Yesterday the I’s columnist, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown took it upon herself to identify the ‘guilty men’ responsible for enabling Johnson’s seizure of dictatorial power yesterday. This followed an anonymous piece by someone calling themselves ‘Cato the Younger’, with the title of ‘The Guilty Men’. ‘Cato’ blames thirteen western leaders, two of whom are women. Alibhai-Brown, however, put up her own, shorter list of six men. They are George Osborne, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson. Now I agree with her identification of all the above as causes of the crisis, with the exception of Jeremy Corbyn. She includes him because he
has been another unknowing collaborator. He still can’t find the voice or moral clarity to oppose Brextremism, and is worryingly beholden to his close, maniacally anti-capitalist advisers. He could come out for Remain and let, say, Caroline Lucas lead a temporary government of unity. It won’t happen. Not even in our dreams.
This is utter balderdash, just Centrist, anti-Corbyn propaganda. Corbyn has made his views on Brexit very clear. He was going to get Britain the best deal he could. If he couldn’t, he would hold a general election and/or second referendum. This, however, has not been reported in the press and media, which still continues to trot out the pat lie that he never campaigned properly for Remain. Swinson, the leader of the Lib Dems, was asserting this outright lie again the other day, claiming that Corbyn was ‘nowhere to be seen’ at the Referendum campaign. He certainly was. Matt Thomas posted a tweet declaring that Corbyn made 123 media appearances, attended 15 rallies and posted 118 pro-Remain tweets. Swinson herself posted only a couple of tweets for Remain.
And Tory Fibs also tweeted
That is a provable lie. During the EU Referendum Campaign 7 May-22 June 2016, Corbyn, over 46 days, campaigned as follows:
• Traveled 5851km • Spoke at 15 rallies • Sent 100 Remain Tweets • Achieved 33,760 retweets • Received media exposure 120 times
and contrasted this with Swinson’s own lamentable performance. While Professor Andrew Russell pointed out that the Lib Dems, by contrast, were ‘conspicuous by their absence’.
As for Corbyn being ‘worryingly beholden’ to ‘maniacally anti-capitalist advisers’, this is just a bit of doubletalk trying to stir up the Red Scare about Corbyn and the Labour party a little more. One of Corbyn’s advisors is hard Left. Seumas Milne is, I believe, a real Stalinist. But Corbyn isn’t, neither is he a Trotskyite, or any other kind of Communist. And the Labour party’s programme is simply a return to the mixed-economy, strong welfare state with strong unions that gave Britain three to four decades of prosperity and economic growth after the War.
And then there’s Alibhai-Brown’s whinge that he didn’t make way for Caroline Lucas’ female-only unity government. But this was never a realistic proposal. It was profoundly sexist, and ignored the profound differences between all of the women Lucas invited to join her. It looks to me far more like an attention-grabbing stunt than a serious proposal. It also belies Alibhai-Brown’s claim to be concerned about the poor. Earlier in her article, attacking George Osborne, she states quite correctly that he
punished the neediest, weakened the welfare state and rewarded the richest. Those “left behinds” who voted for Brexit were deliberately left behind by this coldly ideology, small-state Tory.
All of which is correct. And it also describes precisely many of the women Lucas invited to join her unity government. They were also ideological Thatcherites, determined to punish the poor, reward the rich, and destroy the welfare state. And it’s remarkable that Alibhai-Brown, who has spent her journalistic career fighting racing, hasn’t pointed out that not one BAME woman was included on Lucas’ list.
Of course, the real reason Alibhai-Brown is trying to dump on Corbyn yet again, is because she shares her masters’ fears about a Corbyn government that would really empower working people and bring the profiteering super-rich to heel. And so a fair amount of the blame for BoJob’s seizure of power should go to the men and women of the Fourth Estate.
Murdoch’s papers naturally share a very large part of the blame, because they have relentless hyped and promoted the Tories and particularly Boris Johnson. So have the Torygraph, owned by the weirdo Barclay twins, while the Heil and Depress have also pushed the same extreme right-wing views.
But the nominally left-press should also shoulder their fare share of the blame. The Groaniad, Absurder and the I followed the Tory press in lying about, vilifying and smearing Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, for exactly the same reasons as the Tory papers: they are afraid of anything that really empowers the working class. The only difference is that they have tried to dress up their Thatcherism with some shreds of progressive ideology. The I, for example, tried promoting Sandi Toksvig Women’s Equality Party. That feminist organisation’s credentials went out the window when Toksvig declared her backing for Hillary Clinton in the American presidential election. Clinton shared her husband’s attack on the American welfare state, such as it was, passed racist legislation designed to come down hardest on Blacks supposedly to tackle the ‘war on drugs’, and presided over an aggressive programme of regime change every bit as militaristic as George Bush’s. Clinton was very much a member of the American establishment, but she tried telling everyone she wasn’t, ’cause of her gender. Now we have Alibhai-Brown trying out the same tactics in promoting Lucas against Corbyn. And in doing so Alibhai-Brown shows what a hypocrite she is.
She, and the rest of the press, have also contributed to Johnson’s resistible rise. All of them have supported the neoliberal economics that have empowered the Tory Brexiteers, even when, like Swinson, they claimed otherwise. The left-wing press could have got behind Corbyn. They didn’t. And so they deserve their share of the blame, along with the Tory rags, for keeping the Tories in power, and allowing Johnson to elevate himself to virtual dictator.
Mike’s also put up today a piece about the rising resentment towards the Queen for agreeing to Johnson’s demand to prorogue parliament. The Queen, as our hereditary monarch, is unelected. Boris Johnson is unelected: he was installed by a clique, that happened to form a majority in the Tory party at the time. The Tories are a minuscule part of the British people, and aren’t even the largest political party anymore. They’ve been massively eclipsed by Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. The only people in this sordid affair, who did have a democratic mandate were our MPs. They have been elected by us, and it is to prevent them continuing to represent the will of their constituents and block Johnson’s no deal Brexit, that the Blonde Beast sought the Queen’s permission to rule without parliament for a set period. He has thus demonstrated his contempt for parliament. And arguably, so has the Queen.
Mike states that the monarchy is now desperately trying to backpeddle from this mess. Nicholas Witchell, the Beeb’s royal correspondent, has said that she has never refused to accept the advice of her ministers, and always follows precedent. Mike also quotes the oleaginous hominid stick insect, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who asked the Queen to do this on BoJob’s behalf, as saying that the Queen now feels ‘Boxed in’. Rees-Mogg said
“She and her advisors, I have little doubt, will be frankly resentful of the way this has been done and will be concerned at the headlines which say ‘Queen suspends Parliament.”
Mike comments
Rightly so – because, as current slang has it, the optics are terrible.
People are saying democracy has been denied by an unelected monarch acting on the wish of an unelected prime minister.
And they know she could have stopped him.
He then follows this with a selection of comments from twitter. These are by the QC Chris Daw, the comedian Nish Kumar, the Labour and Co-op MP for Edmonton, Kate Osamor, and ordinary people like Isobel and Lin#CorbynOutrider.
Chris Daw in his tweet states that the first thing they teach at law school is that it is the Queen in parliament, who is sovereign.
Not the Government, not the Prime Minister, and no, not the public via a referendum.
What has happened today rips up centuries of stable government.
It’s an outrage.
This relationship between crown and parliament has been at the heart of the British constitution since at least the days of Queen Elizabeth. It was set down in the 17th century in the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, although this codifies the constitutional view of earlier generations. It is this relationship which has prevented Britain from becoming an absolute, autocratic monarchy, as happened in France.
Isobel’s tweets express the anger and bewilderment of no doubt all too many other Brits, who wonder why the Queen has allowed this to happen. They now see her as rich, remote and isolated from the poverty the Tories have inflicted, content to see the country reduced to a mess. She tweeted
If she is resentful why did she allow it to happen? she knew it would cause a constitutional crisis whilst she carries on with her holiday in Balmoral the country is falling apart because SHE said YES.. she has lost any credibility she hAD she is happy to see UK in a mess.
perhaps the Queen+her family would like to go and live in a Tory Container for the Homeless, shall we demand the Royal Gravy train is cut off – when Boris gives Buck house to Trump.. he will do anything for the fool will she be happy in a Container like the homeless have to be?
I’ll give the Queen the benefit of the doubt here. I really don’t think that she thought that she did have a choice, as Johnson is the leader of the government. But she could have withheld her consent. This reminds me of the time the Australian Tories petitioned he in the ’70s to get rid of the-then Aussie Prime Minister, Gough ‘Wocker’ Whitlam. Because Whitlam was a Labour MP, and was doing too much to empower the working men and women, who have built that great Pacific nation. One of the priests at my local church is rather left-wing, and spent several years out in Oz, working with the poor, homeless and marginalised, including the indigenous people. He said to me one day that he wondered how long it would be, if Corbyn got in, before the Tories petitioned her to do to him what they did to Whitlam. By this example, not long. Not long at all.
Lin#CorbynOutrider tweeted that the Queen didn’t care less until she saw #abolishthe monarchy trending.
Mike concludes
That’s the nub of the matter, isn’t it?
And when this crisis is all over, with Dictator Johnson and his cronies banished to the waste-bin of history, it seems likely the people will want to seek assurances that this can never happen again.
We will need checks and balances to ensure that no unelected head of state can ever again deny us our right to representation.
It seems that, with a few penstrokes, the Queen may have put an end to the British Royalty.
Mike’s article was based on a piece in the garden. But the I also published a similar piece about how there was now a backlash against the monarchy. Not just from this, but also from Andrew’s relationship with convicted paedophile Epstein.
The Tories under Cameron and Johnson are wrecking this country. They are actively causing the break up of the UK and riding roughshod over the British unwritten constitution, for their own selfish, personal and party interest. And they and their Yellow enablers in the Lib Dems dare to claim that Corbyn is a threat!
Yesterday, Boris Johnson took it upon himself to ask the Queen to prorogue parliament so that he could force through his unwanted no deal Brexit against the opposition of MPs. Boris Johnson himself hasn’t been elected. He was foisted on the British public as their leader by the Tory party, who represent a vanishingly small section of the British people. With this act, Johnson has assumed dictatorial powers. And the British people aren’t standing for it. There have already been demonstrations against him on College Green, and Mike has put up a selection of pictures of them by Rachael Swindon, Marcus Chown, Mr Bliz, Steve Bray, Carole Peters, the EU Flag Mafia, as well as a video by former Labour cabinet minister, Andrew Adonis, calling BoJob’s action what it is: Massively unconstitutional. He also encourages Brits to take heart, as he feels we’re still going to win this. He says that this is actually a sign of weakness from Britain’s Trump Junior. Boris hasn’t called an election, because he knows he’d lose it, and he’s aware that the Remain Alliance made last week is too strong for him. Adonis feels that there is still enough time left in September and October for parliament to make its voice felt. And Boris hasn’t made any kind of deal with the Fuhrage, who would eat him alive. So people, who want to see Britain a constitutional country at the heart of Europe should feel encouraged: ‘we’re still going to win’.
There is also this petition against the Johnson’s Machtergreifung. Please sign it if you, like me, deeply object to this trashing of British democracy by an autocratic, mendacious clown.
Mike says in his article about it that it won’t make a scrap of business. Boris is a Tory MP, which means that he automatically ignores demonstrations. Mike’s right about this. But this does show the sheer strength of feeling by the British electorate. With MPs across the party political divide ranged against him, and condemnations from Nicola Sturgeon, the Scots First Minister and the Welsh Assembly, and the resignation of Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Tories north of the border, this is adding to the pressure against Johnson. It may not affect him, but it might scare some of his backers.
God help us, he’s finally done it. BoJob has gone to the Queen to request that she suspend parliament on the 10th September, so that he can force his wretched Brexit through. It’s a move that has been denounced by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. This is his way of avoiding moves by the Tory Remainers, Labour and the other opposition parties through legislation as contained in their pact. The Skwawkbox has posted an article arguing that BoJob’s move now presents Tory Remainers with a chance of defeating him without supporting Corbyn’s vote of no confidence. This means defeating Queen’s Speech, which will probably be on 17th October. If this happens, it means we could be facing a general election on the 5th of December.
Both the Skwawkbox and Zelo Street have pointed out that BoJob’s decision means that he was lying when he denied that he planning any such move when he spoke to the Beeb last weekend. People have been comparing Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament to that of Charles I, who famously lost his head after losing the British Civil War. But as the Skwawkbox also pointed out, there was another parallel far closer in time. NHS doctor and campaigner Rachel Clarke tweeted that ‘We are a parliamentary democracy. This is stunt is straight out of 1930’s Germany’ and that it is ‘utterly inexcusable’.
It is. On both counts. Hitler seized power by using the Reichstag fire to declare a state of emergency. This allowed him to seize full dictatorial powers, which meant the suspension of the Reichstag, the German parliament. He then began passing legislation outlawing all competing political parties. The Skwawkbox comments that while Johnson is suspending parliament just to force through Brexit, he shares the Nazis’ contempt for democracy.
And they also put part of the blame on the ‘Centrists’, including Jo Swinson and the Lib Dems. They will no doubt wring their hands about it, but Johnson has been able to do this because they gave him the space. They could have supported Jeremy Corbyn’s no confidence vote and allowed him the chance to form a caretaker government while a general election was called. But they didn’t. Swinson was too keen to defend her Tory politics against the threat of a genuinely progressive, reforming government. Swinson has condemned BoJob’s decision, and stated that the Lib Dem’s will oppose it. But nevertheless, as the Skwawkbox says, the Lib Dems’ culpability is absolutely clear. And the Skwawkbox wonders if they will now see sense and realise just what a danger BoJob is to the fabric of our society, and join Corbyn against him.
And BoJob does present a very clear danger. Not only has he demanded the suspension of parliament, Robert Peston revealed that he had been told by a ‘No. 10 source’, that if parliament does pass a vote of no confidence, they’ll just hang on and won’t make way for another government.
Again, the actions of a dictator. In this instance, it’s General Pinochet, Maggie’s old chum. Before the Fascist butcher was finally overthrown, his fellow torturers and mass-murderers tried to oust him. They couldn’t. He just stuck there. As for the Nazi seizure of power, the parallel there is to the actions of the Catholic Centre Party. They could have voted against the Nazi machtergreifung. But they didn’t, as they were afraid Hitler would move against the Roman Catholic church. Which he did, eventually. The Centre party was banned along with all the others, and the Roman Catholic youth groups were likewise dissolved to make way for the Hitler Youth and the German Maids’ League as the sole permitted organisation for young people. You can understand and to a degree sympathise with the fear that motivated the Centre party to give in. It takes extraordinary courage to stand up to a dictator, even one that was as initially weak as Hitler. But Swinson doesn’t have that excuse. She’s allowed Johnson the political opportunity to make his odious decision simply for cynical political reasons: she’d rather have a ‘no deal’ Brexit and a completely unelected government than see Corbyn in No. 10.
The similarity between BoJob, the Tory party and Hitler and the Nazis has also not been lost on Mike. He points out the way the Nazis demonised the Jews and the sick and disabled. Just like the Tories and the Lib Dems in their coalition also demonised the sick and disabled. The Tories haven’t murdered them like the Nazis in their infamous Aktion T4, just allowed them to die as they removed the benefits they needed for support.
And he also points out that the first party the Nazis banned was the Communist. And it’s not a coincidence that the Tories have been referring to the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn as Marxist, despite the fact that Labour is actually democratic socialist. It’s very different, and the real Communist parties, like that of the former Soviet Union, heartily despised them. Lenin and co. used the word ‘reformist’, which refers to this form of socialism, as a term of abuse.
And, as under Hitler, we have an extreme right-wing press fomenting nationalist further and promoting Johnson’s populism.
Mike goes on to quote Martin Niemoller’s poem, ‘First they came…’. He stated he paraphrased it a few years ago on his blog to insert the sick and disabled in the first line, to draw attention to the way the Tories were demonising and persecuting them. But now he believes the last line should be about democracy, and how it no longer matters whether I speak out or not, because no-one will listen.
He concludes
That is the situation we face, it seems.
You can watch it getting worse and do nothing, and then tell me I was right when it is too late to reverse this disaster.
And if this seems hysterical, just remember that during the 1970s the British security services and the Times and Mirror were considering organising a coup to overturn Harold Wilson’s government. In that event, trade unionists and left-wing activists were to be arrested and interned. See Livingstone’s book, Livingstone’s Labour.
Johnson is an authoritarian, and the Brexit party, which has announced they will support him, is even further to the right. Democracy is under threat. We need to get rid of him now!
This is a very interesting and no doubt controversial video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, in which he shows the link between Shapiro’s rhetoric about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews and an attack on a synagogue in Indiana. Shapiro is a Republican mouthpiece, a very aggressive Zionist and Jewish. Seder’s also Jewish, describing himself as ‘the most Jewish guy you know’. But Seder’s also left-wing and a determined critic of Israel. He takes Shapiro to task for his sharp distinction between good and bad Jews, based on ethnicity versus religious practice, as distinction which is also made by neo-Nazis. And ‘bad Jews’ are Jews, who vote Democrat and specifically for Barack Obama.
Seder wondered what would happen if a public figure said something that inspired someone to commit a horrible act. And not only did they inspire the perp, they also made an equation that the perp cited as the cause for his committing the horrible act. Shapiro tried this with the Nazi, who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh, claiming that the Nazi was following an ideology similar to Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman and critic of Israel. This is untrue. The Nazi didn’t, and he didn’t cite Omar as an explanation for his murder of the Synagogue’s congregation. But it has happened in the case of Shapiro and two Nazis, who vandalised a synagogue in Indiana.
The Nazis were Nolan and Kiyomi Brewer, and their crime was painting a Nazi swastika and Iron Crosses on a wall of a synagogue in Carmel. Nolan, the husband, was apparently law abiding, docile and passive. He was drawn into it by his wife, Kiyomi. She stated in her defence that she was led into the dark world of Nazism through mainstream right-wing news sites and organisations like Ben Shapirok Breitbart and Fox News. She then moved onto Stormfront, and then a Nazi site on the Discord Server. She and her husband also stated in the court papers that they deliberately selected that particular synagogue because it was full of ethnic Jews. This follows the neo-Nazi claim that Hitler wasn’t against religious Jews, but only against ethnic Jews.
Seder then shows with a series of tweets from 2011, 2016 and this year, that Shapiro himself makes the distinction. In one, he claimed that the Jewish community had always been undermined by bad Jews, and that these bad Jews voted Democrat. In the 2016 tweet, he said that there was a distinction between ethnically and religious Jews. Bernie Sanders was ethnically Jewish, and so passed the first standard, but not a Jew at all by the second standard.
Seder also shows a clip from the interview Shapiro gave with Andrew Neil, which was so embarrassing for Shapiro that he claimed that Neil was some kind of Leftist. Neil isn’t. He’s a Tory. Neil asked him about his claim that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama. Shapiro then tried to get around it by saying that American Jews were largely secular, and so his claim about nonreligious Jews was correct. Neil wasn’t going to be diverted, and stated that he hadn’t said that. He had said that bad Jews voted for Barack Obama.
Shapiro apparently has a list of stupid things he’s said on his website, and this comment is now one of them. But as Seder shows, Shapiro was still defending his comment on Neil’s show just weeks before in 2019. This is disgusting, and he wonders how many times Shapiro can say stupid things like it, which go down on his list, before newspapers like the New York Times stop giving him fawning headlines like ‘The Philosopher for the Cool Kids’. Seder cites her a tweet by Almanaqa refuting another tweet by Shapiro denying that he planned the synagogue attack. He didn’t, and nobody is saying that he did. But his rhetoric did inspire the attackers. Seder also makes the point that this is what the Intellectual Dark Web, so beloved of extreme right-wing ideologues, is actually about – Nazi sites like Gab. He concludes by attacking Shapiro once again for his comments and demanding that he be held responsible for them.
I’m blogging about this because this isn’t just an American problem. In this country the lamestream media, the Conservatives and the Blairites in the Labour party are using the same Nazi distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews to smear the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, as Jewish and gentile left-wing bloggers like Tony Greenstein, Martin Odoni, David Rosenberg, Jewish Voice for Labour, Mike Sivier, Tim Fenton of Zelo Street and Tom of Another Angry Voice have pointed out.
It isn’t quite a distinction between ethnic and religious Jews, as the racism has included very religious, ultra-Orthodox Jews like Shraga Stern. But there is a particular venom within the Zionist right at Israel-critical Jews, like Greenstein and Jackie Walker, who are subjected to the vilest abuse. Abuse which would be considered anti-Semitic if it came from gentiles.
And right-wing Zionists do ally themselves with the Islamophobic and Nazi right. They have links to Tommy Robinson and the EDL, as well as Paul Besser and Britain First. Tony Greenstein’s put up long articles identifying the organisations and individuals involved. These include Jewish Fascist organisations, like Herut. When the Board of Deputies and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis organised their farcical rally against the Labour party last year, two of the Zionists attending sported T-shirts bearing the Kach logo. Kach was a Judaeo-Nazi terrorist organisation banned in Israel. And then there’s the antics of the former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who led a British contingent to the March of the Flags day in Israel. This is when Jewish Nazi thugs march round the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, vandalising homes and businesses and intimidating the locals. The same Jonathan Sacks, who declared Reform Jews were ‘enemies of the faith’. Which is the rhetoric of persecution.
Those smeared as an anti-Semites by the witch-hunters – the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Board of Deputies and so on – have received death threats. Jackie Walker has been horrendously vilified. She has been told that she’s not Jewish, because she’s Black, and that she should be lynched and her body burnt or put in bin bags. Chris Williamson, the Labour MP, who rightly said that Labour had given too much ground to those making false accusations of anti-Semitism, has also received death threats.
So I wonder how long it’s going to be before someone attacks a Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, and then states in court that they were doing it because he or she was ‘the wrong type of Jew’, and they were radicalised by Sacks, Mirvis, Gideon Falter and Marie van der Zyle.
This weekend the papers reported that David Koch, one of the infamous Koch brothers family of oil billionaires had finally dropped off his perch. He had become an ex-Koch. He had ceased to be. Like Monty Python’s parrot, he had gone to join the choir invisibule.
I know it’s poor form to speak ill of the dead, but the Koch brothers are an utterly malign family, and their political legacy is absolutely toxic. I dare say that individually they may be absolutely charming men. But they were also greedy, rapacious, and dedicated to attacking almost every progressive advance in American society and economics since the 19th century. They were one of the main founders and ardent promoters of Libertarianism, and founded a network of extreme right-wing think tanks and pressure groups to push through their noxious agenda. And as oil billionaires, they were most notorious through their campaigns denying climate change, attempting to discredit or suppress proper climate science and remove environmental legislation so that they could continue dumping carcinogen sludge into America’s rivers and waterways.
The video below by the Rational National, presented by David Doel, concisely shows how deeply unpleasant the Kochs were and are. And this was personally as well as politically. David Koch and two of his brothers joined together in a plot to blackmail a fourth brother into giving his share of the family business to them. This brother had never had a girlfriend. They thought he was gay, and threatened to tell their father about his lifestyle. Yes, they really were that low and scummy, ready to stab their own brother in the back just for a share of the corporate profits. They were an example of why Ripley says in the James Cameron film, Aliens, why the xenomorphs are better than humans. Or at least the corporate types. Because ‘you don’t see them fucking each other over for a percentage’.
The Rational National then goes on to show how the Koch brothers were instrumental in getting the anti-union legislation passed through one of their political groups, AFP. This stands for Americans For Prosperity. In the case of the US’s working people, the blue collar Joes and Jos, who really built the country, the name should be called Americans For Poverty. As the Rational National argues, the unions were one of the major forces bringing prosperity to working men and women. When their power was broken, there was a massive transfer of wealth upwards to the rich.
The video then shows a tweet from the Sunrise Movement about how the Koch brothers blocked environmental bills going through Congress, promoted fake science denying climate change, and attacking the environmental legislation preventing them from dumping carcinogens into the water. Thanks to them, Americans’ health in this regard is being affected for the worse. There’s also a clip of the report Christopher Leonard on The Morning Show discussing how the Koch brothers derailed America’s last best attempt to introduce regulations against climate change and greenhouse emissions in 2010. He compares them unfavourably with other big oil companies like Exxon, who were prepared to accept some legislation, including a carbon tax. But their influence wasn’t just confined to America. They also back Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, the Fascist maniac now torching the country’s forests and threatening us all with runaway global warming and extinction. Bolsonaro was funded by the ATLAS Network, another Koch pressure groups, which exists to spread Libertarianism globally.
Doel also cites a tweet by Rational National contributer Keith Boykin, about the other subjects he can’t go into in this short video. These are the Koch brothers’ desire to abolish state schools, social security, rent control, Medicare and Medicaid. He funded the Tea Partyandgroups that denied climate change . They also used dark money to fund right-wing causes and Republican politicos.
Doel also makes the point that the Kochs also weren’t philanthrophists in any sense of the word. All their funding was entirely in their own selfish interests. He cites an article from the New Yorker that quotes the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, who found that the Kochs’ donations were to organisations that directly affected their profit margins. And Koch didn’t even try to hide. He admitted that the family issued tight ideological control. If the organisations to which they gave didn’t do what they wanted, then the money was withdrawn.
Doel concludes by summarising David Koch’s career, stating that he was a horrible person. And I can’t see any reason to argue with that.
One of the beneficiaries of the Koch brothers’ money over here is the infamous Spiked magazine, which was given $300,000 by the millionaire dirt-wads. And so editor Brendan O’Neill smears the international concern about the destruction of the Amazon as racist and imperialist. O’Neill was torn to shreds for his shameless lying and gross propaganda on twitter, by people strongly criticising him for his patronising attitude towards the working class as well as his defence of the destruction of the world’s supply of oxygen. One, Alex Tiffin, said of O’Neill that if Corbyn demanded tougher sentencing for child abuse, O’Neill would immediately write an article demanding its legalisation. See Zelo Street’s excellent article on about this sorry piece of spurious journalism at
He concludes: ‘Brendan O’Neill spouts his climate change denial garbage because those who have fucked the climate pay him to do so. End of story.’
I’m left wondering what other right-wing groups in the UK are also being funded by the Kochs, not least the Tory party. I’m sure the surviving Koch brothers are absolutely delighted by BoJob.
Last Thursday, 22nd August 2019, Kate Maltby decided to give us all the benefit of her views on Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and the ‘Trumpification of British politics’ in the pages of the I. She opined that both BoJo and Corbyn were like the megalomaniac manbaby over the other side of the pond. She was also irritated by the fact that the similarity between Corbyn and Trump hadn’t been picked up by the public in the same way the similarity between Johnson and Trump had. She then went on to whine that both Trump and Corbyn’s politics were based in conspiracy theories undermining western democratic politics, conspiracies which she thought came straight from Putin and the Kremlin. She wrote
Yet to those of us hwo have followed Corbyn’s rise closely, the sight of him comparing any other politician to Donald Trump felt like an act of such shamelessness that it might only be matched by the Ponzi President himself. If there is a single line running through Tump’s politics, it is the practice of rule by conspiracy theory. Yet it is from those who believe that the existing democratic order is essentially a conspiracy that Corbyn also draws his base. As researcher Peter Pomerantsev writes in his superb new book, This Is Not Propaganda, “we live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied”. The digital imprint of the Russian state has been particularly successful in undermining the confidence of voters in western democracies in our own democratic norms and even our ability as voters to understand our political realities.
The analyst Ben Nimmo has summed up the Russian approach to disinformation as “dismiss, distort, distract, dismay”. Hence, the birth of a whole new online culture populated by voters who don’t even share a basic epistemology with existing “elites”. Johnson and the Brexit campaign benefited most clearly from this crisis of trust, but so does their fellow Eurosceptic, Jeremy Corbyn. Track the pro-Corbyn and pro-Trump networks online, and you’ll find a commitment to anti-vax theories that tell you the Government wants to make your children ill. Johnson, to his anti-Trumpist credit, has just announced a campaign to counter this particular theory.
Both are surrounded by supporters who trade in conspiracy theories about Jews. While Corbyn’s party is under formal investigation for anti-Semitism, only this week Trump was manically R’Ting the conspiracy anti-evangelical Wayne Allyn Root, who attacked Jewish Democrats for not supporting him.
She then goes on to take Corbyn to task for not coming down hard enough on the Russians about the Skripal poisoning, and for using the memory of the lies over the Gulf War to cast doubt on the Russian’s guilt.
This is all shameless bilge and propaganda itself. The I also reviewed Pomerantsev’s book, and declared that while it was very good on the subject of Russian propaganda, there was very little material about how the West also manipulates information.
And manipulate it the West certainly does. The conspiracy magazine Lobster has been showing since the beginning of the 1980s how the British and American secret state and other covert organisations have manipulated information and worked secretly to influence state policy to their advantage. During the Cold War there was an entire department, the IRD, or Information Research Department set up within the British state to counter Russian and other enemy propaganda. It also tried to undermine the Labour party by producing disinformation and fake texts linking Labour politicians with the IRA and Soviet espionage. And we’ve seen this campaign start up again under the Tories in the form of the Integrity Initiative, with its extensive links to British intelligence and the cyberwarfare division of the SAS producing smears trying to link Corbyn to the Russians. When various right-wing loons and shameless liars haven’t been trying to claim that Corbyn was somehow an agent for the Czechs.
That the British secret state has also done its best to undermine democracy is solid fact. Britain’s disinformation campaign against its foreign enemies is the subject of a book, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy, by Rory Cormac, (Oxford: OUP 2018). The blurb for this reads
It has long been an open secret that British leaders use spies and special forces to interfere in the affairs of others-as discreetly as deniably as possible.
Since 1945, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, has spread misinformation designed to divide and discredit targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Northern Ireland. It has instigated whispering campaigns and planted false evidence on officials working behind the Iron Curtain, whilst GCHQ now uses the internet to undermine terrorist recruiters. MI6 has tried to foment revolution in Albania, and to instigate coups in Congo, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. It has sabotaged ships to prevent the passage of refugees to Israel, secretly funnelled aid to insurgents in Afghanistan, and launched cultural and economic warfare, not only against Cold War enemies such as Communist Czechoslovakia, but also NATO allies.
Through bribery and blackmail, Britain has rigged elections as colonies moved to independence. It has fought secret wars in Yemen, Indonesia, and Oman-and discreetly used special forces to eliminate enemies, from colonial Malaya to Libya during the Arab Spring. This is the world of covert action: a vital, though controversial tool of statecraft and perhaps the most sensitive of all government activity. If used wisely, it can play an important role in pursuing national interests in a dangerous world. If used poorly, it can cause political scandal-or worse.
In Disrupt and Deny, Rory Cormac tells the remarkable true story of Britain’s secret scheming against her enemies, as well as her friends. He uncovers a world of intrigue and manoeuvring within the darkest corridors of Whitehall, where officials fought to maintain control of this most sensitive and seductive work. A fascinating tale of covert operations in its own right, it is also the story of Britain’s attempt over the decades to use smoke and mirrors to mask its decline as global power.
As readers of this blog will be aware, it’s blatantly untrue that Corbyn and his supporters, or at least the vast majority of them, have conspiracy theories about Jews. What they are aware of is the way accusations of anti-Semitism have been levelled at Corbyn and the Labour left for purely political reasons. The Right, including the Blairites in the party, like Tom Watson and John Mann, are using it to try to maintain the Thatcherite status quo. And the Israel lobby is doing it simply to smear and discredit anyone critical of that nation’s apartheid system and its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
I am at a loss, however, to know where Maltby got the idea that Corbynists are opponents of vaccination. The American anti-vaxxers, from what I’ve seen, tend to be on the political right, Conservatives and Libertarians. The kind of people who watch Alex Jones’ InfoWars and have the same bizarre ideas of ‘Purity Of Essence’ as the mad American general Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove. The type of people, who think putting fluoride in the water is a globalist plot, and any kind of welfare state is a horrendous Commie assault on democracy. Definitely not the kind of people, who support Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, it looks like the accusation is simply a shameless invention of Maltby herself.
I’m not surprised that Maltby has come out with this lying screed. Along with her CV, in which she informs us she’s written for The Financial Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The TLS, The Times, and The New Statesman, and appeared on various TV and radio programmes, she also declares that
Much of what I’ve gleaned about the workings of Westminster I’ve learned from my time on the team behind Bright Blue, the liberal Conservative pressure group and think tank.
She’s a Tory, and the only difference I can make out between ‘liberal’ and right-wing Tories, is that the ‘liberals’ are less open in their hatred of the poor and disabled, and their determination to punish, humiliate and kill them. Oh yes, and their better at deceiving the Tory rank and file that they don’t want to destroy the welfare state and privatise the health service.
She’s just another right-wing hack, upset and irritated by the fact that an increasingly media-savvy public are aware of how much the lamestream media is manipulated by corporate and right-wing political interests. And she’s just following a well-worn media path by trying to link Corbyn and his supporters to anti-Semitism, conspiracy theories and the Russians. It’s time she, and the various shameless hacks like her, were given the boot. Then people might start believing in their politicians and their media.
Mike’s just put up a post this evening urging his readers look at an article on the Open Democracy website about the burning down of the Amazon rainforest by Brazil’s Fascist president, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro is a right-wing extremist, who defends Brazil’s military dictatorship. He also backs the campaign of the logging companies and the ranchers to open up the Amazon to exploitation and cultivation.
Except that, as Mike’s article points out, the soil is so poor that it only lasts for two harvests after the trees have been cut down. I can remember studying the problems of the Amazon, and similar parts of the planet, in the ‘A’ level geography class at school. Part of the course involved the Third World. The Amazon is a precious global resource, because its vegetation soaks up something like 20 per cent of the world’s carbon dioxide. That’s why it’s been called the ‘lungs of the world’. It’s also the home to countless precious and endangered species of animals and plants. And biologists are also interested in it because some of the plant species may possess medicinal properties, and so be immensely valuable in the creation of new drugs and treatments for disease.
The indigenous peoples of the Amazon do practise a form of agriculture, ‘slash and burn’. They cut down an area of forest to cultivate, but only do so for a fixed length of time before moving on to another area and leaving that part of the jungle to regenerate. It’s sustainable as it doesn’t exhaust the soil, as Western-style agriculture does.
It’s also an outright attack on the Amazon’s indigenous peoples themselves. The ranchers and loggers are very jealous of the extensive lands allotted to the Amerindian tribes as their reservations. These peoples have suffered a long, miserable history of European persecution. Following the European invasion of the New World, they were enslaved by the Portuguese settlers. Those that survived the devastation brought about by European diseases, that is. Conquistador accounts of journeys through the Amazon describe cities and communities that were wiped off the map. These accounts were thought to be just legends until archaeologists began discovering the house platforms and other remains belonging to these now vanished communities. These civilisations were vast, and it seems that the Amazon may have had a population of several millions before the catastrophe of European contact.
These sites are also of interest to ecologists, as the ‘black soil’ there has the power to regenerate, and restore its fertility.
Despite being protected under Brazilian law, the persecution and maltreatment of Amerindians continued into the 20th century. Encroaching farmers shot them as troublesome pests on their land. A few years ago, attacks by a group of loggers left one tribe virtually extinct. Although there were survivors, they are too few to form a viable breeding group. When they pass, so does their ancient people.
This is what is threatened by the actions of Bolsonaro and his backers in big business by the mass destruction of the rainforest. And if it goes, it may mean that the rest of the world goes with it as climate change becomes even more massive.
I realise that the subject of the Amazon is immensely touchy with patriotic Brazilians, who feel that it’s a resource they should be allowed to exploit. And I’m very aware that if the world declared that Britain should not be allowed to cultivate, or should be forced to rewild some of its forests, our people would similarly be indignant.
But this goes beyond the rights of individual nations. This is a catastrophe that threatens the world. The international community must join forces and aid the left-wing activists and ecological opposition in Brazil, if we are to preserve the rainforest and ourselves.
Sam Seder of Majority Report fame has also put up a video on YouTube in which Michael Brooks and his team identify Bolsonaro as the Human species’ greatest threat to survival. Here it is.
Tomorrow, UK Gold is set to begin screening the first of its recreations of three episodes of the classic comedy, Dad’s Army. As you’ve probably seen from the adverts and the splash page about it in the Radio Times, as well as a piece about it on The One Show, the actual episodes were lost years ago. They were recorded on videotape, which was then re-used for another show. The scripts, however, has survived, and so they’ve decided to re-shoot them using other actors to replace the original cast. Along with other, younger actors, whose names I don’t recognise, is veteran thesp Timothy West, playing Sergeant Godfrey. It looks great, the actors look and sound like their brilliant predecessors, more or less, and have the right attitude. They say they can’t replace the original team, and are just being their understudies.
But there’s one thing that stops me from watching it. They’ve cast Tracey Ann Oberman as Pike’s mother.
Tracey Ann Oberman is Rachel Riley’s best mate in her persecution of bloggers, who support Jeremy Corbyn. Like Riley, she also likes to throw accusations of anti-Semitism around willy-nilly, insulting and smearing decent people simply because they’re Socialists, left-wing Labour party members and/or simply critics of Israel. And if anyone makes a few acute observations about her, she threatens them with a libel suit.
She’s been a firm supporter of Riley in her prosecution of the 17 people, who blogged about Riley’s bullying of a 16-year old girl with anxiety issues. Riley, amongst other things, declared that she wanted to ‘re-educate’ the poor girl, a term I’ve only used in the context of totalitarian brainwashing. When the child refused, Riley smeared her as an anti-Semite and managed to whip up a troll army into bullying and harassing the girl online. When Mike and 16 others blogged about this, Riley claimed that it was libel and initiated legal proceedings.
But when Mike challenged Riley to state what was libelous when she initially complained, neither she nor Oberman could explain why or how. They also haven’t challenged the facts of the case. This seems to me to be another SLAPP suit, in which the forces of the right attempt to shut down criticism through vexatious legal action. Action they know their opponents won’t be able to afford to defend themselves against.
Oberman herself was threatening to do something similar to Ash Sarkar, the head of Novara Media a few weeks ago. She was accusing Sarkar of being anti-Semitic, again based on no evidence or reason whatsoever, except that Sarkar and Novara have supported Corbyn and criticise Israel and the Israel lobby for the country’s maltreatment of the Palestinians. When Sarkar made a few pointed remarks about Oberman’s privileged background, Oberman whined that she was a ‘jobbing actor’, and that these remarks put her career at risk. She also claimed that she was ‘as White’ as Sarkar is. Sarkar is very definitely a dark complexioned Asian, while Oberman is definitely White. Of course, Oberman meant that she couldn’t be White, because Nazis and racists don’t regard Jews as White. Sarkar saw through that subtext, and said that she was not disputing that Jews didn’t suffer victimisation. They do, and horrendously, it’s growing. But as Tony Greenstein, Buddy Hell and many others have pointed out, Blacks, Asians and Travellers suffer far greater levels of racism. And some of this is perpetrated by the right-wing individuals, who are making so much fuss about the supposed anti-Semitism in the Labour party. And Oberman, as an ardent right-wing Zionist, should herself be very much aware that the original Jewish settlers in Palestine were Whites from eastern Europe, who despised the Misrahim, the indigenous Arabicised Jews, or Jewish Arabs, of Palestine and the Middle East. And there is also massive prejudice in Israel against Blacks and Black African Jews, such as those from Ethiopia. And Nazi racism is utter, murderous rubbish, so no-one should believe the bilge about Jews not being proper Europeans. Including spurious racist sputterings that they can’t be as White as they’re European compatriots.
I also know drama graduates and real jobbing actors. They’re immensely talented people, who work hard trying just to get bit parts in TV and other shows, simply because of the intense competition and uncertainty of the profession. They are most definitely not like Oberman, who was boasting a few weeks ago that every time someone criticises her, she gets another job offer.
So the news that the wretched Oberman is going to be in it puts me in a bit of a quandary. I’d like to watch it, but I don’t want to give any support to Oberman. At the same time, I don’t want to deny the other actors their chance to shine. Perhaps one way round this is to put in the equivalence of a swear box. If I watch anything with Oberman in, then I have to give money to help Mike’s defence fund against Riley’s fake libel action. That might do the trick and salve my conscience.
Last weekend’s I, for Saturday, 17th August 2019, carried a report by Nigel Morris on page 4 about the Labour party’s plans to revive ailing high street. Under the scheme announce by Corbyn, the local authority would take over empty business premises to let them to new businesses or community organisations. The article read
Plans to revitalise “struggling his streets” by reopening thousands of boarded-up shops will be set out today by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Labour would give councils the power to take over retail units which have been vacant for a year and hand them to start-up businesses or community projects.
Town centre vacancy rates are at their highest level for four years, and Labour says an estimated 29,000 shops across the country have been abandoned for at least 12 months.
It has also registered alarm over the preponderance of charity stores, betting shops and fast-food takeaways in areas which previously had a better mixture of businesses.
The plans, applying to high streets in England and Wales, will be set out by Mr Corbyn in a visit to Bolton today. He is expected to say that boarded-up shops are “a symptom of economic decay under the Conservatives and a sorry symbol of the malign neglect so many communities have suffered.”
Labour revive “struggling high streets by turning the blight of empty shops into the heart of the high street.” The proposals are modelled on the system of “empty dwelling management orders” which entitle councils to put unoccupied houses and flats back into use as homes.
Jake Berry, minister for high streets, said the Government had cut small retailers’ business rates, was relaxing high street planning rules and launched a £3.6bn Towns Fund to improve transport links and boost broadband connectivity.
I think Corbyn’s idea is excellent. One of the problems of struggling high streets is the ‘smashed window syndrome’, as I believe it’s called. Once one shop becomes vacant, and has it’s windows smashed or otherwise vandalised, it has a strange psychological effect on the public. They stop going into that particular area for their shopping, and the other businesses start to close down. This is why it’s important to prevent it. Business rates might be part of the problem, but I’ve also heard that it’s also due to economics of the private landlords. I can remember my barber complaining to me about it back in the 1990s. He was angry at the increase in rents he and the other shops in his rank had had foisted on them by the landlord. He also complained that despite the high rents, there were shop units that were still unlet, because for some reason the landlord found it more profitable to keep them that way than to let an aspiring Arkwright take them over.
I’ve long believed in exactly the same idea as Corbyn’s. It struck me that with the expansion of higher education, we now have an extremely well-educated work force. But the current economics of capitalism prevent them from using their skills. If successive governments really believe that the increase in university education will benefit the economy, then graduates need to be able to put their hard-earned skills and knowledge into practice. They should be allowed to create businesses, even if these are not commercially viable and need community support. Because it’s better than forcing them to starve on the dole, or climb over each other and the less educated trying to grab low-skilled jobs in fast-food restaurants. And if these new businesses don’t make a profit, but keep people coming back to the high streets, but give their aspiring entrepreneurs skills and experience they can use elsewhere, or deliver some small boost to the local economy, then they will have achieved some measure of success.
This is an excellent idea. And if it’s put into practice, I think it’ll demonstrate that Socialists are actually better for business than the Tories.
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