In this 15 minute video from the Baltimore-based The Real News network, host Aaron Mate talks to Leon Panitch, professor of political science at York University about the proposals announced at the Labour party’s conference last month that Labour intended to renationalize some of the privatized utilities, introduce profit-sharing schemes and workplace democracy in firms with over 250 members, in which 1/3 of the board would be elected by the workers.
The video includes a clip of John McDonnell announcing these policies, declaring that they are the greatest extension of economic democratic rights that this country has ever seen. He states that it starts in the workplace, and that it is undeniable that the balance of power is tipped against the worker. The result is long hours, low productivity, low pay and the insecurity of zero hours contracts. He goes on to say that Labour will redress this balance. They will honour the promise of the late Labour leader, John Smith, that workers will have full union rights from day one whether in full time, part time or temporary work. They will lift people out of poverty by setting a real living wage of ten pounds an hour.
McDonnell also says that they believe that workers, who create the wealth of a company, should share in its ownership and the returns that it makes. Employee ownership increases productivity and improves long-term decision making. Legislation will be passed, therefore, for large firms to transfer shares into an inclusive ownership fund. The shares will be held and managed collectively by the workers. The shareholders will give the workers the same rights as other shareholders to have a say over the direction of their company. And dividend payments will be made directly to the workers from the fund.
Commenting on these proposals, Panitch says that in some ways they’re not surprising. McDonnell stated that Labour would inherit a mess. But his remarks were different in that usually governments use the fact that they will inherit a mess not to go through with radical policies. Panitch then talks about Labour’s commitment to bring the public utilities – rail, water, electricity, the post office – public ownership, pointing out that these used to be publicly owned before Thatcher privatized them. McDonnell particularly focused on water, before going beyond it, citing the 1918 Labour party constitution’s Clause IV, which Blair had removed. This is the clause committing the Labour party to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, under the best form of popular administration. And unlike previous nationalized industries, these will be as democratically-run as possible. Councils would be set up in the water sector made up of representatives of the local community and workers’ representatives to be a supervisory council over the managers in the nationalized water industry.
They then go to a clip of McDonnell talking about the nationalization of the utilities. McDonnell states that the renationalization of the utilities will be another extension of economic democracy. He states that this has proved its popularity in opinion poll after opinion poll. And it’s not surprising. Water privatization is a scandal. Water bills have risen by 40 per cent in real terms since privatization. 18 billion pounds has been paid out in dividends. Water companies receive more in tax credits than they pay in tax. And each day enough water to meet the needs of 20 million people is lost due to leaks. ‘With figures like that’, he concludes, ‘we cannot afford not to take it back into popular ownership’.
Mate and Panitch then move on to discussing the obstacles Labour could face in putting these policies into practice, most particularly from the City of London, which Panitch describes as ‘the Wall Street of Britain’, but goes on to say that in some ways its even more central to financialized global capitalism. However, Panitch says that ‘one gets the sense’ that the British and foreign bourgeoisie have resigned themselves to these industries being brought back into public ownership. And in so far as bonds will be issued to compensate for their nationalization, McDonnell has got the commitment from them to float and sell them. He therefore believes that there won’t be much opposition on this front, even from capital. He believes that there will be more resistance to Labour trying to get finance to move from investing in property to productive industry.
He then moves on to talk about Labour’s plans for ten per cent of the stock of firms employing 250 or more people to go into a common fund, the dividends from which would passed on to the workers up to 500 pounds a year. Anything above that would be paid to the treasury as a social fund for meeting the needs of British people and communities more generally. Panitch states that this has already produced a lot of squawking from the Confederation of British Industry. Going to giving workers a third of the seats on the boards, Panitch states that it has already been said that it will lead to a flight of capital out of Britain. He discusses how this proposal can be radical but also may not be. It could lead to the workers’ representatives on these boards making alliances with the managers which are narrow and particular to that firm. The workers get caught up in the competitiveness of that firm, it stock prices and so on. He makes the point that it’s hardly the same thing as the common ownership of the means of production to have workers’ sitting on the boards of private companies, or even from workers’ funds to be owning shares and getting dividends from them. Nevertheless, it is a step in the right direction of socializing the economy more generally, and giving workers the capacity and encouraging them to decide what can be produced, where it’s produced, and what can be invested. And if it really scares British and foreign capital, this raises the question of whether they will have to introduce capital controls. Ultimately, would they have to bring the capital sector into the public sphere as a public utility, as finance is literally the water that forms the basis of the economy?
Mate then asks him about Labour’s refusal to hold a second referendum on Brexit, which angered some activists at the conference. Labour said that any second referendum could only be about the terms of the exit. Panitch states that people wanting Britain to remain in a capitalist Europe try to spin this as the main priority of the party’s members, even Momentum. He states that this is not the case at all, and that if you asked most delegates at the conference, most Labour members and members of Momentum, which they would prefer, a socialist Britain or a capitalist Europe, they would prefer a socialist Britain. The people leading the Remain campaign on the other hand aren’t remotely interested in a socialist Britain, and think it’s romantic nonsense at best. He states that the Corbyn leadership has said that they want a general election as they could secure an arrangement with Europe that would be progressive without necessarily being in Europe. They would accept the single market and a progressive stand on immigration rather than a reactionary one. They did not wish to endorse a referendum, which the Tories would have the power to frame the question. And this is particularly because of the xenophobic and racist atmosphere one which the initial Brexit vote was based. Panitch states that he is a great critic of the European Union, but he would have voted to remain because the debate was being led by the xenophobic right. He ends by saying that capital is afraid of the Trumps of this world, and it is because of the mess the right has made of things here in Britain with the Brexit campaign that capital might give a little bit more space for a period at least to a Corbyn government.
This latter section on Brexit is now largely obsolete because Labour has said it will support a second referendum. However, it does a good job of explaining why many Labour supporters did vote for Brexit. The editor of Lobster, Robin Ramsay, is also extremely critical of the European Union because of the way neoliberalism and a concern for capital and privatization is so much a part of its constitution.
Otherwise, these are very, very strong policies, and if they are implemented, will be a very positive step to raising people out of poverty and improving the economy. Regarding the possibility that the representatives of the workers on the company boards would ally themselves with capital against the workers, who put them there, has long been recognized by scholars discussing the issue of workers’ control of industry. It was to stop this happening that the government of the former Yugoslavia insisted that regular elections should be held with limited periods of service so that the worker-directors would rotate. Ha-Joon Chan in his books criticizing neoliberal economics also makes the points that in countries like France and Germany, where the state owns a larger proportion of firms and workers are involved in their companies through workers’ control, there is far more long-term planning and concern for the companies success. The state and the workers have a continuing, abiding interest in these firms success, which is not the case with ordinary investors, who will remove their money if they think they can get a better return elsewhere.
My concern is that these policies will be undermined by a concentrated, protracted economic warfare carried out against the Labour party and the success of these policies by capital, the CBI and the Tories, just as the Tories tried to encourage their friends in industry to do in speeches from Tweezer’s chancellors. These policies are desperately needed, but the Tory party and the CBI are eager to keep British workers, the unemployed and disabled in poverty and misery, in order to maintain their control over them and maximise profits.
Yesterday evening, ITV news reported that one of the big donors to the Labour party had left the party. The donor, who I think was called Gerard, complained that the party was rife with anti-Semitism, and that very little was being done about it. This must have delighted the biased mainstream media. I’m surprised they didn’t do a little dance of joy.
As everyone, who’s been smeared as an anti-Semite by the Israel lobby can vouch, this is an utter lie. The Labour Party takes such accusations very seriously. So seriously that decent people have been suspended, expelled and smeared as anti-Semites and, in Mike’s case, as a Holocaust Denier, simply through baseless accusations brought by mendacious, cowardly individuals. These people hide their real identities, and deliberately twist the evidence and misquote those they are maligning so as to misrepresent them. There are anti-Semites in the Labour party, just as there are in the Tories. But the anti-Semitism smears have nothing to do with real anti-Semitism. It’s about the Israel lobby and its cheerleaders and lackeys trying to get rid of Corbyn, because he supports the Palestinians. And they’re aided by the Blairites, who fear the rise of a real, genuine socialist Left. This is a blow against their control of the party, and their policy of pursuing the vote of the aspirant middle classes instead of sticking up for the poor, the disabled, the unemployed and the working and lower middle classes.
I don’t think that Mr. Gerard will be entirely missed, except by the Blairites. Blair was able to carry through his ‘modernisation’ of the party, getting rid of Clause 4 and transforming it into another Thatcherite political vehicle, because of the funding he was given was by a group of Jewish donors through Lord Levy, who Blair met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy. This made Blair independent of the unions and their funding.
ITV and their guest expert described this latest development as a blow, but said it wouldn’t be as severe as it may have been because Corbyn had transformed Labour into a mass party. And this is the core of the issue.
A couple of years ago Harvard University issued a report stating that America was no longer a functioning democracy but an oligarchy. This is because American politicos ignore what the electorate want, and do the bidding instead of their donors. Hence the Republicans and Corporate Democrats have done their best to represent the interests of the oil industry, big business and Wall Street against ordinary Americans.
And Blair was exactly the same. In Peter Mandelson’s notorious words, New Labour was ‘very relaxed’ about the rich, and Blair promoted a vast number of corporate donors, like Lord Sainsbury, to government posts. If you want to see how many, take a look at the relevant pages in George Monbiot’s Captive State. With the power of the Blairites being challenged by Momentum and the Left, it was always on the cards that the donors Lord Levy had brought into the party to support Blair would eventually abandon Labour. They were never really supporters of Labour to begin with. Indeed, quite the opposite. Like Rupert Murdoch, Who also switched from the Tories to Labour, the impression is that they were only interested in Labour as the best vehicle to pursue their own, corporate interests within the wider area of neoliberal economics. The last thing they wanted was a Labour party which actually does what the public wants and rejects neoliberalism for a mixed economy and proper state funding for education, health and welfare support.
And I doubt very much that anti-Semitism is the real reason Gerard left, despite his bitter comments. It seems to me that he’s another member of the Israel lobby, who feels bitter about the Labour leader supporting the Palestinians. Which does not equate to anti-Semitism. There are a number of Jewish organisations supporting them, which are very definitely not anti-Semitic or remotely self-hating, and who will not accept Jew haters as members.
I’ve been informed that Corbyn is a supporter of Israel himself, but wants a fair, peaceful settlement for the Palestinians. But this seems to be too much for the Israel lobby, who can’t tolerate anybody siding with them, even if they aren’t enemies of Israel as such.
As for Jewish support for the Labour party, Mike and very many other blogs have put up pieces showing the support Corbyn enjoys by a whole ranges of Jewish groups and individuals. And Jewish businessmen have supported the Labour party ever since the days of Harold Wilson, before Maggie Thatcher and her clique seized power in the Tories. I’m confident that the Jewish businesspeople, who genuinely support Labour, will continue to find a welcome place in the party.
It seems to me very strongly that Gerard wasn’t one of them. He looks instead like one of the very many donors, regardless of religion or ethnicity, who supported Blair simply for their own corporate advantage. And in Gerard’s case, to promote Israel against the Palestinians. Now that this is threatened, he has angrily made his departure.
And his accusations of anti-Semitism are just lies made to excuse himself and make his departure look less like the self-interested manoeuvring it is.
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.
Okay, I apologise for the crude nature of this post, but it’s weirdly fascinating and gives a bizarre insight into the mindset, not just of Alex Jones, but of much of the Republican party in America.
In this clip from Secular Talk, host Kyle Kulinski talks about a compilation video one of his viewers sent in, of the various times Alex Jones, the mad conspiracy theorist behind the Infowars internet show, defends Trump from the accusation that his manhood is of less than impressive size.
As Kryten said of Rimmer in Red Dwarf, ‘Oh for a world class psychiatrist!’
This all started with Ted Cruz telling the crowd during the campaigning for the Republican nomination that Trump had tiny hands, and that this meant that certain other areas of his anatomy were also correspondingly small. Mind you, Trump had just claimed that Cruz’s father was responsible for the assassination of J.F.K., which is actually a far worse accusation. My guess is that most people watching Cruz make the accusation probably took it for what it was – a particular low, ad hominem attack, and nothing more. But it’s clearly got under Jones’ skin. Hence the ranting in the video about how well-endowed Trump is, against the lies put out by the media.
Kulinski goes on to discuss how Jones has turned from a critic of the establishment, to its most fervent propagandist through his support of Trump. He likes Trump. It’s as if Trump has cast a voodoo spell over him, as Kulinski describes it. When Obama was president, Jones declared that he was responsible for all manner of conspiracies. Now Trump’s in the Oval Office, the president isn’t responsible for any of those. It’s always the people around him.
He points out just how much of an establishment shill Trump is. He’s doing exactly what his backers in Wall Street and big business want, and is impoverishing ordinary Americans for their corporate profit. He’s the enemy of the middle Class. But to Jones Trump can do no wrong.
Kulinski also discusses some of the other lunatic statements that Jones has made. Jones went on the Joe Rogan Show, where he raved about interdimensional demons and aliens, and claimed that there was a war going on in the political elite between paedophiles and real men, ‘who eat steaks, drink whisky and like women’. Kulinski makes the point of how ridiculous this is as the standard for judging who’s one of the good guys. It means that various truly repulsive Republicans, who have backed every war launched by the presidents, are good guys, merely because they’re heterosexual and have those tastes in food and drink. He also goes on to point out how Jones’ conspiracy theories are demonstrably wrong. Like Jones’ claim that Obama was going to declare a state of emergency, and have everyone rounded up and imprisoned in FEMA camps. Well, Obama’s been and gone, and it never happened. Even worse was Jones’ statement that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged at the pretext for taking Americans’ guns away. He doesn’t mention it here, but this did result in grieving parents being accused by Jones’ viewers of being ‘crisis actors’, and that their children weren’t really shot and killed. Kulinski points out that the legislation that was proposed in the aftermath of the massacre to prevent further outrages like it were a ban on certain types of automatic weapons, magazines of a particular size, and uniform background checks. But the ban on automatic weapons and magazines never got through, because the Republicans blocked it. As for the background checks, this was passed, but was watered down to the point where there are a million loopholes in it. So if Sandy Hook was staged as a ploy to deprive Americans of their firearms, it hasn’t worked.
In fact, Jones’ rants say something about the psychology of part of the Republican base, and the visceral fear of castration that some of them seem to have, associated with socialism, liberalism and feminism. The Republican party stands for a very traditional conception of the sex roles, in which men are expected to be aggressively masculine. The gun culture is part of this. Much of the rhetoric by the Alt Right is about how alpha male they are, compared to all the beta male cucks in mainstream society and the left. When Trump was campaigning for the presidency, Jones did a broadcast about how ‘alpha’ Trump was, and how he’d been having ‘transcendent’ conversations with him. Which, in addition to these comments defending the size of Trump’s genitals, add a kind of homoerotic undercurrent to his attitude to Trump.
Several of Jones’ rants are about the threat to masculinity and biological gender posed by feminism, the UN, and the gay rights movement. In one rant, he declared that the gay rights movement was ‘a transhumanist space cult’ dedicated to removing biological gender and turning us all into genderless cyborgs. Which I’ve no doubt surprised an awful lot of gay people. He also claimed that UN doctors were going to come to cut men’s testicles off. One of the internet news commenters sent up this raging paranoia in one of their vlogs, stating that no, Obama was not going to have them castrated and put in FEMA camps, where they would be forced to carry around greased up lesbians.
Jones’ rants about the size of Trump’s manhood are ridiculous, but they do show the real insecurities about masculinity in the Republican party and the Alt Right. Jones and others like him really do see liberalism and feminism as emasculating movements, which can only be combated by powerful, aggressive alpha males. Hence their support for Trump, and the bitter anti-feminism within the Republican party itself. And not all of those, who hold such views are men. One of those, who has vociferously attacked feminism, and denied that women should have the right to vote is Anne Coulter. And Kulinski makes the point that these genital obsessions have also been played out in the theatre of international relations. Like when he told Kim Jong Un that his nuclear button was bigger. Trump’s concern, and those of his supporters, to show how ‘alpha male’ he is, aren’t just ridiculous, they’re an active danger to the safety of the entire world. As are the stupid conspiracy theories about aliens, paedophiles and FEMA camps promoted by Jones and his Infowars team.
More geopolitical arrogance and stupidity, but this time it’s from the Democrats.
A few days ago Trump caused astonishment and outrage around the world by announcing that he was planning to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As The Young Turks have explained, this is immensely controversial as Jerusalem is also a holy city to the world’s Muslims and Christians, who will resent all of the holy sites being under Israeli control. However, it’s done to support the Likudniks and other Israeli right-winger, who want Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. And it’s also strongly supported by the Christian Zionist right in America, who are looking forward to the restoration of Israel, and an apocalyptic war between Good and Evil, seen as America, Israel and Christianity versus Islam, which will lead to Christ’s Second Coming. Jerusalem is also claimed by the Palestinians. It was taken from them by the Israelis, but the city still has a large Arab population.
In this piece from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Steffi Zamorano and Ron Placone, discuss Trump’s decision, and how its being supported by key leaders of the Democrats: specifically Chuck Shumer, the leader of the Democrats in Congress, Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The clip begins with a series of quotes from Arab and other Middle Eastern leaders condemning the move. These include Manuel Hassassian, the leader of the Palestinian delegation, who describes it as an attack on the Palestinians, and also the Middle East’s Muslims and Christians. El-Sisi, the current military strongman ruling Egypt, also condemns it, as does Erdogan, the Islamist president of Turkey. Erodogan states that he was almost going to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel in retaliation. As Dore points out, Turkey’s America’s ally.
Dore also points out that the move is against America’s best interests and only serves Israel. And Israel is beholden to America. Last year, Congress voted to give it $38 billion of military aid. This is a country that has single-payer healthcare. But Americans can’t have it, because it’s too expensive. The money has to go to Israel to keep their military awash with cash. On the other hand, if America didn’t support Israel, what other country would stand up for them? No-one.
But you expect the Democrats would be different. But they’re not. Chuck Schumer has said that he was pressing Trump to move the embassy to Jerusalem, and took the president to task for his indecision. There’s also a clip from Barak Obama, in which he declares Jerusalem to be the indivisible capital of Israel, and supports moving the American embassy there. If you look at the signs around the podium, it’s clear that he’s speaking at an AIPAC gathering. AIPAC is the main, pro-Israel lobby group in the US. And then there’s a quote from Hillary Clinton, from all the way back in 1999, in which she states she wants the American embassy moved to Jerusalem.
This shows very clearly that the corporatist, Clintonite Democrats as corrupt, arrogant and dangerous on this issue as Trump and the Republicans. But followers of Dore’s show probably won’t be particularly surprised by this. Dore has made a number of videos pointing out the corruption and imperialist agenda of the corporate Democrats, including Killary and Obama. Obama carried on the privatisation and welfare cuts of Bush and the Republicans. He also expanded the wars in the Middle East from two to seven. But he got away with it because he cloaked it all in vague, progressive rhetoric. All that stuff about ‘hope and change’. Dore doesn’t mention it, but race was also a factor. Obama was America’s first Black president, and his election was hailed as a breakthrough for Black people. When he was elected there were celebrations in Africa, and the Nobel Committee gave him a peace prize. Just like they did to Kissinger. But despite the stupid, vicious rhetoric from lunatic Republicans about how Obama hated Whites, and was planning to kill them all in concentration camps, Obama was solidly Conservative in his policies, and did precious little for Blacks. Poor Whites have seen their incomes and life expectancy drop, and Black life expectancy has risen. This has resulted in the racist fringe shouting about ‘White genocide’, and mobilised them in support of Trump. But Black income has dropped even further than poor White, and it’s been projected that in a few decades the average Black family will have absolutely zero wealth.
As for Hillary Clinton, she has shown herself to be every bit as militaristic, imperialist and hawkish as the male politicians and generals that surround her. She fully supported the Iraq invasion, and when Obama was in office was ramping up tensions with China and Russia. Susan Sarandon has commented on interviews that if she’d won the election, America could well have been at war by now. I think Sarandon’s right. As for the reason’s for the new Cold War against Putin and Russia, some of this is an attempt by Clinton to deflect attention from the way she and her coterie stole the presidential nomination away from Bernie, and her massive ties to Wall Street. But it’s also been suggested that it’s also rage by American capitalism against Putin, for making Russia economically independent after they had poured so much money into the privatisation of the economy under Yeltsin.
It’s glaringly obvious to just about everyone how massively stupidly dangerous the current Cold War with Russia, because of the potential for it to develop into a real war. And there were NATO generals predicting that it would. One of them even published a book claiming that by May this year (2017) we would be at war with Russia. Such a conflict could easily become a nuclear war, resulting in the destruction of all life on our beautiful, fragile world.
Mercifully, we aren’t at war with Russia. But the fact that Obama and Hillary were keen to stoke tensions with Putin shows how dangerous they are. Just as their support for Trump moving the American embassy to Jerusalem.
Obama, Hillary and Schumer are unfit for office. Their support for America’s imperialist wars, the new Cold War and the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem are a positive threat to world peace. And the Arab and Muslim leaders who denounced the move are right: it shows absolute contempt and disregard for the feelings of Arabs and Muslims.
It’s been shown that much of the support for terrorist campaign against the West in the Middle East comes from anger at the repeated western military interference in the affairs of the Middle East – the invasions and the overthrow of Middle Eastern leaders, when they are perceived as an obstacle to western political or commercial interests. The Iraq invasion is one example, but so too is the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq, the last democratically elected prime minister of Iran. He was overthrown because he dared to nationalise the Iranian oil industry.
Trump’s decision has sparked riots and protests throughout the Middle East. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it also doesn’t serve to provoke another wave of terrorism directed against us. But I very much doubt that Trump, Killary, Obama and the other major political figures will comment on the way western imperialism is stirring up anti-western sentiment in the Middle East. Instead we’ll just have more discussion about the nature of Islamism – which is indeed part of the problem. And the islamophobic right will start ranting about how it’s all due to something intrinsic in Islam itself, and that Muslims hate us because of our freedoms.
Schumer, Obama and Hillary’s support for Trump’s decision serve yet again to show how corrupt the corporate Democrats are. They have to go. A growing number of Americans want a third party, which will really represent American working people. And the Democrat elite’s support for the transfer of the embassy to Jerusalem is further evidence that a third party is needed, if the Democrat party can’t be reformed and the Clintonites and corporatists cleaned out.
This came to me the other night, after I’d already posted one rant about Killary. But even if it’s a bit too much coming after the earlier posts, I still think it’s a valid point worth making.
Killary was going around the world last month trying to flog her book, What Happened?, in which she tried to blame everyone else for losing the election to the orange racist. It was all the fault of RT and Putin, WikiLeaks, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, misogynist men and ‘treacherous’ women. And not because she herself was a greedy, corporatist warmonger, determined to keep Americans poor and deny them a proper welfare state, with free healthcare, because she’s in the pocket of Wall Street and the other big corporations. Nope. It had nothing to do with any of that.
Killary was Obama’s Secretary of State when he sent the bombers in to level Libya and aid the Islamist rebels in overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, no question – but under him the country was free from foreign domination. It was the most prosperous country in Africa, and its people had the benefit of free healthcare and free education. And while Gaddafi had no qualms against using the Islamists to assassinate his rivals in Africa and the Arab world, he kept them on a very short leash. They could not try to spread their warped vision of Islam in Libya, and attempts by them to interfere in Libyan politics were very definitely not tolerated. Gaddafi’s own ideology was a mixture of Arab socialism and Islam, but it was in many respects a modern, secular state where women enjoyed a greater degree of freedom and equality than elsewhere in the Islamic world.
All that was destroyed when the Islamists took over. There are now at least two parliaments in the country, which is split by civil war. And this week I’ve posted several stories about the revelation that the Islamists have been holding auctions of Black African migrants as slaves. When they haven’t massacred them, along with other Black Libyans. Whole Black towns have been massacred. One of these was Tawergha, which had 40,000 people.
But when Gaddafi was overthrown, Killary was giggling about it. ‘Yeah, we got him!’ she enthused. There are photos of her with the Islamists holding up a sword with one of them. That’ll come back to haunt America, just as the Islamists Reagan and Thatcher proudly promoted as our friends in the fight against the evil Soviet Empire morphed into al-Qaeda, and launched 9/11. The Islamists aren’t our friends, and are the enemies of every civilised person on this planet – non-Muslim and Muslim.
It also helps put the lie to the image Killary was trying to promote twenty or so years ago as a modern, non-racist woman fully comfortable with American multiculturalism. Back when her husband was doing his best to run the country according to the principles of Ronald Reagan, rather than FDR, she wrote her own book outlining her political philosophy.
It was called It Takes A Village, and was her attempt to present herself as a font of folksy wisdom. At the centre of the book was her daughter, Chelsea, and the book was about how she and Bill cared for her, and how they intended to give her nice, positive, left-ish values. It supposedly took its title from an African proverb: ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, thus showing the Clinton’s collectivism and commitment to benefiting everyone. It was also, you may bet, given the title to show how anti-racist she was, how pro-Black and fully integrated into the global village Marshal McLuhan used to bang on about. Never mind the fact that Africans and western experts in African cultures have never heard of the proverb. You can imagine Hillary thinking how this would present her as the embodiment of Black ‘earth mother’ wisdom, like some of the images of the strong mothers in the projects, trying to raise their kids well in spite of grinding poverty, absent fathers and the looming threat of gang culture and violence. No doubt she also saw with the title an opportunity to get on one of the shows presented by Black female celebrities. You know, like Oprah Winfrey. Or perhaps an appearance with Whoopie Goldberg. I’m not sneering at either of these two celebs. They’re great presenters and performers, who’ve given a lot of people a lot of pleasure. The only person I’m sneering at here is Hillary. Because it looks opportunistic and very cynically calculated.
Private Eye more or less said so at the time when they reviewed the book. And I think they’re right. Hillary started her career as a ‘Goldwater Girl’, supporting the pro-Segregation candidate Barry Goldwater. In the 1990s she talked about the threat of ‘super-predators’ at the time when it was almost solely used to describe young Black men. She also framed the drugs legislation that resulted in a massively disproportionate number of Black men going to the slammer for drugs.
And now there’s the revelation that the Islamists she backed have been murdering and enslaving Blacks. And that CNN knew about it all three years ago, but kept silent, because they’re reporters were embedded with the same terrorist groups.
Which raises the question: did Hillary know? It’s hard to believe that, as Secretary of State, she didn’t. Or if she didn’t, she dam’ well should have known. She was in charge of giving them support. She would – or at least should – have been briefed about what these characters are like. It wouldn’t have been hard. There are a fair number of scholars of Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who could have told her exactly what they were like, as well as ulema – Muslim clergy – who could have told her how the Islamists violate the precepts of their religion.
But clearly, she didn’t want to know. All she cared about was getting Gaddafi out. This was because he’d defied the American Empire, and was going to jettison the petrodollar for the Gold Dinar. America wouldn’t be able to use the profits from the oil industry to refinance its debts, and the whole country would go bust. Plus, the Republicans’ friends in Likud wanted Libya destroyed, along with six other African and Middle Eastern nations.
And so Killary has shown herself quite willing to turn a blind eye to the horrors committed by these monsters. Well, what could the world expect from the woman, who stood on her soapbox at the presidential debates, and raved about how happy she was to know, and go on holiday with Henry Kissinger. Yeah, Kissinger. The man who’s rightly been described as the world’s biggest unindicted war criminal, responsible for the spread of Fascism, bloodshed, mass murder and torture across Latin America and South Asia.
Never mind the title of her book. Killary has harmed Black Americans, and promoted the murder and sale of Blacks in Africa.
This is another great piece of reporting from RT. It’s horrendous, and shows the depths of sheer barbarism that the country has been reduced since we and the American helped the Islamists overthrow Colonel Gaddafi.
Gaddafi was no angel. He was a tyrant who ruled by fear and used the Islamists himself to assassinate his enemies in Africa and the Middle East. But he did much to improve his country. His official ideology was a mixture, so I gather, of Arab socialism and Islam. Libya was a modern, secular state, where women enjoyed western style rights under the law. Like the old boy at one point had an all-female bodyguard. Education and healthcare was free. Previously, the oil companies had run the place as they liked. When he took power, they had to pay a fair price for the oil, and fund public works projects, like building roads. He was a monster, but not half as monstrous as those, who have replaced him.
Slavery is recognised and regulated in the Qu’ran, as it is also in the Bible and in many other religions. Mohammed, however, praised the emancipation of slaves as a meritorious act, and the Qu’ran instructs Muslims to treat their slaves gently. The Prophet was also anti-racist, and the Qu’ran also tells Muslims that they are not to distinguish between Black and White. The Muslim states, like the Ottoman Empire, enslaved both Blacks and Whites. After the Ottomans put down a nationalist rebellion in Crete in the 1820s, it was estimated that about 20,000 White, Greek slaves filled their slave markets, and furnished the Georgian painters of the era with pictures of murderous, tyrannical Turks dragging heroic-looking men, and young, virginal, naked women off into captivity. In Egypt there were two guilds for slavers, one for those, who dealt in Blacks and another for those selling enslaved Whites.
In fact, Europeans had also enslaved Whites through the Middle Ages, The word ‘slave’ is derived from ‘Slav’, as so many of the enslaved people finding their way to western slave markets came from the Slavonic countries to the East. This was stopped by the rise of the Mongol Empire and the expansion of Ottoman Turkey in the 15th centuries, and so western Europeans turned instead to importing and exploiting enslaved Africans. Hence the connection of slavery in the Western mind with negritude and African heritage.
After the British ended slavery in their empire in 1839, they turned to trying to stamp it out elsewhere in the world, including Africa and the Ottoman Empire. They were helped in Egypt by the reforming pasha, Khedive Ismail, who was sincerely opposed to it. However, it was blocked by vested mercantile interests, particularly in the Sudan, where it formed an important fabric of the economy of the upper classes. The British attempts to exterminate slavery there, with General Gordon acting in charge of the Egyptian forces, was one of the causes of the Mahdi’s revolt. Throughout the 19th century there were complaints by British ambassadors and diplomatic staff about slaves continuing to be imported into Libya from further south in Africa. These imports were disguised as ‘personal servants’, which the law permitted slave-owners to take with them on their travels. The British also tried to avoid a direct confrontation with the religious authorities as far as possible, by granting certificates of liberation to those enslaved people, who came to them to ask for their freedom.
What finally discredited slavery in Egypt was a prosecution brought by a Circassian slave woman, Shanigal, against her master for raping her. The Circassians are a people from the Caucasus mountains, and converted to Islam after they were conquered by the Turks in the 17th century. Shanigal went to the British authorities to obtained justice, and got it. In doing so, she showed up the massive injustice and hypocrisy towards slavery in the upper and middle classes, with the result that she dealt a major blow against it.
While studying Islam at College, I did read in one of the books on the Islamic Revolution that some of the Muslim fundamentalists then wanted to bring it all back, but they were successfully blocked – thank heaven! – by the rest of the revolutionaries.
However, there is still a widespread racial prejudice against Blacks in the Islamic world. Flicking through a Teach Yourself book on the Arabic of the Levant, way back when I was at school, I found a bit that described how common term for Blacks in the Syrian Arabic dialect literally translates as ‘the slaves’. And in Sudan, the indigenous Black population are still treated very much as slaves by the Arabs. One of the civil rights leaders for the Beja people died back in the 1990s. In the obituary for him in the Independent it mentioned how his Arab teachers really didn’t want him to go to school, because there was no point educating slaves. I mentioned this in a long letter to a Black organisation, that really only wanted to discuss White racism. They really didn’t like it, and politely told me to take my correspondence elsewhere. The problem is that slavery and racism are found all over the world, and in the globalised societies of the 20th century they need to be tackled together.
Most of the crowd in the video looks to be Black. My guess is that many of them, if not the majority, are probably asylum seekers, who came to Europe and France through Libya, and so this has an acute personal meaning for them.
Along with signs with the slogans ‘Ons dit non a l’esclavage’ – ‘We say ‘No’ to slavery’, there are other signs directly attacking Bush, Clinton and Blair as war criminals.
Yes, they are. No argument from me. Bush and Blair started the illegal wars in the Middle East, but it was Obama and Killary, who authorised the bombing of Libya. With Killary smirking and giggling like an excited schoolgirl over Gaddafi’s death. ‘We got him!’, she rejoiced.
Yeah, you got him. But you destroyed a modern, secular state with the highest standard of living in Africa.
The secular state and its infrastructure have been destroyed. The Islamists massacred and butchered whole towns, and particularly those occupied mostly by Blacks. Women are being deprived of their hard-won, modern, western style rights, despite the fact that in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world there are Islamic feminist groups. When I was studying Islam at College, we were told that one year they had a seminar given to them by a Black, Muslim feminist talking about the status of ‘protected peoples’ – that is, those monotheist peoples that Muslims are forbidden to convert by force.
So despite the best efforts of Muslim and Arab reformers, the country has been plunged back to medieval barbarism.
And Killary Clinton is the direct cause of this. And she has the sheer, unmitigated gall to claim that she’s some kind of ‘everywoman’ feminist.
She isn’t, and has never been. She’s a rich, entitled corporate boss, who’s in the pocket of Wall Street and a hundred other corporations, no doubt. She’s as corrupt and bloodthirsty as the male hawks and corporate whores, who surround her.
At home, she stands for corruption, inequality and lack of single-payer healthcare, all to drive up profits for her friends in big business. And abroad, well, she stands for American corporate interests there too. The Americans weren’t interested in freeing the Libyan people from a dictator. They wanted Gaddafi out because he defied American imperial power. And he also threated the petrodollar. He was planning to abandon that, and have it replaced with the gold dinar, which would be used through the Middle East and Africa. If that happened, America wouldn’t be able to remonetise its debts, and the economy would collapse. Or collapse even further.
So Killary sent the planes in to destroy a country, and murder its leader. then she giggled about it.
And the result is this return to savagery and barbarism.
This is the second part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. Martin is the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and a former presenter at RT. She is impassioned, incisive and tells the story of the victims of American and western imperialism both abroad in the Middle East and elsewhere, and the mass of severely normal Americans at home burdened with the tax bill and the sheer rapacious greed of the neoliberal, corporate elite.
She states that Boeing and the other big corporations fund the adverts in the media simply to show the journos, who’s paying their wages, and so keep in line. The media is now all about advertising, not news.
They then talk about the rampant Russia-phobia, which Martin says is causing her to lose her mind. At first she just thought it was the product of Trump and his brown shirts. Dore rips this to shreds by pointing out that it’s not Russia that preventing Americans from getting what they want on a range of issues. 90 per cent of Americans want some form of gun control. But they ain’t getting, and it’s not because of Russia. 80 per cent of the US wanted a public option for Obamacare. Didn’t get it. Not because of Russia either. Americans also want Medicare For All and free college education. Denied that too – but not by the Russians. And everybody in America wants the wars to end. And it ain’t the Russians that are preventing that from happening. The people really screwing America is Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, big pharma, and the fossil fuel industry.
Back to Boeing and its adverts, the company’s funding Meet the Press to shut the press up. Half of America doesn’t believe in climate change, because it’s just presented by the media as just another point of view. And this is because the networks are funded by the fossil fuel industry. And the networks bring on general after endless general to talk about how the US should go to war with North Korea. All they talk about is how the war should be fought, but they are never challenged on the reason why. They never bring on Medea Benjamin, the head of the anti-war opposition group, Code Pink, except to mock her. Similarly, you never see union leaders on TV, nor are there any anti-war voices. As for Brian Williams, who was sacked for telling porkies about how he took fire, his real crime was that he didn’t tell his audience that the ‘objective’ news he was broadcasting was paid for by the generals who appeared on his show.
They then talk about the revolving door between the generals and the defence contractors. After the generals retire, they go to work for some company like General Electric. Martin talks about the $500 million in one bill sponsored by John McCain, to train the Ukrainians against Russian aggression. She caustically and accurately remarks that ‘we’re now funding neo-Nazis’, after setting up the coup that overthrew their last president. America is also giving $750 million to Israel for defence.
The Russia scare was hatched by Ralph Mook and John Podesta in the Democrat party, and it’s grown into a huge conspiracy. Martin describes how she saw it all developing three years ago when she was working for RT. They first attacked Al-Jazeera, demonising it as the propaganda wing of Saddam Hussein. Then they turned against RT as a network and her personally. She states that the report on which the accusations are based is rubbish. It looks like it was half written by some unpaid intern. There’s that contempt for any truth or real fact in this document. She noticed when one of RT’s presenters publicly resigned over Putin’s annexation of the Crimea. That was a psy-ops operation launched by William Kristol, one of the founders of the Neocons and the head of the Project for the New American Century. There was absolute no proof that Russia was meddling in American democracy. And half of the document attacked Martin personally. It was fomenting radical discontent, and the elite hated the way they covered third parties, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street. so talking about how half of America has less than $1,000 in savings is now Russian propaganda. It’s at this point that Martin states she never said anything in praise in Putin. She states that there are plenty of leftists and socialists working at the network, not because they like Putin, but because there is nowhere else to go.
They then talk about how the Democrat party is full of people, who voted for Bush twice. And particularly the way Keith Olberman, whom Martin had previously admired, came out and publicly apologised to George Dubya. She states that Bush is a war criminal. He set up a gulag (Guantanamo) killed and tortured people wholesale, but when he appeared on Oprah she held his hand as if he was Buddha! Martin said she realised Obama was a fake when he refused to prosecute the war criminals. So now they have Trump, who’s hated because he’s a narcissist, but knows he will have people applauding every time he bombs people. They ask rhetorically whether the media will apologise to Nixon if Trump wins a second term.
They then go on to discuss how Trump is actually less dangerous, and more of a threat to the establishment, then Mike Pence, the Vice-President. Martin describes Pence, with good reason, as a ‘Christian ISIS who wants to kill gays’. He’s psychotic, but you wouldn’t have the cult of personality you have with Trump. She states that the Christian Evangelicals love him, as without him they wouldn’t have got in. And so Pence and DeVos are quite happy to use him as the fall guy, taking the rap for the policies they’re pushing through Congress. Trump represents the worst elements in society – the cult of celebrity, of reality TV shows, the adulation given to millionaires. She states that Joyce Behar, another personality, was paradoxically the voice of reason when she said on one interview that things wouldn’t be better if they only got rid of Trump. No, not if that meant Mike Pence becoming president. They talk about how, when Bush was in power, everyone talked about Bush Derangement Disorder. Then it was Obama Derangement Disorder, and now its Trump Derangement Disorder. But Dore also points out that progressives dodged a bullet with Trump. Voting for the lesser of two evils meant that they got Trump, who is too incompetent to get his policies through.
The Beeb really does seem as determined as possible to spread as much Tory and right-wing American lies as they can, even if it brings us closer to a needless war with Russia.
Mike has already commented yesterday on the Beeb’s highly biased reporting of the sexual abuse scandal now engulfing parliament. The Beeb has seized on the Kelvin Hopkins story, and has been banging on about this, while casually ignoring the even bigger scandal about the number of Tory MPs, who sexually harass staff. Hopkins was briefly a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet before retiring to the backbenches. He is accused of harassing Ava Etamadzadeh, to whom he allegedly sent an inappropriate message, and held his body close to hers when they shrugged. The major question here is whether Corbyn knew about the allegations when he appointed Hopkins to the shadow cabinet.
The Beeb has been endlessly promoting this story, with Corbyn stopped in the street by a Beeb reporter. And Laura ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg, who tweeted thirteen times about the allegations but has made no mention of the far greater number of Tory MPs accused of sexual harassment.
While it’s unclear if Corbyn knew anything about Hopkins, the MPs has been suspended from the party and the Labour whip withdrawn. Unlike the Tory party, where Theresa May certainly knew about the unwelcome attentions 36 of her MPs were foisting on their staff in a weekly reported nicknamed ‘the Ins and Outs’. So far, none of the MPs accused have been suspended and they are not being investigated. The only casualty so far seems to have been Michael Fallon, who resigned from his role as Defence Secretary. But Kuensberg wasn’t interested in this, preferring – as good Tory propagandist – to continue harping on about Hopkins instead.
Then last night the Beeb decided it was going to retail once again Killary’s lies that she lost the election due Russian hacking and meddling in the US election on Have I Got News For You. They reported that Trump’s aides Papadopoulos and Paul Manafort were arrested for their corrupt links with Russia and Ukraine.
This is debatable. I can’t comment on Papadopoulos, but the FBI file on Manafort only mentions Ukraine. It doesn’t mention Russia.
The show also claimed that all the files that incriminated Hillary, showing her corrupt dealings in the Democrat party and her connections to Wall Street, were also released through Russian hacking.
They weren’t. As WikiLeaks themselves have said, and indeed the former British diplomat who took custody of the documents for them, the information was leaked by a disgruntled Democratic insider. Russia had nothing to do with it.
Now there’s probably a big story there about Manafort’s connections with Ukraine. Ronald Reagan patronised and supported the ex-pat Ukrainian organisations during the Cold War, giving their leaders posts in the various anti-Communist propaganda departments. These organisations and their leader, Vladimir Stetso, were former Nazi collaborators with a virulent hatred of Jews. Just as the current ruling Ukrainian coalition contains fully paid up, unreconstructed Nazis from the Pravy Sektor.
But we ain’t supposed to know about them. It might put us off the lie that the Maidan Revolution of 2012 was entirely spontaneous and democratic, instead of being stage-managed by Obama’s State Department under Victoria Nuland, George Soros, and the National Endowment for Democracy, which took over the CIA’s task of engineering ‘regime change’ when the Agency became too notorious for fomenting coups.
As for Killary, when in government she was one of the most hawkish members of Obama’s team, and was needlessly ramping up tensions with Russia and China. And the people backing her story about how it was due to the Russians, rather than her own venality and colossal lack of sympathy for the American people, are another bunch of sordid Nazis. They include the Von Mises Society, which is dedicated to privatising the state and destroying what little is left of American welfare provision. They also used to subscribe to eugenics and pseudoscientific racism. That means, they published a series of pamphlets and other literature intended to demonstrate that Blacks were thicker than Whites, and that America should not set up a welfare state, because this would simply be a waste of money. If people were poor, it was because they were biologically unfit. Particularly Blacks.
This is the kind of people, who are promoting Hillary’s lies about the Russians stealing the American election. And the Beeb seems happy to repeat this garbage, even if it means creating another wretched Cold War of the time that dam’ nearly destroyed the world the last time under Reagan.
I don’t know why the Beeb is actually doing this, apart from the issue of right-wing bias within the Corporation. Possibly its part of the whole Atlanticist mindset, which permeates much of the British governing class since America superseded us as a world power after the Second World War. We can only be a major force on the world stage by riding on America’s coat-tails. Everything they do, we have to follow. One British ambassador was told by his superiors in the Foreign Office that his job in Washington was to get up the Americans’ backside and stay there. And so Blair enthusiastically joined Bush in invading Iraq, creating the ‘dodgy dossier’ and lying about weapons of mass destruction in order to do so. And certain NATO generals were predicting that by May this year we would be already fighting Putin’s forces in the Baltic States.
That fortunately hasn’t happened, but I wonder if the generals, civil servants and politicians, who promoted this feel disappointed.
As it stands, it certainly looks like the Beeb are keen to defend Killary, even to the point of lying about Russian involvement and ratcheting up the Cold War a further notch or two.
And showing further that you cannot trust the Beeb to tell the truth about either the Labour party or the real state of affairs in eastern Europe.
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.
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