Here’s another great idea from Bernie Sanders, the self-declared ‘democratic Socialist’, who should definitely be the one to go to the White House next year, rather than Trump.
Remember how Trump was telling everyone at his rallies that if he got into power, he was going to stop the corporations outsourcing their jobs abroad to create more poverty and unemployment in America? Aside from the racism and the islamophobia, it was this promise which may have helped him gain the votes of middle class and blue collar workers, whose jobs are threatened by the neoliberal outsourcing policies championed by the establishment Republican and Hillary Clinton and her clique in the Democrats.
Now Bernie Sanders has come up with a proposal to try and keep Trump to his promise. In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses the report in the Huffington Post that Sanders has put forward the outlines of an ‘Outsourcing Prevention Act’. If this was passed, it would punish companies moving jobs out of America. Those corporations that did so would be banned from receiving federal tax breaks, grants or loans, and demand the repayment of any federal perks. The offending companies would also have to pay a tax equal to the amount they saved through the outsourcing, or 35 per cent of their profits, whichever is the greatest amount. The executives would also be banned from receiving bonuses, stock options or golden handshakes.
Kulinski makes it clear that Democrats and progressive should not be prepared to give an inch of cooperation to Trump when he trying to pass any of the massively unjust or racist measures he’s promised, such as deporting undocumented immigrants, registering Muslims and building that wall with Mexico. Kulinski recognises, however, that the latter is rapidly being played down, with Trump himself now claiming that it was mainly metaphorical. When Trump does propose something that will benefit all Americans, rather than just the corporate elite, or racist Whites, they should be prepared to work with him. This proposal is Bernie’s attempt to make sure Trump doesn’t go back on his promise, and actually does something positive for the American people.
We need something similar in this country. Executive pay has massively outstripped ordinary people’s wages and salaries, and companies are outsourcing jobs abroad, including elsewhere in the EU. It has been something of a local issue here in Bristol, where the local chocolate factory, Cadbury’s in Keynsham, a small town between Bath and Bristol, was closed down after it was taken over by Kraft foods. I’ve got a feeling the company then moved the jobs to a new factory in Poland.
I’m not sure how much chance Bernie’s proposal actually has of ever becoming reality. Trump is now very rapidly going back on all of his election promises, appointing Washington insiders and establishment bankers to important cabinet posts. These include some of the very people he personally attacked at his rallies. And even if it had his backing, neoliberal and corporate interests are now so entrenched in both sides of Congress that it would be bitterly attacked and voted down.
And you can imagine how the Conservatives and their paymasters in the CBI would scream and holler if Jeremy Corbyn promised anything similar in the Labour party. They’d almost certainly be joined by the Blairites. After all, Tony Blair said that his administration was ‘extremely relaxed’ about becoming rich, and did so much to promote businessmen to important and lucrative government posts. And vast numbers of MPs, possibility the majority, are managing directors or senior executives of companies, and therefore stand to benefit personally from government policies that boost business at the expense of domestic jobs.
We need to clean up parliament, and remove the corporate interests so that it starts to represent the British people as a whole, and not wealthy businessmen and women. And we do need to prevent further jobs being lost abroad, and punish the firms that make big profits from creating unemployment here in Britain.
A little while ago I put up a few videos lampooning Alex Jones, the main man behind the conspiracy internet news programme, Infowars. Jones seems to believe that there is a massive conspiracy by the American government and the global elite to wreck and destroy the world’s peoples, including Americans, and turn them into their slaves under a one-world government. He is convinced non-human forces are behind this, though he admits he doesn’t know if they are literally satanic or extraterrestrial. As you might expect, he’s massively right-wing, and gave his very vocal support to Donald Trump. He also did his bit to spread some ludicrous claims about Hillary Clinton, Obama and the Democrats. Among other bizarre allegations, Infowars claimed that Clinton was a demonically possessed Satanist.
Jones himself also has an unusual style of presentation in front of the camera. He can start off normal and rational enough, but quite often he starts ranting and pounding the table like, to use his own words, ‘a fluoride maddened chimpanzee’.
In this video from Kevin Logan, who has posted a long series of vlog pieces taking apart the misogynist claims of the men’s rights activists, he shows Jones screaming about how there is now a race war going on in America, which he seems to think is stirred up by the elites to divide and conquer. Logan has cut this with scenes from South Park, with Cartman also running about like Chicken Little shouting that race war has broken out. And then there’s another scene where Jones rips off his shirt, and runs screaming out of the studio. There’s also another piece, where he’s going on about somebody being in bed with a goblin, which has been edited so it becomes almost a rap. It ends with Jones ranting about chemicals in the water turning frogs gay.
It’s hilarious, but there is a serious point in all this. Jones is something of a force on the internet, and he does spout crazy, dangerous nonsense. And he does have some influence, even if it’s paltry compared to the power of the mainstream networks, as Trump was several times a guest on his show. Jones and his bonkers conspiracy theories now have a connection to the White House and the new president-elect. These are very scary times.
After the Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, here’s another Arturo Ui figure in this country, whose racial populism should be opposed. Paul Nuttall, who looks to me like Ade Edmondson as the stupid, vulgar and violent hooligan Eddie Hitler in his and Rik Mayall’s comedy series, Bottom, has just become head of UKIP. And Hope Not Hate have today put up ten good reasons why decent people should oppose him and his party. Here’s their list of 10 reasons, with a few of my comments underneath.
1. He has strongly supported Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ billboard. That was the party’s advert that showed a line long of immigrants supposedly queuing up to get into Europe. It aroused strong criticism because it was almost identical to a Nazi poster, showing the lines of eastern European Jews, who they accused of threatening to overrun western civilisation.
2. He believes there is a secret coordinated Muslim plot to become a majority in Europe.
The Islamophobic right has been claiming that this is the case for years, despite demographic evidence to the contrary. It’s called ‘Eurabia’, and is based on the belief that Muslim birthrates are so far ahead of White European population growth that within one or two generations we’ll be a minority in our own countries. It’s a nasty, vicious lie, and one that has been exploited by the hatemongers in the Fascist right. There’s a propaganda movie on YouTube that shows pictures of street fighting and a Europe in flames, which claims that this is what will happen to Europe by the ’20s, when there will be a civil war between Muslims and their Leftist allies on one side, and ‘patriots’ – read: Nazis, on the other. There was a scandal in Wiltshire about a year or so ago, when one of the Kippers in that county made a speech, or series of speeches, claiming that this would happen. This was rightly greeted with so much outrage that the politico had to resign.
3. In a speech in the European Parliament, Nuttall labelled the response of the EU to the refugee crisis as “freedom of movement of Jihad”.
Which is the same argument Trump uses to support his ban on Muslim immigration: some of them might be terrorists. Despite the fact that, as they’re refugees, jihad is the reason they’re fleeing the Middle East.
4. He wants to ban the burqa.
One of the reasons this needs to be resisted is that it gives the state the power to dictate religious observances, which should be a matter of individual choice, contravening the human right to freedom of religion. And if it can be done to Muslims, it can be extended to other religious or philosophical groups.
5. Nuttall has called for the NHS to be privatised.
To support this, the article in Hope Not Hate has a link to this video below, by the National Health Action party, where Nuttall calls it a ‘monolithic hangover from days gone by’. This alone is an excellent reason for shunning Nuttall and his wretched party.
6. He wants a 31% flat rate of tax, meaning the rich pay far less.
7. He wants prison conditions to be made deliberately worse and the 1967 Criminal Justice Act to be abolished.
Despite the constant refrains of the likes of the Heil and Express, prisons are grim places. The Mirror this morning carried a report on the rising number of suicides in British prisons, which are far more than those outside. And Private Eye has regularly carried news stories in its ‘In The Back’ column about young offenders committing suicide, or being beaten to death by the other inmates, sometimes in adult jails. Does Nuttall really more useless and avoidable deaths in prison? It’s also unsurprising that he also wants the return of the death penalty, which Hope Not Hate points out would mean that Britain would share the same attitude towards crime as Belarus, a military dictatorship.
8. Nuttall believes climate change is a “hair-brained theory”.
It’s also not going to surprise anyone that he’s also another supporter of fracking.
9. Was one of only 14 MEPs to vote against a crackdown on the illegal ivory trade.
People have been concerned about the devastation of elephant populations in Africa, thanks to the illegal ivory trade since at least the 1990s. A few years ago I think one of the royals even suggested that objects made from ivory before the international ban date should be junked as a deterrent to the poachers by making ivory absolutely unsaleable. Clearly, this view is not shared by Nuttall, who obviously is no fan of conservation and protecting the environment.
10. Opposes same-sex marriage.
This seems to be the bog-standard, default position of the majority of Kippers. Or at least, those who open their mouths.
All of this just shows that, not only is Nuttall deeply bigoted, and his party opposed to many of the institutions, not least the NHS, which have made Britain a healthy, tolerant society, but it also bears out what Tom Pride and many other bloggers have also shown: that the Kippers aren’t offering anything new, or different, but are the extreme right of the Tory party.
Yesterday I posted a piece from The Young Turks’ reporter, Jordan Cheriton, interviewing Oscar Salazar, one of the water protectors demonstrating against the North Dakota pipeline. Mr Salazar is an immense fan of Bernie Sanders, and invited the self-declared ‘democratic Socialist’ politico to make a personal visit to Standing Rock. Bernie Sanders has been a vocal supporter of the water protectors for a long time, joining their struggle before most other big name supporters. He is also known for his own interest and support in Native American issues, in sharp contrast to the majority of American politicians. The media were surprised during his campaign to win the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year when he took the time to talk to Native delegates to the Convention, and he has visited and spoken to Native Americans about the issues that matter to them on their reservations.
In this short clip from The Young Turks, Michael Shure, Jimmy Dore and Bill Mankiewicz discuss the speech Sanders made at the White House, urging Barack Obama step in and stop the pipeline, even if it means declaring the area a national monument. Every environmental study states that this is necessary. Shure states that he believes that Obama is not ignoring the protest simply to obey the wishes of powerful corporate donors. But he doesn’t know why he isn’t acting either. Jimmy Dore, who is also bitterly critical of Obama’s foreign policy stance and his legacy in continuing Bush’s wars and the expansion of the surveillance state, states that he doesn’t know either, particularly how Obama can sleep at night knowing that the pipeline, and very many other injustices, are going on. He also quotes a speech from Obama, in which he talked about restoring tribal self-determination, security and prosperity to Native Americans, and while they couldn’t erase the scourge of broken promises in the past, they could move together in creating a new chapter in their shared history. Dore concluded from this that Obama knows what to say, he just doesn’t know about putting it into practice. Both Dore and Mankiewicz state that he should do so now. Mankiewicz also states that he thinks that Obama called the army engineers, believing this was enough to sort the matter out, at least until it became someone else’s problem. It hasn’t, and the problem is escalating.
As Dore’s quote shows, people have long memories, and the part of the media that is actually serious about doing its job does hold politicians to the promises they make. And unfortunately for Obama, the demonstrators at Standing Rock are very well aware that the violation of the Sioux nation’s reservation for this pipeline fits in the with the long history of broken promises and the forcible seizure of tribal land. If the president ever was serious about this speech – if it was ever anything more than pretty words – then he should do something about it now, and stop the pipeline becoming yet another entry in that long list of broken promises.
This is another clip from The Young Turks about the protests against the oil pipeline at Standing Rock. In this piece, James Cromwell, the Hollywood actor, talks to The Turks’ Jordan Cheriton about how the thuggish behaviour of the rozzers at Standing Rock and the way the protests have been completely ignored by the mainstream corporate media shows the racism against Native Americans. When there are demonstrations elsewhere, the cops react decently. They arrest people, but don’t usually attack or maltreat them. Here it’s different. And this shows the racism against Native Americans. He also notes that when there are protests and riots in the east, the mainstream media are there. But they’re not covering this protest, with the exception of The Young Turks, because they’re really controlled by the oil companies and the bottom line of not doing anything that would upset their sponsors. The only way to be informed in this country [America] is by people looking it up on YouTube. The clip ends with another Native American chant, which I believe must be in the Sioux language, against the pipeline.
Cromwell’s appeared in a number of Hollywood blockbusters. I remember him from Star Trek: First Contact and Deep Impact. He’s not the first big name Hollywood actor, who’s lent their voice to Native protests. Marlon Brando also did so in the 1970s, when he joined one of the peoples on the West Coast defending their fishing rights against another company. Cromwell is also right about people turning to the internet to see what’s really going on. This applies to both left and right, though sometimes people from radically opposed parts of the political spectrum look at the same news sources. I was talking the other day to someone, who clearly viewed themselves as a supporter of small government, who also watched RT as well as Fox News.
The mainstream media and the Beeb in particular are complaining about the way their ability to shape the political consensus is breaking down. They moan that it is making people more polarised in their opinions through people of different political views watching only the news channels that share their opinions. But the underlying problem is not addressed or even acknowledged. The mainstream media has a very pronounced corporate bias. Cromwell describes how it works in America. Over here in Britain, where we supposedly have the impartial BBC, the Corporation is still biased. Books and studies have been published, most recently by Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow universities, showing that the Beeb is very much biased towards the establishment. They are far more likely to interview Conservative MPs and managing directors than Labour MPs and trade unionists, and when they do, they are far more likely to accept automatically the views of the Tories and businessmen as being true. And I’ve quoted Barry and Saville Kushner, the authors of Who Needs the Cuts?, how they were constantly infuriated by the Corporation’s automatic assumption that cuts were necessary and the way BBC announcers and reporters shouted down Labour leaders and politicians, who dared to contradict them. And the other year Mike reported how the Beeb was very definitely not reporting on the massive demonstration against its bias that was occurring on its very doorstep. It did report it online, but definitely not as an item on the television.
If people are abandoning mainstream media, it’s because that media is flagrantly biased. It therefore deserves to lose viewers until it corrects this.
In this clip, The Young Turks journalist Jordan Cheriton, who’s been reporting on the Standing Rock protests against the oil companies’ efforts to drive a pipeline through Sioux treaty land, interviews Oscar Salazar, one of the water protectors. Salazar’s wearing a jumpsuit and clothing covered with Bernie Sanders’ face. He’s a big fan of Bernie Sanders, because of the way Sanders has stood up and talked about the issues facing Native Americans. He makes the point that when Sanders did so, he was thought crazy by the media. Sanders has been an outspoken critic of the oil company and the pipeline, and has supported the protestors and water protectors. Salazar states that such supported is needed because of the way indigenous Americans have been and are being treated, and the way the Native community has much to teach other Americans about living in harmony with the environment. At Cheriton’s urging, he looks into the camera, and asks the Congressman to come to Standing Rock to see for himself what is going on, and states that the protestors are not going to back down and the demonstration will continue.
The clip shows some of Sanders’ tweets supporting the water protectors, and footage of the protestors in the river being blocked and sprayed by the police goons to stop them going on to the island on which the tribe’s dead are buried. The clip ends with the Native chant about the protests against the pipeline.
Remember all those months ago when the Jewish Labour Movement and the Blairites in the Labour party had a collective feeding frenzy and went howling after ‘Red’ Ken, accusing him of being a terrible anti-Semite? Livingstone had committed the unutterable crime of trying to defend other members of the Labour party, falsely accused of anti-Semitism, by stating quite truthfully that Hitler had supported the Zionist movement.
This is quite true. Before embarking on the horrific ‘Final Solution’ the Nazis had as a way of creating a Judenrein Germany. The gave aid and support to people smugglers sending Jews covertly to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. And the Zionists themselves preferred Nazi persecution of their people, to tolerance and the patriotic Jewish groups fighting to stay in their homelands, like the Jewish ex-servicemen’s league in Germany. The Zionist leaders made monstrous pronouncements about preferring all of the Jews in Germany to suffer at the hands of the Nazis rather than half of them being saved if they found sanctuary in England, so long as some went to Israel.
All this is a matter of historic fact. You can find it in the history books, including those written by very pro-Zionist Jews. Yet it didn’t stop the cries of anti-Semitism, or John Mann doorstepping Livingstone to scream the accusation at him. And many histories of Fascism have pointed out that anti-Semites elsewhere, including Britain, were also Zionists through their determination to cleanse their countries of their Jewish population.
Behind all this raving Zionist hysteria is the determination of the Jewish lobby to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. Israel is the Jewish state, and so, according to the Likudniks and the Israel lobby, any hostility to Israel can only be motivated by anti-Semitism. Even if the person criticising Israel is Jewish. Then they’re accused of self-hatred. And Jews and Gentiles alike have been accused of Jew-hatred, even when they are decent individuals without a racist, anti-Semitic bone in their bodies.
This was the reason Jackie Walker, the deputy chair of Momentum, was accused of anti-Semitism for her comments made at a day workshop in preparation for Holocaust Memorial Day. Walker had questioned the organisers’ definition of anti-Semitism, which explicitly conflated it with anti-Zionism. She also criticised it for the way it exclusively concentrated on the Holocaust, giving little, if any, mention of other genocides and crimes against humanity, such as slavery. Walker is half-Jewish herself, and her partner is Jewish. Her daughter attends a Jewish school. Her mother was a Black woman, deported from America for joining the Black American civil rights struggle. Her comments about Israel and the slave trade are part of a general debate amongst historians, scholars and anti-racist activists, including Jews. But that didn’t stop the Israel lobby demanding her head as a terrible anti-Semite.
Now it seems that Netanyahu and the other members of his Likud-led coalition cannot, by their own actions, accuse others of being anti-Semitic if they don’t equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, or even worse, remind the world that many anti-Semites were pro-Zionist. ‘Cause Netanyahu has now done the same himself. He has publicly embraced Trump’s cabinet, which includes two notorious anti-Semites, for the support Trump is going to give Israel.
Neve Gordon has written an excellent article about this in Friday’s Counterpunch.
It begins
In February, the Israeli prime minister praised the British government for introducing new guidelines prohibiting publicly funded bodies from boycotting Israeli products. ‘I want to commend the British government for refusing to discriminate against Israel and Israelis and I commend you for standing up for the one and only true democracy in the Middle East,’ Netanyahu said.
‘Modern anti-Semitism,’ he went on, ‘not only attacks individual Jews, but attacks them collectively, and the slanders that were hurled over centuries against the Jewish people are now hurled against the Jewish state.’
Progressive voices such as Jewish Voice for Peace have tried for years to counter the insidious conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but the identification may now be unravelling at last because of a forceful intervention from the right.
She then discusses Trump’s appointment of Steven Bannon and Jeff Sessions. Bannon was accused by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of putting anti-Semitic material on Breitbart, while Jeff Sessions is another White supremacist with a reputation for anti-Semitism. Sessions made distasteful joke sometime ago about thinking the KKK were all right, before he found out they smoked dope.
But now Netanyahu as embraced Trump, the hero of the racist, anti-Semitic Alt-Right. Netanyahu’s education minister, Naftali Bennett, happily sat next to Bannon last Sunday at a dinner organised by the Zionist Association of America. Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot and a member of the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, praised Bannon, stating
‘I have known Steve to be a passionate Zionist and supporter of Israel who felt so strongly about this that he opened a Breitbart office in Israel to ensure that the true pro-Israel story would get out.’
Neve Gordon’s article rightly concludes
Israel’s leaders and their right-wing Jewish allies in the United States, in other words, have no problem stomaching anti-Semitism so long as the anti-Semite supports Zionism. But if an anti-Semite can be a Zionist then anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are not the same.
This shows the amoral political utilitarianism and hypocrisy of the Israel lobby. With Netanyahu’s embrace of Trump and his foul cabinet, they no longer have any right whatsoever to accuse anyone of anti-Semitism simply because they criticise Israel and its decades of brutality towards the indigenous Palestinians. And they have just proved Livingstone to be right about Nazis supporting Zionism. They did during the Third Reich. And they’re doing so now, with the bland co-operation and blessing of the Likud.
This morning I put up a piece about the report in Friday’s I newspaper that Margaret Thatcher had continued planning to dismantle the welfare state, including the NHS, even after her own cabinet had revolted against it. Thatcher was keen to follow the plans outlined by the CPRS, a right-wing think-tank, to whom she had given the task of formulating plans to transform Britain into a free market economy. Amongst their proposals was the abolition of free universal healthcare, meaning the NHS, and the introduction of compulsory school fees, quite apart from the destruction of the rest of the welfare state.
I said in the article that it would be good to know who the people responsible for the CPRS were, as they should take their share of the blame, rather than just the politicos who fronted the reforms. As it stands, unfortunately it seems to me that even when one politician espousing the views of one of these wretched groups goes down, the members of the think tank just slink away to another job advising someone else. Like the various right-wing groups that jumped from the Tories to New Labour under Blair.
Florence replied:
I would suggest Letwin is the thread running through the whole sorry tale. Elected to a safe seat in 1997, he finished his academic studies (PhD) in 1982, and almost immediately became part of the CPRS in 1982. That was coincidentally when the ideas initially proposed in 1978 became part of the assault on the individual budget holders began in earnest. He then moved on to working with the CPS think tank.
In fact Letwin was associated with some of the most controversial policies – such as using Scotland as a testing ground for the POl Tax, and other unpopular policies. He is associated with racist memos written for Thatcher. He was also the author with Redwood of the 1988 CPS pamphlet that is the blueprint for the 2012 Act, which had itself been under preparation since 2007 -8 (ish).
The CPS was founded in 1972 by the “Mad Monk” Keith Joseph, and Alfred Sherman and Thatcher, to champion “liberal thinking” (now called neo liberalism). “In her own words, its job was to ‘expose the follies and self-defeating consequences of government intervention….’to think the unthinkable’ ” (Margaret Thatcher The Path to Power (London 1995), p. 253). The proposals on the NHS certainly fulfilled that objective, and seem to have arisen from within this coterie and melting pot while the Tories were in opposition in the 1970s. Other notable members of the CPS who are still influential in the Tory party include John Redwood, Dave Willitts, and Michael Fallon. Letwin of course was the main back-room grandee for Cameron and Osborne. He has since left the Downing Street role but his policies continue to be implemented.
Friedman, Joseph and Sherman were the main right-wing influences on Thatcher, but through Friedman and the Chicago School there were links directly to Pinochet in Chile (the Chilean “Chicago Boys”) and into the economic ideologies of nations across the globe. In the Wiki entry for Chicago school for the UK it sparsely notes that Thatcher implemented the Chicago school neoliberal policies and these were left intact and some were completed by Blair including the entry of private medicine into the NHS.
Getting information in who the members of the CPRS and the CPS were during those years is surprisingly difficult.
From my own reading about the subject, Keith Joseph was certainly Thatcher’s mentor, and she was very definitely influenced by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, who were also responsible for General Pinochet’s grotty economic policies. Friedman even went down to Chile to see how his ideas were being put into practice. As for Alfred Sherman, he’s another shadowy figure responsible for much of the neoliberal suffering around the world. I’ve got a feeling he’s the subject of a number of articles in the parapolitical magazine Lobster, as well as possibly being mentioned by Guy Debord’s Cat in his blog. The ‘Deep Politics’ angle – meaning covert manipulation by the secret state – probably explains why information on the CPRS is so difficult to obtain. They were a conspiratorial group within the heart of the establishment, and the establishment most definitely does not want their perfidy exposed.
The I newspaper on Friday also ran a piece by Parisa Hafezi reporting that the Revolutionary Guards in Iran were delighted with Trump’s victory, as they saw his anti-Muslim stance as a means by which they could get back into power. The Revolutionary Guards are the elite, hardline branch of the Iranian army dedicated to preserving the regime. They’ve lost some of the power and influence in recent years through the election of more moderate mullahs to the presidency and Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with the regime. But now they hope to use Trump’s militant Islamophobia to win back influence as the protectors of Iranian Islam.
An anonymous senior official within the government stated “Trump and the Isis militants were gifts from God to the IRGC.”. And a former reformist official also said, “If Trump adopts a hostile policy towards Iran or scraps the deal, hardliners and particularly the IRGC will benefit from it”. (The hardline Revolutionary Guards can profit from Trump’s belligerence to Islam, p. 36).
And on Tuesday, 21st November, Patrick Cockburn put up a piece in Counterpunch, ‘Trump’s Team Will Start New Wars in the Middle East’, which reported that ISIS and al-Qaeda were similarly looking forward to Trump’s presidency because of the radicalisation his hatred of Muslims promised. Cockburn wrote:
Isis is under pressure in Mosul and Raqqa, but it is jubilant at the election of Donald Trump.
Abu Omar Khorasani, an Isis leader in Afghanistan, is quoted as saying that “our leaders were closely following the US election, but it was unexpected that the Americans would dig their own graves.” He added that what he termed Trump’s “hatred” towards Muslims would enable Isis to recruit thousands of fighters.
The Isis calculation is that, as happened after 9/11, the demonisation and collective punishment of Muslims will propel a proportion of the Islamic community into its ranks. Given that there are 1.6 billion Muslims – about 23 per cent of the world’s population – Isis and al-Qaeda-type organisations need to win the loyalty of only a small proportion of the Islamic community to remain a powerful force.
Blood-curdling proposals for the persecution of Muslims played a central role in Trump’s election campaign. At one moment, he promised to stop all Muslims from entering the US, though this was later changed to “extreme vetting”. The use of torture by water-boarding was approved and applauded, and Hillary Clinton was pilloried for not speaking of “radical Islamic terrorism”.
Trump and his aides may imagine that much of this can be discarded as the overblown rhetoric of the campaign, but Isis and al-Qaeda propagandists will make sure that Trump’s words are endlessly repeated with all their original venom intact.
Cockburn goes on to predict that Trump, whatever non-interventionist statements he made before the election, is almost certain to start new wars in the Middle East simply through the venomous hatred of Islam of some of the candidates for his cabinet posts. General Michael O’Flynn, who has reportedly been offered the post as National Security Adviser, has stated that ‘Fear of Muslims is rational’. And according to two journalists with The Daily Beast, one of Trump’s defence advisers is Clare Lopez, who wrote a book, See No Sharia, which claims that Islamists and the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the White House, the FBI, and the Departments of State, Justice, Defence and Homeland Security. And one of the other candidates Trump was considering declared that ‘Islam is a cancer’.
O’Flynn also runs a private intelligence organisation, which has amongst its clients the Turkish government, which would like to invade Iraq and Syria to sort out the Kurds there. Considering all these explosive and incendiary elements, it’s hard not to agree with Cockburn that, one way or another, Trump’s going to start more wars in the Middle East.
The I newspaper on Friday (25th November 2016) carried a report that recently released cabinet papers reveal that Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe continued to plan for the abolition of the welfare state and the privatisation of the NHS even after the rest of the cabinet violently and vehemently rejected her plans. Here’s what the paper wrote
Thatcher’s plan to abolish the welfare state outraged MPs
The Prime Minister tried to advance incendiary proposals despite uproar in Cabinet. By Cahal Milmo.
Margaret Thatcher and her Chancellor Geoffrey Howe secretly sought to breathe new life into incendiary plans to dismantle the welfare state even after they had been defeated in a cabinet “riot”, newly released files show.
Shortly after she came to power in 1979, Mrs Thatcher instructed a Whitehall think-tank to put forward proposals on how to shake up long-term public spending based on the free market principles she spent her 11 years in office seeking to apply.
But what the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) put forward in 1982 was the most radical and vexing blueprint of the Thatcher era, including a call for the end of the NHS by scrapping free universal healthcare, introducing compulsory charges for schooling and sweeping defence cuts.
The proposals proved far too militant for the “wets” in Mrs Thatcher’s frontbench team and were shouted down at a meeting in September that year which Nigel Lawson, the then Energy Secretary, later described in his memoirs as “the nearest thing to a Cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration.”
A chastened Mrs Thatcher, who later claimed she had been “horrified” at the CPRS document, responded to the leak of a watered-down version of the paper by using her speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1982 to insist that the NHS is “safe with us”.
But Treasury documents released at the National Archives in Kew, west London, show that the Iron Lady and her first Chancellor did not let the project drop and planned behind the scenes to “soften up” the ministers in charge of the main departments targeted by the CPRS.
In November 1982, a memo was sent informing Sir Geoffrey that Mrs Thatcher had set up meetings with her Health Secretary, Norman Fowler, Education Secretary Keith Joseph and Defence Secretary John Nott. The memo said: “This series of meetings is designed to soften up the three big spenders. Without their support the operation will not work.”
The document details a political pincer movement between No 10 and the Treasury with Sir Geoffrey asked to ensure that no department’s funding was ring-fenced – although there was recognition that the Prime Minister’s public position on the NHS made that difficult. It said: “Your main aim, I suggest, should be to ensure that no sacred cows are prematurely identified. Given the Prime Minister’s concern about the NHS, this may be difficult.”
The files suggest the ploy met immediate opposition. A later Treasury memo said: “DHSS [Department of Health and Social Security] officials say there is no chance that Mr Fowler would agree to further study of this idea. I imagine that in the circumstances, and especially given the Prime Minister’s speech at Brighton, it is difficult to press them.”
The documents go on to reveal that Sir Geoffrey had a certain ambivalence towards how the Thatcherite project should proceed.
When the Adam Smith Institute came forward with a project to set out a plan for radical Whitehall restructuring to be enacted after the 1983 general election, Sir Geoffrey accepted the concerns of his political adviser that the scheme would fail.
Sir Geoffrey Wrote: “Every proposal will be seized on and hung round our neck. I see v great harm.” (p. 16).
This gives the lie to Thatcher’s claim in her autobiography that when she reviewed the NHS, she found it to be basically found, and only felt that it should have given more space to private industry. It also shows that Leon Brittan was also lying in his autobiography when he also claimed that the Labour party had lied about the Tories planning to abolish the NHS. They had considered it in 1983, and again considered it four years later in 1987.
As for the cabinet rebels who ‘rioted’ against Thatcher’s scheme, from what I’ve read they were motivated not from principle but from the realisation that if she tried to carry out her plans, they’d all be out of a job come the next election.
This did not stop the Tories carrying on the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS. Thatcher carried on chipping away at it. So did John Major, and it was kicked into a higher gear by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And now David Cameron and his wretched successor, Theresa May, have nearly completed the job.
I also like to know who the members of the CPRS were, who recommended the complete dismantlement of the welfare state. At the moment, ideological thugs like them hide behind their extremely low profiles. If the politicians, who’ve embraced their ideas are attacked on lose their seats, these people are nevertheless safe, in that they slink off and get another seat at the governmental table somewhere else. Mike on his blog pointed out how Wasserman, one of the architects behind Thatcher’s plan to privatise the NHS, was also one of the official invited back to advise Cameron on how to ‘reform’ it, in other words, privatise more of it.
It’s about time the shadowy figures behind these ideas were named and shamed, as well as the foul politicos who back them.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 