Put Your Own House In Order Mr. Caphead

The capheads want the UK to stay in the EU. What better reason do you need for voting to leave?

David Cameron's EU Deal

The Dronemaster's Speech

If you want a good reason to vote to leave the EU in the forthcoming referendum then the knowledge that the warmonger and dronemaster Obama is in favour of the UK staying put is the only reason you need.

No Popery Here !

Finish Off The Fanatics Now

The US “Plan B” for Syria and the threat of world war

By Bill Van Auken of WSWS

Negotiations on Syria’s bloody armed conflict were held in Munich Thursday against the backdrop of a government offensive, supported by Russian airstrikes, to break the grip of Western-backed “rebels” over the largely shattered eastern part of Aleppo.

The talks were convened under the auspices of the 17-member International Syria Support Group, which includes the US and its regional allies—Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar—in the war for regime change in Syria, along with Russia and Iran, which are allied with and actively aiding the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Washington demanded an immediate cease-fire and halt to Russian airstrikes in Syria. The US, together with the reactionary Arab monarchies and the regime in Turkey, fears that without a halt to the fighting, the Islamist militias that they have supported, financed and armed for nearly five years may face irreparable defeat.

Russia, for its part, reportedly proposed a cease-fire that would begin on March 1, thus allowing enough time for the Syrian government to reestablish its control over Aleppo.

Late Friday night, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that they had reached a tentative deal that would see a ceasefire “within a week” along with expedited humanitarian aid. Kerry allowed that while the agreement looked good “on paper,” it was yet to be tested. All of the underlying conflicts remain unresolved, and both US and Russian military operations are to continue in the name of the struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

On the eve of the Munich talks, Kerry, in an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, delivered an unmistakable threat in connection with the US negotiating strategy in Munich: “What we’re doing is testing [Russian and Iranian] seriousness.” he said. “And if they’re not serious, then there has to be consideration of a Plan B… You can’t just sit there.”

“Plan B” would consist of a sharp escalation of the US military intervention in Syria, carried out under the cover of combating ISIS, but directed at toppling the Assad government.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have also reportedly spent the last several days discussing a “Plan B” that would involve their participation in direct military intervention to save the “rebels” that they have supported. The Saudi-owned news group al-Arabiya has quoted officials in Riyadh as confirming the House of Saud’s decision to send troops into Syria in what would constitute a provocatively hostile invasion.

Responding to the ominous implications of such an escalation, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told the German daily Handelsblatt Thursday: “The Americans and our Arab partners must think hard about this—do they want a permanent war? All sides must be forced to the negotiating table instead of sparking a new world war.”

Medvedev’s choice of words was not mere hyperbole. A military intervention to rescue the “rebels,” which amounts to a war to save Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Al Nusra Front, the leading force on the ground in Aleppo province, could quickly bring the US and its allies into combat with Russia, an armed confrontation between the world’s two major nuclear powers.

US officials have spoken in recent days of creating a “humanitarian corridor” to Aleppo and other rebel areas under siege by government forces. Presumably this “corridor” is meant to replace the main supply route for the “rebels” from Turkey, which has been cut off by the government offensive, disrupting the CIA-orchestrated arming of the “rebels” with stockpiles poured in from Libya, the Gulf oil kingdoms and beyond. Such a corridor would require a military force to protect it and enforcement of a “no-fly zone,” meaning a confrontation not only with Syrian government forces, but with Russian warplanes as well.

Turkey, Washington’s NATO ally, is meanwhile blocking its border to Syrian refugees in order to create the maximum crisis possible so that it can pursue its own strategic aims, which include not only regime change in Damascus, but also the bloody suppression of the Kurdish minority on both sides of the frontier.

The Obama administration has issued no warning to the American people that it is embarking on a policy in Syria that could pit the US against the Russian military and potentially trigger a global catastrophe.

There is no significant popular support for US military intervention in Syria, which has been promoted under the false flag of “humanitarianism,” aided by a whole coterie of pseudo-left organizations that have specialized in portraying a bloody sectarian campaign by CIA-backed Islamist militias as a “Syrian revolution.”

The extent of the catastrophe unleashed upon Syria through this intervention was spelled out in shocking terms with the release of a new study by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, which found that fully 11.5 per cent of the population inside Syria has been either killed or injured as a result of the armed conflict. The death toll from the war—combined with the systematic destruction of the country’s social infrastructure and health care system and a dramatic drop in living standards—has caused life expectancy to plummet from 70.5 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.4 years in 2015.

The study found further that the country’s unemployment rate had soared from 14.9 percent in 2011 to 52.9 percent by the end of 2015, and that the overall poverty rate is estimated at 85.2 percent.

In short, the Obama administration has inflicted upon Syria a war that is every bit as criminal and lethal as the war carried out by the Bush administration against Iraq.

The Syrian people are the victims of a US-orchestrated war that is driven by the global strategy of American imperialism to reverse its economic decline through the use or threat of military force. Washington sought regime change in Syria as a means to an end: the weakening of the two principal allies of Damascus, Russia and Iran, and the reassertion of a Western stranglehold on the vast energy resources of the Middle East.

The threat of world war is posed not merely by the prospect of US and Russian warplanes facing off in the skies over Syria, but by the entire logic of the Syrian war for regime change and the broader strategic aims that it serves. This finds expression in NATO’s escalation of the military encirclement of Russia and the increasingly provocative anti-Chinese policy being pursued by the Pentagon in the South China Sea.

The US drive for global hegemony was articulated in the strategic maxim enunciated by the Pentagon nearly a quarter of a century ago that Washington must prevent the emergence of any power capable of challenging the dominance of American capitalism on a global or even regional scale. This “grand strategy” has led to unceasing US wars of aggression since and now poses the real threat of a third, nuclear, world war.

Against this barbaric strategy of the US ruling establishment, the American and international working class must advance its own independent strategy, fighting for the withdrawal of US and all foreign military forces from Syria, Iraq and the entire Middle East and for the unity of the working class across all national, religious and ethnic boundaries in a common struggle to put an end to capitalism, the source of militarism and war.

Capitalism Doesn't Work

History, wrote the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, is cruel, not kind. Like the proverbial wicked stepmother, it teaches lessons with blows, not caresses.

Today's blows come in the form of austerity, the mechanism by which the rich get the poor to pay for the crimes of the banks and imperialist war for the purpose of plundering the natural resources of others which in turn has led to the refugee crisis threatening to engulf Europe.

Capitalism doesn't work. It must be overthrown to secure justice for all.

Very Fishy Indeed!

It turns out that the only dissenting voice on the UN working group considering the case of Julian Assange was a Ukrainian. We all know that the Ukrainian government comprises of a bunch of fascists who illegally seized power with the connivance of the Obama outfit in the US. Was this their way of saying thank you to Obama for helping engineer the bloody coup?

Cameron Says F*ck the UN

UN panel condemns detention of WikiLeaks founder

Stop the persecution of Julian Assange!

By Bill Van Auken of WSWS

More than five years after first being detained under a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by Sweden in relation to fabricated allegations of sexual misconduct, and after more than three and a half years holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been vindicated by a United Nations human right panel. This body has ruled that his persecution by the Swedish and British governments amounts to “arbitrary detention” and constitutes a violation of international law.

Assange’s sole “crime” is making public secret documents detailing the real and murderous war crimes carried out by the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the conspiracies hatched by the US State Department and the CIA in countries around the world.

For exposing its criminal operations, Washington is determined to silence and punish Assange, using the lies concocted by Swedish prosecutors and the complicity of the British government to achieve its aims.

The Swedish Foreign Ministry Thursday acknowledged that the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) will today issue its findings that Assange has been “deprived of his liberty in an arbitrary manner for an unacceptable length of time.”

The UN panel could only have reached such a decision based on overwhelming evidence that the charges against Assange constitute a legal frame-up mounted for political purposes.

Even before the findings of the UN working group were made known, Assange issued a statement from the Ecuadorian embassy accepting the decision as the culmination of his final legal appeal. He declared that, were the panel to rule against him, he would leave the embassy on Friday “to accept arrest by British police.” He went on to insist that if it found that the Swedish and British governments were acting in violation of international law, “I expect the immediate return of my passport and the termination of further attempts to arrest me.”

Neither London nor Stockholm, however, have shown any similar inclination to allow international law and the human rights treaties to which both are signatories to guide their actions.

A spokesman for the government of Prime Minister David Cameron issued a cynical statement insisting that Julian Assange “has never been arbitrarily detained by the UK but is, in fact, voluntarily avoiding lawful arrest by choosing to remain in the Ecuadorian embassy.” Only last October did British police end a round-the-clock siege of the embassy, announcing that they were pursuing “covert” methods in seeking Assange’s capture. At one point, the British government indicated that it would ignore international law protecting embassies and send security forces to storm the building.

As for the Swedish government, the foreign ministry in Stockholm issued a brief note asserting that the UN’s ruling “differs from that of the Swedish authorities” and would not alter its legal vendetta against the WikiLeaks founder.

The British and the US governments have regularly invoked the findings of the UN panel on arbitrary detentions when they could be used to lend a “human rights” pretext to imperialist operations against countries like China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela and Cuba. That the actions taken by London and Washington themselves should be subject to international law, however, is rejected out of hand.

What they find impermissible is the exposure of their crimes, which have killed and wounded millions, while turning many millions more into homeless refugees. This is why they have not only hounded Assange, but placed Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in prison for 35 years.

Manning was convicted by a drumhead military tribunal in 2013 on charges of “aiding the enemy” for providing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents, including the “collateral murder” video showing an Apache helicopter’s gun sight view of the 2007 massacre of 12 Iraqi civilians. Also leaked were the “Afghan war diary” and the “Iraq war logs,” exposing multiple war crimes committed by the US military, and over 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables revealing Washington’s counterrevolutionary intrigues around the globe.

Meanwhile, Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed the NSA’s wholesale collection of every form of data on the planet, from US and non-US citizens alike, in open violation of the US Bill of Rights and international law, has been turned into a man without a country, living in forced exile in Moscow.

There are a number of other such cases, including that of ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou, the only person punished in connection with the CIA’s torture of detainees—sent to prison for publicly exposing it. The Obama administration has prosecuted more individuals under the Espionage Act for leaking secret information to the media than all other US presidents combined.

Assange can expect even worse if he falls into the clutches of the British police and the Swedish authorities, who are acting as the agents of the US military and intelligence apparatus. He has been the subject of a secret grand jury investigation for over five years and is undoubtedly charged in a sealed indictment with espionage and other crimes against the state that could bring him life in prison or even the death penalty. Meanwhile, leading political figures in the US have openly called for his assassination.

Assange, Manning, Snowden and others have faced relentless persecution for daring to lift the lid on the secret operations of the US government.

This witch hunt is driven by the deepest needs of the American state, which functions as the instrument of a financial oligarchy. It defends this ruling layer’s vast wealth and monopoly on political power against the masses of working people in the US and around the world, while seeking to offset the economic decline of American capitalism by waging ever-more dangerous wars of aggression. Given the criminal character of these operations, a regime of secrecy and increasingly dictatorial methods is indispensable.

The only genuine constituency for the defense of democratic rights is the working class. Working people must come to the defense of Assange, Snowden, Manning and other victims of state conspiracies and repression.

Any attempt to arrest or extradite Assange must be answered with mass demonstrations and work actions in the UK, the US and all over the world.

This campaign in defence of Assange and the other victims of state repression can go forward only as part of the struggle of the international working class against the capitalist system, whose historic crisis threatens humanity with both world war and police state dictatorship.

And All That

Time for a song. Robert Burns' hymn to humanity.