This is a longish segment – about half an hour – from the Jimmy Dore Show, in which the two discuss the horrors of US imperialism abroad, domestic oppression and exploitation at home, and the complicity of the mainstream media. Martin is the presenter of The Empire Files on TeleSur English, the South American alternative broadcaster. The show was formerly hosted by RT, for which Martin has been pilloried as a ‘Commie’ and ‘collaborator’. Despite the fact that she has never said anything in prize of the arkhiplut Putin, the latest Kremlin silovik kleptocrat.
With her intelligence and fierce determination to tell the story she wants, Martin comes across to me like a younger, far more politically motivated and impassioned version of Kate Adie, the Beeb journo, who once put the fear of the Almighty into Colonel Qaddafy. It shows the major failings of US mainstream media that, as talented and committed as she is, she does not have her own show on the national networks. I’m a great fan of The Young Turks, and was delighted when they sent Nomiki Kunst over here to talk to the peeps at the Labour party conference back in October. I wish she’d come over this side of the Pond to do something over here. Our politicos are also neoliberal, neocon puppets for the War on Terror. I heartily wish we had someone like her on British TV. Instead, all we’ve got are the corporate shills from Murdoch, the Barclay Twins and Paul Dacre, who turn up occasionally on Have I Got News For You. People like Julia Hartley-Brewer.
The show begins with Dore paying tribute to the how intelligent her work is, calling it ‘Talk smart’. The two then joke about how she’s accused of being a ‘Russia-bot’ to the point where even she’s wondering if she’s human or just an on-line AI. They then go on to discuss her show, The Empire Files. She states that she’s trying to do what Oliver Stone did in his history of the US – covering the untold history of America, and particularly US imperialism. She takes the view that history is written by the victor, but she wants to give the stories of the marginalised, the excluded. The victims of Empire, and counter the dominant story told by the corporate media. She states that she has been most proud of going on location to places like Palestine. Now that she isn’t in RT, she has complete journalistic freedom, and so could spend four weeks in Palestine simply listening to its people. She states that everything, every issue, needs to be examined through the lens of Empire. She admires Dore’s show, because he also talks about the warmongering and imperialism. She states that the First World has risen on the backs of the colonised.
Dore replies by saying that Judah Friedlander, another comedian he’s had on his show, said he learned from travelling around the world that different peoples have a different perspective. Like in Vietnam they don’t talk about the Vietnam War. They talk about the War with the Americans. They also discuss how America is the world’s biggest purveyor of terrorism, as shown by Iraq, and the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But when you talk about how horrendous that is, you just hear b*llshit from people about how the Japanese shouldn’t have bombed Pearl Harbour. Which by the same logic means that the Mexicans have every right to nuke the US for what the US has done to them.
They then dissect American exceptionalism. This is the belief that America can run rampant across the world, because America’s morally superior to every other country. They joke that it means that everyone else in the world gets healthcare, but not Americans. As for the reasons why Iran hates America, it’s because the US launched a coup against the last, democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq. And why are we friends with the Saudis? It’s because of the Petrodollar. Kerry even went and publicly admitted it.
They then talk about whether Americans really understand the crimes that are being committed in their nation’s name, or whether they do, but the mechanism does not exist for them to influence their lords and masters in Congress. Martin states that it’s the latter, though she doesn’t think that the great American public truly understand how horrendous the situation really is. But she points to Trump as one indicator that people know to a certain extent what’s going on. Trump was elected partly because his rhetoric was occasionally anti-interventionist. People do see through this façade, but the mechanism to change anything isn’t there.
Dore concurs. He states that he’s a night club comedian. He switched to doing this show, because there was no proper media, not even the press. The media was pro-war, and attacked the critics, who opposed the invasions. Phil Donahue had the show with the highest ratings on CNN, but they sacked him because he spoke out against it. Ed Schulz got sacked from the New York Times because he opposed the TPP. Martin states that she joined RT because it was the only network that would allow her to tell this story. She and Dore then discuss the self-censorship of journos like Piers Morgan. Martin states that she paid for editorial freedom that others choose not to do. They then talk about how the media carries adverts for Boeing, the big American aerospace manufacturer and military contractor. As if ordinary peeps could afford to buy a plane.
This is an absolute bombshell! In this piece from the Jimmy Dore Show, Dore and his co-host, Ron Placone, discuss the sensational news that a meeting of union leaders that convened on October 24 have passed a resolution condemning the two-party system and pledging them to consider setting up a separate, independent labour party.
The resolution was introduced by the chair of the political committee of AFL-CIO, Lee Saunders, and Randi Weingarten, the head of the teacher’s union. This is particularly remarkable, as Weingarten was responsible for throwing the union’s weight behind Hillary Clinton regardless of the views of its members. Dore states that when they asked American teachers how they felt about their union supporting Killary, they said they weren’t consulted. Those are America’s two largest unions.
Weingarten said that the system had failed working people for decades, and that it had taken away the pillars supporting working people’s rights to good jobs and benefits on behalf of the rich and corporations. The resolution was passed at a meeting of about 50 delegates in an upstairs room where the convention was being held. The delegates contended that both the Republicans and the Democrats were under corporate domination.
Mark Dimondstein, who was the foremost promoter of the idea of a labour party, is the president of the postal workers’ union. He has been calling for it ever since NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – was set up in 1993, which he said showed that both the Republicans and Democrats were in the pockets of the capitalists. Dore and Placone chuckle over the fact that Dimondstein must be having the biggest ‘I told you so’ moment, and encourage him to gloat all he wants, as he’s earned it.
The meeting was split over whether they should first start up an organisation and start discussing issues, or get into political races and risk becoming the ‘spoilers’ in the current two-party system. Dore states in response to this that it’s the two-party system that’s rigged. That’s how Americans now have Trump: it was due to a rigged Democratic primary and electoral college. One delegate, Velasquez, stated that the new party should compete in politics, but start at the local and state levels. Dore asks rhetorically why they should, and argues instead that they should compete at all levels. All the delegates agreed, however, that the Democrats have not done them any favours. They never have, and they never will. Dore believes that the reason why Velasquez wanted them to limit themselves to local and state level politics, was so that they don’t get called ‘Ralph Nader’, after the left-wing American politician, who attempted to run as a third party candidate.
Saunders and Weingarten are also members of the Democratic National Committee. The main resolution, however, said that they would set a pro-worker agenda, that would stand regardless of party. Dore states that this is similar to what they had in mind when they went to Canada for Peter Alard. That all the progressives would get together and produce a litmus test. They will thus endorse any political candidate in any party, provided that they support their pro-worker objectives.
Dimondstein said that they couldn’t take half a loaf, a quart of a loaf, an eighth of a loaf, or even crumbs any more. Dore states that they weren’t even being offered that under the present system. And he was applauded when he said that even when the Democrats got control of both the presidency and Congress in the 2008 election, they did not follow through with reform of labour legislation and other priorities for working people, but instead passed the Transpacific Partnership – TPP – the free trade deal. Dore and Placone states this was done by Barack Obama. They also make the point that it wasn’t done by Russian secret agents amongst the DAPL and Black Lives Matter activists. Dore states that it wasn’t the Russians, who threw the election but Barack Obama, Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Haliburton, Exxon, the Koch brothers, the people in New York, who had 200,000 people thrown of the voting rolls, and the Electoral College. He stated that the Democratic Party hadn’t done anything for them despite having the presidency, the Congress and the Senate. Dore states that this is what he and other progressives had been saying, but they were told they were stupid, petulant, children. Now the labour unions agree with them, and its those who called them stupid and so on, who now have no political sense. The people in the Democratic Party, who called them that and gave America Hillary Clinton are the people that are ultimately responsible for Trump. They are everything that’s broken in the Democrat Party.
Dimondstein stated that the Republicans entrenched union-busting, Bill Clinton deregulated Wall Street, and Jimmy Carter deregulated trucking. Dore reminds his viewers that, thanks to Carter, we now have truckers working 18 hours or so and taking methamphetamines to get to their destinations on time. Dimondstein made it clear that constructing a labour party would be a long-term plan and require both community and labour support, but it would be wrong to confine the movement for a labour party to the current two-party system. Dore goes on to say that if everyone, who felt this way had actually voted for the Green Party at the last election, it would have radically changed the political landscape. They might still have had Trump, but the Democrats would have been wiped out and the opposition instead would have been the Green Party with a genuinely radical agenda. Instead, half or eighty per cent of all progressives are trying to reform the Democrats, which he thinks is a fool’s errand.
Dore and Placone are amazed that this story has received so little press attention. It should receive more, as the 2016 election showed how little footing the Democrat Party now has with the working class. Placone states that it’s now time for progressives and working class organisations to stop endorsing the lesser of two evils, because that can result in the more evil getting into power, and the lesser evil becoming worse. He states that we have now reached the crisis point with that, and if we haven’t, he doesn’t know what will wake people up. But whatever it is, it’ll be too little, too late. Dore suggests that it might be when the ice caps finally melt so that the coastline is now in Minnesota. Obama would probably come back to open the arctic for drilling just one more time. He has been responsible for opening it up to drilling twice. Dore also points out that there are a lot of people interested in forming a third party – progressives, Greens and others – and it’ll eventually happen.
This is absolutely stunning. If it goes ahead – and I sincerely hope it does – then America will be transformed into a country, whose political system is far more like that of Europe. Especially if Bernie and the progressives manage to get single-payer healthcare passed.
What the American unions are discussing is precisely what the British Labour party went through a century and more ago. The Labour party has its roots in the Lib-Labs, the trade unionists elected to parliament as working class members of the Liberal Party. Then after the passage of the Taft Vale judgement, which ruled that trade unions could be sued for damages and losses caused by strikes, they then decided to form an independent party to press for working class policies. This was the Independent Labour Party. The Labour Party as it is now was founded in 1901 as a party formed from the unions and various socialist organisations and societies.
As for pressing for all political parties to put forward pro-worker policies, that was the goal of the Fabian Society when it was founded. There’s a lot of sheer rubbish spouted by the American right-wing conspiracy nuts about how it was some kind of secret society. It wasn’t. And it’s still around. It became part of the Labour party. I should know. I was a member briefly in the 1980s. I’ve blogged about some of their pamphlets I bought and read, even citing them. Unfortunately, they’ve now been heavily infiltrated by the Blairites, and are one of the chief sites of anti-Corbyn activism in the party.
And something similar appears to have happened in Canada in the 1960s and ’70s, when hippy radicals formed the New Democrat Party up there.
If this does go through, it should encourage similar left-wing movements around the world, and strengthen the genuine socialists in the British Labour party and the European socialist parties.
And I’ve no doubt that the capitalists and big corporations will now try and throw everything they can at it to stifle this vital new change. I’m not surprised that very few newspapers carried the story, because the newspapers generally represent the interests of big business. And big business and the capitalist class is absolutely terrified of the unions and genuinely working class organisations. That’s why the British press, including the pro-Labour Mirror, has been so consistently against Jeremy Corbyn.
However, it has also been pointed out that before the First World War, America did indeed have a very strong left-wing movement. There were the Communists, the Wobblies and Eugene Debs and his attempt to form a labour party for America. What set this back was the Cold War, which allowed the forces of the right to smear and vilify them as part of the global Communist threat. Now that Communism has fallen, fewer Americans are being taken in by this ruse, and the spirit of Eugene Debs lives on.
I hope this all goes through, and that it’s successful. If that happens, then the world will be a fair bit better for working people.
In this short video from RT America, they interview Max Blumenthal on the withdrawal this week from the United Nations’ cultural organisation, UNESCO, by America and Israel. The two countries have claimed that the organisation is profoundly anti-Semitic. He says that the Israelis would far rather have been in the organisation, haranguing it from inside. Blumenthal states that Israel was more or less forced to leave the organisation against its own wishes by Trump’s decision to quit. He makes the point that Washington would never have left it, if they thought it was biased against France or Spain. He also says that America owes UNESCO $500 million, which it now no longer has to pay back. The bigger question, he also suggests, is why Israel was ever allowed into the UN in the first place, considering its Talibanesque destruction of Palestinian archaeology and historic monuments. He also states that the present coalition government in Israel, led by Likud, includes the 3rd Temple Foundation, who would like to tear down the al-Aqsa Mosque in order to rebuild Solomon’s Temple. The mosque is the third holiest in Islam, and its destruction would start a war throughout the region.
The programme then discusses Trump’s decertification of the nuclear deal this week with Iran. One of the foreign policy advisors, Ben Rhodes, has said that Trump’s withdrawal from UNESCO, his decertification of the nuclear agreement with Iran, and his threatened withdrawals against NAFTA, the TPP and other international agreements, means that no other country will trust America. Blumenthal also comments that Trump’s decertification will strengthen the hand of the hardliners inside the Iranian government, against the current liberalisation that the country is going through. He also makes the point that Trump’s decision has been influenced by ‘Israel-first’ billionaires, like Sheldon Adelson, who have contributed millions to his campaign.
The news that the Likudnik coalition includes maniacs, who would like to destroy the al-Aqsa, or Dome of the Rock, Mosque is terrifying. There have been several attempts by Jewish extremists to destroy the Mosque already in the hope that by doing so they will start an apocalyptic war that will lead to the restoration of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah. The same belief is held by some of the extreme right-wing Christian Fundamentalists, who hope that it will bring about Christ’s return to Earth. This apocalypticism is one of the main influences behind Christian Zionism.
I’ve read, however, that the Mosque isn’t built over the remains of Solomon’s Temple. Stephen Runciman, in his History of the Crusades, states that the mosque was built where the caliph Omar prayed after conquering Palestine. Omar did not pray at a site already venerated by the country’s Jewish and Christian inhabitants, as he realised his followers would want to turn it into a mosque. So he deliberately chose a place outside the Temple precincts, where rubbish was dumped.
As for the destruction of Palestinian monuments, I would have liked to know much more about this. The Israelis have destroyed immense numbers of Palestinian homes and villages as part of their campaign of ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Arabs. Blumenthal himself in the clip refers to the way Arab villages are being bulldozed in order to build settler colonies.
I am, however, aware that Muslims in Britain are very much aware, and very concerned about the closure of Palestinian mosques. I did part of my minor degree in religious studies, which included modules on Islam. One of the pieces of literature I read researching British Islam was the Muslim ‘parish’ magazine for the congregation in a British mosque. Apart from the local news, it also covered the closure of a mosque in Israel, and its conversion into a disco/ nightclub by the Israelis. This is to them a shocking sacrilege, and it would be to many other religions if their centres of worship were treated in this way.
The newsletter also reported that a local Christian church in the same area of the mosque had also been closed. This is something you definitely don’t hear about from the very pro-Israel Christian Zionist right. The impression these organisations try to give is that Israel is very positive towards Christianity, and that Christians are religiously obliged to give their absolute support to the country. As opposed to the Arabs, who are bitterly opposed to Christianity. Yet I can remember being told by a former local priest, that in his experience of visiting Israel and Syria, it was Syria that had a far more tolerant attitude towards Christian antiquities and those visiting them.
I don’t mention this in order to stir up any kind of religious hatred against Jews. I am very much aware that Jews have suffered horrendous persecution by Christians down the centuries, and am very definitely opposed to it. I am merely trying to make the point that Christians in America and elsewhere are not being told the whole truth about the state of religious politics in Israel. They are being instead presented with a very biased and distorted account that places the blame almost wholly on Muslims.
This is another piece from the Jimmy Dore show, in which the American comedian comments on the massive pro-war bias of the American media and military-industrial complex, while the evidence shows that the American people do not want more conflict. In fact, as the quote from Donald Trump with which Dore begins the video shows, they’re sick of it. The quote is from when Trump was campaigning for the presidency, when he said that America should cut its losses and not go into Syria, but concentrate on rebuilding itself. Dore points out that this is the message that gets politicians elected. Once in power, however, they abandon this and do the bidding instead of the military-industrial complex, the shadow, corporate government, which Truman warned Americans about.
MSNBC has been part of the corporate voice calling for war. They are owned by Comcast, which is one of the worst companies to work for, according to surveys. They always take the corporate line, and sack those journalists and broadcasters, who dare to deviate from it. Like Ed Schultz, who was thrown off the air because he spoke against the TPP. Or Phil Donohue, whose show was cancelled, despite having the highest ratings on the network. He was sacked because he opposed the Iraq invasion. Dore has particular contempt for the network, because it pretends, unlike Fox and the Conservative broadcasters, to be liberal when it is anything but.
In this piece, he comments on a poll the network conducted, in which they asked their viewers whether America should go to war with North Korea. By mid-day, the poll showed that just 10 per cent of American voters wanted one. Dore goes through some of the stats, which are broken down into certain time segments, and shows the different attitudes to war in the different sections of the American population. At one point, 25 per cent of males were in favour of a first strike by America, compared with only 5 per cent of females. 36 per cent of voters in their 20s and 30s were in favour of a first strike, compared to only 5 per cent of people over 55. That older demographic includes people, who remember how Americans were lied to about Iraq, and also Vietnam. At one point, the number of Democrats, who believed America should launch a pre-emptive strike, was about 5 per cent, compared to 19 per cent of Republicans.
If these polls can be trusted – and that’s a big if, as the people responding to it are the viewers of a network, which claims to have a liberal bias, and so most of the respondents would probably also have liberal views – most Americans emphatically do not want a pre-emptive strike, let alone another war, with North Korea. The views of the American people are profoundly at odds with the policies of their governments, as dictated by the powerful corporate industries. Americans want peace, but are denied it by the military-industrial complex, who have succeeded in hollowing out American democracy.
The world was shocked last week by the election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States. The news showed footage of Clinton and her supporters weeping at the result. Yet as this documentary from Reichwing Watch shows, Clinton herself was no liberal. They describe her as a Republican Democrat. The description is accurate. As this documentary shows and concludes, she is like her Republican opponents a corporatist militarist, backing powerful companies, the military and the armaments industry against ordinary Americans, the environment, and the smaller nations of Latin America and Iraq, which have had the misfortune to feel the boot of American imperialism. And far from a supporter of women and ethnic minorities, the documentary also shows how she cynically sponsored the punitive legislation that has seen the mass incarceration and denial of federal welfare support to Blacks, defend truly horrific rapists and cover up Bill’s affairs and sexual assaults. All while claiming to be a feminist. The documentary also shows how Hillary was also extremely cynical about gay marriage, opposing it until the very last minute when it was politically expedient.
The documentary is divided into several chapters, dealing respectively with imperialism, Black rights, the gun lobby, the war on women, LGBT rights and corruption. It begins with a quote from Christopher Hitchens urging people not to vote for Hillary, as it is a mistake to support candidates, who are seeking election for therapeutic reasons. He then cites her husband, Bill, as an example.
Chapter 1: Building an Empire
This chapter begins with Killary’s support for the Iraq invasion, despite admissions from other members of the US Congress that the full scale industrial equipment needed to produce weapons of mass destruction was not found, and opposition to her and the invasion from Congressmen Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Gravett, and the liberal news host, Jon Stewart. It also shows clips of Obama and Christopher Hitchens stating that she had the support of the Republicans for her stance on the Iraq invasion, including Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is rightly described by one of the speakers in this documentary as ‘the greatest unindicted war criminal in the world today’. It discusses how the US supported coup in Ecuador recalls the Kissinger sponsored coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende in favour of the Fascist dictator, General Pinochet. It also mentions Killary’s sponsorship of the military coup in Honduras and the assassination of the indigenous rights leader, Berta Carceres. After the coup, Killary ensured that the regime received American aid, including military, in return for which American corporations also received lucrative contracts, especially in the construction of the dams. This section of the documentary also shows how Killary is absolutely ruthless and single-minded when it comes to pursuing her own projects, even at the possible expense of her husband’s interests. When Bill Clinton was finally considering intervening in Bosnia in the 1990s, Killary refused to support him until the very last minute as she was also afraid that this would affect her own healthcare reforms. She was also a firm supporter of No Fly Zones in Syria, despite the view of many others that these would lead directly to war with Russia.
Chapter II: Black Lives Matter
The title of this section of the documentary is highly ironic, considering that for much of her career, Shrillary hasn’t been remotely interested in Black rights, and indeed began her political involvement actively opposing them. She herself freely admits that when she was in college, she was a Goldwater Girl, supporting the segregationist Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he and Hillary continued to celebrate Confederate Flag Day along with the rest of the reactionaries. There’s also a clip of her describing the threat of urban ‘super predators’ connected to the drug gangs. This was a term that at the time was used almost exclusively to describe Black men. There’s a clip of Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, about contemporary legislation designed to marginalise and impoverish Black America, denouncing the extremely punitive legislation Killary and Bill introduced as part of the war on drugs. These deny federal welfare aid to those convicted of drug offences for going to college, access to public housing and even food stamps. This was part of the Clinton’s strategy to win back swing voters, who had voted for Reagan and the Republicans. Clinton herself continued her strategy of appealing to White voters at the expense of Blacks. In 2008 she credited White voters for supporting her against Barack Obama. She also at one point discussed the assassination of Bobby Kennedy when answering a question about how long she planned to continue her campaign against Obama. She was viciously attacked for this by Stewart, who was outraged that she should mention this at a time when Obama was receiving death threats because of he was a Black man aiming at the presidency. Hillary was also herself extremely cynical in mentioning Obama’s Muslim background and upbringing. Without ever quite saying that he was a Muslim, and therefore shouldn’t be president, she nevertheless reminded people that he had been, thus reinforcing their prejudices.
Chapter III: The Gun Lobby
This begins with Hillary denouncing the armaments industry. However, once in power, she approved $122 million in sales for the gun firms, many of which produced the weapons used by Adam Lanza to shoot his mother and the other children at Sandy Hook school. She also managed to raise American armament sales abroad by 80 per cent over her predecessor, Condoleeza Rice, approving $165 billion of armaments sales in four years. These companies then invested part of their profits in the NRA, which sent lobbyists to Washington, several of whom, including representatives of Goldman Sachs, then went and attended a fundraising dinner for the Clintons.
Chapter IV: The War on Women
This concludes with a clip of Madeleine Albright urging women to vote for Clinton as ‘there is a special place in Hell for women, who do not help other women’. Yet Clinton’s own feminism and support for women is extremely patchy. This part of the documentary begins with her making a speech about how women’s rights are human rights, and vice versa. Which is clearly true. However, it then goes on to play a recording of her talking in 1975 about how she successfully defended a monstrous rapist, who had attacked a 12 year old girl. The girl was left in a coma for several months, needed considerable therapy to help her back on her feet afterwards. She has been on drugs, never married or had children. Her life has been ruined because of this monstrous assault, by a man Clinton knew was guilty, but successfully defended. Due to plea bargaining, he only served a derisory two months in prison.
This part of the documentary also shows how Hillary covered up for Bill’s affairs, and his sexual assault of Juanita Broderick. Broderick, then married, was a nurse at a nursing home, who had done some campaigning for the Clintons. They visited the home, during which Clinton sexually assaulted her in one of the bedrooms. Afterwards Killary approached her, caught her by the hand, and said that they appreciated how much she meant to her husband. Broderick clearly, and not unreasonably, considers this to be a veiled threat, and states that Killary frightened her. The section concludes with a piece about her support for another Democrat, Cuomo, and how this candidate was really another Republican in the guise of a Democrat, who believed in trickle-down Reaganite economics.
Chapter V: LGBT Rights
This begins with a clip from an interview with a gay serviceman, stating how it was very difficult initially in the navy when his sexuality was first known about. This section of the documentary shows how she actively opposed gay marriage until she thought there was votes in supporting it. She is seen supporting her husband’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy towards gays in the military as a progressive position, despite the fact that Bill himself said it was only a compromise. It then shows her making speeches declaring that she believed marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and that New York State should not recognise gay marriage.
Chapter VI: Corruption
This part begins by discussing how the Clinton’s took money from Tyson’s, one of the major poultry producers in Arkansas, and one of the agri-businesses credited with polluting 3,700 miles of the states’ waterways. Clinton passed laws setting up a task force to looking into the problem, while ensuring that about a third of the seats on this quango went to Tyson’s. Tyson’s were an important contributor to the Clintons’ campaign funds, in return for which Bill passed laws favouring the firm, and allowing them to grow into the state’s biggest poultry firm.
And the corruption didn’t stop there. It goes on to show how Killary did absolutely nothing to challenge Walmart’s ban on trade unions when she was on their board, and the company still lags behind others in promoting women to important positions. She was also hypocritical in her ‘Buy American’ campaign to persuade Americans to buy domestically produced goods. While she was at Walmart, the company continued to sale imported goods, some of which were even misleadingly labelled as ‘made in America’. This included clothing made in factories in Bangladesh which employed 12 year old girls.
Elsewhere, Killary also campaigned against a bankruptcy bill promoted by the credit card companies in their favour, in a reversal of her previous policy. The also made $675,000 from three speeches to Goldman Sachs, speeches which she refused to release.
She has also been duplicitous in her support of the NAFTA and TPP free trade agreements. She accused Obama during his election campaign of supporting NAFTA, while secretly reassuring the Canadians that she really backed it herself. There is also a clip of Elizabeth Warren, another Democrat politician, attacking the TPP. Warren states that this free trade deal isn’t about developing commerce, but in giving more power to multinational companies at the expense of national governments and hard-working ordinary Americans. America already had free trade deals with very many of the countries included in the treaty. And about half of the TPP’s 30 chapters are devoted to giving more power to the companies.
This section of the documentary also includes a clip of Mika Brzezinski, the daughter of Carter’s foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, talking about how Killary has no personal convictions of her own, and will say anything to get herself elected. This is followed by the veteran radical, Noam Chomsky, stating that Clinton’s Democrat party is really that of moderate Republicans. President Truman, who warned about the threat of the military-industrial complex, is by their standards now far to the Left. It also has a clip from an interview with one of the multibillionaire Koch brothers describing how they liked Bill Clinton over many Republicans. This one is, admittedly, rather more hesitant when it comes to whether he’d support Killary. There’s then footage from a speech by Bill Clinton promoting small government and how there isn’t a programme for every problem. This is followed by footage of Hillary herself stating that she isn’t dogmatically Republican or Democrat. The documentary ends with the description of her as the worst of the two defects of the American political system. She is both a militarist, and a promoter of corporate power.
Donald Trump is a monster, and his election has brought fear to many millions of ordinary Americans, particularly those from ethnic minorities. The Beeb yesterday reported that 300 racially motivated incidents had been recorded since he was elected last week. Non-white children have been bullied at school, racist slogans sprayed on Black and ethnic minority people’s property and vehicles, and the Nazis from Alt-Right have crawled out from their pits to spew hatred against the Jews. Trump’s even appointed Steven Bannon, a racist and anti-Semite executive from the right-wing news organisation, Breitbart, his ‘chief strategist’. America and the world are facing the prospect of a Nazi in the White House.
But Hillary herself is no angel. She’s a corporate, militarist monster, who supports the very big businesses that are bringing poverty to working people in America by lowering wages, denying union rights, polluting America’s great natural environment, and shipping jobs overseas.
And abroad, her pursuit of American imperial power, as expressed in the American military complex’s own jargon of ‘full spectrum dominance’ – in other words, absolute military power over the rest of us – has threatened to plunge the world once again into a Cold War and the prospect of nuclear annihilation. And her embrace of Henry Kissinger should be a mark of shame to any decent human being. This is the man, whose firm support of dictators in Latin America and Asia, and whose conduct of the Vietnam War, brought death and torture to tens, if not hundreds of millions of innocents.
And Killary herself has blood on her hands through her support of the Iraq invasion, and the coups in Ecuador and Honduras.
Quite frankly, considering the millions she’s threatened with torture, assassination, disappearance and the Fascist jackboot, I really honestly don’t have any sympathy with her weeping over her election defeat. She’s lucky. She didn’t get to be president, but no-one will be rounding her or her husband up to be raped or tortured by the secret police, before being murdered in a concentration camp. She doesn’t have to worry about Chelsea being murdered by a death squad. She gets to live, and enjoy her very privileged life as a major politico and businesswoman. The people she and the rest of the administrations she served and supported, who’ve had their lands invaded and governments overthrown, haven’t been so lucky.
Mike yesterday posted a piece about the report in the Huffington Post that documents released by WikiLeaks show that Bill Clinton made a number of slighting remarks about Jeremy Corbyn in a speech to wealthy donors to the Democrat Party last October. Clinton claimed that Corbyn was ‘the maddest person in the room’, and that he was only elected because Labour party members were ‘so mad at Tony Blair that ‘they practically went out and got a guy off the street instead’. He compared Corbyn to the leader of the Greek anti-austerity party, Alexis Tsipras, and claimed that Ed Miliband lost the election against Cameron because he was too leftwing.
Mike in his comments states that Clinton’s remarks need to be put in context. He was speaking at a time when Bernie Sanders was competing with Shrillary for the Democrat presidential nomination. Corbyn had supported Bernie Sanders in the past, and the two had been compared to each other. He also notes that Clinton appeared to be a little confused, as he referred to a conversation he had had with a Northern Ireland secretary, who stated that Shrillary had helped him through a bad period in that part of the UK. Clinton thought it was one of Cameron’s minions, but in fact it was a minister in Gordon Brown’s cabinet.
Mike concluded that Corbyn’s office was right not to pay any attention to Clinton’s comments.
I think that Mike’s been a bit too generous to Bill Clinton. Yes, he was speaking at a time when his wife was competing against Bernie Sanders, the most left-wing member of the Democrat party. Sanders is a self-declared democratic Socialist, just as Corbyn is seen as far left in the Labour party. Actually, this isn’t accurate. Corbyn is centre left old Labour. He isn’t a Trotskyite at all, no matter what the Blairites and their media enablers scream at the public.
But even without Sanders, Corbyn would be well to the Left of the Clintons, and I don’t doubt for a single moment that the former president despises both Corbyn and Ed Miliband, along with Sanders, for the threat they posed to the transatlantic electoral strategy he and Tony Blair had formed for their respective parties. Blair modelled his ‘New Labour’ on the ‘New Democrats’ Clinton formed within the American Democrat Party. After losing to Reagan and then to George Bush senior, Clinton took over many of the Republican’s policies in order to win over their voters. He therefore declared that his party was going to end ‘welfare as we know it’, and put forward the same neoliberal policies Reagan had pursued in the Republicans.
And the same strategy was put into practise over here by Blair. Blair ditched Clause 4, the article in the Labour party constitution which committed it to socialism. He carried on the Tories’ policy of privatising whatever remained of the state sector, including the NHS. And like the Tories, the American Republicans and Clinton’s New Democrats, New Labour was also determined to cut down the welfare state. Hence the introduction of the work capability test, taken from the ideas of an American medical insurance firm, and administered by Atos, in order to satisfy the Conservative desire to see more people thrown off benefits and into poverty.
I’ve said that Blair and New Labour are Thatcherite entryists. They’ve been pursuing right-wing, Tory policies, despite the fact that they belong to an historically left-wing party. Blair’s tactic was all about convincing the establishment – business, the banks and the press – that Labour was now thoroughly neoliberal and economically orthodox, and so would form a responsible government. In other words, one that would do everything the upper classes wanted.
Hillary Clinton in her own way was even more ‘establishment’. She made hundreds of thousands of dollars from giving speeches to Wall Street bankers, and was as corrupt and corporatist as the other American politicians, for all her claim that she was somehow an outsider because she was female. In the 1990s she briefly supported free universal healthcare and education, before she then started receiving donations from the medical insurers and other big corporations. She and the head of the Democrat Party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders, just as the Blairites in the Labour party tried everything in their power to stop Corbyn being elected as leader. And that includes purging voters from the rolls. Faced with Trump being nominated as their presidential candidate, many leading Republicans threw in their lot with Shrillary. She tried to make a show of supporting organised labour and American working people with a speech to an audience of trade unionists, in which she pledged to support them. But the damage was done. The left-wing Democrat base knew that she had betrayed them, and that her promises counted for nothing. Especially as American jobs were being harmed by the very free trade deals, the TPP, NAFTA and so on that she and Obama supported.
And now that policy has come crashing down. Hillary’s attempt to be as corporate establishment as the Republicans failed to get her into the White House, and she lost to a racist, misogynist braggart and wannabe Fascist.
Now The Young Turks have posted up a piece arguing that the Democrats will probably try and blame their defeat on Bernie Sanders. I think that’s highly likely. They’re absolutely wrong, of course. They lost for a variety of reasons. Sexism was one – many Americans objected to the idea of a woman holding the presidency. Media bias was another – for all Trump’s claims that the media were biased against him, they gave him hours and millions of dollars worth of free airtime. Pervasive racism is another factor. But Hillary’s own political stance was also a major factor. The Young Turks, Secular Talk and other shows made the point that if Bernie Sanders had been elected instead, then he would have beaten Trump easily.
But that was a step too far for the Democrats, who’d clearly rather have a Fascist buffoon in the White House than someone, who genuinely spoke for working Americans.
This should be the end of the line for the New Democrat, and by extension, the New Labour project. It has shown that copying the pro-privatisation, neoliberal line of the Republicans won’t get you into the White House. The Democrats really can’t go any further to the right, without returning to their original stance as the party of the KKK. And as that strategy has failed across the Pond, it’s going to fail over here. The Blairites in the Labour party should be worried. Clinton’s defeat has shown that they can’t and won’t get into power by copying the Tories. That was, after all, also the message of Ed Miliband’s defeat as well, followed by the victory of Jeremy Corbyn. But I doubt Bomber Benn and the other Thatcherite entryists will take any notice. They’re probably too busy concentrating on saving their careers and all the lucrative seats on private health and utility companies they can get after they leave politics.
So, you can expect further screaming that it’s all somehow Bernie Sanders’ fault from Shrillary and her team across the Pond, and violent denunciation of ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn from the Blairites and their right-wing colleagues in the media over here. Because with Clinton’s defeat, they know only too well that Corbyn is all too electable, and represents the end of their project.
This is another piece from the American comedian Jimmy Dore, commenting and explaining a piece by Dean Baker of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The article, ‘Inequality as Policy: Selective Trade Protectionism Favors High Earners’, critically examines the way free trade deals are designed to protect high earners’ jobs, while making those of the workers more insecure. Baker comments that while offshoring has harmed working class jobs in America, white collar jobs and intellectual property have been ‘robustly protected’. Baker states that while globalisation and the introduction of greater mechanisation are cited as the main causes of increased inequality over the past few decades, they’re viewed as the natural products of the way the economy operates, rather than as the results of deliberate policies.
Dore criticises the rightwing attitude towards the free market, which claims that this is a natural mechanism. He instead argues that markets are invented by rich people, and deliberately given a set of rules by the rich to protect themselves. You can have a policy that favours workers, and decreases inequality, just as you can have a policy that favours the wealthy and increases inequality. Baker explicitly states that the course of globalisation and the rewards of technological innovation are the results of policy. The greater inequality they have created is the result of conscious choices determining policy. Dore states that ‘you don’t have to sell out your own people’ as under the TPP to send job to poor people, who are in a worse position that American workers. Dore quotes Baker on the fact that Free Trade deals put American workers in competition with their counterparts elsewhere, who are paid much less, and whose products are then imported back into the US. In other words, American working class jobs are offshored, just as they are here in Britain through the adoption of similar policies by New Labour and the Tories. Dore considers how NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement – resulted in the lifting of trade tariffs between America and Mexico, so that the big agricultural businesses went south of the border to use cheap Mexican labour, and shipped the fruit, Vegetables and other products back into the US. This only benefits the owners of industry. It hurts the workers, and it hurts the US economy, as the workers have less money to spend on the domestic economy. The result of this, which has been predicted, is to lower wages from manufacturing workers, and workers without a college education, as they are forced to crowd into the remaining areas of the economy.
Doctors’ jobs, by contrast, are protected. Foreign-trained doctors cannot practise in the US without them completing a residency programme first, and the numbers in this, as for foreign medical students, is consciously limited. Baker notes that this form of protectionism goes unchallenged despite the elimination of the barriers on trade and trade goods elsewhere in the economy. Doctors in the US thus earn $250,000 a year, twice as much as those in other wealthy countries. The cost to America is $100 billion a year in higher medical bills compared to those of other countries. Baker states that economists, including trade economists, have chosen to ignore the barriers that sustain high professional pay at enormous economic cost. Members of Dore’s crew make the point that American doctors aren’t paid more because they’re better than those elsewhere, but on the other hand, the doctors elsewhere in the developed world don’t have ‘a ton of debt’ from medical school. They also talk about the immense bureaucracy that ties up doctors through the insurance-driven American healthcare, which simply doesn’t exist under single-payer systems. The crew members talks about a doctor he knew in Chicago, who raged against the insurance companies because of the immense amount of time he had to spend with them ensuring the patient got treated.
Baker’s article also states that scientific and statistical analysis shows that economic elites and business interests have an impact on government economic policy. By contrast, average citizens and mass-based groups have little independent influence. In other words, government policy is written by the wealthy. The result of this has been to redistribute wealth to the rich over the past four decades. Other ways in which the market has been manipulated at the expense of the middle and lower classes is through macroeconomic policies that deliberately result in high unemployment. Baker recognises that tax policies designed to redistribute wealth are desirable, it should also be understood that economic policies have also been designed to increase inequality. He states that it is easier to have an economic which automatically reduces inequality, than one which produces inequality, which then has to be remedied through redistributive taxation.
Dore states that Trump is correct when he describes how American trade policy has destroyed workers’ jobs in America. However, is he is ‘100 per cent wrong’ when he wants to use the same managers and owners, who have designed these policies, somehow to produce a replacement, as these corporate industrialists have no loyalty to America, only their company. Dore’s crew states that America has suffered, as it’s become a service economy whose people can no longer afford the services, thanks to the gutting of the middle classes. And Dore himself says he gets tweets asking where he gets the information that half the country is poor – which it is. He then advises his interrogators to google the statement ‘half the country is poor’. This isn’t hidden, privileged information. It’s obvious, and deliberately designed.
All of this applies to Britain. The TPP being pushed by the Tories, and which will doubtless receive the backing of the Blairites in the Labour party, will also have the effect of offshoring more British jobs in our dwindling manufacturing and service industries. And thanks to the creeping privatisation of the NHS and the introduction of student fees by the Blairites, which were then raised by the Tories and Lib Dems, our student doctors are also saddled with massive medical fees. And our doctors and medical professionals are similarly being tied up with paperwork thanks to the deliberate introduction by New Labour of medical insurance companies, based on the system used by Kaiser Permanente in America, that also determine where and how patients are treated.
It’s disgusting, and the result of four decades of free market ideology beginning with Thatcher and Reagan, and now carried on by Obama and Shrillary in America, and the Blairites, Lib Dems, David Cameron and his successor, Theresa May, over here.
They have to be turfed out of parliament. All of them.
Earlier this evening I published a piece on the chilling news that, according to the American reporter Joe Scarborough, of the Morning Joe show, Donald Trump can’t understand why America doesn’t use its nuclear arsenal. The fact that Trump is a maniac, who can’t understand one of the basic principles that has so far kept the world safe from thermonuclear Armageddon is terrifying. Unfortunately, the Republicans aren’t the only party which passionately endorses aggressive militarism. So to are the Democrats under Hillary Clinton. I’ve blogged before about the way Clinton is as much a hawk as any of her male colleagues, supporting the illegal invasion of Iraq, military intervention in Libya, the overthrow of a democratically elected socialist regime in Honduras, and its replacement by a bog-standard brutal military dictatorship, and her desire to expand the war into Syria.
In this piece, The Young Turks’ comedian and commenter, Jimmy Dore, discusses how the anti-War section of the Democratic party was silenced when they started chanting against Leon Panetta, when he took the stage. Panetta is another monster. He’s a former head of the CIA, which has more than enough blood on its hands through supporting right-wing coups, like that which overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile in 1975. Allende was a democratically elected Marxist, pledged to break up the big estates to give land to the peasants. This was too much for the Chilean upper classes and the powerbrokers in America. Allende was overthrown in a coup, and replaced by the brutal General Pinochet. Panetta was also foreign secretary under Obama. To show how morally repugnant Panetta is, Dore has a clip of him chuckling at the number of wars America is currently fighting during an interview. He’s asked how many wars America is fighting at the moment, to which he responds with laughter and the answer ‘That’s a good question’. Dore is naturally, and justifiably, very sarcastic about that – because obviously, being a bunch of homicidal maniacs is so funny, he remarks.
The progressive wing of the Democrats weren’t impressed either, when Panetta took to the stage at the Democratic National Convention. They stood up, and started waving anti-war placards, and crying, ‘No more war!’ This was too much for the organisers, who cut the lights on them and started white noise machines to drown out their chanting. This didn’t entirely work, as the protesters used the lights from their mobile phones. Dore is also scathing about another media idiot who commented, ‘Sadly, you can still hear the cries of ‘No more war”. When the chanting starts, Panetta responds with chuckling, and then launched into an attack on the friendship between Trump and Putin, as the Russian leader is the enemy du jour at the moment. Dore responds that the American government should like him, because he’s a Christian who believes in a surveillance state and overthrowing other countries. Just like them. He also remarks on how the protesters were described as ‘the Sanders wing of the party’. He corrects this by reminding them that they’re just the peace wing. He also states that the Democrats are now more authoritarian than the Republicans. He asks his viewers to imagine what would happen if the Tea Party at a Republican convention started chanting ‘More war!’ Would they pull the plug on them? No. He laments the fact that the Democrat party has now become the party of corporate warmongers. He tells his audience that, instead of giving in to establishment Democrat demands to give them their vote, they should make the Dems come to them – demand that they stop fracking, block the TPP and similar trade deals,and end the corporate corruption. He also says that they should demand the Democrats deregulate Wall Street, which is probably a mistake, as it was the deregulation of Wall Street, supported by Shrillary, which caused the massive American financial crash.
In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses the astonishing news that according to the Washington Post, just over half of American young adults don’t support capitalism. The papers reports that a poll by Harvard University of young people aged between 19 and 29 found that 51% of them did not support capitalism. Only 33% said they supported Socialism, however.
Kulinski states that this finding made him wonder if they were even more liberal than he was. He states that he’s not a Communist, and is largely opposed to it, although many of his viewers are Communists. He’s in favour of the mixture of Socialism and capitalism found mainly in the Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Europe. He then goes on to consider that maybe most of the people polled are also in favour of such a mixed economy, but that the questions were badly worded so as to make them sound like they were in favour of total nationalisation when they weren’t.
America is one of the most capitalist nations on Earth, so it’s amazing how far leftward the country has moved. This might have something to do with the fact that for decades, the free market capitalism espoused and so militantly promoted by Reagan, Bushes snr and jnr, Bill Clinton et al hasn’t delivered. Unemployment is growing. The TPP has resulted in more jobs being exported abroad. 20 per cent of Americans could not afford healthcare before the introduction of Obamacare, and the Republicans have fought tooth and nail to repeal that. In many ways, Obama’s a Conservative politician. He receives much of his funding from Wall Street, Obamacare was originally a Conservative idea from Richard Nixon’s administration, supported by Newt Gingrich, amongst others. On gun control he’s hardly more restrictive than George Dubya. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans screaming that he’s everything from a Communist to a Nazi to a radical Muslim. The accusations are ridiculous, and so are they for making them.
And much of this corruption come from the corporate funding of politics. Corporations fund politicians’ campaigns, so that their policies reflect those of their big business sponsors, rather than the American people. 80 per cent of Americans want gun control. Very many others don’t want to see cuts to Medicaid and social security. But the politicians don’t want gun control, and are doing everything they can to cut the Medicaid and social security budget.
And as a result of all this, the approval rating for Congress fluctuates from 9% to 20%. And a Harvard study declared that America was an oligarchy, rather than a proper, functioning democracy.
This has no doubt got America’s corporate masters hopping mad. You can expect even more of them to start putting pressure on our politicos in Britain to start privatising even more stuff, like the Health Service, so they have a few more nice little earners should Bernie Sanders, or someone very like him, get in. Which now seems increasingly possible.
And I dare say that the Tories over here are also worried. After all, they’ve taken much of their free market ideology from the American Republicans and Libertarians. The same goes for the Blairites in the Labour party. They took over the Chicago school’s nonsense, and followed Bill Clinton’s line in refashioning the Democrat party to look like a slightly paler version of the Republicans. Blair and the leading lights of New Labour were a part of the Reaganite network, the British-American Project for the Successor Generation. If capitalism, or at least, its free market variant is looking increasingly rocky in the American homeland, then you can bet that its cheerleaders and supporters are grimly contemplating the fact that this anti-free market mood might just cross the Atlantic and come over here.
And that will be no bad thing. Frankly, the day can’t come soon enough.
I’ve posted a number of pieces about the damaging effects on the projected TPP trade agreement now being considered by politicians across the world. Left-wing bloggers and social activists have criticised the agreement on the grounds that it gives private corporations the power to sue national governments for legislation that may harm their trade. In effect, it takes power away from national governments to regulate and control industry, and gives it to big business. There have been a number of petitions launched against it in Britain, most notably because of the threat it poses to the National Health Service. Campaigners are trying to get the NHS omitted from the deal, as they fear that the TPP will lock in the Tories’ steal privatisation of the health service.
The TPP is also controversial and unpopular in America. In this video from The Young Turks, the anchors John Iadarola, Michael Shure and Elliot Hill discuss the findings of researchers from Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Unit. The Tufts researchers found that the claims that the TPP would promote economic growth and jobs were all wrong. Instead, they predict that in America, GDP will be 0.54% lower than it would be without the trade deal. The Japanese would also be worse off by 0.12%.
The also state that there would be minimal or negligible economic gains for the participating countries. There would be less than 1% economic growth for the nations in the Developed World after ten years, and only 3% for nations in the Developing World.
771,000 jobs would be lost due to the deal. The most severe job losses would be felt in America, which would lose 448,000. The countries that did not participate in the trade deal would also suffer massive job losses. In the Developed World, GDP would suffer by 3.77%, and 879,000 jobs would be lost, mostly in Europe. In the Developing World, the economic losses would include 5.24% of the GDP and 4.45 million jobs lost in China and India.
The Turks acknowledge that there are other predictions that the economy will actually grow under the TPP, and state they merely want to start a conversation about this issue. But from this, it seems clear that the TPP will be devastating to nations right across the globe. The only people, who will profit from it are the leaders of big business. Everybody else seems set to lose their jobs and see their nations become even more impoverished.
The Turks also ponder how it can be that whatever the price of oil, it’s bad for the economy. When the price is high, it’s harming the economy. When it’s low, this also harms the economy. John Iadarola suggests, half-jokingly, that it’s time we stopped being dependent on oil. He mentions that he did a piece the other day on how Denmark got 42% of its power from wind. He doesn’t say this would be possible in America, but something should be done to make America less dependent on it.
This programme provides further evidence that the TPP is altogether harmful, and should be firmly resisted by everyone, whether they’re in Britain, America, China, Japan, India or wherever.
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