Here’s another report on the massive failings and sheer contempt for democracy and proper political conduct by the Tories. It focuses particularly on Rishi Sunak, a multi-millionaire from the hedge funds, who’s married to a tech millionaire. He therefore has absolutely no clue about how his policies are harming ordinary, working Brits.
‘Dear David,
Rishi Sunak has now been PM for nearly six months. Hardly the fresh start we were promised, his premiership has been stained by the same non-stop cycle of scandals, investigations, and inquiries that embarrassed the country under Truss and Johnson.
The Raab inquiry; Scott Benton’s cash-for-favours scandal; Sunak paying Johnson’s legal fees; Richard Sharp and the BBC; Matt Hancock’s leaked texts; Keeping the illegal Rwanda flights plans alive. Sunak is not just trapped by the ineptitude and corruption of his predecessors – he’s completely embroiled in their insular and out of touch world.
This week, a new scandal dropped that once again calls into question Sunak’s now infamous promises for “integrity, accountability and professionalism at every level”.
The PM failed to declare shares held by his wife, Akshata Murty, in a childcare agency that will receive a big boost from the government. Sunak and his wife stand to benefit from Jeremy Hunt’s budget, which offers payments to childminders of £1200 when they sign-on to childcare agencies like Murty’s Koru Kids (mentioned by name on the UK government website).
Following on from outrage about Mrs Murty’s non-dom tax status, her financial connections to Shell and Goldman Sachs, and Sunak family ties to tax havens in the Cayman and British Virgin islands – this simply reinforces Sunak’s image as a PM completely detached from the reality most people live in. Sunak is the first PM ever to come from the world of hedge-funds and venture capital – and (probably) the first to be married to the heiress of a global tech-giant.
Sunak never fails to display how out of touch he is. Whether he’s talking about his lack of “working class friends” or admitting that he’s taken money from deprived parts of the UK, he comes across as someone that lives in an entirely different reality.
This week, we saw it again with his “Maths to 18” plans. Downing Street reportedly had to ditch their social media campaign after the only spokesperson they could find for it later claimed Sunak’s maths education plan was “short-sighted, out of touch and grossly unfair on students.”
Westminster in 2023 is like a remote islet, growing more and more distant from our real lives and instead cuddling up to oligarchs, aristocrats, and billionaires. It’s a systemic problem that can only be resolved with serious reform. Merely voting in another party without a mandate to fix it is not enough.
It’s why I’m committed to ending FPTP, enforcing a strong and binding ministerial code, seeing off Tufton Street think-tanks, fixing campaign finance law, and bringing back our human rights in full force – and Open Britain is too. It’s the only way to bring this Westminster club back down to Earth.
All the best,
Matt Gallagher Open Britain’
Robin Ramsay of the conspiracy/ parapolitics magazine Lobster has repeatedly stated that the concentration on the financial sector by Thatcher and successive governments, including Tony Blair, has seriously harmed British manufacturing. And it’s not just the working class that are being harmed by the Conservatives. I came across a video today about how Britain’s small businessmen and women were also being harmed by the Tories’ promotion of big business above everything else. I’m not surprised. Margaret Thatcher always made much of her background as the daughter of a shopkeeper, while Ted Heath had the nickname ‘the grocer’. But for a long time now small businesses have been suffering from Thatcherite policies. Blair favoured the big supermarkets over small community shops, and that has also damaged communities. Small, local shops employ more people, and so when the big supermarkets moved into an area, when these shops closed down due to the competition, unemployment in the area also rose. Big businesses are also slow to pay their suppliers, and as these may be small businesses, they’re particularly in danger of going bust. There were demands on John Major’s government, I recall, to pass legislation requiring the big companies to pay their small suppliers promptly, but this disappeared. The statement that voting in another party without a mandate for reform won’t solve the problem is quite right. Starmer seems to me to be all too ready just to carry on Blair and the Tories’ policy of benefiting the financial sector at the expense of everyone else, just as Blair did.
For ordinary working and lower middle class Brits to benefit instead, this policy has to be attacked and discarded.
One of the fascinating book reviews Lobster has published recently is John Newsinger’s review of Sarah Chayes’ Everybody Knows: Corruption in America (London: Hurst 2020). Chayes worked for the western army of occupation in Afghanistan, during which time she came to realise that the American forces weren’t their to free the Afghans, secure democracy and defend women from a vicious and repressive theocracy. No, they were there to prop up Hamid Karzai’s massively corrupt government, whose members and clients were doing everything they could to screw whatever they could get out of Agha and Khanum Ordinary Afghan. This formed the subject of his first book, Thieves of State. In Everybody Knows, she turns to the subject of the massive corruption in America, most especially in Donald Trump’s administration.
The companies participating in this corporate looting of America and the rest of the world include the Koch companies, Goldman Sachs, one of whose former inmates is our own Rishi Sunak, the connections between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, and the connections between the mercenary outfit Frontier Services Group and Cambridge Analytica. The politicos involved include Mitch McConnell and Steve Mnuchin. McConnell was active trying to hold up increased funding for health-care and pension funds for retired miners, many of whom were his own constituents. He also managed to redirect $4 million of a grant intended to pay for the clean-up of a heavily polluted industrial so that instead it helped to pay for a new, $200 million steel plant ready for its Russian owners, whom McConnell also helped get sanctions lifted on the Russian company, Rusal.
These networks don’t just infect the Republicans, as you’d expect. They’re also heavily interlinked with Democrat politicos and Clinton’s and Obama’s governments. One passage of the review which I found particularly interesting described Madeleine Albright’s corporate looting of Africa. She owns a company that specialises in buying up Third World debt and then forcing those nations to pay it. Of course it comes out their hard-pressed budgets for healthcare, clean drinking water and education. Her hedge fund, Albright Capital Management, bought out a company specialising in pop-up electricity plants in developing African nations. These benefit the countries’ kleptocratic leaders at the expense of local people, who remain ‘mired in pollution and conflict’. It was Madeleine Albright, if I remember correctly, who told American women that there was a special place in hell for them if they didn’t vote for Killary. I’d say there was a special place in hell reserved for someone who enriches herself and her already overprivileged friends and partners stealing badly needed money from the world’s very poorest.
How to tackle this corporate corruption and exploitation? Chayes and Newsinger make it clear that the corporate elites have been able to get away with this because of the massive transfer of wealth and power away from the working class. The book describes how the corruption of the American Gilded Age of the 19th century was successfully fought and broken by a militant and powerful working class. Newsinger’s review concludes
Chayes celebrates struggle through to the great class battles of the 1930s. She clearly recognises that the kleptocracy that is swallowing the world will only be beaten back if there is a shift in the balance of class forces; and will require, needs to be based on, struggle in the workplace. What is needed, therefore, is the revival of a militant labour movement. And this is absolutely urgent because ‘the Midas disease’ threatens environmental catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. (pp. 283-284) She has come a long way since Afghanistan.
How this can be done with corporatist like Biden in charge of the Democrat party and the country, and the nullity Keir Starmer as head of the Labour party, remains a very good question. But this book review, and the light it sheds on the military-industrial complex in America and its looting of the Third World, is particularly relevant now that we have Biden and the other G7 leaders meeting in Cornwall.
Zelo Street reported yesterday that the Board of Deputies of British Jews had taken a break from accusing the Labour party to turn their ire on another British politico. This was Nigel Farage, Fuhrer and CEO of the Brexit Party. According to the Graoniad, the Board had accused the man 2000AD’s Judge Dredd satirised as ‘Bilious Barrage’ because
“Farage’s airing of claims about plots to undermine national governments, and his references to Goldman Sachs and the financier George Soros, showed he was seeking to ‘trade in dog whistles’ … [he] was also condemned by the MPs who co-chair the all-party group against antisemitism”.
They then provide a series of examples from a recent tweet and interview with Newsweek magazine. In the tweet’s video message, the Fuhrage claimed that Britain was facing a wave of ‘cultural Marxism’. This is an idea that has its origins in Nazism, and their claim that Germany was being subverted by Jewish ‘Kulturbolschevismus’. Organisations funded by George Soros were also responsible for companies removing adverts for right-wing TV programmes. This was the trope of the ‘disloyal Jew’.
In the Newsweek article, Nige had ranted about ‘unelected globalists’ shaping the lives of the public based on recommendations from the big banks. ‘Globalists’ was a code word for ‘Jews’ or ‘Jewish bankers’. Goldman Sachs was the only bank he named, which followed another theme from the extreme right.
And Zelo Street also provided a few examples of his own to support the Board’s accusation. In another tweet, the Brexit Party’s Duce Faragissimo had praised Viktor Orban’s Hungary for standing up to the globalists, and wished we all did the same. He also talked about anti-Brexit plots backed by George Soros, including the campaign for a second referendum. Rants against the globalists featured regularly in his tweets. In one, he declared that we were all sick of threats from the globalists. This followed a statement that London was the world’s no. 1 financial centre, and Frankfurt only the 11th. We were, he also announced, heading toward a world where the democratic nation state had made a comeback against the globalists. Former US president Barack Obama, and Chancellor Merkel of Germany were ‘holding a losing party’ for the globalists. And then there was this series of comments about Goldman Sachs
“Goldman Sachs and big business lost the referendum … Congratulations to former EU Commission President [José Manuel Barroso], now over at Goldman Sachs. Global corporatism! … If Goldman Sachs are leaving London for the US, why aren’t they going to their beloved European Union? … Goldman Sachs Chairman thinks those who want border controls are ‘xenophobic’. Badly out of touch”.
The Street noted that these snippets showed the Fuhrage being promoted by the Beeb, Sky News and the Heil. By doing so, they were also promoting anti-Semitism. The Street concluded
Serious anti-Semitism always comes from the far right. Nigel Farage is living proof of that.
Farage’s rants and denunciations of the globalists, Goldman Sachs and George Soros are the latest forms of the anti-Semitic fears about Jewish bankers that first appeared in the Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They also have their roots in some of the conspiracy theories that emerged in the 1970s about the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission. Many leading bankers, like Bernard Baruch, had backed the formation of the United Nations, Trilateral Commission and the elite Bilderberg group, which meets annually to discuss global politics. Thus the UN and the other organisations were seen as devices by which Jewish bankers sought world domination, culminating in a one-world dictatorship, the enslavement of gentiles and the extermination of the White race. Not all versions of this theory are necessarily quite so anti-Semitic. Some of them distinguish between Jewish bankers and the rest of the Jewish people, noting that some of the former, like the Rothschilds, advanced credit and loans to Nazi Germany even when the Nazis were persecuting the Jews. Other forms of the theory are more bonkers still. In one of them, the Trilateral Commission takes its name from the Trilateral ensign, the flag of the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli, with whom the US has made a Faustian pact. The aliens are allowed to abduct and experiment on humans in return for providing extraterrestrial technology like velcro.
I wouldn’t like to say that Farage is definitely an anti-Semite, but his rhetoric and beliefs about evil globalists comprising banks like Goldman Sachs and the Jewish financier George Soros are certainly part of a series of conspiracy theories, some of which are viciously anti-Semitic.
The Board is right to denounce Farage for spouting these theories. However, this hasn’t changed my mind about the Board as a whole. Most of its accusations of anti-Semitism, along with those of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Chief Rabbinate and their allies in the Labour Party, the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, have been directed against Labour, its former leaders Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband, and Corbyn’s followers. They have done so not out of concern about real anti-Semitism, but from a determination to defend Israel and its barbarous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from criticism. At the same time the Board denounced the Fuhrage yesterday, it was also attacking Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, for demanding the government impose a block on the import of goods manufactured in the Occupied Territories if Israel begins its planned annexation of a third of the West Bank tomorrow.
It looks to me that the Board’s accusation of Farage for anti-Semitism is intended to soothe its left-wing critics by showing them that it doesn’t just attack the Labour Party. It really does attack other parties for anti-Semitism, really. But this doesn’t change the fact that the Board seems packed with Tories and Tory supporters. And it doesn’t change the fact that Board’s chief motivation for its attacks on the Labour Party is simply an attempt to excuse the inexcusable and defend entirely reasonable and proper criticism of Israel.
The Board is right to accuse Farage. But its accusations against the Labour Party are still wrong and politically motivated.
In the words of the late, great Victor Meldrew, ‘I don’t believe it!’ Boris Johnson, in his infinite wisdom, or massive lack of it, has decided to make Nadine ‘Mad Nad’ Dorries minister for mental health.
This is nothing more than a slap in the face for disabled people, and shows exactly the contempt Boris has for them. Two years ago Nads Dorries issued a hate tweet at her disabled critics on Twitter. She called them ‘window-lickin’ trolls’. An excerpt on Mike’s post about this, which quotes the leader of Inclusion London, Anne Novis, explains why it’s so offensive. According to the staff running disability equality training sessions, the term ‘window-lickers’ started as an insult to people with Down’s Syndrome or cerebral palsy because these poor souls often have difficult controlling their tongues. Since then, it’s expanded to cover all disabled people. The excerpt then quotes Novis explaining why it’s unacceptable, and makes Dorries completely unsuitable for the post to which she has now been appointed.
Novis said: “It indicates not only that Nadine Dorries would use such offensive language but also that her understanding would be very poor about issues faced by disabled people, including mental health issues.
“You wouldn’t accept it around racist, or religious or cultural difference; you just wouldn’t accept that sort of language and expect someone then to go into a post that is meant to be assisting those people.
“There would be no confidence in her. We would have no confidence in this person being a minister because of what she has brought across through her language.”
Absolutely. It’s hate speech, pure and simple.
And a petition has already gone up calling her to be dismissed. To sign it, as I have, please go to Mike’s article at
But this really is amazing. Johnson seems to be choosing all the wrong people for their ministerial posts. Of course, as they’re Tories they’re not the right people in the first place. But he’s gone further than that and posted men and women who are supremely, actively incompetent or otherwise unfit for their office. Like Sajid Javid. Today Mike put up an article revealing that the Mekon’s minion in the financial sold duff financial policies, CDOs, when he was at Deutsche Bank. These were financial instruments designed to turn toxic bad debts into good investments. Like so much of the other financial investment being flogged by banks like Goldman Sachs before the Crash of 2008, they did nothing of the sort. In fact they contributed to that disaster, which the poor of the rest of the world is now having to pay off while the fat cat rich, like BoJob and Javid himself, get even richer. It’s a good question whether Javid was stupid and naive in selling them, or if he actually knew the open secret in the financial sector that they were toxic. In which case, he’s a fraudster.
Then there’s Priti Patel, who was sacked from Tweezer’s cabinet because she decided that her position meant that she could work for herself and for her friends in Netanyahu’s wretched extreme right-wing Israeli government, rather than for her country and its people. She’s an active security risk, but Johnson has made her Home Secretary.
And the leader of the House of Commons is Jacob Rees-Mogg, an ardent Brexiteer, another millionaire, whose riches are based on his investments, with an extreme right-wing voting record, who doesn’t believe in women’s reproductive rights.
It’s almost as if Johnson is doing this deliberately to wind up the British public as far as he can, while the Tory press and lamestream media praise him to the heights as some kind of genius, who will deliver us from the mass poverty Brexit will inflict and has already inflicted.
Get him out, and get these incompetents and frauds out too!
Just as the Jewish Chronicle may have itself been guilty of anti-Semitism by denying that one of the signatories to the letter of support for Corbyn and the Labour party sent to the Sunday Times, so other members of the right may also be aiding anti-Semitism by their repeated use of the conspiracy theory that the Jews are the real force behind capitalism.
Three days ago, on 16th March 2019, David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group, an ardent campaigner himself against racism, anti-Semitism and thus Zionism, put up on his blog an article discussing this very point, which had been published that day in the Morning Star. He began by commenting on the statement by Blairite Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh to John Humphrys on Radio 4 that ‘anti-capitalist politics are at the root of anti-Semitism’. Rosenberg states that it’s an appalling slur against everyone fighting against the poverty and inequality of Tory Britain, but it also revealed that the Right, even those, who think they are pro-Jewish, still believe anti-Semitic stereotypes, as McDonagh obviously thinks that Jews are rich capitalists.
He goes on to discuss how this is at the heart of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that sees the Jews as using their wealth to control the banks and governments. A theory that was pushed by Henry Ford, an Episcopalian Christian and founder of the car manufacturer that bears his name, in his paper the Dearborn Independent. Ford believed that the Jews caused World War I, and published the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And someone else who believed this poisonous nonsense, and was Ford’s biggest fan in Europe, was one A. Hitler.
Rosenberg goes on to discuss how there are Jews, who identify the Jewish community with capitalism, banking and property and so accuse the anti-capitalist left as anti-Semites. He then cites Richard Mather, who claimed in an article in the Jerusalem Post that ‘the Labour party’s call for the seizure of property’ was part of ‘anti-Semitic class warfare’, and pieces written by the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, and one of his journos, Alex Brummer, who both claimed that Corbyn was an anti-Semitic threat to Jewish capitalists, with Pollard harking back to Corbyn’s attack on the bankers that caused the financial crash ten years ago. Rosenberg tweeted in response to this nonsense that of Pollard and Corbyn, one of them thought all bankers were Jews. And it wasn’t Corbyn.
Rosenberg goes on to say that
In my 61 years I’ve never met a Jewish banker. I’ve met unemployed Jews, Jewish decorators, post-office workers, van drivers, taxi drivers, shopworkers, social workers, secretaries, teachers, pharmacists, and several comedians.
He reinforces this point by describing how Arnold Brown, a Jewish comedian, who came from a poor background in Glasgow, tore up the floorboards at his home one day after the other schoolkids told him that all Jews were rich. He also makes the point that the racist Right use the stereotype of the rich Jewish capitalist to divert popular anger away from capitalism to particular Jewish figures, who are supposed to be responsible for its ills, such as Rothschild and Goldman Sachs to George Soros today, demonised by Trump and a slew of extreme right-wing regimes because he funds agencies for migrants and refugees and anti-government demonstrations.
But he also makes the point that this stereotype also erases the strong history of Jewish left-wing anti-capitalist activism, writing
When McDonagh, Mather and Pollard repeat stereotypes of Jews as capitalists, they not only feed these conspiracy theories, but also erase an outstanding tradition of Jewish anti-capitalism. People know the famous Jewish revolutionaries, like Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemberg, Emma Goldman, but it was in mass Jewish workers’ movements such as the Bund, and among the Jews so numerous in socialist and communist parties over the last 120 years, that anti-capitalism was ingrained. In 1902, a Russian Jewish bookbinder, Semyon Ansky, wrote a Yiddish song to honour the Bund’s struggles for social justice. The movement adopted it as its anthem. One powerful verse translates as:
“We swear to the heavens a bloody hatred against those who murder and rob the working class. The Tsar, the rulers, the capitalists – we swear that they will all be devastated and destroyed. An oath, an oath, of life and death.”
He goes on to say that he is going that day to march and speak with the Jewish Socialist Group on a national demonstration in London against racism and Fascism, including the anti-Semitism that is rising in central and eastern Europe and Trump’s America with the Pittsburgh shooting. He concludes
At street level, far right organisations concentrate physical attacks more frequently on Muslims, Roma, migrants and refugees, but when they want to explain to their supporters who they believe holds power in the world they fall back on Jewish conspiracy theories as surely today as they did in the 1930s. The fight against antisemitism, Islamophobia and anti-migrant propaganda are absolutely linked and we must combat them together.
Absolutely. Rosenberg’s blog is particularly fascinating for the pieces he publishes about the Bund, the socialist party of the eastern European masses in the Russian Empire. It’s a history that I doubt many non-Jews know about, as the Yiddish-speaking communities the Bund represented were murdered by the Nazis. If people outside the Jewish community know about it at all, it’s probably because of the movement’s connection to the Russian Socialist movement. The Bund were, with the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, part of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the parent organisation of the Russian Communists. It was their withdrawal from the party conference in 1909, when Lenin demanded that there should be no separate organisation for Jewish socialists, that made the Bolsheviks the majority faction and gave them their name, from ‘Bolshe’, the Russian word for bigger.
But the articles by David Rosenberg and other left-wing Jewish bloggers and vloggers reveal a rich, lost history of Jewish anti-capitalist struggle. One of the remarkable consequences of the anti-Semitism smears is that this history is being rediscovered and brought to public attention as Jewish Marxists and socialists refute these smears. Jon Pullman’s film, The Witchhunt, attacking these smears and particularly the libelous hounding of Jackie Walker, includes a brief mention of the Bund, including black and white footage of their demonstrations and banners. If Channel 4 had kept to its original charter as an alternative BBC 2, the Bund and its legacy would be a very suitable subject for a documentary. It could also easily be screened on BBC 4. But I doubt that this will ever happen because the stereotype of the rich Jew is too important a weapon against the anti-capitalist left for it to be refuted by such a thing as actual history.
And if left-wing Jewish history, like that of the Bund, is being forgotten, some contemporary works on the Jewish community may inadvertently reinforce the stereotype of the rich Jew. Back in the 1990s an aunt gave me a book about the Jewish community in Britain, The Club. It was a mainstream book by a very respectable mainstream publisher, but from what I can remember about it, it was about the elite section of British Jewish society, the top 100. I think it was written from an entirely praiseworthy standpoint – to celebrate Jewish achievement, and to how how integrated and indeed integral Jews were to British society and culture. But books like it can give an unbalanced picture of Jewish society in Britain by concentrating on the immensely wealthy and successful, and ignoring the ordinary Jewish folk, who live, work and whose kids go to school and uni with the rest of us, and whose working people marched in solidarity with us.
It’s fascinating and necessary that the history of Jewish socialism is being rediscovered, and that activists in the Bund’s tradition, like Rosenberg, continue to write, demonstrate and blog against racism and anti-Semitism as part of the real struggle by working people.
After the anti-Semitism lies and smears against the Labour party and decent, anti-racist people like Mike, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Martin Odoni and so many, many others, here’s what looks very much like the real thing. Yesterday Mike put up a piece about a smear made on Patreon by Raheem Kassam against the journalist Carole Cadwalladr. Kassam’s a staunch supporter of Brexit, but many of the ‘Leave’ organisations are now being investigated for breaches of electoral law and funding irregularities. Much of this is the result of Cadwalladr’s investigations into these bodies. Kassam couldn’t tolerate this, and so issued a Tweet claiming that because Cadwalladr’s investigations were published on the Open Democracy website, which is partly funded by George Soros and his Open Society Foundation, she’s being backed by ‘Globalist shills’. Mike explains that this is apparently an anti-Semitic dog-whistle.
Kassam stated
“Cadwalladr has attempted to cover such tracks by issuing a series of tweets alleging that any critique of the billionaire, fund manager Soros is ‘racist’ against Jews. This is despite Soros’s rejection of his Jewish identity, and in spite of the fact that he has openly admitted to assisting in the confiscation of Jewish property during the Holocaust”.
The Liberal Jewish organization, Zelo Street, responded by issuing a firm refutation of Kassam’s claims.
“George Soros did not assist in confiscation of Jewish property” – and this certainly seems unlikely as he would have been only 15 at the end of World War II. “And whether he “rejects his Jewish identity” is irrelevant. Calling “Soros” is code for “the Jews”. Like gratuitously pitching terms like “globalists”, “global bankers”, and “Goldman Sachs”.”
Mike in his article wonders if the Leave response to these breaches of electoral law is simply anti-Semitism, and asks if many Leave supporters will disassociate from Kassam, or whether they will simply double down and renew their calls for Remainers to get over it.
I really don’t think there can be much doubt that Kassam’s tweet was full of coded anti-Semitic terms. The American Right, and particularly Fundamentalist Evangelical Christians, have been afraid of the creation of a ‘One World’ dictatorial state for a very long time. In modern Millennialist Christian theology, this will be the beginnings of the End Times, with the Anti-Christ as the dictator of this new global state. Which will, of course, begin the persecution of Christians. See the ‘Left Behind’ series of Christian novels by Tim LaHaye. I don’t doubt that most of the people, who hold these views aren’t anti-Semites. But it can shade into the real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the Jews secretly running the world, manipulating capitalism and Communism to enslave gentiles and destroy the White race through immigration and racial intermixing. The literature for this conspiracy theory sees the United Nations as the seed from which the One World dictatorship will develop, as well as the Trilateral Commission in the US and the Bilderberg group. The last is a regular meeting of major political and business figures from around the world, and is the centre of much conspiracist speculation.
The literature also discusses the major roles of the Jewish financiers in the creation of these bodies, through the Rothschild banking family and Bernard Baruch. Some of this literature will try to distance itself from overt anti-Semitism by drawing a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Jews. The good Jews are the millions of ordinary Jewish peeps not involved in the conspiracy, and who may themselves be the victims of it. The material taking this line will point out that Rothschilds continuing giving credit and financing the Nazi regime even when it began openly persecuting the Jews. The bad Jews are, of course, Rothschilds and the other immensely wealth Jewish banking families. These last are described as ‘Zionists’, but the term isn’t used according to its normal meaning. When the people promoting this conspiracy talk about ‘Zionists’, they really mean the Jewish global banking conspiracy. They definitely don’t mean in its proper sense of supporters of the state of Israel. Hence the Nazis and anti-Semites in America refer to their government as ZOG, or Zionist Occupation Government.
George Soros has now entered the demonology of paranoid anti-Semites because he is an immensely wealthy Jewish financier, who funds a variety of groups promoting human rights, democracy and liberal society, as well as being on opponent of Brexit. Thus, he’s been bitterly attacked and vilified by Viktor Orban and his far-right Fidesz party, which now forms the Hungarian government. At the same time, the real Zionists and Netanyahu’s government in Israel despise him because Soros is an anti-Zionist. He’s despised the Zionist movement because of the way they made deals, under the leadership of Kasztner, with the Nazis to allow the deportation of many Jewish Hungarians on the condition that a certain number should be allowed to emigrate to Israel.
Tony Greenstein has today put up a piece about how George Soros thus provides a unifying connection between modern Nazis and anti-Semites, and Netanyahu and the Israel lobby. He also reproduces with his own article a couple of pieces from other journalists, which support his point. One is by Dove Kent of Jewish Currents, and Adele M. Stan of the American Prospect. These articles are also worth reading, as they show very clearly how Trump is using dog-whistle anti-Semitic codewords to weaken the Left. The women protesting against Judge Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault but is nevertheless trying to become a member of the Supreme Court, are accused of being funded by Soros. As is the Black Lives Matter movement and Trans Rights campaigners. Anti-Semitic tropes were also used to attack the Left during McCarthyism, and were particularly effective because Jews were over-represented in Communist and Left-wing groups. Greenstein in his piece also describes how Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby have also deployed anti-Semitic stereotypes and rhetoric to demonise Soros.
Greenstein also describes how right-wing broadcaster and polemicist, Glenn Beck has also attacked Soros using the rhetoric and ideology of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. He described Soros as a ‘puppetmaster’, a Jewish financier with no ties to any country – which conforms to the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ in Nazi ideology – who wanted to create a ‘one world government’. He also claimed that Soros came from an anti-Semitic family, and participated in the Holocaust against the Jews when he was 14. Beck isn’t a peripheral figure. He’s been a fixture of the American right-wing broadcasting scene for decades. But he is bonkers. Many of his broadcasts and talks are simply rants in which he predicts that America will suffer some kind of totalitarian Nazi-Communist-Socialist-Atheist dictatorship, and that ‘They’ will come for him. And his performance, already bizarre, often ends with him in tears. The online humour magazine, Cracked, a few years ago, covered one of his talks in California, which hilariously described how nonsensical and mad it all was. Apparently it feature someone in pseudo-Nazi costume representing tyranny, while a woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty represented freedom. Oh yes, and I think there was someone who was supposed to represent anarchy as well.
This is the paranoid, anti-Semitic worldview that is deliberately evoked by the attacks on Soros, although I don’t doubt that many of those, who are taken in by it probably aren’t anti-Semites and don’t realise the very definite anti-Semitic background behind it.
As for Raheem Kassam, if I recall correctly he’s another member of Breitbart, who also promotes Islamophobia. I also seem to remember that a few years ago he was also connected to UKIP and perhaps some other extreme right-wing parties in Britain.
Which also shows what a number of anti-racist campaigners have pointed out: the racism may start out by attacking other groups, like Muslims and Blacks, but ultimately it returns to the Jews.
Alex Jones is the head of Infowars, and has been pushing bonkers conspiracy theories about one-world government takeovers, and Satanists, aliens, the Illuminati or whoever, all secretly running things behind in the scenes in collusion with big business and the Democrat Party. In this video from AlexJonesClips on YouTube, 26 of Jones’ lies are presented, both in audio from the man himself, and written on the screen with the real truth about what he’s claiming.
The video is under 9 minutes long, and most of the lies come from 2009. There are too many of them to discuss here, but they’re about big business like Walmart, Google and other companies being connected with the NSA and FEMA camps. The government is coming to seize your children and forcibly inoculate them. The UN wants to destroy industrial society, then take people’s children away to raise them in state dormitories. The NSA uses satellites to track people going to gun shows from orbit, so they can seize their guns. Bankers at Goldman Sachs are arming themselves against the people. The cops are thugs who beat up old ladies, and want a war with the public. Time magazine is pushing euthanasia week after week, and people being electrocuted with Tasers is now ubiquitous in comedy. Oh yes, and there’s the classic piece of right-wing paranoia about the 666 separator codes inserted into barcodes, which he somehow connects with sun god worship in Ancient Egypt.
These are the real conspiracy theories that need to be attacked, and it’s good that someone has gone to the trouble of cataloguing and refuting some of them.
This is an absolute bombshell! In this piece from the Jimmy Dore Show, Dore and his co-host, Ron Placone, discuss the sensational news that a meeting of union leaders that convened on October 24 have passed a resolution condemning the two-party system and pledging them to consider setting up a separate, independent labour party.
The resolution was introduced by the chair of the political committee of AFL-CIO, Lee Saunders, and Randi Weingarten, the head of the teacher’s union. This is particularly remarkable, as Weingarten was responsible for throwing the union’s weight behind Hillary Clinton regardless of the views of its members. Dore states that when they asked American teachers how they felt about their union supporting Killary, they said they weren’t consulted. Those are America’s two largest unions.
Weingarten said that the system had failed working people for decades, and that it had taken away the pillars supporting working people’s rights to good jobs and benefits on behalf of the rich and corporations. The resolution was passed at a meeting of about 50 delegates in an upstairs room where the convention was being held. The delegates contended that both the Republicans and the Democrats were under corporate domination.
Mark Dimondstein, who was the foremost promoter of the idea of a labour party, is the president of the postal workers’ union. He has been calling for it ever since NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – was set up in 1993, which he said showed that both the Republicans and Democrats were in the pockets of the capitalists. Dore and Placone chuckle over the fact that Dimondstein must be having the biggest ‘I told you so’ moment, and encourage him to gloat all he wants, as he’s earned it.
The meeting was split over whether they should first start up an organisation and start discussing issues, or get into political races and risk becoming the ‘spoilers’ in the current two-party system. Dore states in response to this that it’s the two-party system that’s rigged. That’s how Americans now have Trump: it was due to a rigged Democratic primary and electoral college. One delegate, Velasquez, stated that the new party should compete in politics, but start at the local and state levels. Dore asks rhetorically why they should, and argues instead that they should compete at all levels. All the delegates agreed, however, that the Democrats have not done them any favours. They never have, and they never will. Dore believes that the reason why Velasquez wanted them to limit themselves to local and state level politics, was so that they don’t get called ‘Ralph Nader’, after the left-wing American politician, who attempted to run as a third party candidate.
Saunders and Weingarten are also members of the Democratic National Committee. The main resolution, however, said that they would set a pro-worker agenda, that would stand regardless of party. Dore states that this is similar to what they had in mind when they went to Canada for Peter Alard. That all the progressives would get together and produce a litmus test. They will thus endorse any political candidate in any party, provided that they support their pro-worker objectives.
Dimondstein said that they couldn’t take half a loaf, a quart of a loaf, an eighth of a loaf, or even crumbs any more. Dore states that they weren’t even being offered that under the present system. And he was applauded when he said that even when the Democrats got control of both the presidency and Congress in the 2008 election, they did not follow through with reform of labour legislation and other priorities for working people, but instead passed the Transpacific Partnership – TPP – the free trade deal. Dore and Placone states this was done by Barack Obama. They also make the point that it wasn’t done by Russian secret agents amongst the DAPL and Black Lives Matter activists. Dore states that it wasn’t the Russians, who threw the election but Barack Obama, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Haliburton, Exxon, the Koch brothers, the people in New York, who had 200,000 people thrown of the voting rolls, and the Electoral College. He stated that the Democratic Party hadn’t done anything for them despite having the presidency, the Congress and the Senate. Dore states that this is what he and other progressives had been saying, but they were told they were stupid, petulant, children. Now the labour unions agree with them, and its those who called them stupid and so on, who now have no political sense. The people in the Democratic Party, who called them that and gave America Hillary Clinton are the people that are ultimately responsible for Trump. They are everything that’s broken in the Democrat Party.
Dimondstein stated that the Republicans entrenched union-busting, Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street, and Jimmy Carter deregulated trucking. Dore reminds his viewers that, thanks to Carter, we now have truckers working 18 hours or so and taking methamphetamines to get to their destinations on time. Dimondstein made it clear that constructing a labour party would be a long-term plan and require both community and labour support, but it would be wrong to confine the movement for a labour party to the current two-party system. Dore goes on to say that if everyone, who felt this way had actually voted for the Green Party at the last election, it would have radically changed the political landscape. They might still have had Trump, but the Democrats would have been wiped out and the opposition instead would have been the Green Party with a genuinely radical agenda. Instead, half or eighty per cent of all progressives are trying to reform the Democrats, which he thinks is a fool’s errand.
Dore and Placone are amazed that this story has received so little press attention. It should receive more, as the 2016 election showed how little footing the Democrat Party now has with the working class. Placone states that it’s now time for progressives and working class organisations to stop endorsing the lesser of two evils, because that can result in the more evil getting into power, and the lesser evil becoming worse. He states that we have now reached the crisis point with that, and if we haven’t, he doesn’t know what will wake people up. But whatever it is, it’ll be too little, too late. Dore suggests that it might be when the ice caps finally melt so that the coastline is now in Minnesota. Obama would probably come back to open the arctic for drilling just one more time. He has been responsible for opening it up to drilling twice. Dore also points out that there are a lot of people interested in forming a third party – progressives, Greens and others – and it’ll eventually happen.
This is absolutely stunning. If it goes ahead – and I sincerely hope it does – then America will be transformed into a country, whose political system is far more like that of Europe. Especially if Bernie and the progressives manage to get single-payer healthcare passed.
What the American unions are discussing is precisely what the British Labour party went through a century and more ago. The Labour party has its roots in the Lib-Labs, the trade unionists elected to parliament as working class members of the Liberal Party. Then after the passage of the Taft Vale judgement, which ruled that trade unions could be sued for damages and losses caused by strikes, they then decided to form an independent party to press for working class policies. This was the Independent Labour Party. The Labour Party as it is now was founded in 1901 as a party formed from the unions and various socialist organisations and societies.
As for pressing for all political parties to put forward pro-worker policies, that was the goal of the Fabian Society when it was founded. There’s a lot of sheer rubbish spouted by the American right-wing conspiracy nuts about how it was some kind of secret society. It wasn’t. And it’s still around. It became part of the Labour party. I should know. I was a member briefly in the 1980s. I’ve blogged about some of their pamphlets I bought and read, even citing them. Unfortunately, they’ve now been heavily infiltrated by the Blairites, and are one of the chief sites of anti-Corbyn activism in the party.
And something similar appears to have happened in Canada in the 1960s and ’70s, when hippy radicals formed the New Democrat Party up there.
If this does go through, it should encourage similar left-wing movements around the world, and strengthen the genuine socialists in the British Labour party and the European socialist parties.
And I’ve no doubt that the capitalists and big corporations will now try and throw everything they can at it to stifle this vital new change. I’m not surprised that very few newspapers carried the story, because the newspapers generally represent the interests of big business. And big business and the capitalist class is absolutely terrified of the unions and genuinely working class organisations. That’s why the British press, including the pro-Labour Mirror, has been so consistently against Jeremy Corbyn.
However, it has also been pointed out that before the First World War, America did indeed have a very strong left-wing movement. There were the Communists, the Wobblies and Eugene Debs and his attempt to form a labour party for America. What set this back was the Cold War, which allowed the forces of the right to smear and vilify them as part of the global Communist threat. Now that Communism has fallen, fewer Americans are being taken in by this ruse, and the spirit of Eugene Debs lives on.
I hope this all goes through, and that it’s successful. If that happens, then the world will be a fair bit better for working people.
Mike over at Vox Political has suffered another smear, this time from Gareth Davies of Anti-Nazis United. His article purports to be a rebuttal of Mike’s own refutation of the original smears and libels published by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Actually, I think their name is somewhat of a misnomer. From what I’ve seen of them, they don’t seem to have any real interest in combatting genuine anti-Semitism, only in using it as a tool to smear decent critics of Israel, and in scaring European Jews to emigrate there. Perhaps a better name would be the Campaign for Anti-Semitic Libel? That would seem to be a far better description of this organisation’s real aims and methods.
I’ve blogged before about how Mike is very definitely anti-racist and most definitely not anti-Semitic. He talks with obvious pride about the invitation by one of his Jewish friends to be one of the readers in a Holocaust memorial event she was staging when he was at college. Mike was one of those, who read out a few of the names of the millions murdered by the Nazis. The young lady told him afterwards that she found his performance deeply moving. He’s had friends of all races, and doesn’t judge people according to their ethnicity or sexual orientation.
Nor, as I said, has he ever denied or tried to falsify the numbers of the Nazis’ victims in the Holocaust. I’ve described in a previous article how he gave me a book on the Nazis’ bureaucracy of terror which accompanied an exhibition about it in Berlin. The exhibition was also put on by the federal government, and gave the facts and figures of the Holocaust and the associated pogroms carried out by the Nazis. It also had a gallery and brief biography of a few of the Nazis’ victims.
Mike has always had a horror of Nazism. It’s part of his strong feelings for justice and deep hatred of other forms racism and prejudice.
Mr Davies has been unable to rebut Mike’s refutation of the smears against himself through anything Mike has written, and so has tried to smear Mike based on some of the comments left by his readers. Mike has written a robust rebuttal of this latest smear in turn, going point by point through Davies’ article, tackling and refuting each in turn.
His article stands by itself, but there are a few more things that could be added to a couple of his points. The only criticism of Mike Davies makes based on Mike’s own writings, is about Mike’s remark about Liam Byrne’s suitability as a Labour politicians, based on his previous employment with Accenture and Rothschild’s. Mike writes
Next complaint: This indicates that Mr Davies has trawled back through my articles, looking for anti-Semitic language he can use against me. It appears he found only one example that comes even remotely close, in 8,705 published pieces. This was in a reference to Liam Byrne’s employment history: “Work for a multinational consulting firm (Accenture) and then the Rothschild merchant bankers(!)” commenting on my “strange use of an exclamation mark”.
Of course the point I was making was that it seemed odd for a Labour politician to be working for a firm as closely associated with capitalism as the Rothschild company, and that I doubted it was what many people would call a “proper job” – contrast with Alan Johnson, for example, who was a postman, or Dennis Skinner, who was a miner. My guess is that the accusation is about the Rothschilds being Jewish but that had nothing to do with the point I was making.
The Rothschilds do loom large in the demonology of the Nazi right. They’re at the centre of various stupid and potentially murderous conspiracy theories about international Jewish bankers that have been around since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, there are very good reasons why genuinely anti-racist Socialists should also be suspicious of this firm and the others in financial sector, regardless of the racial origins of their founders.
The working people of Britain and America have been sacrificed to the interests of the financial sector. One of the tenets of neoliberal policy has been to let manufacturing industry decline as the West was supposed to be moving into a post-industrial society. Furthermore, the Pound was kept high by Maggie Thatcher, who was unable to realise that this made British exports uncompetitive through increasing their prices on the international market. The financial sector also insisted on the loosening of regulations that resulted in the massive crash of 2008, brought about by extremely reckless speculation by Goldman Sachs, Lehmann Brothers and others in Wall Street.
In fact, manufacturing industry is still vital for Britain and America’s prosperity, as Ha-Joon Chang shows in his books. And the bankers that caused the crash have rightly earned the contempt and disgust given them by the rest of the public. Even after wrecking the global economy and encouraging right-wing governments to pursue austerity policies that have caused immense suffering to ordinary men and women, these people have insisted on billion dollar bail-outs, and are continuing to award grossly inflated pay increases and bonuses to each other.
The reaction of the Republicans in America was to try to equate criticism of bankers as Nazi anti-Semitic attacks, on the basis that the Nazis ranted about Jewish bankers, and so banker = Jew. But these criticisms weren’t being made on the basis of the bankers’ race or religious beliefs. They were simply about avaricious, destructive bankers, full stop. Race had nothing to do with it. And the banking elite attacked also includes gentiles.
And Rothschilds also has an unpleasant history of collaboration with the Nazis. They were one of the American banks, who gave credit and financial support to the Nazi regime in the 1930s. This when the Nazis were carrying out their horrific persecution of German and then Austrian Jews after the Anschluss. This was reported in the western press at the time. Certainly, this fact has also been incorporated into some of the stupid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to make them seem less racist. I’ve come across books that have distinguished between ‘good’ Jews, the victims of the Nazis, and the ‘Zionist’ Jews, like the Rothschilds and others, who were determined to enslave Whites. Despite these careful revisions, they’re still dangerous, racist nonsense.
But that doesn’t change what the Rothschilds did. And it has understandably a legacy of bitterness. I came across an entirely respectable history book in the 1990s on the shelves of Waterstone’s in Bath about Wall Streets murky dealings with Hitler and his squad of butchers.
And the Rothschilds sadly weren’t the only company to provide material aid and assistance to the Nazi tyranny. So did American companies like IBM, a fact that provided the inspiration for one of the bitterly funny episodes of the anti-superhero comic, Marshal Law, a comic with a clear social conscience that attacked right-wing American politics through very dark, violent satire.
Earlier in his article, Mike rebuts the claim that he’s anti-Semitic, because he liked a Tweet urging him to ‘stay strong against the cabal’. Mike writes
He writes
Look up “cabal” in a dictionary and it is described as “a secret political clique or faction”. Perhaps that does not quite describe the CAA, because its political motive in trying to stop me from being elected to Powys County Council is clear and not secret, but the intention of the person who made that tweet was clearly to support me in resisting the CAA’s lies. Why should I not be grateful?
This criticism might be partly based on one of the etymologies constructed for the word, which is supposedly derived from Qabbala/ cabbala and other versions of the word spelt with a single ‘B’. This is a form of Jewish mysticism, which also became popular amongst Christian occultists in the 17th century as Aristotelian natural philosophy crumbled. There was so much demand for it, that one Italian rabbi complained that he and other savants couldn’t go anywhere without a Christian clutching them by the sleeve and saying, ‘Be my master in this!’
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable mentions this origin of the term, but states that it came to be applied to English politics from the machinations of one of Charles II’s court factions. It says
A JUNTO, a council of intriguers. The famous cabal (1687-1673) of Charles II’s reign, the group of five ministers, the initial letters of whose name (Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington, Lauderdale) by coincidence spelt this word, did not give rise to the usage. It was often applied in the 17th century to the king’s inner group of advisers. See CABBALA.
This was the sense in which it was being used by the Tweeter, which doesn’t seem to have mentioned the bizarre conspiracy theories about supposed Jewish occultism.
Now I don’t know anything about Mr Davies or the group, Anti-Nazis United. There is a need to be vigilant against Nazism, as the real thing has returned in force since Brexit. This Wednesday, the I columnist, Yasmin Alibhai-Browne, wrote an op-ed piece about the disastrous effect this was having on the lives of the new immigrants from eastern Europe, as well as the native-born children and grandchildren of earlier migrants to this country. This came after the suicide a week or so ago, of a Polish girl because of the bullying she’d experienced at her school in Cornwall. Browne herself has suffered racist abuse, despite the fact that she’s married to a White British husband, and has been here since her family arrived from Uganda in the 1970s.
And real anti-Semitism has come back, most nakedly in the form of the banned Nazi youth group, National Action, who openly goose-stepped in the streets in cod-Nazi uniforms. Their speeches were vile rants about the supposed international Jewish conspiracy to enslave and destroy the White race through encouraging non-White immigration and racial intermixing. The classic Nazi bilge you can find amongst some of the Alt-Right maniacs infesting Trump’s cabinet.
We do need to combat this. But I see absolutely no desire by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism to do that. Rather, they seem determined to exaggerate the real threat of Nazism and racism in this country simply as a way to smear genuinely principled critics of Israel. As I’ve said, time and again, the people Mike’s defended are genuinely anti-racist Jews and gentiles, many of whom have suffered genuine persecution for their ethnicity and anti-racist activism. I have felt myself moved when reading about how they, or close members of their families, have been assaulted, or how their parents or grandparents were driven out of their homelands in Germany or eastern Europe.
It is, quite simply, utterly monstrous that these people should feel afraid once again because of their race, and vilified as the very people, who have persecuted them, because they see the same hate that motivated the Nazis in the Likudniks persecution of the Palestinians.
And I am afraid that Mr Davies and his fellow activists are being manipulated in this, to serve as the useful fools for bigots and racists, who hide behind the Jewish people’s history of terrible persecution in order to smear critics of their own, decades-long campaign of massacre and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Arab people of Palestine.
Mike over at Vox Political has reblogged a piece by Eoin Clarke, who’s on Twitter as @LabourEoin, showing how Labour will pay for their reforms. It’s to counter all the critics, who complain that Labour haven’t shown where they’re going to get the money from.
This also answers, in part, a deeper object that you’ll always hear from the Tories: That the country can’t afford Labour’s welfare policies. Of course it can. As Mike has shown ad infinitum, Labour kept well in budget during its time in power. The only period of massive overspending was when Gordon Brown had to pump money into the global economy after the banking crash. This wasn’t Labour’s fault. Labour had contributed to it by following the same ‘light touch’ regulation – in fact continuing the Tories’ deregulation of the financial sector – but the direct cause was the massive speculation and bizarre financial shenanigans of Goldman Sachs et al in Wall Street. I’m not a fan of Gordon Brown. Despite claims that he was ‘Old Labour’, I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that he did not share Blair’s neoliberalism. But Brown did keep us out of the Euro, and he did save the global economy.
What is clear that is the country and its people definitely can’t afford another five years of the Tories.
Thanks to the Tories’ privatisation of essential services, we are paying more for a worse service for everything from the NHS to the railways. We are paying more in subsidies for the rail network than we were when it was nationalised. And contrary to Tory claims, during the last years of British Rail when the network was operating under Operating For Quality, the company offered better value for service than any time since nationalisation or after privatisation. Since then, fares have been raised and services cut.
The same is true of the Tories’ privatisation of the NHS. Private healthcare is actually far more bureaucratic than socialised medicine, as the private healthcare companies charge for advertising and their legal department as well as administration. They also must show a profit for their shareholders. Thus, as the Tories have outsourced NHS services, a process that began with Peter Lilley and the PFI, costs have actually gone up due to the inclusion of private industry.
Not Forgetting the millions of low and unwaged workers, and the unemployed, Cameron and May have created.
There are 8 million people in ‘food insecure’ households, according to the UN. This is because Cameron and May have deliberately kept wages low, and introduced zero hours contracts, among other tricks, in order to keep labour costs down and the workforce frightened. As a result, we’ve seen millions of people forced to rely on food banks for their next meal. These are hardworking people, who have been denied a living wage, all for the profit of big corporations like Sports Direct.
Then there are the millions of unemployed and disabled, who have been thrown off benefits under the absolute flimsiest of pretexts. This has been covered by left-wing bloggers again and again. And tens of thousands have died from poverty and starvation. See the stats and biographies of some of those, who have been murdered by these policies, collected by Stilloaks, Johnny Void, Mike over at Vox Political, Another Angry Voice and so on.
It isn’t a case of Britain being unable to afford Labour. The country cannot afford not to have Labour in power.
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