I go this email yesterday from Laura Pidcock. Despite the Labour party haemorrhaging members at the rate of 2,000 a day because of Starmer’s intolerance and determination to purge the party of socialists and members with real, traditional Labour views, there is a fightback going on within the party itself. It’s composed of groups like the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance and the Labour Assembly Against Austerity. They’re field six candidates for the elections to the NEC, Pidcock herself is one of them. Her messages reads
ALERT: Support Socialist Candidates for Labour’s NEC
📣 Show your support: Retweet here / Facebook share here – read more here and my article here 📣 The scale and intensity of the challenges facing working class people here and across the world needs to be treated with the seriousness and urgency it deserves. We are facing a prolonged jobs and workers’ rights crisis, an environmental emergency, a global health pandemic and a huge political crisis. This pandemic has also shone a spotlight on deep structural inequalities, and liberation for all must be at the heart of our agenda.
The need for mass resistance against the Tories and for socialist solutions to the crises we face is why I’m standing to be your representative on Labour’s NEC and to ask for your support for the six #GrassrootsVoice candidates supported by the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance and a range of groups including the Labour Assembly Against Austerity. Our platform calls for Labour to commit to “expanding democratic public ownership and universal provision of universal public services and to guaranteeing the building blocks of a high-quality life including education, housing, healthcare, social security and social care.”
📣 Show your support: Retweet here / Facebook share here – read more here and my article here📣
We are standing to uphold these socialist principles and policies, to fight the Tories now and to insist that people and heath come before profit. We need to defend and push beyond the 2019 manifesto in order to achieve a transformative Labour government that can tackle the crises we face. And we must always remember that the membership is the Labour Party, which is why we must strongly defend democracy in our party.
To help us achieve a Labour Party that will fight the Tories and for a socialist Labour Government that will deliver the radical change we need, please support myself, Nadia Jama, Ann Henderson, Yasmine Dar, Mish Rahman and Gemma Bolton.
Best wishes, Laura Pidcock, Labour NEC candidate.
HELP THE TEAM WIN – CAMPAIGN CHECKLIST
When is your CLP deciding its nominations?
CLPs will be making nominations for the Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) between now and midnight on Sunday 27 September (when nominations close).
CLP Section NEC election – Nominate the CLGA 6
We are supporting the six candidates backed by the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance for the CLP Section of the NEC. They are standing as #GrassrootsVoice and campaigning for a transformative Labour Government, socialist policies and party democracy. The candidates are: Gemma Bolton, Yasmine Dar, Ann Henderson, Nadia Jama, Laura Pidcock and Mish Rahman. You can read more here.
Whilst there are nine CLP Section NEC seats up for election, the CLGA is only supporting six candidates. If it supported more it could result in it winning fewer seats. This is because the Party is introducing an STV system into this election. Therefore the principal goal at each Nominations Meeting should be to get these six candidates nominated.
Youth and Disabled Members Reps
The Labour Assembly Against Austerity also urges you to support Lara McNeill for NEC Youth Representative and Ellen Morrison for NEC Disabled Members Representative.
I have absolutely no reservations about supporting these candidates. Forty years of Thatcherism, privatisation and the destruction of the welfare state has and is reducing the working people of this country to beggary. The right-wing members of the party bureaucracy put in place under Blair and Brown are intolerant, bullying and partisan, responsible for throwing the elections. They have also consistently lied, smeared and grossly maligned real, decent anti-racist women and men simply for being socialists and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. It was someone on the NEC, for example, who smeared Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. No doubt one of the nameless snakes now threatening to sue the authors of the suppressed report which showed how vile and racist the Blairite apparatchiks were.
I’m aware that Pidcock has said that they can’t field as many candidates as people would like for fear that more would lose. They’re obviously keen not to spread their resources too thinly. Nevertheless, this is an excellent start.
I feel that we have to mobilise our forces within the party against Starmer and the Blairites, because if we leave, we’re giving them what they want. A smaller, elite-dominated party centralised around a right-wing leadership, that represents corporate donors and the establishment rather than socialists and working people.
Supporting the Centre-Left candidates for the NEC elections is a great place to start.
A few days ago I posted up a piece about the death of Jody Whiting, another victim of the sanctions system. Whiting had been sanctioned because she missed a jobcentre interview. In fact, she was in hospital at the time, being treated for a cyst on the brain. In despair at having no money to support herself and her children, she went into a local wood and hanged herself. She joined hundreds of others, who have died of starvation or taken their own lives.
Florence, one of the great commenters on this blog, posted these observations on how the system contravenes UN human rights legislation, and is scathing about its architect, the Blairite Labour MP Yvette Cooper.
Under the UN Treaty on Human Rights it is illegal to use starvation as a punishment, I understand. Yet this is exactly what the sanctions are designed to do – it is stated in the DWP Handbook which state that sanctions will produce physical and mental “discomfort”.
(And while Yvette Cooper is being lauded for her “Windrush” success by the RW journalists and PLP (ignoring Diane Abbot, David Lammy and the others who have done all the work – racist much?) she was the one who designed the DWP system much as it is today, persecuting the people who need the Social Security safety net. Yes, the Tories have made it worse, but she gifted them this system of assessments and sanctions. Yet even after the UN report on the abuse of human rights by the DWP, she made election promises to be “harder than” IDS on the ‘scroungers and frauds’. I hope that she is not proposed again as a contender for the Labour Leadership, she is unfit on that very simple, human test.)
The sanction system has gone far beyond physical and mental discomfort, and is responsible for real suffering and death. Medical doctors and psychiatrists have reported how it has pushed patients into depression and anxiety, and made those, who already suffer from it worse. Much worse.
As for the media ignoring the attacks on the Windrush deportations by Diane Abbott, David Lammy and others to concentrate on Yvette Cooper, this does show racial bias. The right-wing media hate Diane Abbott and do everything they can to attack and humiliate her, because she is left-wing and passionately anti-racist. David Lammy, I believe, was one of those responsible for Operation Black Vote in the 1990s. This was to encourage more Black people to vote in elections, so their issues would be taken more seriously by politicians and there would be more BAME people elected to parliament. Which is certainly enough to bring down the rage of the Sun and the Mail. And I can remember how racist the right-wing press were in the 1980s, and their attacks on the Black MPs then elected to parliament, like Diane Abbott.
The media has also been constantly promoting and supporting the Blairites against Corbyn and the real Labour moderates. It’s because the Blairites are all Thatcherites, and share their hatred of nationalisation, workers’ rights and the welfare state. A little while ago when the Blairites looked like they were facing the threat of deselection, the Torygraphy/Mail journo, Simon Heffer wrote a piece claiming that they were ‘thoroughly decent people’ being bullied and undermined by the evil Fascist Trotskyite Marxists of Momentum. I’ve no doubt they’d like to promote her as the British version of Hillary Clinton, just as they were supporting all the female candidates against Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. If one of them was elected head of the party, it would be a success for women. Despite the policies they stand for – more austerity, low pay, privatisation, including that of the NHS, and outsourcing harming women the most.
Cooper’s statement that a Labour government would be even harder than the Tories on the unemployed showed just how out of touch she was with the realities of life on the breadline. It also showed that whatever they were, the Blairites aren’t ‘thoroughly decent people’. They did everything they could to smear and undermine Corbyn and his supporters. Heffer and the right were claiming that Momentum is some kind of far left entryist group, and compared them to Militant when that group was intriguing against the right-wing members of the Labour party when Kinnock was leader. But Momentum represents traditional Labour politics and voters. The real intriguers, who have constantly been trying to rig everything in their favour, are the Blairites.
Cooper isn’t solely responsible for the sanctions system. As Jo, another of the great commenters on this blog said, the Tories didn’t need to pick it up. But they did, and massively expanded it. So there is now something like a quarter of million people, who can only get their food from food banks because of the deliberate poverty the Tories have inflicted through the system.
Cooper and the Blairites are a disgrace. They should either back the real Labour activists and supporters standing behind Corbyn, or else they should resign and go to a right-wing party, that better reflects their political beliefs.
One of the great commenters on this blog, 61chrissterry, also blogs himself about disability issues. Looking briefly at his site just now, I found an article he’d reblogged from Autism Parenting, an American magazine for the parents of children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. These disorders cover autism, which can vary greatly in terms of severity, and Asperger’s, which is now increasingly seen as simply high-functioning autism. It’s a condition that affects many children. The current policy is to include autistic children, except when severely disabled, in mainstream schools, and teacher training now includes course on special needs children. These include autistic, dyslexic and children with Attention Deficit Disorder. The article in the magazine discusses ways parents can get help. It talks about the social security budget and the available funding for children with autism, and Medicaid. The article is about a course the writer attended in South Carolina.
I don’t know if this will be any help to anyone over the other side of the Pond with an autistic child, or has friends or relatives that do. But I mention it because it might, and it may interest British and European readers, who want to keep informed about what is going on internationally in the way autistic people are being treated by the state.
I’ve mentioned several times over the past week or so the hypocritical smears the Tory press – the Torygraph, Scum and Heil – have published claiming that Jeremy Corbyn was a supporter of IRA terrorism, and, by implication, of the Manchester terror attack last Monday. Corbyn wasn’t. He did support attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Troubles through negotiation, something Thatcher and the Tories loudly denied they were doing, but did anyway. Both the Belfast Telegraph and the Irish Times have hailed the Labour leader as a man, who strove for the best for the people of Ireland and Ulster. Ian Paisley’s wife even said that Corbyn was courteous and polite.
So, not quite the fanatical supporter of Irish nationalist terrorism these papers wanted to smear him as.
And the Tories, under Thatcher, did their own supporting of terrorist violence in Ulster. Peter Taylor’s 1999 documentary, Loyalists, featured interviews with leading Ulster Loyalist politicos and terrorists, one of whom admitted that they were getting information from British intelligence in the late 1980s allowing them to kill members of the IRA and other Republicans.
And that hasn’t been the only incident, where terrorists supported by the British state have committed atrocities. The last one was just a week ago. In Manchester.
Jim Kavanagh writing in Counterpunch has a piece pointing out that the family of the suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, were members of a Libyan Islamist terrorist group, who were given sanctuary in Britain as part of NATO’s recruitment of such terrorists in their campaign to overthrow Colonel Qaddafy. He attacks the racist double standards of the western media, for giving massive attention to attacks like this in the West, while paying much less attention to the other victims of Islamist violence in Africa and elsewhere in the world. Such as Mali, where 100 people, mostly Russians, Chinese and Africans, were butchered by two Islamist terrorists at the Bamako hotel a few years ago.
He reminds his readers that, despite Qaddafy’s own political posturing, Libya was a secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa. And Qaddafy himself hated and persecuted the Islamists. The late ‘mad dog of the Middle East’ and his son, Saif, even tried to warn Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that if he was killed, the terrorists would move on to attack Europe and there would be a massive influx of refugees into the continent.
Kavanagh also reproaches American liberals for believing that you can be politically liberal, and still support western imperialism. He states that Barack Obama and Killary, whose gloating over the death of the Libyan dictator was particularly repulsive, have so far presided over more carnage than Donald Trump. American liberals are deluded if they believe that they can unleash and then contain the Islamist terrorists they have recruited, armed and trained at will. He compares terrorist atrocities like that committed in Manchester to the film ‘Groundhog Day’, whose hero is doomed to go through the same day again and again. And this, he feels, will continue until something immeasurably more horrific finally wakes Americans up to the horrific reality.
He states
‘Last Monday, jihadi suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 people. Salman grew up in an anit-Qaddafi Libyan immigrant family. In 2011, his father, Ramadan Abedi, along with other British Libyans (including one who was under house arrest), “was allowed to go [to Libya], no questions asked,” to join the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an al-Qaeda-affiliate, to help overthrow Qaddafi. In Manchester, as Max Blumenthal puts it, in his excellent Alternet piece, it was all “part of the rat line operated by the MI5, which hustled anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles to the front lines of the war.” In Manchester, Salman lived near a number of LIFG militants, including an expert bomb maker. This was a tough bunch, and everybody—including the cops and Salman’s Muslim neighbors—knew they weren’t the Jets and the Sharks. As Middle East Eye reports, he “was known to security services,” and some of his acquaintances “had reported him to the police via an anti-terrorism hotline.”
Could it be any clearer? The Abedi family was part of a protected cohort of Salafist proxy soldiers that have been used by “the West” to destroy the Libyan state. There are a number of such cohorts around the world that have been used for decades to overthrow relatively prosperous and secular, but insufficiently compliant, governments in the Arab and Muslim world—and members of those groups have perpetrated several blowback attacks in Western countries, via various winding roads. In this case, the direct line from Libya to Mali to Manchester is particularly easy to trace.‘
‘The jihadi attackers in Mali and the jihadi bomber in Manchester were direct products—not accidental by-products, but deliberately incubated protégés—of American-British-French-NATO regime change in Libya, a project that was executed by the Obama administration and spearheaded by Hillary Clinton.
Before the glorious revolution, Libya under Ghaddafi had the highest standard of living of any country in Africa, according to the UN Human Development Index. Before the jihadi onslaught backed by NATO bombing campaign, Ghaddafi’s Libya was an anchor of stability in North Africa, as even the U.S. and British governments knew and acknowledged, per a 2008 cable from American foreign service officer Christopher Stevens, published by Wikileaks:
Libya has been a strong partner in the war against terrorism and cooperation in liaison channels is excellent…Muammar al-Qadhafi’s criticism of Saudi Arabia for perceived support of Wahabi extremism, a source of continuing Libya-Saudi tension, reflects broader Libyan concern about the threat of extremism. Worried that fighters returning from Afghanistan and Iraq could destabilize the regime, the [government of Libya] has aggressive pursued operations to disrupt foreign fighter flows, including more stringent monitoring of air/land ports of entry, and blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.
The US-British-French-NATO humanitarian intervention put an end to that by overthrowing the Libyan government under entirely phony pretexts, in contravention of fundamental international law, and in violation of the UN resolution they claimed as a justification. The executioners and beneficiaries of that aggression where the jihadis who have been rampaging from Mali to Manchester. It’s a bright, clear line.
Ghaddafi himself warned Tony Blair that “an organization [the LIFG].has laid down sleeper cells in North Africa called the Al Qaeda organization in North Africa.” Ghaddafi’s son, Saif, warned that overthrowing Libya’s would make the country “the Somalia of North Africa, of the Mediterranean” and “You will see millions of illegal immigrants. The terror will be next door.”’
‘Manchester is the latest iteration of a scenario we’ve gone through so many times now, like some groundhog-day dream. At the end of my post two years ago, I was urging and hoping that Americans would wake up. But a lot of American liberals and lefties, including Berniebots, still like to imagine there’s a political space they can inhabit called Progressive Except Imperialism. There isn’t. Imperialism with Social Security and Medicare and Obamacare—even single-payer healthcare—is imperialism, and it’s reactionary and supremacist. Equal-opportunity imperialism is imperialism. African-American, women, Latinx, or LGBTQ presidents, generals, and drone operators do not make it any less criminal, or dangerous, or any less inevitably erosive of all those cherished progressive domestic programs.‘
The recruitment of Islamist terrorists goes back further than Blair, Bush, and Obama and Killary, right back to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher gave sanctuary in this country to Islamist terrorists as part of the proxy war against the Russians in Afghanistan. She and Ronnie celebrated them, because they were anti-Communists fighting against ‘the Evil Empire’. And the Russian ambassador told the Americans that once the Salafists had finished with them, they would come for America.
And this came horribly true on 9/11. Having defeated the Soviet Union, the Saudi-backed terrorists believed they could bring down the other superpower, America.
As for Thatcher, one of the terrorists she gave asylum to in Britain was a monster, who blew up a plane-load of schoolchildren flying to Moscow in order to kill the Soviet officers also on board.
And the same Islamists she settled in Britain became part of the wider underground of radicalised Islamist discontent.
Corbyn never supported terrorism. But Thatcher, and her New Labour protégé, Tony Blair, certainly did. And the results were Loyalist terrorists acting as Thatcher’s death squads in Ulster, and Islamist terrorism in Britain.
And Theresa May made it all easier for the Manchester bomber and those like him by cutting the numbers of the police force, armed forces and border guards. And when members of Her Majesty’s finest tried to warn of her of this danger, she sneered at them.
Jeremy Corbyn has promised to reverse all this. Which, despite all the Tory screaming and posturing, trying to portray them as the party of great war leaders since Churchill, Corbyn and the Labour party represent this country’s best hope of peace and security.
Mike put up a story today about a report from the OBR claiming that the NHS’ budget will have to be increased by £88 bn over the next 50 years. They claim that in order to meet those costs, other parts of the government’s budget would have to be cut. Indeed, the amount of money that would need to be spent on the NHS to meet demand would make the budget generally ‘unsustainable’, according to the report Mike quotes from the Graoniad.
Mike calls this scaremongering, and points out that there are plenty of ways costs could be reduced to acceptable and sustainable levels.
* Like making sure people have access to cheap drugs. Again, this is not something the Tories want. A few years ago, their Health Minister, Alistair Burt, actually filibustered a bill that would have allowed the government to seek new licences on unpatented drugs that would have allowed the NHS to purchase cheaper medicines. As Mike points out, Burt’s obstructive speechifying in parliament added millions to the NHS bill then. All to benefit big pharma against the NHS and the people of this country. Even those with private medical coverage.
* The pressure on beds through bed-blocking by healthy people with nowhere else to go could be solved through more funding for care homes, and raising the social care budget so that family members could care for elderly relatives at home.
* Some healthcare costs will be reduced through ordinary progress, as people become better aware of the risks to their health, and take care to avoid them.
* The costs of healthcare could also be cut by actually reversing the Tories’ attacks on health and safety legislation. Mike also points out that workers’ health can be improved by paying them better, as low pay causes more stress, and damages their mental and physical health. But as he also points out, Conservative supporting bosses get very upset if you point that out to them.
* And you can also cut £22 billion from the NHS’ budget by getting rid of the all the contracts given to private healthcare companies.
Mike states that all that’s needed is the will to try doing things in a better way. Starting by kicking out May and the Tories.
There’s a lot more that could be said here, not least about the OBR itself. I’ve got a feeling it was established by the Tories. Whoever set it up, I am sure that the Office of Budgetary Responsibility was set up to ‘lock-in’ the cuts to government spending by providing a spurious statistical legitimacy to the neoliberal doctrine of limiting government expenditure to the bare minimum. You can see it in the departments’ very name: Budgetary Responsibility. Not ‘Fiscal Effectiveness’ or ‘Efficiency’, but ‘Budgetary Responsibility’. It’s to reinforce the message that spending as little as possible of taxpayers’ money is ‘responsible’. It’s part of the Tory refrain that they represent ‘responsible’ government expenditure as opposed to ‘high-spending’ Labour. Which is a colossal myth. Under the Labour party, as Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis make clear in their NHS-SOS, the NHS was in budget.
This piece by the OBR also comes after the Tories have been rightly under attack for the crisis in the English NHS.
It therefore looks to me very like a Tory department issuing a very dubious budgetary speculation in order to justify the Tory round of cuts and privatisation. My calls it scaremongering, and also says at the beginning of his article that it’s trying to scare people into accepting the health service’s privatisation. He also makes clear that if that’s what they’re trying to do, they’ll have to try a lot harder.
Mike also wonders how much private healthcare will also cost by 2067.
That’s a very good question.
There is now a considerable movement for single-payer health care now in America, despite the intention of the Orange Nazi who’s going to be their next president to repeal Obamacare, and privatise social security, Medicare and Medicaid. The reason’s simple. Private healthcare in America is now massively expensive. It’s now so expensive that about a fifth of Americans can’t afford it. It also costs the American government far more than the NHS. In fact, if you look at the stats, America is one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the developed world.
And one of the most cost-efficient is the NHS. Or was, before Cameron and May took over and started to wreck it.
And in fact, if you look at the comparative stats, you find that Britain spent far less on its health service than other European countries. That was deliberate. It was under the Tories, once again, that Britain stopped funding our state healthcare at the same rate the Europeans funded theirs. Because the Tories have always hated spending money on the NHS.
You saw it a couple of years after the Health Service was introduced by Nye Bevan. A group of right-wing Tory MPs then got up on their hind legs to start shouting that the NHS was too expensive for the country. They lost the argument, but obviously never went away. They came back under Thatcher, and have been running the NHS down ever since.
And it’s because American healthcare is so expensive, that the private healthcare companies have crossed the Atlantic are trying to have our state healthcare privatised. Put simply, they’re having difficulty squeezing any more out of the Americans. So they came over here, and started whispering their blandishments to Tony Blair, who never met a rich, dodgy businessman he didn’t like. They didn’t need to do much persuading for the Tories, as the party of the rich, mendacious and exploitative was already well stocked with people, who stood to make a killing if the NHS was privatised.
And as private healthcare means that unless you can pay, you die, killing is precisely the right word.
This load of stats is sheer propaganda and scaremongering by a Tory-staffed government department for the Tories. Ignore it.
This is another excellent video from Reichwing Watch. Entitled Peasants for Plutocracy: How the Billionaires Brainwashed America, it’s about how wealthy industrialists, like the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, created modern Libertarianism and a stream of fake grassroots ‘astroturf’ organisations, in order to attack and roll back Roosevelt’s New Deal and the limited welfare state it introduced. And one of the many fake populist organisations the Koch brothers have set up is the Tea Party movement, despite the Kochs publicly distancing themselves from it.
The documentary begins with footage from an old black and white American Cold War propaganda movie, showing earnest young people from the middle decades of the last century discussing the nature of capitalism. It then moves on to Noam Chomsky’s own, very different perspective on an economy founded on private enterprise. Chomsky states that there has never been a purely capitalist economy. Were one to be established, it would very soon collapse, and so what we have now is state capitalism, with the state playing a very large role in keeping capitalism viable. He states that the alternative to this system is the one believed in by 19th century workers, in that the people, who worked in the mills should own the mills. He also states that they also believed that wage labour was little different from slavery, except in that it was temporary. This belief was so widespread that it was even accepted by the Republican party. The alternative to capitalism is genuinely democratic self-management. This conflicts with the existing power structure, which therefore does everything it can to make it seem unthinkable.
Libertarianism was founded in America in 1946/7 by an executive from the Chamber of Commerce in the form of the Foundation for Economic Education. This was basically a gigantic business lobby, financed by the heads of Fortune 500 companies, who also sat on its board. It’s goal was to destroy Roosevelt’s New Deal. Vice-President Wallace in an op-ed column in the New York Times stated that while its members posed as super-patriots, they wanted to roll back freedom and capture both state and economic power. The video also quotes Milton Friedman, the great advocate of Monetarism and free market economics, on capitalism as the system which offers the worst service at the highest possible profit. To be a good businessman, you have to be as mean and rotten as you can. And this view of capitalism goes back to Adam Smith. There is a clip of Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal, answering a question on why the media is so incurious about the true origins of Libertarianism. He states that they aren’t curious for the same reason the American media didn’t inquire into the true nature of the non-existent WMDs. It shows just how much propaganda and corruption there is in the American media.
The documentary then moves on to the Tea Party, the radical anti-tax movement, whose members deliberately hark back to the Boston Tea Party to the point of dressing up in 18th century costume. This section begins with clips of Fox News praising the Tea Party. This is then followed by Noam Chomsky on how people dread filling out their annual tax returns because they’ve been taught to see taxation as the state stealing their money. This is true in dictatorships. But in true democracy, it should be viewed differently, as the people at last being able to put into practice the plan in which everyone was involved in formulating. However, this frightens big business more than social security as it involves a functioning democracy. As a result, there is a concerted, and very successful campaign, to get people to fear big government.
The idea of the Tea Party was first aired by the CNBC reporter Rick Santilli in an on-air rant. Most of the Party’s members are normal, middle class Americans with little personal involvement in political campaigning. It is also officially a bi-partisan movement against government waste. But the real nature of the Tea Party was shown in the 2010 Tea Party Declaration of Independence, which stated that the Party’s aims were small government and a free market economy. In fact, the movement was effectively founded by the Koch brothers, Charles and David Koch. Back in the 1980s, David Koch was the Libertarian Party’s vice-president. The Libertarian Party’s 1980 platform stated that they intended to abolish just about every regulatory body and the welfare system. They intended to abolish the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Authority, Occupational Health and Safety Administration, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Labor Relations Board, the FBI, CIA, Federal Reserve, Social Security, Welfare, the public (state) schools, and taxation. They abandoned this tactic, however, after pouring $2 million of their money into it, only to get one per cent of the vote. So in 1984 they founded the first of their wretched astroturf organisation, Citizens for a Sound Economy. The name was meant to make it appear to be a grassroots movement. However, their 1998 financial statement shows that it was funded entirely by wealthy businessmen like the Kochs. In 2004 the CSE split into two – Freedom Works, and Americans for Prosperity. The AFP holds an annual convention in Arlington, Virginia, attended by some of its 800,000 members. It was the AFP and the Kochs who were the real organising force behind the Tea Party. Within hours of Santilli’s rant, he had been given a list of 1/2 million names by the Kochs. Although the Koch’s have publicly distanced themselves from the Tea Party, the clip for this section of the documentary shows numerous delegates at the convention standing up to declare how they had organised Tea Parties in their states. But it isn’t only the AFP that does this. Freedom Works, which has nothing to do with the Kochs, also funds and organises the Tea Parties.
Mark Crispin Miller, an expert on propaganda, analysing these astroturf organisations makes the point that for propaganda to be effective, it must not seem like propaganda. It must seem to come either from a respected, neutral source, or from the people themselves. Hence the creation of these fake astroturf organisations.
After its foundation in the late 1940s, modern Libertarianism was forged in the late 1960s and ’70s by Charles Koch and Murray Rothbard. Libertarianism had previously been the ideology of the John Birch Society, a group harking back to the 19th century. Koch and Rothbard married this economic extreme liberalism, with the political liberalism of the hippy counterculture. They realised that the hippies hated the state, objecting to the police, drug laws, CIA and the Vietnam war. Ayn Rand, who is now credited as one of the great founders of Libertarianism for her extreme capitalist beliefs, despised them. The film has a photo of her, next to a long quote in which she describes Libertarianism as a mixture of capitalism and anarchism ‘worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two different bandwagons… I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect.’
The documentary also goes on to show the very selective attitude towards drugs and democracy held by the two best-known American Libertarian politicos, Ron and Rand Paul. Despite the Libertarians’ supposedly pro-marijuana stance, the Pauls aren’t actually in favour of legalising it or any other drugs. They’re just in favour of devolving the authority to ban it to the individual states. If the federal government sends you to prison for weed, that, to them, is despotism. If its the individual state, it’s liberty.
And there’s a very telling place piece of footage where Ron Paul talks calmly about what a threat democracy is. He states clearly that democracy is dangerous, because it means mob rule, and privileges the majority over the minority. At this point the video breaks the conversation to show a caption pointing out that the Constitution was framed by a small group of wealthy plutocrats, not ‘we the people’. This is then followed by an American government film showing a sliding scale for societies showing their positions between the poles of democracy to despotism, which is equated with minority rule. The video shows another political scientist explaining that government and elites have always feared democracy, because when the people make their voices heard, they make the wrong decisions. Hence they are keen to create what Walter Lipmann in the 1920s called ‘manufacturing consent’. Real decisions are made by the elites. The people themselves are only allowed to participate as consumers. They are granted methods, which allow them to ratify the decisions of their masters, but denied the ability to inform themselves, organise and act for themselves.
While Libertarianism is far more popular in America than it is over here, this is another video that’s very relevant to British politics. There are Libertarians over here, who’ve adopted the extreme free-market views of von Hayek and his fellows. One of the Torygraph columnists was particularly vocal in his support for their doctrines. Modern Tory ideology has also taken over much from them. Margaret Thatcher was chiefly backed by the Libertarians in the Tory party, such as the National Association For Freedom, which understandably changed its name to the Freedom Foundation. The illegal rave culture of the late 1980s and 1990s, for example, operated out of part of Tory Central Office, just as Maggie Thatcher and John Major were trying to ban it and criminalise ‘music with a repetitive beat’. Virginian Bottomley appeared in the Mail on Sunday back in the early 1990s raving about how wonderful it would be to replace the police force with private security firms, hired by neighbourhoods themselves. That’s another Libertarian policy. It comes straight from Murray Rothbard. Rothbard also wanted to privatise the courts, arguing that justice would still operate, as communities would voluntarily submit to the fairest court as an impartial and non-coercive way of maintain the peace and keeping down crime. The speaker in this part of the video describes Koch and Rothbard as ‘cretins’. Of course, it’s a colossally stupid idea, which not even the Tory party wanted to back. Mind you, that’s probably because they’re all in favour of authoritarianism and state power when its wielded by the elite.
I’ve no doubt most of the Libertarians in this country also believe that they’re participating in some kind of grassroots, countercultural movement, unaware that this is all about the corporate elite trying to seize more power for themselves, undermine genuine democracy, and keep the masses poor, denied welfare support, state education, and, in Britain, destroying the NHS, the system of state healthcare that has kept this country healthy for nearly 70 years.
Libertarians do see themselves as anarchists, though anarcho-individualists, rather than collectivists like the anarcho-syndicalists or Communists. They aren’t. This is purely about expanding corporate power at the expense of the state and the ordinary citizens it protects and who it is supposed to represent and legislate for. And it in practice it is just as brutal as the authoritarianism it claims to oppose. In the 1980s the Freedom Association became notorious on the left because of its support for the death squads in Central America, also supported by that other Libertarian hero, Ronald Reagan.
Libertarianism is a brutal lie. It represents freedom only for the rich. For the rest of us, it means precisely the opposite.
I found this very interesting paragraph in a piece by Michael Hudson ‘Obama Said Hillary Will Continue His Legacy. And She Will!’ in this weekend’s collection of Counterpunch articles:
Obama’s brilliant demagogy left many eyes glazed over in admiration. Nobody is better at false sincerity while misrepresenting reality so shamelessly. Probably few caught the threatening hint he dropped about Hillary’s plan for corporations to share their profits with their workers. This sounds to me like the Pinochet plan to privatize Social Security by turning it into exploitative ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Programs). The idea is that wage withholding would be steered to buy into the company’s stock – bidding it up in the process. Employees then would end up holding an empty bag, as occurred recently with the Chicago Tribune. That seems to be the great “reform” to “save” Social Security that her Wall Street patrons are thinking up.
Hudson’s article is a sustained demolition of the liberal image Shrillary and the rest of the establishment Democrat Party have promoted. She is not remotely on the side of the increasingly impoverished Middle and working classes, but a neoliberal corporatist concerned with promoting the profits of her donors in Wall Street and Big Business at the expense of ordinary Americans. She stands for more austerity, further cuts to education and welfare programmes, including Medicare, and the TTP and TTIP free trade agreements, that threaten to outsource more American jobs.
She’s also an extremely militaristic hawk, who has supported a series of bloody interventions from Iraq, Libya, and Syria to Honduras. She promises a further escalation of American military action around the globe. To divert attention from the corrupt machinations in her favour by the Democrat party machine, headed by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she has attacked Putin for supposedly hacking into the Democrat’s computer, which held details of these underhand deals. She’s also using Trump’s friendship with the Russian leader to attack him, in which Hudson sees as a return to the Red-baiting antics of the McCarthy era. He describes how she has appealed to Republic voters against those of Bernie Sanders and the progressive Left. And how Bernie Sanders has also ill-served his own supporters by endorsing her, despite the fact that she stands for everything he opposes.
Hudson also makes the wider point that many, if not most of the policy positions Hillary adopts are exactly the same as Obama. Obama was no radical: he described himself as a ‘moderate Republican’. The only radical feature about him was his ethnicity. He was Black, and this constituted a liberal point in his favour, just as Shrillary’s biological femininity is a point in hers. But Hudson makes the point that Shrillary’s biological gender is irrelevant to her politics. She does not embody the traditional female characteristics of empathy, but a very masculine aggressive militarism, in which she is ‘one of the boys’ with the other army hawks.
There is much here that parallels the political situation over here in Blighty. Owen Smith and the Blairites in Labour are also neoliberals, standing for austerity, welfare cuts, aggressive militarism and pursuing the aims and enrichment of the super-rich at the expense of the poor. It’s not even remotely surprising, as Blair modelled his New Labour project on Bill Clinton’s New Democrats. And both parties based their electoral strategy on trying to win over Conservative voters through the adoption of corporatist, anti-working class policies.
But the piece also indicated very strong parallels with Theresa May’s Conservatives. They’re even more corporatist than New Labour, but May announced when she entered No 10 that she was in favour of workers on companies’ boards of directors. This is a radical socialist policy. It’s one so radical, that leftwing Labour MPs like Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone were ruthlessly pilloried for endorsing it in the 1970s and 1980s. Now May, an arch capitalist, says she’s in favour of it.
She clearly isn’t, at least as far as it is conventionally considered. It may well be, as I’ve said before, just rhetoric, a piece of left-wing guff to make her sound more progressive than she actually is. David Cameron, her predecessor, did the same before he became prime minister. He and Ian Duncan Smith opposed New Labour’s welfare cuts, including the privatisation of the NHS, and made noises about supporting Green policies. Cameron’s political mentor, Anthony Blonde, claimed that neoliberalism had failed, and that the Tory party would support pro-worker policies in his book, Red Tory. He even made approving noises about the great 19th century Russian Anarchist, Peter Kropotkin.
Except that it was all rubbish. Once in power, the Green policies were swiftly jettisoned and fracking and nuclear power wholeheartedly endorsed. Neoliberalism was declared to be the only way forward. And he made deeper cuts under his austerity campaign than Labour, and, if anything, stepped up the privatisation of the NHS.
It looks like May is repeating that strategy: first appear a bit left, then, when your position has been consolidated, get rid of it all and carry on as normal.
But it may be that she does mean something about worker directors. If she does, it won’t be for the welfare of the working class. Hudson states that Hillary’s call for profit-sharing sounds like Pinochet’s attempts to privatise social security through turning it into a employee share scheme. Something like this is also likely over here with May’s worker directors. The Tory party has already tried to promote one scheme, by which workers were able to acquire shares in their company, if they signed away their employment rights. It looks very much to me that May will try something similar under the pretense of introducing industrial democracy. If she ever does anything like that at all in the first place, that is.
Mike the other day also put up a piece on Owen Smith’s performance on BBC’s Newsnight. Mike and a number of other opponents of Blairite neoliberalism found it a cheering experience. It wasn’t quite a car crash, but, according to Mike, there were still some heavy swerves. He also observed that although Smudger mostly managed to control himself over Corbyn, he still felt constrained to sneer at him for his perceived lack of patriotism, and claimed that Corbyn had only had just over half the votes in the election, far underestimating the amount of support Corbyn had and has.
What I found particularly telling was the way Smiffy refused to use the word ‘Socialism’. He instead used the term ‘Labourism’ instead, to the manifest incredulity of the interviewer. In actual fact, historians of the Labour party and political scientists have for a long time made a distinction between ‘socialism’ and ‘labourism’. Socialism means the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. It can take many different forms, from co-operatives through to state ownership, or collective ownership by trade unions, as in Syndicalism. It may also involve different degrees, from complete nationalism, as in the former Soviet Union, to a mixed economy, as in Britain and most other western European countries before Thatcher and the Neoliberal devastation of our public life.
Labourism, on the other hand, simply means anything that benefits organised labour. For a couple of decades after its foundation, there was a tension in the Labour party between the trade unions, or some of the elements in the trade unions, and the various Socialist bodies. Some of the trade union members wanted the Labour party to concentrate on protecting union rights, such as the right to strike and picket, and fighting to obtain better wages for working people. Furthermore, under Lloyd George’s introduction of the first, preliminary foundations of the welfare state, trade unions could serve as the official bodies for the administration of the social security and healthcare schemes, along with private insurance companies. This has been described as a ‘labourist’ policy, as it was designed to help working people, but was not a socialist measure in that it did not involve the state or collective ownership.
I was also told by a friend last week that the Labour party has removed the term ‘Socialism’ from its constitution. I’m not surprised. Blair was not a Socialist by any stretch of the imagination. He got rid of Clause 4, the clause in the Labour party’s constitution that pledged the party to nationalisation and collective ownership. I’m not surprised that New Labour, in order to endear itself to all those darling swing voters and the aspirant middle classes, as well as rich donors, dropped the ‘socialist’ label as well.
But Smudger isn’t a labourist, either. Blair and New Labour hated and distrusted the trade unions, and have done everything they can to deny them any effective power to oppose the increasingly punitive and exploitative employment legislation. Legislation introduced not just by the Tories, but by the Labour right. Blair and Brown talked rubbish about the need to support flexible labour market policies as well as social justice. In practice, the Warmonger and his grumpy sidekick jettisoned social justice, as again, swing voters, the aspirant middle class, and the media barons, like Murdoch, all had the vapours when faced with it.
So Smiff isn’t a Socialist, nor proper labour. He didn’t oppose the Tory welfare cuts, and I doubt very much that he wants to anything about the employment legislation that is driving people in this country into poverty – the zero hours and short employment contracts, the proliferation of unpaid internships, workfare and all the rest of the vile schemes designed to make working people as poor and as desperate as possible.
He and the rest of New Labour – Progress, Saving Labour and the rest, are bog-standard Tories, and nothing else. They should leave the party and cross the floor to their true political home.
I found this piece, the Heads of a Scheme for Social Security, of 11th December 1941, in Derek Fraser’s The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy Since the Industrial Revolution (London: MacMillan Press Ltd 1973). In it, Beveridge lays out the various welfare benefits, which came to form the basis of the post-War Welfare State. The document runs as follows:
1. Assumptions: No satisfactory scheme of social security can be devised [except on the] following assumptions:
A. A national health service for prevention and comprehensive treatment available to all members of the community.
B. Universal children’s allowances for all children up to 14 or if in full-time education up to 16.
C. Full use of powers of the state to maintain employment and to reduce unemployment to seasonal, cyclical and interval unemployment, that is to say to unemployment suitable to treatment by cash allowances.
2. Unified Social Security: On these three assumptions, a scheme for social security is outlined below, providing for each member of the community basic provision appropriate to all his needs, in return for a single compulsory contribution.
3.Principle of Scheme: The principle of the Social Security Scheme is to ensure for every one income up to subsistence level, in return for compulsory contributions, expecting him to make voluntary provision to ensure income that he desired beyond this. One consequence of this principle is that no means test of any kind can be applied to the benefits of the Scheme. Another is that the Scheme does not guarantee a standard of life beyond subsistence level; men whose powers of earning diminish must adjust themselves to that change.
3. Needs: The needs to be covered are of seven kinds, including as one the composite needs of a married woman.
C. Childhood, provided for by allowances till 14 of it in full-time education, till 16.
O. Old Age, including premature old age, met by pension beginning from 65 for man and 60 for woman normally, but beginning earlier for proved permanent invalidity.
D. Disability, that is to say inability through illness or accident to pursue a gainful occupation, met by disability and invalidity benefits.
U. Unemployment, that is to say, inability to obtain paid employment by a person dependent on it and physically fit for it, met by unemployment benefits.
F. Funeral Expenses of self or any person for whom responsible, met by funeral grant.
L. Loss in Gainful Occupation other than Employment, e.g. bankruptcy, fire, theft., met by loss grant.
M. Marriage Needs of a Woman, including provision for:
1. Setting up of a home, met by furnishing grant.
2. Maternity met by maternity grant in all cases, and in the case of a period before and after confinement.
3. Interruption of husband’s earning, by his disability or unemployment, met by dependent benefit.
4. Widowhood, met by pension at various rates corresponding to nees and by credit of contributions for unemployment and disability.
5. Separation, i.e. end of husband’s maintenance by desertion or legal separation, met by adaptation of widowhood pensions.
6. Old Age, met by pension at 60, with provision for antedating if husbands earning capacity is stopped by old age.
7. Incapacity for household duties, met by grant to meet expenses of paid help in illness.
8. Funeral grant for self or any person for whom responsible after separation from husband. (pp. 265-7).
I realise that its assumption about gender roles now seem dated and sexist, with the assumption that the husband goes out to work while the mother stays at home to raise the family. However, regardless of its flaws and the continuation of poverty after the foundation of Welfare State, the system of payments laid out here by Beveridge did have immense success in tackling poverty.
And since the 1980s they’ve been under attack by the Tories. Under Thatcher and Major, the system of welfare grants that previously operated were replaced by loans. Welfare payments have also been increasingly cut, and conditions deliberately imposed so that increasingly fewer people are considered eligible for them. This has also been extended to disability payments, with the result that 590 people have died of starvation, poverty, neglect or suicide thanks to the cuts made by the Tories and their Lib-Dem enablers at the last parliament. And over a quarter of a million more psychologically vulnerable people have seen their condition made worse.
And thanks to these attacks on the welfare state and the abandoning of the Keynsian goal of full employment, 4.7 million people in our immensely rich country are now in ‘food poverty’.
Please remember this when you go to vote on Thursday. And don’t vote for the Tories or Liberal Democrats.
In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses the astonishing news that according to the Washington Post, just over half of American young adults don’t support capitalism. The papers reports that a poll by Harvard University of young people aged between 19 and 29 found that 51% of them did not support capitalism. Only 33% said they supported Socialism, however.
Kulinski states that this finding made him wonder if they were even more liberal than he was. He states that he’s not a Communist, and is largely opposed to it, although many of his viewers are Communists. He’s in favour of the mixture of Socialism and capitalism found mainly in the Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Europe. He then goes on to consider that maybe most of the people polled are also in favour of such a mixed economy, but that the questions were badly worded so as to make them sound like they were in favour of total nationalisation when they weren’t.
America is one of the most capitalist nations on Earth, so it’s amazing how far leftward the country has moved. This might have something to do with the fact that for decades, the free market capitalism espoused and so militantly promoted by Reagan, Bushes snr and jnr, Bill Clinton et al hasn’t delivered. Unemployment is growing. The TPP has resulted in more jobs being exported abroad. 20 per cent of Americans could not afford healthcare before the introduction of Obamacare, and the Republicans have fought tooth and nail to repeal that. In many ways, Obama’s a Conservative politician. He receives much of his funding from Wall Street, Obamacare was originally a Conservative idea from Richard Nixon’s administration, supported by Newt Gingrich, amongst others. On gun control he’s hardly more restrictive than George Dubya. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans screaming that he’s everything from a Communist to a Nazi to a radical Muslim. The accusations are ridiculous, and so are they for making them.
And much of this corruption come from the corporate funding of politics. Corporations fund politicians’ campaigns, so that their policies reflect those of their big business sponsors, rather than the American people. 80 per cent of Americans want gun control. Very many others don’t want to see cuts to Medicaid and social security. But the politicians don’t want gun control, and are doing everything they can to cut the Medicaid and social security budget.
And as a result of all this, the approval rating for Congress fluctuates from 9% to 20%. And a Harvard study declared that America was an oligarchy, rather than a proper, functioning democracy.
This has no doubt got America’s corporate masters hopping mad. You can expect even more of them to start putting pressure on our politicos in Britain to start privatising even more stuff, like the Health Service, so they have a few more nice little earners should Bernie Sanders, or someone very like him, get in. Which now seems increasingly possible.
And I dare say that the Tories over here are also worried. After all, they’ve taken much of their free market ideology from the American Republicans and Libertarians. The same goes for the Blairites in the Labour party. They took over the Chicago school’s nonsense, and followed Bill Clinton’s line in refashioning the Democrat party to look like a slightly paler version of the Republicans. Blair and the leading lights of New Labour were a part of the Reaganite network, the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. If capitalism, or at least, its free market variant is looking increasingly rocky in the American homeland, then you can bet that its cheerleaders and supporters are grimly contemplating the fact that this anti-free market mood might just cross the Atlantic and come over here.
And that will be no bad thing. Frankly, the day can’t come soon enough.
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