This is the second part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. Martin is the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and a former presenter at RT. She is impassioned, incisive and tells the story of the victims of American and western imperialism both abroad in the Middle East and elsewhere, and the mass of severely normal Americans at home burdened with the tax bill and the sheer rapacious greed of the neoliberal, corporate elite.
She states that Boeing and the other big corporations fund the adverts in the media simply to show the journos, who’s paying their wages, and so keep in line. The media is now all about advertising, not news.
They then talk about the rampant Russia-phobia, which Martin says is causing her to lose her mind. At first she just thought it was the product of Trump and his brown shirts. Dore rips this to shreds by pointing out that it’s not Russia that preventing Americans from getting what they want on a range of issues. 90 per cent of Americans want some form of gun control. But they ain’t getting, and it’s not because of Russia. 80 per cent of the US wanted a public option for Obamacare. Didn’t get it. Not because of Russia either. Americans also want Medicare For All and free college education. Denied that too – but not by the Russians. And everybody in America wants the wars to end. And it ain’t the Russians that are preventing that from happening. The people really screwing America is Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, big pharma, and the fossil fuel industry.
Back to Boeing and its adverts, the company’s funding Meet the Press to shut the press up. Half of America doesn’t believe in climate change, because it’s just presented by the media as just another point of view. And this is because the networks are funded by the fossil fuel industry. And the networks bring on general after endless general to talk about how the US should go to war with North Korea. All they talk about is how the war should be fought, but they are never challenged on the reason why. They never bring on Medea Benjamin, the head of the anti-war opposition group, Code Pink, except to mock her. Similarly, you never see union leaders on TV, nor are there any anti-war voices. As for Brian Williams, who was sacked for telling porkies about how he took fire, his real crime was that he didn’t tell his audience that the ‘objective’ news he was broadcasting was paid for by the generals who appeared on his show.
They then talk about the revolving door between the generals and the defence contractors. After the generals retire, they go to work for some company like General Electric. Martin talks about the $500 million in one bill sponsored by John McCain, to train the Ukrainians against Russian aggression. She caustically and accurately remarks that ‘we’re now funding neo-Nazis’, after setting up the coup that overthrew their last president. America is also giving $750 million to Israel for defence.
The Russia scare was hatched by Ralph Mook and John Podesta in the Democrat party, and it’s grown into a huge conspiracy. Martin describes how she saw it all developing three years ago when she was working for RT. They first attacked Al-Jazeera, demonising it as the propaganda wing of Saddam Hussein. Then they turned against RT as a network and her personally. She states that the report on which the accusations are based is rubbish. It looks like it was half written by some unpaid intern. There’s that contempt for any truth or real fact in this document. She noticed when one of RT’s presenters publicly resigned over Putin’s annexation of the Crimea. That was a psy-ops operation launched by William Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century. There was absolute no proof that Russia was meddling in American democracy. And half of the document attacked Martin personally. It was fomenting radical discontent, and the elite hated the way they covered third parties, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street. so talking about how half of America has less than $1,000 in savings is now Russian propaganda. It’s at this point that Martin states she never said anything in praise in Putin. She states that there are plenty of leftists and socialists working at the network, not because they like Putin, but because there is nowhere else to go.
They then talk about how the Democrat party is full of people, who voted for Bush twice. And particularly the way Keith Olberman, whom Martin had previously admired, came out and publicly apologised to George Dubya. She states that Bush is a war criminal. He set up a gulag (Guantanamo) killed and tortured people wholesale, but when he appeared on Oprah she held his hand as if he was Buddha! Martin said she realised Obama was a fake when he refused to prosecute the war criminals. So now they have Trump, who’s hated because he’s a narcissist, but knows he will have people applauding every time he bombs people. They ask rhetorically whether the media will apologise to Nixon if Trump wins a second term.
They then go on to discuss how Trump is actually less dangerous, and more of a threat to the establishment, then Mike Pence, the Vice-President. Martin describes Pence, with good reason, as a ‘Christian ISIS who wants to kill gays’. He’s psychotic, but you wouldn’t have the cult of personality you have with Trump. She states that the Christian Evangelicals love him, as without him they wouldn’t have got in. And so Pence and DeVos are quite happy to use him as the fall guy, taking the rap for the policies they’re pushing through Congress. Trump represents the worst elements in society – the cult of celebrity, of reality TV shows, the adulation given to millionaires. She states that Joyce Behar, another personality, was paradoxically the voice of reason when she said on one interview that things wouldn’t be better if they only got rid of Trump. No, not if that meant Mike Pence becoming president. They talk about how, when Bush was in power, everyone talked about Bush Derangement Disorder. Then it was Obama Derangement Disorder, and now its Trump Derangement Disorder. But Dore also points out that progressives dodged a bullet with Trump. Voting for the lesser of two evils meant that they got Trump, who is too incompetent to get his policies through.
A little while ago I put up a post commenting on Jacob Rees-Mogg, the aristocratic Tory MP for north-east Somerset just south of me, his vile voting record and his disgusting views on abortion. Mogg caused massive offence when he appeared on television and stated that, as a Roman Catholic, he did not believe in gay marriage nor abortion under any circumstances, even when the mother was the victim of rape or incest.
Even when abortion was banned as an illegal operation in this country, it was still permitted in exceptional circumstances, such as when the pregnancy posed a threat to the mother’s life and situations like those above. The British public, and especially women, were extremely vocal in their condemnation of his views. This includes the great commenters on this blog, who were very much aware of the suffering this would inflict on women, who had suffered those assaults. And this is quite apart from the issue of a woman’s sovereign right over her own body. As one of my cousins remarked ‘F**k him! It’s my body! He’s not telling me what I can put in it!’
I also said in my article that I was sure that, the Tory party being what it is, there is probably more than a little hypocrisy in Mogg’s attitude. I hope his wife and daughters never suffer these attacks, but if they were raped and became pregnant, it would not surprise me if his lordship discreetly made arrangements for a termination.
Mercifully for Mogg’s family, this hasn’t occurred. But he has shown himself to be a massive hypocrite. Mike today put up the story, broken by the Sunday Mirror, that Mogg’s investment firm, Somerset Capital Management, has £5 million worth of shares in Kalbe Farma, an Indonesian pharmaceutical company, which manages a drug used in illegal abortions.
The drug is intended to treat stomach ulcers, but abortions are illegal in Indonesia. It is also known to trigger abortions, and is used to do this in the country’s illegal abortion clinics.
Mogg, however, has defended himself by stating that abortions are illegal in Indonesia, a condition which would satisfy the Vatican. And he can’t really help it, as ‘the world isn’t as we would wish it.’ So he’s not a hypocrite.
As Mike states, this isn’t a defence, and Mogg very definitely is.
I think Mogg’s attitude is actually rather worse than simple hypocrisy, but active complacency when it comes to what can be a life-threatening operation when carried out by the untrained. The clinics that use the drug to induce abortions are illegal, which casts very severe doubts on the medical competence of those performing them. When the operation was illegal here and elsewhere in the West not so long ago, women did die from bleeding and other injuries when they were forced to have backstreet abortions. It’s horrific that this may be happening in Indonesia.
I have to say, I share some of Mogg’s distaste for abortion. I believe in the fundamental sanctity of human life, and would rather the operation wasn’t used simply for contraceptive purposes. Not when contraception in various forms is legal and easily available. But the world isn’t as I would like it, and Mogg’s views are hypocritical and repellent. And in this case, they are a real danger to women’s health.
Mogg himself is being touted by the Tories as a possible replacement for Theresa May. He shouldn’t be. His voting record shows that he is consistently for making the poor poorer, and keeping those of his own class as rich as possible. He started his political career by touring Fife as its Tory candidate, telling the guid folk up there why they should vote to keep an hereditary House of Lords. In 2014 he attended the annual dinner of the Fascist Traditional Britain Group, and when this was exposed he tried to excuse himself by saying he didn’t know what they stood for when he got the invitation. Which I find ‘a likely story’ (heavy irony). Abortion has been legal here for decades, and whatever he thinks of it, I hope it has preserved vulnerable women from death and mutilation at the hands of untrained quacks. His views are not just offensive, but a real danger to the health of the women of this country. He should be kept away from power, not given it.
This morning Mike’s put up a piece attacking the mainstream media for their constant libels, falsehoods and misrepresentation of the Labour party, and their apparent success in convincing the general public that Labour, at least under Jeremy Corbyn, is unelectable.
Bernie Sanders wrote a piece in one of the American magazines a few weeks ago criticising the power of the corporate media in the US, and the way it constituted a genuine threat to democracy. The clip below is from the Humanist Report, whose host describes the article and Bernie’s argument.
Bernie stated that, as a rule, the issues that concern most working Americans are treated the least seriously by the corporate media, with those of severe concern to ordinary folks given the least serious coverage. The media also likes to present ‘politics as entertainment’, which explains the rise of Trump, an entertainer, who knows how to exploit this type of media coverage.
The media is also biased against working class issues and the politicos who stand up for working people, because of the power of the advertisers, in the extreme wealth of corporate presenters, and the shrinking number of corporations and the immensely wealthy tycoons that own them. Sanders points out that you don’t see any in-depth articles attacking the bloated prices for prescription drugs, that have made them unaffordable to the poor. That’s because American newspapers and corporate media make part of their revenue from the advertising from the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.
The news presenters audiences see on their TV screens are also immensely rich through multi-million dollar contracts with the TV networks. Sanders points out that this doesn’t make them evil, but it does distance them from the bread and butter interests that matter to your average middle class person. Similarly, the number of companies that own the US media have also declined. There used to be about nine different companies owning American broadcasters. Now there are six. Thus the American media is increasingly in the hands of a small number of extremely powerful magnates. There are about 15 of these, whose individual wealth is in the billions.
This is dangerous because the corporate media still have the power to shape public opinion. For example, when Bernie was running for the presidential nomination last year, there was a more or less complete news blackout own him. But they gave plenty of coverage to that Nazi buffoon, Donald Trump. Academic studies, such as one made by Harvard, show that the corporate controlled media is effective in deciding which issues matters to Americans, such as terrorism.
The presenter states that this has been good for alternative media – for the Humanist Report, Secular Talk and The Young Turks, as people are increasingly turning to them. But it also means that the corporate-controlled media are failing in their job. They are meant to be the ‘fifth arm of government’, which keeps power in check and accountable to the American people. But they aren’t. They represent the aims and wishes of an immensely wealthy elite against those of the American people as a whole.
According to polls, over half of Americans now want a single-payer healthcare system. One fifth of Americans would be unable to afford private healthcare insurance without Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But Donald Trump wants to repeal Obamacare and privatise Medicare and Medicaid, the state healthcare system that exists to pay for the medical treatment of those Americans too poor to afford private health insurance.
In this clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, the comedian goes to Hollywood Boulevard, where protestors are holding a demonstration, ‘Our First Stand’, demanding single-payer healthcare, and talks to some of the people there. The demonstration’s on both sides of the street outside the famous Chinese Theatre, and the protestors are a mixture of Asian Americans and Whites. One of the ladies he talks too is an Asian woman, who tells him how her husband has a congenital heart condition. Thanks to this, before the passing of Obamacare, they found it extremely difficult to get health insurance. Now she and he are frightened that Trump’s threatened repeal with leave him without it, as well as millions of other Americans, who are similarly affected. She is also concerned and upset that Congress just doesn’t seem to understand the needs and wishes of ordinary Americans like her.
He also talks to a White woman, who agrees with him that none of this would probably have happened if Hillary Clinton had won. Trump’s victory has galvanised people to protest. But like the young man Dore talks to at the beginning of the clip, she recognises that the corporatist Democrats are part of the problem. She was one of Bernie Sanders’ supporters, and she is aware and angered by the way his campaign for the presidency was blocked and defeated not by the Republicans, but by Killary and the section of the Democrat party that care more about winning big donations from the big corporations and representing them, than working for Mr and Mrs. Average Joe and Josie.
The crowd has placards saying ‘Medicare for All’, and one guy has a sign emblazoned with ‘F*ck Big Pharma’. It’s a slogan with which Dore fully approves, and he stands next to it to show his support and get it on camera. The crowd are all shouting slogans like ‘Healthcare is a right, not a privilege’.
This isn’t just an American issue. We’re faced with the same kind of situation in Britain and particularly in England. The Tories and New Labour have been trying to privatise the health service gradually since Thatcher won the general election in 1979. 55 out of 166 local health authorities now have problems finding beds, thanks to funding cuts imposed by Jeremy Hunt and his mistress, Theresa May. More and more vital NHS services are being rationed and contracted out to private healthcare providers. People are suffering because of cancelled operations, difficulties reaching the doctor, and long waiting lists.
All manufactured to give private healthcare providers access to a lucrative market that has previously been tied to the state.
And if Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron and May get their way, we will have the same problems over here. Private healthcare is massively expensive and very inefficient, whatever tripe the Tories, BUPA, Virgin Healthcare or Circle Health try to tell you. In America, up to 40 per cent of a company’s budget may go on administration. Pretty much like it was in the private hospitals in this country before the NHS. Private healthcare only works for those who are fit. For everyone else, especially those with congenital conditions, like the husband of the lady in the above video, it’s exorbitantly expensive. Private hospitals are smaller than state, and the private healthcare industry in Britain depends massively on state support.
There are demonstrations in this country against the Tory privatisation of the NHS. But we also need to bear in mind that, just like the corporate wing of the Democrats worked to undermine Bernie Sanders’ campaign, so the Blairites in the Labour party, led by John Mann, Hilary Benn and the rest of them, have tried to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership with the connivance of the mainstream media. Corbyn has made it clear he intends to renationalise the NHS, in contrast to the Blairites, who have tried so hard to privatise it.
Mike has put up a couple of very chilling articles about Paul Mason’s speculation of where the anti-Corbyn rebels in the Labour party will try to take the coup next. Mason points out that they are largely silent in defending or promoting Owen Smith. He notes that Smiffy was one of those Labour politicos, who sounded left-wing when their real political views were on the right – neoliberal economics intended to keep the Labour party under the control of big finance, the big pharmaceutical companies and the merchants of death. He goes on to state that at the Gateshead and Doncaster hustings, both broadcast by the Beeb, it became evident that Smiffy doesn’t believe in anything. There was no clear indication when he became converted to soft-left Corbynism, but without the unpleasant bits challenging capitalism and big business left out. He speculates that Smiff, and Angela Eagle before him, is only there as a kind of placeholder, to remove Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbynites from control of the Labour party, after which the resources of Progress, Saving Labour and Tomorrow’s Labour will be used to bring the party once more under corporate control.
Mason goes further and suggests that the next phase of the coup will come after the special conference on the 24th of September. The Blairites are formulating new polls to show that the public prefers Theresa May to Jeremy Corbyn. They will then draw up a list of constituencies which they claim will be lost to Labour come a general election. This will be conveniently leaked to their friends in the right-wing press. Then the bullying and intimidation of Corbyn by Labour’s backbenchers will begin anew, with Smith smiling approvingly, but not taking part, and making disapproving noises occasionally castigating such intimidation. They will then start more legal actions to get their grubby mitts on the party’s name and assets. This is what the establishment of Saving Labour and Tomorrow’s Labour is for. By Christmas, Mason predicts, they will have engineered a split in the Labour party to remove Corbyn’s 300,000+ supporters. As for Smith, he will be discarded. They never took him seriously, and he was never anything more than a tool to prise Corbyn out of office.
This is just purely destructive, but it shows the power of corporate big business in New Labour. It also shows, as Mike points out, the sheer irrationality of the Blairites that they are prepared to purge the majority of the party’s members, and even sabotage its electoral chances, just to keep control. It doesn’t matter how many times the accusations of anti-Semitism and misogyny are refuted, they keep being repeated. Just like Goebbels demanded they should be in his strategy of using the one big lie.
This is disgusting, and shows why the Blairites themselves should be removed from power. They should never have been given it in the first place.
Mike also put up another piece reporting that Owen Smith had been verbally tackled by a former miner over his use of Orgreave, as the place to launch his policies. Smudger finally unveiled his programme of reform at the town a few days ago. Of the twenty policies he announced, Mike reports that 13 of them were either lifted from Jeremy Corbyn, or were inspired by him.
But what angered the miner, John Dunn, was that Smiffy had chosen the town as the place to make his grand statement. Orgreave was the site of one of the most notorious incidents during the 1980s miners’ strike, when the police physically attacked the striking miners. Footage of the struggle was edited by the BBC, and then broadcast to show the miners as the aggressors, rather than the victims. Dunn said on his Facebook page that he had asked Smiffy to stop what Dunn saw as ‘shameless opportunism’. Smudger then started saying something about his own background in South Wales, but this cut no ice with the irate miner. Dunn reminded him that when Smudger was working for a pharmaceutical company, he and the others were struggling for justice. He further asked Smiffy why, if he was so keen on the issue of Orgreave, he hadn’t signed Ian Lavery’s early day motions about it. He then compared Smudger to the UDM scabs, who undermined the strike. Smudger didn’t have an answer to that, and ‘scuttled’ back into his car.
Mr Dunn is, of course, quite right. New Labour has done everything to cave in to the Tories’ demands to destroy the abilities of the trade unions to fight to protect people’s jobs and employment rights. Blair himself threatened to cut the party’s ties with the trade unions, if he didn’t get his way reforming the party’s constitution. Once in power, he did everything he could to minimise their importance within the party, despite the fact that the Labour party was partly founded to defend the trade unions and their right to strike after the Taff Vale judgement. As for Smudger himself, he worked for Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, for which Smiffy issued a PR puff lauding Blair’s privatisation of the NHS as a great opportunity for the company. In parliament, Smiff abstained from voting on the Tories’ welfare cuts.
Smiffy therefore stands for everything which the Labour party was founded to oppose – the impoverishment and exploitation of the poor and working people, the denial and sale of welfare support and healthcare, and the expanded power of private industry and corporate profit, against declining wages and conditions for workers and employees. Yet, like New Labour, he continues to use the iconography and rhetoric of radical Labour history to present himself as far more radical than he actually is. He isn’t. New Labour has consistently pursued a strategy of appealing to big business and swing voters in marginal constituencies. Corbyn has challenged this tactic by articulating a genuinely left-wing programme of renationalisation, renewed trade union rights, and genuine welfare reforms. This is ardently supported by an expanded party membership. This has clearly frightened New Labour, which took the working class for granted. So they have now taken to adopting some of his policies, and invoking the memories of past battles between Labour and capital. But it’s all a sham. Smudger’s new, left-wing policies are simply a disguise for the neoliberalism that he really favours. He and the rest of the 172 anti-Corbynite MPs have shown themselves willing to lie and smear in order to discredit Corbyn and his supporters anyway they can. I have no doubts that Smudger’s lying about these policies as well. Once in power, they’re liable to be swiftly forgotten, or watered down to the extent that they’re useless. Or maybe he’ll just say that the time isn’t right just now, so wait a bit.
We’ve waited too long. We’ve waited for over thirty years of privatisation and welfare cuts. It’s long past the time this was all stopped, and Smudger, Eagle and the other Red Tories voted out in favour of the true members and supporters of the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn and his followers.
In response to one of my previous posts about Owen Smith, Michelle posted this comment about an article by the former ambassador Craig Murray discussing Smudger, and his fake credentials as the ‘soft left’ alternative to Jeremy Corbyn. She wrote:
Smudger’s attendance at arms fairs and defence industry events should make him genuinely anathema to anybody, who takes seriously the Labour party’s proud tradition of campaigning for peace.
Or who simply thinks that the British taxpayer deserves to get value for money. A little while ago I blogged about an article in a past issue of the parapolitical magazine, Lobster, where its editor, Robin Ramsay, reviewed a book that laid bare just what an horrendous scam the arms industry is. Put simply, it’s a way for the arms companies to sell massively overpriced and frequently seriously defective equipment to the government, boosting their profits massively in the process. And all this quite apart from the actual morality of the trade in weapons.
There was a time a few years ago under John Major and then Tony Blair when it seemed the arms industry was never out of the pages of Private Eye for the above reason. The big arms companies were selling extremely expensive and often seriously defective kit to the government, often way behind schedule and well over budget. These stories were also very revealing, in that during the negotiations for these armaments the revolving door between the arms industry and senior civil servants in the Ministry of Defence loomed very large. This is noxious enough, but some of the substandard kit that has been fobbed off on the British armed forces is so faulty, that it has cost the lives of servicemen and -women.
As for Trident, looking through the Cheltenham branch of Waterstones on Friday, I found a book criticising it, called simply, The Case Against Trident. I’m afraid I can’t remember who wrote it, or who the publisher was, but I expect that you should be able to find it out easily enough through a quick search on Amazon. As for whether the wretched missile would even work, I can remember the Scots comedian Billy Connolly taking the mick out of the arms industry on that score in the 1980s on his album, Billy and Albert. He made the point that nuclear weapons could be filled with all kinds of rubbish, as ‘you can exactly take it down the car park and try it out.’ No, indeed, and a lot of the rubbish the arms industry has sold the Ministry of Defence and the British taxpayer, has been passed off precisely because you can’t.
But Murray’s article is also interesting because of what he says about Smiff’s attitude to the NHS. A day or so ago I published another piece reporting that Smudger had been a PR spin doctor for Pfizer, during which time he was a very keen supporter of the Blairite’s programme of privatising the NHS. He quotes Smudger as saying
“The focus groups also explored areas of choice that do not yet exist in the UK – most specifically the use of direct payments and the ability to choose to go directly to a specialist without first having to see the GP.”
He also notes that Smiff went to Pfizer directly from a job with the Labour government, and has been the Head of Policy and Government Relations for Pfizer. And the pharma company has donated handsomely to Progress – £53,000.
He concludes
I do not doubt Owen Smith’s expertise in brand positioning. I expect that there are indeed a large number of Labour Party members who might vote for a left wing alternative to Corbyn. But I also suspect that Smith has adopted the PR man’s typical contempt for the public, who are not as stupid as he seems to think. There is no evidence whatsoever that Smith is a left winger. There is every evidence that he is another New Labour unprincipled and immoral careerist, adopting a left wing pose that he thinks will win him votes.
People will notice, Owen. They really are not that stupid.
Please go to Murray’s article. It’s well worth reading, especially as Smiff’s history contradicts his excuse of his job of Pfizer that it was before he was a member of the Labour party. This shows that it’s a porky. He already was a member of the Labour party, and left it to go to Pfizer.
There really is nothing trustworthy or remotely admirable about him whatsoever. He really is another Red Tory desperate to sell of the Health Service and grind down the poor to get his share of the big profits his corporate masters want. Now wonder he so despises Corbyn and Momentum.
More Chunky Mark, the Artist Taxi Driver, I’m afraid. I’m reblogging him because he does have genuinely pertinent and incisive observations about the current leadership challenge against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party.
He begins this rant by talking about how the media just repeats its lies and smears against Corbyn, until people automatically believe they’re the truth. He doesn’t mention it, but this is exactly the tactic advocated by Goebbels and Hitler for spreading Nazi propaganda. You start with a big lie, keep the message simple, and carry on banging away at it until enough people believe it. And they will.
He then moves on to discussing how Angela Eagle has lost her bid for leadership to Clive Owen, who boasted that he was normal man, married, with three kids. Chunky Mark sees this as a further rejection of socialist values in the Labour party, in that a female candidate once again lost to a man. He notes that Condoleeza Rice, the woman of colour in George Dubya’s cabinet of neocon monstrosities, observed that Corbyn’s opponents are all men, but they use the testimony of women as their weapons against Corbyn. ‘So this is it,’ asks the Chunky One rhetorically, ‘women are just cannon fodder for the men in this contest?’ At the heart of his outrage here appears to be the allegation that Smith was deliberately playing on anti-gay prejudice when he stressed his family background, as Eagle has said she’s a lesbian. I don’t know how far that was the case. Eagle had on 6 per cent of the vote before she started out, so I think it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that she’d lose. But this doesn’t mean she wasn’t used along the way.
As for Owen Smith himself, he’s another shabby PR spin doctor, like David Cameron. And he’s not untouched by scandals. Among the firms he worked for was a big pharmaceutical company that was fined $762 million for promoting their anti-cancer drug in such a way that it would cause people to die. And before then, Smith worked for Pfizer, another profiteering big pharma company. Smith quotes Stephen Kinnock, the son of Neil Kinnock, himself now an MP, who has said that if Corbyn wins, it’s all over for Labour. Chunky Mark observers caustically that this is what the Labour values now come down to, being a PR merchant for a corrupt pharma company that miss-sells drugs and kills people.
Chunky Mark notes that the real plotters are the 172 Labour MPs. The Labour party, thanks to Corbyn, is the biggest political movement in Europe, but the Labour MPs can’t stand it because it doesn’t represent their ideas for the world. He states that he was there at the election with John Snow, when one after another the Labour MPs walked out in a huff after he won. Corbyn represents the dreams of people, who believe another world of possible. And the Chunky One goes on to state that this is all about your dreams, who represents you in parliament, not big business.
With Hillary Clinton looking like she’s going to be the Democrat candidate for the Whitehouse, The Empire File’s Abby Martin takes a good, long look at what Hillary really represents in this video. And it’s ugly. Very ugly.
Hillary’s campaign is heavily backed by corporate donors. These are most notoriously the Wall Street banks she has bailed out, including Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, but also the private prison industry, the pharmaceuticals, private healthcare, private schools and just about every other fat cat big multinational. Contributors to the Clinton Foundation have included the Saudis and Victor Pinchuk, the oligarch now partly responsible for turning Ukraine, the home of Gogol, Mussorgsky, and Nestor Makhno (for the Anarchists out there) into a post-Soviet banana republic. She’s also supported fracking and the NAFTA agreement that has outsourced jobs from America, as well as destroyed the industries of the other countries that have signed it.
While Bernie Sanders is the people’s candidate, Hillary’s been helped out by the system of superdelegates that the Democrats put in place way back in the 1980s to stop popular, populist candidates coming through. The votes of these privileged individuals vastly outweigh those of the ordinary delegates. And 1/3 of Hillary’s are unsurprisingly drawn from big business.
Hillary’s political history may also be described as ‘chequered’. This would be a euphemism. She started out as a Republican, campaigning for Barry Goldwater, the notorious pro-Segregation candidate. She’s tried to shrug this off as a case of personal naivety, but her activism on his behalf came after the initial peaceful protests, the freedom bus rides. She was part of the Republican reaction.
Her career in the Democrats has been untainted with racism either. The Democrats lost the Southern White vote after they embraced a minimal welfare establishment – medicare and Medicaid – and desegregation. Bill and Hillary attempted to reverse this, and win back White voters by launching the New Democrats in the ’70s and ’80s. These had an anti-welfare, pro-death penalty stance, calculate to appeal to White voters. There was also a strong racist undercurrent to her rhetoric. The Clintons attacked ‘welfare queens’ and ranted about urban ‘superpredators’, feral young males, who in the media were almost always identified with Blacks. She’s tried to distance herself from her past there, apologising for what she claims was a poor choice of words. They weren’t poorly chosen. Quite the opposite. She knew precisely what she was doing.
As Bill and her also know what they’re doing to the poor peasants of the world under the guise of charitable assistance. They’ve set up an organisation to provide help to the peasant farmers of the Developing World, such as the people of Africa. But it’s not a charity. Far from it. It’s a for-profit organisations, and the big businesses that back it expect to get something back in return. It’s another way of enslaving the Developing World’s peasant farmers under the guise of assisting them.
The video also documents her hawkish attitudes to defence, from selling arms to the Saudis, helping organise a coup against a democratically elected government in Honduras, and most notoriously, supporting the invasion of Iraq. She also tried to distance herself from this decision, but history shows that she was strongly in favour of the Iraqi invasion and urged her nation to support George Bush. She has also been responsible for the carnage into which Libya has descended through arming the rebels, who overthrew and killed Colonel Gaddafy. She’s shown on TV laughing about Gaddafy’s execution. The result has been what everyone else warned her about – the emergence of an unstable state governed by Islamist militias. She also wants America to ramp up its presence in Afghanistan. Martin states that Hillary stands for perpetual war.
And most chillingly, Hillary has repeatedly stated that she’s in favour of war with Iran, including the use of nuclear weapons. Again, it’s hard to disagree with Martin when she says that this makes Hillary immensely dangerous, as a war with Iran would be much far-reaching than the Iraq invasion. Indeed it would. It’d be a recipe for global chaos, and would mean that America was effectively at war with the whole Shi’a Muslim world.
And Martin makes it very clear, that as a woman she rejects Hillary’s campaign to gain women’s votes, because she leaves out immigrant women, poor women, and the women of the nations she’s bombed. Here’s the video:
Okay, this is another video from The Young Turks across the Pond. I’m reblogging it here, because the attitude of the Republican senator, who made this stupid speech is exactly the same as the Conservatives over here. It’s so similar that I wonder how long it’ll be before Ian Duncan Smith, Katie Hopkins, Louise Mensch or some other Tory rentagob makes precisely the same argument in parliament, or in the pages of the Sun or the Mail.
The Republican senator, Tom Cotton, gave a speech to the right-wing Heritage Foundation arguing that disability benefits should be abolished because they act as a disincentive for the disabled to get jobs. He stated that disability benefits encourage increasing numbers of people to stop working to go on them. Eventually there comes a point, according to Cotton, where the sheer number of people on disability benefits drives companies away from an area. Without the prospect of work, the people then turn to drugs like heroin.
The Turks’ Ana Kasparian points out that the heroin epidemic in America isn’t due to disability benefits. It’s due to the pharmaceutical companies putting pressure on doctors to overprescribe massively oxycotin. When this drug then becomes unavailable, those who have become addicted to it then try to self-medicate with heroin.
The Turks’ other anchor, Cenk Uygur, states he has some sympathy with Cotton, on the grounds that if benefits are paid at a rate above that of normal wages, most reasonable people will try to go on them instead. But he argues that isn’t the reason why Cotton has made this argument. Cotton is talking about the depressed communities in the Appalachians – the ‘Rust Belt’. These communities have been hard hit by the decline of the American manufacturing industry. Unlike Pittsburgh, the Appalachians haven’t been able to boost their economy with the introduction of new technology. So Cotton is attempting to divert attention from industry’s inability to create employment in the area by blaming the people themselves for their problems.
Uygur and Kasparian also start talking about the double standards the Repugs adopt when talking about drug addiction amongst White and Black communities. When it comes to White communities, they’re much less harsh and start to pretend to feel the pain of those communities suffering from it. ‘Cause those people aren’t Black. They also do so because many of the politicos’ own families are addicted to something unpleasant. To properly demonise something, they have to pretend it’s foreign. Uygur states that in the 1920s, when the US outlawed cannabis, they renamed it ‘marijuana’ in order to link it mentally with Mexicans. As for the corrosive effect of the pharmaceutical industry on American politics, the industry is the largest political donor.
The Tories share Cotton’s attitudes to disability. They too are determined to stop people claiming it, along with other benefits. As for the pharmaceutical industry, this is one of the problems that come with privatised medicine. So if the Tories get rid of the NHS, we’ll suffer the same phenomenon over here. And the Heritage Foundation has influenced British politics. Very many of the Tories on the extreme Right-wing of the party, like one Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes, have been part of sections of the party, that have links to the Foundation and similar right-wing organisations. Cotton is saying what a fair number of Tories are thinking, and what they’d like to say if they could get away with it.
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