I found this on the channel of someone describing themselves as ‘Loveofpeace’. On Thursday, just before Philip Hammond released his vile, abysmal budget, the People’s Assembly organised a mass demonstration in front of 10 Downing Street, in which they piled up a small mountain of food, which they would later deliver to a real food bank. They did this to call attention to the mass starvation the Tories’ austerity policies are causing.
This is just a series of short snapshots of the demo, but it shows the workers piling on the food. There’s also a performance poet attacking the media for colluding with the government. It shows the signs up demanding an end to austerity, the sacking of the Tories, and defending the NHS. There’s also a banner from one of the Marxist parties or groups, and another sign saying ‘Migrants welcome here’.
There are now something like a quarter of a million people forced to use food banks. 7 million in ‘food insecure’ households, where they don’t know if this meal will be their last. And that liar Philip Hammond had the utter gall to appear on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday and claim there were no jobless in Britain. He was wrong: Marr quoted the figure of 1.25 million. I don’t believe that, as the figures are fiddled so that they’re meaningless. I think the real figure is probably 4 million. Quite apart from the fact that most of the poor in Britain are actually in work. But they’re not making money because of low wages, zero hours contracts and all the other fiddles employers are using to not have to pay real wages. And Mike put up another piece about some female Tory from Yorkshire, somebody Pow, who claimed that people had thousands in the bank and the Tories had made them richer.
Well, they have made some people richer. Those, who were rich already. The top 25 per cent. Either this woman really doesn’t know any poor people – which is possible – or she’s suffering from serious cognitive dissonance, and actually believes what her party says – or she’s a liar. Either way, she’s telling porky pies, and is totally unsuited to government.
Get her, Hammond, May and the rest of the Tories out. Now. Before more people die from starvation.
I’ve been posting various articles this week attacking Hillary Clinton and the lies she’s been spinning as she promotes her book, What Happened. This is her account of how she failed to be elected the first female president of the US in 2016, losing to the fake-tanned, bewigged maniac now determined to plunge us all into a new Cold War. Killary was in Australia one week, where one Ozzie journo caught her telling five whoppers when she was interviewed on ABC. She has since come to England, where she’s been speaking at the South Bank Centre and at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature.
She’s going to appear on the Graham Norton Show tonight, Friday 20th October 2017, at 10.35 pm. The blurb for the programme on page 114 of the Radio Times states
Hillary Clinton talks to Graham about the US presidential campaign, as detailed in her book What Happened. Jeff Goldblum, Gerard Butler and Jack Whitelaw join her on the sofa.
Another piece on the previous page, 113, adds rather more information.
This time last year Hillary Clinton had her heart set on the Oval Office and probably expected to spend her evenings on a White House sofa. How on earth has she ended up on Graham Norton’s couch instead? She’ll tell him “What Happened” while discussing her new book about her annus horribilis.
Here’s hoping Clinton doesn’t try to describe 2016 after a glass or two of Norton’s house reserve, though. He’s never one to resist a red, white and blue gag.
As with so much, you are not going to hear the unvarnished truth from Clinton because, to paraphrase the old Hollywood line, ‘she can’t handle the truth.’ The simple truth is that many ordinary, working Americans were sick and tired of the poverty and massive income inequality the Reaganite neoliberalism championed by her and Bill had created. They were sick and tired about public programmes being cut, while money was poured into the banks and big businesses that were already bloated from public money anyway, and which had profited massively from the economic mess they’d created. They were sick and tired of American imperialism, of seeing their finest young men and women sent off to kill and be killed in countries which, with the exception of Afghanistan, had not attacked America on the orders of a lying president, just as Brits are sick and tired of the same neoliberal policies and the same militarism heavily promoted by the Clinton’s fan and George Dubya’s poodle over here, Tony Blair. These wars are being fought not to defend America or promote democracy, but simply to despoil and loot these other nations for the benefit of western, chiefly American, multinationals.
She lost because Americans were sick of rising medical bills, which a growing number simply can’t afford, even after Obamacare. And far from being the traditional image of the welfare recipient as an unemployed scrounger, the majority of these poor around the developed world are working people, who are now paid so poorly thanks to Thatcherite doctrines of pay restraint, that they have to work two or three jobs simply to keep their heads above water, go on welfare, or, in Britain, subsist using food banks.
And the American public, Blacks and Whites, also remembered how she exaggerated the threat of crime by young Black men, in order to push through highly punitive legislation that now sees something half of the Black American male population go to the slammer. For the profit of the privatised prison system, of course.
American women saw through her faux-feminism, in which she tried to present herself as campaigning for all women, when in fact she was a bog-standard corporate insider, despite her repeated claims that she had to be an outsider, ’cause she was female. Killary represented nobody but herself and the other, rich, entitled women like her. She was perceived as massively corrupt, massively insincere, and profoundly unsympathetic to the plight of ordinary working people.
But Killary can’t handle any of this, and so has been running round blaming everyone but herself. She’s blamed Bernie Sanders, the genuinely left-wing Democrat she and the head of the Democratic National Convention, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, stitched up and from whom she stole the nomination. She’s also blamed the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who was a stronger feminist figure. Both she and Bernie promised Americans Medicare for all. She’s blamed it on a culture of misogyny. While this does exist, her claim that she was being bullied because of her gender by Sanders’ supporters is another lie.
And she’s also ramped up international tension by blaming the Russians. Because WikiLeaks published internal Democrat party documents showing just how corrupt she was. She’s claimed that Russian hackers were responsible for this, when in fact the former British diplomat, who took custody of them for WikiLeaks, said that they came from a Democrat Party insider.
And Killary has absolutely no business screaming at others and accusing them of corrupt dealings with Putin’s Russia, when this is exactly what she and her husband and the chief himself, Barack Obama, did. A little while ago, the New York Times broke the story that before she signed off on a deal, which saw uranium mines in Kazakhstan and a fifth of the uranium processing industry in America itself taken over by a consortium of Russian companies, the Clinton Foundation received $145 million from individuals connected with these companies. And her husband, Bill, was given $500,000 for a speech he gave to a Russian bank.
One of her aides, Brodnitz, pointed out in an internal document for her campaign that this affair would damage her electoral chances, and put people off voting for her. Now the American paper, the Hill, has also published a piece reporting that the FBI was investigating her and Bill for two years for this, but the Department of Justice only decided to release the details to the public after the deal had gone through. Thus, Obama had actively connived at preventing her and Bill’s possible prosecution for it, until after the deal had been made. And very profitable it was too for her and Bill, though possibly not for the American taxpayer.
In the video below, the American comedian Jimmy Dore and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, the Miserable Liberal, discuss this latest revelation of Killary’s corruption and double-dealing.
This is just more evidence that Bernie should have got the nomination. If he had, he would have been the far stronger opponent to Trump. And we just could now have a genuinely progressive, Democratic government. This would, in turn, have been a filip to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party over here, as well as genuine left-wingers and Socialists elsewhere in the world.
But this would have been too much for the corporate hawks running Congress to stomach, so they gave it instead to Killary. Who then lost to an even worse candidate, Trump, but one who was better at articulating popular American hopes and fears than she was.
I like Graham Norton. He’s a genial host, although I’ve long stopped watching his show. I dare say he’ll get Killary to talk at length about her book, and she’ll spin and lie about the reasons she lost, just like she’s been lying to interviewers and the paying public all over America, Australia, Britain and the rest of the civilised world. I dare say that Norton will ask her some awkward-ish questions, but they won’t be so awkward that they’ll embarrass her or stop her making similar appearances in the future.
But I doubt very much he’ll ask her about her very real corruption scandals, like the above relationship with the Russians or the handsome payments she got from Wall Street in return for protecting them from further regulation.
This is a short extract from a much longer interview on RT’s Going Underground, in which Baroness Meacher, a crossbench peer and former social worker, discusses her work organising the House of Lord’s blocks against the government’s attempts to remove £4.4 billion worth of tax credits from the working poor.
In this piece she talks about how she believes that the suicide rate will rise, specifically mentioning the poverty caused by rent rises. More people are being dragged to court for their inability to pay the rent. They are then convicted, and so have further court costs and fees added to their debts. Many of those so tried and convicted are disabled. The result, she predicts, will be that sadly more people will die by their own hand.
This is appalling, but I have no doubt that she’s correct, and this will happen unless this vile government is stopped. 590 people have already died in poverty due to the government stopping their disability benefit, thanks to the ‘welfare to work’ tests. Many of these, if you read the stats and biographies produced by Stilloaks and other disability rights bloggers and activists, were by their own hand. According to psychiatrists and psychologists, 290,000 people suffering from anxiety and depression have seen their mental state become worse.
This alone is a savage indictment of the lawless, vindictive, punitive and cruel attitude of Dave Cameron to the poorest in our society.
Like just about all its predecessors, Cameron’s government is doing its level best to emasculate and destroy the trade unions. Thatcher did it back in the 1980s with her union-busting legislation, and then the highly militarised use of the police during the Miners’ strike. Cameron’s trying to destroy them and their political representation in the Labour party through attacks on the union levy, further legal limits on the right to strike, and the legalisation of the use of blackleg labour from agencies to stop strikes being anything but cosmetic. The International Labour Organisation in the UN have denounced this last piece of legislation. And David Davies, one of the most right-wing of the Tory MPs, called Cameron’s plan to force stikers on pickets to giver their names to the police as ‘Francoist’.
Dave Cameron hopes this legislation will leave the unions powerless, and the workforce cowed, willing to accept the very worst wages and conditions. In the short term, he’s probably right, but in the long term, probably not. Not from the example of pre-Revolutionary Russia. The lesson there is quite the opposite: if you grind people down into the dirt for long enough, and deprive them of the right to strike and form unions, they will nevertheless strike and form unions, and the strikes and unrest will get more severe the worse conditions gets and the more force is deployed.
Lionel Kochan, in his Russia in Revolution (London: Paladin 1970) notes that in 19th century Russia it was illegal to form trade unions, go on strike or form any kind of collective organisation for the workers. (p. 42). There were no friendly societies or strike funds to support striking workers. Nevertheless, strikes became a feature of Russian industrial life. To be sure, not all workers went on strike. He states that between 1895 and 1904, only half the workers in factories tended to go on strike, most of which didn’t last very long. The average strike lasted about ten days. (p. 44).
Nevertheless, industrial unrest became so chronic that the government was forced to increase the police and the armed forces to put down strikes. The number of policemen was raised to 1 to 250 workers, and there was one factory inspector, whose duties included warning workers that they could not legally strike, and what would happen to them if they did, for every 3,000 workers. The army was called in to suppress strike action and workers’ demonstrations 19 times in 1893, 50 in 1899, 53 in 1900, 271 in 1901 and 522 in 1902. (p. 47). And the number of those on strike could be huge. During the revolutionary agitation of 1905, 111,000 people had gone on strike by 8th January. (P.88). At its height, there were 125,000 people on strike in the Russian capital. (p.94). In 1907, 740,000 people went on strike. (p. 160).
Most of these strikes were for purely economic reasons – an increase in wages and the betterment of working conditions, rather than for political reforms such as the establishment of a parliament and the right to vote. Nevertheless, the number of political strikes increased as the new century progressed. And this was despite some minimal concessions to modern representative politics, such as the establishment of a parliament – the Duma – albeit on a very restricted franchise by Nicholas II. In 1910 there were 222 strikes involving 46,000 workers. The following year, 1911, there were 466, with 105,110 workers. And the number of political strikes went up from eight in 1910 to twenty four in 1911. (p. 161). In 1912 the number of political strikes rocketed to 1,300. (P.162). And then in 1914, the year the War broke out, the number of strikes as a whole shot up to 3,466, of which 2,500 were politically motivated.(p. 164).
In many ways, this is to be expected. If you drive people down to the point where they have absolutely nothing to lose, they will revolt, and revolt violently. At one point wages were so low -just 40 kopeks – that they were insufficient for a worker to support a family. You can compare that to the in-work poverty today, where most welfare recipients are people working, often very long hours, but not earning enough to support themselves or their families.
Despite the glowing picture of the Developing World by the Tory writers of Britannia Unchained, which urged Brits to work harder for less money, ’cause that’s what workers outside the West are doing, parts of India is currently riven by Maoist rebels. I’ve mentioned the Naxites before, radical Marxists in the poorest states in Indian waging a guerrilla war on behalf of the peasants and Dalits. And much of the radical Muslim unrest and terrorism in India has concrete social and economic motives. In many areas, Muslims are treated as second-class citizens, given the worst jobs and with an unemployment rate higher than their Hindu compatriots. In fact, most of the Islamic unrest throughout the world probably has its origins less in religious doctrine and more in conditions of high unemployment, low pay, poor opportunities and political sclerosis.
By making democracy a sham, and repressing unions and other organisations trying to work for better wages and working conditions, Cameron is storing up problems for the future. The Fascist dictatorships of Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain collapsed, partly through workers’ strikes. As did the Communist dictatorships at the opposite end of Europe.
Now Cameron needs to maintain the illusion of democracy, and some minimal welfare state in order to deceive people that his government is actually democratic, and he is doing something to help them. After all, Bismarck said
Give the workman the right to work as long as he is healthy, assure him care when he is sick, assure him maintenance when he is old … If you do that … then I believe the gentlemen of the Social-Democratic programme will sound their bird-calls in vain. (Cited in Koch, p. 48).
Of course, Cameron is doing his best to make sure people don’t have the right to work, or are cared for and maintained in sickness and old age. He wants to pass welfare provision on to private industry, who will provide a much poorer service. But he needs to give the illusion that he is doing all the above. And it’ll probably work – for a time. Possibly even decades. But at the end there will be an explosion. And it may be all the more bloody, because of the way he has reduced democracy to a sham, so that people will just discard it in favour of authoritarianism, just as after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 millions of Germans were convinced that democracy had failed.
But what does Cameron care? He probably banks on being long dead by then, if he gives it any thought at all. Or perhaps he dreams of fleeing somewhere else, when the conflagration finally comes. To Switzerland, perhaps. Or the Cayman Islands. South America. Perhaps, America itself, always assuming Sanders doesn’t get in. And if it all kicks off before then, he, or Bojo, or some other Tory pratt, will indulge their stupid fantasy of being a great war leader, bravely reconquering the cities from Communist militants.
And we’re back to Orwell’s description of the future: a boot stamping on a human face. Forever.
This is another excellent political snippet from Secular Talk. In this video, Kyle Kulinski discusses the findings of the Economic Policy Institute, as reported in the International Business Times, that ‘welfare queens’ don’t really exist. ‘Welfare queens’ was the term given by Reagan to lazy, unemployed women, who didn’t want to work and just scrounged off welfare. The Institute’s study shows that most of the people on welfare are the working poor, people in work whose wages don’t cover their basic needs. The report states that
* 2/3 of all people on needs-based public assistance are either working, or have a family member who’s working.
* About half of all recipients of public assistance are working full time.
The report states outright that indolence and laziness aren’t pushing up the welfare bills. Low pay is. And the reports goes on to say that massive bonuses and pay is awarded to corporate executives, it’s appropriate to ask whether corporations are passing their societal responsibilities to tax payers.
* Nearly half of all workers in the forestry, fishing and hunting sectors receive help of some kind.
* This is also true of a 1/3 of those in retail, recreation, entertainment, accommodation and food sector.
Kulinski makes the point that the solution is to the raise the minimum wage. He states that many Republicans actually do want the minimum wage to be raised. He attacks the Republicans, who want to close down welfare programmes, arguing that this would make America Somalia, and force people to starve. He also makes it very clear that he has no time for hypocritical Republicans, who say they love Jesus, but don’t want to put Christ’s concern for the poor and excluded into effect. If America were to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, $45 billion in taxes would be saved. Kulinski points out that this is because workers, when they can’t make enough to live on, turn to the state safety net, which is provided by the taxpayer. Thus, if you pay people a living wage, the Republicans could cut the welfare bill, including Medicaid. All you have to do is make Walmart pay their workers more. He argues that Walmart would be able to afford the extra $2 an hour paid to people, and that the cost passed on to the public would at most be 8c more. This would not stop people going to Walmart.
Kulinski concludes that the system now works by making a miniscule percentage extremely rich, who then give crumbs to everyone else. They have to go on welfare to make ends meet, but the corporations have bought congress, so it looks in the other direction. Kulinski states in very forthright terms that this must go.
The show also has some of the cartoons showing the hypocritical attitude towards poor women. When they’re pregnant, the Republicans are desperate not to let them abort the child. When they have the child, the Republicans are hurling abuse and stating they should never have got pregnant in the first place. And there’s a cartoon of a fat cat businessman on a mountain of money accusing a starving worker of being greedy.
This study really should surprise no one. It’s been that way for about twenty years. At the end of the 1990s the Financial Times, then a Liberal newspaper, stated that the vast majority of the poor across the Developed World were working. This is the case for America, Australasia and Europe. They reviewed a programme on the radio about poverty in New Zealand, which showed the problems working people in the land of the Kiwi and the All Blacks had keeping body and soul together. Same as hard-workin’ folks in the Appalachians. And there has been report after report, study after study, showing it in Britain.
And it’s fairly clear that, despite the vilification of people on welfare as benefit frauds and scroungers, aIDS, Cameron and Osbo are very aware of this. No, ‘aIDS’ isn’t a spelling mistake. I’ve decided to call the ‘Gentleman Ranker’ aIDS, because like that foul disease he’s determined to kill people, and spread his vile poison throughout society. But back to the main point. IDS and the others have passed regulations stipulating that if you’re receiving benefit for low pay, you get a phone from your ‘Job Coach’ encouraging you to get a better paid job. In order to cut the welfare bill, of course. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that they know the majority of the poor in this country are working, and aren’t being paid a proper, living wage. But they really don’t want to admit that, as the free market is supposed to make sure that everyone gets what they deserve, in a rising tide that lifts all boats due to trickle down economics. This was rubbish when Reagan and Thatcher spouted it. Hunter S. Thompson had a go at it in Generation of Swine. But they’re still going on as if it were all true, thirty years later.
There’s only one sure way to tackle in work poverty, and that is to demand the minimum wage be raised. And to vote out the people, who are blocking this. Like AIDS Ian Duncan Smith.
Last week, Russell Brand, the former anarchist firebrand, met Ed Miliband. For Miliband at least, the meeting was successful, in that Brand has abandoned his stance of urging people not to vote, to urging them to vote Labour instead. It’s left some on the radical Left feeling betrayed, as Brand has compromised his ideological purity by supporting a party, which they see as still retaining the New Labour contempt for those on welfare and which still intends to implement something like a workfare scheme. See, for example, Johnny Void’s recent post.
If it’s upset some on the Left, it also seems to have rattled the Right. Whatever you make of Brand as a comedian, and millionaire actor coming from an affluent middle class background, Brand is articulate and can make some very cogent, sharp points about the state of British and international politics. I’ve reblogged some of his posts from The Trews, his video series on Youtube where he analyses and deconstructs the news and the serious and not-so-serious issues of the day. He has made some very good criticisms of the corrupt state of British politics, the failure of current capitalism to provide most of the people of this country with the state support and welfare benefits they need, the increasingly harsh inequalities thrown up by the class system, and racism and the vilification and marginalisation of ethnic minorities, including Muslims.
And some of this seems to have struck home. On the cover of the Daily Mail one day last week was a picture of Brand with Miliband. Underneath was the headline ‘Would you trust this clown to run the country (and we don’t mean the one of the Left’.
Miliband sent a shiver of horror down the collective spines of Britain’s super-rich last week when he announced that he was going to end the non-dom tax bracket, which allows some of the extremely rich resident in Britain to avoid paying tax as they are technically resident in another country.
Many of those not paying British tax are fleet street editors and proprietors.
Like one Viscount Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail.
Rothermere junior inherited his non-dom status from his father, who spent most of his life in Paris. Harmsworth fils, however, seems pretty well resident in this country, especially as he’s building a multi-million pound stately home for himself in the country estate he purchased. He funded this through a complex series of loans, rather than pay for it himself directly, as this allows him to use his non-dom status to avoid paying tax on it.
And Brand has tried to tackle him on his refusal to pay tax. In one of the sequences in Michael Winterbottom’s documentary exposing the corrupt politics of modern corporate Britain, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Brand is shown turning up outside Rothermere’s stately home, and pressing the button with the communicator to get to talk to Rothermere about his non-dom tax status. Not surprising, they don’t let him in, and Brand stays shut out.
Obviously, Rothermere’s very worried about the possible ending of this tax dodge, and the personal attention he received from the abortive visit by Brand. Hence the personal abuse and vilification.
Rothermere and his editor have no right telling anyone how to vote in this country. They don’t pay British tax, and have absolute contempt for those, who depend on welfare benefits provided by the state – the unemployed, working poor, the sick, the disabled. Their attempts to rubbish Brand, Miliband and the rest of the left is merely self-serving propaganda, and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.
And absolutely no-one should take seriously their demands to vote Tory. Rothermere and his fellows welcome their programme of tax cuts, because it will leave them richer, and the rest of us poorer.
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