The Plight Of The Refugees

Casualties of “Fortress Europe”: Refugees dead on land and sea

By Marianne Arens and Patrick Martin of WSWS 

The death toll among desperate refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East and Africa continues to mount, with horrifying scenes that go beyond anything seen in Europe since World War II.

The vast majority of these refugees are seeking to escape violence unleashed on their homes and families by the imperialist powers, above all the United States, with its accomplices including France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

Once they escape their home countries, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and various countries in east and west Africa, the refugees encounter still more violence at every step: from police and border guards, from smugglers like those who asphyxiated refugees in the hold of a ship and the van of a truck, and from neo-Nazi mobs in Saxony, who were permitted to attack them by German police.

Read More Here

Memory Lane

Will the refugees from Syria, Libya, Iraq as well as from all the other places the US and the UK have bombed eventually end up looking like this? 

War Causes Refugees And War Is A Cameron Speciality

The refugee crisis and the inhuman face of European capitalism

From WSWS

The horrific treatment of refugees seeking shelter in central Europe in recent weeks via the Balkans and Italy shows the brutal and inhuman face of European capitalism. Desperate people, fearing for their lives and fleeing the war-ravaged regions of the Middle East and North Africa, confront a bitter ordeal.

Every day provides new outrages: corpses drifting in the Mediterranean; refugees without sufficient food and water crammed together in intolerable sanitary conditions; families with small children forced to cross hundreds of kilometers on foot; police deploying batons and tear gas against defenseless migrants; and everywhere borders and barriers, secured by barbed wire and security forces to repel the refugees with force.

Just yesterday, two boats with up to 500 migrants capsized off the coast of Libya, with hundreds feared dead. Among those on board the ships were migrants from Syria, Bangladesh and several African countries, according to media reports.

This follows the discovery of the bodies of up to 50 Syrian refugees in a truck on an Austrian highway. They are presumed to have suffocated en route. The parked vehicle was found by a highway worker who noticed liquid from decaying flesh dripping from the truck.

Read More Here

Banksy's Dismaland

Fed up with church fetes, food festivals, beer festivals and air shows where you are likely to get killed? Do something special this bank holiday weekend - visit Banksy's 'Dismaland' the closest thing you will get to a selfie of Britain today.

Capitalism On The Rocks

Global Ponzi scheme threatens to implode

From WSWS

Asian stock markets opened Monday with another sharp selloff. As of this writing, China’s Shanghai Composite index had dropped by over 8 percent and Japan’s Nikkei, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng and Australia’s All Ordinaries were all down by more than 3 percent. China’s central bank was preparing another round of cash infusions into the country’s financial markets.

The global panic, which has wiped out over a trillion dollars in stock values in the US alone, has shattered the claim that the US and world economies are in the midst of an economic recovery.

Prompted by decelerating economic growth in China, a collapse of financial markets and currencies in the so-called emerging market countries, and a continuing fall in the price of oil and other commodities, the plunge in stock prices is an expression not simply of passing conditions, but rather the inability of governments and central banks to address the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist system that led to the Wall Street crash and recession of 2008–2009.

What appears to be coming to an end is the period when massive infusions of cash by central banks into the financial markets, combined with a ruthless assault on the living standards of the international working class, could paper over the systemic character of the crisis and produce a boom in stock prices, corporate profits and the wealth of the financial aristocracy—even as the real economy continued to stagnate.

Read More Here

Beware Of Greeks Praising Austerity

In bid to ram through austerity package, Tsipras calls snap elections in Greece

By Alex Lantier of WSWS 

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras used a nationally televised address yesterday evening to announce his resignation and the calling of snap elections. While Tsipras defended his government's imposition of a European Union (EU) package of deep austerity measures, government sources said the elections would most likely be set for September 20, before these measures begin to go into effect in October.

“I will go to the president of the republic shortly to submit my resignation, as well as the resignation of my government,” Tsipras said before going to meet with President Prokopis Pavlopoulos.

In his subsequent meeting with Pavlopoulos, Tsipras said that he did not have enough support for his policy agenda: “The present parliament cannot offer a government of majority or a national unity government.”

The Greek constitution now grants the leaders of the country's three largest parties—Syriza, the right-wing New Democracy (ND), and the pro-EU The River party—up to three days each to try to form a government. If they fail, a caretaker prime minister, Supreme Court head Vassiliki Thanou-Christofilou, will be appointed to serve until the elections.

The election is a cynical attempt to boost Syriza's vote and stabilize the state apparatus in anticipation of a confrontation with the working class. Tsipras aims to retain office but obtain a new parliament and government, providing a more reliable base of support for imposing his austerity policies.

Read More Here

The Big Idea - To Save Capitalism From Itself

Jeremy Corbyn’s economic plan to rescue British capitalism

By Paul Mitchell and Chris Marsden of WSWS

The economic prescriptions put forward by Labour Party leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn have been met with apoplexy in some quarters.

Daily Telegraph deputy editor Allister Heath fumed about “a disaster for Britain” should the “unreconstructed socialist” Corbyn become leader of the Labour Party. His election would deal “the pro-capitalist side a terrible blow” and mark “a return to the ultra-confrontational 1980s… Class war, extreme language and nonsensical positions.” Labour Party shadow chancellor Chris Leslie denounced Corbyn’s supposedly “starry-eyed, hard left” plan.

In reality, Corbyn’s campaign and the policy prescriptions he espouses are shaped by two related considerations.

He decided to enter the leadership race in the aftermath of Labour’s disastrous performance in May’s General Election. Noting that the collapse in the vote for the party is due to widespread opposition to the austerity politics that it has implemented, Corbyn is seeking to revive support by putting on a “left” face. But Corbyn has always insisted that all that can be achieved are minor reforms through the very Labour Party he criticises.

Under conditions of an ever deepening systemic crisis, his aim, in the words of the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, is to save capitalism from itself. He speaks for a layer within ruling political circles who believe that merely continuing with unrestrained austerity threatens to plunge British and world capitalism into a second economic crash.

Read More Here

The Liar And Warmonger Speaks Out

The Labour Party risks "annihilation" if Jeremy Corbyn wins the party's leadership contest, former prime minister Tony Blair has warned.

He is obviously referring to the English Labour party since the Scottish Labour party has already been annihilated - last May at the general election if you remember Mr Blair.

Egg On His Face

Scottish Socialist Party defends Syriza

By Steve James and Chris Marsden of WSWS

Syriza’s abject capitulation to the European financial oligarchy provides a devastating exposure of Europe’s pseudo-left tendencies, none more so than the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP).

For years, Syriza has been hailed as a model party of the future. Now the model is in pieces. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras is preparing to impose unprecedented levels of pro-European Union (EU) austerity measures, for which all those who have hailed Syriza share responsibility.

Syriza can continue to count on the support of these tendencies, even as it intensifies its assault on the working class.

The comments of SSP co-leader Colin Fox are a record of political blindness—at first characterised by wild enthusiasm and then by cynical dissembling and demoralisation.

Writing on his blog on January 25, Fox breathlessly celebrated Syriza’s electoral victory as the coming to power of “Europe’s first radical left-wing government since 1945.” He described Syriza as offering a way out of “social and political purgatory.”

For Fox, Syriza’s rise to power was an opportunity to promote illusions in a perspective based on national economic development under capitalism and within the framework of the EU. It provided the SSP with the possibility of arguing that meaningful social concessions could be won outside of and in opposition to a revolutionary struggle against capitalism. According to Fox, Syriza in government implied, “Hope is coming. Greece will advance. Europe is changing.”

Events have left Fox’s claims in ruins. By June, he was forced to admit, “Any honest and objective assessment of the progress made on [its] pledges does not flatter Syriza. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his colleague Janis Varoufakis have succumbed to pressure applied by their creditors in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels and New York. The debts have not been written off. Indeed unaffordable repayments have all been made in full. The Port of Piraeus, the jewel in the crown of the Greek state, is to be sold off to a Chinese company. The promised increases in the minimum wage and state pensions have not happened either.”

Read More Here

Jeremy Corbyn Takes On Margaret Thatcher

Good News

Jeremy Corbyn now has the support of more than half of those with a vote in the Labour leadership contest, a new opinion poll suggests.

Stark warnings from a string of senior party figures that choosing the veteran left-winger would be catastrophic for its chances of returning to power appeared to have had little effect.

The YouGov survey for The Times of 1,411 eligible voters in the contest to succeed Ed Miliband at the head of the opposition found Mr Corbyn had nearly doubled his lead in a week to 32%.

It gave him 53% - enough to win without a need to count second preferences - with Andy Burnham losing five points to 21%, Yvette Cooper slipping two to 18% and Liz Kendall down three on 8%.

Ménage à trois

The NATO Inspired Nightmare That Is Libya

Hillary Clinton Exposed - Movie She Banned From Theatres

Insecticide Required?