Recently I’ve been getting on my Iphone videos from somebody called Thatanna. I have absolutely no idea who he or she is, but this morning they put up a poll. Is the NHS broken beyond repair – Yes, or No? I responded and voted ‘No’, of course. But apparently, I was only one of a few. Most of those polled agreed that it was. And that is exactly how the Tories want it. A properly run state healthcare system will always outperform private industry, as Raymond Tallis and Jackie Davis amply demonstrate in their book NHS – SOS. It’s why the Tories have been deliberately running down the NHS over the past forty years, cutting funding and holding down wages while outsourcing work and medical care to private corporations. This past week we even had a drunken Tory stand up and say the quiet bit out loud. He demanded the privatisation of the NHS and its replacement with a continental social insurance scheme. In fact, 78 per cent of the British public, according to polls, support the NHS and there are groups and organisations fighting for it, such as We Own It. But the Tories are doing their best to destroy it economically and as an idea that people will defend. And apparently this has worked on Thatanna’s audience.
Fight back. Support the NHS. Get Truss and the Tories out!
One of the arguments Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have been pushing to attack state healthcare is that, as it’s funded through public taxes, it somehow leaves people worse off. I came across a recent right-wing video on YouTube that seemed to be pushing that line. It proclaimed that American university students were all in favour of Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All – until they were told what it would cost them. I didn’t watch it, because I knew it would annoy me. Similarly, over here the Tories and Blairites have been telling people that the inclusion of the private sector will bring costs down, thus allowing government to make savings and cut taxes. In fact, private healthcare is wastefully bureaucratic, far more so than state healthcare. But the Tories just want to cut taxes for the rich without making the lives of the poor any better. Indeed, they are determined to make them worse through savage welfare cuts, wage freezes, and further attacks on workers’ rights and employment conditions. And by encouraging more people to take out private health insurance in order to avoid their manufactured problems in state healthcare, the costs are transferred to the consumer. For the rich this is no problem. For middle income groups, it means having to pay thousands for operations and procedures that should be routine and free. They are worse off.
The book Health Reform: Public Success – Private Failure, Daniel Drache and Terry Sullivan, eds., (London: Routledge 1999) makes the point that Lord Beveridge, the architect of the modern welfare state, believed the contrary. State welfare provision which actually leave the poor and working people better off. Without doctors’ and hospital bills to pay for their illness, they would have more disposable income. The book states
It is not sufficiently recognised that by removing the financial burden of catastrophic illness from their wage packets, their disposable incomes would rise. No longer would they have to pay doctors from their pockets when their children were born or they fell sick and when they went to hospital; lack of money did not constitute a barrier to good care. These reforms, along with the spread of collective bargaining in advanced industrial economies, enabled people to enjoy the benefits of an expanded notion of social citizenship. Healthcare and full employment thus constituted a forward-looking framework for social health and not simply clinically provided health care.
(p. 10).
Which means that the prosperity given to working people through free medical care, full employment and strong trade unions can act as proper citizens, able to make political and economic choices that will affect government.
Which is why the Tories and the Republicans in America have attacked trade unions and scrapped the idea of full employment, because they give working people too much power. And what’s the odds that similar thinking also isn’t one of the factors in their attacks on state healthcare. Oh, they do honestly believe that private enterprise is always better than state provision, but the threat of medical bills in a private healthcare system as well as general poverty is a good way of keeping the workforce cowed and fearful.
NHS privatisation will not make healthcare cheaper and more efficient. It will just make working people poorer and allow more bullying and exploitation from their employers.
I’ve put up a number of quotations from the book The Spirit and Structure of Germany Fascism by the American economist Robert A. Brady, published over here by Victor Gollancz in 1937. Brady was concerned to show how the Nazis in Germany had allowed the German business classes to seize power and crush and exploit the workers, as well as creating and exploiting a murderous hatred of Jews, Gypsies and other people they consider ‘subhuman’ and an enemy of the German, Aryan race.
In the last chapter of the book, ‘The Looming Shadow of Fascism’, Brady shows that many of the attitudes of German business were identical to those businessmen elsewhere in Europe. The chapter includes passages from other publications, including those by explicitly pro-Nazi American writers, whose ideas are similar or even identical to those of the Third Reich. And he warns that a Fascist seizure of power from organized, monopoly capitalism was a real threat in America. A threat that would result in the persecution of ethnic minorities like the Japanese, Jews, Mexicans and Blacks. He writes
In all the complicated, confused, and myth-charged experiences of the human race, there can be no more curious spectacle than that which is taking place along this line before our very eyes in every capitalistic land to-day. Here we have the business enterprise, perhaps the most completely amoral and materialistic single-purpose institution the human mind has yet devised, governed by a class of men who may be ever so sentimental with their children and ever so “kind and gentle with their wives,” but who, in order to maintain their position unimpaired as the prime material beneficiaries of economic activity, are compelled to resort to the wholesale promotion of one of the most incredibly jejune, intellectually and emotionally shallow, and crudely primitive “faiths” known in the iridescent annals of myth and fable.
The doctrinal position of business evangelism has two faces, an inner and an outer. The first is that which business men believe concerning themselves and their human kind. The second is that which they wish the remainder of the population to believe about the business-military hierarchy-the “leaders’-on the one hand, and about the proper role each , and every member of the rank and file should expect to play in this “best of all possible worlds: on the other.
Both these propaganda faces are the same in all nations ordered on a capitalist basis. There is a veritable mountain of literature obtainable in every one of these countries which could be used to illustrate the close parallels in the programme, the doctrine, and the mood of their respective business communities. The variations which one will find are in the form of adaptations of the same doctrinal positions to local or national circumstances; they do not indicate differences in doctrine. As was shown in many different places in the preceding chapters, almost the entirety of the German Nazi programme and line of argumentation is identical in content and point of view with that of the American business community. Such elements as the persecution of the Jews is different, not in intent, but only in the fact that such persecution could serve Nazi ends in Germany in the particular circumstances of the years 1933-6. When the American situation has ripened to that of Germany in 1933, there will be race terror in the United States as well, and it will be anti-negro, anti-Jew, anti-Mexican, and anti-Japanese. (pp. 337-8, my emphasis).
Brady was clearly afraid of Fascism seizing power in America within a few years of his writing the book. Mercifully, he was wrong. But only just. A group of businessmen did meet various generals in the 1930s with the intention of organizing a coup to overthrow F.D. Roosevelt after he launched his New Deal. And those businessmen were the literal parents and ideological founders of modern Libertarianism.
Big business has been gaining increasing power in America and Britain since the days of Thatcher and Reagan. Trade unions have been smashed, welfare programmes destroyed, the state provision of healthcare also cut back. Wages have been frozen under the guise of curbing inflation. The result is growing poverty, job insecurity, homelessness and starvation. 330,000 Brits are homeless. A quarter of a million are keeping body and soul together through food banks. And over a thousand disabled people have died because they’ve been thrown off benefits in what Mike over at Vox Political has described as cheque book genocide.
And with poverty has come increasing racism, stoked by fears over mass migration and affirmative action/positive discrimination programmes. In Britain Tweezer and the Tories set up posters and sent vans round to Black areas telling illegal immigrants to hand themselves in. Windrush migrants, who have every right to live in this country, were illegally deported. Islamophobia is on the rise, partly caused by the suicide bombings that have occurred as blow-back from the Islamist groups aided and abetted by the West as allies in our wars in the Middle East, and by migrants forced out of the region and elsewhere by the very same wars. So we’ve had UKIP, Brexit and the lies of the ‘Leave’ campaign in Britain. While in America there’s Trump and his friends and supporters in the Alt-Right. He wants to build a wall with Mexico to protect American from further immigration. Armed troops have been sent down to the border to shoot unarmed illegal immigrants, and the Republicans are stoking up fears about the migrant caravan from Honduras. Quite apart from the increase in White Supremacist domestic terrorism, including the massacre of the worshippers at a synagogue because they were closely linked to a Jewish charity aiding asylum seekers come to the US, and therefore, to the perpetrator, enemies of the White race.
We’re not at the level of an imminent Fascist takeover yet. But the signs are there, and Brady’s warning remains chillingly relevant.
Last year I started work on a book about current western imperialism. How the US has interfered across the world to bring down democratically elected left-wing governments when they threatened American corporate power and put in place vicious, murderous right-wing dictatorships. All done in the name of protecting the world from the Communist threat, of course. The latest phase of this imperialism is George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s ‘War on Terror’, under which they invaded a country that was absolutely no threat to us – Iraq – just to loot its oilfields and state industries, all for the benefit of American multinationals, western big business and the Saudi oil industry. And the list goes on, through the continued occupation of Afghanistan, the funding of Islamist forces against Assad in Syria, and Obama’s and Killary’s staged, fake democratic revolution in Ukraine, which launched a government with real Nazis goose-stepping through the streets of Kiev, killing real leftists and chanting their very real hatred of Jews.
The book was suggested by ‘Florence’, one of the many great commenters on this blog, who was afraid of the lack of the understanding of the anti-imperial dimension to Socialist/ Labour party activism. She remembered the 1970s when many people became active in left-wing politics through campaigns against General Pinochet in Chile, for example. He was another real Fascist thug, who seized power in a CIA sponsored coup that overthrew the democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende. The result was decades of Fascist terror, including horrific torture and rape, the internment and murder of radicals, and mass executions. Oh yes, and they stole left-wing activists’ children, to be brought up instead by good Fascist families. Pinochet was strongly influenced by the Chicago school of Milton Friedman and von Miles. The latter had explicitly turned away from democracy, because the masses would never accept his destruction of the welfare state, and state schooling, healthcare et. Pinochet was in power until the late 80s. And he ended up fleeing from justice to Britain, where he had a good friend in Maggie Thatcher. Pinochet is exactly the type of monster left-wingers in the ’70s and ’80s fought very had against, the memory of which might be lost unless more is done to show that monsters like Pinochet are still being installed and supported.
I’ve a few more things to do on the book before I send it off to Lulu. But I’ve worked out the chapters and their contents. Here’s the list:
Introduction and Florence’s request
General US/Western Interference
Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about US Crimes of Empire: Part 1:
Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about US Crimes of Empire: Part 2
Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about the US Crimes of Empire: Part 3
Secular Talk on Seven Fascist Regimes supported by America
The Young Turks: CIA Overthrows Democracies, But Can’t Get Rid of Dictators
William Blum’s List of American Foreign Interventions: Part 1
William Blum’s List of American Foreign Inrterventions: Part 2
Blum’s List of Countries In which US Has Interfered with their Elections
Lee Camp: New Docs Show America Knew about Indonesia Genocide
American State Censored TV Programme on American Nerve Gas Atrocity in Laos.
William Blum on the naïve Trust of Countries invaded by US
William Blum on Right-Wing Coups in Greece
Democracy Now on Hillary Clinton and the Right-Wing Coup in Honduras
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger
Democratic Socialist on the Von Mises’ Institutes Lies About the Pinochet Coup
RT’s Lee Camp on What the US Military Is Doing in Niger
TeleSur English: CIA Planned False Flag Attacks in Miami
Telsur English: US Planned to Use Biological Warfare Against Cuba
Telesur English: Venezuela Drops Petrodollars, Threatens US Global Power
Jimmy Dore: Taliban Have Surrendered Several Times, Each Time Refused by America
Jimmy Dore Show: Obama Rejected North Korea Nuclear Peace Deal in 2015
Jimmy Dore Show: US Begins Bombing in Somalia Again, Because Oil Found
William Blum on the Abortive Prosecution of NATO Leaders for War Crimes in Yugoslavia
Jimmy Dore on the Church Committee Hearings of 1975 into CIA Corruption
Jimmy Dore: Hillary Wanted to Rig Palestinian Elections
Alan Moore on CIA Atrocities in Central America: Brought to Light Financial Times Review of Book on Origins of American Financial Imperialism
Michael Moore’s New Film against US Miltitarism and Imperialism
Bernie Sanders’ Speech Attacking US Coups of Foreign Governments
Iran
The Pro-Israel Billionaires Pushing Trump towards Confrontation with Iran
Telesur English on the Similarities between Trump’s Action on Venezuela and the 1953 Coup in Iran
Redacted Tonight on How Trump Is Lying to Us About Iran and North Korea
American Comedian Lee Camp on the Real Reason Iran’s Been Put ‘On Notice’
William Blum on the Demonisation of Iran,
The Israel Lobby, Liam Fox and the Planned Bombing of Iran
Jimmy Dore: NBC Attacks Obama, Clinton, Silent about Reagan’s Treachery with Iran
Secular Talk: Candidate for Trump’s Secretary of State Wants War with Iran
Real Reasons for Iraq War
Comedian Bill Hicks on Gulf War I and George Bush Senior
The Case for Prosecuting Blair as War Criminal for Iraq Invasion
Spokesman Pamphlets on Blair, the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ and the Iraq Invasion
George Galloway and Peter Hitchens on Blair and the Iraq War
Vox Political: Youssef El-Gingihy on Western Imperialism in Iraq
An Iraqi Woman Describes the State of her Country before Bush and Blair’s Invasion
Counterpunch Article on the History of British Imperial Domination in Iraq.
Owen Jones on the Chilcot Report, the Iraq War and Tony Blair
Vox Political on Those, Who Believed Blair’s Lies about Iraq
1920s Iraqi Poem on the New Constitution and Order Imposed by and for Britain, Not Iraqis Private Eye on the Western Firms Seeking to Grasp the Iraqi Oil Fields
The Young Turks on Report Showing Iraq Invasion Based on Lies
Brainwash Update on Lawlessness, Murder and Assassination by American Mercenaries Blackwater in Iraq
Young Turks’ Item on Pentagon Censoring Internal Reports Showing War Not Working in Iraq and Syria
Gaddafi and Libya
Telesur English on the Chaos Caused by the Death of Gaddafy
Colonel Gaddafy Predicted He Would Be Killed for his Opposition to Capitalism
The Death Toll from Italian Colonialism: Why Johnson’s Comments about Libyan Corpses Is Not Funny
Russia and Ukraine
HIGNFY Spreads More Lies about Russian Interference in American Election
BBC 2 Programme Next Week on British Forces in Ukraine and Estonia
Despite the Jokes, HIGNFY Is Fake News
Putin and Trump, and Bill Clinton’s Interference in Russian Elections for Yeltsin
Counterpunch Article Claiming US Spy Agencies Trying to Engineer War with Russia
Have I Got News For You and the Bias in BBC News Satire
William Blum on American Preparations for Nuclear War with Russia
More Military Tension between NATO and Russia; Pat Mills Right in ABC Warriors
Seamas Milne on the Dangers of Conservative Propaganda in the History of Communism
Counterpunch on Putin’s Non-Existent Threat to the Baltic States
Counterpunch on NATO’s Preparations for War with Russia
Syria
Syrian Uprising Directed by Saudi Prince and Other Foreign Governments
RT on House of Lord’s Opposition to £200 million Going to Syrian Opposition
Counterpunch on Saudi Arabia’s Influence on British Foreign Affairs
Jimmy Dore: Pentagon-Backed Rebels Fight CIA-Backed Rebels in Syria
Jimmy Dore Show: Putin Refutes Western Media Lies about Syrian Gas Attack
Secular Talk on Lack of Media Outrage for Syrian Rebels Massacring 126 Civilians
Jimmy Dore on Media Censorship of the War in Syria
Canadian Journalist Exposes BBC Lies over Syria
Boris Johnson Slapped Down By May for Telling Truth about Saudi Militarism
Deep State Lies about Terrorist Threat Produced Syria and Russia
Why Are the Tories Demanding Assad’s Overthrow?
More on the Real Reason behind Western Intervention in Syria
Jimmy Dore on the Real Reason for the Civil War and Western Military Attacks on Syria
Counterpunch on American Foreign Policy and Regime Change in Syria
More on US Military Funding of al-Qaeda and Islamist Militants
Syria Chemical Weapons Attacks Were ‘False Flag’ Operations Intended to Draw America into Civil War
Counterpunch on British Spies’ Recruitment of Islamist Fighters against Syria
What’s the Real Reason We’re Bombing Syria?
ISIS Is the Saudis’ Private Army for Control of the Oil Fields
Peter Hitchens Spearing BBC Anti-Russian Propaganda over Syria
Redacted Tonight: Mainstream Media Pushing War in Syria Hiding Connections to Arms Companies
Ukraine
BBC 2 Programme Next Week on British Forces in Ukraine and Estonia
America and the Manufactured Revolution in Ukraine
Global Research on US and EU Sponsored Fascist Regime in Ukraine
Counterpunch on the Washington Post’s Journalist Blacklist and the CIA, Eugenicist Nazis and Ukrainian Fascists
US State Department Supporting Fascism and Puppet Government in Ukraine Private Eye on Britain’s Arms Sales to both Russia and Ukraine Lobster on the Ukraine as Monsanto Trojan Horse
NATO and the Economic Exploitation of Eastern Europe
As you can see, it’s really a collection of articles from this blog, but I hope it will give people an idea of what’s really going on in the world in the name of democracy and freedom, and help get a few more people on to the streets, writing to their MPs or otherwise involved in combatting western corporate militarism and imperialism.
Last week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Jeremy Corbyn asked Theresa May what planet she was on. Quick as flash, she came out with an answer ten minutes later, as Ian Hislop joked on Friday’s Have I Got News For You. She struck back at Corbyn, claiming he and John McDonnell were on ‘Planet Venezuela’.
Maduro’s socialist government in the South American country is in crisis, as there are severe shortages of food and other goods in the shops, and rising discontent. Protests are breaking out all over the country. In the face of this unrest, the government has become increasingly authoritarian, redrafting the constitution in order to give itself new power to suppress the opposition.
The crisis hitting the country shows very much the attitude of May and her wretched party towards socialism. Creating any kind of welfare state, including state healthcare for the poor, is uneconomic and unsustainable. Only free market capitalism in a low wage economy brings prosperity. Well, it does to the upper 25 per cent of the population. The rest of the country is much worse, but a bit of tinkering with the statistics usually works to give the impression the Tories want us all to believe that everyone’s more prosperous and doing well, even when it’s very obvious they aren’t. And if that fails, you can always demonise the poor themselves as feckless, lazy, wasteful and so on.
In fact, the argument ad Venezuelam isn’t a good one, and there are already videos up on YouTube attacking it. Bad Mouse productions has one up, though I haven’t looked at it.
But there’s another dimension to the Venezuelan crisis. I’ve read elsewhere – possibly on William Blum’s blog, but may be also on Counterpunch – that the Venezuelan government is the target of a concerted campaign by the Americans and the multinationals to overthrow it. The American government has traditionally hated and sought to overthrow every liberal or left-wing government in Central and South America as a threat to American hegemony – the infamous Monroe Doctrine – and the corporate interests of the American big businesses that have dominated the continent’s economy. Two of the most notable instances were the coups against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1958, and the 1975 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. Both were democratically elected socialist politicians, overthrown with American aid and replaced with brutal Fascist dictators.
America has been trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government for some time, not least because Venezuela last week came of the petrodollar. If more countries do this, it will make it impossible for America to service its national debt, and the economic crisis hitting the country will get much worse.
And aiding the American government are the multinationals, which are deliberately withholding food and other goods in order to drive prices up.
And Venezuela may not be the only country to suffer such economic warfare by big business. Britain under a Corbyn government may be next. Also last week, at the Tory conference, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, urged business leaders to do everything they could ‘to resist’ a Labour government. Mike reported this on his blog, and commented that Hammond should be sacked for ‘unparliamentary conduct’. He had urged proprietors and managers to break the fiduciary trust between themselves, their shareholders, and the companies they run. Instead of managing them in the interests of the firms themselves, he was asking them to manage them for the political benefit of the Tories.
I commented on Hammond’s remarks that it also shows the hypocrisy by the Tories towards political activism. When the unions do it, and go on strike against a Tory government, or simply to protect the interests of their members, the Tories and big business start screaming that it’s ‘subversion’. When they do it, it’s all right. It’s simply the captains of industry working to save capitalism. Except in this case, capitalism isn’t under threat. Corbyn is simply advocating a mixed economy and a stronger welfare state. This is very far from the total nationalisation demanded by the Communist and Trotskyist parties. And business would prosper through greater state investment stimulating the economy, and the poor being given higher wages to purchase their goods.
But this isn’t what big business wants. It wants a workforce of crushed, low wage workers kept in something close to debt peonage, which they can exploit and discard at whim. Which is very much the policy of the Tory party under Cameron and May.
Hammond wanted industry to work towards overthrowing a Corbyn government. And big business is very definitely trying to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist government. May’s comment about Corbyn and McDonnell living on Planet Venezuela might be an innocent reply, or it could indicate that she’s also very aware of the real situation over there. And like her chancellor, she wants it done to Britain if Labour gets in.
After the successes of the women’s marches across America and many other parts of the world, including Britain, the organisers are calling for another, expanded march and day of protest on March 8th – International Women’s Day. They don’t want the previous march to be a single event, which everyone then moves on from and then forgets. They want to keep the pressure up and the issues alive. Not only do they plan another march, but they’re also calling for a general strike by women. They state:
In the spirit of women and their allies coming together for love and liberation, we offer A Day Without A Woman. We ask: do businesses support our communities, or do they drain our communities? Do they strive for gender equity or do they support the policies and leaders that perpetuate oppression? Do they align with a sustainable environment or do they profit off destruction and steal the futures of our children?
The two hosts, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, point out that many men also joined the women’s march, and that it wasn’t just about one issue, but about a number that worry Americans. They also make the point that protesting is a quintessential tradition of American freedom, and warn about biased reporting from Fox News. Faux News broadcast some sneering, distorted coverage of the original women’s march, claiming that the marchers didn’t know what they were protesting against. To provide some similitude, they interviewed some people marching, who were less than articulate and informed than others. They make the point that this is the stand Faux News trick. If they ask 20 people about a protest, and 19 give a clear, informed answer, but one doesn’t, they’ll broadcast the answer of that one person.
They also jokingly wonder what’ll happen on March 8th, if Ana Kasparian and the show’s female producers and staff don’t come in.
Not everybody was happy with the inclusiveness of the women’s march. Julian Vigo, one of the contributors to Counterpunch, argued that its effect was diluted because it didn’t solely concentrate on women and their issues. I think she’s wrong. The march was very popular, because it included women’s equality as one of a number of issues that concerned women and men. I can remember some of the feminists campaigning in the Labour party, who tried to appeal to women to come out and vote during one election, saying that they believed that ‘every issue is a women’s issue’.
As for Faux News, well, what do you expect? They didn’t get their nickname for nothing. Academics, who’ve analysed their content has said that 75 per cent of it is rubbish. You’re actually less informed if you watch Fox than if you don’t. And pretty much could be said about the Dirty Diggers newspapers around the world, not excluding the Times.
There have been a number of general strikes by women around the world, ever since the ancient Greek play, Lysistrata. There was one way back in the 1970s or ’80s in Iceland, if memory serves me right.
It will be interesting to see if there’s a general strike by this country’s women. We suffer from the same issues that are plaguing America – poverty, starvation, stagnant and declining wages, cuts to benefits, destruction of the welfare state and attacks on state healthcare provision. But the head of the government is Theresa May, and these grotty policies were introduced by Maggie Thatcher. As a result, I’m afraid that if there is a march and women’s strike, the protestors will be smeared as misogynists. Killary’s platform was essentially Conservative, and she herself a staunch supporter of Wall Street and the power of big business. She had also supported the Iraq invasion, and a Fascist coup in Honduras, which saw a female indigenous leader murdered by a right-wing death squad. Despite the fact that her policies would have hurt millions of women across America and beyond, her supporters were smearing her critics, and particularly supporters of Bernie Sanders, as misogynists. There was also the unedifying spectacle of Madeleine Albright, who has very vocally supported all manner of international aggression and atrocities by the US, telling women that there was a ‘special place in hell’ for them if they didn’t vote for Hillary.
British feminists have also shown that they’ll back a female politico, even if they despise her policies. When Thatcher was ousted Germaine Greer penned a piece ‘A Sad Day for Every Woman’, lamenting the removal from power of the first female British prime minister. This was despite Thatcher not considering herself a feminist, there being no women in her cabinet, and the active damage her policies had inflicted on women in general.
Similarly, various female hacks in the Graun and other papers, including the I, tried to claim that Angela Eagle was the victim and other female Labour politicos were the victims of terrible misogyny from Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters, just as Killary’s supporters had tried to smear Sanders’, and similarly without any real evidence.
We definitely need more mass demonstrations and days of action in this country against the government and its vile policies, policies that are killing hundreds, and leaving millions in poverty and starvation. But I fear that if women march and strike against Theresa May, just like they marched against the Orange Buffoon, they’ll be attacked and smeared for their lack of solidarity to a female leader.
Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for the American presidency, is notorious for his racism and misogyny. Among his supporters are White supremacists and the denizens of the ‘Alt Right’. These were the subject of an article by Counterpunch a few days ago. That magazine basically described them as the KKK on the internet. They’re privileged White guys, but differ from the usual run of bog-standard Nazis in having intellectual pretensions. Among Trump’s most notorious policies are his statement that he intends to build a massive wall along with the border with Mexico, and make the Mexicans pay for it.
But Hillary Clinton, the Democratic contender, is also herself deeply unpleasant and reactionary. She’s another corporatist, taking money from big business and pushing through legislation that favours them against ordinary blue-collar and middle class Americans. She’s in favour of deregulating the banks, cutting welfare even further and denying Americans universal free healthcare, despite the fact that a majority of Americans now want it. She’s also every bit as militaristic and hawkish as her male counterparts in Bush’s administration. She fully supported the invasion of Iraq, and also supports the bombing of Syria. She’s also started rattling the proverbial sabre against Putin and the Russians after a series of hacks revealed the Democrat Party’s skullduggery in promoting her against her left-wing opponent, Bernie Sanders.
For some reason, she’s much more popular amongst Black American and ethnic minority voters. She’s seen as more liberal, despite the fact that she isn’t. She was behind the punitive legislation in the 1990s that put a vastly increased number of Black American men behind bars. She also notoriously made a speech about communities under threat from ‘superpredators’, a term which then was almost exclusively applied to Blacks.
And in this piece from the American comedian Jimmy Dore shows, she also pre-empted Trump in racist policies. She was demanding greater clampdowns on illegal immigration, including the construction of incarceration centres, and building a wall with Mexico ten years ago, in a speech in 2006. He also points out that she sponsored 14 bills tightening up immigration, including the construction of three-layered barriers.
Quite honestly, as a European observer, I no longer know which candidate is worse. Trump’s a raving Fascist, and so, increasingly is Shrillary. Trump’s a buffoon, who is dangerous not just because of his sheer contempt for liberty and decency, but through stupidity and ignorance. But Shrillary is also profoundly dangerous, because she is also a warmonger and contemptuous of human liberty and decency. She is also dangerous for the opposite reason to Trump: she’s more intelligent, and arguably knows precisely what she’s doing when demands the destruction of Middle Eastern countries and backs Fascist revolutions in Latin America, like she did in Honduras.
It’s precisely because both candidates are now almost equally vile, that many American voters are turning to alternative parties and candidates. Many Republicans are turning to the Libertarians. Progressive Democrats, who supported Bernie Sanders, are turning to Jill Stein, the Green candidate. And who can blame them? Whichever one of those two wins, it’ll be bad for America, bad for Europe and potentially lethal for the Middle East.
This is a story from another side of the Pond, but it’s relevant because it shows the kind of horrific medical system that the Blairites and the Tories are introducing over here through the destruction of the NHS. In this piece from the atheist/ secularist news channel, Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski comments on a story in Raw Story from a report from a respected medical journal, The Journal of Antibiotics. A survey was done of 400 people in Houston, Texas, asking them how they obtained their antibiotics. These were people, who needed the drug, not those who did not. Kulinski is very clear to dispel this possible misunderstanding, as the overprescription of antibiotics is a separate issue. It’s responsible for the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, which is a serious threat to health around the world.
This is about people, who genuinely need the drug. It investigated how people obtained it, when they could no longer afford it. About a quarter had saved up supplies of the drug. Another 12 per cent talked about getting it from friends or relatives. And 4 per cent took pet antibiotics. As Kulinski points out, animals metabolise drugs in a different way. This shows how desperate the poor are in America when they can’t afford healthcare.
Kulinski describes this disgusting state of affairs in justifiably strong language. He points out how its shows the twisted attitude of the country’s political elite, who have been bought by the corporations. Many Americans can’t afford medicines. The country’s infrastructure is falling apart. In some places there isn’t any clean water. But the country has spent $7 trillion on the Iraq War. It’ll be paying it off until 2053. $80 billion has spent bailing out the banks. $4 billion or so was given by the government to the oil company, ExxonMobil, to help with their research and development, despite the fact that this is one of the richest companies in America. He makes the point that America can afford to spend all this money on pork barrel projects for companies, and making wars on ‘Brown people’ who have never invaded us. But somehow it can’t afford to spend money on healthcare, despite the fact that singlepayer is actually cheaper than the insurance system already in place.
Nearly all of these criticisms can be directed at our parliament, and our politicos in New Labour and the Tories. Blair was all too eager to invade Iraq as George Dubya’s poodle. We’re sending our sons and daughters to fight and die in a country that never attacked us, despite all the spin and lies about how Hussein was in league with Bin Laden, and ready to launch weapons of mass destruction at 45 minutes notice. And Blair and the Tories are selling off our healthcare system, so it won’t be long before we have people in this country saving antibiotics, or using stuff that’s been prescribed for their dogs and cats. We’ve already seen 4.7 million of us forced into food poverty. That’s people, who don’t have enough to eat, or don’t know when or where their next meal’s coming from. But we have more than enough money to support the Iraq War, and for Cameron, May and Bomber Benn to talk about attacking Syria. We’ve more than enough money to spend on Trident, a weapon system we don’t need, which will set us back trillions. And despite the spin, the majority of jobs it’ll create are in America. And apparently we’ve got enough money to go threatening to start a war with Russia, despite the fact that Putin isn’t a threat, and the people being genuinely persecuted in Ukraine is the ethnic Russian minority.
Oh yes, and as someone who believes in socialism and the trade unions, I have difficulty in understanding why I should be called upon to support a war for a government that includes Nazis and brutally attacks trade unionists. That’s right – the coalition currently ruling the Ukraine includes the Nazis from the Pravy (Right) Sektor. When I say ‘Nazis’, I mean Nazis. The real thing. People who wear the insignia and regalia of the auxiliary SS units and nationalist organisations that collaborated with the invading Nazis during the Great Patriotic War. Unreconstructed anti-Semites, who revere the memory of those responsible for the Holocaust and the pogroms against Jewish Ukrainians. During the ‘democratic’ demonstration that ousted Yanukhovych from power in Maidan Square in Kyiv, a group of these attacked a group of trade unionists, throwing several of them out of the upper floors of one of the buildings into which they’d fled. Red Ken in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, condemned the way the West had recruited Nazis, including participants in the Holocaust, as part of the global campaign against Communism. And he’s right. We shouldn’t have recruited them and given them sanctuary, and we shouldn’t be supporting a bunch of Nazi collaborators now.
This is what British and American politics has degenerated into. We’re bankrupting ourselves for wars against people, who’ve done us no harm, while denying our own people healthcare, food and clean water. All for corporate profit.
This is another video from Jimmy Dore, an American comedian and political commentators, whose been a regular guest on The Young Turks. In this video, he discusses an interview The Turks’ roving reporter, Jordan Cheriton, had with an elderly lady, who described her experience of being denied medical cover until she finally got Medicare. Medicare is the American system, in which the state pays for the healthcare of those too poor to have private medical insurance. This lady was denied private health insurance because she had a pre-existing condition: asthma. She only got medical cover through Medicare after thirty years or so without it.
Cheriton met her at a meeting of the supporters of Grayson, the progressive Democrat candidate for Florida, who’s one of those following in the footsteps of Bernie Sanders. Sanders was the self-described ‘Democratic Socialist’, who wanted to introduce universal healthcare in America, and whose bid for the presidency was blocked by Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democrat party machine. This lady and Dore attack the opponents of state healthcare, who accuse its supporters amongst the younger generation of ‘having it too easy’ and not knowing anything about the real world. One of those is Shrillary. Dore has a clip of her from earlier this year, voicing her opinion that state medicine is impractical, and ranting that ‘it will never happen’. One of Dore’s producers points out that back in the 1990s, she was in favour of universal state-paid healthcare, until the cheques from private enterprise came in. Dore is also suitably scathing about the charge that universal single-payer healthcare is ‘utopian’ in Hillary’s words, when the rest of the world has it. The lady at the meeting, and in the later interview with Cheriton, states that she’s glad the young people support state healthcare, and wants the old politicians who oppose it to move aside so they can come through.
Here’s the video:
I’m putting this up because this is the reality of the American healthcare system. Robin Cook in his pamphlet on the NHS for the Fabian Society nearly thirty years ago pointed out that private medicine discriminates against people with long-standing illness, because of the greater expense of treating them. They concentrate on covering relatively healthy people, who they can make a profit from, as they don’t need to pay out so often. And, of course, private insurance only works if you can afford, which 20 per cent of Americans can’t due to escalating medical bills.
This is the system which Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron and now Theresa May want to introduce in Britain. This is why Jeremy Hunt has described the NHS as ‘an abomination’, and the Tories are manufacturing a funding crisis in the NHS. They’re doing so because they’ve also got connections to private healthcare firms, and the American healthcare companies are seeking to expand because of growing dissatisfaction over that side of the Pond with private healthcare. Over half of Americans now want a state healthcare system, like Canada and the rest of the world.
Don’t have any illusions on this score about New Labour wishing to support the NHS. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown laid much of the foundations for the continuing Tory privatisation of the health service, but were determined not to let anyone know, as, like Thatcher before them, they realised that it would lose them the election. This is the healthcare system that New Labour – Progress, Tomorrow’s Labour, Saving Labour and the other Blairite shills support. It’s why the Conservative media have put so much into attacking Corbyn, as he threatens to undermine it and their corporate masters by renationalising the NHS.
Don’t give your vote to them or the Tories. Defend the NHS, and support Corbyn, while there’s still time.
On a different issue, I notice one of the guys listening to her speak is a young Asian bloke wearing an ‘Islamic Relief’ T-shirt. He’s obviously a religious Muslim, who takes serious the obligation under Islam to provide alms to the poor. Many British Muslims also do. My parents met one young Muslim lady doing the same when giving to the local food bank. I guess she and he must be the horrendous Muslims coming to destroy British society in advance of ISIS. (Sarcasm). It’s been pointed out again and again that immigrants are actually net contributors to society, as they actually pay more in taxes than they take out. But this gets forgotten in the racist hysteria.
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