I found this video from the left-wing news service Double Down News on YouTube. It’s a short video of just under three minutes, whose title says it all: 18 yrs ago today the Iraq War began. Never Forget how the Media Sold, Enabled & Whitewashed the War. It’s basically an appeal by DDN for more support as the alternative to the lamestream broadcasters. Left-wing Greek politico Yanis Yaroufakis turns up at the end to urge people to support it on Patreon. But it does an excellent job of reminding us how the British media backed the War in Iraq. The video begins with clips of Andrew Marr raving about Tony Blair and his decision to go to war, defying the wishes of the British public. This is cut with shots of Bush and Blair entering a plane together, Blair taking a photo on his phone of explosion, and brutalised prisoners with bags over the heads being led away by American/ British troopers. It ends with Marr interviewing the awesome Noam Chomsky, in which Chomsky seeks to disabuse Marr of the notion that journalism is a crusading profession. Chomsky tells Marr he knows many highly respected journalists, who have a very different, very cynical view of it, who talk about playing it like a violin. Marr objects to Chomsky’s statement that journalists self-censor, saying that he doesn’t. Chomsky calmly replies: ‘No, I’m sure you believe every word. But if you had a different view, you wouldn’t be where you’re sitting’.
I leave it up to you whether you want to support DDN or not. I think news services like them – The Canary, The Skwawkbox, and Novara Media over here and their equivalents, like the Jimmy Dore Show in America, will become even more important as the media becomes increasingly propagandistic and uniformly right-wing.
And it seems that the Neocons responsible for the death and chaos of Iraq and Libya are coming back. This was the warning made by the Labour left when they presented an event on Zoom on why socialists should be anti-war, which included a talk by the head of the Stop the War Coalition. We need to remember: Blair lied, people died.
And the wretched, propagandistic British media praised this unindicted war criminal to the heights!
Okay, I’m sure that this is something that no-one wants to see: allegations of war crimes against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m afraid I’ve only caught a glimpse of it, but there was a trailer tonight for tomorrow’s edition of Panorama, 18th November 2019, which showed that this would be the subject of its investigation.
I understand that much of the curriculum at Sandhurst is about the morality of war, and the British army has prided itself that it uses the minimum of force. And the British armed forces for centuries have been subject to the rule of law. One of the slavery documents I found in the archives when I was working at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum here in Bristol was a parliamentary inquiry into allegations of atrocities against women and children by British troops during a slave rebellion in the West Indies.
But the men and women in our armed forces aren’t moral supermen. For all their training, courage and professionalism, they are human beings under immense stress. They were sent in by Blair to fight an illegal war in Iraq, which is already a war crime, though one for which the former Prime Minister and his cabinet and advisers are culpable, rather than the troopers who fought it. There were problems with supplying them adequately with the right equipment, so much so that they were supposedly nicknamed ‘the borrowers’ by the Americans because our troops had to borrow theirs. And the enemy fights dirty. I’ve heard it said that the Taliban in Afghanistan used to smear their bullets in excrement so that people shot by them would become infected in addition to the gunshot wound. I’ve also read reports online of the allied forces coming upon individuals, who it was highly probably had been the very Taliban, who had been firing on them moments before, but who swore they were no such thing. Even when it looked like they were washing their hands to remove the cordite stains.
In the American territory in Iraq, decent conduct seems to have broken down completely. I’ve reblogged pieces from The Jimmy Dore Show and other American left-wing news shows, which described how a former American diplomat to the zone complained about what he found there. The mess of one set of American troops was adorned with Nazi emblems and regalia. The private military contractors – read ‘mercenaries’ – were out of control, running drugs and prostitution rings. They also casually shot Iraqi civilians for fun. The real-life trooper, who was the subject of the Eastwood flick, The Sniper, a few years ago, also claimed to have shot civilians, including women and children. And the American military command also collaborated with sectarian death squads.
In this chaos and carnage I can quite believe that some our troopers would also take out their frustrations and aggression on the very civilians that Blair told us he was sending them in to liberate.
I’ve no doubt that this is going to stir up controversy, and I hope that the documentary is thorough and balanced – much more so than its wretched smear job against the Labour Party. And if it is found that British soldiers and personnel have committed atrocities against civilians, it will also be remembered that the ultimate responsibility for these wars lies with Tony Blair and his fellow war criminal, George Bush.
The corporatist, Clintonite wing of the Democrats has looked at the success of Donald Trump, and drawn precisely the wrong lesson from it. They concluded that after a millionaire reality TV star won the Republican nomination and then the presidency, what they had to do was field their own millionaire TV star as a candidate. And in this instance, they’ve decided that this candidate might be Oprah Winfrey. The idea’s gone over well too in the press on this side of the Atlantic. The ‘Opinion Matrix’ column in the ‘I’ newspaper quoted two newspapers raving about what a wonderful idea this would be.
In this clip from The Jimmy Dore Show, Dore and his co-host, Ron Placone, talk about why Oprah would be a terrible candidate. There’s a lot in there, but essentially the argument is very simple.
They quote a long article from the Guardian, one of the few newspapers, which doesn’t think it’s a good idea to choose Oprah. This points out that the problems afflicting ordinary working Americans come from the very nature of free market capitalism. People are becoming poorer and more insecure because of the destruction of what remained of the American welfare net, outsourcing, privatisation, low wages and job insecurity. All of these need to be tackled.
But this is precisely what Oprah will not do. She’s another neoliberal, who believes that it’s not the system that needs to be changed, but you. If you look inside yourself, you can improve your place in society, and rise up to be anything you want. It’s a reassuring message for some people, as it tells them that America is still the land of opportunity. Even though it isn’t, and hasn’t been for a very long time. Way back in the 1990s there was little difference between social mobility in the UK and the US. An article commenting on this in the Financial Times made this point, and argued that what gave American society its attractive power was the myth that it was, that ordinary people could still move up to be president, or a company director, or whatever. This is now no longer true, and in fact there’s greater social mobility in Europe.
This explains why Oprah’s so attractive to the corporate elites. She’s a black woman, so if she got the presidency, it would be a symbolically liberal gesture. Just like Killary and her team were arguing that the election of Clinton would be a victory for all women. Even though Clinton has done and would do nothing for America’s working people, and especially not women, who do the lowest paid work. It was all identity politics, with Killary claiming to be the outsider because she was a woman. Even though she’s in the pocket of Wall Street and other corporations, and as thoroughly corporate and corrupt as any of them. But if you didn’t back her, and instead chose Bernie, who actually stood for policies that will benefit America’s working people, you were automatically smeared as a ‘misogynist’. This included women voters, who, La Clinton declared, were only doing what their husbands and boyfriends told them.
The same’s going to be the case with Oprah Winfrey. It’s more identity politics, even though identity politics didn’t work with Clinton, and they probably won’t work with Oprah. Winfrey offers ordinary working Americans nothing, which is presumably why the corporate press in Britain was raving about what a good candidate she is. All the billionaires now owning papers, who don’t pay tax in this country, are presumably salivating at the thought of another president, who’ll do just what business leaders tell them.
As for what effect her presidency will have on Black Americans, you only have to look at Barack Obama to see that this prospects aren’t good. Despite all the racist screaming from the Republicans that Obama was an anti-White racist, who was planning to exterminate White Americans, Obama in many ways was a completely unremarkable, corporate politico. And he did precious little to solve the various problems facing Black communities in America. Oprah will be exactly the same, only the poverty will be worse. Economists have looked at the decline in the household wealth of working Americans. This has declined drastically. But the decline in White household wealth is nowhere as severe as that experienced by Black families. It’s been estimated that in a few years, their average household wealth will be $8.
Oprah has nothing to say to that. Absolutely nothing. Except that people should look inside themselves, believe in themselves, work hard and then magically their dreams will come true.
Except we live in a harsh, cruel neoliberal corporate hell, rather than the dream reality held out by corporate shills like Killary.
And domestic poverty isn’t the only reason why Oprah would be an awful president. She’s another hawk in foreign policy. In this clip from the Sam Seder’s Majority Report, they comment on a piece in her show where she promotes the invasion of Iraq, repeating the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Hussein didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction. There was no connection between him and Osama bin Laden. It was a Likudnik and Neocon lie to invade Iraq, steal their oil and plunder their state industries. The result has been chaos and mass death, carried out not just by Sunni insurgents, but also by the mercenaries under General McChristal, who was running death squads against the Shi’a.
If Oprah gets in, there’ll be more wars in the Middle East and elsewhere, as the American military machine keeps demanding more conflict and more funding.
Now I’ve nothing against Oprah Winfrey personally. She’s glamorous, intelligent and a genial TV host. But that’s all she is. In terms of policies, she offers absolutely nothing to ordinary Americans, except more corporatism, bigger profits for the rich, and more poverty and exploitation for the poor, including and especially Black Americans. And as far as foreign policy goes, she’s a danger to world peace. The Iraq invasion destroyed one of the most successful secular states in the Middle East, where women were safe to hold jobs outside the home, into a sectarian bloodbath. All for the profit of multinational corporations.
But I don’t doubt that if ordinary Americans don’t vote for her, the Democrat propaganda machine will vilify them, just as they smeared everyone who voted for Bernie against Killary. If you don’t vote Oprah, they’ll scream, you’ll be a racist and a misogynist. And no doubt Blacks will be told that they’re all ‘Uncle Toms’ and ‘housen****ers doing what Massah tells them. All while the Black, female candidate doesn’t care a jot about doing anything practical to help working Americans with their real problems, but just promotes the neoliberal myth of American social mobility. While seeing that the corporate rich get even richer, of course.
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.
Yesterday I put up a story from the I, which reported that over half of British dentists were planning to leave the NHS in the next few years. If that happens, courtesy of Jeremy Hunt and the Tories’ plan to privatize the NHS, British dentistry might end up looking very much like this.
In this video from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano comment on a story broadcast on NBC. The news team there visited the town of Los Almagadones in Mexico, which now styles itself the ‘dentistry capital of the world’. The town has a population of 5,000, but has more than its fair whack of dentists. It has 600 practicing dentists, working in more than 300 clinics. 114 million Americans lack dental insurance, and so can’t afford dental treatment. And so some make the journey south of the border to get their teeth fixed.
Dore states that this will explode the myth of American exceptionalism – the idea that America is innately superior to every other nation. Clearly it isn’t. Not if many of its citizens are reduced to going abroad for healthcare. Dore points out that the stories of Canadians coming to south to America for their medical treatment is largely a myth. But the story that Americans are going to Mexico are very real.
He and Placone and Zamora also use the story as an opportunity to lambast the continuing racism against Mexican and Hispanic migrants in the US. Americans are going south of the border for what is known as ‘dental tourism’, but the Mexicans aren’t organizing mass protests or trying to shame them.
The three joke about the idea of combining tourism with dentistry, including building a combined nightclub and dental surgery, before Dore rounds of the video with a well-aimed attack on Hillary and the corporate Democrats. These are the politicos, who rigged the Democratic nominations so they could steal it from Bernie Sanders and give it to Killary. And she and they care only for the immensely rich, and are entirely happy to deny ordinary, middle class working Americans with single-payer healthcare. Because free, universal healthcare is ‘utopian’, despite the fact that the Germans have had it ever since Bismarck in the 19th century.
Bernie Sanders in his book describes vividly the deplorable lack of affordable healthcare in America. Many counties lack doctors, let alone hospitals, because the area is too poor to support one according to the law of free market economics. He tells how one Sunday every month, one of the dental surgeries in Virginia provides free dental treatment. People are so desperate for it they actually sleep in their cars overnight.
This is what British healthcare is going to be like, if Theresa May and the Tories get back in.
The assault of monopoly capitalism on alternative news sources continues. This very brief video from RTUK reports that Google have removed RT from its prime ad list in the US without notice, and quotes Kirill Karnovich-Valua, RT’s deputy editor in chief, as saying that the move ‘speaks to the unprecedented political pressure increasingly applied to all RT partners and relationships in a concerted effort to push our channel out of the US market entirely, and by any means possible’.
The pretext for this attempt to force RTUS out of the American market is that RT is owned by the Russian state, and the Russian government have been interfering in US politics. Such as by leaking all the incriminating documents showing how corrupt Killary and her corporate Democrats are, and how they manipulated the Democratic primaries in order to steal the nomination from Bernie.
In fact, this is just lies. The Russians haven’t interfered in the American elections, or at least, no more than usual, and they weren’t responsible for leaking the docs that embarrassed Hillary Clinton. It’s just Killary and her supporters, including far rightwing organisers like the Von Mises Institute, ramping up a new Cold War with Russia to deflect attention from the corruption and widespread discontent with capitalism in America.
It’s part of the same process of demonetization that is being inflicted on all the alternative news sources under the pretext of protecting the public from ‘fake news’. Those affected include left-wing news sites like The Young Turks, Democracy Now, Secular Talk, The Jimmy Dore Show, the David Pakman Show and Sam Seder’s Majority Report.
These shows don’t broadcast fake news. They are very different from Alex Jones’ Infowars, which has done nothing except push stupid conspiracy theories and extreme right-wing bilge about how the Democrats/Globalists/Reptoids or whoever are planning to take over America, put everyone into FEMA camps and turn them into mind-controlled slaves.
The real reason Google has done this is because no-one trusts the mainstream media, and the alternative news programmes on the internet are eating them alive. And so that corporate capitalism can remain in place, and that Americans and the rest of the world are denied any rights in the workplace, welfare benefits or single-payer healthcare, Google are now trying to push out RT and close down the others by starving them of advertising revenue.
This is very interesting. In this clip, the left-wing American comedian and his co-hosts discuss Barak Obama’s voted against a UN resolution last year condemning Nazism. The resolution was for ‘combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and other practices contributing to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’. America was one of only three countries which voted against it. One of the others was Palau Palau, which I think is a Polynesian island nation.
The reason Obama gave for voting against it was that while his administration condemned all forms of racism and ethnic and religious hatred, they objected to it because it contravened free speech. As Dore points out, the right to free speech does not cover crimes such as libel and incitement to criminal activity. And these crimes surely cover being a Nazi, who wishes to exterminate others simply because of their race.
Reporting the vote, the newspaper USA News stated it was because America was afraid Russia would use the resolution to launch attacks on its neighbours. Dore states he doesn’t know how that would work, but suspects it has something to do with the Nazis in the Ukraine. He also concludes the piece stating that this is an issue to watch, as there is something else going on there behind the scenes.
He also makes the point right at the beginning of the clip that this incident is very interesting, considering that everyone is now criticizing Donald ‘Donnie Tiny Hands’ Trump for his highly equivocal comments about the White supremacists, racists and Nazis in Charlottesville. Trump says that there are ‘fine people on both sides’. There obviously aren’t, as being a hate-twisted Nazi clearly definitely makes you not a ‘fine person’.
Dore has already made the point many times in his videos that for all his fine talk about egalitarianism, racial and religious tolerance, fairness and so on, Obama was as ruthlessly corporatist as his predecessors, giving generous handouts to the banks and other corporations, and privatizing vital public services like America’s school system. This was often against the wishes of parents, the local community, the teaching staff and local clergy. Afro-Americans were particularly concerned about the changes and the damage this would do to their children’s education.
Dore has also made the point that Obama took the two wars Bush had started, and expanded them into seven.
One reason Obama got away with this was probably because of his colour. The election of an Afro-American to the White House was hailed as showing that racism was dead in America, and that the country was now ‘post-racial’. The Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize even before he had actually done anything.
And yet under Obama, America became even more bitterly racist, and racially divided. Some of this was due to an extreme right-wing reaction, which saw Republicans and talk radio hosts claiming that the new president was filled with a burning hatred for Whites, and was a crypto-Communist-Nazi-Maoist-Muslim infiltrator, who was going to outlaw guns, put everyone in concentration camps, and kill more people than Mao or Stalin.
It’s possible that one reason why Obama did not vote for the UN’s condemnation of Nazism and its glorification is because Nazis and White supremacists in America have used the Second Amendment guaranteeing free speech to avoid prosecution for their own vile sputterings. Dore and The Young Turks have made the point that Obama delayed giving any money to the anti-racist, anti-Nazi group, Life After Hate, until the very end of his presidency because he was afraid of Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh’s a long-time feature of America Conservative radio, who’s been fouling the airwaves with his vitriolic hatred of the organized working class, Socialism, ethnic minorities, feminism, climate change and liberals since the days of Ronald Reagan. It’s possible that Obama was afraid of him and those like him on this issue too. Some members of the Right, which automatically hate and despise the UN as anti-American anyway, would automatically seize on any support Obama gave to the resolution as showing his determination to exterminate the White race. Even though Israel, which America wholeheartedly supports, had also voted for it.
But the real reason is undoubtedly what USA News said it was: the Americans were afraid Russia would use the resolution to launch attacks on its neighbours. Which also include Ukraine. The Maidan Revolution, which overthrew the previous, pro-Russian Ukrainian president and installed the present nationalist, pro-Western regime, was a carefully staged coup, partly orchestrated by Victoria Nuland, the American ambassador, and the American embassy, as well as pro-democracy organisations like those of George Soros and the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a quasi-governmental organization, which William Blum has shown in his books has taken over the CIA’s role of overthrowing awkward foreign government the Americans don’t like.
And the coalition now governing Ukraine includes real, unreconstructed Nazis, who are every bit as violent and vicious as those in the West. They proudly wear the uniforms of the auxiliary SS regiments in which many Ukrainian nationalists served during the Second World War. And the beat and persecute trade unionists, ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and real democrats.
Russian forces are in the Ukraine, but they are there very much to protect ethnic Russians from attack and persecution from the Ukrainian nationalists. It’s why they’ve stayed in the east of the country. If Putin was really set on reconquering Ukraine for a new, Soviet empire, he’d be in Kiev by now, rather than the Donbass.
I’m therefore very sure that this resolution was voted down by Obama, because of the threat it posed to American attempts to interfere with Ukraine, and contain or break Russia as a geopolitical power. And in so doing, Obama also gave a little more help to the Fascists that ran amok in Charlottesville the Friday before last.
Remember the advert for Jeremy Corbyn that went around a week or so ago, which showed a group of very middle class people sneering at Corbyn and his supporters, while showing up how each and everyone was a hypocrite? Here the American comedian, Jimmy Dore, comments on the advert and why it’s so good.
The various characters featured sitting round a dinner type, guzzling wine and moaning about how modern kids want something for nothing, are all portrayed as having done exactly the same themselves. Such as a man moaning about how students don’t want to pay for their university tuition, when he himself never paid for his. The Tories and their supporters went berserk, claiming it was just bourgeois stereotypes, and that ‘Lenin would have been so proud’.
As Dore points out, these aren’t stereotypes. Mike also made the point in a blog post he put up about it that, for all their whining, the Tories hadn’t actually shown that these ‘bourgeois stereotypes’ were wrong. They clearly aren’t, as you can see by reading the Daily Heil or some of the letters from right-wingers in the press. There was one from a woman in the I newspaper a week or so ago which claimed that Corbyn was ‘bribing’ students with promises to make university education free.
Dore also goes on to discuss neoliberalism and globalism, and how they approach the economy the wrong way round. This should all be familiar to people who read Mike’s blog, and Another Angry Voice and Mainly Macro. He points out that these came in with Ronald Reagan. Neoliberalism wants taxes cut to give more money to those at the top. But this doesn’t work. F.D.R. showed that with his New Deal. If you give money to working people, they spend it and stimulate the economy. If you give it to the rich and the bosses, they don’t do anything with it. The money just sits in their bank accounts and stagnates.
As for globalism, this means simply taking domestic – American, in this case – jobs and offshoring them to another country where the people are even more desperate than in America. The corporation profits, but not America, because the profits don’t come back over here.
He also attacks the trend for great mechanization, and the craze for driverless cars and robots at McDonalds. This suffers from the same problem, as driverless cars and robots don’t spend money.
As for domestic poverty, a half of all American wage earners are paid less than $30,000. This is in the richest country in the world.
And Dore also points out that while Ronald Reagan introduced neoliberalism – a misnomer, as there’s nothing ‘liberal’ about it, it was Bill Clinton, who put it on steroids. So did Tony Blair, who, he reminds us, is like George Dubya, a war criminal.
In addition to these comments, it struck me that one reason the Tories went berserk over this is because Channel 4 screened a real-life programme that was very, very much like this shortly before Labour’s landslide election in ’97. It was called ‘The Dinner Party’, or something similar, and featured a group of very middle class individuals sat round a dinner table, making stupid, ill-informed and bigoted comments about the lower orders. The Independent, if I recall correctly, reviewed it, and said that it almost made the Labour victory inevitable.
Which is clearly what the Tories and their supporters are afraid of here.
They’re also upset because they can’t refute it. It strikes too close to home. So all they can do is moan about how stereotypical it is, without offering any real evidence to refute it.
In this video from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his friends show and talk about a video produced by the London School of Economics into the British press’ bias against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the British Labour party. Corbyn, they explain, is the British counterpart of the American progressive, Bernie Sanders, and the British media has been attacking him worse than the American has Bernie.
The LSE video states that the British media sees itself as the watchdogs of democracy. However, corporate ownership has transformed the media into the guard dogs of the political order, and its attack dogs against politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, who threaten it.
In a sample of 25 per cent of the British news about Jeremy Corbyn over 2 months in 8 newspapers, they found that
* 54 per cent of all news articles were negative or antagonistic.
* 67 per cent of all editorials and opinion pieces were negative.
It noted that the right-wing papers were particularly scornful, but there was considerable bias against Corbyn in the left-wing press. The left-wing press denounced him as ‘too left’, ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unelectable’.
Which, as Dore’s own sarcastic comment of, ‘Where have I had that before?’ makes clear, is the same sneers the Democrat party has made against the awesome Bernie.
This was partly due to the civil war in Labour, where anti-Corbyn sources were used in the media to outweigh pro-Corbyn sources.
This is broken down into the stats for the amount of news coming from pro- and anti-Corbyn sources for all newspapers, the Torygraph and the Depress. But anti-Corbyn sources are still used in preference to pro-Corbyn sources in the Daily Mirror and the Independent.
It states that the British media have deliberately set out to delegitimise the leader of the biggest opposition party in the UK.
The screen shows some of the sheer abuse hurled at Corbyn, including ‘vegetarian’. Dore’s fellow comics have great fun with that insult, using it to mock the right-wing rhetoric about ‘pie in the sky’.
It was not only done through scorn and personal attack, but also by associating him with terrorism and the enemies of the UK, such as Osama bin Laden.
* 18 per cent of articles linked him with Iran, Hamas, Hisbollah, the IRA or terrorism in general.
* This was particularly true of articles in the Torygraph, the Depress and the Scum, where the proportion of articles which included these slurs were 14%, 20% and 19% respectively.
* 22 per cent of articles depicted Corbyn or his ideas as dangerous.
* 52 per cent of articles did not give Corbyn’s own views.
* In 11 per cent of articles which did repeat Corbyn’s views, they were taken out of context or distorted.
* The LSE’s video concludes that this is not only a political problem, but also a moral and democratic problem, as the media is used to delegitimise any attack on the status quo, and present neoliberalism as commonsense.
Dore states that this is exactly the same process that has been used against Bernie Sanders and his campaign for single-payer healthcare in the US. And the US media hasn’t told their audience that the reason they can’t have the same healthcare system as the rest of the world is because their government is corrupt.
This video shows what I dare say most of the readers of this blog know already: that the media is massively biased against politicians, who genuinely want to do something for the people.
Like Corbyn.
Like Bernie.
Don’t believe the media lies.
If you haven’t voted for Corbyn already, do so. And save the NHS in England. And if you’re American, support Bernie and his campaign to give America the healthcare system its great people need and deserve. Not the one foisted on it by Trump and the corporate shills in the Republicans and Democrats.
Here’s a piece of news about something different from the forthcoming elections, though don’t worry, I’ll get back to them shortly. In this clip from the Jimmy Dore Live Show where Dore is joined on stage by a team, which includes Steffi Zamorano and the Progressive Democratic Congressman, Ro Khanna, the comedian quotes a new book, Shattered, about Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The book states that after she lost the election, Killary’s aides, Robbie Mook and John Podesta, decided to blame it all on Russian hacking rather than admit that Clinton herself was to blame for her own failure.
He also cites an internal document from Pete Brodnitz, one of Clinton’s electoral team in 2015, that states that Clinton’s top vulnerability was that the Clinton foundation accepted over $140 million from a Kremlin backed bank to make a deal with the Russians that gave them control over 20 per cent of American uranium production.
53 per cent of Hillary supporters were less likely to support her after finding out about that, and 17 per cent were much less likely to support her. The poll also found that after hearing a series of negative statements about Clinton, the public’s chief concern was that she does not sound honest.
Dore draws the obvious conclusion: Clinton’s team manufactured the claim that she lost because of Russian hacking in order to hide the fact that she and her family had made millions from a deal giving the Russian government a sizable control over a strategic energy industry. It also corroborates the feeling of her critics that she wasn’t honest, as her campaign team lied about her defeat.
This is all about Clinton trying to seem ultra-patriotic to hide her greed, her corruption, and her willingness to sell out American industry to a rival foreign power.
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