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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2021 20:53:22 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 12:58:50 GMT
The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-assange-persecution-is-westernThe first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners. I wish I was kidding. In their write-up on Wednesday's proceedings, The Dissenter's Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that "the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the U.S. government offered 'assurances' that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado." What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange's health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer "assurances" that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. What's ridiculous about these "assurances", apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the US government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains: "They say: we guarantee that he won’t be held in a maximum security facility and he will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures and he will get healthcare. But if he does something that we don’t like, we reserve the right to not guarantee him, we reserve the right to put him in a maximum security facility, we reserve the right to offer him Special Administrative Measures. Those are not assurances at all. It is not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise." So the prosecution's legal argument here is essentially "We promise we won't treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to." This is not just a reflection on the weakness of the extradition appeal, it's a reflection on the savagery of all the so-called free democracies that have involved themselves in this case. This same prosecution argued that Assange should not be denied US extradition from the UK on humanitarian grounds as in the case of activist Lauri Love because Love suffered from both physical and psychological ailments while Assange's ailments are only psychological. They stood before the court and made this argument even as Assange was visibly pained and unwell in his video appearance from Belmarsh, which he was only able to attend intermittently due to his frail condition. "For my newspaper, I have worked as media partner of WikiLeaks since 2009," tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi who attended the hearing via video link. "I have seen Julian Assange in all sorts of situations, but I have never ever seen him so unwell and so dangerously thin." So they're just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing US war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a US prison cell. The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category. The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in "free democracies", but right out in the open. To tell journalists "We'll just throw you in prison if you cross us." What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose US crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world. This is an Australian journalist in the process of being extradited from the UK for publishing facts about US war crimes in the nations it has invaded. The aim is to set up a system where anyone in the US-aligned world can be funneled into its prison system for publishing inconvenient facts. This is the savagery of the western world at its most transparent. It's not the greatest evil the US-centralized empire has perpetrated; that distinction would certainly be reserved for its acts of mass military slaughter that it has been inflicting upon our species with impunity for generations. But it's the most brazen. The most overt. It's the most powerful part of the most depraved power structure on earth looking us all right in the eyes and telling us exactly what it is. And if we can really look at this beast and what it is doing right now, really see it with eyes wide open, it reveals far more about those who rule over us than anything any journalist has ever exposed. ___________________________
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 16:23:39 GMT
Sunak’s Budget will hammer many Brits. This is where the Left can intervene Far from the promised ‘high-wage economy’, many face wages that look increasingly paltry next to skyrocketing prices for gas, electricity, and food James Meadway 28 October 2021, 11.25am www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/sunaks-budget-will-hammer-many-brits-this-is-where-the-left-can-intervene/Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Budget confirmed the sea change in British politics, apparent since the general election of 2017, that the era of austerity has drawn to a close. Ever since Boris Johnson became prime minister back in summer 2019, this has been a Conservative administration committed to consistent spending increases. The 3% average annual spending increases over the next three years, totalling £150bn, are lower than the 4% average increases under New Labour, before the financial crisis hit. And they are nothing like enough to repair the damage done by ten years of Tory austerity, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows on the graph below. Nonetheless, the increases are real. Alongside Sunak’s longer-term ‘fiscal rules’, they show that the new consensus in British economic policy looks strikingly close to Labour’s economic programme of 2017. Labour’s ‘Fiscal Credibility Rule (FCR)’ then offered a rolling target for day-to-day spending to match taxes inside of five years. It allowed borrowing for capital investment – spending on things like new railways, or research. It had a target for debt to GDP to fall at the end of Parliament. And it had a knock-out rule so that, in a deep recession, the whole FCR would be suspended to allow the government to spend as much as was needed to stabilise the economy. Sunak’s new fiscal rules allow borrowing for capital spending. They have a target for debt to GDP to fall at the end of Parliament. They have a knock-out rule so that, in a deep recession, the entire fiscal framework could be suspended to allow the government to spend as much as required to stabilise the economy. And they have a rolling target for day-to-day spending to match taxes inside of three years. Sunak said he wanted a “high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity, economy” – a strikingly similar formulation to that regularly offered by Labour’s John McDonnell, who spoke of a “high-wage, high-investment” economy. Sunak offers significant increases in investment for decarbonisation and for scientific research. The overall tax burden has been raised to its highest level since the late 1940s – about the same level, overall, as Labour’s 2017 tax plans implied. It was striking, however, that so many were blindsided by some of Sunak’s Thatcherite rhetoric before the Budget. But his little homilies about wanting low taxes and the joys of a small state, made at Tory party conference and then tacked on to the end of yesterday’s big spending announcements are just that – Sunday sermons, offered for the benefit of the party faithful. What matters is what he does, and Sunak is a big-state Tory chancellor. ‘Lord, make me fiscally conservative, but not yet,’ is his real attitude, channelling St Augustine. This should have been expected. Disputes inside the Conservative government had blown up prior to the Spending Review, in an unusually public fashion. The business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, was publicly rebuked by the Treasury earlier this month for claiming he was in discussions with them about support for energy-intensive businesses. The Treasury itself was then slapped down by the prime minister’s spokesperson. It’s an intra-Tory row, the sort of tittle-tattle that fills the Sunday papers and occupies Westminster journalists’ attention. But the outcome told you far more about where this government was going. Whatever the Treasury’s intentions – and, like those of Sunak himself, the Treasury’s own internal bias is towards so-called ‘balanced budgets’, even if it means spending cuts – this is the prime minister’s government. And Johnson wants spending. The reality is [one] of rising prices putting real pressure on most people’s living standards It should also have been possible to see how those tensions would be eased, thanks to some eagle-eyed reporting by Chris Giles of the Financial Times, who noted that the official forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility were likely to be far more optimistic than earlier in the year. This had the effect on the day of handing Sunak a £30-40bn windfall, which he happily used to increase spending. Of course, he didn’t have to: an old-school Tory might have used the bonus to (foolishly) try to shrink the government debt faster, or cut taxes – and clearly, at some point before the election, Sunak wants to cut taxes. But just not yet. Even before the pandemic, the Conservatives had already increased spending. It rose 4.1% in 2019, with Sajid Javid as chancellor, ahead of COVID erupting in Britain in early 2020. The balance of forces inside the Tory party is running against spending cuts. With all those newly elected Tory MPs holding slender majorities in former Labour areas, who had been promised an end to austerity by Johnson, the pure electoral calculation leans towards more spending. The dislocation that Brexit is causing – and will continue to cause – is made easier to deal with hefty levels of government spending, and economic intervention more generally. It’s not especially easy to extricate a country from 40 years’ worth of trade and economic treaties with its closest trading partners. The blow can be softened by public funds. More speculatively, the political hit that British financial services in general have taken from Brexit has undermined their own capacity to act as a loud voice for ‘sound money’ inside government. This is even before considering the immediate impact of the pandemic and the exceptional levels of funding needed to cope with the backwash from 2020-21. Labour’s response Surveying all this, a certain kind of political commentator has leapt to the opposite conclusion, declaring Sunak to be offering a ‘Labour Budget’ and, in the weary cliché, parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn. On one level, the new consensus is a challenge for Labour. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the party switched from a mealy-mouthed ‘too far, too fast’ argument against Tory spending cuts to an outright anti-austerity position. As the cuts became increasingly unpopular, digging deeper and deeper into the fabric of British social life, this argument started to take hold. Labour’s relative success in 2017 – somewhat shockingly, the only election since 1997 where the party actually gained seats – reinforced the point. But having won the argument, without having won the election, the Tories’ shameless flip into increasing spending presents a political challenge. How, then, to update a tried-and-tested anti-Tory position? There is some evidence that Labour’s frontbench is getting there. Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’ response to Sunak, delivered immediately after his presentation with precious little time to prepare, was notably effective, visibly and audibly rattling the Tory benches opposite. She zeroed in on the two major flaws in his argument: first, that spending now by the Tories was not sufficient to repair the damage of austerity; second, and more importantly, that the pattern of tax cuts and benefits changes they had introduced reflected their pure class interests. Sunak had slashed the taxes paid by UK-based banks, but at the same time significantly increased the taxes to be paid by most people in work, in the form of a National Insurance Contributions increase. He had previously cut £20 a week from Universal Credit, with the slight increase in the system’s generosity at Budget doing too little to compensate for it. The Resolution Foundation estimates that an average household could be looking at a £3,000 tax increase from Budget measures. For all the talk, from the prime minister downwards, of wanting a ‘high-wage’ economy, the reality in the immediate future – and, most likely, stretching well into following years – is of rising prices putting real pressure on most people’s living standards. Far from ‘high wages’, many of us face wages that look increasingly paltry next to skyrocketing prices for gas, electricity, and food. Coupled with tax rises the squeeze is going to be only too real. And this is Sunak’s real hostage to fortune. The OBR’s forecasts may now look relatively rosy, and its estimate for the long-run damage from COVID less severe. But the OBR is an institution heavily predisposed to optimism bias, as the record of its first decade shows:
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 17:12:06 GMT
The Tipping Point In Britain, we tend to be shy when it comes to talking about politics. A Frenchman needs no encouragement at all. Every American knows how their friends vote (it's probably how they choose their friends). But in the UK, politics – like religion – has always been a private matter. Until now. Have you noticed that more and more of your friends are "coming out" with their opinion of the Tory government? Even staunch Conservatives seem at a loss, claiming its traditions of fair play and honesty have been ambushed by a right-wing clique? Of course, this sort of seismic shift in thinking doesn't happen overnight. For each of us, there has to be a tipping point – something that takes the situation a step too far and makes us say: "Enough is enough." This might have happened early on when it became clear that the fishing industry had been double-crossed - or was it the slowly-dawning realisation that the £350 million a week for the NHS was just an empty promise? It might have been the Northern Ireland Protocol and the shock that any British government would risk a return to the bloodshed and the anguish that was 30 years of The Troubles. And, for many people, it was not until this week when MPs voted to allow water companies to pump raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters. What possible justification can there be for that? Or maybe this is still not enough for you. Don't worry; there'll be something else along next week. If, indeed, you have been thinking along these lines, you will have noticed that your problems are only just beginning: No sooner have you decided you want to see the back of this Tory Government than you realise it is impossible: They have an 80-seat majority. The next general election is not until 2024. The anti-Tory parties will split the vote, and the new Elections Act means they won't be allowed to join forces. On top of everything else, the policing bill means that joining a street demonstration could land you in jail. Make no mistake: This Tory government is determined to remain in power forever. So maybe it is better to stop worrying and think about something else. Leave politics to the politicians: There is nothing more futile than spending your days and nights trawling through angry Facebook groups, knowing all the while there is nothing any of us can do. And it was at this point – just when it all seemed hopeless - that somebody had a brilliant idea. It is called RTTG. The awkward initials stand for Remove the Tory Government, and it is an online organisation with one purpose: To draw up a list of British electors opposed to the present government. When they have more than 50% signed up and verifiable (you have to give your name and address, your date of birth and so on), they will go to court on your behalf. Possibly, the case will be brought by the Good Law Project, who have been harassing the government through the courts with a good deal of success. They would argue that for a people to be governed by a party chosen by only 43.8% of the electorate contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights – and we are still bound by the Convention even though we have left the EU. Victory in the courts would result in an appeal to The Queen to dissolve Parliament as she did in 1975 when she dismissed Gough Whitlam's Australian government. In place of Boris Johnson and his cabinet, a Government of National Unity would be established to initiate a three-step process of change: 1. To establish a form of Proportional Representation so that never again can a party with a minority of the votes win a majority of the seats. 2. To set up an independent watchdog with the power to prevent dishonesty and corruption in Parliament. An MP breaking the rules would be banned for life. 3. The interim government would then call an election under the new system, returning British politics to honesty and fairness. Yes, it does sound far-fetched. But then, all revolutions begin with a mountain to climb. There is no reason why this is not achievable. All it requires is for enough people to stand up for what they believe to be right – and to do so without waiting for everyone else to do it first. There is real urgency here. The present government is in the process of adjusting the system so that it can never be changed again. That is why there we cannot wait for the next election. The majority must take control now – within the next 12 months… before it is too late… So, I have joined the RTTG and sent them a small donation along with my date of birth - and I have a monthly standing order in favour of the Good Law Project to help them too. You can do the same if you like. Remove The Tory Government is at: remove-the-tory-government.org/The Good Law Project at: goodlawproject.org/And if you don't believe this government needs to be removed, have a look at boris-johnson-lies.com/
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 16:28:11 GMT
Spending review and budget come up nearly empty on disability strategy funding By John Pring on 28th October 2021 Category: Politics www.disabilitynewsservice.com/spending-review-and-budget-come-up-nearly-empty-on-disability-strategy-funding/The chancellor appears to have failed to provide any new funding for disabled people in the budget and spending review, other than in education and back-to-work support, despite pledges made by ministers when launching their new National Disability Strategy. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, said in August (PDF) that the strategy would be a “down payment” on the promise to “build back better and fairer, for all our disabled people”. But analysis of the strategy by Disability News Service (DNS) showed it was accompanied by only £3.95 million in new funding, or just 28p for every disabled person in the UK. And when challenged about this lack of new funding by the Commons work and pensions committee, the then minister for disabled people, Justin Tomlinson – later sacked and replaced by Chloe Smith – suggested that new funding was likely to be announced soon. He told the committee that a “huge amount” of the work of the government’s Disability Unit in the following few weeks would be to provide evidence for individual government departments that would “strengthen the likelihood” of disability-focused funding bids being successful in the spending review, which sets departmental budgets up to 2024-25. Despite this pledge, budget and spending review documents published yesterday (Wednesday) by the Treasury appear to include no details of any such funding being agreed by the chancellor, other than for education and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). This suggests that other government departments either failed to put in any disability-related bids to the Treasury, or the Disability Unit did not provide them with the necessary evidence. Disabled people’s organisations have previously described the National Disability Strategy as a “cynical re-packaging of current policies and current budgets” and the lack of new funding as “an insult”. The only mention of disabled people in Rishi Sunak’s 7,800-word budget and spending review speech was to announce a significant increase in capital funding that will provide 30,000 new school places for disabled children and those with special educational needs (SEN). The budget document says this will mean “more than tripling current capital funding levels to over £900 million by 2024-25”. But even this will be split between funding to improve the accessibility of mainstream settings and money to build new segregated special schools, which is unlikely to be seen as a step forward for disability rights and equality. The only other new disability-related funding appears to be an extra £156 million over the next three years to provide employment support for disabled people, which will focus on providing more DWP work coaches. The government’s Disability Unit, DWP and the Treasury had not commented by noon today on the lack of new disability-related funding. Meanwhile, there were some grounds for optimism in the chancellor’s announcement that government departments will see their spending increase by 3.8 per cent a year in real terms over the next three years. But there is likely to be anger at Sunak’s claim that this proves that the Conservatives are “the real party of public services”. That claim comes only a week after DNS reported how government-funded researchers linked post-2010 cuts to spending on social care and health by the Conservative-led coalition to more than 57,000 deaths in England in just four years. Although local authorities in England were yesterday handed a multi-year settlement of an estimated average real terms increase of three per cent a year, this will depend on them increasing council tax by three per cent a year, and there was no new money for social care following the much-criticised reforms announced last month by the prime minister. Cllr David Fothergill, chair of the Local Government Association’s community wellbeing board, said: “Social care has been on the frontline throughout the pandemic and it is disappointing that no additional funding to address existing pressures on care and support have been provided.” Probably the most unexpected of Sunak’s announcements was a cut in the universal credit (UC) “taper rate” from 63p to 55p. This will mean that a claimant’s UC payment will be reduced by 55p, rather than 63p, for every £1 they earn above their work allowance. The government will also increase the work allowance – the amount that households with children or a member with “limited capability for work” can earn before their UC award begins to be reduced – by £500 a year. Sunak said that nearly two million families would keep, on average, an extra £1,000 a year as a result of these UC measures. He also announced a rise in the National Living Wage from £8.91 an hour to £9.50 from April 2022. But Inclusion London pointed out that, although the cut in the UC taper rate was “welcome news”, disabled people who are out of work will not benefit. Sunak failed to reverse the decision to end – earlier this month – the temporary £20-a-week “uplift” that was handed to all universal credit claimants at the start of the pandemic. Disabled campaigners said the budget was – again – focusing government support on those in work, while those who are not working, or cannot work, including many disabled people, face continuing rises in the cost of living with no such government support. Disabled campaigner Kaliya Franklin, who was a leading member of the grassroots Spartacus Network that researched issues on disability and social security, said on Twitter this morning: “Sunak is too slick to say ‘on yer bike’ but his actions are all about creating such desperate poverty that it forces people into work. And to move. “Without any recognition of the millions not expected to work because they are caring for young children, sick or disabled.”
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 16:50:00 GMT
Ten years ago today, Jimmy Savile died a national hero. Since then he has been exposed as a brutal child abuser – but his rise would have been impossible without powerful friends in the British establishment. tribunemag.co.uk/2021/10/jimmy-savile-government-monarchy-police-thatcherThere’s an amateur video uploaded recently onto YouTube of a 1978 summer fete raising money for blind children. Jimmy Savile—who preferred small, local charities over large ones with organised structures—speaks from the podium, and is handed a child’s drawing of his face. ‘Shall we tell them what this drawing is of?’ says Savile, before jolting his arm upwards and barking: ‘That is a photo-fit of the Yorkshire Ripper.’ A second or two of discomfort, perhaps, but the overwhelming noise on the audio is laughter and applause. 1978 was three years before the Yorkshire Ripper was caught, and at the exact point at which the NSPCC would later identify as the apex of Savile’s abuse. The preceding years had seen Savile working his way upwards through media elites—dancehalls, to radio, to pop television, to primetime flagship television—as well as integrating into the National Health Service. The years that followed, however, can be understood as Savile tirelessly working upwards through the British establishment—the Thatcher government, the monarchy, and an ever present relationship with the police. Organisations like the BBC and the NHS have both—correctly—been subject to long, detailed enquiries. There has been some investigation into the police. The British establishment, however, has faced little such formal scrutiny into their complicity with Savile’s crimes. As we mark ten years since the death of Savile, it’s important that this history does not go unremembered. The Thatcher Government When Jimmy Savile was knighted in 1990, it was the result of a concentrated decade of networking at the upper end of the British establishment, most particularly with Margaret Thatcher. During the politically febrile 1970s, Savile appears to have hedged his bets, filming a 1974 party political broadcast with Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe. Liberal politician Cyril Smith, who would be unmasked as a paedophile in the aftermath of Savile’s death, enjoyed a light entertainment turn on Savile’s ‘Clunk Click’ programme. Savile’s first encounter with Margaret Thatcher was at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in 1977. Two years later, on the eve of the general election that would take her to power, Thatcher appeared with Savile on ‘Jim’ll Fix It’, smiling that she wanted Savile to ‘fix’ her becoming Prime Minister. Savile’s repeated assertion that he spent numerous Christmas Day dinners with the Thatcher family has no evidence—we should be careful of repeating the claims of paedophiles. All the same, files do show that Savile spent two New Year’s Day lunches at Chequers with Thatcher. Savile learned how to become politically useful for Thatcher, using a fundraising bid to save the government from the embarrassment of having to close down the country’s main spinal injuries unit as a result of its own budget cuts. In 1986, after yet another civil service rebuttal for a Savile knighthood, Thatcher’s then private secretary Nigel Wicks wrote to Robert Armstrong, then Cabinet Secretary, ‘She (Thatcher) wonders how many more times his name is to be pushed aside, especially in view of all the great work he has done for Stoke Mandeville.’ In a revealing 1982 cartoon in the Sun, Savile is depicted as a gangster—complete with Fedora and machine gun—with Margaret Thatcher showing him pictures of Arthur Scargill, as well as Labour politicians Michael Foot, Tony Benn, and Dennis Healey, with the caption, ‘Bump off these lot and I’ll see you get a knighthood.’ Soon, Savile would come to the rescue of the Thatcher government yet again. In 1988, the entire management board of Broadmoor secure psychiatric hospital was suspended by Ken Clarke’s Department of Health. It would be, instead, replaced by a taskforce headed by Savile, who had been involved in the facility on a volunteer basis since the 1960s, but would now be given free rein of the hospital. This was rubber stamped by Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie, who wrote ‘Attaboy!’ in her diaries on hearing Savile’s plans for reform at the hospital—which included union-busting, as Savile alleged that inflated overtime payments was rife among the unionised workforce. Currie later conceded that this was likely Savile blackmailing staff who could blow the whistle on his abuse. Read the NHS investigations into Savile and there are numerous examples of everyday people with little power standing up to Savile, or at least doing what they could reasonably do, within their small domain, to protect those who were in their care. There are no such stories within the Thatcher government: only an elite who took him at face value time and time again. In 2013, a year after the scale of Savile’s crimes became apparent and evidenced, Norman Tebbit said, ‘I’ve got no doubt Jimmy Savile was a very odd fellow, and I’m pretty sure he was in breach of the law on a number of matters… Jimmy did a great deal of good, as well as wrong. And in anybody’s life, you have to look at both sides of the ledger.’ The Monarchy Savile claimed that he was introduced to the Royal Family first via Lord Mountbatten—a figure with persistent allegations of involvement in child sexual abuse. But it would be Savile’s relationship with Prince Charles that would prove far more significant. Meeting in 1977, Savile’s relationship to the Prince would be described by Diana as like that of ‘a mentor’. In tandem with his efforts to court Thatcher, Savile would begin work on the Royal family. In 1985, Savile persuaded Charles and Diana—at the apex of their popularity—to appear on his primetime two-hour anti-drugs special ‘Drugswatch’. That year, during a gathering of health officials at Highgrove House, Charles referred to Savile as ‘my health advisor’. Savile would be invited to Charles’ 40th birthday party celebrations. ‘He played the fool to our big-eared Prince’s Lear,’ explained one St James’ Palace aide to Dan Davies, whose 2015 book In Plain Sight remains the definitive work on Savile. After the birthday party, Savile would be seen regularly in Charles’ offices. In 1990, when tensions between the married couple spilled out into public, Savile was brought in to ‘fix’ Charles’ marriage (confirmed in Davies’ interview with Dickie Arbiter, former press secretary to both Prince Charles and the Queen). Among Arbiter’s allegations is the claim that Savile was brought in to vet employees for Charles. In another interview, Arbiter also alleged that Savile’s behaviour at St James’ Palace caused ‘concern and suspicion’. ‘He would walk into the office and do the rounds of the young ladies taking their hands and rubbing his lips all the way up their arms if they were wearing short sleeves,’ Arbiter said of Savile. ‘If it was summer [and their arms were bare] his bottom lip would curl out and he would run it up their arms.’ When Savile finally was named in the Queens’ honours, in 1990, he received personal congratulations from Charles, Diana, and Prince Andrew. Sarah Ferguson is even said to have made a homemade card. One of the most revealing public utterances Savile ever made was following his knighthood, to the journalist Lynn Barber: ‘I had a lively couple of years, with the tabloids sniffing about, asking round the corner shops—everything—thinking there must be something the authorities knew that they didn’t. Whereas in actual fact I’ve got to be the most boring geezer in the world because I ain’t got no past. And so, if nothing else, it was a gi-normous relief when I got the knighthood, because it got me off the hook.’ On his 80th birthday, in 2006, Savile received the gift of a box of Cuban cigars and a pair off cufflink from Prince Charles. ‘Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country,’ said an attached note. ‘This is to go some way in thanking you for that.’ The Police As early as the 1960s, as a DJ in Manchester, Savile was cultivating close relationships with the police. In his shocking, long out-of-print 1974 autobiography As It Happens, Savile references a female officer being ‘dissuaded’ from bringing charges against him for harbouring a teenage runaway. She had done this, wrote Savile, ‘because it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.’ Such was the extent that Savile’s crimes were known to the police, he was considered a person of interest during the Ripper investigations. Savile was brought in for questioning after members of the public contacted the police naming him as a possible suspect. After a body was found close to Savile’s Roundhay Park home, a Harley Street dentist was ordered to make a cast of Savile’s teeth. When journalist Dan Davies first met Savile to begin work on the In Plain Sight book, he was first frisked by a serving West Yorkshire Police inspector. The inspector was a regular at Savile’s Friday Morning Club, the regular coffee mornings at his Leeds flat, which included several West Yorkshire Police figures. Savile was used to front West Yorkshire Police campaigns—his voice was even immortalised in ‘talking street signs’ in 2008 giving residents advice about crime prevention. Though a 2013 HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report did investigate numerous police forces’ links to Savile—finding that ‘mistakes were made’—it is important to reflect on the substantial opportunities that were hampered by police negligence or corruption. An anonymous letter in 1998, a victim coming forward in 2003, a 2008 complaint that reached both the police and a Sun journalist. In 2009, Savile was interviewed by Surrey police. ‘That’s why I have up in Yorkshire, where I live in Leeds, a collection of senior police persons, who come to see me socially,’ Savile explains. ‘I give them all my weirdo letters and they take them back to the station and say, “Oh, have you seen what Jimmy’s got today?”‘ When the police ask whether Savile gives them to the police to investigate, Savile clarifies. ‘No, no, not investigate them, no. Not going to do anything with them. But if anything happens to me…’ The Legacy This summer, I read a Spectator diary piece by Petronella Wyatt, the British journalist whose affair with Boris Johnson once led to him being sacked from the Conservative Shadow Cabinet. ‘Back in the 1990s,’ wrote Wyatt, ‘I used to see teenage girls with eyes the colour of Verveine at some of the extravagant parties I was invited to. Looking back, I have a fair idea of why they were there. But it never occurred to me to ask their ages or protest their presence. Was I complicit?’ Turning a blind eye to child abuse occurs in all areas of life, across all sections of society, and across all classes. In the decade since Savile’s death, establishment attitudes towards child abuse have come under more, not less, scrutiny, with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and continuing legal challenges against Prince Andrew. One of the most revealing moments in Andrew’s 2019 BBC Newsnight interview came when he was asked about how he felt after his one-time friend Epstein was jailed in 2008 for soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution. ‘It was one of those things,’ replied Andrew, ‘When somebody’s going through that sort of thing, well I’m terribly sorry, [but] I can’t see you.’ This month, a report estimated that over 216,000 children were victims of sexual violence by French Catholic priests in the post-war era. The scale of human suffering, the reach of that trauma, is incomprehensible. We must not view the Jimmy Savile crimes as a historical curiosity, but instead as a lens through which to greater understand how child sex abuse occurs, and to provide no safe space for those complicit in facilitating its horrors. The British establishment has so far shown few signs of any seriousness about interrogating this.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 16:56:36 GMT
The Perspective of the Outside October 20, 2017 Anindya Bhattacharyya Mark Fisher on the political aspect of the uncanny and vampiric: “Behind all of the manifestations of the eerie, the central enigma at its core is the problem of agency. It is about the forces that govern our life and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension.” Fisher lays out these concepts in the opening pages of The Weird And The Eerie, alongside some critical remarks on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unheimlich, usually translated “uncanny”, and for almost a century the go-to reference for any analysis of strangeness in popular culture. While paying his dues to Freud, Fisher notes that the unheimlich “is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange – about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself” The eerie operates on a more subtle metaphysical terrain than the weird, concerning the failure of presence or failure of absence rather than the outside breaking into our interiority. Its associated affects are stillness, disturbed only by a near imperceptible ripple that signals a mystery around what is or is not but should not or should be. And at this point the eeriness of contemporary life comes into sharp focus: “Behind all of the manifestations of the eerie, the central enigma at its core is the problem of agency… It is about the forces that govern our life and the world. It should be especially clear to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world that those forces are not fully available to our sensory apprehension. A force like capital does not exist in any substantial sense, yet it is capable of producing practically any kind of effect.” Mark’s celebrated essay ‘Good For Nothing’ sets out this thesis: “Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act.” The only remedy is a reinvention of working class consciousness – “a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions”, but crucially one that is possible, necessary, urgent." Read the full article here: www.redwedgemagazine.com/online-issue/the-perspective-of-the-outside
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 19:17:44 GMT
Who Goes Fascist? A Political Psychologist Explains. Kristen Renwick Monroe looks at rescuers, bystanders, and perpetrators to understand why people do unspeakable acts. By Linda MannheimTwitter www.thenation.com/article/society/kristen-renwick-monroe-interview/In April 2018, an audience packed the American Academy in Berlin to listen to the political scientist Kristen Renwick Monroe. The room crackled with energy. Donald Trump had been president for just over a year, and people desperately wanted insight into the tumultuous changes happening in the United States. The newspapers were filled with stories about the Muslim travel ban, a planned wall along the US-Mexican border, and White House attacks on the press. Monroe’s talk, “Third Reich Émigrés and Traumatic Political Change,” looked at the decisions people made in Nazi-occupied Europe. It also explored what we could learn from people who had lived through that time. How, in perilous times, would we know how to act? The lecture was a game changer for me. I was used to being offered simplistic explanations for why people became fascists: It was the economy or a lack of education or a need for nationalist pride. By studying rescuers, bystanders, and perpetrators, Monroe gave me a new way to understand people’s choices. Monroe’s research explores how identity constrains choice, limits the options we see, and influences our sense of ethics. A two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and a finalist for the National Book Award, she is the author of many books on moral choice and the director of the UC Irvine Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality. Her research has transformed the field of political psychology. —Linda Mannheim LINDA MANNHEIM: When I tell people about your work, I tell people about rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis. Can you explain the patterns you saw with people in each group? KRISTEN RENWICK MONROE: When we see a stranger, the rescuers see another fellow human being. So when I asked them, “Why did you do this? Why did you risk your life to save Jews or Allied airmen or people you didn’t even know?” They would say things like, “But what else could I do? They were human beings like you and me.” And when I asked the bystanders what they would say, “But what could I do? I was one person alone against the Nazis.” The phrases were so similar: no choice in either case. What could I do? What else could I do? Tony was one of the rescuers. He was very firmly altruistic. And he had no resources at all. He’d been condemned to death. You know, he was in hiding the entire war. He had no home. I have an interview with Tony’s cousin, and she said, “I was very spoiled, because we had servants, and I could go play tennis and squash.” She had a big house, and she said she couldn’t hide anyone in her house during the Nazi era because she had [servants] who might betray her.
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2021 15:11:05 GMT
‘Levelling Up’ Fund Gives £1.25 Billion to Areas that Have Lost £25.5 Billion Sam Bright 29 October 2021 bylinetimes.com/2021/10/29/levelling-up-fund-gives-1-25-billion-to-areas-that-have-lost-25-5-billion/English local authorities that have benefited from the first round of the Government’s ‘Levelling Up Fund’ lost £25.5 billion in spending power after 2010, a Byline Times analysis reveals. On Wednesday, the Government announced the first recipients of the fund – devoted to infrastructure projects in relatively deprived areas of the UK. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities allocated an initial £1.7 billion in funding for the first round, ultimately intending to invest £4.8 billion. As the name of the fund suggests, this investment forms part of the Prime Minister’s much-heralded ‘levelling up’ agenda, ostensibly designed to heal the profound, long-standing inequalities between different areas of the country. However, while the money invested by the Government sounds significant, it does not come close to matching the money withdrawn from these same areas under the austerity years. Byline Times used data from the Place-based Longitudinal Data Resource – a project by data experts at the University of Liverpool – to calculate the decline in spending power among the English local authorities that have received levelling up funds. The data set runs from 2010 to 2018 and applies to 59 of the 64 English local authorities that have received funding. If these local authorities would have retained their 2010 spending power, they would have been able to spend £25.5 billion more by 2018, the data shows. The £1.25 billion now awarded to these areas represents just 5% of the money that was lost during the austerity years. The data also does not take into account inflation. Calderdale in Yorkshire, for example, lost £259 million in spending power between 2010 and 2018 – only to receive £12.2 million for a swimming pool in Halifax through the Levelling Up Fund. Sunderland, meanwhile, has been awarded £20 million for a new housing eco-system, having lost £562 million in spending power from 2010 to 2018. The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities did not respond to Byline Times’ request for comment. Overall, the north-east has seen relatively few local projects funded in the first spending round. London, the south-east and the south-west all boasted more recipients than the north-east – despite the levelling up agenda previously concentrating on former industrial areas of the country that have suffered from decades of neglect, in part prompting their support for Brexit. The pattern of levelling-up spending also reveals something fundamental about the Government’s approach to regional redistribution. The Chancellor announced a new fiscal rule in Wednesday’s Budget, to be voted on by MPs: the Government will only borrow to invest in capital projects (i.e. infrastructure), while day-to-day spending should be met exclusively through tax revenues. Boris Johnson’s administration can therefore invest liberally in headline-grabbing infrastructure schemes, while restricting the amount of support provided to local authorities for basic services. This may be designed to give the appearance of ‘levelling up’ even as the Government upholds its general antipathy to state spending. As Marcus Johns, of the IPPR North think tank, said: “[It] looks like this Budget is going to be capital intense and revenue light, and the Chancellor’s new fiscal rules could lock in austerity in public services and local government while Government points to new infrastructure projects as levelling up.” The Conservative Party’s victory at the 2010 General Election ushered in an era of public sector austerity, during which the then Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne curtailed Government spending. From 2010-11 to 2017-18, Government funding for local authorities fell by an estimated 49.1% in real terms. In 2019, Professor Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics, told MPs that while local government had experienced funding cuts before, “the reduction since 2010-11 is without parallel in modern times”. As a result, the circumstances of former industrial ‘Red Wall’ seats have deteriorated since 2010. As Byline Times has reported, child poverty increased by 16% in the Red Wall from 2014/15 to 2019/20 – double the England-wide average. Staggeringly, 39% of secondary school children in Blackpool are now eligible for free school meals, compared with 25.6% in 2011/12. NHS waiting times in Red Wall areas have also jumped markedly, from 8.5 weeks in 2012 to 11.6 weeks in 2020 (pre-pandemic) – an increase of 36.5%. The gap between the Government’s rhetoric and reality appears to have again been laid bare.
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2021 17:48:59 GMT
It’s No Longer About Conservatism It’s About Lawlessness and Power Shahmir Sanni 9 September 2020 bylinetimes.com/2020/09/09/its-no-longer-about-conservatism-its-about-lawlessness-and-power/It is in the middle of a global healthcare, economic and social crisis that we find the most catastrophic elements of mankind – but also their most beautiful. It is in times like these that great change happens. Sometimes it is good and sometimes it is bad. We are all too familiar with how Conservative governments work – from the miners’ strikes in the 1980s to austerity and now Brexit, we have seen who they are and where their values lie. They have, for much of the time, justified their moral ineptitude under the guise of economic sensibility, and quite successfully so. But this is no longer the case. The Conservatives are not thinking in terms of the economic sustainability for which they are so famously supported by the moderate right and small ‘c’ conservatives – but entirely in terms of maintaining political power. And that is where the political and cultural crisis in Britain is at its precipice. One parliamentarian declaring in the House of Commons that the Government breaking international law over its U-turn on the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement is a possibility isn’t just one parliamentarian’s silly mistake. It isn’t just his word. It is an echoing of the collective sentiment of this Vote Leave Government and Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party. No Time to Turn a Blind Eye Irisked my life, livelihood and everything in between to expose the deep-rooted corruption of Brexit as well as the entire Conservative establishment. When I went public with how the Vote Leave campaign broke electoral law during the 2016 EU Referendum – by donating funds to youth group, BeLeave, which were actually funnelled to its data and ad-targeting firm AggregateIQ – they outed me and, together with the BBC, the entire establishment worked to silence me. I had moments in which I had to remind myself that I wasn’t crazy because of how vicious it all became. I saw Dominic Cummings and his executive team being removed from data drives. I had participants of these acts cry in front of me about how the unlawful activities were breaking them. I personally heard them talk about it over and over again – only to then be met by racism, homophobia and the incredible power of white supremacy and political violence when I spoke out. To simply bring to light acts of unlawfulness. They broke the law. Even progressives stayed away from the evidence because they knew the scale of corruption would render them hopeless. It was scary – not just for me, but for all those who supported and didn’t support me. Because if we cannot trust our own Government, how are we to trust our own livelihoods and safety? It is time we choose bravery and unapologetic opposition to anyone that supports this Conservative Party and its Government. Small ‘c’ conservatives and moderates have only two options: to side with people that value justice and the rule of law; or to side with those who do not. Because, just like the Brexit scandal, this is not about Remain or Leave or about Labour or Conservative, it is about the law – about those who value it and those who do not. When those in power stop valuing the rule of law, it is the precipice of the change I spoke of. There are times in which others can be met halfway. There are times in which people can park their opinions and hear those of others. There are times in which one can say ‘I don’t agree, but I can see your point’. But breaking the law by those in positions of power is not that time. It is an act of violence, an act of state violence, that does not warrant analysis but clear-cut action against those blinded by the acquisition of power.
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2021 15:34:20 GMT
The GOP's #1 Issue Is the Survival of White Supremacy There is no country in the world or time in history when racism as a political strategy has ended well for a nation - If the GOP fails to purge itself of its racist politicians our future is grim hartmannreport.com/p/the-gops-1-issue-is-the-survivalFor Democrats, there are tons of issues on the ballot. Climate change, free college, expanding Medicare, family leave after giving birth, Pre-K education, middle-class tax cut, child tax credit, the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and literally dozens of other less high-profile ways to expand democracy and rebuild our middle class after 40 years of assault by neoliberal Reaganomics. For Republicans there’s really only one issue: race. Or, more specifically, maintaining the dominance of white people over every other racial group in America, and the survival of political and economic white supremacy. Forty years ago, Republicans pretended they stood for something other than white supremacy, although they knew they needed white supremacists to win electoral victories just as Democrats had before they “gave away the South” by passing and signing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964/1965. Republicans used to talk about slow-and-steady improvement of society, of reasonable-but-not-excessive benefits for American citizens, of the need to hold the country and our democratic institutions together for future generations. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for example, wrote a letter on December 8, 1954 to his rightwing brother Edgar, who’d recently complained that “liberal” programs like Social Security were just “socialism” and would destroy America. Eisenhower laid it out for him: “Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental functions. I oppose this – in some instances the fight is a rather desperate one. “But to attain any success it is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything – even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. “This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government. “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” H. L. Hunt was then the richest man in the world, a nationally famous Texas oilman, and supporter of the white supremacist John Birch Society, whose literature and the signs they provided to rallies frequently noted that “Race mixing is communism.” Hunt was such a segregationist that he financially supported the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammed and white supremacist Democrat George Wallace. And Eisenhower was right in 1954 about the ideal of “moderation“ in the GOP: “out” racists within the Republican Party were then a minority; most were Southern Democrats like Wallace. That all changed a decade later when the parties essentially switched sides on the issue of race post-1964 as Richard Nixon openly welcomed Southern white supremacists into the GOP with his “Southern Strategy.” Republican strategist Kevin Phillips wrote in 1964 about the coming resurgence of the GOP, as a backlash against the Democratic Party’s embrace of multiracial democracy. Phillips had suggested the GOP was just adopting slaveholder Jefferson’s “small government” worldview that dominated his thinking until 1801 when he became president (and then largely reversed his thinking). In 1970, during the Nixon presidency, James Boyd wrote a commentary on the process for The New York Times titled “Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” specifically mentioning Phillips’ theory and quoting Richard J. Barnet, then the co-director of The Institute for Policy Studies: “But the analogy is not with Jefferson; it is with Hitler. The elements are all there — deep‐rooted social cleavage, insoluble problems, rhetoric which attempts to legitimize and encourage hate, a phony genetic and geographical underpinning, a despised minority to blame for everything. It all adds up to scapegoat politics, which is a tactic of fascism. “The new gains of the Republican party are based upon preserving the status quo by stopping the civil rights advance. But the status quo is racist. The [Nixon] Administration tries to legitimize this… “To say we are to stop [progress on integration] now, to pervert the moral authority of the Presidency in order to make [white] people feel more comfortable with their prejudices — and that's what's happening today — is to say that we accept racism. And to build a political majority based on racism is taking a long step toward fascism.” Barnet was prescient. Today’s Republican white supremacists, much like H.L. Hunt in the 1950s, live in a totally zero-sum world: when anybody who’s not white “wins” any sort of benefit or power, they believe white people “lose” by the same proportion. All people get jobs: Republican white supremacists believe white people must lose jobs All people get voting rights: Republican white supremacists believe they will end up with politicians who no longer put white supremacy first All people get housing rights: Republican white supremacists believe their housing opportunities are damaged All people’s history gets recognition in schools: Republican white supremacists believe their white children will “feel ashamed of their white skin” All people immigrate to America: Republican white supremacists believe their power to maintain white supremacy is diluted All people get healthcare: Republican white supremacists believe that’ll just produce more non-white babies, which is why 12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid even for pregnant mothers It shouldn’t require saying, but they are all wrong and anti-American. This is a large and diverse country, and empowering everybody strengthens the entire nation, as opposed to weakening white people. Nonetheless, Republicans are already cranking it up this far ahead of the 2024 election. Yesterday, I got an email from Donald Trump. It was pure dog-whistle to his white supremacist base, a clear continuation of Nixon’s Southern Strategy: “Our Country is being poisoned with the millions of people that are illegally flowing through our Borders. “Many are criminals from the emptied prisons of other countries, most of these are very dangerous people. “Our Country is dying from within and nobody is doing anything to stop it.” Trump, of course, rose to power in the GOP by taking “birtherism” national, questioning the legitimacy of America’s first Black president, starting in 2008. He opened his campaign in 2015 with a racist rant about Mexicans. Meanwhile, white supremacist media is all over “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), an obscure course taught in law school that illuminates the legal aspects of institutional racism. CRT has never, ever been taught in any public school in America, but that’s not stopping Republican Glenn Youngkin from lying about it in his fight against Terry McCauliffe for Virginia governor’s race. As Judd Legum points out in his Popular Info newsletter: Youngkin’s closing TV ad claims to contain “newly unearthed documents” which it presents as proof that McAuliffe's administration “actively pushed” K-12 students to be taught CRT. The ad claims that this is an excerpt from “MCAULIFFE'S ACTUAL 2015 TRAINING FOR TEACHERS.” … But the document has nothing to do with teaching CRT theory to K-12 students in Virginia schools. Rather, it is a presentation delivered as part of a two-day institute, which took place in September 2015, about disciplinary practices in Virginia schools. The Editorial Board of The Washington Post summarized it in an editorial published last week titled, “Youngkin is Using the Critical Race Theory Bogeyman to Rile up the Trumpian Base.” “Trumpian base” is just another way of saying white supremacists. Texas, meanwhile, just pushed through their redistricting for the next decade. While over 90 percent of the population growth in that state that got them two new seats in the US House of Representatives was among people of color, the gerrymander radically cuts their representation in the US House as well as in the Texas House and Senate, handing those seats to white Republican politicians. And 19 Republican-controlled states have passed over 30 laws to make it especially harder for people in cities to vote and allow state legislatures to overturn the results of elections. Cities in those states, of course, are where the majority of each states’ people of color live. What’s truly astonishing here is that the media isn’t routinely referring to all these facets of rightwing media and Republican “policy” as naked white supremacy. When covering the McCauliffe/Youngkin race, reporters rarely point to Youngkin’s CRT/schools white supremacy strategy, instead asking if Biden’s sagging approval numbers are the reason white Virginians might not vote for McCauliffe. Being a racist in the United States should be a badge of shame. Instead, its a path to political victory in about half the nation, and will get a politician willing to use it a long way toward that end in most of the rest of the country. When Richard Barnet pointed out in 1970 that the new GOP strategy of openly appealing to white racists would eventually lead America in a fascist direction, he was both right and a prophet. The core of Hitlerism was race and it led to over 6 million dead “non-Aryan” people; Viktor Orbán rode attacking the race and religion of Syrian refugees to power in Hungary and is celebrated by Tucker Carlson and Fox “News.” And, sure enough, last week a person (not a parent) stood up at at Chandler, Arizona school board meeting and said: “Every one one of these things, the deep state, the cabal, the swamp, the elite, you can’t mention it. But I will. There is one race that owns all the pharmaceutical companies, and these vaccines aren’t safe, they aren’t effective, and they aren’t free. You know that you’re paying for it through the increase in gas prices, the increase in food prices. You’re paying for this. And it’s being taken from your money and given to these pharmaceutical companies. And if you wanna bring race into this, it’s the Jews.” After two decades of vilifying Muslims post-9/11 the GOP has now gone back to its Southern Strategy roots: blame all the problems of society on Jews, BLM, Black people and refugees more generally, and their anti-fascist “Antifa” allies. In this, they’re celebrating murderers like Rittenhouse while promoting white supremacists like Glenn Youngkin. There is no country in the world or time in history when racism as a political strategy has ended well for a nation. If the media continues to refuse to call out Trump’s racist election strategies and base, and the Republican Party fails to purge itself of its Trump-humping racist politicians, America’s future is indeed grim.
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2021 15:36:11 GMT
We Need To Save The Children From QAnons SEPTEMBER 13, 2020 / JOHN PAVLOVITZ johnpavlovitz.com/2020/09/13/we-need-to-savethechildren-from-qanons/“Oh, no.” I thought to myself. “She’s one of them.” I’d been hearing about these people for a few weeks: a supposedly rapidly-growing cultic movement of mostly white, upper-middle class Christians in America, embracing a host of nonsensical conspiracy theories and perpetuating recklessly dangerous fake news videos about planned pandemics, underground ANTIFA armies, miracle COVID cures, and alleged Democrat-run child trafficking rings—but I’d never come across anyone who seemed to qualify, and assumed perhaps it was just an urban social media legend that spiraled exponentially out of control, as these things do. And if it did exist, this certainly sounded like too extreme and bizarre a sect to infiltrate any of the educated and reasonable people I knew. But suddenly, there she was: a young mother of three from our former church, sharing her abject horror at the suggested atrocities befalling the world’s children at the hands of “well-connected Liberals operating in the shadows,” followed by effusive praise for former President Trump for “courageously and secretly saving thousands of children.” (Wait, what?) My first reaction was to chuckle at the very idea of Donald Trump (a historically insecure and unbearably needy, amoral narcissist): one, doing anything decent and two, not taking credit for it if he had. If there was some small army of liberated children somewhere that he could claim responsibility for, he’d have immediately paraded them across a stage in front of some sycophantic, unmasked rally crowd; or trotted them out for a press conference in the newly-decimated Rose Garden; or lifted one of them up awkwardly in front of the nation like an upside-down Bible in a transparent photo op. The idea of a man who has literally separated thousands of migrant children from their parents and placed them in dog kennels without food, kindness, or medical care—actually saving kids, was patently insulting. The thought of a guy who’s been accused by over 25 women of sexual assault or misconduct—having the slightest interest in survivors of abuse, seemed like a paradoxical joke. But my friend wasn’t kidding. She really believed the grab-them by the p*ssy/”if she weren’t my daughter perhaps I’d be dating her/Jeffrey Epstein dance party bestie President—is an emancipator of endangered children. As I stared at her post and I started to connect some dots from it to the delusional people I’d heard about, I wouldn’t let myself imagine that I was seeing what it seemed like I was seeing; that maybe this was a coincidental post—until she closed her impassioned dissertation with a single letter: Q. “Damnit.” I said out loud, and my heart sank, the way it does when you hear news of someone’s dire diagnosis or recent death. I felt sick to my stomach as I read and reread her essay, with my disbelief and nausea and anger growing steadily, seeing more people I knew and respected—liking and commenting and sharing her words as if they weren’t objectively ridiculous: people I served alongside at churches, parents in whose homes my children had spent the night, human beings I considered rational and discerning and intelligent. Since then, it’s been sobering and sad to see just how many of them and people like them are similarly afflicted with this viral, collective mental illness; otherwise normal human beings who’ve fully taken leave of their senses and amplified the kinds of baseless, fantastical fiction they’d have laughed at a few short years ago—all to ironically justify their political affiliation with a predator by substituting the disturbing reality in front of them that is true—for the greater conspiracy they need to be true. And it would all be a laughable farce if these people weren’t so dangerous: if their fringe conspiracies hadn’t gone mainstream in political races and churches; if their self-righteous autobiographies weren’t making them so willing to ratify violence and to place so many innocent people in danger; if their vile, irresponsible myths weren’t driving people to behavior that can only be described as unstable and criminal. That’s the thing about self-delusion: it’s a gateway drug to full-blown psychosis. When you’ve convinced yourself that you’re saving trafficked children, you’ll excuse and justify just about anything and you’ll believe just about everything. Combine this fear-fueled brainwashing with gun-loving bravado, Bible-thumping fervor, and a president who understands the power of weaponized lies—and we’re at the precipice of an irreparable collective break from reality. These people are becoming untethered from the world as it is. And that’s the saddest irony in all of this: the children of QAnons are the ones in grave danger; not some imaginary, assailed masses being spirited from underground bunkers by a guy who can’t stop golfing or rage-tweeting on the toilet long enough to keep hundreds of thousands from dying from a virus. The offspring of these cult members are the ones who need the rescuing from the people raising them. They have parents who aren’t residing in reality any longer. They have parents who can’t discern fact from fantasy. They have parents whose religion has become toxic. They have parents who traffic in blatant untruths. They have parents who believe that CNN isn’t a valid new source—but that a YouTube video from an account launched last week, is. They have parents who don’t trust the president’s medical expert for advice on a pandemic, but will make the words of some random woman in a white coat on Facebook—gospel truth. How can kids growing up with these people as their moral guides and role models, hope to become perceptive adults connected to objective reality? How can they come out of homes like this mentally unscathed? How can they learn to reject nonsensical conspiracy when they have been weaned on it? When I tried to engage my friend, I began to understand just what this movement has done to once sensible human beings, as she began attacking me for supposedly partnering in harming children—and lobbing out a series of what I later learned were copy-and-paste responses designed to perpetuate the narrative of a secret and insidious threat that she and her orange messiah were saving America from. It was like talking to someone in the throes of a cult. It was my friend, but she was no longer all there. A part of her was altered. The responsible adults in America need to rescue the Children of Qs, and the children of this nation, and the millions of children in genuine danger by traffickers and abusers. We need to steadfastly defend truth and condemn lies. We need vote leaders into office who are committed to reality. We need to vote in people who respect Science. We need to make sure that facts and data and objective reality don’t become “fake news” and that fabricated nightmares don’t become any more mainstream. We need to give the children of this nation a President and leaders in politics and churches who don’t feed chaos and conspiracy, and we need to confront our parents, friends, classmates, and co-workers who traffic in dangerous and irresponsible myths. Lovers of truth, let’s save the children together—all of them.
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2021 15:53:04 GMT
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2021 15:58:09 GMT
Jeremy Corbyn: We Need to Take Power From the People Who Are Destroying Our Planet BY JEREMY CORBYN COP26 looks set to be another case of governments talking big on the climate yet doing nothing to stop the big polluters. As Jeremy Corbyn writes, ordinary people can only save our future by taking power back into our own hands. jacobinmag.com/2021/11/jeremy-corbyn-cop26-climate-change-conference-united-nationsWe are in our twenty-sixth year of United Nations climate change conferences. It’s over forty years since oil companies discovered and then suppressed knowledge of climate change. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught about our warming world. And yet the crisis continues unabated. The last IPCC Working Group report set out five emissions scenarios — but even in the most optimistic case, global surface temperatures will surge for decades. From the Joe Biden administration’s climate-finance pledges to China’s commitment not to build new coal-fired power plants, we are at last seeing some commitments from the world’s great powers. Yet there remain three problems. The level of change is inadequate; big polluters remain entrenched and capable of holding back progress; and the people first and worst hit by climate impacts are being left to suffer. Actions lag behind words. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson has gone from past climate skepticism to stealing the language of the “Green Industrial Revolution” pioneered by Rebecca Long-Bailey under my leadership of the Labour Party. Sadly, he has not stolen the substance attached to the words. The government’s climate-change targets are insufficient and risk not being met, and the money they have committed is orders of magnitude less than their spending surge for weapons and war. We are today living through a crisis that has shown grim portents of what to expect from current governments on climate change. During the coronavirus crisis, our response was derailed, and lives were lost, as a result of nationalism, profit-seeking, vaccine-hoarding, the deliberate running down of critical services by governments bent on austerity, and denial of the crisis’s seriousness. We cannot rely on weak politicians running a system that rewards profiteering at the expense of the public good. At the events we are hosting with trade unions and civil society organizations alongside COP26, I will make a simple point: our future depends on us taking power into our own hands. Green New Deal To give some examples of what this looks like: climate change impacts on land and at sea are already heightening risks to livelihoods, health, biodiversity, infrastructure, and food. This is not just true for communities immediately dependent on oceans and forests — everywhere, approximately 800 million people living in extreme poverty will be most vulnerable to the food-price spikes created by disruption to food supply linked to extreme weather. Whether it’s the millions of Indian farmers once again striking for their future, or rewilding initiatives, or land rights movements, or the Right to Food campaign here in Britain, we need global conversations about how we secure access to food for all in a warming world. Our cities — even in the advanced economies — are already unacceptably polluted, posing serious risks to health and life. Without mitigation, heat and flooding will worsen this situation significantly. Heat waves will occur in cities, while sea level rise, storm surges, and river surges will combine to make flooding more likely. From those campaigning against decisions to put poorer and minority ethnic communities in the front lines of airline pollution, to the mutual aid networks that flourished during the coronavirus pandemic, to communities drawing up local Green New Deal plans along the lines of the successful Preston Model, we need to reimagine our towns and cities. Many solutions to the climate emergency will come from such collaborative, bottom-up action. Yet it alone is not enough. We need governments with the vision and the backbone to rein in the fossil fuel industry once and for all, working together across borders to do so. The transition to renewables must be accelerated, and millions of people must be offered the skills and the good, well-paid jobs to get it done. The United States’ Civilian Climate Corps proposal is one step in the right direction. But it’s only the beginning of a global Green New Deal that takes carbon out of the atmosphere and puts money in workers’ pockets. Fossil fuel extraction is not the only way that the few profit from climate change. When Texas froze earlier this year (which may well have been linked to climate change), energy companies took the opportunity to hold people to ransom with astronomical energy bills. The same risk is inherent in the United Kingdom’s current energy crisis. These situations are often used as arguments against renewable energy, rather than the arguments against disaster capitalism that they should be. Climate-linked crises, from African desertification to North American wildfires, have one thing in common: they cause people to move. According to new research from the International Federation of Red Cross Societies, internal displacement due to disasters surged last year — both in the Global South and in advanced economies — and all 192 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies are dealing with climate impacts in some form. A global Green New Deal must do two things: provide immediate climate finance to aid adaptation and prevent displacement — and dismantle the industry profiting from displacement. Redistributing Power Another new paper launched before COP26 provides a disturbing figure: the world’s biggest emitters are spending up to fifteen times more on arming borders against future climate-linked refugees than they are on climate finance for the poorest countries. This “Global Climate Wall” is already driving violence at borders, drawing investment away from real climate action, and providing a false sense of security to the most powerful nations. The $68 billion border, surveillance, and military industry that supplies it lobbies extensively to get its way, and, as the researchers point out, possesses a revolving door with its fellow climate profiteers in the fossil fuel industry. Imagine if such funding and imagination was applied to ending climate displacement, and to developing global compacts on refugee protection, on the scale of the Nansen passports granted to stateless refugees after World War I. I previously wrote for Jacobin that the climate emergency is a class issue. It punishes the many and is driven by systems built by the few. Only a huge redistribution of power can prevent the climate crisis from deepening — and build a better world from what follows. Often, the situation seems bleak. But when we come together, we have the ideas and the power to change the world. I was born into the generation that followed the end of World War II and into a society that rebuilt from a disaster in the interests of the many. We created new homes in new towns, invested in our children’s futures, and built our National Health Service, which stands to this day as a living monument to what compassion and a belief in the common good can accomplish. In the face of climate change, we can do even more, using the power and resources at our disposal to preserve human life on a flourishing planet. Let’s not wait until after a crisis to rebuild.
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2021 17:17:08 GMT
'Troubling' Survey Finds Violent, Anti-Democratic Views Thriving on American Right "I think that we really have to take them seriously as a threat to democracy," a pollster said of the survey's findings regarding Americans who believe violence may be needed "to save the country." www.commondreams.org/news/2021/11/01/troubling-survey-finds-violent-anti-democratic-views-thriving-american-rightA nonpartisan research institute raised alarm Monday as it released the results of a poll regarding Americans' political and cultural views, warning that the "Big Lie" that former President Donald Trump won the election and other baseless, extreme right-wing falsehoods have a firm grip on a sizable portion of the U.S. population. According to the 12th annual American Values Survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), about a third of Americans believe Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and that the election was stolen from him, as the former president and right-wing news sources have claimed for the past year. Two-thirds of Republicans hold this belief, as well as 82% of people who say they trust Fox News more than any other news source—as more than one in five Americans do, according to a 2018 Washington Post survey. Among people who most trust even further right-wing sources including One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax, 97% believe the election was stolen from Trump. The "Big Lie" and the QAnon conspiracy theory have found a foothold "among those who fear a changing America," said Robert P. Jones, founder and CEO of PRRI, including those who harbor "Christian nationalist sympathies," as 68% of Republicans do according to the poll. Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to tell PRRI that the country's "culture and way of life" has worsened since the 1950s and that the country is "in danger of losing its culture and identity." "Students of history will recognize the dangerous perpetuation of the 'Big Lie' ta stormhat the election was stolen," said Jones in a statement. "These factors have coalesced in a white Christian nationalist ideology that is strengthened by the proliferation of far-right news sources, resulting in an unprecedented willingness by a sizable minority to believe it may be justifiable to threaten, harm, or kill their fellow citizens to restore the perceived status quo.” According to the survey, nearly one in five Americans agreed with the statement, "Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country"—a finding Jones called "troubling." Republicans were nearly three times as likely to agree with this sentiment.
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