The Humanist Report: Killary Gets Rough Reception in Wales

Which the American presenter pronounces as ‘Welch’ and ‘Welsh’, confusing the term for its people with the name of the country itself. But you can forgive him that because (1) he’s foreign, and (2) he loves the people of Welsh for standing up to Her Highness and telling her how it really was. And he also likes Matt Free of Channel 4 News for also asking Killary tough questions, which American pundits avoid.

As I’ve discussed in previous blog posts, Killary, who seems to think going around with a mass-murdering creature like Henry Kissinger is a badge of honour, has been going up and down on the Earth promoting her book like crazy. It’s called What Happened, and is basically her attempt to blame everyone but herself for her massive failure to win the election against a colossal moron like Donald Trump. She was Down Under a few weeks ago, giving the Aussies the benefit of her wisdom. Then she was over here, at the South Bank Centre, the Cheltenham Literary Festival and then Swansea University across the border, to receive an honorary degree. The Uni decided to grant her the honour for her work promoting women’s and children’s rights around the world. As the presenter here states, presumably they didn’t get the message that she voted for the Iraq War.

But all did not go smoothly for Kissinger’s fangirl. The students at Swansea actually booed her. And one young woman, a biochemistry student, Kirsty Lloyd, called out to her ‘Bernie would’ve won. He would’ve beaten Trump.’ Which he would have. He was in the lead against her in the polls, until she, Debbie Wasserman Schulz of the Democratic National Convention, and Donna Brasile, Clinton’s main woman in her team, managed to steal the presidential nomination from her.

Lloyd said afterwards

“Hillary Clinton cheated Bernie Sanders of his nomination. And all those drone strikes, which kill women and children are illegal contradict the reason she is being given a doctorate – which is for doing things for women and children all over the world. The main thing she’s done for women and children is kill them in drone strikes.”

And things didn’t get better when she was being interviewed by Matt Free. He reminded her that her share amongst women went down 1 per cent from 44 per cent under Obama to 43. Hillary then tried to rebut this by saying that it was only White women who became disillusioned with her. Overall she won amongst women. And she lost because gender is not yet a powerful factor in American elections as race is. The commenter on the Humanist Report states that this could only be the response of an American politician, who sees everything in terms of identity politics. He also points out that it’s also terribly insulting to Barack Obama, as it implies that he only won the election because he was Black.

Free goes on to make the point that she lost partly because of her background. She’d already been in office – sort of – as the First Lady with Bill Clinton, and so her membership of a political dynasty worked against her. And people didn’t like her as they saw her as an establishment candidate, in an age of revolution.

At which point Hillary goes off and drones on about how she led in all the debates, and was seen as the more intelligent, winning candidate. When he asks her, Clinton responds that she lost partly because of Steve Dromey and Russian ‘interference’.

The Report’s presenter again points out here how Killary has contradicted herself. She says she takes full responsibility for her failure, but then immediately blames other people. He also states that it’s great to see how people in the rest of the world don’t follow American pundits in fawning over their guests, asking easy questions. He liked the way Free made her squirm. He states that you don’t see politicians like Hillary pop up elsewhere in the world, because everywhere she’s seen as another sleazy, corrupt politician like all the others. Largely because of the dodgy dealings of the Clinton Foundation. But you do find politicians like Bernie Sanders appearing in other countries, like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.

The presenter clearly makes some great points, though he and Free on Channel 4 could have challenged her about the so-called ‘interference’ from the Russians. They didn’t lose her the election. They were trying to interfere in the American election, but no more than they usually do. Crucially, they didn’t leak the incriminating emails to WikiLeaks. Those came from a Democratic insider disgruntled at her corruption.

As for her being the better candidate over Trump, he points out that Trump was trailing behind her and faced worse challenges than she did. In Utah a Mormon, Republican establishment candidate went independent to challenge Trump. And Trump faced another Republican challenger elsewhere, who took more votes away from him than Jill Stein did Hillary.

Hillary, her arrogance, corruption, and entitlement is responsible for her failings, not other people.

Except in one instance: the Electoral College. This swung overwhelmingly for Trump, despite the fact that Killary had three million votes more than he did at the popular level. And the College is an anti-democratic measure put into America’s bizarre and byzantine electoral system in the 19th century in order to give some political power to the southern, slave-holding states. If America was a genuine democracy, it would have vanished a long time ago. But it’s enshrined in America’s constitution, and so is preserved as part of the great wisdom of the patrician founders of the American political system. Who were all patricians with a real fear of power being grabbed by the White peasants and proles, let alone Blacks. They set up the Constitution to keep power in the hands of the monied, and so have built into the system the political paralysis that is stifling the forces for real change that America needs.

Killary Appearing at Cheltenham Literary Festival Today – But Will They Ask the Really Awkward Questions

Hillary Clinton was due to appear at the Cheltenham Literary Festival today, 15th October 2017, undoubtedly as part of her tour promoting her book, What Happened? In it, she tries to examine and explain how she came to lose the American presidential election to the orange maniac, whose now bringing us just that little bit closer to war with Iran, and nuclear Armageddon. Various American progressive and radical news shows, like The Young Turks, the Jimmy Dore Show and Secular Talk have extensively reviewed her book and ripped it to shreds very effectively. Some of the videos are quite long, but the problem with Hillary’s campaign can be summed up very simply: her. Clinton is a horrible person, and a horrible candidate. She is part of the corporate elite, personally corrupt in the sense that she is very much in the pocket of Wall Street and big business, and a warmonger, who was ramping up international tensions with Russia and China unnecessarily even before she lost the election. Now it’s even worse as she and the other corporatist Democrats try to cast the blame on Russian interference, rather than look much closer to home to the weakness of Clinton herself. She is massively out of touch with ordinary, working American people.

A majority of the population now want single-payer healthcare, like the rest of the Developed World. And which the Germans have had since Bismarck’s ‘Socialist Law’ of the 1870s, when the real Iron Chancellor tried to crush the rise of Germany’s Social Democrats by stealing a bit of their thunder. While Bernie Sanders has shown how America could easily afford it, and it would be cheaper both for the state and for ordinary Americans, Killary herself has declared that it’s ‘utopian’. Which is why it been working very well in Germany and the Scandinavian countries for more than a hundred years, and the French and Swiss have similar systems which mix state payment and private insurance. But this is still too far-fetched and difficult for the world’s only superpower.

Her record gets much worse when it comes to Black Americans. Bill Clinton was so popular with America’s Black population, and had the same easy charm that many of their politicians and celebrities have, that he was hailed as ‘the first Black president’. But Bill and his wife were responsible for putting in place the legislation that’s seen a massive proportion of Black men jailed for drug offences. She drew an artificial distinction between crack and ordinary cocaine, to make it appear that the one favoured by Blacks was a greater threat than the other, and so deserved greater punishment. Pushing this legislation, she talked about the threat of ‘superpredators’ at a time when this term was nearly exclusively used to describe young Black men.

On the world stage, she was responsible for arming Islamist rebels in Libya so that they overthrew Colonel Gaddafy. Gaddafy was certainly no saint. He was a dictator, who tortured and locked up his political opponents. But he kept the nation together and made sure that his country was paid a fair price for their oil after it had been run as an Italian colony from the late 19th century onwards. During the decades of his people’s struggle for independence, one third of the population was killed. It was a secular state, albeit one where the official ideology, as laid out in his Green Book, was a mixture of Islam and Arab socialism. There was free education and free healthcare. Libya was the most prosperous African country, and Gaddafy himself stood up for the continents’ rights in global affairs. And while he used the Islamists to assassinate his political rivals elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East, they weren’t allowed to terrorise his people.

After Gaddafy was toppled, the country descended into civil war between rival factions, including the Islamists. It is still divided between two completing authorities. Its education and healthcare systems have been destroyed, and the Islamists have seized control of large parts of the country.

And then there’s the issue of the coup in Honduras. Up until 2012 or so, this had a liberal president, who actually wanted to raise the living standards of the peasants and urban working class, who were desperately poor, as well as protect the land and livelihood of the country’s indigenous peoples. And, as usually happens in South and Central America when the establishment is faced with the threat of a liberal regime, he was overthrown by a right-wing coup. This installed a Fascist dictator, who started rounding up, imprisoning, killing and torturing opposition leaders, activists and trade unionists. America has legislation designed to prevent it from supporting foreign coups. Killary decided to get around this by officially declaring that the coup wasn’t military, so that America could continue giving aid to the Fascist government.

And in her own party, Hillary was in cahoots with the head of the Democratic National Convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, so that Democratic nominations were fiddled to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. Sanders was by far the better candidate, with far greater appeal to working Americans. But he’s a self-declared ‘Democratic Socialist’, who wants single-payer healthcare, a renewed American welfare state, stronger trade unions, and an altogether better deal for America’s poor and working people. And unlike the Clinton’s, Bernie has genuinely taken an interest in promoting the welfare of America’s ethnic minorities. He was one of the first, if not the first, mainstream American politician to go to the reservations of America’s First Peoples to seek their views on improving conditions for them.

But this was all too much for Hillary, whose entire electoral strategy consisted of turning against the party’s core constituency amongst blue-collar workers, Blacks and other minorities, to appeal to Republicans. Just like the Clinton’s mate, Tony Blair, pursued the Tory vote as the expense of the British White working class over here.

But Killary can’t accept any of that, and so blames everyone else in her book except herself, including Jill Stein, the head of the Green Party. Clinton’s tried to present herself as some kind of feminist, whose victory in the election would somehow be a step forward for America’s women, despite the fact that she would do nothing for them. Bernie was much more popular amongst the female population, because he promised women – and men – work and proper healthcare. As did Jill Stein. Stein was a doctor. I put up one of her election broadcasts I found on YouTube, in which Stein talked to a group of women about the necessity for a single-payer healthcare system. She stated unequivocally that it was especially needed for America’s women. And I don’t doubt for a moment that Stein’s absolutely right. From what I’ve seen, the cost of giving birth alone under the American private medical system is tens of thousands of dollars, so much so that American couples have to spend years saving up and then worrying if it’ll bankrupt them before starting a family. It’s a situation that also shows how hollow the Republicans’ concerns about the falling American birthrate is. Their solution is to try to ban abortion. I think Mussolini in Fascist Italy also did that. But he also passed legislation to give Italian women state aid in raising a family. It was part of the Fascists’ reactionary campaign to take women out of the workplace and back in the home and the kitchen, but even then it was far less reactionary in its methods than that of contemporary Conservativism.

The electorate knew that Hillary wasn’t going to do anything for ordinary women, and so voted for the other candidates. And so Killary responded by trying to smear Sanders as a misogynist, just as the Blairites in the Labour party tried to smear Jeremy Corbyn over hear. It hasn’t worked.

And Killary’s still trying to present herself as some kind of feminist ‘everywoman’. When she appeared on America’s Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon a few days ago, the show’s female writers and a tearful Miley Cyrus also appeared to write ‘thank you’ notes to her praising her for being such an inspiration to them. The Humanist Report produced the video below rightly critiquing not just Hillary, but also the other mainstream comedians, who have politicos on their show, whether the comedians are Fallon, Bill Maher or whoever. He attacks them because they are using their comedy to promote a corporatist agenda regardless of whether the politicians are from the Democrats or Republicans. The Report’s presenter urges his audience to watch intelligently and critically. They can’t and shouldn’t censor, but they should hold presenters and broadcasters, even himself, up to a higher standard.

I am very definitely not a Humanist, but it’s an excellent point that can’t be repeated too much. Here’s the video.

I wonder just how many of the really tough questions have been or will be put to Hillary at the Cheltenham Literary Festival today. My guess is that they’ll ask some awkward questions, but nothing too hard or likely to make her feel uncomfortable.

As for Hillary’s appearance in Britain, I was talking about it to a friend of mine in Cheltenham the last time I was up there a week or so ago. He told me that one of his American friends had wondered what she was doing over here. The obvious answer is that Britain has a special relationship with America, and American politics directly affects this country, and indeed the rest of the world. But his reply was different. He said: ‘Because you owe us an apology’.

When George ‘Dubya’ won the election in 2000, Americans went on social media to apologise to the rest of the world. I think something similar is needed now. But instead of ordinary Americans apologising, it should be Hillary apologising to the ordinary Joes and Josies across the US for being such a transparent corporate shill that she lost to someone as bigoted, stupid and murderous as Trump.

Redacted Tonight on the Corporate Bias of the Mainstream Media

I’ve already put up a piece earlier today from The Humanist Report, which described an article Bernie Sanders had written warning about the threat to American democracy from the bias in the corporate-controlled mainstream media. In this piece from RT’s Redacted Tonight, comedian Lee Camp also discusses this topic.

Camp covers some of the same causes Sanders does, such as the concentration of media into the hands of an increasingly few corporate giants. Only six companies now control American newspapers, magazines, book publishing, television and radio. There were 9 major companies, till ‘Republican’ president Bill Clinton signed the bill permitting a wave of mass media amalgamations. No, that isn’t a mistake. Camp calls him a ‘Republican’, ”cause that’s what he was.’ Absolutely. Clinton did what Blair was to do with the Labour party in England. He took over and imported into the Democrats the anti-welfare stance of the Republicans and their free trade ideology in order to appeal to Republican voters.

Camp also talks about the pressures on companies from the power of the advertisers, who don’t want anything to reflect badly on them or business as a whole. In 1966, for example, Proctor and Gamble sent the TV companies carrying their adverts a message informing them that the must not broadcast anything that would make business and industry look bad. If they did so, and showed a story in which a businessman was the villain, they had to show that the corrupt individual was the exception, not the rule. Camp duly sends this pernicious nonsense up with a riff about a banker’s co-workers in Goldman Sachs being incredibly surprised that he is morally dead.

He also talks about how the corporations themselves are headed by immensely rich businessmen, who don’t want to publicise anything that might harm their profits and corporate power. Thus, anyone, who tries to do something for the poor and vanishing middle class will be attacked and ignored. He quotes the late, left-wing comedian George Carlin: ‘It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.’

One of the ways the media pushes its lies and gross distortions is through constant repetition. Here, Camp quotes a Harvard professor. Others have said the same thing, but quoted an entirely different expert: Adolf Hitler. Hitler said that if you wanted people to believe one enormous lie, you kept on repeating it until it sounded like the truth.

Camp exemplified how effective this tactic is with Obama’s speech about military action in Syria. When he first suggested it, the American public were largely unenthusiastic. The military-industrial complex hadn’t gotten around to propagandising this to the American people. But they soon got to work, and so when it was suggested again a few years later, the American public was supposedly far more enthusiastic about it, after being bombarded with a corporate media campaign.

The government has also tried to ensure that the media broadcast a message that was friendly to big business. In 1975 a document was published on the topic of possible media regulation as a response to falling standards. The thinktank that published this was naturally concerned about this. But as Camp jokes, this wasn’t about whether the girls presenting the weather were wearing underwear or not. No, this was about making sure that broadcasting reflected the ideals and standards of corporate business. If they didn’t, the government would step in and start regulating them.

At the beginning of the clip, Camp states that Americans believe in the myth that they have an impartial media. They believe that because you can say anything you like on TV, as illustrated with a clip of a man ridiculing Hillary Clinton in a bizarre rant, therefore the Land of the Free has an equally free media. However, the immense costs of setting up a newspaper, TV or radio station mean that only the rich can afford to do it, and so the news that Americans receive reflects very much the views and priorities of the rich. Which do not consist in empowering the poor and working people against them.

It’s a very good piece, which cites chapter and verse of studies and writings about the right-wing bias and power of the mainstream media. Camp is, however, quite an edgy comedian, so there’s strong language and some vulgar jokes.

The Humanist Report: Bernie Sanders Warns of the Power of Corporate Media

This morning Mike’s put up a piece attacking the mainstream media for their constant libels, falsehoods and misrepresentation of the Labour party, and their apparent success in convincing the general public that Labour, at least under Jeremy Corbyn, is unelectable.

Bernie Sanders wrote a piece in one of the American magazines a few weeks ago criticising the power of the corporate media in the US, and the way it constituted a genuine threat to democracy. The clip below is from the Humanist Report, whose host describes the article and Bernie’s argument.

Bernie stated that, as a rule, the issues that concern most working Americans are treated the least seriously by the corporate media, with those of severe concern to ordinary folks given the least serious coverage. The media also likes to present ‘politics as entertainment’, which explains the rise of Trump, an entertainer, who knows how to exploit this type of media coverage.

The media is also biased against working class issues and the politicos who stand up for working people, because of the power of the advertisers, in the extreme wealth of corporate presenters, and the shrinking number of corporations and the immensely wealthy tycoons that own them. Sanders points out that you don’t see any in-depth articles attacking the bloated prices for prescription drugs, that have made them unaffordable to the poor. That’s because American newspapers and corporate media make part of their revenue from the advertising from the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.

The news presenters audiences see on their TV screens are also immensely rich through multi-million dollar contracts with the TV networks. Sanders points out that this doesn’t make them evil, but it does distance them from the bread and butter interests that matter to your average middle class person. Similarly, the number of companies that own the US media have also declined. There used to be about nine different companies owning American broadcasters. Now there are six. Thus the American media is increasingly in the hands of a small number of extremely powerful magnates. There are about 15 of these, whose individual wealth is in the billions.

This is dangerous because the corporate media still have the power to shape public opinion. For example, when Bernie was running for the presidential nomination last year, there was a more or less complete news blackout own him. But they gave plenty of coverage to that Nazi buffoon, Donald Trump. Academic studies, such as one made by Harvard, show that the corporate controlled media is effective in deciding which issues matters to Americans, such as terrorism.

The presenter states that this has been good for alternative media – for the Humanist Report, Secular Talk and The Young Turks, as people are increasingly turning to them. But it also means that the corporate-controlled media are failing in their job. They are meant to be the ‘fifth arm of government’, which keeps power in check and accountable to the American people. But they aren’t. They represent the aims and wishes of an immensely wealthy elite against those of the American people as a whole.