I believe that there is a relationship between inequality - and all the things that go with it and follow from it - and environmental degradation.
Greater fairness between individuals and between countries is, in my opinion, one of the essential requirements for us to surmount the epic problems that we face in the world today.
I think most of us have are aware of what really happens at Davos. The wealthy and powerful are cooking up more schemes to screw the 99% over. Your Bono's and your Bill Gates are no friends to the working class or the working poor. Take Jeff Bezos for example. He has a mass of wealth totaling $112 Billion.
- To end global hunger - $30 Billion
- To end homelessness in the USA - $20 Billion
Jeff Bezos, or even Bill Gates could do that in an instant and still have Billions to spare. The super rich don't care about "regular" people, and never have.
Peter Rabbit ComfortablyPlumb 7 Apr 2018 14:25This is the Osborne analogy regurgitated.
If you live in a £2.5 million house, you are wealthy, not average or poor. To be wealthy is not some form of human rights entitlement, especially if it is at the cost of the overwhelming majority. This concept is known as "greed" and "selfishness". Obviously your mantra is that of Gordon Gekko "greed is good".
The real focus of our taxation system should be to tax wealth and recipients of silly amounts of annual income.
All these arguments are dated and are applicable to the Thatcher era of the early 1980s which has long gone and is not going to return. The problem facing our society currently is run away social and economic inequality and the entrenchment of substantial wealth for a very small number of people which is fuelling generational social and inequality.
TakoradiMan BrotherLead 7 Apr 2018 14:24I presume that most those living in the U.K. will fall within top 1% which the Guardianista loath so much.
I'm sorry but this post is utterly clueless.
To be in the top 1% you need to have a household income of well over £50k per annum (closer to £100k I suspect - no one here has yet given very authoritative figures); only a fraction of the UK population are that well off.
AnneK1 Landlord52 7 Apr 2018 14:24
Except that they don't and the charities have to come along and ask us for more money because the public sector haven't used tax revenue efficiently. I would say Britain's ineffective public sector are the greatest threat to Corbyn's chances of forming the government we need to rid us of these dangerous Tories.
PeterlooSunset 7 Apr 2018 14:24
The richest 1% own the corporate media (including the private equity firms keeping the Guardian afloat) that keep telling us we have to focus our attention on identity politics while they loot all the wealth.
prematureoptimsim -> Inthesticks 7 Apr 2018 14:23Ur talking about something called "Reagan-nomics" or what was commonly and lovingly referred to as "trickle down economics". After the destruction of unionized labor, years of globalization, record profits for corporations & wall street and a high octane doze of Reagan / Thatcher Neoliberalism, "trickle down" has obviously been a complete failure.
U need proof ? Just examine recent history of presidential elections. . . .
- Barack Obama - ( Mr. Hope and Change )
- Donald Trump - ( Mr. Make America Great Again ).
And in the end it's the same as it ever was. The rich get richer and. . . . Well u know the rest. Good luck to u. Enjoy ur crumbs.
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Apr 05, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Originally from The demise of the nation state By Rana Dasgupta
hat is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the " national nervous breakdown " of Brexit. France " narrowly escaped a heart attack " in last year's elections, but the country's leading daily feels this has done little to alter the " accelerated decomposition " of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that "the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt"; in Italy, "the collapse of the establishment" in the March elections has even brought talk of a "barbarian arrival", as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition , introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian "solutions" are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious "purification" (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame "our" history, "our" populists, "our" media, "our" institutions, "our" lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss "politics", we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is "foreign affairs" or "international relations" – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked " resurgence of the nation state ".
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Apr 05, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The future of economic globalisation, for which the Davos men and women see themselves as caretakers, had been shaken by a series of political earthquakes. "Globalisation" can mean many things, but what lay in particular doubt was the long-advanced project of increasing free trade in goods across borders. The previous summer, Britain had voted to leave the largest trading bloc in the world. In November, the unexpected victory of Donald Trump , who vowed to withdraw from major trade deals, appeared to jeopardise the trading relationships of the world's richest country. Forthcoming elections in France and Germany suddenly seemed to bear the possibility of anti-globalisation parties garnering better results than ever before. The barbarians weren't at the gates to the ski-lifts yet – but they weren't very far.
In a panel titled Governing Globalisation , the economist Dambisa Moyo , otherwise a well-known supporter of free trade, forthrightly asked the audience to accept that "there have been significant losses" from globalisation. "It is not clear to me that we are going to be able to remedy them under the current infrastructure," she added. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, called for a policy hitherto foreign to the World Economic Forum : "more redistribution". After years of hedging or discounting the malign effects of free trade, it was time to face facts: globalisation caused job losses and depressed wages, and the usual Davos proposals – such as instructing affected populations to accept the new reality – weren't going to work. Unless something changed, the political consequences were likely to get worse.
The backlash to globalisation has helped fuel the extraordinary political shifts of the past 18 months. During the close race to become the Democratic party candidate, senator Bernie Sanders relentlessly attacked Hillary Clinton on her support for free trade . On the campaign trail, Donald Trump openly proposed tilting the terms of trade in favour of American industry. "Americanism, not globalism, shall be our creed," he bellowed at the Republican national convention last July. The vote for Brexit was strongest in the regions of the UK devastated by the flight of manufacturing. At Davos in January, British prime minister Theresa May, the leader of the party of capital and inherited wealth, improbably picked up the theme, warning that, for many, "talk of greater globalisation means their jobs being outsourced and wages undercut." Meanwhile, the European far right has been warning against free movement of people as well as goods. Following her qualifying victory in the first round of France's presidential election, Marine Le Pen warned darkly that "the main thing at stake in this election is the rampant globalisation that is endangering our civilisation."
It was only a few decades ago that globalisation was held by many, even by some critics, to be an inevitable, unstoppable force. "Rejecting globalisation," the American journalist George Packer has written, "was like rejecting the sunrise." Globalisation could take place in services, capital and ideas, making it a notoriously imprecise term; but what it meant most often was making it cheaper to trade across borders – something that seemed to many at the time to be an unquestionable good. In practice, this often meant that industry would move from rich countries, where labour was expensive, to poor countries, where labour was cheaper. People in the rich countries would either have to accept lower wages to compete, or lose their jobs. But no matter what, the goods they formerly produced would now be imported, and be even cheaper. And the unemployed could get new, higher-skilled jobs (if they got the requisite training). Mainstream economists and politicians upheld the consensus about the merits of globalisation, with little concern that there might be political consequences.
Back then, economists could calmly chalk up anti-globalisation sentiment to a marginal group of delusional protesters, or disgruntled stragglers still toiling uselessly in "sunset industries". These days, as sizable constituencies have voted in country after country for anti-free-trade policies, or candidates that promise to limit them, the old self-assurance is gone. Millions have rejected, with uncertain results, the punishing logic that globalisation could not be stopped. The backlash has swelled a wave of soul-searching among economists, one that had already begun to roll ashore with the financial crisis. How did they fail to foresee the repercussions?
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Mar 30, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Bin Salman's affair with academia isn't a fluke – it's a result of the neoliberal logic by which universities increasingly operate. As the journalist David Dickson noted in 1984, American universities and corporations have "teamed up to challenge the democratic control of knowledge" by delegating control over academic research to "the marketplace".
This market rationality extends even to the way research is evaluated – which the Saudi government has been gaming. To give one example, it paid highly cited mathematicians at universities around the world to list King Abdulaziz University as an affiliation, thereby making it the seventh "best" mathematics department worldwide in the 2014 US News and World Report university rankings .
Here, the Saudi government is only playing by the rules of a game designed by western elites. This is the same logic that has been used to allow corporations, nonprofits and the military to steadily buy out chunks of academia to the point where it makes little sense to presume clear boundaries exist between these entities. As a result, numerous partnerships entangle MIT researchers with Bin Salman. On his Boston tour, he also visited IBM's Cambridge research facility, which recently partnered with MIT to form an artificial intelligence research laboratory in exchange for a $240m commitment to the university. Boston Dynamics , an MIT partner that builds robots for the US military, also offered a demonstration. Such alliances ought to cast doubt on MIT's promise to understand the "societal and ethical" implications of AI and build socially beneficial technologies.
The terms of all of these partnerships are essentially opaque, while the secrecy that surrounds them denies the community the chance to deliberate and take action. The growth of unaccountable university partnerships, like other crises facing educational institutions, stems from the absence of democratic engagement. When universities decide to sell themselves to the highest bidder, they become deaf to the interests of their students and the wider societies in which they operate. Subservience to war criminals and corporate overlords tends to follow.
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Apr 03, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Russian ministers suggest that British secret services carried out Skripal poisoning to distract from Brexit
Tue 3 Apr 2018 10.03 EDT Last modified on Tue 3 Apr 2018 12.34 EDT Downing Street has issued a plea for "proportionate" action from Russia to the Salisbury poisoning row after its foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, warned that relations with the west are now worse than during the cold war.
Theresa May is visiting Scandinavia next week with the international security threat from Russia expected to be at the top of the agenda.
Her one-day visit to Denmark and Sweden was announced after Lavrov appeared to suggest that UK secret services may have been involved in the 4 March attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury. He said the incident could have been "beneficial" to the British government to distract attention from Brexit .
Speaking in Moscow, Lavrov said there was "a lot of talk about a 'cold war', about the situation being worse than it was during the classic cold war, because then there were some rules, and some decency was observed".
He added: "I believe that our western partners, I mean primarily the United Kingdom, the United States and some countries that blindly follow them, have cast away all decency, they are resorting to open lies, blatant misinformation."
It came as a former Russian military official Lt-Gen Evgeny Buzhinsky warned that the conflict could even end up as "the last war in the history of mankind". In a thinly veiled threat, he said the diplomatic crisis could result in a "very, very bad outcome" and accused the west of "cornering Russia" which, he argued, was a "very dangerous thing".
The deputy foreign minister, Alexander Grushko, called the poisoning of Sergei Skripal a "provocation arranged by Britain" in order to justify high military spending because "they need a major enemy".
However, Downing Street in effect called for calm at its weekly briefing for political reporters, simply saying it expected the wider dispute with Russia would not be settled for a long time. A No 10 spokesman said: "We need to respond in a proportionate way to this aggressive behaviour from Russia and that's what we're doing."
He added: "As the prime minister has made clear, the UK would much rather have in Russia a constructive partner ready to play by the rules. But this attack in Salisbury was part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive Russian behaviour, as well as a new and dangerous phase in Russian activity within the continent and beyond. As the prime minister has said, we must face the facts, and the challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come."
Russia is also keeping up the pressure on the UK to provide consular access to Skripal's daughter, Yulia, now she is recovering in a Salisbury hospital.
Reports from Russia claim that a cousin has contacted the British and Russian authorities to be given permission to go to the UK to be by her bedside.
Lavrov said it was outrageous that the UK was not letting diplomatic staff see Yulia Skripal . The Russian embassy in London claims the UK is in breach of article 36 of the Vienna convention by refusing consular access to a Russian national.
Downing Street raised the possibility that the 33-year-old may have requested that consular access be denied. It said access was based on a number of considerations "including consent from the individual".
Russia also warned it would not accept any international scientific findings on the nerve agent used to poison the Skripals unless its scientists were involved in testing the nerve agent samples. Moscow spelt out its conditions for cooperation before an emergency meeting it has convened for Wednesday of the executive of the Organisation for Prevention of Chemical Weapons in The Hague.
The OPCW is the internationally recognised body responsible for overseeing the 1997 chemical weapons convention and has been testing samples provided by British scientists from the Skripals.
The first results about the nature of the poison - which the UK believes to be novichok, a nerve agent of Russian origin – are expected in days. Alexander Shulgin, Russia's permanent representative to the OPCW, complained that Russian scientists have been barred from the tests owing to British objections.
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Apr 01, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Trump is after Amazon, Congress is after Facebook, and Apple and Google have their problems too. Should the world's top tech firms be worried?
rump is going after Amazon; Congress is after Facebook; Google is too big, and Apple is short of new products. Is it any surprise that sentiment toward the tech industry giants is turning sour? The consequences of such a readjustment, however, may be dire.
Trump lashes out at Amazon and sends stocks tumbling
Read more
The past two weeks have been difficult for the tech sector by every measure. Tech stocks have largely driven the year's stock market decline, the largest quarterly drop since 2015.
Facebook saw more than $50bn shaved off its value after the Observer revealed that Cambridge Analytica had harvested millions of people's user data for political profiling. Now users are deleting accounts, and regulators may seek to limit how the company monetizes data, threatening Facebook's business model.
On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission confirmed it was investigating the company's data practices. Additionally, Facebook said it would send a top executive to London to appear in front of UK lawmakers, but it would not send the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, who is increasingly seen as isolated and aloof.
Shares of Facebook have declined more than 17% from the close on Friday 16 March to the close on Thursday before the Easter break.
Amazon, meanwhile, long the target of President Trump's ire, saw more than $30bn, or 5%, shaved off its $693bn market capitalization after it was reported that the president was "obsessed" with the company and that he "wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law".
Shares of Apple, and Google's parent company Alphabet, are also down, dropping on concerns that tech firms now face tighter regulation across the board.
For Apple, there's an additional concern that following poor sales of its $1,000 iPhone X. For Google, there's the prospect not only of tighter regulation on how it sells user date to advertisers, but also the fear of losing an important Android software patent case with the Oracle.
Big tech's critics may be forgiven a moment of schadenfreude. But for shareholders and pension plans, the tarnishing of tech could have serious consequences.
Apple, Amazon and Alphabet make up 10% of the S&P 500 with a combined market capitalization market cap of $2.3tn. Add Microsoft and Facebook, with a combined market value of $1.1tn, and the big five make up 15% of the index.
Overall, technology makes up 25% of the S&P. If tech pops, the thinking goes, so pops the market.
"We're one week into a sell-off after a multi-year run-up," says Eric Kuby of North Star Investment Management. "The big picture is that over the past five years a group of mega cap tech stocks like Nvidia, Netflix, Facebook have gone up anywhere from 260% to 1,800%."
Confess -> Nedward Marbletoe , 1 Apr 2018 16:12
The post office is a service for citizens. It operates at a loss. Being able to send a letter across the country in two days for fifty cents is a service our government provides. Amazon is abusing that service. It's whole business model requires government support.Byron Delaney , 1 Apr 2018 15:59Amazon's spending power is garnered simply from its massively overalued stock price. If that falls, down goes Amazon. Facebook is entirely dependent on the postive opinion of active users. If users stop using, down goes Facebook's stock price, and so goes the company. It's extremely fragile. Apple has a short product cycle. If people lose interest in its newest versions, its stock price can tank in one year or so. Google and Microsoft seem quite solid, but are likely overvalued. (Tesla will most likwly go bankrupt, along with many others.) If these stocks continue to lose value, rwtirement funds will get scary, and we could enter recession again almost immediately. Since companies such as Amazon have already degraded the eatablished infrastructure of the economy, there may be no actual recovery. We will need to change drastically in some way. It seems that thw wheels are already turning, and this is where we are going now - with Trump as our leader.lennbob , 1 Apr 2018 15:58'Deutsche Bank analyst Lloyd Walmsley said: "We do not think attacking Amazon will be popular."'PardelLux , 1 Apr 2018 15:54Lloyd Walmsley hasn't spent much time in Seattle, apparently. The activities of Amazon and Google (but especially Amazon) have all contributed to traffic problems, rising rents and property prices, and gentrification (among other things) that are all making Seattle a less affordable, less attractive place to live. That's why Amazon is looking to establish a 'second headquarters' in another city: they've upset too many people here to be able to expand further in this area without at least encountering significant resistance. People here used to refer to Microsoft as 'the evil empire'; now we use it to refer to Amazon. And when it comes to their original business, books, I and most people I know actively avoid buying from Amazon, choosing instead to shop at the area's many independent book stores.
Dear Guardian,Alexander Dunnett , 1 Apr 2018 15:42
why do you still sport the FB, Twitter, Google+, Instagramm, Pinterest etc. buttons below every single article? Why do you have to do their dirty work? I don't do that on my webpages, you don't need to do neither. Please stop it.Not being a Trump supporter, however there is a lot of sense in some of the comments coming from Trump,. Whether he carries through with them , is another subject.Neovercingetorix , 1 Apr 2018 15:20
His comment on Amazon:- " Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state or local governments, use our postal system as their delivery boy (causing tremendous loss to the US) and putting many thousands of retailers out of business."Who can argue against that? Furthermore, the retailers would have paid some tax!
Talk about elephants in the room. What about the elephants who were let out of the room to run amuck ? Should it not have been the case of being wise before the event , rather than after the event?
A quasi-battle of the billionaires. With Bezos, there's the immediate political element in Bezos' ownership of the clearly anti-Trump Washington Post, which has gone so far as to become lax in editorial oversight (eg, misspelling and even occasional incomplete articles published in an obvious rush to be first to trash POTUS), but there are other issues. Amazon's impact on physical retail is well-documented, and not so long ago (ie, before Trump "attacked" Amazon"), it was sometimes lamented by those on the American left, and Trump is correct in that critique, provided one believes it is valid in the first place. Amazon does have a lot of data on its customers, including immense expenditure information on huge numbers of people. What kinds of constraints are there in place to protect this data, aside from lawyer-enriching class action suits? Beyond that, there's also online defense procurement, worth hundreds of billions in revenue to Amazon in the years to come, that was included in the modified NDAA last year. Maybe that is on Trump's mind, maybe not, but it should probably be on everyone's mind. Maybe the Sherman Antitrust Act needs to be reinvigorated. It would seem that even Trump's foes should be willing to admit that he gets some things right, but that now seems unacceptable. I mean, look at the almost knee-jerk defense of NAFTA, which way back when used to be criticized by Democrats and unions, but now must be lionized.Byron Delaney , 1 Apr 2018 14:46If Amazon can get cheaper shipping than anyone else and enable manufactuers to sell direct, they can sell more than anyone else as long as consumers only buy according to total price. This means two things. One, all retailers as well as distributors may be put out of business. Two, the success of Amazon may rely almost entirely on shipping costs. American consumers also will need to forego the shopping experience, but if they may do so if they're sarisfied with remaining in their residences, workplaces, and cars most of the time. This is the case in many places. People visit Starbucks drive thrus and eat and drink in their cars. If Amazon owns the food stores such as Whole Foods and Starbucks, it's a done deal. Except for one thing. If this happens, the economy will collapse. That may have already happened. Bezos is no rocket scientist.
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Mar 31, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Across the country, correctional facilities are struggling with the reality that they have become the nation's de facto mental healthcare providers, although they are hopelessly ill-equipped for the job. They are now contending with tens of thousands of people with mental illness who, by some counts, make up as much as half of their populations .
Little acknowledged in public debate, this situation is readily apparent in almost every correctional facility in the country. In Michigan, roughly half of all people in county jails have a mental illness, and nearly a quarter of people in state prisons do. In 2016, the state spent nearly $4m on psychiatric medication for state prisoners. In Iowa about a third of people in prison have a serious mental illness; another quarter have a chronic mental health diagnosis.
Meanwhile, nearly half of the people executed nationwide between 2000 and 2015 had been diagnosed with a mental illness and/or substance use disorder in their adult lives. When a legal settlement required California to build a psychiatric unit on its death row at San Quentin the 40 beds were filled immediately.
The mental health crisis is especially pronounced among women prisoners: one study by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 75% of women incarcerated in jails and prisons had a mental illness, as compared with just over 60% and 55% of men, respectively. A more recent study showed that 20% of women in jail and 30% in prison had experienced "serious psychological distress" in the month before the survey, compared with 14% and 26% of men, respectively.
Although the overall number of people behind bars in the US has decreased in recent years, the proportion of prisoners with mental illness has continued to go up. In 2010, about 30% of people at New York's Rikers Island jail had a mental illness; in 2014, the figure rose to 40% , and by 2017, it had gone up to 43%. Studies of the most frequently arrested people in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere have found that they are far more likely than others to have mental illness, to require antipsychotic medications while incarcerated and to have a substance use problem.
That there are so many people with mental illness locked in our jails and prisons is but one piece of the crisis. Along with race and poverty, mental illness has become a salient feature of mass incarceration, one that must be accounted for in any discussion about criminal justice reform.
Mental illness affects every aspect of the criminal justice system, from policing to the courts to prisons and beyond. Nor are the effects limited to the criminal justice system; many people with mental illness cycle back and forth between jail or prison and living in the community.
The racial inequity of the criminal justice system has been widely noted: it is estimated that one out of every three African American men and one of every six Hispanic men born in 2001 will be arrested in their lifetimes.
But for Americans with serious mental illness, it is estimated that as many as one in two will be arrested at some point in their lives. It's not just arrests. One in four of the nearly 1,000 fatal police shootings in 2016 involved a person with mental illness, according to a study by the Washington Post. The Post estimated that mental illness was a factor in a quarter of fatal police shootings in 2017, too.
People with mental illness are among the most disadvantaged members of our society, and when they end up in the criminal justice system, they tend to fare worse than others. People with mental illness are less likely to make bail and more likely to face longer sentences. They are more likely to end up in solitary confinement, less likely to make parole and more likely to commit suicide.
Yet jail and prison have become, for many people, their primary means of getting mental healthcare. Their experiences offer an especially eye-opening view of a criminal justice system that today houses more than two million people and costs us hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
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Mar 31, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
That does not mean the crisis will necessarily end there, or that the crisis is contained.
Russia, whose standing among the international community is badly damaged, is determined to do go further to clear its name, or at least throw up enough chaff so that a chunk of western public opinion doubts the British intelligence service's account of Skripal's poisoning. Moscow has already suggested a meeting on Monday of the executive of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to have "an honest conversation" about the poisoning.
The OPCW is studying samples – provided by the UK – of the novichok nerve agent allegedly used, but does not have the ability to judge the identity of the person that placed the agent by the door of Skripal's house . But the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, is determined to put the UK on the defensive and has already claimed that "if our western partners dodge the meeting then it will be further evidence that every thing that is happened is a provocation".
Russia has also responded to the apparent recovery of Yulia Skripal, who was poisoned alongside her father. She may be able to provide insights into how the poisoning occurred, or even reveal whether she knows of some other motive by some other non-state actor.
The British intelligence services will be debriefing her as soon as her health permits. It would clearly be a huge embarrassment for the UK government if it emerged she believed the Russian state was not involved.
As it is, the UK government is aware that some allied leaders, despite the public show of solidarity, face skeptical voters at home who are either against a confrontation with Vladimir Putin, or expect more convincing proof to be provided.
The UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, in a speech late on Wednesday waxed lyrical about how the Skripal episode represented a turning point in the west's approach to Russia, but his officials are aware that this mood can easily dissipate as other considerations, such as commerce, energy security or the Middle East come into play.
The UK will try to push for further measures against Russia at the June meeting of the EU heads of state. If it is ambitious, it may may challenge German support for Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia that could put European energy demand at the mercy of Moscow.
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Mar 30, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Zakharova said nobody had cancelled the agreement, which she said still had force in international law. The UK is likely to argue that an agreement between the UK and the Soviet Union is not enforceable in court and there is no reason to give Russia access to a woman it apparently tried to kill. Russia challenged claims made by Dean Haydon, Britain's counter-terror police chief, that the Skripals first came into contact with the nerve agent from their front door .
... ... ...
"Traces of the nerve agent have been found at some of the other scenes detectives have been working at over the past few weeks, but at lower concentrations to that found at the home address," Haydon said on Wednesday.
Maj-Gen Alexander Mikhailov, from the Russian security agency FSB, claimed that if it was true the poisoning had happened on the doorstep then the Skripals would have died instantly and would not made it as far as the park where they were found slumped on a bench.
Mikhailov said Theresa May should resign for misleading world opinion.
Both sides are waiting for a report from the OPCW, which sent experts to visit the scene in Salisbury and is studying samples of the nerve agent.
Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of Russian president Vladimir Putin, said it was difficult to guess what other options for anti-Russian measures Britain could take.
"As for the UK, due to the fact that now it is a fairly unpredictable country in relations with the Russian Federation, it is difficult for us to judge what other options can be considered, and what can be the basis for this," Peskov said.
See also:
May considers banning City of London from selling Russian debt
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
AlanAudio -> SamXTherapy , 28 Mar 2018 10:24
It's easy to use simple to remember associations from fiction.For instance, your first school could be Grange Hill, Greyfriars or St Trinians.
First car could be Genevieve, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or maybe James Bond's Aston Martin.
Mother's maiden name could be a favorite author while your first pet's name could be Lassie, Trigger or Peter Rabbit.
So long as you choose from fictional sources which mean something to you, it's pretty easy to remember those answers.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
aliasboy -> ChomskyReader , 28 Mar 2018 08:45
When a friend invited me to join Googlemail over a decade ago, I accepted and used it as an address for any organisation who might store or misuse my data.Little was I to know that Android would rely on a Gmail address...
Having said that, my AdSense adverts still show me ads that are no way based on my online activity so I wonder if the same people are behind the algorithms here as were predicting the world economy in 2007.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
bobbo123 , 28 Mar 2018 08:54While I love Wikipedia as a wonderful, creative application of social media, I've always been spooked by Facebook and the like, and consider the "internet of things" (IdiOT) directly intrusive ...Massaniello , 28 Mar 2018 08:46Does my resistance to the big-bro-data invasion classify me as a Luddite? And how long will it remain technically feasible to opt out of the idiot stuff?
I recall a time some 20 or so years ago when many of us thought about and wondered how in the world the Internet could survive if info and interactions were without monetary cost. It seemed like a space within which we could freely move and think and engage. I recall driving down the NJ Turnpike in 1993 Listening intently to a radio news report about the wonders of the upcoming information super highway that was about to bring us all together and overcome violence and racism and sexism and without any tolls. Al Gore himself was encouraging this wondrous new world. We were about to be a part of World Wide Web love fest reminiscent of a 1967 Summer of Love Be-In.Now we know how the Internet survived. Call it innovation. I call it a police state, engineered by right-wing jerks at Stanford with a little help from their friends at Cal Tech, MIT, and Harvard, and based in Silicon Valley. If that's the way you want it, well that's the way you'll get it.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
laerteg -> hellopixel , 28 Mar 2018 10:13Actually, it's wonderful (though it's also full of lies, propaganda and bs).But like all too many wonderful things, the greedy and the power hungry despoil it, manipulate it to their own advantage, and use it to exploit others - often under the guise of "security."
A new technology is developed, people start using it, and before they know it, they can't live, work, or perform many daily tasks without it.
Oh, sure, all of us here could stop commenting online. We could abandon social networks. But what about everything else that involves giving up our personal information to a corporation and/or the government that has become part of how things get done in our world?
That's a heck of a lot harder.
Add to that our collective intention since 1980 to weaken government regulation of business' ability to do whatever it wants with our personal information, while increasing government's ability to surveil us and invade our privacy, as well, and you have an internet that is getting less and less wonderful by the day.
Oh, and don't forget those in business and government trying to destroy net neutrality, so some (those who can pay for it) will be more equal than others in their ability to use the internet.
We need to take ownership of our information and data back again and regulate the internet as a utility.
It may not have much affect on who knows what about those of us who have already given away our privacy, but it could protect future generations .
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
... Remember to look at the back of the your envelopes containing your personal mail - when it's being scanned by your State it will have it's rear various pencilled initials. At one time the departments in sorting offices were only allowed to deviate mail for twenty minutes but now given that standards have dropped not such constraints exist. That's progress.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
vedvek -> wascallywabbit , 28 Mar 2018 10:06
I recommend the new 'Brave' browser - it's primary focus is on privacy. It was created by the former CEO of Mozilla (Firefox) and employs at least one engineer involved in the development of the Tor browser (the one used for super-secure browsing on the dark web). Its snappy performance is also a pleasant surprise.wascallywabbit , 28 Mar 2018 09:4119. One way to limit the amount of data that you are providing is to stop using Google Chrome. It is a browser created by an advertising company specifically to harvest your personal information. If you are logged in to gmail, using google for your searches, watching Youtube and browsing on chrome, then you're making it easy for them. Try Firefox or one of the other browsers out there, use a different search engine, and don't leave your account logged in to google all day.dg000000 -> fishtail75 , 28 Mar 2018 09:30With every financial transaction, banks know the location, value and can estimate the goods I buy. They could run AI algorithms to determine everything about my habits and preferences to spend and sell this insight to shops and websites who could use this it to get me to part with my money easier...but they don't.Mobile operators poll my mobile phone constantly so always know my location, they know the numbers I call and text so know my social network. They could run AI algorithms to determine where I'll be when, and who I'll likely be with...but they don't.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Battleweary -> LestWeNeverForget , 28 Mar 2018 11:19
Make their day, write something outlandish.
Decades ago, long before mobile phones were invented, we used to get crossed lines on our landline regularly. We could hear other people in the background, and one day a nosy woman listening to our conversation was relaying what we were talking about to her husband, oblivious to the fact we could hear her, so we spiced up the conversation.
I started it by saying, "OK, but down to business, lets talk about next week". We made it sound as if we were planning a heist. She was totally taken in, to the point of asking her husband if she should tell the police! After a few minutes of leading her on, I said," Do you think the nosy bitch listening in on the crossed line got all that? ".
She slammed her phone down.
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Mar 29, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
1. Download all the information Google has on you
You may well have downloaded your Facebook data already; it has become something of a trend in recent days. Now take a look at what Google has on you. Go to Google's "Takeout" tool and download your data from the multiple Google products you probably use, such as Gmail, Maps, Search and Drive. You'll get sent a few enormous files that contain information about everything from the YouTube videos you have watched, your search history, your location history and so on. Once you've seen just how much information about you is in the cloud, you may want to go about deleting it. I highly recommend deleting your Google Maps history, for a start, unless you are particularly eager to have a detailed online record of everywhere you have ever been. You may also want to stop Google from tracking your location history. Sign in to Google, open Maps, then click on "timeline" in the menu. At the bottom, there's an option to manage your location history.
... ... ...
10. Never put your kids on the public internet
Maybe it's fine to upload pics to a shared (private) photo album, or mention their day in a group DM. But if it's public, Google can find it. And if Google can find it, it's never going away. How are you going to tell your child in 16 years' time that they can't get a drivers' licence because Daddy put a high-res photo of their iris online when they were two and now they trip alarms from here to Mars?
12. Sometimes it's worth just wiping everything and starting over
Your phone, your tweets, your Facebook account: all of these things are temporary. They will pass. Free yourself from an obsession with digital hoarding.
If you wipe your phone every year, you learn which apps you need and which are just sitting in the background hoovering up data .
If you wipe your Facebook account every year, you learn which friends you actually like and which are just hanging on to your social life like a barnacle.
14. Have as many social-media-free days in the week as you have alcohol-free days
This can be zero if you want, but know that we're judging you.
15. Retrain your brain to focus
Save up your longreads using Instapaper or Pocket and read them without distraction. Don't dip in and out of that 4,000-word article on turtles: read it in one go. Or maybe even try a book!
16. Don't let the algorithms pick what you do
You are not a robot, you are a human being, and exercising your own free will is the greatest strength you have. When that YouTube video ends, don't watch the next one that autoplays. When you pick up your phone in the morning, don't just click on the stories at the top of Apple News or Google Now. Exercise choice! Exercise freedom! Exercise humanity!
17. Do what you want with your data, but guard your friends' info with your life
Yes, you should think twice before granting that fun app you downloaded access to your location or your photo library. Do you trust it not to do weird things with your pictures? Do you know it won't track your every movement? But ultimately, those are your decisions, and they are for you to make. But your friends' data isn't yours, it's theirs, and you are a trusted custodian. Don't think twice before authorising access to your address book, or your friends' profiles: think five or six times, and then don't do it.
18. Finally, remember your privacy is worth protecting
You might not have anything to hide (except your embarrassing Netflix history) but that doesn't mean you should be blase about your privacy.
Increasingly, our inner lives are being reduced to a series of data points; every little thing we do is for sale. As we're starting to see, this nonstop surveillance changes us. It influences the things we buy and the ideas we buy into .
Being more mindful of our online behaviour, then, isn't just important when it comes to protecting our information, it's essential to protecting our individuality.
Frenske 28 Mar 2018 23:58
I always use the wrong birthday when registering for accounts unless it is for financial services and utility which may do credit check or are used in credit checks. If my real name is not required I use a variation on my last name.
Jack Harrison 28 Mar 2018 22:33
Astounding that people are surprised about all this data hoarding and selling.
There's a reason Facebook, Google etc are worth BILLIONS. It ain't because of the ads you ignore or are blocked.
FooBar21 -> cachito11 28 Mar 2018 21:31
"There billions of species on our own very planet that show us daily how life is not about money."
In their case daily life is a constant struggle to evade an endless supply of predators who are always looking to tear them limb to limb or swallow them whole, find whatever scraps of food they can find to avoid starving to death, and compete with conspecifics for the right to procreate. On a good day.
wascallywabbit -> Davinci Woohoo 28 Mar 2018 19:34
Thanks Davinci for the reasoned and balanced response.
I appreciate that it's not necessarily your view, but that there is a lot of history behind it. However, to a European living in a modern democracy, it just seems to be a strange and counter-productive attitude. For example, rather than paying taxes for pooled and equitable public services, many of those services are run as profit-making businesses, thus removing money from the system. It also reinforces class divisions, as the rich can pay, but the poor cannot. As a result, many people cannot pay for medical care, cannot send their children to university, and are forced to buy a car to move around.
Again, I'm not criticising you personally, just the mindset that you mentioned.
fatkevin 28 Mar 2018 19:25
It seems sensible to take steps to 'protect' ourselves from the data hoover that is google or Facebook.
But should it be that way round? These cyborg organisations should frame their technology and services that automatically displays social responsibilities towards those they are currently sucking dry of personal information.
Our data is ours, and not theirs to sell onto or allow political freak shows to 'target' us for the suckers benefit, and not the suckees welfare. Who knows how many abusers have been able to hit on vulnerable family's with children!
The internet is a colourful addictive place that most users have only a limited grasp of its potential, as nicely illustrated by our politicians being dumb to these recent events impact. Capitalist thinking, we know, is incapable of self regulation. Internet orgs therefore need steep guidelines that imposes tight operating practices that ensures the vulnerable (that's you and me) don't have to encounter the likes of these recent catastrophes.
Putting lead into food a century ago was deadly until food standards were criminalised; the same applies to the cyborgian world of the internet.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Aseoria -> ID6902426 , 28 Mar 2018 12:48
The US has been cracking down on protected First Amendment rights for years now. Just heard that someone was kicked off the post office lawn last week for protesting, so FIrday's peace vigil may be at risk again.We haven't had any problems with the police harassing us for probably 12 years, but that may be raising its head again.The US government has a lot to answer for in terms of press freedom and its reaction to organized protest. One only need remember the clusterfuck at Standing Rock during the final months of Obama's presidency to see that this country has major problems with racism, violence, liberty, equality, fraternity. The US is by no means a "functioning democracy with proper rule of law". More like a corrupt plutocracy riding full-speed into overt fascism, where who you know and who you blow makes the most difference if you wind up in trouble with the law.
I never take First Amendment rights for granted. I am totally aware that if you don't use your rights, and often, you lose them. I have never had an account on Facebook, but sometimes I cruise other people's pages to the extent that Zuckerburg will allow without gathering my information(or maybe they can get it if you just look at a page). Always thought it was a supremely wrong idea to allow your identity to be taken away by some fat cat with a clever idea.
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Raoul Duke -> milgram , 28 Mar 2018 08:47
It has nothing to do with marxism. I think "cultural marxism" is used in the same context.It's basically just a label used by right-wingers to describe all the identity politics etc that faux lefties like the neoliberal democrats engage in to distract their voters from looking at actual leftist economic policies. So instead of trying to narrow the gaps between economic classes it's focuses on giving all identities, cultures and subcultures equal worth.
If that makes sense.. My vocabulary kind of lacked the words I was looking for to try to give a good description just now.. (English being my 2nd language an all)
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is not a joke; it is a caption from a very famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner. It is also not 15 years old; it was published in July 1993. Get your facts here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Leo Douglas , 28 Mar 2018 15:23
speaking of "smart toasters" this 'daily show' clip from 15 years ago is a gut-busting hoot.
i rarely if ever post links in comment sections, but this ties in quite nicely with this article!!cheers^
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/jpo4t4/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-lies-of-the-machines
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Mar 29, 2018 | discussion.theguardian.com
Mark Holmes , 28 Mar 2018 10:21
13. An Echo is Fine...
This list item brought to you by A partnership with Amazon and the NSA.
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Mar 28, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
As the porn star's allegations show, discourse in Washington is shifting to something more tawdry and celebrity-oriented
... The idea of a porn star appearing on network television to share details of a sexual encounter with the US commander in chief would have been intellectually confounding at any other moment in time. Instead, the interview, which took place only few days after a former Playboy playmate, Karen McDougal , talked about her affair with Trump, seemed a part of the everyday political landscape in 2018.
... Trump may seem like an aberration but instead he may be an inflection point. It's possible that after over two centuries of presidential campaigns with governors, senators and the occasional general, American politics is shifting to something more tawdry and more celebrity-oriented. The often spoken and rarely met ideal in the United States is that political debates should be about issues. But, after a political campaign where candidates debated penis size on a debate stage, it may be the legacy of Trump that politics has permanently descended to locker-room talk.
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Mar 26, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The Russian government called the expulsions "a provocative gesture" and said it would retaliate in kind, raising the prospect of further tit-for-tat expulsions, as the US and Europe left the door open for additional measures. The Kremlin said Vladimir Putin would make the final decision, and the Russian embassy in the US launched a poll on Twitter asking which US consulate in Russia should be closed.
The US has ordered the expulsion of 60 Russian officials who Washington says are spies, including a dozen based at the United Nations, and told Moscow to shut down its consulate in Seattle, which would end Russian diplomatic representation on the west coast.
The EU members Germany, France and Poland are each to expel four Russian diplomats with intelligence agency backgrounds. Lithuania and the Czech Republic said they would expel three, and Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands two each. Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Sweden and Romania each expelled one Russian. Iceland announced it would not be sending officials to the World Cup in Russia .
Ukraine, which is not an EU member, is to expel 13 Russian diplomats, while Albania, an EU candidate member, ordered the departure of two Russians from the embassy in Tirana. Macedonia, another EU candidate, expelled one Russian official.
Canada announced it was expelling four diplomatic staff serving in Ottawa and Montreal who the Canadian government said were spies. A pending application from Moscow for three more diplomatic posts in Canada is being denied.
Raj Shah, a White House spokesperson, told reporters Monday that the US expulsions were part of "a coordinated effort".
He added that Donald Trump "spoke with many foreign leaders, European allies and others and encouraged them to join with the United States in this announcement".
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Mar 22, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Expulsion of diplomats is a temporary setback but the PM might have done more
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There is one area where the Russian elite is vulnerable. It keeps its money in the west, with much of it laundered in London and via UK corporate entities and banks. Unlike in Soviet times when apparatchiks enjoyed superior Moscow apartments, Putin's friends are multibillionaires, with yachts, villas, planes and other international assets.
An entire class of British professionals service Russia's super-rich. They include lawyers, public relations executives, real estate firms, headmasters and accountants. It is this last group which sets up complex offshore-managed structures used for the purposes of money laundering. They went unmentioned by May.
And on the question of what to do about Russian cash, May was vague. The measures she suggested on Wednesday were aspirational. They included bringing to bear the capabilities of law enforcement against "serious criminals and corrupt elites". This happens already. But hard-pressed officers from the National Crime Agency admit prosecuting wealthy perpetrators is difficult and time-consuming.
May could have frozen the luxury properties of tycoons such as Alisher Usmanov or Igor Shuvalov, Russia's deputy prime minister, whose handsome London flat overlooks the Ministry of Defence. She didn't. Oligarchs, of course, are not officials. But they are useful intermediaries who enjoy their fortunes at Putin's pleasure.
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Mar 18, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
"As for the tragedy that you mentioned, I found out about it from the media. The first thing that entered my head was that if it had been a military-grade nerve agent, the people would have died on the spot," said Putin.
"Secondly, Russia does not have such [nerve] agents. We destroyed all our chemical weapons under the supervision of international organisations and we did it first, unlike some of our partners who promised to do it, but unfortunately did not keep their promises."
Despite the tensions, Putin said Moscow was ready to cooperate with London: "We are ready to cooperate, we said that straight away. We are ready to take part in the necessary investigations, but for that there needs be a desire from the other side and we don't see that yet. But we are not taking it off the agenda, joint efforts are possible."
"I think any sensible person would understand that it would be rubbish, drivel, nonsense, for Russia to embark on such an escapade on the eve of a presidential election."
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Mar 16, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Originally from: After the Skripal attack, talk of war only plays into Vladimir Putin's hands by Simon Jenkins
Theresa May's language in the wake of events in Salisbury has been unhelpful, given our history of provoking Russia
Do we really want war with Russia? Do we want to risk one, even a tiny one? The prospect has certainly taken British minds off Brexit. It has exhilarated the press. It has given Theresa May an immense boost and helped the defence lobby in its campaign for more money. There is nothing democracy seems to enjoy so much as contemplating war, to unite it and raise its spirits. It is never unpopular -- beforehand.
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Parliament parroted the same nonsense. The Tories' Tom Tugendhat said the poisoning "if not an act of war, was certainly a warlike act". Labour's Chris Leslie and John Woodcock worked themselves into a lather over "our country under attack" and "the gravity of the threat Russia poses to this nation". In these bidding wars of exaggeration, words lose all meaning.
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Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the west has revelled in the humiliation of Russia. Every act of the EU and Nato after 1989 was to the same destructive end. Russia's neighbours were welcomed into the EU. Nato extended its defensive border to the edge of the Russian Federation, despite then president Boris Yeltsin (and to an extent Germany) pleading with the west "not to play with fire".
As Yeltsin plunged into his botched privatisations in the 1990s, London egged them on by opening its banks to handle Russia's stolen billions. Britain was complicit in creating the world's greatest kleptocracy, brazenly and for a quarter of a century. Even this week, the prime minister lacked the guts to face down the City of London and call a halt to Russian money laundering.All this is a grim echo of how the allies treated Germany after Versailles in 1919. They rubbed its nose in defeat, occupying its territory, destroying its dignity and stripping it of its flimsy wealth. Germany eventually found refuge in dictatorship.
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Camus wrote that "plagues and wars take people equally by surprise". The idea that Skripal may be the Franz Ferdinand of the next European conflict may seem ludicrous. Yet the west's responses to post-Soviet Russia, however reasonable in the short term, have been disastrous in general. A war with Russia would be the west's fault.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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Mar 21, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
Senior Russian diplomatic and military officials have accused the UK of hiding and possibly planning to destroy evidence in the investigation into the Salisbury nerve agent attack.
The comments came during a remarkable briefing at Moscow's foreign ministry given for all foreign ambassadors in Russia, to lay out the country's argument for why it is not responsible for the attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, on 4 March.
Britain says they were poisoned with a nerve agent known as novichok and has blamed Russia for the attack, but Moscow has fiercely denied any involvement. The case has prompted the two countries to expel diplomats in a tit-for-tat dispute.
Speaking to a lecture hall of diplomats, Vladimir Yermakov, deputy head of the ministry's department for non-proliferation, suggested that the UK was "hiding facts" about the case that may later "disappear".
Laurie Bristow, the British ambassador to Russia, did not attend and the ambassadors of other major allies, including the US, Germany and France, also boycotted the briefing.
But one British diplomat did go. Emma Nottingham condemned the "disinformation" coming from the Russian government during the briefing, which was closed to the press but streamed live online.
"Russia has offered us so far no explanation of how this agent came to be used in the United Kingdom and no explanation as to why Russia has an undeclared chemical weapons programme in contravention of international law," Nottingham told the five-person panel.
"We are not obliged to give anything to Great Britain," Yermakov replied to Nottingham. "It is an attack on Russian citizens on the territory of Great Britain, so why don't we carry out a joint investigation?"
Yermakov also suggested that Russia may not accept the conclusions of an investigation by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as fact.
"It is not possible to evaluate what happened in Salisbury within the framework of the convention and within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," he said in remarks translated by Interfax. "Deeper expert evaluations will be needed, and in any case we need to conduct our own investigations for Russia to be able to draw any conclusions."
The briefing lasted just under two hours.
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Mar 21, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
one of our recommended browsers . Report
Aquinasotic , 30 Mar 2014 04:27
At present there is no way of disciplining a retired judge who trades on his former title of "Judge" and his rank of QC to give advice to lay people (without any up-to-date knowledge of law or professional indemnity insurance) and then speak on their behalf as a McKenzie Friend in Court.Cynical007 -> JohntheLith , 26 Mar 2014 16:32I know of a case where this actually happened - a retired Chancery Circuit Judge intervened in a case involving a religious charity when he has no known connection to the faith in question. His intervention was distinctly unhelpful for the parties and impeded the proper administration of justice. But nothing could be done about his unprofessional and meddling behaviour.
Journalists are not state officials, and do not have the power to imprison citizens. There is no right to be a judge (so state regulation of judges is legitimate) whereas there is a right to freedom of speech (so state regulation of journalism is not legitimate).Cynical007 -> HybridMoments , 26 Mar 2014 16:31profester , 26 Mar 2014 06:29The move to a system of locally elected (ie, accountable) judges is long overdue.
A tribunal consisting of elected politicians is not a real court.
Judges are lawyers: a rapacious breed drawn predominantly from and representing the "highest" stratum of society. They are expert at presenting one-sided arguments, whatever the facts and evidence. They provide "blue chip justice" favouring that social segment that can afford to hire lawyers and so keep the legal sector in work. They know how to wear down complainants (often of limited means) with unjustified decisions that have to be appealed at every stage of proceedings. They are assisted by absurb laws which deem them virtually infallible in jurisdictions such as the Employment Tribunal, where it is, in practice, not an "error of law" to find something impossible to be true or to make a finding contrary to the weight of evidence, or without evidential basis (and invariably favouring the employer). Even when an indefatigable complainant succeeds in an appeal against a rotten judgement, they often find their case "remitted" for a rehearing before the same biased tribunal or another made up of the friends and colleagues of the first, and likewise of the employer. Many contributors here, and all employment lawyers, know this to be true, yet this unjust system persists. What criticisms of it there are focus on ultimately minor issues such as whether one should have to pay fees to lodge complaints, rather than the more important issue of its institutional racialism and the virtual impossibility of Black people being successful in complaints against members of the establishment within it.pictish22 , 25 Mar 2014 21:59You also need to remember that judges work within a system which is controlled by politics, press start complaining about high number of car thefts, car thieves suddenly start getting jailed while house breakers do not.newthought -> profester , 25 Mar 2014 20:03There are also other parts of the system for instance social work reports, often made about people who know the systems inside out, know exactly what to say and when to say it. Lawyers who are simply there to lie, on both sides of the case with full knowledge they are doing it. Police who are more concerned about getting results than actually justice. And finally the judges themselves who all appear to have totally different interpretations of the law, I have seen grown men break down when they find out they are getting 1 judge over another and that was just the lawyers.
Judicial lies are far from confined to racism-motivated instances. The whole system of "justice" is the biggest scam on the planet. That's why they don't allow recording of your own hearing.newthought -> HybridMoments , 25 Mar 2014 19:56The judiciary regularly get away with complete and utter cheap lies in their judgments. They are unaccountable as it only takes two more judges to refuse permission to challenge the lies and that's the end of the matter. In one of my cases I asked to audio-record (my own case). Both the judge and government barrister insisted I would not be alllowed to record. The reason for this refusal of recording is so that there is no record of the filthy lies judges deploy in the smaller civil court rooms where there are no reporters. One important subset of lies is about the limitation act. Supposedly fact means possibility, knowledge means suspicion, and was means might be - well that's what high court judges say these words mean, and the fact that loads of dictionaries say otherwise is of no power against them.Ministryoftruth -> HybridMoments , 25 Mar 2014 19:51
We need every litigant to have the right to record their own cases.Americans have elected judges. This has not stopped Judicial malfeasance there, it can actually create new forms of it.Ursultana , 25 Mar 2014 18:34And perhaps that needs review. After all, they are all members of same brotherhood or society, and all operate from under Londons Bar .So is no independence at all.Violator -> HybridMoments , 25 Mar 2014 17:21JohntheLith -> Hywelliau , 25 Mar 2014 17:20The move to a system of locally elected (ie, accountable) judges is long overdue.
Good grief! What an appalling idea.
Ok, but... The Press "often" have more influence on Society than the Judiciary. Ergo, who needs to watched more?arvindkc77 , 25 Mar 2014 16:45My recent experience of JCIO is not entirely sanguine. I represented myself in a child custody case in Birmingham. The Cafcass favored my child to stay with me. The Circuit Judge presiding over the case, lied in his judgment three times in order to favor my ex. When I took the matter to the appeal in High Court, the Law Lord presiding practically said that because the Circuit Judge is experienced, he is entitled to lie. I was quite gobsmacked. JCIO were completely unmoved by my protestations. It is apparent that truth is diminished if you are a layman fighting the excesses of establishment.whitecross , 25 Mar 2014 14:44Corruption is the word and has been for some time.Vizier , 25 Mar 2014 13:56I have to say I think that most magistrates are firmly in the pockets of the police. So really most of them are corrupt.Vizier -> theacademic , 25 Mar 2014 13:53"When normal people face such baseless allegations, the case is struck out, or a responsible prosecutor stops it"JaniceP , 25 Mar 2014 13:15Or rather the ordinary person is found guilty and spends years in prison.
The internet is awash with people who have been unfairly treated by the Justice system. Court observers have commented on the familiarity between Judges and business men in employment tribunal cases, and the employee losing, and also losing an appeal. Has anybody ever tried to get an employment judge's notes from the case? Impossible. Ultimately when the judge says the notes are not to be released under any circumstances (why not if they have nothing to hide) and the Trbunal President when asked under a data protection request, tells you that the data controller, is, yes the original judge who won't release them under any circumstances, is it any wonder that people have no faith in the British Justice system, or should we rename it Old Boys Network system?gogogob , 25 Mar 2014 12:54It is reassuring to learn that judges get fair hearing. At least somebody does!Gordon Bell , 25 Mar 2014 12:21The corrupt protecting the corrupt!ripteam , 25 Mar 2014 12:16
I refer to the Porton Down cover-up that involved the killing of 39 Porton Down veterans who died as a result of being injected with a bacteria derived from salmonella - abortus equi - in an altered state. (source FOI) Upper Tribunal Judge Edward Jacobs (unlike Judge Brian Kennedy QC) who ordered details of the deaths to be made public) did purposely support the MoD by allowing them to keep secret ALL facts related to the killings. Judge Edward Jacobs also ignored a 3.72 million pounds fraudulent payment (stolen from public funds) awarded to Martyn Day Senior Partner with the London law firm Leigh Day & Co. It was Martyn Day who supposedly represented 39 family members of deceased veterans. In effect Jacobs by his very silence and by allowing crimes of this nature to be kept under wraps did himself become party to the crime.Was the judge who handed down six months to a student for stealing a water bottle ever investigated for serious misconduct?theacademic -> Robthablob , 25 Mar 2014 11:56http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/poll/2011/aug/12/riots-water-theft-punishment
yes, though that was a later comment.Robthablob -> theacademic , 25 Mar 2014 11:44"The comments in this section so far could hardly be more wrong" I don't know, I though Patrick Logicman was spot on with his "But then you couldn't tell them from janitors" remark above.Hywelliau -> JohntheLith , 25 Mar 2014 11:30Yes but in the midst of the usual press anarchy, a few wise words from Joshua are surely not out of order?ID7776906 -> profester , 25 Mar 2014 11:28The predilection of cheap jack town magistrates describing themselves as Judges, takes some beating. The powers of local authorities to press their own non-criminal "charges" can be rather unpleasant, and quite happy to present fictitious evidence in abundance, backed up by such "judges".
If you review most Laws in Britain,USA Canada,etc they were enacted worded and favored the very rich and property owners when passed. Judge`s hands are really tied to the laws of the land and it is the rich bias and regulations that keep the poor in their place that Judges are restricted by when looking to dispense justice [as far as the law allows].theacademic -> Ozymandius , 25 Mar 2014 11:27Same applies to the Police they didn`t make the laws.The Justice system and the Police have been deliberately kept apart from society so they identify more with conservatism and the status quo and even identify with it as elitists.
The difference is that the father needs to be suspended in case the allegations prove to be true, because something important is alleged. Here the allegations against the judges seem to be about nothing - nothing obviously wrong has happened even if the facts are true.DigitalAsian , 25 Mar 2014 11:19In my experience of the judiciary in criminal trials is that they do have a tendency to protect the Police and even on the odd occasion pervert the course of justice to protect them. You cannot assume that any judge will be impartial in any case or inquiry especially if police corruption is being investigated or has been alleged. In my view you trust a judge to be independent and impartial at your own risk.Ozymandius , 25 Mar 2014 10:56Suspending a judge from duty pending investigation is rather like a judge confining a separated father to a supervised contact centre while his ex's phony allegations are looked into. All rather unnecessary but what do you do?profester , 25 Mar 2014 10:45My experience of the judiciary convinces me that it functions principally to protect the establishment. This is perhaps seen most blatantly in the employment tribunal, where judges make virtually unchallengeable findings of "fact" that contradict incontrovertible evidence that they simply ignore in order to exculpate defendants in race and religous discrimination cases. Sometimes they collude with defendants to pervert the course of justice by accepting fabricated documents as genuine, despite the existence of the genuine documents showing their inauthenticity (which they do not mention as they are irreconcilable with the documents that they wish to represent as genuine). Sometimes, they make important findings based on key documents that they have never seen, which the claimant dispute ever existed and the defendants claim they have lost. At other times, the judges just simply lie about the evidence if that is required to discredit the complainant. Such phenomena are well-documented (e.g., http://www.irr.org.uk/news/culture-of-disbelief-why-race-discrimination-claims-fail-in-the-employment-tribunal/). However, maybe because sex, drugs and death are not involved - and it only affects Blacks, after all - no-one seems at all interested, no programmes get made about this or articles get written in the mainstream media even when prominent journalists have the evidence of its occurrence.PatrickLogicman , 25 Mar 2014 10:21It is a tradition in this country that, freedom of speech notwithstanding, judges do not respond to attacks on them in the media. This means that we often hear the attack, but not the defence. Let me illustrate this with an example from history which shows that judges can be right, even when non-lawyers think they are obviously wrong.PatrickLogicman -> photonal , 25 Mar 2014 09:42If the media and some members of Parliament had got their own way, Mr. Justice Grantham would have been sacked after instructing a jury in strong terms that a prison warder charged with manslaughter, against whom the evidence of guilt was overwhelming, was nevertheless not guilty. It transpired about two years later that the single prosecution witness had lied: the "victim" was dead before the warder entered the room. I understand that the warder was named Mitchell and, despite being acquitted, did not get his job back.
Had Mr. Justice Grantham been sacked he could not have investigated the Adolph Beck case, the true facts might never have come out and we might still not have a criminal appeals process.
"The credit for resolving this miscarriage of justice lay firstly with the 1904 trial judge, Mr Justice Grantham, who had lingering doubts about Beck's guilt and had delayed concluding the case despite apparently strong prosecution evidence and procedures. It was in this period of delay, before being sentenced, that the crucial arrest of the real offender took place."
Source - historybytheyard.co.uk"The whole judicial system needs an overall."theacademic , 25 Mar 2014 09:38Each? But then you couldn't tell a judge from a janitor. They tried that in China. It didn't work. Call me old-fashioned, but I rather like the wigs and gowns.
;-)
The comments in this section so far could hardly be more wrong. Perhaps self-regulation does not work for most professions, but in the case of judges it seems to "over-work" and the desire to ensure that judges are seen as people of integrity seems to take over at times. On the basis of JR's article, there seems very clearly to be no substance in the allegations against either Fulford or Thornton. When normal people face such baseless allegations, the case is struck out, or a responsible prosecutor stops it. So the impression here is that the regulator is afraid to be thought to sweeping things under the carpet and so the process continues - and absurdity is piled onto absurdity when the judges are even suspended from work in the meantime.worksforcommunityorg , 25 Mar 2014 09:23Turenne and Shetreet's book, referred to in the text, notes instances when judges not only face complaints but actually receive criticism for doing things which others can do and might even be expected to do. For example, it seems that judges should plead guilty to minor traffic offences if they are guilty, and should not seek technical ways that might exist to defeat the charges (ie ways that are not based on the merits of the case). This may be a good idea, of course, but it further ridicules any notion that the regulator is soft.
I have for many decades thought that most judges are daft old fools, out of touch with reality. My opinion has been confirmed by many examples.photonal , 25 Mar 2014 09:11I'm not up enough with the law to be able to suggest a better alternative, those who know what they are talking about should do that. However, I was pleased to see the web site linked to in the article , which seems to be a small step in the right direction.
The whole judicial system needs an overall.anusplatt , 25 Mar 2014 08:41Justice and access to it should be a cornerstone of our society - except that in its current form, it is reduced to a cleverly disguised commodity - whereby the 'truth' / 'justice' can be purchased by paying for expensive lawyers.
This age old practice of letting "professionals" regulate themselves is thankfully in decline but not quickly enough. They didn't regulate themselves, they protected each other like brothers in crime. Lawyers, police, bankers, religious institutions, doctors banded together to give themselves maximum benefit. And the pompous indignation when Joe Public dared to question them. I have always felt that these groups pulled the wool over our eyes. I laugh at the term "professional" often they are far from it.JohntheLith , 25 Mar 2014 08:01sonofblake , 25 Mar 2014 07:57Who is judging the judges?
We know a lot more about judicial complaints than we used to but it remains the case that judges themselves judge judgesI find it amusing that a journalist in a National Newspaper is writing an article about a group of self interested people being able to judge themselves.
Who handles complaints about newspapers? I'll give you a clue with a quote fro the Press Complaints Commission's website:
The Press Complaints Commission is currently in a phase of transition; and it will soon be replaced by a new structure of independent self-regulation for the newspaper and magazine industries.
Self-regulation. Sounds a bit like what the judges do.
I smell hypocrisy.
One of the key elements of the English judiciary is that it is NOT elected. The executive and legislature are the elected bits and thus the judiciary must defer to them in terms of law-making and keep to their own province of interpreting the law - true it can be a fuzzy line at times but it is a hugely important part of the functioning of the rule of law. Elected judges would be a disaster for many reasons.HybridMoments , 25 Mar 2014 07:30What the UK judiciary gets away with is utterly horrifying. That they palm it off as 'isolated cases' is bad enough, but hiding behind the pretence that people 'don't know the facts' is even worse.The move to a system of locally elected (ie, accountable) judges is long overdue.
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Mar 21, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The rapid rise of oligarchy and wealth and income inequality is the great moral, economic, and political issue of our time. Yet, it gets almost no coverage from the corporate media.
How often do network newscasts report on the 40 million Americans living in poverty, or that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation on earth? How often does the media discuss the reality that our society today is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s with the top 0.1% now owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%? How often have you heard the media report the stories of millions of people who today are working longer hours for lower wages than was the case some 40 years ago?
How often has ABC, CBS or NBC discussed the role that the Koch brothers and other billionaires play in creating a political system which allows the rich and the powerful to significantly control elections and the legislative process in Congress?
We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask
Sadly, the answer to these questions is: almost never. The corporate media has failed to let the American people fully understand the economic forces shaping their lives and causing many of them to work two or three jobs, while CEOs make hundreds of times more than they do. Instead, day after day, 24/7, we're inundated with the relentless dramas of the Trump White House, Stormy Daniels, and the latest piece of political gossip.
We urgently need to discuss the reality of today's economy and political system, and fight to create an economy that works for everyone and not just the one percent.
We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask: who owns America, and who has the political power? Why, in the richest country in the history of the world are so many Americans living in poverty? What are the forces that have caused the American middle class, once the envy of the world, to decline precipitously? What can we learn from countries that have succeeded in reducing income and wealth inequality, creating a strong and vibrant middle class, and providing basic human services to everyone?
We need to hear from struggling Americans whose stories are rarely told in newspapers or television. Unless we understand the reality of life in America for working families, we're never going to change that reality.
Until we understand that the rightwing Koch brothers are more politically powerful than the Republican National Committee, and that big banks, pharmaceutical companies, and multinational corporations are spending unlimited sums of money to rig the political process, we won't be able to overturn the disastrous US supreme court decision on Citizens United, move to the public funding of elections and end corporate greed.
Until we understand that the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and that people cannot make it on $9 or $10 an hour, we're not going to be able to pass a living wage of at least $15 an hour.
Until we understand that multinational corporations have been writing our trade and tax policies for the past 40 years to allow them to throw American workers out on the street and move to low-wage countries, we're not going to be able to enact fair laws ending the race to the bottom and making the wealthy and the powerful pay their fair share.
Until we understand that we live in a highly competitive global economy and that it is counterproductive that millions of our people cannot afford a higher education or leave school deeply in debt, we will not be able to make public colleges and universities tuition free.
Until we understand that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all and that we spend far more per capita on healthcare than does any other country, we're not going to be able to pass a Medicare for all, single-payer program.
Until we understand that the US pays, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because pharmaceutical companies can charge whatever price they want for life-saving medicine, we're not going to be able to lower the outrageous price of these drugs.
Until we understand that climate change is real, caused by humans, and causing devastating problems around the world, especially for poor people, we're not going to be able to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into sustainable forms of energy.
We need to raise political consciousness in America and help us move forward with a progressive agenda that meets the needs of our working families. It's up to us all to join the conversation -- it's just the beginning.
Bernie Sanders is hosting a town hall on Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class on Monday 19 March at 7pm before a live audience in the auditorium of the US Capitol. It will be live-streamed by the Guardian
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May 15, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
The question now is whether all of Russia's chemical weapons were destroyed and accounted for. Theresa May – having identified the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack as novichok, developed in Russia – told the Commons on Wednesday that Russia had offered no explanation as to why it had "an undeclared chemical weapons programme in contravention of international law". Jeremy Corbyn introduced a sceptical note, questioning whether there was any evidence as to the location of its production.The exchanges provoked a debate echoing the one that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq over whether UN weapons inspectors had overseen the destruction of all the weapons of mass destruction in the country or whether Saddam Hussein had retained secret hidden caches.
On social media, there were arguments that the novichok could have come from some part of the former Soviet Union other than Russia, such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan or Ukraine, or some non-state group, maybe criminals.
The years following the fall of the Berlin Wall were chaotic, with chemical weapons laboratories and storage sites across the Soviet Union abandoned by staff who were no longer being paid. Security was almost non-existent, leaving the sites at the mercy of criminal gangs or disenchanted staff looking to supplement their income.
"Could somebody have smuggled something out?" Amy Smithson, a US-based biological and chemical weapons expert, said to Reuters. "I certainly wouldn't rule that possibility out, especially a small amount and particularly in view of how lax the security was at Russian chemical facilities in the early 1990s."
It took almost a decade before order was restored, in part through stockpiles being transferred to Russia from other parts of the former Soviet Union and in part through help from US and other western experts.
Novichok was developed at a laboratory complex in Shikhany, in central Russia, according to a British weapons expert, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, and a Russian chemist involved in the chemical weapons programme, Vil Mirzayanov, who later defected to the US. Mirzayanov said the novichok was tested at Nukus, in Uzbekistan.
The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who visited the site at Nukus, said it had been dismantled with US help. He is among those advocating scepticism about the UK placing blame on Russia.
In a blog post , he wrote: "The same people who assured you Saddam Hussein had WMDs now assure you Russian 'novichok' nerve agents are being wielded by Vladimir Putin to attack people on British soil."
A Russian lawyer, Boris Kuznetsov, told Reuters he was offering to pass to the British authorities a file he said might be relevant to the Salisbury case. It details an incident when poison hidden in a phone receiver killed a Russian banker and his secretary in 1995. The poison came from an employee at the state chemical facility who sold it through intermediaries – in an ampule placed in a presentation case – to help reduce his debts.
The UK government case rests not just on its argument that novichok was developed in Russia, but what it says is past form, a record of Russian state-sponsored assassination of former spies.
Murray, in a phone interview, is undeterred, determined to challenge the government line, in spite of having been subjected to a level of abuse on social media he had not experienced before.
"There is no evidence it was Russia. I am not ruling out that it could be Russia, though I don't see the motive. I want to see where the evidence lies," Murray said. "Anyone who expresses scepticism is seen as an enemy of the state."
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Jun 28, 2013 | www.theguardian.com
Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden are upset about something, they just can't say what. In a letter sent to the National Security Agency this week about a fact sheet on its surveillance programs, the senators complained about what they refer to only as "the inaccuracy". The inaccuracy is "significant". The inaccuracy could "decrease public confidence in the NSA's openness and its commitment to protecting Americans' constitutional rights". But, because the information underlying it is classified, the inaccuracy can't be described.
This is either a frustrating illustration of the absurdities of America's secrecy regime, or the start of a pretty solid vaudeville act.
The frenzied public debate over the NSA leaks has focused on the correctness of the government surveillance programs themselves. But America cannot properly debate these and future surveillance efforts until it decides what can be debated.
As an official in the first Obama administration, I worked in jobs requiring top secret clearance. I know firsthand how essential secrecy can be to effecting policy goals and how devastating leaks can be. I navigated diplomatic relationships threatened by the indiscriminate release of WikiLeaks documents, and volunteered on the taskforce that sifted through them, piecing together the damage done. But it is also true that a culture of over-classification has shielded too much from public debate and that more could be disclosed without damaging the efficacy of intelligence programs.
Trillions of new pages of text are classified each year. More than 4.8 million people now have a security clearance, including low level contractors like Edward Snowden . A committee established by Congress, the Public Interest Declassification Board, warned in December that rampant over-classification is "imped[ing] informed government decisions and an informed public" and, worse, "enabl[ing] corruption and malfeasance". In one instance it documented, a government agency was found to be classifying one petabyte of new data every 18 months, the equivalent of 20m filing cabinets filled with text.
It is difficult to argue that all or even most of that information should be classified. By keeping too many secrets, America has created fertile ground for their escape. Already, the Obama administration has been forced to initiate six espionage prosecutions for leaks – twice as many as every previous administration combined.
It has also left the American people disillusioned and mistrustful. This is especially true of a new generation raised in a networked world that has made them expect far greater transparency from the institutions around them. According to a recent Pew Research Center/ USA Today poll , a clear majority of young people (60%) feels that the NSA leaks served the public interest.
The leaks illustrate how bad the lack of trust has become - and present an opportunity for greater disclosure.
There is no doubt that some secrecy is essential to the efficacy of surveillance programs like those revealed by the NSA leaks. The specific sources and methods of such programs should be protected. However, it is entirely possible to protect those specifics while also broadly disclosing to the public the scope of information subject to collection, and the rationale behind doing so.
That level of disclosure should be the norm for future programs, and can still be instated in the case of the current NSA surveillance programs. Two Congressmen – Democrat Adam Schiff, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, and Republican Todd Rokita – introduced a bill last week that would call on the Department of Justice to declassify the legal justifications for NSA surveillance efforts. Universal public disclosure of individual decisions could impede the efficacy of the program, but there is no reason the Department of Justice can't disclose its generalized legal reasoning. That's a drawer in the stadium of filing cabinets that America can safely open.
"You can't have 100% security and then have 100% privacy," President Obama said in the days immediately following the leaks. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society." But the government can and should let Americans know what choices it is that they're making. The intelligence community might find Americans, particularly young Americans most suspicious of government institutions, more sympathetic to their delicate balancing act as informed participants.
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Mar 14, 2018 | www.theguardian.com
UK spy poisoning: Russia tells UN it did not make nerve agent used in attack
Russian envoy suggests Britain itself may have been behind the attack as UK allies support London's assertion
... ... ...
In his response, the Russian envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told the council: "No scientific research or development under the title novichok were carried out." He alleged the Salisbury attack was a false-flag attack, possibly by the UK itself, intended to harm Russia's reputation. "Most probable source of this agent are the countries who have carried out research on these weapons, including Britain," Nebenzia said.
The Russian ambassador sought to turn the tables on the UK, claiming that Theresa May's letter to the UN, outlining UK grounds for accusing Russia, was itself a "threat to a sovereign state".
"The letter contains completely irresponsible statements which are even difficult for me to comment on using diplomatic vocabulary," the Russian envoy said.
He later told reporters that the case belonged at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in The Hague.
"We are ready to cooperate," he said.
Allen pointed out that the UK had already called in the OPCW to take part in the investigation. He described extensive evidence that novichok nerve agents had been developed by the Soviet Union and bequeathed to Russia.
In her statement on behalf of the US, Haley said: "Let me make one thing clear from the very beginning: the United States stands in absolute solidarity with Great Britain. The United States believes that Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade nerve agent," Haley said.
... ... ...
The French ambassador, François Delattre, made a similar declaration backing the UK position, offering "the full support and complete solidarity of France for the UK".
... ... ..
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Mar 12, 2018 | off-guardian.org
Thomas Peterson says March 9, 2018
From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury.Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises.
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Mar 12, 2018 | off-guardian.org
"Poor little Britain", with half the population, a much smaller territory, and being part of the largest military alliance in the world, spends only 10 billions less than Russia in "defense".
If the same tone would have been used in the BBC and guardian articles against another nation, for example Israel, it would rightly be treated as anti-Semitic and even considered as hate crime by the Police.
The stink of hypocrisy from the Guardian and almost all the English press has made me absolutely convinced that the public are being softened up for a direct conflict against Russia. My guess is that it will kick off within the next year. I think that Putin has mis-calculated because NATO know that the Russians don't yet have the capability that they boasted of recently, it's largely still in development, so NATO needs to move now before they are further constrained. The lunacy of such a move is lost in their desperation to go to war.
Several weeks ago I predicted that there would be some false-flag event that would lead to a boycott of the World Cup in Russia, there's no way that the neocons can allow Russia to be portrayed positively.
Francis Lee says March 10, 2018
I suppose by now we should be used to the nauseating, self-righteous bluster dished out on a daily basis by the Anglo-Zionist media. The two minutes hate by the flabby 'left' liberals who now have apparently joined forces with the demented US neo-cons in openly baying for a war against Russia. How, exactly did these people expect Russia to react to the abrogation of the ABM agreement, marching NATO right up to Russia's doorstep, staging coups in the Ukraine and Georgia, having the US sixth fleet swanning around in the Black Sea? Of course, Russia reacted as any other self-respecting state would react to such blatant provocations. And this includes the US during the Cuba crisis and its self-proclaimed right to intervene in its sphere of influence – Latin America – and for that matter anywhere else on the planet. And it does so A L'outrance.Jen says March 10, 2018But I was foregetting, the Anglo-Zionist axis has a divine mission mandated by the deity to reconfigure the world and bring democracy and freedom to those "Lesser breeds without the Law" (Kipling). Of course, this updated version of 'taking up the white man's burden' by the 'exceptional people' may involve mass murder, mayhem, destruction and chaos, unfortunately necessary in the short(ish) run. But these benighted peoples should realise it is for their own good, and if this means starving to death 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions, well, it was 'worth it' according to the lovely Madeline Albright. This is the language and methodology of a totalitarian imperialism. As someone has remarked the Anglo-zionist empire is not on the wrong side of history, it is the wrong side of history.
The arrogance, ignorance and crass venality of these people is manifest to the point of parody.
I agree with Mark Rice-Oxley that Russian oligarchs should pull their money out of Britain and return it to Russia to invest in businesses there. That would be the ethical thing for them to do, to fulfill their proper tax obligations and stop using Britain as a tax haven.Jen says March 11, 2018I hear that Russia has had another bumper wheat harvest and is now poised to take over from Australia as the major wheat exporter to Egypt and Indonesia, the world's biggest buyers of wheat. So if Russian oligarchs are wondering where to put their money in, wheat production, research into improving wheat yields and the conditions wheat is grown in are just a few areas they can invest in.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr Rice-Oxley – your wish might come true bigger than you realise!
On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash, it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's because the system itself encouraged those inflows.David C. Lee (@worldblee) says March 10, 2018Who's really "dodgy", Mr Rice-Oxley?
"Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it really doesn't need a standalone military anyway.Emily Durron says March 9, 2018The Guardian are scum. Lying, deceiving, warmongering, hating scum.bevin says March 9, 2018I would love to parachute them all into East Ghouta.
Their world is falling apart- in Korea and the Middle East the Empire is on the verge of eviction. All the certitudes of yesteryear are dissolving. Even the Turks, who, famously, held the line in Korea when the PLA attacked and the US Eighth Army fled south, are now on the other side. The same Turks who hosted US nuclear armed strategic missiles so openly that the USSR sent missiles of its own to Cuba.Thomas Prentice says March 9, 2018As to the UK, the economy is contracting and the economic infrastructure is cracking up- living standards are plummeting and the only recourse of those responsible for the mess-the officers on the bridge- is propaganda. Like the Empire the British Establishment has been living on the fruits of its own propaganda for so long that, when it is exposed as merely empty bullying, there is nothing left but to resort to more lies in the hope that they will obscure raw and looming reality.
In The Guardian newsroom the water is three feet deep and rising inexorably, the ship is sinking and all hands are required to bail or the screens will go black. There is no time to wait for developments, for investigations to be completed, for evidence- every ounce of strength must be thrown into the defiance of nature, the shocking nakedness of reality.
There is something very significant about the way that simultaneous attacks of impotent russophobic dementia are eating away the brains of the rulers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The game, which has been going the same way for about 500 years, is up. The maritime empire is becoming marginal and the force that it has used, throughout these centuries, no longer overwhelms. The cruisers and carriers no longer work except to intimidate those not worth frightening.
There is only one thing left for the Empire and its hundreds of thousands of apparatchiki-from cops to pundits, from Professors to jailers- either they adjust to a new dispensation because the Times are Changing or they blow themselves and the whole planet up.
Cleary the Guardian was swallowed up by England's fascist regime controlled by the City of London when it surrendered its hard drives to the regime for examination and/or destruction in the wake of the Snowden revelations.The Guardian ownerships also sold their souls -- although the Guardian had already been in decline before they nabbed Glenn Greenwald. When he left, the Guardian lost ALL presumptive credibility.
Now The Guardian is just an organ of regime propaganda like the BBC (thank GOd for OffGuardian) and here is the island nation AGAIN asserting its dominance over the whole world, but this time on behalf of his brawnier brother, the EUSE, aka Exceptional US Empire.
One wonders how much longer the Russians will put up with this now that it is CLEAR that -- for the first time ever -- the Russians have complete military and nuclear superiority over "The West."
I'll bet Putin won't invade Ukraine, Germany, France, Brussels and England from the North and from the sea in the wintertime.
The Big Problem Is That Americans are afraid -- frightened -- but they are NOT afraid or frightened of a particular thing -- it is a generic fright. So they are no longer afraid of nuclear war. Trotsky said America was the strongest nation but also the most terrified' and nothing has changed except military and nuclear superiority along with economic clout has shifted to Russia and China. Were Americans afraid of nuclear war -- or say, of an invasion from Saskatchewan or Tamaulipas -- there might be hope.
But somewhere along the time beginning with Clinton, Americans didn't worry their pretty little heads about nuclear war or American wars on everybody anywhere any longer so long as it didn't disturb their creature comforts and shopping and lattes by coming to the homeland. The Nuclear Freeze movement was, after all, a direct response to Reagan's "evil empire" military buildup in the 1980s and then voila he and Gorbachev negotiated away a whole class of nuclear weapons and Old Bush promised Nato wouldn't expand. Hope. Then that sneaky little bastard Clinton started expanding Nato on behalf of the Pentagon / CKIA / NSA / military /congressional industrial complex.
None of this suggests tht it will end pretty.
MichaelK, March 9, 2018
The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian!
It's rather scary. The Guardian screaming for a crusade aimed at toppling the Russian system and replacing it with something else, something closer to 'our values.' The moralizing is shocking and grotesque. I really wish the ground would just open up and swallow the Guardian whole. We'd be far better off with out it.
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Mar 11, 2018 | off-guardian.org
Thomas Prentice says March 9, 2018
Cleary the Guardian was swallowed up by England's fascist regime controlled by the City of London when it surrendered its hard drives to the regime for examination and/or destruction in the wake of the Snowden revelations.The Guardian ownerships also sold their souls -- although the Guardian had already been in decline before they nabbed Glenn Greenwald. When he left, the Guardian lost ALL presumptive credibility.
Now The Guardian is just an organ of regime propaganda like the BBC (thank God for OffGuardian) and here is the island nation AGAIN asserting its dominance over the whole world, but this time on behalf of his brawnier brother, the EUSE, aka Exceptional US Empire.
One wonders how much longer the Russians will put up with this now that it is CLEAR that -- for the first time ever -- the Russians have complete military and nuclear superiority over "The West."
I'll bet Putin won't invade Ukraine, Germany, France, Brussels and England from the North and from the sea in the wintertime.
The Big Problem Is That Americans are afraid -- frightened -- but they are NOT afraid or frightened of a particular thing -- it is a generic fright. So they are no longer afraid of nuclear war. Trotsky said America was the strongest nation but also the most terrified' and nothing has changed except military and nuclear superiority along with economic clout has shifted to Russia and China. Were Americans afraid of nuclear war -- or say, of an invasion from Saskatchewan or Tamaulipas -- there might be hope.
But somewhere along the time beginning with Clinton, Americans didn't worry their pretty little heads about nuclear war or American wars on everybody anywhere any longer so long as it didn't disturb their creature comforts and shopping and lattes by coming to the homeland.
The Nuclear Freeze movement was, after all, a direct response to Reagan's "evil empire" military buildup in the 1980s and then voila he and Gorbachev negotiated away a whole class of nuclear weapons and Old Bush promised Nato wouldn't expand. Hope. Then that sneaky little bastard Clinton started expanding Nato on behalf of the Pentagon / CKIA / NSA / military /congressional industrial complex.
None of this suggests that it will end pretty.
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Mar 11, 2018 | off-guardian.org
Mark Rice-Oxley, Guardian columnist and the first in line to fight in WWIII.
The alleged poisoning of ex-MI6 agent Sergei Skripal has caused the Russophobic MSM to go into overdrive. Nowhere is the desperation with which the Skripal case has been seized more obvious than the Guardian. Luke Harding is spluttering incoherently about a weapons lab that might not even exist anymore . Simon Jenkins gamely takes up his position as the only rational person left at the Guardian, before being heckled in the comments and dismissed as a contrarian by Michael White on twitter. More and more the media are becoming a home for dangerous, aggressive, confrontational rhetoric that has no place in sensible, adult newspapers.
For example, Mark Rice-Oxley's column in today's Guardian:
Oh, Russia! Even before we point fingers over poison and speculate about secret agents and spy swaps and pub food in Salisbury, one thing has become clear: Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war.
Read this. It's from a respected "unbiased", liberal news outlet. It is the worst, most partisan political language I have ever heard, more heated and emotionally charged than even the most fraught moments of the Cold War. It is dangerous to the whole planet, and has no place in our media.
If everything he said in the following article were true, if he had nothing but noble intentions and right on his side, this would still be needlessly polarizing and war-like language.
To make it worse, everything he proceeds to say is a complete lie.
Usually we would entitle these pieces "fact checks", but this goes beyond that. This? This is a reality check.
Its agents pop over for murder and shopping
FALSE: There's no proof any of this ever happened. There has been no trial in the Litvinenko case. The "public inquiry" was a farce, with no cross-examination of witnesses, evidence given in secret and anonymous witnesses. All of which contravene British law regarding a fair trial.
even while its crooks use Britain as a 24/7 laundromat for their ill-gotten billions, stolen from compatriots.
TRUE sort of: Russian billionaires do come to London, Paris, and Switzerland to launder their (stolen) money. Rice-Oxley is too busy with his 2 minutes of hate to interrogate this issue. The reason oligarchs launder their money here is that WE let them. Oligarchs have been fleeing Russia for over a decade. Why? Because, in Russia, Putin's government has jailed billionaires for tax evasion and embezzling, stripped them of illegally acquired assets and demanded they pay their taxes. That's why you have wanted criminals like Sergei Pugachev doing interviews with Luke Harding, complaining he's down to his "last 270 million" .
When was the last time a British billionaire was prosecuted for financial crimes? Mega-Corporations owe literally billions in tax , and our government lets them get away with it.
Its digital natives use their skills not for solving Russia's own considerable internal problems but to subvert the prosperous adversaries that it secretly envies.
FALSE: Russiagate is a farce, anyone with an open-mind can see that . The reference to Russians envying the west is childish and insulting. The 13, just thirteen, Russians who were indicted by Mueller have no connection to the Russian government, a nd allegedly campaigned for many candidates , and both for and against Trump. They are a PR firm, nothing more.
It bought a World Cup,
FALSE: The World Cup bids are voted on, and after years and years of investigation the US/UK teams have found so little evidence of corruption in the Russia bid that they simply stopped talking about it. If the FBI had found even the slightest hint of financial malpractice, would we ever have stopped hearing about it?
invaded two neighbours
False: A European Union investigation found that Georgia was to blame for the start of the (very brief, very humiliating) Russo-Georgian war . It lasted a week. That a week-long conflict started by the other side is evidence of "global threat" in a world where Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have happened is beyond hypocritical it is delusional.
Regarding the second "neighbour": Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are not at war. Ukraine has claimed to have been "invaded" by Russia many times but has never declared war. Why? Because they rely on Russian gas to live, and because they know that if Russia were to ever REALLY invade, the war would last only just a big longer than the Georgian one. The "anti-terrorist operation" in Ukraine was started by the coup government in 2014. Since that time over 10,000 people have died. The vast majority killed by the governments mercenaries and far-right militias many of whom espouse outright fascism .
bombed children to save a butcher in the Middle East.
MISLEADING: The statement is trying to paint Russia/Assad as deliberately targeting children, which is clearly untrue. Russia is operating in Syria in full compliance with international law. Unlike literally everybody else bar Iran. When Russia entered the conflict, at the invitation of the legitimate Syrian government, Jihadists were winning the war. ISIS had huge swathes of territory, al-Qaeda affiliates had strongholds in all of Syria's major cities. Syria was on the brink of collapse. Rice-Oxley is unclear whether or not he thinks this is a good thing.
Today, ISIS is obliterated, Aleppo is free and the war is almost over. Apparently Syria becoming another Libya is preferable to a secular government winning a war against terrorists and US-backed mercenaries.
And now it wants to start a new nuclear arms race.
FALSE: America started the arms race when they pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. Putin warned at the time it was a dangerous move . America then moved their AEGIS "defense shield" into Eastern Europe . Giving them the possibility of first-strike without retaliation. This is an untennable position for any country. Putin warned, at the time, that Russia would have to respond. They have responded. Mr Rice-Oxley should take this up with Bush and Cheney if he has a problem with it.
And before the whataboutists say, "America does some of that stuff too", that may be true, but just because the US is occasionally awful it doesn't mean that Russia isn't.
MISLEADING: America doesn't do "some of that stuff". No, America aren't "occasionally awful". They do ALL of that stuff, and have been the biggest destructive force on the planet for over 70 years. Since Putin came to power America has carried out aggressive military operations against Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. They have sanctioned and threatened and carried out coups against North Korea, Ukraine, Iran, Honduras, Venezuela and Cuba. All that time, the US has also claimed the right to extradite and torture foreign nationals with impunity. The war crimes of American forces and agencies are beyond measure and count.
We are so used to American crimes we just don't see them anymore. Imagine Putin, at one his epic four-hour Q&A sessions, off-handedly admitting to torturing people in illegal prison camps . Would we ever hear the end of it?
Even if you cede the utterly false claim that Russia has "invaded two neighbours", the scale of destruction just does not compare.
Invert the scale of destruction and casualties of Georgia and Iraq. Imagine Putin's government had killed 500,000 people in Georgia alone, whilst routinely condemning the US for a week-long war in Iraq that killed less than 600 people. Imagine Russia kidnapped foreign nationals and tortured them, whilst lambasting America's human rights record.
The double-think employed here is literally insane.
Note to Rice-Oxley and his peers, pointing out your near-delusional hypocrisy is not "whataboutism". It's a standard rhetorical appeal to fairness. If you believe the world shouldn't be fair, fine, but don't expect other people not to point out your double standards.
As for poor little Britain, it seems to take this brazen bullying like a whipping boy in the playground who has wet himself. Boycott the World Cup? That'll teach them!
FALSE: Rice-Oxley is trying to paint a picture of false weakness in order to promote calls for action. Britain has been anything but cooperative with Russia. British forces operate illegally in Syria , they arm and train rebels. They refused to let Russian authorities see the evidence in the Litvinenko case, and refused to let Russian lawyers cross-examine witnesses. Britain's attitude to Russia has been needlessly, provocatively antagonistic for years.
Russians have complained that the portrayal of their nation in dramas such as McMafia is cartoonish and unhelpful, a lazy smear casting an entire nation as a ludicrous two-dimensional pantomime villain with a pocketful of poisonous potions .Of course, the vast majority of Russians are indeed misrepresented by such portrayals, because they are largely innocent in these antics.
TRUE: Russians do complain about this, which is entirely justifiable. The western representation of Russians is ignorant and racist almost without exception. It is an effort, just like Rice-Oxley's column, to demonize an entire people and whip up hatred of Russia so that people will support US-UK warmongering.
Most ordinary Russians are in fact also victims of the power system in their country, which requires ideas such as individual comfort, aspiration, dignity, prosperity and hope to be subjugated to the wanton reflexes of the state
FALSE: Putin's government has decreased poverty by over 66% in 17 years . They have increased life-expectancy, decreased crime, and increased public health. Pensions, social security and infrastructure have all been rebuilt. These are not controversial or debated claims. The Guardian published them itself just a few years ago. That is hardly a state where hope and aspiration are put aside.
Why is Russian power like this: cynical, destructive, zero-sum, determined to bring everything down to a base level where everyone thinks the worst of each other and behaves accordingly?
MISLEADING FALLACY: This is simply projection. There is no logical basis for this statement. He is simply employing the old rhetorical trick of asking WHY something exists, as a way of establishing its existence. This allows the (dishonest) author to sell his own agenda as if it solves a riddle. Before you can explain something, you need to establish an explanandum something which requires explaining. This is the basic logical process that our dear author is attempting to circumvent. We don't NEED to explain why Russian power is like this, because he hasn't yet established that it is .
I think there are two reasons. The most powerful political idea in Russia is restoration. A decade of humiliation – economic, social and geopolitical – that followed its rebirth in 1991 became the defining narrative of the new nation.
MISLEADING LANGUAGE: Describing the absolute destruction caused by the fall of the USSR as "rebirth" is an absurd joke. People sold their medals, furniture and keepsakes for food, people froze to death in the streets.
At times, even the continued existence of the Russian Federation appeared under threat.
TRUE: This is true. Russia was in danger of Balkanisation. The possibility of dozens of anarchic microstates, many with access to nuclear weapons, was very real. Most rational people would consider this a bad thing. The achievement of Putin's government in pulling Russia back from the brink should be applauded. Especially when compared with our Western governments who can barely even maintain the functional social security states created by their predecessors. Compare the NHS now with the NHS in 2000, compare Russia's health service now to 17 years ago. Who do you think is really in trouble?
The second reason is that the parlous internal state of Russia – absurdist justice, a threadbare social safety net, a pyramid society in which a very few get very rich and the rest languish – creates moral ambivalence.
PROJECTION: he actually makes this statement without even a hint of irony. The Tory government has killed people by slashing their benefits, and homeless people froze to death during the recent blizzards. The overall trend of British social structure has been down, for decades. Poverty is increasing all the time , food banks are opening and people are increasingly desperate. We are trending down. 20%, one in five British people, now live in poverty .
In that same time, as stated above, Russia's poverty has gone down and down. 13% of Russians live in poverty, almost half the UK rate. In 2014, before we sanctioned Russia, it was only 10%. Even the briefest research would show this. Columnists like Rice-Oxley go out of their way to avoid inconvenient facts.
What is to be done? I wouldn't respond with empty threats, Boris Johnson. No one cares.
Here we come to the centre of the shrubbery maze, up until now the column was just build up. Establishing a "problem" so he can pitch us a "solution".
There are only two weaknesses in this bully's defences. The first is his money. Britain needs to do something about the dodgy Russian billions swilling through its financial system. Make it really hard for Kremlin-connected money to buy football clubs or businesses or establish dodgy limited partnerships; stop oligarchs from raising capital on the London stock exchange. Don't bother with sanctions. Just say: "No thanks, we don't want your business."
FALSE: This shows not even the most basic understanding of the way money works. Money being made in Russia and spent in London is bad fo Russia. Sending billionaires back to Russia would inject money INTO the Russian economy. Either Rice-Oxley is actually a moron, or he is being deliberately dishonest.
What he REALLY means is that we should put pressure on the oligarchs, not to the hurt the Russian economy, but in the hopes the oligarchs will turn on Putin and remove him by undemocratic means.
He is pushing for backdoor regime change. And if you think I'm reading too much into this, then here
The second is public opinion. The imminent presidential election is a foregone conclusion, but the mood in Russia can turn suddenly, as we saw in 1991, 1993 and 2011-2012.
Notice how quickly he dismisses the democratic will of the Russian people. Poor, stupid, "envious" Russians aren't equipped to make their own decisions. We need to step in. "Public opinion" turning means a colour revolution. It means US backed regime change in a nuclear armed super-power. Backed by the cyberwarriors paid to spread Western propaganda online.
Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown how public opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive to win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.
The hypocrisy is mind-blowing, when I read this paragraph I was dumb-founded. Speechless. For months we've been hearing about how terrible Russia is for allegedly interfering in the American election. Damaging democracy with reporting true news out of context and some well placed memes.
Our response? Our defense of our "values"? Use the armies of online propagandists our governments employ – their existence was reported in the Guardian – in order to undermine, or undo the democratic will of the Russian people. Rice-Oxley is positing this with a straight face.
Russia is such a destabilising threat to "our democratic values", such a moral vacuum, that we must use subterfuge to undermine their elections and remove their popular head of state.
Rice-Oxley wants to push and prod and provoke and antagonise a nuclear armed power that, at worst, is guilty of nothing but playing our game by our rules and winning. He wants to build a case for war with Russia, and he's doing it on bedrock of cynical lies.
It's all incredibly dangerous. Hopefully they'll realise that before it's too late. For all our sakes.
vexarb says March 11, 2018
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Putin's 10 year plan for the future of Russia. Putin is a builder, like Peter the Great. He is a seeker after excellence, like Catherine the Great. If his 10 year plan can achieve the half of what he set out in his recent speech, the name Putin will go down in history with the same sobriquet.Jay Q says March 10, 2018The most important part of Putin's March 1st speech:
https://thesaker.is/the-most-important-part-of-putins-march-1st-speech/
And on the village level, because that's where most of the real work of the world is done, a snippet BTL from Auslander who lives in the Crimea: "the first implications of anti corruption efforts are obvious in our little village. We'll see how it pans out but everyone can, and should, assist in this task. The proof will be in the pudding when The West starts screaming about certain kind, gentle and innocent 'businessmen' who end up counting trees [in Siberia?] for a decade or three."
Take a look at this wretched piece in the Guardian:M. says March 10, 2018I wonder how much longer the general readership over there will cotton on to the pro-war and propaganda agenda of the Guardian and leave it en masse? It's as dishonest as The Sun.
"Poor little Britain", with half the population, a much smaller territory ,and being part of the largest military alliance in the world, spends only 10 billions less than Russia in "defense". One of those "defense" strategies included in the budget, one that all those commentators vilifying Russia conveniently ignore, is to blow up weddings, funerals and entire villages with missiles fired from drones. No trial, no public kill list, no record of people killed, no accountability. That is sanctioned, extra-judicial murder of suspects and everyone around them. And these progressive commentators, eager to spread prosperity by any mean, seem to be ok with it.Greg Bacon says March 10, 2018Update: as I was writing this I noticed that The Guardian has a piece by (of all people!), Simon Jenkins, which, yes, takes for granted that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Russians, but asks if there is a moral difference between that and killing suspects with drone strikes. For that, he has been labeled an useful idiot and "an apologist for attempted mass murder on British soil". Highly amusing if you ask me, but also a terrifying example of how straying if only a little bit from the official line ("yes, the Russians tried to kill this guy, they are the worst, but maybe we should have a look at ourselves and our (kind of) inappropriate tendency to murder everyone we want") has to be punished. There are no ifs or buts while at the two minutes of hate. Now even the pieces that are there to give a semblance of balance have to be torn apart by those liberal, prosperity loving persons that can´t seem to be able to condemn the murder of children at will. Now it is time to express hatred towards Goldstein, I mean, of course, Putin and everything Russia.
This,,,"Russia appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war." Should be changed to "The Guardian appears lost, a global menace, a moral vacuum, a far greater threat than it ever was during the cold war."stevehayes13 says March 10, 2018All suffering from PTDS AKA Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The Russophobes over at the Guardian (and the rest of the corporate media) would be well advised to review the trial of Julius Streicher at the Nuremberg Tribunal.Sheila Coombes says March 10, 2018The Guardian has consistently propagandised for regime changes inspired by Washington NeoCons, those of Libya, Syria, Ukraine and is ramping up their propaganda machine toward North Korea, Venezuela and now Russia itself having promoted destabilisation on its borders in Ukraine.Big B says March 10, 2018I find it the ultimate paradox that a publication purporting to be 'liberal' acts so enthusiastically for deadly regime changes from this once Trotskyist but now extreme Right Wing group. There is nothing 'liberal', 'humanitarian', or moral about promotion of deadly regime changes that have destroyed previously peaceful nations and murdered hundreds of thousands in the process. Guardian for the geopolitical goals of the self-declared 'exceptional' Empire, the new 'master race' that of the US.
One final observation on the Skripal case (for now): this stuff is so toxic. We don't know what the stuff is: nevertheless, we know it is so toxic, can only be made by a state, and needs careful expert handling. We know this because every paper and TV channel has by now emphasised that this stuff is so toxic, etc. If we missed the "nerve agents and what they do to you" coverage: we can ascertain for ourselves from the men in the hazmat suits, the this stuff must be so toxic. The Army have now been deployed: on hand after completing the largest CW exercise ever held, 'Toxic Dagger'; they are now employing their specialist skills to carry out "Sensitive Site Operations" because this stuff is you get it by now. In another piece of pure theater: police in hazmat suits were examining the grave of Alexander and Liudmila Skripal because even after a year or more buried underground, you can't be too careful, because this stuff is A woman from the office next to Zizzi was taken ill (maybe she had the risotto con pesce) because even after a week, and next door, traces of this stuff can still beDomesticExtremist says March 10, 201811 (or 16) people were hospitalised from the effects of 'this stuff': the first attending officer, Nick Bailey, is only just out of ICU and lucky to be alive. The Skripal's are not so lucky: and on "palliative care" according to H de Bretton-Gordon. Yet the eye-witness calling himself 'Jamie Paine' was close enough to get coughed on; and the unnamed passing doctor and nurse that attended the Skripals at the scene, clearing their airways, are all fine (despite being hospitalised). Yet PC Bailey nearly died? Funny that?
When first you practice to deceive: someone in the propaganda department must have noticed this glaring inconsistency. Enter, stage right, former Met Chief Ian (now Lord) Blair (guess who was leading the Met when Litvinenko was poisoned?): to clarify that PC Bailey was contaminated when he was the first officer to enter the Skripal's home – not attend them in Salisbury. This allowed the Torygraph and Fox to speculate that Yulia brought a contaminated present for her father (which she kept in a drawer for a week, because this stuff is so toxic?). The Torygraph's previous spin: that Skripal was poisoned for his contributions to the Pissgate dossier were torpedoed by Orbis (Steele's company). Speaking on Radio 4: after pushing the Buzzfeed "14 other deaths" dodgy dossier; Blair said "So there maybe some clues floating around in here." Yes, clues that you are lying? This is pure theater: only it is more Morecambe and Wise than Shakespeare.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/09/russian-spy-may-have-poisoned-home-police-believe/
Theatre indeed.BigB says March 10, 2018Check out the report from C4News (mute the sound).
Two guys plodding around in fluorescent breather suits, another couple with gas masks, but behind them firemen in normal uniform and no gas masks and the reporter 20 feet in front, in civvies wih no protective gear at all.
Virulent nerve agent threat? Theatre, and not very convincing at that.
Another day, another story: now the BBC, Torygraph (contradicting its own article above), Wiltshire Police, and Nick Bailey himself all confirmed that he became ill after attending the Skripals. So now we know they are lying: the house story concocted by Blair was a complete fabrication. The "nerve agent" appears to be only selectively toxic!flaxgirl says March 10, 2018
http://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/journalnewsindex/16078868.Police_officer_in_hospital_over_nerve_agent_attack_releases_first_statement/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/08/russian-spy-poisoning-police-officer-struck-rare-nerve-agent/It just seems like the so very patronizing nonsense you'd see in a right-wing publication.Edwige says March 10, 2018Or the tune you'd hear played on the "mighty wurlitzer".BigB says March 10, 2018Flaxgirl: a bit OT, but not too much as this event does not seem to have too much basis in reality: on the question of fabrication the UK Home Office held an event this week – Security and Policing 2018 – where the "Live Demo Area" was sponsored by Crisis Cast. I though you might interested? Are they providing critical incident training: or the critical incidents themselves is a legitimate question after the events in Salisbury?Francis Lee says March 10, 2018https://www.securityandpolicing.co.uk/security-policing-live/demo/
As featured on UK Column News (from 22:52.)
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-6th-march-2018I suppose by now we should be used to the nauseating, self-righteous bluster dished out on a daily basis by the Anglo-Zionist media. The two minutes hate by the flabby 'left' liberals who now have apparently joined forces with the demented US neo-cons in openly baying for a war against Russia. How, exactly did these people expect Russia to react to the abrogation of the ABM agreement, marching NATO right up to Russia's doorstep, staging coups in the Ukraine and Georgia, having the US sixth fleet swanning around in the Black Sea? Of course, Russia reacted as any other self-respecting state would react to such blatant provocations. And this includes the US during the Cuba crisis and its self-proclaimed right to intervene in its sphere of influence – Latin America – and for that matter anywhere else on the planet. And it does so A L'outrance.Jen says March 10, 2018But I was foregetting, the Anglo-Zionist axis has a divine mission mandated by the deity to reconfigure the world and bring democracy and freedom to those "Lesser breeds without the Law" (Kipling). Of course, this updated version of 'taking up the white man's burden' by the 'exceptional people' may involve mass murder, mayhem, destruction and chaos, unfortunately necessary in the short(ish) run. But these benighted peoples should realise it is for their own good, and if this means starving to death 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions, well, it was 'worth it' according to the lovely Madeline Albright. This is the language and methodology of a totalitarian imperialism. As someone has remarked the Anglo-zionist empire is not on the wrong side of history, it is the wrong side of history.
The arrogance, ignorance and crass venality of these people is manifest to the point of parody.
I agree with Mark Rice-Oxley that Russian oligarchs should pull their money out of Britain and return it to Russia to invest in businesses there. That would be the ethical thing for them to do, to fulfill their proper tax obligations and stop using Britain as a tax haven.Jen says March 11, 2018I hear that Russia has had another bumper wheat harvest and is now poised to take over from Australia as the major wheat exporter to Egypt and Indonesia, the world's biggest buyers of wheat. So if Russian oligarchs are wondering where to put their money in, wheat production, research into improving wheat yields and the conditions wheat is grown in are just a few areas they can invest in.
Be careful what you wish for, Mr Rice-Oxley – your wish might come true bigger than you realise!
On top of what I said yesterday, if Russian oligarchs do pull all their money out of Britain, the British economy would crash, it being highly dependent on the services sector (constituting 80% of Britain's GDP in 2016 according to Wikipedia) and the financial services industry in particular. So if all those Russian billions swirling through Britain's financial system are "dodgy", that's because the system itself encouraged those inflows.David C. Lee (@worldblee) says March 10, 2018Who's really "dodgy", Mr Rice-Oxley?
"Poor little Britain" which actually spends on par with Russia in terms of its military budget, despite the fact that a) it's a much smaller country to defend and is surrounded by water, and b) it's part of NATO with the US as its staunch defender so it really doesn't need a standalone military anyway.Emily Durron says March 9, 2018The Guardian are scum. Lying, deceiving, warmongering, hating scum. I would love to parachute them all into East Ghouta.Fair dinkum says March 9, 2018"It's them, over there, they are evil. We must stop them. They are coming for us, they will take our children and steal our i phones !!! Arrgh!!!" "I'll have another strong short black thanks"bevin says March 9, 2018Their world is falling apart- in Korea and the Middle East the Empire is on the verge of eviction. All the certitudes of yesteryear are dissolving. Even the Turks, who, famously, held the line in Korea when the PLA attacked and the US Eighth Army fled south, are now on the other side. The same Turks who hosted US nuclear armed strategic missiles so openly that the USSR sent missiles of its own to Cuba.Thomas Peterson says March 9, 2018
As to the UK, the economy is contracting and the economic infrastructure is cracking up- living standards are plummeting and the only recourse of those responsible for the mess-the officers on the bridge- is propaganda. Like the Empire the British Establishment has been living on the fruits of its own propaganda for so long that, when it is exposed as merely empty bullying, there is nothing left but to resort to more lies in the hope that they will obscure raw and looming reality.In The Guardian newsroom the water is three feet deep and rising inexorably, the ship is sinking and all hands are required to bail or the screens will go black. There is no time to wait for developments, for investigations to be completed, for evidence- every ounce of strength must be thrown into the defiance of nature, the shocking nakedness of reality.
There is something very significant about the way that simultaneous attacks of impotent russophobic dementia are eating away the brains of the rulers on both sides of the Atlantic.
The game, which has been going the same way for about 500 years, is up. The maritime empire is becoming marginal and the force that it has used, throughout these centuries, no longer overwhelms. The cruisers and carriers no longer work except to intimidate those not worth frightening.
There is only one thing left for the Empire and its hundreds of thousands of apparatchiki-from cops to pundits, from Professors to jailers- either they adjust to a new dispensation because the Times are Changing or they blow themselves and the whole planet up.
From what's emerging now, it seems there simply were no assassins wandering round Salisbury. Instead, it appears Mr Skripal for some reason has a house full of nerve gas, or enough of it at least to take out himself, his daughter and a policeman who inspected the premises.Thomas Prentice says March 9, 2018Cleary the Guardian was swallowed up by England's fascist regime controlled by the City of London when it surrendered its hard drives to the regime for examination and/or destruction in the wake of the Snowden revelations.vierotchka says March 9, 2018The Guardian ownerships also sold their souls -- although the Guardian had already been in decline before they nabbed Glenn Greenwald. When he left, the Guardian lost ALL presumptive credibility.
Now The Guardian is just an organ of regime propaganda like the BBC (thank GOd for OffGuardian) and here is the island nation AGAIN asserting its dominance over the whole world, but this time on behalf of his brawnier brother, the EUSE, aka Exceptional US Empire.
One wonders how much longer the Russians will put up with this now that it is CLEAR that -- for the first time ever -- the Russians have complete military and nuclear superiority over "The West."
I'll bet Putin won't invade Ukraine, Germany, France, Brussels and England from the North and from the sea in the wintertime.
The Big Problem Is YThat Americans are afraid -- frightened -- but they are NOT afraid or frightened of a particular tbhing -- it is a generic fright. So they are no longer afraid of nuclear war. Trotsky said A'meria was the strongest nation but also the most terrified' and nothing has changed except military and nuclear superiority along with economic clout has shifted to Russia and China. Were Americans afraid of nuclear war -- or say, of an invasion from Saskatchewan or Tamaulipas -- there might be hope.
But somewhere along the time beginning with Clinton, Americans didn't worry their pretty little heads about nuclear war or American wars on everybody anywhere any longer so long as it didn't disturb their creature comforts and shopping and lattes by coming to the homeland. The Nuclear Freeze movement was, after all, a direct response to Reagan's "evil empire" military buildup in the 1980s and then voila he and Gorbachev negotiated away a whole class of nuclear weapoms and Old Bush promised NAto wouldn;t expand. Hope. Then that sneaky little bastard Clinton started expanding Nato on behalf of the Pentagon / CKIA / NSA / miklitary /congressional industyrial complex.
None of this suggests tht it will end pretty.
vierotchka says March 9, 2018Maybe it's time to try some new digital hearts-and-minds operation. In the internet age, Russians have already shown how public opinion can be manipulated. Perhaps our own secret digital marvels can embark on the kind of information counter-offensive to win over the many millions of Russians who share our values. Perhaps they already are.
He really is taking Russians for idiots and fools!
There is one key element that proves that the Russians didn't do it: The Russians aren't so clumsy as to poison over a dozen other people at the same time.MichaelK says March 9, 2018The whole piece is an emotionally charged rant, bordering on hysteria, based on a transparent tissue of lies, distortions and absolutely stunning hypocrisy; and this coming from the 'liberal' 'left of centre' Guardian!It's rather scary. The Guardian screaming for a crusade aimed at toppling the Russian system and replacing it with something else, something closer to 'our values.' The moralizing is shocking and grotesque. I really wish the ground would just open up and swallow the Guardian whole. We'd be far better off with out it.
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The Guardian
...the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims
....because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump's fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but "blue-collar" is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to "engage" a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person's responses to his questions.
When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump's, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.
... ... ...
Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about ... trade.
It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies' CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.
Trump embellished this vision with another favorite left-wing idea: under his leadership, the government would "start competitive bidding in the drug industry." ("We don't competitively bid!" he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.
... ... ...
Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic power brokers, what they call "free trade" is something so obviously good and noble it doesn't require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.
To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There's a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico and that they're all going to lose their jobs.
As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we've had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.
Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to "stay competitive" and "the extremely price-sensitive marketplace." A worker shouts "Fuck you!" at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can "share" his "information". His information about all of them losing their jobs.
But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.
AdvertisementIt is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he's telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump's followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.
Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his "attitude," the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, "immigration" placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: "good jobs / the economy."
"People are much more frightened than they are bigoted," is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey "confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don't have a future" and that "there still hasn't been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another."
Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. "These people aren't racist, not any more than anybody else is," he says of Trump supporters he knows. "When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs."
"They look at that, and here's Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he's representing emotionally. We've had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we've had to fight them to get them to represent us."
Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a "creative class" that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer.
What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who's dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, "we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart. . . . Our airports are, like, Third World."
Trump's words articulate the populist backlash against [neo]liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.
Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trump_vs_deep_state is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.
Arnold Murphy, 2016-03-08 18:45:41And here is one good historical reason about who American's really are that they should not vote for Drumph http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/a-charge-to-veterans-no-longer-in-uniform A Charge to Veterans No Longer in UniformBelow is a letter that General Jonathan Wainwright sent to Soldiers discharged from the military, following their service in World War II. As our military downsizes and many choose to leave the service, I think this letter reminds us of the charge to continue to reflect the values of our individual services and be examples within our communities.
To: All Personnel being Discharged from the Army of the United States.
You are being discharged from the Army today- from your Army. It is your Army because your skill, patriotism, labor, courage and devotion have been some of the factors which make it great. You have been a member of the finest military team in history. You have accomplished miracles in battle and supply. Your country is proud of you and you have every right to be proud of yourselves.
You have seen, in the lands where you worked and fought and where many of your comrades died, what happens when the people of a nation lose interest in their government. You have seen what happens when they follow false leaders. You have seen what happens when a nation accepts hate and intolerance.
We are all determined that what happened in Europe and in Asia must not happen to our country. Back in civilian life you will find that your generation will be called upon to guide our country's destiny. Opportunity for leadership is yours. The responsibility is yours. The nation which depended on your courage and stamina to protect it from its enemies now expects you as individuals to claim your right to leadership, a right you earned honorably and which is well deserved.
Start being a leader as soon as you put on your civilian clothes. If you see intolerance and hate, speak out against them. Make your individual voices heard, not for selfish things, but for honor and decency among men, for the rights of all people.
Remember too, that No American can afford to be disinterested in any part of his government, whether it is county, city, state or nation.
Choose your leaders wisely- that is the way to keep ours the country for which you fought. Make sure that those leaders are determined to maintain peace throughout the world. You know what war is. You know that we must not have another. As individuals you can prevent it if you give to the task which lies ahead the same spirit which you displayed in uniform.
Accept and trust the challenge which it carries. I know that the people of American are counting on you. I know that you will not let them down.
Goodbye to each an every one of you and to each and every one of you, good luck!
J.M. WAINWRIGHT
General, U.S. Army
Commanding
Albert Matchett
Why Americans are supporting him begins to make sense. A lot like here in the UK, our politicians have reduced amount of money that people have available to spent. And can not understand why sales turnovers keeps going down. No money, No sale. Companies say made abroad equals higher profits but Not if the goods made can not be sold, Because we have to many unemployed or minimum hours contracts or low income people.
matt88008
Bonnie Parmenter , 2016-03-08 18:30:08The only thing more ludicrous than voting for Donald Trump would be to vote for Hilary Clinton. Whilst Trump is evidently crude, vulgar, bombastic, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic, his manifest personality flaws pale into insignificance when compared to the the meglomaniacal, prevaricating, misandristic, puff adder, who is likely to oppose him!
Clinton is the archetypal political parasite, who has spent a lifetime with her arrogant snout wedged firmly in the public trough. Like Obama, Bush, et al, Clinton is just another elitist Bilderberger sock puppet, a conniving conspirator in the venal kleptocracy, located in Washington D.C, otherwise known as the U.S. federal government.
Trump at least is not in thrall to the system and thus, by default, can be perceived by the average blue-collar American as being an outsider to the systemic corruption that pervades the whole American political process. A horrible choice, but the lesser of two evils.
Trump was always a Democrat, before now and so were a lot of other Americans. America is watching how the Democrat Party is destroying America. The race card is a low blow to Trump supporters. Illegal immigration is a legitimate issue in the US. It has nothing to do with racism.Worker, 2016-03-08 18:29:43Protecting America from potential terrorists entering the county is a real issue. We can look what happened in Paris and Cologne. These are concerns of the people of America and they want protection and solutions. It has nothing to do with racism. The biggest reason people support Trump is because they trust his financial aptitude. They honestly feel he can bring America back to greatness. I personally don't care for his personality and don't completely trust him but I may have to vote for him, considering my other choices. As soon as Rubio and Kasich drop out, Cruz will take off. Rubio, if he truly hates Trump, as he acts, may want to drop out sooner than later.
British capitalism grew because of two things cheap coal that made using the new steam engine and the protected monopoly markets offered by the empire which also provided monopoly access to the resources of those countries. American capitalism grew up behind high tariff walls, ditto Chinese capitalism now.ChristopherMyers, 2016-03-08 18:29:06British capitalism went into relative decline from the mid nineteenth century because of the opening up those monopoly markets to overseas competition.
TTIP will be used by big capital both here in Europe and in the US to drive down the wages and working conditions of workers in Europe and the US, and that is why the EU is solely a bosses agenda and workers here in Britain have more to gain by leaving the EU, an EU that has crucified workers in Greece just so German bankers don't lose.
If the soft left and that includes much of what passes for the left in the PLP continues to pander to the interests of big capital then the working classes will continue to be alienated from the Labour party.
To the middle class soft left choose a side, there are only two, labour or capital . If you choose capital you personally maybe ok for a while, but capitalist expansion is now threatening the environment and with it food and water security. Capitalism rests on continuous expansion but is now pushing against natural limits and when capitalist states come under too many restrictions to their expansion you have the perfect recipe for war and in 2016 a war between the largest capitalist states has the risk of going nuclear.
I'll just bet that if you were to look a little closer, you might find that there are a lot of different races voting for Trump, so stop trying to brand him as racist. That is just another trick the opposition wants you to fall for. The corporations are fearful that they might have to actually give a high paying job to an American, tsk, tsk.tonybillbob, 2016-03-08 18:22:48It's ironic that a billionaire is leading the inter-class revolution.Hiroku, 2016-03-08 18:16:17I don't completely buy into the premise (last paragraph) that most liberals are well educated and well off and that it's liberals -- speaking of the electorate -- that have turned their backs on blue collar workers. There are many working-class Democrats -- that's part of Bernie Sanders' base, the youth of America is very liberal and very under-employed, non-Evangelical Black people tend to vote liberal/Democrat -- at least according to the GOP, the Clinton campaign & the polls -- so to state that it's liberals who've turned their backs on the blue collar class is folly.
Now, the statement that liberal politicians have turned their backs on their working-class base, as well as the working-class Republicans, is very true, and that's a result of too much money in politics. Pandering to lobbyists while ignoring the electorate.
What I don't understand about the liberal electorate is why so freakin' many low-income voters choose Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Why so many, supposed, educated people (at least smarter than the rank-&-file Republican voter, goes the legend) would vote against their best interests and support a lying, flip-flopping, war-mongering, say-anything-get-elected, establishment crony is beyond comprehension.
If it comes down to it, at least with Trump you know where his money came from. How, exactly, is it that the Clintons went from being broke as hell after leaving the White House to having a net worth of over $111M in just 16 years? Since Slick Willy left office, except for the past four years, hasn't Hillary always been a government employee? Except, you know, when she's campaigning. She's worth $35M, herself, is there that much money in selling books? If not, then she got paid -- bribed -- quite handsomely to speak at private functions.
Both Clintons exemplify Democratic politicians who've utterly ignored the working class while pander to and serving only the executive class of America. Ronald Reagan would be proud of both Bill and Hillary Clinton's devotion to the 'trickle down' theory of economics.
One thing that's important to consider, too, is how voting for politicians who claim to have your back on wedge issues is really shooting yourself in the foot economically. Wedge issues are the crumbs the Establishment allows the electorate to feast on while they (the Establishment) rob the Treasury blind, have their crimes decriminalized, start wars to profiteer from, write policy, off-shore jobs, suppress wedges, evade taxes, degrade the environment, monopolize markets, bankrupt emerging markets, and generally hoard all the economic growth for themselves.
Friends don't let friends vote for neo-liberalists!
Politicians in the U.S. are inherently corrupt, both figuratively and literally (they just hide it better as perks and campaign contributions). Politicians in the U.S. make promises, but ultimately it is just rhetoric and nothing ever gets delivered on. Once elected, they revert to the Status Quo of doing nothing – or they vote for the bills of the interest groups that supported them during the election.Letschat, 2016-03-08 18:11:08As far as racism is concerned, why is it racist to want to send undocumented people out of a country that they entered illegally in the first place? This seems to be the general accusation levied against Europeans and Americans (i.e. whites). We seem to have the obligation to take in refugees from all over the world otherwise we are seen as racists. Yet, I see no effort by the Gulf States, Saudi or any other Muslim country taking some of the Syrians. This would make a lot more sense since they have the commonality of language, religion and culture. But nobody deems them to be racists.
What a brilliant article. It seems no one wants to talk about anything other than vilifying Trump supporters because their vested interests are all about grind working people into the dust so the high end of town can make every more money. No wonder Trump is cutting through. The whole world has been watching our leaders sell us down the river in these deals.dublinross, 2016-03-08 18:16:59This is probably the first article I've read that gives a clear-eyed account of exactly why Trump is gaining so much support. More of this and less of the sneery pieces would be much more enlightening to those of us who have been baffled by his continuing success.Sanibel, 2016-03-08 18:03:55People had the opportunity to elect Ross Perot who focused on Trade without using racism, back in 92. Perot, also a billionaire predicted all the catastrophic impact due to free trade and kept warning everybody. The majority decided otherwise...AllenPitt, 2016-03-08 17:55:06I think this assessment gives far too much credit to the average Trump supporter. It's unlikely that any of his followers have a clue about trade or NAFTA or anything beyond Trump's fame as a brash television celebrity.Nedward Marbletoe -> AllenPitt, 2016-03-08 18:13:20It's unlikely you've ever met one.AllenPitt -> Nedward Marbletoe, 2016-03-08 18:24:52You're in no position to know, yet still arrogant enough to spout a baseless claim without evidence. That pretty well sums up Trump and his supporters.Sanibel -> AllenPitt, 2016-03-08 18:33:30Correct. Ross Perot tried to explain to them NAFTA and Free Trade dangers to no avail. Maybe he should have seasoned his dull speeches with racism and hate...thedono, 2016-03-08 17:54:50Correct! Even Obama won't use the words "working class"...they are now ' dirty words'..Yasser, 2016-03-08 17:51:02The working class are fed up being ignored, patronized, lied to, and manipulated with words by politicians in both the US and Australia.
Politicians think that all they have to do is 'look good' and say the right thing. Then wait a bit, change the words and continue to manipulate things from backrooms.
Trump doesn't do that-and that is why people are voting for him...
However, if he got into power he would have to do exactly the same as the others to survive
The working class tens of millions have the votes and if need be, the guns. Thank you, second amendment. Essentially they're presented with the prospect of their kids spending their working lives slaving at $10-$20 an hour, or to die trying to alter the future of that elite-orchestrated course of events. What would an American choose?normanshovel, 2016-03-08 17:49:12The Guardian openly abuses blue collar workers on a daily basis and is at a loss to understand why they can't connect with them.anteater1961, 2016-03-08 17:46:16This is another non-story.
All Clinton has to offer is more of the same lying and "free trade" deals, and subterfuge and killing.Mint51HenryJ, 2016-03-08 17:40:49Trump says he's gonna step up, bring the jobs back to America, get the mass of people moving forward again, so Trumps is gonna win this thing.
Almost all of Trump's proposals, as well as those of other candidates, cannot be implemented without the concurrence of Congress. Tariffs must pass both houses, while ratification of treaties requires a 2/3 supermajority in the Senate. A question for each of the so-called debates ought to concern how each candidate intends to convince congress to pass his/her most contentious proposal.CivilDiscussion, 2016-03-08 17:37:23Trump is awful but he taps into passion, fear and real concerns. If these corrupt phony political parties can't help real people then this is what we get -- Trump, Hillary Clinton and fake revolutionary Bernie Sanders who promised to support the evil Clinton when she wins the rigged nomination. Trump is no worse than the other fake chumps pretending to be our friends.Deirdre Mullen, 2016-03-08 17:34:41"We liberals..." You disgust me. While you defend Trumps supporters as not entirely consumed with racism as much as fear, as people who actually may have interests in the economy and in trade, as workers who, just maybe, SHOULD have the right to work in an airconditioning factory that ISN'T in Mexico, or China, or Indonesia.... while you defend these not-really-not-totally-racist working class people you excoriate them and continue on your merry little way trashing Trump. Staying safe, staying disgusted with the man, and walking the Party Line like a good little establishment "liberal." The true liberal doesn't exist anymore. Your article sucks. If anyone other than Crass Mr. Trump gets elected to the presidency of this country we will continue down the same road of useless wars for the MIC and Banking Scum, the 1%, whatever you wish to call them and it will be more painful than it is now. Because what's really important is the correct opinion on everything. Not that things change radically and that the working classes of all colors and creeds begin to see some fair shakes, which would happen under Trump.ony Skaggs, 2016-03-08 17:28:59
I happen to know someone who worked in his company, who didn't even know the man but was on his payroll. It got around to him that this employee had exhausted his health benefits with the company he chose (he had leukemia) and he was hitting up other employees for money to pay his cancer care bills so he could continue treatment. Trump got word of this and didn't even know this person only that he worked for his company - and sent word to the hospital that he guaranteed payment and that the hospital should take care of him as well as possible and he would be responsible. He told the family to keep it a secret, but of course a few people got wind of it. THAT is exactly the opposite of what Mr. Clean Romney did letting an employee drop dead for lack of health insurance, but he'd be SUCH a better president, sooooo caring. Trump is the only one who isn't bought and paid for on the Hill of Vipers and that's what attracts us racist, white, gun-toting, immigrant-hating, blah blah blah fill-in-the-blanks-you-liberal-twit people towards Trump. And those pulling out all the stops to "Stop Trump" are just making it more clear than ever that the presidency is and has been hand picked and cleared as willing to dance on the puppeteer's strings and do the insiders and oligarchy's bidding.Thomas Frank is often right, but not this time. If working class white Americans of a certain type wanted to support a candidate who is against all this neo-liberal free-trade nonsense, they could easily support Bernie Sanders. He's an outsider like Trump as far as the American political class goes, but has actually done good things as a Senator and stands up for workers. It's interesting that it's not just NAFTA and job losses that these Trump supporters are interested in, it's the xenophobia as well, the anti-Muslim hysteria, and the thuggish behavior of beating down protesters at the Trump rallies. Frank just can't blame the media class for all that...it exists and happens and Trump fans the flames. Trump could care LESS about working class Americans, he cares ONLY about himself - the classic demagogue.cally777, 2016-03-08 17:22:35Free trade has undoubted winners and losers, but historically attempts to 'protect' or 'control' a nation's economy have ended badly in stagnation and political authoritarianism. Obvious case in point, the Soviet Union in the latter half of the twentieth century. Conversely opening up the economy to competition seems to do exactly the opposite, eg the Chinese 'economic miracle'.BG Davis -> cally777, 2016-03-08 17:33:25
A controlled economy might count as 'left-wing' but its the kind of example of Socialism gone bad that socialists feel embarrassed about.As for racism, its not hard to pick up the racist signals from Trump, genuine or not, so anyone supporting him has a nose-holding ability which those with moral sensibilities will find difficult. Perhaps 'he/she's a racist but ...' is not such an uncommon stance, yet when it comes to the head of state, its that much harder to turn a blind eye. Of course lots of Germans did it very successfully in the 1930s and 40s.
One really is reminded of Hitler's fans and Mussolini's fans during the 30s.Yasser -> cally777, 2016-03-08 17:53:19Bullshit. Europe is doing better than both America and China. Free trade plus corruption does not equal prosperity. A little less "free trade" and a little less corrupt elites goes a long way towards prosperity.Tramontane, 2016-03-08 17:21:29Free trade isn't free. It has cost millions of Americans their jobs, even their homes and hopes for the future. Both parties have taken American workers for granted even worse than the Democrats have taken Blacks for granted lately. The Republicans have kept most blue collar laborers in their party because they appeal to their bigotry and their religious snobbery. Republicans have made few offers to even attempts to help US because they don't have to and they don't want to. Current Democrats are almost as bad, but at least they have a past track record of helping create a vibrant middle class. What we need is a Labor party to represent those of US who have to work to earn a living, as opposed to those who were born wealthy, or gained their wealth through stock manipulation/dividends and fraud. It is the working people who actually create new wealth. Trump's bigotry does not bother white blue collar workers because they mostly agree and hate and fear Blacks. The Venn diagram of bigots, white laborers and the south overlap almost 100%.Per_in_Sweden, 2016-03-08 17:21:23I believe the KISS principle is popular in America, is that why things go so well for Trump?furtado2001, 2016-03-08 17:18:00Have I applied the KISS principle Keep It Simple, Stupid. Don't be afraid to ask questions, relax yourself and all else by calling yourself a simple, stupid, snail; I'll try to get there, but you'll have to be pedagogic and it will take enough time, preferably I want to sleep a night on the matter (sound judgement depends (but not only necessary but not sufficient) on considering and weighing the significantly complete set of related aspects, and this complete set may take considerable time to bring to the table another tip; in strong or new intellectual or emotional states keep calm and imagine filter words with your palms covering your ears). Prestige and vanity of own relative worth can be very expensive. If you do a wrong, more or less, try to neutralize the wrong, rather than have the prestigious attitude that direct or implied admittance of wrong is hurting your vain surface, since with accountability and a degree of transparency will ultimately have consequences of the wrong, and by not swiftly correcting them you are accountable for this reluctance too.
Part of the KISS principle is to remind you of assumptions, explicit and emotional, as well as remind you of what's hidden. To be aware of what you do not know is a way of making emotional assumptions explicit which help in explicit risk assessment. An emotional assumption such as "everything feels fine" can turn into "I assume there is no hidden nearby hostile crocodiles in the Zambezi river we're about to pass into."
Best Regards,
/Per
Finally, a decent article about Trump on the Guardian...lurgee -> ffurtado2001 , 2016-03-08 17:53:55Tom Frank is an American writer so the appearance of this article is an unhappy mischance. Normal service will be resumed shortly.tabbaasco , 2016-03-08 17:17:14So Trump's success is all about trade imbalance and its negative impact on the American working class, which the author perceives as predominantly white. This is far from the truth: many if not most workers in agricultural, custodial, fast food, landscaping, road maintenance...are Africa-American, Hispanics, or undocumented workers. Does Trump also speak for those people who work in jobs that have been turned down by the white working class? Would he stand up for them by, for example, calling to raise the minimum wage to $14 an hour?ElyFrog, 2016-03-08 17:15:01Taibbi in the latest Rolling Stone says the same thing. Taibbi went to listen to Trump's speeches. Trump pillories Big Pharma, unemployment and trade deals and Wall Street. He's less warlike than Clinton.kodicek -> talenttruth, 2016-03-08 17:26:57So it is very possible Clinton will be hit from the LEFT by Trump. That is how bad the Democratis really are.
And blah blah blah...kodicek, 2016-03-08 17:04:59Actually, Trump's is a very optimistic picture of the USA.
And 'change' – I.e more globalism, means less and less job security: economic security slipping away at a unprecedented rate. Transnational interests basically rule America, not to mention the mainstream media, whose job it is to attack Trump. Many millions have seen through this facade.
Democrat or Republican, the incestuous political establishment is being exposed like never before.
Trump is revealing what other candidates refuse to admit: that they are owned before they even step foot into Washington.onevote, 2016-03-08 17:03:38I mean - Clinton is Goldman and Sachs, TTIP, Monsanto approved!
And this is who the Guardian are siding with? Go figure...I think his denouncing trade deals is what made the Republicans, (aka, Corporatist Party of which Hillary should clearly be a part of-but save for another day) go bonkers. They cannot control this guy and he's making sense in the trade department. It's not as if suddenly the Republican party has grown a set of morals.weaver2, 2016-03-08 16:56:39The question of course is how serious is he? Is he true or co-opting Bernie's message?
One thing's for certain, he's against increasing the minimum wage."But, taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is," he told debate moderator Neil Cavuto when asked if he would raise wages. "People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can't do it." Politico, 11/12/15
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/donald-trump-minimum-wage-215787#ixzz42Kd1MmTK
Brilliant, brilliant column! I will add, because no one else calls him on these things, that Obama is still pushing TPP, has increased the number of H1B Visa holders in the US, and is now giving the spouses of H1B Visa holders the right to work, meaning they, too can take a job that might have gone to a US citizen, and Obama has essentially cut the retirement benefits working class seniors have paid for all their lives. Yet no one calls him on these things, except Trump.John Kennedy, 2016-03-08 16:54:21Where did this general theme of insulting voters come from? Calling Trump supporters racists idiots is no way to win their votes. You can not win an election by being an insulting troller.Per_in_Sweden, 2016-03-08 16:50:10The same people who attack Trump engage in even worse behavior. No wonder Trump will win the election.
On Free TradeCivilDiscussion, 2016-03-08 16:47:47What is your take on free trade? What is your take on protectionism? Well the real question is "What is best for our country?" Work, services and manufacturing of goods, is a dynamic thing. At some times there is lots of work for most people, at some times hardly any work is available.
The amount of work available is a factor of 3 things, 1. Initiatives to work. 2. Financing of these initiatives. 3 Law and order. Either individuals start their own business through an initiative and if people with money believe in that individual and initiative they get financed as long as there is law and order so that the financing gives a return of investment. Or existing business start their own initiatives with their own money, investors' money or loans.
When people sit on their money out of fear, lack of quality initiatives or qualified abilities, the economy hurts and people are going to be out of work. It works like a downward spiral, when people have no income, they cannot buy services and goods, and the business can therefore not sell, more people lose their jobs, less people buy and so on.
On the other hand, if people are hired, more people get money and purchase things from businesses, demand increases, businesses hire more people to meet demand, more people get money, and purchase more things from the businesses. The economy goes in a thriving upward spiral.
What about trade between nations? Well as you have understood, there is a dynamic component of the economy of a nation. There is an infrastructure, not only roads, electric grids, water and sewage piping, but a business infrastructure. Institutions such as schools, universities, private companies providing education to train the workforce. A network of companies that provide tools, knowledge, material, so that a boss simply can purchase a turn-key solution from the market, after minimal organising, after the financing has been made. These turn-key solutions to provide goods and services to the market and thus make money for the initiative makers and provide both jobs and functions as an equalising of resources. Equalising if the initiative makers take patents, keep business secrets and have abilities that are more competitive than the rich AND do not sell their money-making opportunity to the rich but fight in the market.
In other words, if you sit on a good initiative and notice you are expanding in the market (and thus other players are declining in their market share, including the rich), don't be stupid.
Now a hostile nation to your nation, knows about this infrastructure. This infrastructure takes time to build up. One way to fight nations is to destroy their infrastructure by outcompeting them with low prices. All businesses in a sector is out-sourced. But the thing is, if a nation tries to do this, and if you have floating currencies (and thus you have your own currency, which is very important to a nation), your own currency will fall in relative value. (e.g. businesses in China gets dollars for sold goods to USA, sell them (the dollars they got) and buy yuan (the currency in China), this increased sell pressure will cause the dollar to drop in value) If you import more than you export. Therefore your nation's business will have an easier time to sell and export. Thus there is a natural balance.
But, if your nation borrows money from the hostile nation, then this correction of currency value will not occur. The difference in export and import will be balanced by borrowing money and the currency value will stay the same.
Thus all your manufacturing businesses and thus the infrastructure can be destroyed within a nation because of imports are more than exports and the nation borrows money.
Then when the nation is weak and dependent on the industry of the hostile nation a decisive stab in can occur and your nation will be destroyed and taken over by the hostile nation.
Free trade naturally includes the purchasing of land and property. Thus while we exchange perishable goods for hard land and property, there is a slow over taking of the nation's long term resources, all masked off under the parole of free trade. Like a drug addict we crave for the easy way out buying cheap perishable goods while the land is taken over by foreign owners protected by our own ownership laws. The only way out of this is replacing free trade with regulated trade. In our nation's own interest.
Thus free trade can be very destructive. It really is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Best Regards,
/Per
Trump is a disruptor -- and this moribund political economic system deserves disruption. The feeble Democrats could only come up with Sanders (who cringingly promised to support Hillary once she overwhelms him in the rigged system) is not in the same class. Bigoted clown in some ways he expresses the anger millions feel. Get used to it.willpodmore, 2016-03-08 16:40:29Brilliant article, which demolishes the vicious myth that "America is Racist" as the Huffington Post column announced.Sascha Dikiciyan -> Maria Ashot, 2016-03-08 17:04:41Im sorry. No matter how smart you like to appear when you commenting on the Guardian after saying things like "Trump is far and away the smartest, brainiest, most intelligent candidate running on either side" how can anyone take your views serious?Alfreda Weiss, 2016-03-08 16:36:41Yeah maybe not all voters are racists. Sure. But most of them still are. Most Trump voters are also extremely uneducated, ignorant and filled with right wing media false fact anger. "To make America great again" I have never laughed so hard in my life before. America isn't in bad shape right now. There are always problems but building a wall (which is hysterical) to save us from immigrants for example is just plain crazy.
Trump of course inserts real issues like Veterans. Trade. Ok. Its easy to say one thing but when you look at his past, he's ruined various businesses and is currently under investigation for fraud.
To say that that DT is smart is crazy. The guy cannot articulate anything to save his life and when you look at how protesters get (mis)handled at his rallies how can you even come on here and say the things you do. YOu should be ashamed of yourself. But sure have a President that's ignoring Climate change and you will see where Florida will be in a few years. Ironically they vote for Trump so the joke in the end will be on them.
This article may have some good points but still, Donald Trump is nothing more but
an opportunist. He doesn't really give a shit about you, the little white class. He's not intelligent or even capable to LEAD a country like ours. Europe is laughing at us already. The circus was fun for a while but I think its time to get realistic and stop this monkey show for good.Trump/Cruz are monsters who have plans for the take-over of the US. Trump will be like his friend Carl Icahn. He will take all he can in profit. Sell off parts cheap off-shore. Ignore the ex-workers living under a bridge. Cruz the Domionionist Evangelical will say Armageddon is in the Bible as he creates it in the Middle East. Neither man should be running for President, but the system has been captured by the likes of Rupert Murdoch who is drilling for oil in Syria with his friends Cheney and the Rothschilds. The Koch Brothers Father set up the John Birch Society. Jeb Bush from a family of many generations who supported Hitler too. We are seeing the bad karma of the West in bright lights including the poor whites who thought being a white male meant something. They flock to any help they think they can get from the master-con-man Trump or the Bible man Cruz.weaver2 -> Alfreda Weiss, 2016-03-08 16:57:10You didn't read the article, did you?Alfreda Weiss -> weaver2, 2016-03-08 18:00:26Yes. The US was systematically gutted by people like Romney and friends who made fortunes for themselves. One of Trump's best friends, Carl Icahn, the hostile take-over artist, knows exactly how the game is run. It begins by doing and saying anything to get control. Americans are now chum for the sharks and they know it. Following a cheap imitation of Hitler is not the answer. Nor is the Evangelical Armageddon Cruz promised his Father.overhere2000, 2016-03-08 16:30:30Trump is just Reagan without the halo.USfan, 2016-03-08 16:27:48What this article fails to understand is that racism was always an essential feature of Reaganomics. Reagan told the mostly poorer white voters of the south and midwest to vote tax cuts for the 1% on the theory this would increase general prosperity. When that prosperity failed to materialize, the Republicans always blamed minorities: welfare queens, mexican rapists, etc. Racism was essentially a feature of their economic model.CivilDiscussion -> USfan, 2016-03-08 16:52:23Now look at Trump's economic model. It's a neoliberal's dream. He doesn't have a meaningful critique of the system - that's Bernie Sanders. Instead, Trump picks fights with the Chinese and Mexicans, to further stoke the racism of his base under the guise of an economic critique. That's just more of the same. It's what Republicans have been doing for three decades.
The only way in which any of this is new is that Trump fronts the racism instead of hiding it. That has less to do with Trump than with the slightly deranged mindset of white Republicans after 7 years of a black President. You think it's a coincidence these people are lining up for King Birther?
Sorry, Thomas Frank - this is all about race. There are many flavors of neoliberal critique; Trump has chosen the most flagrantly racist one. His entire appeal begins and largely ends with race. It's the RACISM, stupid. That and little else.
Nope you are wrong. Millions supported Obama but he betrayed almost everyone on the left and the working class. Race is not the issue. Lying is.weaver2 -> USfan, 2016-03-08 16:59:18You don't know what you are talking about. You are the one who is stupid. Obama is pushing bills that destroy US jobs. Maybe you don't depend on a paycheck to live, but millions of people do. Too bad you are so removed from reality that you can't empathize.rippedtanktop -> USfan, 2016-03-08 17:00:15'Neoliberalism' is a tired cliche , a revanchist term designed to help pseudo-intellectual millenials sound and feel quasi-intelligent about themselves as they grope, blindly towards a worldview they feel safe about endorsing.macmarco, 2016-03-08 16:27:25One must also look at the anti-Trump brigade to find many of his audience. Below in no particular order are major reasons why he has millions of supporters.Nedward Marbletoe -> macmarco, 2016-03-08 18:43:24The Anti-Trump Brigade
1. GOP
2. Tea Party
3. Politicians, elected officials in DC all parties.
4. DC media from TV to internet
5. Romney, Gingrich, Scarborough, Beck and other assorted losers.One thing in common they all have very high negatives, particularly the politicians and media outlets.
Yes! I got on the Trump train after seeing Fox News CEO Ailes' horrible press release insulting Trump the day before Fox News was to moderate a GOP debate.Stefano Garavelli, 2016-03-08 16:26:56The lack of journalistic ethics was so egregious... and then when not one other media outlet called Fox on their bullshit, not even NPR... I said hey, it is essential to democracy to treat candidates fairly. they are not treating him fairly! The media hates democracy!?
So yeah, your point is totally correct.
In 2016, anything can happen, but so far the Republican primaries showed a state of severe confusion in the party http://ilmanifesto.global/donald-trumps-fortune/RedOnFire, 2016-03-08 16:24:30Good article focusing in on what should really concern us - trade. In particular our inability to make goods rather than provide services. This is one of the reasons for the slide in lower middle class lifestyles which is fueling support for Trumparbmahla -> RedOnFire, 2016-03-08 16:39:47Protectionism can be very destructive. Japan forced Detroit to improve the quality of its cars. Before Toyota and Honda did it, why would GM and Ford want to make a car that lasted 200,000 miles? Cheap foreign labor was only one of the reasons for the decline of US manufacturing.ID6693806 -> RedOnFire, 2016-03-08 16:48:59Redonfire,weaver2 -> RedOnFire, 2016-03-08 17:00:32When I tell one of my sons that globalization has shafted the European working an d middle class, he says" yes, but what about its creation of a Chinese and Indian middle class". I reply that I care as much about them as they care about me.
And "service industry" jobs are also being offshored to call centers and the like. When was the last time you heard a US accent when you called tech support or any other call center?ID311139, 2016-03-08 16:21:24... all of which simply begs the question: "Why are they not turning to Bernie Sanders, who is also against free trade give-aways to the rich"Ross Grandanette -> ID311139, 2016-03-08 16:43:35I think mostly because he said he will raise their taxes. So many of Sanders supporters are quite young and pay little or no taxes.CivilDiscussion -> ID311139, 2016-03-08 16:49:49Because Sanders will support Hillary as he promised to do -- does that sound like a revolutionary? Bill Clinton invented NAFTA. Get it?Jason Holland -> ID311139, 2016-03-08 17:02:14because ultimately, I feel based upon listening to my family members who are working class white folks, they feel that Bernie is a communist, not a socialist, and they don't trust that (or likely really know the difference). So unfortunately for Da Bern, he will never be able to attract most of these votes, even though he and The great Hair have (in general) some of the same policies.georgeat4, 2016-03-08 16:19:49The real question is why will the left not turn to the Hair, and get 70% of what they want, having to listen to bragado and Trump_vs_deep_states as the trade off?
TwistedCripple, 2016-03-08 16:17:40He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants.
I have to say this doesn't seem wildly outrageous - many of them will be working in the black economy, and helping to further undercut wages in the US. Actually seems quite reasonable. Trump is still a buffoon, but why throw this at him, when there is soo much else to go at?
The weakness of Labour under Blair has caused the same problems. They abandoned the working classes in favour of grabbing middle class votes and relied on working class voters continuing to support them, because they had "nowhere else to go". It worked for "New Labour" for a while, then us peasants got fed up with the Hampstead Set running the show for their own class and we started voting UKIP or, as in my case, despairing and not voting at all. Thank God Jeremy Corbyn has put Labour back on track & pushed the snobbish elements of the people's party back to the margins!ehmaybe, 2016-03-08 16:17:34This reminded me of something I heard on NPR this weekend: Charles Evers, Medgar Evers' brother and a prominent civil rights activist since the 50's, is endorsing Trump.Sunset Blue, 2016-03-08 16:17:14The reason is because the media and most of the people are involved in character debates about him and that's just a game. You support "your guy" and try to denigrate "their guy". It's a game of insults and no-one ever won an argument by insulting their opponent.CivilDiscussion -> Sunset Blue, 2016-03-08 16:56:11Trump policies show that he wants a trade war, that he wants to build a wall, which will do little or nothing, at great cost, and he wants to exclude Muslims, when Americans have experienced more attacks from Christian Terrorists, and American civilians are still 25 times more likely to die falling out of bed than in a terrorist attack.
- He wants to abolish corporate tax entirely, without saying where the money will come from instead (that means you).
- He wants to cut spending on education. But hasn't said if that's because he wants someone else to do the job, or because he wants a stupid electorate. The Federal Government spends 1.3% of it's budget on education - how much can actually be saved and doesn't the 4.3% spent on national debt interest indicate somewhere where more can be saved ?
- He opposes democracy in the Middle East & prefers the stability of dictators (despite the chaos that existed in the US, right after independence).
- He wants more sanctions on Iran - proving his detachment from reality. The Iran nuclear deal was pragmatic. it was agreed when we knew Russia, China and India were preparing to lift their own sanctions, leaving the world with no real leverage to get a better deal.
- He supports gun rights, saying they save lives, even though more people die from accidental shootings, than are saved when used defensively. I am a gun owner in favor of more gun control, because I want to see the balance shifted to give law-abiding citizens a greater advantage over criminals. (at this point, the gun nuts jump in saying "criminals don't obey the law". Yes they do when in jail. If we abolished any law that was ever broken....we would have NO LAWS).
- He wants fewer vaccinations for children, to avoid the (discredited) problems with autism.
- He wants a more isolationist diplomatic approach & more military.
- He focuses on the criminal activity of illegal aliens, even though crime rates are lower in their communities than in the general population.
- He doesn't want the minimum wage raised, he wants more minimum wage jobs - even though people on minimum wage often require state and federal financial assistance, just to live.
Interestingly you have raised issues that are all very complex -- and that is just the problem. We have become a society that promotes complexity and then does not want to discuss and analyze those complex issues, but wants to oversimplify and fight and make the "other side" be a devil. Are we all getting dumbed down to slogans and cliches?westerndevil, 2016-03-08 16:11:51This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards . Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs .bucktoaster, 2016-03-08 16:11:06and who signed the job-crushing NAFTA legislation that allowed companies to move jobs offshore? Bill Clinton........ the Republican in Democrat clothing.brexitman, 2016-03-08 16:10:06Good article , obviously his support comes from those that Washington does not serve and reflects badly on democracy in America.3sisters, 2016-03-08 16:10:05bookie88, 2016-03-08 16:09:45The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer.
I hear a bell ringing somewhere.
"Noe-Liberalism" was given an impetus push with the waning days of the Carter administration when de-regulation became a policy.....escalated tremendously during Reagan and the rest is history......participated in by both major US political parties. They never looked back and never looked deep into the consequences for the average folk.KarenInSonoma, 2016-03-08 16:05:55Famously said, "You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube", applies to global trade also. The toothpaste is out of the tube. Any real change will be regressive, brutal and probably bring about more wars around the globe.
What has to change and can is the political attitude of the upcoming political leaders and the publics willingness to focus more on what a, "progressive" society should be. To totally eliminate the abject greed inherent in the "free economies" (an oxymoron if ever) that is crushing most of the working classes around the world under "global free trade (agreements)" will be impossible.
A re-focus on what is meant by the "commons" would help enormously. And an explanation that would appeal to the common folk by pointing out the natural opportunities to all of us (with the exception of the true elites) by developed intellectuals and common folk leaders would also benefit all.
By the "commons" I mean:
- General benefit to most common working class people which would include the "class" definition of "middle classes"....which are in too many cases floundering in the current economic climate.
- Universal health care.
- An expansion of production "co-ops".
- Universal education through at least 2-4 years of "college".
- A general overhaul of our Military/Industrial/Intelligence etc./Complex.
- A re-allocation of our collected tax priorities (applies to the above).
- A "commons" focus on a total rebuilding of our rusted, commercially destroyed environments all across this country (and across the world).
Capitalism is a game. There needs to be a firewall between the free flows of rabid global capital and the true needs of a progressive society. The game of capitalism needs rules and referees to back up those rules. There has to be political/public will to back up those rules and referees with force of law.
We need a total new vision for the globe. Without it we will succumb to total social/economic chaos. We here in the US have no true progressive vision exhibited by any candidate. Bernie Sanders comes close but no cigar. Hillary C. is trying to exert the vision of seeking the presidency as a kind of, "family business."
Trump is appealing to many who have been trashed by globalization.......Continuous warfare is not a foreign policy. Greed and narcissism is not a national one. We continue to fail in history lessons.
As I would expect, Thomas (The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule; What's the Matter With Kansas?) Frank offers insights that Clintonites can ignore at their peril. As the widow of a hardworking man who was twice the victim of "outsourcing" to Malaysia and India, and whose prolonged illness brought with it savings-decimating drug costs, I can well see how Trump's appeal goes beyond xenophobia and racism. But no, I could never vote for him.CivilDiscussion -> KarenInSonoma, 2016-03-08 16:58:00Yet if you vote for Hillary Clinton you get more of the same.George Wolff -> KarenInSonoma, 2016-03-08 16:58:12I'm touched by your family's tragedy Karen, and glad that it has not made you fall for Trump as Mr. Frank suggested you might. My best wishes.George Wolff, 2016-03-08 16:05:40Everybody knows that Trump sends jobs overseas and employs illegals, even his devotees. This destroys Frank's argument that people adore Trump because he sympathizes with their pain and actively wants to help them.willpodmore -> George Wolff, 2016-03-08 16:48:24Frank did not write that "people adore Trump because he sympathizes with their pain and actively wants to help them."CivilDiscussion -> George Wolff, 2016-03-08 16:59:24
As Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, said, "We've had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we've had to fight them to get them to represent us."
Ill-considered trade deals (NAFTA ended a million jobs) and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll.
Trump is saying that NAFTA and neo-liberalism have failed the American people.You could be describing Hillary and Bill the fraudulent guy who "feels your pain". Liars and in the pockets of bankers, that couple is not your friend.weaver2 -> George Wolff, 2016-03-08 17:04:32Frank's argument is on what his followers believe to be true. Frank admits that their beliefs may be naive. He is writing on the reasons for Trump's popularity.Derrick Helton, 2016-03-08 16:04:15Beyond who or what i vote for, It is nice to see a news article focusing on issues and platforms instead of one of the many attacks or other issues seperating politics from legislation. I want news on candidates positions, ideas, plans. This circus of he said she said and the other junk used to sway votes or up ratings is beyond dumb.twelveyards, 2016-03-08 16:03:03Free trade is like all other good ideas, it only works if it is kept in balance.trimlimbs, 2016-03-08 16:02:54
Understanding the internal structure of the Atom is a good idea. Proliferating Hydrogen bombs, the same idea taken way too far..
And as for bad human ideas, well just the worst thing on the planet.
People support Trump and the very different Corbyn because they can see that that our current version of Free trade is hopelessly inefficient and screws everybody except the very rich.Libers are not american, nor do they care if we suffer. They want to destroy this country.ID8031074 -> trimlimbs, 2016-03-08 16:12:19They care about power. Progressives don't give a sod about the minorities or supposedly oppressed groups they bang on about. They want power and they are getting lots of it. When the West burns, those progressives who acquired enough power will be safe inside their walled fortresses with their bodyguards.bobmacy, 2016-03-08 16:01:55Its' a sad truth that corporations have used trade deals to increase profits by shipping jobs to areas where pay is sometimes 1/10 of pay in US. Sanders is the only other politician voicing concern. In fact Sanders is responsible for the stall on the next trade deal with China and Japan. Japan and China uses devaluation s a trade barrier and World Trade does nothing. we are constrained in our ability to devalue our currency because of the effect on the stock market. many Americans rely on money invested into stocks and bonds. I don't see a true value to trade if it involves loss of jobs and lowered pay. I do see value in fair trade where we receive somewhat equal return , like 60/40, like in China and Japan where the return is more like 80 for them 20 for us.holiday66, 2016-03-08 16:01:03Yes, Trump does talk about jobs/economy but let us not forget that the Third Reich also promised to end runaway inflation and unemployment. To a large extent, they did low unemployment levels. However, racism was an important galvanizing factor. In the Middle Ages, racism was a galvanizing factor in the Crusades. Muslims dominated Mediterranean trade and stop it, European monarchy used racism against Moors/Saracens/Turks to garner support against the Muslims at that time. So, for history,s sake, let,s just call a spade a spade..........Trump is racist and so are his supporters (among other things).Pseudaletia, 2016-03-08 16:00:59While I'm no fan of big corporations or NAFTA (which was negotiated by Bush #1 and Brian Mulroney, both conservatives), no one seems to be talking about the other side of the equation - demand. Perhaps jobs are going to Mexico, China etc. in part because consumers won't pay the cost of a product manufactured in rich nations. Small example - a big outdoors co-op here in Canada used to sell paniers and other bike bags made by a company in Canada. Consumers would not buy them because they cost more, so the firm closed down and that co-op's bike equipment now comes from Viet Nam. If Trump foces Apple or Ford to return jobs to the US, will the products they make be too expensive for the consumers? If a tariff wall goes up around the US, will the notoriously frugal American shoppers start to get annoyed because, while they have t-shirt factories in wherever state, the products they want cost more than what they want (or can) pay for? I don't have any special insight into the effects on consumer prices of tariffs, but I do think it's at least prudent to include that in the discussion before starting a trade war.Elizabeth Chubbuck, 2016-03-08 15:59:48Hilarious.. talk about "I love the uneducated!" Yeah because everything he rants about with free trade he has benefited from.. let us not forget MADE IN CHINA Trump suits.ID8031074 -> Elizabeth Chubbuck, 2016-03-08 16:13:55Are you being racist against the Chinese? I think maybe YOU are a XENOPHOBE!Neil24, 2016-03-08 15:59:08The Guardian's incessant Trump bashing disguises, unfortunately, how similarly repugnant Cruz(particularly) and Rubio are. Clinton is better, not by far, and Sanders though wonderfully idealist and full of integrity, will be able to accomplish nothing with the Republicans controlling Congress.ID8031074 -> Neil24, 2016-03-08 16:00:03Wonderfully idealist... there's an oxymoron if ever I heard one.Dean Myerson, 2016-03-08 15:56:45I stopped reading part way through. I constantly hear about Trump's opinions on trade and free trade deals. It doesn't get as much coverage as his most spectacular statements, but it gets plenty of coverage.ID8031074, 2016-03-08 15:56:28I'm living in Japan, where in the past decade they have taken in 11 refugees. That's not 11 million or even 11 thousand. I mean 11.Progressives may be surprised to hear that Japan is a wonderful country, not only free from imported terrorism but also mind-boggling safe. I mean "leave your laptop on the street all day and it won't get stolen" safe. They also have cool anime and Pokemon and toilets which are like the Space Shuttle.
And guess what, they are not racist. They have borders and they are not racist. I know this is a hard concept for progressives to get their heads around, but believe it or not it is possible.
By the way, they think Europeans are absolute INSANE to let in these touchy-feely economic migrants. They're right, and Europe is going to pay one hell of a pric
bobmacy
Its' a sad truth that corporations have used trade deals to increase profits by shipping jobs to areas where pay is sometimes 1/10 of pay in US. Sanders is the only other politician voicing concern. In fact Sanders is responsible for the stall on the next trade deal with China and Japan. Japan and China uses devaluation s a trade barrier and World Trade does nothing. we are constrained in our ability to devalue our currency because of the effect on the stock market. many Americans rely on money invested into stocks and bonds.
I don't see a true value to trade if it involves loss of jobs and lowered pay. I do see value in fair trade where we receive somewhat equal return , like 60/40, like in China and Japan where the return is more like 80 for them 20 for us.
Pseudaletia
While I'm no fan of big corporations or NAFTA (which was negotiated by Bush #1 and Brian Mulroney, both conservatives), no one seems to be talking about the other side of the equation - demand. Perhaps jobs are going to Mexico, China etc. in part because consumers won't pay the cost of a product manufactured in rich nations.
Small example - a big outdoors co-op here in Canada used to sell paniers and other bike bags made by a company in Canada. Consumers would not buy them because they cost more, so the firm closed down and that co-op's bike equipment now comes from Viet Nam.
If Trump foces Apple or Ford to return jobs to the US, will the products they make be too expensive for the consumers? If a tariff wall goes up around the US, will the notoriously frugal American shoppers start to get annoyed because, while they have t-shirt factories in wherever state, the products they want cost more than what they want (or can) pay for? I don't have any special insight into the effects on consumer prices of tariffs, but I do think it's at least prudent to include that in the discussion before starting a trade war.
ID8031074
Alfreda Weiss, 2016-03-08 15:51:29I'm living in Japan, where in the past decade they have taken in 11 refugees. That's not 11 million or even 11 thousand. I mean 11.
Progressives may be surprised to hear that Japan is a wonderful country, not only free from imported terrorism but also mind-boggling safe. I mean "leave your laptop on the street all day and it won't get stolen" safe. They also have cool anime and Pokemon and toilets which are like the Space Shuttle.
And guess what, they are not racist. They have borders and they are not racist. I know this is a hard concept for progressives to get their heads around, but believe it or not it is possible.
By the way, they think Europeans are absolute INSANE to let in these touchy-feely economic migrants. They're right, and Europe is going to pay one hell of a pric
US media eliminated a "fair and balanced" rule before Rupert Murdoch bought much of it to create a propaganda machine based on the values of the old South: white supremacy, radical Evangelicals, guns, power in the control of a few rich men. FOX Nation created the fascist character played by Trump who puts the US in danger.ZeIndi -> Alfreda Weiss, 2016-03-08 15:53:04Thanks for saying that. Absolutely agree.ID8031074 -> Alfreda Weiss, 2016-03-08 16:17:12Great story except that have you noticed that the media is exceeding 'progressive' left these days? If Rupert did all this to made the whites into the master race he did a bloody poor job, since the media all over the world absolutely hates Trump. The amazing thing is that finally people are ignoring the exceedingly biased media and are using their brains to vote.weaver2 -> Alfreda Weiss, 2016-03-08 17:09:05You didn't read the article.Noah Heggins, 2016-03-08 15:50:28Big businesses need to be policed in respects to damaging the economy which will hurt the working class. The current trade policies are ridiculous. Companies move jobs abroad, taking jobs out of the country: which lessens tax revenue for federal and local government (forcing people to get on assistance, increasing our debt), pay next to nothing wages abroad, then import those same products back here for free. After all that is done the American people that are on assistance use those funds given to them by the government to purchase these products. Big business is using the government as a subsidy in so many ways.Shatteredandhollow, 2016-03-08 15:50:06I can remember yesterday on the guardian website an article saying that Transmetropolitan predicted the rise of Trump. That may be true (I haven't read it) but I can't help but be reminded of Glorious Godfrey from Jack Kirby's Forever people ( http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/6/64/Glorious_Godfrey_0003.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141024022501 )Tom Wessel, 2016-03-08 15:50:01As despicable as Trump is, I found this to be very good article. But please be careful with the "liberal" designation. They are Neo-Liberals. Better known as 60's-70's moderate republicans like Hillary.ID8031074 -> Tom Wessel, 2016-03-08 16:20:09Trump isn't despicable, he's a great guy!Makidadi, 2016-03-08 15:46:04The systematic attack on the working class in the U.S.A. by the corporate elites has resulted in a largely uneducated proletariat that knows very little about politics. The working class has been buffeted with so much right wing propaganda over the years, that a labour-oriented analysis has been taboo. Red-baiting and Christian fundamentalism have made simple things like government health insurance, investment in infra-structure, decent labour and environmental laws, the right to form unions, public education, etc., seem like commie schemes.Mauryan, 2016-03-08 15:45:24Into this void comes Trump. Make no mistake, the points made in this article are valid. The de-industrialization of the USA is part of the problem. However, part of the reaction of an uniformed, under-educated proletariat is to turn to bigotry and xenophobia. There is precedent for such a population opting for a rabble-rousing, blustering, strong-man with bad taste in hairdos.
Of course, the other idiots running for the Republicans are nearly equally odious.
Trump's concern for the working class is all good. But just by imposing tariffs and building barriers to free trade are not going to bring jobs back. Skill levels are lost. Cost of manufacturing can go ten times or more higher than overseas manufacturing. If the blue collar works are willing to earn the same wages as the Chinese and Mexicans then it would be profitable for the industry to return.keepithuman, 2016-03-08 15:38:18Quality control is another issue. American workforce has poor quality standards compared to those in Asian countries. These people can build a multistoried building in a month like ants. There are lot of safety and environmental regulations that are absent in those countries. So big businesses can get things done there than in the US. Trump has to take into account all these factors.
One can force jobs to return to the US. But companies will fold, being unable to compete. Too much water has flowed under the bridge since the Reagan/Bush/Clinton times. The US economy has been tremendously weakened.
Corporations have gotten much more greedy than ever before. They will arm twist the Congressmen to block any move by President Trump to impose tariffs and build walls. Those who don't like Mexicans still employ them to do dishes in their restaurants and mow their lawns.
For Trump's plan to work a major disaster has to happen in the other countries either in the form of massive wars or economic collapse that will force the businesses to rush back to the US to keep their manufacturing going.
The new generation of Americans lack the vocational skills of those who lost their jobs to the Chinese, Koreans and Mexicans in the 80s and 90s.
So Trump can say all the emotional things he wants and it will resonate with the worker class. But he won't be able to keep his promise. They will expect him to deliver and he simply will not be able to. It is a mighty mountain to climb with excess baggage on the back.
This article makes the most sense of anything I have read about the spread of Trump_vs_deep_state and why Trump is in the position he is in. Certainly, having been involved in 'downsizing' I can attest to the bitter (and justified) feelings of folk who were let go from jobs after 10+ years of service, and cast out to rot in a stagnant job market. This could well be a backlash from those times. The problem is - OK now Donald is the POTUS, what does he do about it? His supposed skills of doing deals never had to take into account the Congress, the House and intransigency on both sides of the aisle. I think he will be well out of his depth and will make a mighty mess of the whole thing, perhaps worsening the situation for Americans everywhere. I wish that his followers would consider this, but theirs is an emotional, knee jerk response, as opposed to logically looking at what is happening.simpledino, 2016-03-08 15:36:36So this race continues on its trajectory for better or worse. We shall see.
The Democratic Party partly abandoned its core constituencies after the so-called Reagan Revolution, thinking that to become more like the Republicans was the ticket with an electorate that had just angrily voted them out of power.Part of the difficulty here is that capitalism itself perpetuates systemic inequalities and injustices, and both parties support that economic system, which (to be fair) we seem to be stuck with for some time to come. I would suggest that for Democrats, it's high time to get back to being the party that stands for sensible management of our economic order to minimize the harm it does and maximize the good it can do. Most of the Republicans are little more than cheerleaders for a system they understand only in a cartoonish form. Trump, rascal though he is, speaks the language of populism and does not come across as simply a cheerleader for capitalism -- he is the one in the GOP race who hammers dubious trade deals and insists that he'll bring American manufacturing back. I think the author is right to say that is what so many ordinary people are hearing and supporting and that we aren't simply witnessing the power of racism, sexism, etc. Still, people look for scapegoats to pin complex forces on, and in that sense racism surely comes into play. It's easy to see that Trump has stoked this need to identify alleged "threats" in an embodied form: as in, Latin-American immigrants and Muslims.
The deep irony in all of this is that with Trump, the people would have direct oligarchy/plutocracy rather than at one remove: he isn't an outsider, he IS the system -- or at least he's exactly the sort of fellow that our current socioeconomic order has been shaped to benefit.
On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders is the candidate who most obviously speaks to the economic issues that Trump has put his finger on. I have also heard Hillary Clinton say the Democrats are the party that wants to "save capitalism from its excesses" (close paraphrase), and she's right to suggest that as a guiding philosophy, but it's understandable if people find her a somewhat odd bearer for such a message, given her connection to the New Democrat Nineties.
My hope is that in the end, the sheer ugliness of Trump's campaign will drag him down to defeat, whether the Democratic nominee is Hillary or Bernie, though I also think that Hillary, as a strong political "operator," would be more capable of dealing with the vicious general election campaign Trump is almost certain to wage.
bobmacy -> simpledino
hillbillyzombie, 2016-03-08 15:32:50This s why union members ignore their democratic leaders and vote republican. The values of Clinton are not the values of union members. Sanders would receive a lot of Trump supporters in a general election.
Two reasons that Trump won't win.weaver2 -> hillbillyzombie, 2016-03-08 17:27:221) Go to any Home Depot in America and watch white men in pickup trucks drive up and hire undocumented workers for day labor.
2) A joke that Stephen Colbert told: "My Grandfather didn't come over here from Ireland to see the place overrun by immigrants! No, he came over because he killed a guy."
America is not like a European nation. It has had open borders for centuries, and despite the moaning and bitching, that will likely continue to be the case.
Hey, all you lot in the Trumpenproletariat who are whining about having to compete for jobs: how about you grow a pair and learn some useful skills, eh? I work in computers with a lot of great lads and lasses from the sub-continent. They seem to be able to find a job. And if you can't program a computer, then just go down to Home Depot and get in line, like everybody else. I was washing dishes in my 40's and it didn't do me any harm; maybe some good, honest work would be good for you lot.
Thanks for having no compassion what so ever for your fellow citizens. Americans are not hired for programming jobs because of those teenagers from the "sub continent" that you are so hot for took all the jobs. They are imported H1B Visa holders who were hired to destroy the lives of Americans who DO have programming skills but are over 40. People over 40 aren't going to be great at construction work, either, btw and won't be hired for it. Especially not if everyone else on the construction team speaks only Spanish. Thanks for insulting your fellow citizens who have been betrayed. People like you are the reason Trump is so popular.hillbillyzombie -> weaver2, 2016-03-08 17:38:47EnglishroG, 2016-03-08 15:26:20Americans are not hired for programming jobs because of those teenagers from the "sub continent" that you are so hot for took all the jobs.
Crap on a stick. My company HAS to spend money and go to India to find qualified programmers because Americans are too damn cheap to fund public education. I used to be a teacher in GA, so go pull the other one. Our generation has utterly failed young people by doing f**k all to help prepare them for the future we all saw coming.
People over 40 aren't going to be great at construction work
Then do what I did and wash dishes. I worked for several years at it in GA. I did indeed learn a bit of Spanish in the process, so that's another plus.
Of course, what America needs are more good-paying, middle-class manufacturing jobs. Duh. Like the ones that Obama saved in his auto bailout in the mid-West. Like we have here in Seattle with the Boeing assembly lines.
But cutting off trade with other nations is not the answer. Not only do we export billions in manufactured goods, foreign companies like BMW, Toyota, and Airbus (to name three) have build production facilities in TN, SC, and AL. And blaming recent immigrants for our self-inflicted economic woes is just stupid and childish; which explains Trump in two words.
Great insights in this article.callitwhatitis, 2016-03-08 15:26:09I actually blame two things for the rise of Trump:
1) The greed of the CEO class, who've manged to give most of the productivity gains and consequent profits to themselves and their shareholders rather than the workers. Hence the appalling unfairness of stagnant wages for the best part of three decades for vast swathes of the American public.
2) A corrupt political system openly run by corporate lobbies. The hope that Trump already has tons of money and so can't be bribed is a logical one, even if the reality will prove sadly different.
I have it on good authority that inside the "Make America Great Again" baseball caps the label says "Made In China".hurrya1, 2016-03-08 15:24:12Americans have known for a long time that their products - right up there the iPhone - are made in China. This fact doesn't really stop them from buying. I dispute that trade deals are really "sexy" enough to get most people's goat.
More likely is good old fashioned opportunistic manipulation:
Is free trade really to blame for the deindustrialization of the US? Why is no one talking about misallocation of capital? Infrastructure has not been maintained in the past 20 years because the US squanders the money in other fruitless pursuits like a $3 trillion war in Iraq, campaigns in Afghanistan, trillions of subsidies to too big to fail banks, an inefficient, overpriced and underperforming health care system, $160 billion in dubious disability benefits, billions of overpayment for medical drugs, more than $60 billion in medicare fraud.Marilyn Gallagher, 2016-03-08 15:24:12Most of the jobs are made redundant because of technological changes and not free trade. Coal miners lost their jobs when Natural gas prices declined and generating electricity from nat gas became cheaper. Imports are only 5% of GDP so they can't be responsible for 100% of the problems. The US deficit wth China is only 2% of GDP.
China is facing same issues as the US has faced in the past 30 years. China has at least 5 million people working in state-owned entities (SOEs) who are deemed redundant. The SOEs are mainly in the coal and steel industry, industries suffering from overcapacity. Instead of shutting down the SOEs and firing 4 million people, China is handling the problem slowly and carefully and thinking of ways to place the people in new jobs. They plan to give the SOEs enough time to transition the workers to new industries and train them for new jobs. Compare that to the typical US companies like Carrier, IBM, Coal and Steel who will fire thousands of workers in a second with no plan to help the workers transition and the minimal severance pay they can get away with. Workers have no support mechanism to help them transition to new industries and no serious retraining programmes. The education system lacks professional training programs that can help the workers compete globally.
The US is going from bubble to bubble, proof that the people in charge of allocating capital and making investment decisions are not very good. In the meantime, the 80 to 90% of the workers that depend on the good judgement of the capital allocators suffers from falling living standards.Walmart is the bigest importer in the USPhil429, 2016-03-08 15:22:38obby Navarro, 2016-03-08 15:18:25Trump's words articulate the populist backlash against neo liberalism that has been building slowly for decades ... neo liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives.
A small prefix, but it makes a world of difference.
Ford Motor Company, Carrier Corporation, Nabisco just three of the companies he has called out on the national media stage for moving operations to foreign countries. No one else does this .. He is calling major American Corporations out . The racism is just a bait to get u to listen to the show. This guy is calculating and he is correct in what he says about trade issues.Markus Fiske, 2016-03-08 15:18:16I loved it when he stated that u have to be a neutral party in the Israel and Palestinian issue. He is right. U have to be neutral to come up with a proper deal. This guy is on the money. No wonder the Republican establishment is shitting their pants. He is radical in so many ways. He is on to something that the Democrats are closing watching. He does not speak with fork tongue like the other white establishment candidates spew.
Our infrastructure is falling apart because no one wants another cent of tax. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in more than 20 years. Up it 2 cents and watch the jobs and the repairs that follow.
Bringing back manufacturing jobs is all well and good so long as everyone is fine with the price of the goods that are made in the USA.
I believe someone once said, "You can't have your cake and eat it too".
That said, I'll take Bernie.Markus Fiske
jifferyvtwo, 2016-03-08 15:03:44Our infrastructure is falling apart because no one wants another cent of tax. The federal gas tax hasn't been raised in more than 20 years. Up it 2 cents and watch the jobs and the repairs that follow.
Bringing back manufacturing jobs is all well and good so long as everyone is fine with the price of the goods that are made in the USA.
I believe someone once said, "You can't have your cake and eat it too".
That said, I'll take Bernie.
As Trump says, "we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart. . . . Our airports are, like, Third World."cappagh66, 2016-03-08 14:53:54Who rebuilt China? This is a new one on me. What are the figures for this?
What is the infrastructure that is falling apart. Americans are obsessed by cars to the extent of neglecting everything else except air travel. Even so, their airports are apparently "3rd world standard". That isn't my experience of their airports which are the same as everywhere else in the "West", i.e. shopping centres and junk-food purveyors for the masses and luxury "gated" environments for the rich (of which Trump is one). Perhaps it's the sight of Latino, Asian and Black people travelling that bothers him. Still, he doesn't have to sit with too many of them in the first-class lounge.
At last a reasoned and balanced account of what lies behind the Trump phenomenon and that is not to support in any way his more lurid utterances against Mexicans and Muslims. Indeed, how refreshing to see it published in the Guardian, the house Journal of the British Liberal elite. In the US as in the UK the white working class are now the most maligned and downtrodden section of society. Mocked as chavs in Britain and as rednecks in the US, put out of work, as businesses relocate abroad and very often put out on the street as housing becomes more and more unaffordable, it seems that in the US at least, the worm is beginning to turn. Who should we blame for this? Thatcher, Reagan, Bush and Cameron? No, we might expect it from them. The real blame lies with the Blairs and the Clintons and their middle class Liberal supporters. These beautiful people abandoned a group no longer fashionable in their polite salons, as they went in search of fresh noble savages. In their desire to rule they have also sown the seeds of division. How long before the chickens come home to roost in UK politics as is now happening Stateside?lestina, 2016-03-08 14:46:23If what Mr.Frank writes is true (and he makes a pretty convincing argument) why is that Bernie Sanders isn't slaughtering Hillary, who's untrustworthy and sold out to big business years ago? I suppose it's because Americans, even those at the bottom of the heap, have been indoctrinated into believing in the American Dream/nightmare, which means believing in unbridled capitalism, so too many recoil from Bernie's socialism.PaulThtanley -> lestina, 2016-03-08 15:02:11
It's rather comical that instead they see their salvation in Trump, very much part of the 1% that gets ever richer while they get poorer.You asked a sensible question then responded with your own silly prejudices.SidFinster -> lestina, 2016-03-08 15:31:32A more sensible answer to "why is [it] that Bernie Sanders isn't slaughtering Hillary, who's untrustworthy and sold out to big business years ago?" would be:
Because it's only declared Democratic Party voters who are voting in the Bernie-vs-Hillary race. Bernie is indeed slaughtering Hillary in many of the same groups that Trump is dominating, but Hillary has a lot of die-hard fans in the Democratic Party. The black vote is solidly hers. There are lots of activists who have campaigned for The Clintons for decades and see themselves as firmly aligned with them. She does well with other minority voters and there are plenty of women who will vote for her too (although plenty of women hate her guts). And then the "pro-business" types in the party are with her too - not to mention the superdelegate vote-rigging that the DNC will certainly not want to renounce given what the RNC is currently dealing with. Long story short, it looks like Hillary has just enough "firmly with her" people among Democratic voters to clinch the nomination. Does that mean she is more popular in America than Bernie Sanders? Not necessarily.
Why isn't Bernie Sanders slaughtering Hillary? Two words:Machine politics.
aul Byrne , 2016-03-08 15:31:32
I just watched Hannity interview Cruz on Fox News. Hannity was highlighting how much the establishment and Washington hate Cruz because he is an outsider.DrDenim, 2016-03-08 14:42:50
That's like saying how much the Conservative party hates the Queen because she is an outsider.The whole Mitt Romney ploy of running again is just an establishment way to portray Cruz as anti-establishment because it gives him a vehicle to attack their decision. It gives Cruz a needed platform to condemn the establishment for its arrogance and grab some of Trump's thunder. Only a certifiable imbecile would call Cruz an outsider.
A company moving from Pennsylvania to Tennessee is ok, but moving a bit further to Mexico is treason? This seems arbitrary. Why are national borders a sacred limit? The anti-trade protectionism (which didn't work before..) of Trump and Sanders in my opinion show a disregard for the poor in other countries, in favor of people (relatively) better off in the US who have offers of retraining and other opportunities.turnip2 -> DrDenim, 2016-03-08 15:06:59Manufacturing boom in China has lifted more people out of poverty than there are people in the United states!
Regarding your last point, China lifted people out of poverty because others could afford to buy their goods. Not so much anymore, as today's news is that Chinese exports have dropped 25%.simonsaint, 2016-03-08 14:17:09As to your initial point, it is natural for people to be worried about their jobs in a globalised world. For generations, the standard of living in America went up with each generation and this is no longer true.
Cheap wages, etc. might be good for those at the top but not so for ordinary workers. Maybe one way to resolve the above and address currency manipulation is to have one currency in the world?
I hate to use the analogy but Hitler made sense too, amid all the 'nasty' stuff there were elements of truth that were enough to seduce the masses and create a power base. Potent stuff.ID8031074 -> simonsaint, 2016-03-08 14:22:55Trump is not like Hitler. Only a neo-progressive could compare Hitler (a former tramp who seized power through force and wrote a book ranting about how he would exterminate all the Jews) to Trump (a billionaire business man and celebrity who seeks democratic election and wants to enforce immigration rules properly).fritzhansschmitt, 2016-03-08 14:25:44You 'progressives'.... How much 'progress' will it take before you realise you have been wrong about absolutely everything ever? This is a serious question.
Well, the Chinese working class is doing much better than 20 years ago. Same is true for Eastern Europe. And India. And Indonesia. And Singapore.AllisonAnn, 2016-03-08 14:27:54Global free trade, mixed with under-regulated global finance, spreads wealth to global elites, and poverty to Western working classes. What Trump is advocating is plunging the 3rd world middle classes into poverty again, so our middle classes are better off again. I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but let's face, it' not exactly left-wing to say that the poor should be somewhere else. It's left-wing to say that there shouldn't be poverty at all. That's not possible with finite resources and no global social state. Hence, the (perhaps right and certainly right-wing) answer is: let's ge back to oppressing and plundering the poor countries to make sure we stay rich and cozy.
I am not at all sure this can work in a world with almost unlimited access to information and transport because people cannot be stopped from migrating to where they can hope for for life in dignity, safety and (usually modest) prosperity.
You explain neo-liberalism as the cause of average people's distress - then blame liberals. Don't blame liberalism - blame neo-liberalism. They aren't one and the same.ID4461539 -> AllisonAnn, 2016-03-08 14:42:13Neo-liberalism outsources your job to India or Mexico. Liberalism calls you a racist when you complain about it. Two sides of the same coin.SavannahLaMar, 2016-03-08 14:03:02I find it very hard to believe that 'Donald J Trump' is not committed to corporatism and neo-liberalism. He just knows how to play to his audience. If you don't like neo-liberalism, turning to a divisive demagogue who made his money from the neo-liberal system and is whipping up your anger against other victims of neo-liberalism is not the answer.Anjeska, 2016-03-08 14:02:58Good piece, but I'm afraid liberals are right - Trump's movement would not be what it is without bigotry and stupidity, which is why his support does not come from the broad spectrum of American society. He said it himself 'I love the poorly educated!' Thankfully there are plenty of working class Americans who are also concerned about neo-liberalism who are not buying what he is selling.
But, if he did ever did get to the White House, he would a) fail to act on his promises b) hide behind policies which take as much as they give c) try and act on his promises but be undermined by Congress and the Senate even more comprehensively than Obama was, an eventuality which he will have expected all along, and can hide behind.
At least America's liberals have tried a little to ameliorate the worst excesses of neo-liberalism with policies which, ironically, those people who now make up Trump's base have consistently railed against!
A reasonable article about the Trump phenomenon. Still can't entirely discard the accusations of racism. Trump is not a racist period. Anyone who believes so does so because he or she fell fro propaganda or because they believe this cheap propaganda trick will work in this election. The great thing so far is that it doesn't work.PostTrotskyite, 2016-03-08 14:02:14
I have long been more disgusted with the disdain and hate urban privileged elites have for ordinary people.Nick Kristof is a prime example. He loves to patronize to poor people abroad but has nothing but contempt left for the losers of globalization in this country.
What the author said needed to be said, that Trump (and Sanders) are at least willing to talk about what brought the US (and the developed world) to its knees, economically - neo-con corporate trade deals with 2nd and 3rd world countries. All of the other candidates are corporatists who represent big money and the 1%.Williamthewriter, 2016-03-08 13:58:20These trade deals cut both ways. Poor Mexican farmers were had their livelihood's plowed under by cheap imported American corn. This led them to head north, not only to jobs in American but jobs in the new billion dollar factories being built on their side of the border. These new billion dollar factories paid them so little than they were forced to live in cardboard and corrugated tin shacks they build around the factories. Many of the women (many times young girls in actuality) were sexually abused by their bosses who could simply fire them if they complained. The situation also gave rise to the brutal narco gangs that have killed tens of thousands over the intervening years. If any good has come from Bill Clinton's signing of the NAFTA accords one would be hard pressed to know what it is. The other trade agreements has resulted in similar situations.fivepasttwelve, 2016-03-08 13:50:13Very interesting and very good article! I like these two parts best:BruceRobbie, 2016-03-08 13:48:10>>Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. <<
>>We liberals bear some of the blame [...] for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier [...] to close our eyes to the obvious reality [...]: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.<<
Finally we might remember the winning slogan of some Bill Clinton 1992: " It the economy, stupid! "Yes, too many academics, politicians and business people have FREE TRADE as their only religion. It serves them well, evidently. And they don't care about the "left-behinds", not a bit. Not in their home country (if they have one, which is doubtful when it come to big money) nor in the countries with which they do trade.
That's the USA, UK and EU (and China) in 2016.
Kingsnorth, 2016-03-08 13:42:41The Military and Pharma deals are highlighted here and with good reason. Lobbyists from both sectors have ensured that the US taxpayer has paid handsomely for hardware and drugs. These lobbyists have effectively bought Washington DC and handed the bill to taxpayer. The American taxpayer just wants value for money and Washington isn't delivering, so just like any other business that fails it's customer base it gets sacked or goes out of business. Hence the rise of Trump and Sanders.
If the American taxpayer wants to wrestle back control and get value for money out of its tax dollar, then they now have two very different options that have promised to deliver this, which of these very routes they choose is up to them.
Another piece which seeks to actually understand Trumps's support, as opposed to just shriek uncomprehendingly at it, is this, from Rolling Stone recently. Cracking writing too:Lester Smithson, 2016-03-08 13:27:28'Backlash against liberalism' nails it, I think. Both economic and social liberalism have created a vast class of unrepresented people who, when they speak up, are shot at by middle class grandstanders too busy obsessing over identity politics to have noticed that a great chunk of their population is on the breadline. It'll only grow.
I don't support Trump. However, I do get it.donteulen -> Lester Smithson, 2016-03-08 14:47:33
He thinks Bush lied: check
He thinks the Iraq was a mistake: check.
He thinks DC is bought and paid for: check.
He things immigration has been a game for Dems and GOPers: check.
He thinks corporatists like HRC have sold America out: check.
These are powerful messages. And to hear about the GOP/Apple/Google/corporatists trying to subvert the election (again) makes me want to support him. I just can't, however.I would add the following:ID8031074, 2016-03-08 13:22:37
He doesn't focus on abortion
He doesn't focus on the 2nd amendment
He doesn't focus on about Israel
He doesn't focus on about increasing military spending to "protect" us
He doesn't think Iran is out biggest threat (e.g., Romney who could not distinguish between the US and Israel)
In short, he isn't following the same old Republican mantra that has only led us to economic and social quagmires.You write:Ryan Hickel, 2016-03-08 13:24:06"The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. "
Excuse me, but why are you condoning people who break the law? If they are undocumented immigrants, they have broken the law and are continuing to break the law until they leave the United States. Basically, you think that the USA (and all of Europe) should be borderless. The thing is my dear 'progressives', a lot of people disagree with you and are genuinely and reasonably alarmed by this idea. And, believe it or not they are not all 'racists'. They are in fact sensible law-abiding people who think that borders are a damn good idea and that immigration laws should be enforced.
Sirs, please stop telling us sensible people we are racist. You don't need to be working class, racist or stupid to vote for Trump. All we need is some common sense and a bit of foresight.
This is a great analysis. I'm an educated 39 year old American who believes in domestic industry support and protection and a strong welfare state. The problem is, nearly my entire life both the Republican and Democratic parties have been doing their utmost to dismantle both of these pillars of middle class success (which largely means blue collar, success). The Clintons have been among the most successful cheerleaders for the destruction of these two pillars of blue collar economic security. Their records of public "service" have sadly been a net negative for most Americans; while being quite lucrative for a smaller, but influential minority (some shareholders/wall street/national security interests or the professional class as Mr. Frank dubs it above).Ruby4 -> ID8031074, 2016-03-08 13:29:43I'm voting for Sanders if I have a chance. If not, I'm really tempted to vote for Trump, because as repellent as some of his statements (and his general demeanor) are, a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for more of the same. At least a vote for Trump potentially keeps some of these ideas in the forefront; unlike I might add where under Obama where progressive groups were expressly told to shut up and go along with the President as soon as he was elected.
ID8031074 -> Ruby4, 2016-03-08 13:39:50You don't need to be working class, racist or stupid to vote for Trump.
Apparently working class people everywhere supported billionaire racists because they think they are "anti establishment and non elitist" just like us?
I'm neither working class, anti-establishment (except in so far as it has been hijacked by neo-progressive lunatics) or elitist. I'm also fairly sure I am not more than averagely stupid. I am think I am not racist, since I'm surrounded by foreigners all day in my job and manage to control my racist rage reasonably well. In spite of all this inability to fit into the cosy box the Guardian has prepared for me, I would still vote for Trump in a heartbeat. The man has common sense. He speaks his mind instead of some watered-down politically correct silage such as oozes out of the mouth of Hillary Clinton or any of our British politicians (except Nigel). I hope to God that this man gets elected and that Britain leaves the EU. If both these things come true, maybe just maybe there is some hope left for the Western world.endaninda, 2016-03-08 13:18:29As with nearly all the large media outlets, it's easy pickings to label a group racist, bigot, uneducated or the one started by CNN - low information. These are great terms to malign and suppress a large swath of people who have watched the parties sell America down the river; their hard earned money (taxes) used against them - healthcare, schools, welfare and jobs given to illegals in the form of H1b, or no enforcement of the borders. We just call them racists and bigots because they aren't onboard with paying the tab. And they watch the give alway trade deals, corporations using lobbiests, PACS, other nations natural resources and finally Supreme Court (citizens United) as tools to suck away their economic stability. And at each election cycle, the candidates for office are suddenly concerned - for a moment.paulc156, 2016-03-08 13:20:04Yes this certainly makes a lot of sense and kudos for writing the article is deserved. I would just add though that the Trump voters he's talking about are still incredibly gullible/thick. Trump is the man to deliver? He was born into wealth, had the great fortune to be heavily leveraged into property during the great 70's property boom, understands and exploits the role of the state in bailing out his bankruptcies so ensuring the privileged retain their privileges in perpetuity and people think this is all well and good. As I recall reading on a blog only yesterday, people [so called left leaning working people] are endorsing something akin to feudalism! Not as left as the author would have it.ID8031074 -> paulc156, 2016-03-08 13:26:36Trump would do more for the USA than any of our rubbish European crew.TheMountebankSpeaks -> ID8031074, 2016-03-08 13:36:59Well done for making no sense at all.shooglebunny -> paulc156, 2016-03-08 13:50:31If Trump was some ragged trousered philanthropist from the rust belt the argument would be that he is too uneducated or lacking in worldly experience to be president.paulc156, 2016-03-08 13:20:04Basically the argument boils down to only members of a recognised elite being suitable for high office.
This is dangerously antidemocratic. These are public elected officials, not members of some sort of aristocracy.
Yes this certainly makes a lot of sense and kudos for writing the article is deserved. I would just add though that the Trump voters he's talking about are still incredibly gullible/thick. Trump is the man to deliver? He was born into wealth, had the great fortune to be heavily leveraged into property during the great 70's property boom, understands and exploits the role of the state in bailing out his bankruptcies so ensuring the privileged retain their privileges in perpetuity and people think this is all well and good. As I recall reading on a blog only yesterday, people [so called left leaning working people] are endorsing something akin to feudalism! Not as left as the author would have it.ID8031074 -> paulc156, 2016-03-08 13:26:36Trump would do more for the USA than any of our rubbish European crew.TheMountebankSpeaks -> ID8031074, 2016-03-08 13:36:59Well done for making no sense at all.shooglebunny -> paulc156, 2016-03-08 13:50:31If Trump was some ragged trousered philanthropist from the rust belt the argument would be that he is too uneducated or lacking in worldly experience to be president.retsiLdivaD, 2016-03-08 13:05:51Basically the argument boils down to only members of a recognised elite being suitable for high office.
This is dangerously antidemocratic. These are public elected officials, not members of some sort of aristocracy.
This article is disengenuous: I seem to recall reading quite a few articles about the Trump supporters being the lower white middle class and the white working class- the so-called 'losers'of globalisation, and that the hopelessness of their lives and views was why they supported Trump- or indeed why they seem to be killing themselvesniblickhead, 2016-03-08 13:05:11Of course, that then was shouted down as being condescending: these people were not losers in any sense of the word, they weren't afraid and angry , they were hopeful and happy about Trump. We didn't understand that the trade thing was just embellishment- it was al about making America great again and morning in America- and selecting one for Spannish and two for English, etc. The whole Trump supporters are bigots is something of the beginning of his run, when he claimed that Mexico was sending rapists over the border, and of the last few weeks, especially following his not-denouncing, but denouncing (Hang it all, Robert Brown) of David Duke.
I would suggest that this exactly where all demagogues of the right get their votes: the small bourgeoisie and settled working class,, who have a lot to lose, or so they think, and are constantly afraid. It is the same with Farange and Le Pen, and Berlusconi etc.
Neoliberalism has failed- or rather run its course, in the same whay that Keynsian social democracy had run its course in teh late 1970s. But! In the same that Keynsian social democracy brought the NHS and higher wages and public space and cultural investment etc, neoliberalism brought millions of people out of poverty, or at least out of the abject poverty that they lived in, in the 1980s. I wouldn't want to be a garment worker in Bangladesh, but we have to remember and celebrate that all those women do now have a choice other than prostitution.
Matt Bell -> niblickhead, 2016-03-08 13:07:26Isn't this the standard way the right wing operates - they tap into your fear from the other and for your children. I can see at least two other examples of free-driven electorate. You can see it in Europe now against immigrants. And in India where the current PM came to power on the back of all this - fed up people, frightened, wanting a better life, trying to ignore his right wing creds - no matter that some of these power hungry candidates go out of their way to stir up fear and hatred."People are much more frightened than they are bigoted..." "...people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don't have a future"
This article is empathising and pointing out that just maybe the fear is justified. Do you not get that?binkis1 -> niblickhead, 2016-03-08 13:21:42Trump goes to the small rural areas that draw these viewers and disparages the very issues they see played out on their tv and think is real...He is selling a pig in a poke to pig farmers...This is the death knell for the GOP for decades.Pinkie123, 2016-03-08 13:04:08The problem is though that beneath all the rhetoric and bluster Trump is just as much the member of an elite class as any metropolitan liberal. And more importantly his economic philosophy is responsible for the very disenfranchisement of his supporters. He is not outside the ideological norm, just a panto-dame, populist exaggeration of it.MsMilarepa, 2016-03-08 13:02:44There was another article like this about sneering middle-class dismissal of Brexiters by John Harris, who thoughtfully - and to some extent rightly - argued that we should try to understand where poor, dis-empowered and frightened people are coming from.
But at the same time this narrative of political establishment versus 'ordinary people' places adverse limits on national political discussions. You now have to tip-toe round people's ignorance and prejudice for fear of being labelled a condescending liberal elitist, or, perish the thought an expert who' knows best'.
The fact of the matter is that some of these people have been mislead/are ignorant/uneducated/bigoted and, indeed racist. It is ludicrous to suggest that there is not a significant number of Trumps supporters who are either casually or fundamentally racist.
The answer should be a UK and US High school mandatory course in politics, economics and critical thinking. If you don't understand these things you are vulnerable to exploitation by demagogues and political thugs. Sorry, but that's just a fact.
Finally.raffine, 2016-03-08 12:50:47I've been waiting to read an article like this on Trump's steady rise. I don't understand why they are so rare: even though the critics love to lampoon supporters of far-right/populist politicians as stupid and racist, this is very rarely the sole motivating factor for their support.
Xenophobia (much more useful term here, racism is meaningless ... when in France, for instance the issue is the supposed 'Muslim' invasion) provides a context, a kind of comfortable emotional zone, but more often than not people vote for reasons that they believe are based on logic.
This or that politician will improve my economic circumstances and my family. They may be 'wrong' - either in reality or in perception - but it is extremely important for people to stop judging these voters and labelling them, as in the end as their views and platforms become more and more mainstream those same critics will be 'shocked' etc.
Unaware that it was their own laziness and lack of interest that allowed these ideas to go unchallenged, for years beforehand.
Besides, racism and xenophobia is hardly limited to the supporters of populist parties, believe me; such emotional reactions can be widespread and again unexpressed and ignored until they have become entrenched in a culture.
(I've seen this happen twice: in my native Australia and France, in a different way ...)
Mr Frank, it's much simpler.Lafcadio1944, 2016-03-08 12:50:031. An epidemic of homeschooling
2. Generations (old and younger) voters addicted to reality TV and TMZification of the news
3. Fox News debasement of the political public sphere and its level of discourse
4. Right-wing talk radio
5. A deep strain of homophobic, anti-women's rights, anti-black, and anti-latino beliefs among conservative RepublicansAt long last after 1001 obsurdly ignorant editorials all over the place one that actually has some truth to it.TheToad, 2016-03-08 12:44:47Yes, there is plenty of racism and bluster on other subjects but Trump stands for the anti-Neoliberal view. People on the left will vote for him because they know full well that the "trade" deals are enriching the "transnational elite" in historically unprecedented amounts while the hoy polly are barely making it if at all. People on the left ignore the wall and vote Trump because the wall can be dealt with later but the oppression of Neoliberal ideology is killing them today. People on the right will ignore abortion and vote Trump because that is a lower priority to them than the economic devastation in their lives - and they know the "trade" deals are sending them directly to Bangladesh living standards. Their adult children are still living at home, there are no descent jobs, their opportunities have been foreclosed by a Neoliberal establishment which governs for the "transnational elite" and the corporations they own and the hoy polly can be damned.
In some sense Trump is a movement not just a presidential candidate.
People are also tired of politicians who claim moral high ground and speak condescending and self righteous tones about how good they are and have only their best interests in mind while supporting "trade" deals which are nothing of the kind they are transfers of government power to corporations.
In that narrow sense, Trump represents a movement and not just a presidential candidate.
It out there now Trump even if he never wins another state has put the lies of the Iraq war on the table but most impotently he has put the "trade" deals on the table which frightens the Neoliberals more than anything else. These issues will not go away just by eliminating Trump for the race now - it's too late the news is out - Neoliberalism is a dangerous ideology of extremism in the support of authoritarian corporate power and dynastic wealth.
An excellent article. Can I hope we may have a similar one taking a look at the real motives of UKIPpers and 'Brexiters' at some point?citizenthemis, 2016-03-08 12:34:01
Swap 'Britain' for 'America' and 'Labour' for 'Democrats' and that sums up the mainstream 'left' over here in a nutshell. Then they wonder why so few people bother to vote for them.Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a "creative class" that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer.
It's not the working class. The working class is dying in America, in Europe and in Australia. What we are witnessing is the appeal of right wing populism to the "precariat"class. This is a new class that has been emerging over the past 30 years. These are the casualised, zero-hours contract workers who were raised with traditional working class values that are no longer relevant to what their lives have become. They are confused and angry. I would suggest that you read Professor Guy Standing's book, "The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class".maud69cambridge, 2016-03-08 12:30:24Same people who believe Jesus will come down from heaven & save them, a higher power will always intervene & all will be well again. He promises a return to a strong America, a dream, a land which maybe never has existed. When was America truly "strong" ... maybe the 1950´s ? All the assembly jobs went south & east 20 years ago, there is nothing left for blue collar workers but the service sector, and as usual the middle class are squeezed into paying for everything while Trumps peers get richer & richer & pay hardly any taxes. Perhaps he appears to be more optimistic than others?AQuietNight -> maud69cambridge, 2016-03-08 12:45:59" there is nothing left for blue collar workers but the service sector , and as usual the middle class are squeezed into paying for everything while Trumps peers get richer & richer & pay hardly any taxes. Perhaps he appears to be more optimistic than others?"Italo62 -> maud69cambridge, 2016-03-08 13:13:41This creep is moving upwards into lower and middle management. Just as technology decimated many blue collar jobs, technology will move into management as well.
It's funny listening to the Democrats promote more education and then have the newly minted graduates compete against lower cost HB1 visa holders. The Democrats won't touch this issue because, well, because, well it would be racist.
The Democrat Party wants Silicon Valley money, so they will assure a steady supply of HB1 visa holders and illegals. No matter what Bernie says or Hillary says, poverty will be the future of many Americans. An oversupply of any skill guarantees low wages just as a over supply of untrained workers kept wages low in many low skill industries.
Trump aims straight at the belly of the beast. He doesn't need Silicon Valley money, the Democrats do. Keep this in mind when you listen to Sanders or Clinton (yes, Sanders will have to take Silicon Valley money for the good of the greater Democratic Party).
NO, the people that believe in Jesus will vote for Rubio. The people that vote for Trump are sick of the neo-liberal status quo.DrDenim -> AQuietNight, 2016-03-08 14:37:32Over 200,000 jobs were created every month last year. There are 50,000, 3-year limit H1B visas per YEAR. And tech workers are still in demand. How are they taking a noticeable number of jobs?Richard E A Smith , 2016-03-08 12:27:00And sponsoring a visa costs quite a bit and can only stay a few years, I don't see how they would be much cheaper. Training can take a year or more for high tech jobs so this seems like a poor strategy.
The new "Weimar republic" has lasted longer than expected. We can fully expect little versions of Hitler popping up everywhere now. Either that or the elite get very worried about events. Their ill gotten gains will then look very fragile with an exploding population. Perhaps they might start to think of a little culling....just a little you understand!MrMeinung, 2016-03-08 12:25:09The Trump phenomenon, as well as similar phenomena in other western world countries, are not due to a failure of the peoples but due to a failure of the western elites to solve the problems of their countries and give people real hope for the future.stephenacworth -> MrMeinung, 2016-03-08 12:36:59I particularly enjoyed the following parts of this good article that high-light these failures:
"To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic power brokers, what they call "free trade" is something so obviously good and noble it doesn't require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream."
"Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a "creative class" that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps."
(emphasis added).If the mainstream politicians want to take control back from the Trumps and LePens – and I hope they do – then they should urgently listen to their electorate and start addressing their problems. After all they are not elected to promote abstract economic philosophies but to produce real, tangible results.
western elites don't want to solve the problems of their countries, they want to extract more economic wealth and power... there is no desire to end anxiety and misery as long as they can be profited from...CharlesBradlaugh -> stephenacworth, 2016-03-08 12:41:07There is a corollary to that ...without the underclass rising up against them. The gains of the early 20th century in working rights, pay and conditions were made only because the ruling class were terrified that there would be revolution.camba1987 -> stephenacworth, 2016-03-08 12:51:32Agree 100 %. I belong to the poor. Why can't we have our turn?Mitch Jensen, 2016-03-08 12:16:36Free trade is what made the US great and what made other western countries prosperous. But free trade is global, it didn't just affect western countries, it had an enormous influence on non-western countries that were forced to open up their economies as well. And that influence wasn't all positive. Take Jakarta, an Indonesian city that had a population of six hundred thousand in 1945, and that has a population of over ten million now. Free trade blew up the city, it made a handful of people in it filthy rich, but it also produced a large underclass, an underclass of people who left their families and villages for the big city only to end up as cheap labor. There's five thousand people that live on a landfill, living off the rubbish Jakarta produces. Indonesia has seen a brain drain, educated people have left the city because they can make a better living in some western country in Europe, the US or Australia. In Indonesia, economic -and social- liberalism has ripped the fabric of society apart.CharlesBradlaugh -> Mitch Jensen, 2016-03-08 12:43:38The negative, corrupting and destabilizing effects of global free trade have always been visible in non-western countries, but it didn't matter to westerners as these were seen as developing countries. But it mattered to the people who lived there, and it has been responsible for anti-western sentiments, sentiments that radical islamists have been able to exploit. The main reason radical islam isn't more succesful in Indonesia, is because most people are too busy surviving to care about revolution.
The problem with Trump is he denies this global interconnectedness. Instead he tries to maintain the fantasy of American Exceptionalism. What Trump sells is the fantasy that American prosperity wasn't based on global free trade, but on it's hard working population. Poor countries on the other hand were poor because they were uncivilized, backwards and/or lazy. The American Dream was corrupted by this outside influence, and if you want to make America great again, you have to keep all bad influences outside of the borders.
It's a myopic view that's not gonna cut it in the 21st century, because the countries outside of the western world will no longer accept it.
Totally right, he is lying to people unable to face reality.Nedward Marbletoe -> Mitch Jensen, 2016-03-08 17:39:57idk, he talks about this global interconnectedness. Currency devaluations, negotiating trade deals (notice, NOT imposing trade deals, negotiating is his constant theme).MrMeinung, 2016-03-08 12:06:47And how "free" is free trade anyway. Only the goods can move, not the labor. The environmental laws are nowhere near the same, so China is exporting costs like pollution. Etc.
A good article that identifies the causes of rising populism correctly not only in the US but everywhere in the western world:Janjii, 2016-03-08 12:01:45- People simply do not believe anymore that the less extreme political elites are capable of or - even more significantly - willing to solve their problems.
- People have the feeling that their elites - political and other - do not even bother to listen to them.That is true for the whole political spectrum:
- - The right has elevated a certain economic thinking to almost religious dogma and can not shake off the suspicion that they do not really care for the average citizen.
- - The left, as detached from reality as ever, is preoccupied with things like identity politics and political correctness and can not persuade that they can change something in the things that really matter.
- - The center gives the impression of a shameless opportunist, speaking left rhetoric but adopting right policies - or bad copies of them.
And I do not believe it has to do with "blue collar" only. The middle classes, professionals etc. also sense the above. They are just too "politically correct" to endorse somebody like Trump openly.
Under these circumstances the Trumps and LePens of this world can certainly be rubbing their hands in satisfaction.
Not so much a mystery. It is the result deploying psychology, media, ICT and money for certain people to generate a desired effect in society. Happened before, among other occasions reference to WWII: Germans were made believe they should cause death and destruction and in the US or the Americans would not have supported going to war against the Germans without the efforts of media those days.CraigieBob, 2016-03-08 12:01:28
Watch John Carpenter: 'They Live' as a symbolic play; read of course Orwell's 1984, and chew on Kathleen Taylor's work 'Brainwashing, the sience of thought control', oxford university press ( http://www.amazon.com/Brainwashing-Science-Thought-Kathleen-Taylor/dp/0199204780/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1457438307&sr=1-1&keywords=brainwashing+the+science+of+thought+control ).
Also the Report from Iron Mountain ( http://projectcamelot.org/Report_from_Iron_Mountain.pdf ) is illustrative, and for a practical implementation of false flag operations by US military see the declassified document 'Operation Northwoods' ( https://publicintelligence.net/operation-northwoods /)Do you know who's opposing Donald Trump in Florida, right now? The anti-Trump attack ads I'm seeing are funded by the American Future Fund, a front organization for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, itself, in turn, yet another front organization for Charles and David Koch. Maybe Trump supporters, with whom I find little else on which to agree, believe that the enemy (Trump) of their enemies (the Kochs) is their friend. (?)LordMurphy -> CraigieBob, 2016-03-08 12:30:10At any rate, this would imply that the ideologically hard-right and mega-polluting Kochs are now the Republican "establishment." That's probably not a good thing.
Exactly, they were the backers of Mitt Romney last time out.wufnik, 2016-03-08 12:00:53My purely anecdotal survey of these comments suggests that maybe one-third of the commentators get Frank's piece--the other two thirds clearly do not, and making Frank's case for him. A bit alarming.previous -> wufnik, 2016-03-08 12:11:16It's pretty typical on this forum. Look at the comments below Nick Cohen's latest article. He compared the reactions of the establishments of the Republican and the British Labour parties to the takeover by an "extreme" outsider. I estimate that 80% thought he was comparing Corbyn to Trump!chapachups1, 2016-03-08 12:00:08An excellent analysis, didn't expect to see this in the Guardian.LordMurphy, 2016-03-08 11:59:41Its about time that somebody pointed out what has been quite obvious to many for several weeks. Trump is succeeding to gather all round support with his message, the Democrats might have managed to diminish Sanders's chances but they have alienated many people that want to punish the old guard on Wall Street and in Washington.gregorypierrecox, 2016-03-08 11:52:13At last. But it took an outsider at the Guardian to write an intelligent article on Trump and his supporters. How many who would never be caught dead secretly agreeing with Trump will be voting for him comes Election Day.AL Seth, 2016-03-08 11:46:01If one look past the racism and rhetoric, the one truly legitimate and credible thing Donald Drumpf talk about is certainly trade policies. As far as he's concern, that is the cause of all problems in the American economy and he is not entirely wrong.fallentower, 2016-03-08 11:22:02First consider the following: of all the people in USA, which particular class of people had the most to gain before the crisis of '08? The answer is the white working class. This particularly class was supposed to be the backbone of the American economy whereas minorities were never expected to receive the same privilege of economic positions - i.e. nationally American . When the white majorities realized that they're nothing special compared to their supposed inferior minorities, a certain animosity is borne. From that animosity, what was a subconscious consideration would mass-inspire a whole class of people against their supposed inferiors - a.k.a. racism!
What people tend to casually overlook is the fact that racism is not the cause of Drumpf political success, it was the result. (Either this was something he might never have intended or this was exactly what he anticipated).
At this point, it is safe to say that he has realized this, that his base are the "uneducated white working class" who expected privileges above other minorities, not to be thrown in with them. And at this realization, Drumpf should have walked away from the presidency, but unfortunately, he's Donald Drumpf. This does not mean that the racist deserve our sympathies, but they do deserve our consideration. One does not simply call out a racist and ignore everything they might have to say - that is, in itself, racism. One must realized that these are not just racist, but desperate racists .
There is a reason why Donald Drumpf is constantly compared to a certain German despot whose name I'd like to avoid. During the '20s and '30s, Germany had just lost a humiliating war and is economically in the dump. The whitest Germans were made to live on the streets, even the despot had to live under a bridge, at one point. A sub-conscious hatred against any privilege people, especially those who were not white-German, was born, but it was not yet fashionable. This despot then feed on this hatred and tries to prove it on a genocidal scale... and failed!
The reason why Drumpf pick on Mexicans, Muslims and Chinese is simply because they appeal to his base followers - the Muslims threaten their lives, the Mexicans threaten their jobs and social standing and the Chinese threaten their economy. And if his base followers believe whatever he has to say about bringing their jobs back (a socialism of sorts), they're going to believer everything else he says and Drumpf knows this - it is easier to inspire with hate than to educate, especially when it comes to power. That is his ultimate goal because the white working class makes up majority of voters turn-out. After he gets elected, if, then whatever he said prior to his election could be easily dismissed as Trumspeak - the art of promising his followers riches without conveying a 'how' or 'when,' if ever...
The real irony is that Bernie Sanders promises socialism which could be seen as a subconscious hatred against the super-rich yet deservedly so. After all, what else could you call bailing out the bankers besides "SOCIALISM FOR THE RICH" ? Sanders neither resort to such slander nor feed on such hatred which could be the reason he might not win.
This is a perceptive piece, and makes a good case for why Trump - if he can curb his excesses - could be a dangerous opponent in November if he makes it past the Republican Party's efforts to nobble him. I think the Democrats are going to be particularly concerned about their vulnerability to Trump in parts of the midwest - Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, for sure, and maybe even Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan if he really catches fire. It would still be an uphill battle for him, and there's a good case to be made that the anti-Trump forces will also come out in force and cause problems for him in more diverse states such as Florida. But I wouldn't dismiss him or laugh him off - the Republicans did that for a long time and look where it's got them. To be honest I would much rather be up against Cruz and find it quite ironic that in their desperation to have a not-Trump some Republican grandees are even portraying Cruz as acceptable. He's a religious nutjob who'll crash and burn outside the red states, a guaranteed general election disaster.whollymoley, 2016-03-08 11:00:30XanthanGumsSon, 2016-03-08 10:58:18But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington's free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.
Sounds a lot like Europe and the successful populists there too. They also use bigotry, and use migrants as the scapegoat, but their voters are just as concerned with their economic future - and global "free" trade has a far bigger impact than migration (naturally, as it involves competition with hundreds/thousands of times' more workers).
The age of global "free" trade we live in is relatively recent - only since the 1990s - but I'm not sure if it even stands up to its own theory: many of the economies that outcompete us use massive state power as part of their comparative advantage (we know that China manipulates its currency and censors/suppresses attempts to improve working conditions). So how can this be justified as "free" trade?
Now, maybe there's a security argument for wanting to tie China into world trade, but if so I would like to hear it used openly rather than covered up with empty rhetoric about "free" trade. And if so, don't the people paying the price for this global security deserve some compensation?
You are certainly right, Thomas Frank, about the failure of neo-liberalism, but...how do you explain the working-class white people not supporting Bernie Sanders? Sanders has spoken out about the free trade deals, exporting of jobs, etc., as well. But Sanders does not have a Sanders line of clothing made by poor people in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Trump does. But those white folks still back Trump. They are racist and they are ignorant. That's what binds them to Trump. Like Trump, they are Trumps (Neanderthals).Richardwrl, 2016-03-08 10:41:53Great article. The left in the UK has a similar issue with the working class - constantly banging on about championing it but rarely willing to get to grips with the fact that the working class aren't politically homogenous and are capable of making their own conscious and intelligent decisions (usually dismissed as false consciousness if they don't accord with the 'right' views).cynical_bystander , 2016-03-08 10:39:41Here, the part of the left represented by Jeremy Corbyn has never been able to grasp the reason why so many working class voters supported Thatcher. They blame Murdoch, Tory lies, 'popularism'... anything other than think about why someone might have made that conscious decision.
Blair understood that what mattered to the working class is what matters to the vast majority of voters - their own and their family's economic prospects. Whatever the failings of the reality of his policies, he clearly got that just not being affluent didn't magically endow anyone with a liberal/progressive/collectivist view of society and also that that absence didn't reflect a defect in the voter.
Orwell correctly identified that "only the lower classes are never, even temporarily, successful in achieving their aims"James1403, 2016-03-08 09:59:21While I personally doubt Trump will deliver much, I have understood that people are angry for a long time now. in fact it's sort of obvious if you talk to any blue collar person as the writer has pointed out. What he needs to point out is this 'free trade', is often relying on semi-slave working conditions often trashing the environment and is inefficient only being competitive through externalizing it's costs. think about it' that cheap shit for $4.90 relys on some one working in toxic conditions, no workplace safety trashes the environment and some how gets thousands of miles to you. It's not technology doing it, it's exploitationleicajon -> Gallicdweller, 2016-03-08 13:14:02I quite agree the question must be asked why hasn't "ordinary working people" been drawn to the left?Andrew Doggett, 2016-03-08 09:56:45"To answer this question one must take a hard look at what is generally represented as "left" politics in the United States.
Official "left" politics is constituted by the Democratic Party, which is-no less (and in some respects even more) than the Republican Party-the political instrument of Wall Street and substantial sections of military and intelligence strategists. The Obama administration, which entered the White House promising "change you can believe in," continued and expanded the policies of the Bush administration. Its economic policies have been dedicated entirely to the rescue and enrichment of Wall Street. Its signature social initiative was the restructuring of health care in a manner designed to massively expand the power and boost the profits of the insurance industry. Obama's administration has institutionalized assassinations as a central instrument of American foreign policy and overseen a dramatic escalation of attacks on democratic rights.
Of what, then, does the "leftism" of the Democratic Party consist? Its "left" coloration is defined by its patronage of various forms of identity politics-fixated on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference-promoted by a broad swathe of political organizations and groupings that represent the interests of affluent sections of the middle class. They have no interest in any substantial change in the existing economic structure of society, beyond achieving a more agreeable distribution of wealth among the richest 10 percent of the population.
The essential characteristics of this political milieu are complacency, self-absorption and, above all, contempt for the working class. In particular, the affluent "left" organizations-or, to describe them more accurately, the "pseudo-left"-make little effort to suppress their disdain for the white working class, for which they can find no place within the framework of identity politics. A vast segment of American workers is written off as "reactionary." Their essential class interests-decent jobs and a safe workplace, a livable income, a secure retirement, affordable health care, inviolable democratic rights, peace-are ignored". See http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/03/03/pers-m03.html
Well this is a slightly different type of article about Donald Trump.Elinore, 2016-03-08 09:35:51And I agree; yes its always about Jobs, Money to raise a family, to be able to pay for education for your kids and healthcare. Who really believes that Hillary Clinton or any other Dynasty Family really cares about the average working families who are struggling to get by? The author mentioned that he thinks that it may be the attitude of Donald Trump that is actually appealing to voters; and this could be an interesting observation. He's his own man to a certain degree; but he is also part of the establishment to a certain degree as well. He has made financial contributions to both Republican and Democratic politics. IF, IF he was to somehow become the President it would be interesting to see how much his actions differ from his promises that he is making while on the campaign trail. I suspect there would be quite a bit of difference. But its debatable if any President actually has the influence to change or stop the Free Trade Agreements that are currently being put in place between the US, the EU and other Worldwide Regions. But this de-industralisation of the manufacturing industries, this race to the lower wage economies outside the EU and the US is only going to cause a lot of social unrest, and eventually there has to be a breaking point. And before it does I suspect the Political System will suffer the most in terms of right wing politics becoming more popular again, both within the EU and the US. We all know that there are substantial amounts of eligible voters who actually don't bother to vote. I believe that this is no doubt due to a present unhappiness on the part of these voters with the present Political Elite. But the danger with this continued behavior is that sooner or later an individual will come along who will link directly into this voter anger and fear of how things are at present in our World Economy. And while Donald Trump may not be that person as such, due to his own attachments to his business empire; somebody somewhere may be taking note of this Trump Campaign and realise that there now exists (or perhaps in the near future) the ideal conditions for a powerful and influential individual, or individuals to stage a take over of our Political Systems and to achieve access to Power and Influence of society and people.
I have a feeling based on scientific data that the whole world is not only violently racist but also has a deep and abiding visceral hatred for anyone who is the slightest bit different from what is perceived to be the norm.Nada89, 2016-03-08 09:28:59That's why people vote for Trump. He gives respectability to their innate nastiness. They are saying to themselves look at Trump he could be President one day - therefore my views must be acceptable for they are the same as his views and nobody but nobody stops Trump from saying how much he hates other people who are not like him.
It's a common phenomenon that is replicated in this country as well and is one that has kept surfacing throughout history.
Any extension of Trump's views and his mindset would lead to mass slaughter of those who has decided to hate because they simply do not firt into his view of the world.
- Muslims are not the enemy of the human race.
- Women are not there to be fucked.
- People who have sex with their own gender are admirable people who make wonderful contributions to the human race.
- America is not a great country. And it is not entitled to kill those it perceives to be its enemies.
- Until human beings stop hating each other people like Trump will flourish. He feeds off vileness, lies, hypocrisy and hatred .
He hates everything and everyone that is not part of himsewlf.
Most commentator do not seem to have grasped what Thomas Frank is saying.bartelbe, 2016-03-08 09:22:06
The article is not really about Trump, but rather the motives of those who are not exactly living the American dream, and why they might support Trump's views about trade and the US economy.Thomas Frank asks questions about Americas working class, why they are being fucked over, and why self-appointed arbiters of the country's social conscience seems more concerned with demonising them, forever referring to them as racists or bigots, rather than understanding why this strata might feel so afraid and powerless.
TF says, "here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to "stay competitive" and "the extremely price-sensitive marketplace." A worker shouts "Fuck you!" at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can "share" his "information". His information about all of them losing their jobs."
The commentariat seem to despise the working class in many western countries (the UK is exactly the same) accept for those occasions when a curiously sanctimonious tone is adopted to attack a social ill, and even then it is not really because there is any genuine identification with the working class but rather because they are being used as a vehicle to attack another group that is even more despised (such as landlords, or corporations)
It will be a cold day in hell before anybody outside of the working class really gets it, or as one very wise women said - the only people who can improve conditions for the working class are the working class themselves
bookmanjb, 2016-03-08 09:21:03Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to "stay competitive" and "the extremely price-sensitive marketplace." A worker shouts "Fuck you!" at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can "share" his "information". His information about all of them losing their jobs
Oh that is familiar, HR is the art of kicking a man in the balls in such a way he looks like an arsehole if he complains about it. My workplace likes to go about positive thinking and zen while loading the staff with unpaid overtime.
As for your wider point, free trade works fine in an economist's textbook, but those textbook models are worthless for modelling the real real. They make absurd assumptions like perfect information and rational economic actors.
The reality is Western workers cannot compete with countries that have sod all environmental standards and worker protections. Free trade benefits the rich and requires a sea of debt to keep it working. The only way they can sell to first world economies that have been hollowed out is if those economies are kept alive with debt.
Free trade wouldn't work if everyone played by the rules, and we know countries like China don't. They rig their currency and subsidise their industry. I can see why an anti-free trade message would play well.
As much as I respect Thomas Frank, there's a big hole in his "they're not really racist" theory. If these working class whites, mostly males, were really PRIMARILY interested in trade/jobs/economy, they'd be at BERNIE'S rallies, whooping and cheering. The truth is that a primary motivator for their Trump_vs_deep_state is that they feel that "those people" are getting free stuff all day long while they, the Trumpettes, are laboring for an ever-decreasing slice of the pie. And that's what Trump's pounding away at. The fuel in Trump's fire is definitely racism, xenophobia, & sexism, and that's what's propelling his followers.EdHyde -> bookmanjb, 2016-03-08 10:42:35Working class people know better than starry-eyed liberals that a socialist hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell of winning the White House.ezodisy -> bookmanjb, 2016-03-08 16:12:10I love Bernie for his sensitivity to people and social issues, but he has no chance to bring the US a return of manufacturing and higher paid full-time jobs as Trump does. Blind to say otherwise IMO.jonb12321, 2016-03-08 09:20:53In my view, Trump, Farage, Wilders, etc. are the only Western politicians who are committed to the idea of nation-states - with the idea of control over national borders and the sense of a unique national identity. Now, when epithets like 'rascist' or 'bigot' are used, it is often to attack the sentiments that follow from the belief in a nation-state.rexyrooster, 2016-03-08 09:03:50Take this from the text above:
[Trump is] 'an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign strongmen and dictators'.
Can't see how Trump can have offended each US ethnic group in turn AND have wide support; and be racist AND admire foreign strongmen. And I can't see why deporting illegal immigrants (which every nation-state must do if it wishes to survive) is such an outrageous proposition.
I'm not a fan of Trump, but the PC insults hurled against him have had the opposite effect on me: I see that he must at least have some courage, to face down PC ideology - which in my view constitutes an actual threat to our liberties, while Trump only represents a possible threat.
Trumps disregard for PR and the media which controls every word and action of the other candidates is refreshing. Clinton's posey stance with well rehearsed looks and movements and well honed speeches is pure artifice. Nothing is sincere about her. Working people like Trump,warts and all, unfettered by the need to suck up to business and their slaves in the press. He is disgusting for some of his views but he says what many people actually think.InYourDrive, 2016-03-08 09:00:20Where have you been? This analysis has been ongoing since 1989. Michael Moore - Roger and Me. The trouble with journalism is that it automatically equates the white working class with racism. The problem lies in your camp, not in Trump's followers. Just listen to one of his speeches on trade and you get it straight off the bat. It's the same in the UK with UKIP - all UKIP followers are racist. I feel it prudent to put in a qualification here before some holier-than-thou white middle class socialist accuses me of being a kipper. I, too, am a white middle class socialist. I just have greater faith in the working classes than the knuckle-dragger epithet they usually attract from white middle class socialists.Greg Ewing, 2016-03-08 08:50:55Why didn't these blue-collar Trump supporters vote for Bernie Sanders then? Sanders has been a vocal opponent of the excesses of free trade, opposing the TPP and all recent agreements. He has also consistently stated that China has been responsible for costing millions of American jobs. Trump still has companies with factories in China and, when exposed, can only bluster that he will do something about it soon. What a joke! Trump knows what is going to be popular and pulls all of the levers to satisfyFrank Rummel, 2016-03-08 08:40:23
the predominantly foolish people who support him - the poor who can't afford Medicare yet who are against 'obamacare'; the unemployed who prefer to blame immigrants for taking their jobs than the billionaire businessmen like Trump; and the evangelicals whose faith justifies their racism, envy and greed. There also appears to be a genuine smattering of radicals who hope that supporting Trump will lead to a change in American politics that will eventually prove to be beneficial.It all happened so sudden...rooolf, 2016-03-08 08:30:29Things were going along all hunky dory; Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic candidate to continue their royal line and Jeb could sustain the Bush Dynasty. Elite life was good. Record numbers of the millionaire caste growing exponentially while blue collar drubs' wages slumped without a peep from them. How could things be any better? All that was needed is to maintain status quo and rake in the loot.
To be honest, until June of 2015, I was a Bernie Sanders supporter. I'm old and poor so there is not much hope for me. We may as well beat out of the rich all we can get because they are not going to part with a dime otherwise. The Republican Party, to me, was on it's deathbed. McCain, Palin and that stuffed shirt Romney with magic underwear were only the nails in their coffin.
***KABOOOMM***!!!! WTF, Donald Trump comes along. He talks about "the wall". And Mexico is going to pay? Well, I thought, his goose is cooked. To make a long story short, I turned on the news and Trump's comment was not suicidal. That was interesting.
Next, Trump talks bringing the jobs back and how China is screwing us and I'm thinking, Pat Buchanan talked about slapping a tariff on China long ago and little old me also thinks that would be a great way to bring the jobs and the money home to roost. Globalist-Elite economist propaganda be damned, I'm tired of living in a country of losers. We haven't won a war since 1945 and everyone takes advantage of us and scoffs at us.
Now, I'm watching Trump rallys, interviews, speeches and victory celebrations from all over the country on YouTube. His message is pretty much the same, but I like it. I'm a very intelligent person, but I know that you have to pound people of mediocre intelligence with a message over and over until it finally sinks in, so I understand where he is coming from and that repetition is a necessary evil of mass media politics.
OMG, it's Super Tuesday and now Trump is winning delegates from state after state. The bodies are stacking up; Christy, Paul, Fiorina, Carson to name a few. Wow! Jeb Bush, the fair-haired boy of the Elites is blown out of the water as Trump mocks him at the debates and runs him out of the playground like a schoolyard bully! That was a watershed moment. The death of a dynasty. What a spectacle as the Elite's anointed candidate for the highest office on the planet and with a $150,000,000 war chest fades into the dark to wimpishly retire and sulk. Geeez, gimme some more a dat.
The Elites are reeling now! All this was unexpected. We thought we were going to have a bunch of suits talk policy, act presidential and try not to fart. But Trump turned the Republican nomination into a circus and the Elites are going to start playing dirty now, after all, this IS American politics.
Trump a racist?
As for "Black Lives Matter," I'm sure others may see them differently, but to me they are stupid. For example, they crash a Bernie Sanders rally, take over his mic and Bernie slinks off a foolish disgrace to the background of the PC leftist milieu. Bernie Sanders of all people! He's as far left as you can possibly get in the U.S. short of a communist and they are making trouble for him? Another example, BLM posts instructions on how to prepare for protests at the upcoming conventions. In Arabic??? That is sure one great way to win the hearts and minds of the American people! Trump kicked BLM the hell out.
In modern America, the word "racism" is a sacred and powerful word/weapon that progressives use to brutally bludgeon someone who disagrees with you. It doesn't have to be a race matter per se. For example, criticizing Hispanics or Muslims can be called racism even though they are not races by the main definition of the word. Trump's opponents are sweating bullets now and throwing everything at him; bigot, nazi, white supremacist, pedophile etc. any slur that comes to mind that stirs strong negative emotion to attack him. Is it any wonder that the KKK thinks he's "one of them" if lefties are shrieking "RACIST" at Trump?
I could go on, but let me conclude...
Your article touched on many salient points of the Trump nomination except for one thing: Donald Trump is shaking up the world!! He is the only man in this time and place who can stand up to the Elites that run this world. It won't be easy. They will probably kill him by "lone nut" or a "Texas Suicide," but Trump threatens those bastards and I hope he kicks the crap out of 'em.
I find it interesting and alarming that many comments find this article a revelation. it's someone has finally written it but the idea can't be that surprising...can it?p_promet, 2016-03-08 07:43:23but it is because the professional class have dismissed anything that doesn't fit their worldview as not true. there is no true, just opinion, and there's is skewed.
the left has embraced neo liberalism and the capitalists agenda so wholeheartedly they had nothing to do but push a political correctness, this has just added to trumps appeal, people aren't racist or bigots for pointing out the bleeding obvious yet they're belittled vehemently.talking nice isn't everyones forte, or priority, the left has lost their supporters by being snobs, kinda ironic.
I'd never vote trump, saunders is the man, but trumps appeal is hardly mysterious for the those outside the bubble
ydobon
14h ago
11 12Another point: illegal immigration (indeed, mass immigration in general) hurts blue-collar workers economically (or why do you think Wall Street loves it so much?), meaning that a desire to have immigration laws enforced doesn't necessarily rest on 'racism' or bigotry per se. (That's quite apart from the question of why wanting one's own nation to retain its cultural/ethnic continuity is indeed 'bigoted' in any real sense - are Mexicans, Japanese or others bigoted and racist for having strict laws about maintaining their existing ethnic fabric?)
WOW!!bonsaitree -> p_promet, 2016-03-08 09:51:44
***
It's a bit unusual for an online newspaper article to go viral on the internet--but if Mr. Frank's remarks come even close to to gaining traction, then I would have to agree with, of all people, Bernie Sanders(!), that not only is a revolution in order, it may already be underway--
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...And NOBODY SEEMS TO KNOW IT...
***
***
In college, I was nurtured in New Deal Economics [my major], which gives an idea of how dated I am
But I swear by my grade-point average, that Mr. Frank's revelations are very old news indeed-old news that is become BIG NEWS, that is due to hit the front page again, after three quarters of a century.
***
...During the Great Depression of the 1930's, the anthem of the working class was, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime...?"
The New Deal fixed all that; or at least we like to think so.
And guess what FDR and all his friends were called? Socialists! Communists! Enemies of the American Dream.
-
But blue collar workers didn't see it that way-the ones who built Hoover Dam and our National Parks during 1930's, when any job was a gift from heaven!
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And now it's all come back
The Great "Recession" [who are we kidding?] followed by eight going on twelve years of continuing blight for blue collar workers-
And with the emergence of Donald Trump of all people(!), the hungry howls of the millions of working poor are heard once again, echoing back and forth across the land.
AND THEY ARE ANGRY
***
A relative once asked me about Carl Marks, who he called, "the Father of Communism."
I replied that Marx was an economist, whose primarily interest was studying the impact of rapid industrialization in the West, along with what he supposed might be its **political** consequences.
His ideas gained remarkable amounts of traction, predicting [but probably not promoting] the many communist revolutions that followed. [Rather his ideas were used to **underwrite** the actions of the promoters.]
***
So now we witness the arrival of Donald Trump, whose rise, as Mr. Frank mentioned, is indicative of continuing economic trends in America that are not necessarily new, but could indeed lead to historically documented political consequences. Big ones-
Remarkably, these trends have apparently been overlooked, misinterpreted, or maybe just ignored both by members of the academic community as well as members of the Establishment
But things are shaping up. Fast.
***
***
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are strange bedfellows indeed! But their fingers seem to point in the same direction. And even though their words don't "sound" the same, their message **is** the same-
" BETTER START PAYING A LOT MORE ATTENTION TO THE WORKING CLASS " [my caption]
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Woe unto those who brush them aside !!The working class have been being brushed aside for many years now, politicians only talk to the blue collar workers when they want their vote after the vote they can be safely ignored, because the rich talk louder and pay the politicians after they have been in office (sometimes apparently before they leave office as well) so the politicians do as they are bid by the rich. even labour in this country the party that was supposed to be for the working classes ignore the working classes once in power or opposition. it has to change and it looks to the working classes of America that trump may be the man to change it.Pussiesbow, 2016-03-08 07:04:46So a journalist has woken up at last to the real problems for the majority of ordinary humans, in this case in the US but prevent throughout the world.jcas0167, 2016-03-08 06:50:54The Neoconservatives in all major parties and the lobby groups who influence them have been extremely successful in feathering their own nests at the expense of working class people and their hopes ever since Thatcher and Reagan came to office fourty years ago.
The fact that many working class people are not particularly well educated (see cuts to public ed) or are often not very well able to articulate an argument often ends with people focusing their anger and frustration at those that the "shock jocks"and spin doctors rant about to deflect real critical thought about the actual causes of their insecurity and fear which is rooted in irresponsible government policy.
Yes, I think that Trump is a selfserving blowhard, straw man and bigot not unlike many of his peers who have better skills or more discretion in hiding their real beliefs, as are many of the blue collar people who follow him but that does not negate the real driving force behind the fear, insecurity and anger that is at the root of Trump's success in campaigning.
'Anti-Fragile' author and risk expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb thinks Trump would actually be the most risk averse and pragmatic candidate. Trump isn't beholden to oligarch donors who have an ideological agenda to pursue 'regime change' in the Middle East, or neo-liberal economic policies.Aria Price, 2016-03-08 06:36:53Trump has spoken about trade and manufacturing for decades, as well as questioning US military involvement overseas. This is why 'neo-con's like Romney want to stop him.
I'm a Trump Supporter - I'm not White, I'm a minority & I'm not in the "working class"AdamCMelb, 2016-03-08 06:31:46I support Trump because he's literally the only politician that at least talks about issues that the "professional class" likes to pretend aren't happening.
You guys cover up Islamic violence & anyone who talks about it is immediately called an Islamophobe & a Racist (For telling the truth!)
Trade deals - Who was talking about it before Trump & Sanders? Not the politicians, and certainly not the media.
The wall is racist? - Why don't you talk about all the Americans that PROTESTED the border surge because of the huge strain having people from across the border was having on their taxes & communities? Or the fact that Obama didn't care that Americans didn't want them there & just did what he wanted (which is unconstitutional). So if Trump's a bully, what would that make the media & the Obama administration?
Trump Supporters are AMERICANS voting for an AMERICAN GOVERNMENT not racists, not bigots, just Americans who have watched this country be destroyed by corporate greed.
This article laboured the point a bit, but it was refreshing in that it sought out an explanation for Trump's success, rather than just making assumptions about it based on the writer's own prejudices. Though I think illegal immigration is as much a part of Trump's popularity as his stance on trade.MrMustard Magoo, 2016-03-08 06:21:34Re the latter, though, what evidence is there that free trade deals have actually had the effects that their critics, from Sanders to Trump, claim they have? Certainly, the years post-NAFTA were practically economic golden years for the USA. Correlation is not causation, of course, but it is better than mere dogmatic rhetoric.
And what would Trump or Bernie (Bumpie?) actually do to reverse any alleged losses to free trade. Are we talking about putting up tariff trade barriers, making goods more expensive for American consumers? How would that improve their living standards?
A lot of these "professional" classes have no clothes and the core of Trump supporters see through your rubbish. Half of you would be on the scrap heap begging for a job at McDonalds if it weren't for quantitative easing, the complete perversion of the financial system, mass immigration, the high taxes used to fund bloated, inane and superflous government departments, and for the Chinese to make your shitty product for $2 an hour if you do work for a company that makes something tangible.mintslice -> pascald, 2016-03-08 06:32:48The media is bleeding, not even your own supporters want to pay for your bloviated propaganda.
If it's racist to not want open borders and just a reasonable amount of immigration that the west had through out most of the late 20th century then I am "racist" and proud of it.
Oh and according to Bernie white people can't know poverty, we're sick and tired of the racism towards white people and the blatant double standards.
But here's the rub. Where are you hearing Donald Trump say "I wont do free trade agreements anymore?"gunnison, 2016-03-08 06:08:57Where have we heard Trump say "Im going to remove all those Investor State Dispute Settlement clauses from all our bilateral and multilateral trade agreements because they are anti democratic and contrary to the rule of law"?
All Trump is promising is that the deals he will make will somehow be more favourable to America than the TPP that is already heavily tilted in favour of US multinationals.
That though some magical thinking he will achieve a better deal than the best and brightest in the State Department, or their expsensive private sector consultants.
Trump is talking a big game about doing things differently, but there is no detail to his platform.
When push comes to shove, Trump wont be able to change the course of global capital.
Multinationals have Congress on a short leash. Trump cant overturn Citizens United. He wont even try.
Is Trump seriously suggesting he will get the US Congress to ratify some new type of trade agreement that protects American workers?
Its bullshit. When push comes to shove, does anyone really think Trump is going to stand up for American workers and take sides against the people he plays golf with?
For fucks sake Trump benefits from globalisation every single day. He benefits from intellectual property laws that enforce his trademarks. He benefits from business migration that helps him secure foreign workers for his building projects and resorts.
He said as much when discussing the need for seasonal foreign labour at his resort in Florida.
Donald Trump raging against globalisation is like ISIS raging against the West while wearing Nikes, using iphones and drinking RedBull.
Its theatre. But his working class power base havent the education to pick it. They're being played for suckers. He's turning their downward envy into votes. He wont do jack shit for them other than quicken their blood pressure while blaming the foreign investors that he needs to sustain his own wealth.
Good piece. This especially:Margaret Moussa, 2016-03-08 05:55:33Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people's concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a "creative class" that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn't need to listen to them any longer.
Its no surprise that working class white people in the US scapegoat racial minorities and are vulnerable to politicians who encourage them in this direction. To actually focus on the CAUSES of their persistent poverty and unemployment would require the courage to face up to the very powerful American corporate elite. What makes this sad is that this elite is itself the principle beneficiary of the Republican party's economic and socially regressive (unfair) policies.Ryan Rji Rji -> Margaret Moussa, 2016-03-08 06:13:49We don't actually scapegoat racial minorities. You're scapegoating us by saying that.rooolf, 2016-03-08 05:51:35
We scapegoat the actual problem, which is the political elite, and it isn't just the Republicans. The Democrats too (Hillary) are in bed with the same corporate interests that are fighting hard against Trump. It has literally nothing to do with race. Zero.well youse finally realised!shepmeister, 2016-03-08 05:44:38while both sides embraced neo liberalism, while globalization appeared successful, while you entrenched mums and dads in the stock market, both sides of politics wrote off critics as uneducated and bigoted. didn't listen to a word, didn't include them in YOUR democracy
well the shtick is up, the taxpayer funded bank bail out didn't work. all that public money went to the people with money that fucked it initially, the immigration ponzi scheme didn't work, the exporting jobs didn't work, it worked for a while but you didn't even take us with you for the short ride.
the whole system is broken and all the professional class do is continue name calling the workers. write them off all you want your plan has not worked
Much better than the average article on Trump. He makes a good point about the problems of the academic echo chamber, with experts all quoting each other, rather than real blue-collar workers.Akihabara -> shepmeister, 2016-03-08 06:52:30As good a summary as exists of the problems with the two major parties: they just don't get it.Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll.
I understood intellectually why various governments around the world went and implemented bailouts for their banks, etc during the GFC. Without banks the finance system grinds to a halt and everybody suffers because both business and individuals aren't able to get credit, etc.angryinsocal, 2016-03-08 05:44:16However, my problem with what happened is that these bailouts left mostly the same senior people in charge of these same banks, insurance companies, etc. What should have happened is that the price of the rescue was that the top couple of levels of any financial organization relying on rescue funding should have been sacked and had much of their bonuses made off the financial risk taking clawed back - the philosophy being you created the mess by taking way too much risk so you now take responsibility for that mess. Unfortunately it didn't happen, hardly anybody was held responsible, it was mostly people with no connection to financial industry who received the pain and then our various reserve banks started pumping out almost free money to the same industry as caused the GFC in the first place through their stupid risk taking.
No wonder people are angry.
To be honest Trump is right on one very key issue as an American, and as a progressive who still would not vote for any Republican. I mean a vote for the Republican party would have disastrous consequences in terms of death and financial ruin as it always has in recent years. But Trump is right on free trade. Americans were never told that tens of thousands of plants would close in America and in fact were told that the plant jobs that left would be replaced by new and better jobs. That never happened, the new and better jobs went from often Union and high priced labor with good benefits, to non-union service sector menial work. At least for the high school trained American worker. Globalized free trade has decimated the industrial base of the western world. In effect a multinational today pays his workers in rupees, pesos, and yuan while selling his good for dollars and euros; meanwhile they open a polluting sweatshop in Asia. to add insult to injury. In short we are taking a double hit of losing the high paying work while having our air and water poisoned for personal profit. Actually, more accurate to say we are getting triple screwed because then the multinational neither pays a reasonable tariff to enter our market nor does that corporation ever pay tax in the US, instead they pay it in the Cayman Islands or Dubai. This is the rigged economy.Giancarlo, 2016-03-08 05:23:51"Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trump_vs_deep_state is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed."samuel glover -> Giancarlo, 2016-03-08 06:15:46This bears repeating over and over again! I, too, find Trump to be quite distasteful but hearing him lay into the likes of Carrier and Ford for packing up and moving to Mexico- and seeing so many Republican voters and conservative leaning independents get excited about it- makes me suspect he is performing a greater service than many of us think. The race to the bottom has got to stop, and that's not going to happen until the ordinary men & women in both parties refute the globalist, neo-liberal dogma. Trump has, stunningly, managed to get many Republicans to openly shun 'free trade'. We can either engage with these voters in a way that actually speaks to their very real concerns or we can dismiss them with the kind of false consciousness crap that Democrats have been pushing for years, a strategy that pushes them to conclude that the 'left' has no solutions and doesn't care about them anyway. A surefire way to strengthen the far right if I've ever seen one.
Thank you, Thomas Frank, for another stellar piece!
If he's helping to destroy the party that seriously claimed that George W. Bush was suitable for the presidency, Trump is definitely doing a real service to America.Ben Cantwell -> samuel glover, 2016-03-08 10:44:24I hope Sanders is doing something similar to the wheezing relic that calls itself the Democratic Party.
It is interesting that Sanders has committed to campaigning until the convention even if he gets to a position where he can't win.mothersuperior5, 2016-03-08 05:10:26Party elder seeking to reignite the soul of the party and remind it of its core values and beliefs.
yes. as is Bernie on trade. theres another message as well: relative isolationism on foreign policy. thats not an impotent rage thing btw. thats the result of an objective view: Syria and Libya show that the gig is up. thats why Romney defending George W is so pointless. Trump is not the war monger ideologue. Cruz and Rubio are at least in order to make their case to the establishment. the electorate is far wittier and nuanced than the geniuses are. thank god for democracy.Morris1798 -> mothersuperior5, 2016-03-08 05:36:10There is only one type of isolationism. Complete and total isolationism, there is no such thing as partial isolationism.hurrya1 -> Morris1798, 2016-03-08 18:26:47It's non-interventionism. The US should let other countries sort their problems. The US does not need middle east oil and should not be responsible for middle east stability or security. Europe should take more responsibility for its neighborhood.skippy07, 2016-03-08 05:00:36Globalism is dead. Trump is the messenger. It will be every country for itself. The global elite will get on the isolationist bus or they will be replaced. It has ever been so.mothersuperior5 -> skippy07, 2016-03-08 05:14:45nailed it.Talgen -> skippy07, 2016-03-08 05:18:51Dan Kallem -> Talgen, 2016-03-08 06:00:17Globalism is dead. Trump is the messanger. It will be every country for itself.
I wish it were so, but they spent too much time and money on this and wont let the people toss their ambitions to the side..
I believe "they" will have little choice in whether it holds together as it is now: the massive debt bubble used to prop up an economy having just experienced one of the largest bubble bursts of all time, the mortgage securities bubble/non-scandal, will require a massive contraction, as there will never be sufficient growth to cover the truly astounding amount of debt owed.mismeasure, 2016-03-08 04:46:25Something will have to give, eventually if not very soon, and it will not be a pretty sight. I sense many of us know this, but are choosing to place our heads in the sand in the face of knowing there is nothing any of us can do about it.
Notably it takes someone not on the payroll, Thomas Frank, to write something sensible about the Trump phenomenon. He is able to do this because he has, in the language of an earlier time, a class analysis.Psyberus, 2016-03-08 04:40:00Increasingly, a view that touts itself as diverse and anti-racist-- one ostensibly rooted in indispensable values such as dignity, tolerance, and egalitarianism-- is being used as ideological cover.
"Privilege checking," etc. is becoming a way of not talking about the colossal damage wrought by neoliberal capitalism. Clinton is a case in point.
Her anti-racist credentials-- largely gifted to her by an affluent and empowered Black political Establishment-- are supposed to deflect attention from her support for economic policies that are crippling working people of all races.
Americans mock Australia's political system, where you vote for a party, and the party picks the Prime Minister, but at least it allowed us to get rid of OUR version of Trump = Tony Abbott after just 2 years of leadership. The absurdities, mistakes, outrageous actions, obvious lies and extreme damage to Australia's reputation just got too much, and he was removed by his own party, ensuring he returned to being a political joke, a piece of amusing satire.Ministryoftruth -> Psyberus, 2016-03-08 05:07:56If the US votes Trump in, he remains in place a lot longer and can do a LOT more damage to the country than our incompetent joker ever did.
Scary...pass me the popcorn please....
Yet both the ALP and the LNP sing the same song on privatisation and neoliberalism. Free trade is great and good, government run services should be subcontracted out or outright privatized and there is no alternative they both say.peacefulmilitant, 2016-03-08 04:33:47Australia has also been with an almost hung parliament through two governments now such is the public dissatisfaction with the political mainstream. If you think the hard left and the hard right won't affect Australia's fortunes you haven't been paying attention.
Good analysis.And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry.
Those who still cling to this idiotic explanation at some point would have to realize that many of the people who now vote for Trump 8 years ago voted for Obama. Now there is a puzzle they will never be able to solve.
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Apr 04, 2017 | russiaexplainer.com
THE DOSSIER
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Dec 30, 2017 | theduran.com
According to Zerohedge, there is another reason to know Steele's sources, and that is to learn not just the origin of the dossier but its place in the larger Trump-Russia affair.
As the WashEx adds, there is a belief among some congressional investigators that the Russians who provided information to Steele were using Steele to disrupt the American election as much as the Russians who distributed hacked Democratic Party emails. In some investigators' views, they are the two sides of the Trump-Russia project, both aimed at sowing chaos and discord in the American political system.
Still, investigators who favor this theory ask a sensible question: " It is likely that all the Russians involved in the attempt to influence the 2016 election were lying, scheming, Kremlin-linked, Putin-backed enemies of America – except the Russians who talked to Christopher Steele? "
On the other hand, the theory is still just a theory, for now and as the Examiner's Byron York correctly points out, to validate -or refute – it House investigators will seek Steele's sources – and is why they will try to compel Kramer to talk.
journey80 , December 28, 2017 12:32 PM
Franz Kafka journey80 , December 28, 2017 9:59 PMAre we supposed to believe that the CIA doesn't have any Russian spooks on its payroll? Any Russian "sources" are going to be taken as gold? Really incredible that it is assumed that everyone will believe any loopy paid-by-Soros "sources" the CIA trots out.
https://www.thenation.com/a...
I'll not bother with the CIA's repugnant history of overthrowing governments all over the planet. But I do have to ask: when are the Russia-did-it enthusiasts going to stop making fools of themselves?
stevek9 , December 29, 2017 8:56 AMThey have an audience which chooses to believe that the fools are wise-men.
There is another theory: the 'Kremlin' did not direct any of this. Steele's contacts might just be a bunch of washed-up spies like himself, feeding him garbage ... because he was paying for it.
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Dec 28, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Have you ever wondered why mainstream media outlets, despite being so fond of dramatic panel debates on other hot-button issues, never have critics of the Russiagate narrative on to debate those who advance it? Well, in a recent Real News interview we received an extremely clear answer to that question, and it was so epic it deserves its own article.
Real News host and producer Aaron Maté has recently emerged as one of the most articulate critics of the establishment Russia narrative and the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, and has published in The Nation some of the clearest arguments against both that I've yet seen. Luke Harding is a journalist for The Guardian where he has been writing prolifically in promotion of the Russiagate narrative, and is the author of New York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
In theory, it would be hard to find two journalists more qualified to debate each side of this important issue. In practice, it was a one-sided thrashing that The Intercept 's Jeremy Scahill accurately described as "brutal".
The term Gish gallop , named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted. Throughout the discussion the Gish gallop appeared to be the only tool that Luke Harding brought to the table, firing out a deluge of feeble and unsubstantiated arguments only to be stopped over and over again by Maté who kept pointing out when Harding was making a false or fallacious claim.
In this part here , for example, the following exchange takes place while Harding is already against the ropes on the back of a previous failed argument. I'm going to type this up so you can clearly see what's happening here:
Harding: Look, I'm a journalist. I'm a storyteller. I'm not a kind of head of the CIA or the NSA. But what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France, most recently when President Macron was elected ? -
Maté: Well actually Luke that's not true. That's straight up not true. After that election the French cyber-intelligence agency came out and said it could have been virtually anybody.
Harding: Yeah. But, if you'll let me finish, there've been attacks on the German parliament ? -
Maté: Okay, but wait Luke, do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed didn't happen?
Harding: [pause] What? -- ?that it didn't happen? Sorry?
Maté: Do you concede that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just claimed actually is not true?
Harding: [pause] Well, I mean that it's not true? I mean, the French report was inconclusive, but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We've seen attacks on other European states as well from Russia, they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.
Maté: Where else?
Harding: Well, Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It's a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyber attack in 2008, which certainly all kind of western European and former eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the time, when relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, well the US does the same thing, the UK does the same thing, and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff out into kind of US public space and try and influence public opinion there. That's unusual. And of course that's a matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.
Maté: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned; you also mentioned Germany. There was a lot of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out? -- ?and there's plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this? - ? that actually there was no Russian hack in Germany.
In the above exchange, Maté derailed Harding's Gish gallop, and Harding actually admonished him for doing so, telling him "let me finish" and attempting to go on listing more flimsy examples to bolster his case as though he hadn't just begun his Gish gallop with a completely false example .
That's really all Harding brought to the debate. A bunch of individually weak arguments, the fact that he speaks Russian and has lived in Moscow, and the occasional straw man where he tries to imply that Maté is claiming that Vladimir Putin is an innocent girl scout. Meanwhile Maté just kept patiently dragging the debate back on track over and over again in the most polite obliteration of a man that I have ever witnessed.
The entire interview followed this basic script. Harding makes an unfounded claim, Maté holds him to the fact that it's unfounded, Harding sputters a bit and tries to zoom things out and point to a bigger-picture analysis of broader trends to distract from the fact that he'd just made an individual claim that was baseless, then winds up implying that Maté is only skeptical of the claims because he hasn't lived in Russia as Harding has.
jeremy scahill 0
@jeremyscahill
This @aaronjmate interview is brutal. He makes mincemeat of Luke Harding, who can't seem to defend the thesis, much less the title, of his own book: Where's the 'Collusion' - YouTube
11:03 AM-Dec 25, 2017
Q 131 11597 C? 1,148The interview ended when Harding once again implied that Maté was only skeptical of the collusion narrative because he'd never been to Russia and seen what a right-wing oppressive government it is, after which the following exchange took place:
Maté: I don't think I've countered anything you've said about the state of Vladimir Putin's Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the topic of your book.
Harding: Yeah, but you're clearly a kind of collusion rejectionist, so I'm not sure what sort of evidence short of Trump and Putin in a sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing would convince you. But anyway it's been a pleasure.At which point Harding abruptly logged off the video chat, leaving Maté to wrap up the show and promote Harding's book on his own.
You should definitely watch this debate for yourself , and enjoy it, because I will be shocked if we ever see another like it. Harding's fate will serve as a cautionary tale for the establishment hacks who've built their careers advancing the Russiagate conspiracy theory , and it's highly unlikely that any of them will ever make the mistake of trying to debate anyone of Maté's caliber again.
The reason Russiagaters speak so often in broad, sweeping terms? - saying there are too many suspicious things happening for there not to be a there there, that there's too much smoke for there not to be fire? - ? is because when you zoom in and focus on any individual part of their conspiracy theory, it falls apart under the slightest amount of critical thinking (or as Harding calls it, "collusion rejectionism"). Russiagate only works if you allow it to remain zoomed out, where the individually weak arguments of this giant Gish gallop fallacy form the appearance of a legitimate argument.
Well, Harding did say he's a storyteller.
* * *
Thanks for reading! My work here is entirely reader-funded so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook , following me on Twitter , bookmarking my website , throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal , or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers . Our Hidden History 4 days ago (edited) That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence (something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies.
That's not how you're going to get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on "oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season. Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
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