Parliament
The Den Of Thieves
Thursday, 28 January 2016
Thursday, 21 January 2016
Do not go gentle into that dark night
In one of the most bizarre proposals imaginable, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has suggested the UK could re-commission Trident nuclear submarines, but without nuclear weapons.
Corby’s proposal was given short shrift by a fuming, right-wing Union leadership. Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, and Sir Paul Kenny, leader of the GMB, are making noises expressing concern for jobs. Last week, Kenny told BBC Radio 4, “If anybody thinks that unions like the GMB are going to go quietly into the night while tens of thousands of our members’ jobs are literally swannied away by rhetoric then they’ve got another shock coming.”
Likewise the British people are not going to go quietly into that dark night of a nuclear holocaust just to protect the jobs of a few thousand men.
Monday, 18 January 2016
Saturday, 16 January 2016
The World Will Be Glad To See The Back Of Obama
Washington invokes hunger to promote war in Syria
Bill Van Auken of WSWS
The United States, France and Britain called a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Thursday to press for “immediate action” to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged areas of Syria. The supposedly heartfelt humanitarian concerns of the three imperialist powers that are currently bombing Syria came amid a concerted propaganda campaign over alleged starvation in the southwestern Syrian town of Madaya.
Originating with Al Jazeera, the news agency controlled by the Qatari monarchy, a key source of financial and arms support for the Al Qaeda-linked militias that have ravaged much of Syria, the invocation of Madaya as proof of the supposed inhumanity of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has been taken up by much of the world media. The New York Times published a front-page report Friday on conditions in the town, based on accounts that the newspaper said “could not be independently confirmed.”
There is no reason to doubt that conditions are desperate in Madaya, as they are in much of Syria after more than four years of a sectarian civil war fomented and provisioned by US imperialism and its regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. As many as 4.5 million Syrians are in areas that have been cut off from the rest of the country by the battle lines.
If Madaya is the focus of international attention, however, it is because it is encircled by Syrian government forces along with their allies from the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. The town sits at a strategic juncture near the Lebanese border and less than 25 miles from the capital, Damascus.
In the international furor being whipped up over conditions in Madaya, including through the use of photographs of starving people taken elsewhere, little attention is given to the fact that the town is largely controlled by the al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and Ahrar al-Sham, a similar Salafist jihadi militia.
While conditions of hunger in the town are routinely attributed to the government siege, residents have reported that food supplies have been monopolized by the Al Qaeda-linked groups, which sell them at extortionate prices to finance their operations. On October 18, the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered two months’ worth of food supplies to Madaya, with the government doing nothing to impede humanitarian access to the town. That many are facing hunger is largely attributable to the looting of the aid shipment by US-backed “rebels.”
While the imperialist powers and their media accomplices are directing all eyes to Madaya, they have wholly ignored equally if not more desperate conditions in the predominantly Shia towns of Kefraya and al-Foua in the northwestern province of Idlib, which have been under attack by the US-backed “rebels” since 2011 and under a total siege since March of last year. Starved of supplies and under constant attack, the town has seen 1,700 civilian residents killed.
The indifference of the imperialist powers to hunger and suffering among populations under siege by their proxy forces demonstrates that the invocation of starvation is just one more bid to promote a war for regime change as some kind of humanitarian intervention.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the launching of the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. Then, as now, phony pretexts were floated by the US government and echoed and amplified by the corporate media to justify a predatory war for control of the Middle East and its strategic oil resources. In this regard, little has changed over the course of a quarter century of uninterrupted American militarism in the region.
In 1991, it should be recalled, the public was told of marauding Iraqi troops snatching Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them to die in order to ship the devices back to Iraq. A tearful volunteer nurse was brought to Capitol Hill to testify on this atrocity, which seemed to echo World War I propaganda about German soldiers using Belgian babies for bayonet practice.
Only well after the US invasion was it revealed that the “nurse” was, in fact, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the oil sheikdom’s royal family, and that the incubator story was a propaganda hoax from start to finish.
Bill Van Auken of WSWS
The United States, France and Britain called a meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Thursday to press for “immediate action” to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid to besieged areas of Syria. The supposedly heartfelt humanitarian concerns of the three imperialist powers that are currently bombing Syria came amid a concerted propaganda campaign over alleged starvation in the southwestern Syrian town of Madaya.
Originating with Al Jazeera, the news agency controlled by the Qatari monarchy, a key source of financial and arms support for the Al Qaeda-linked militias that have ravaged much of Syria, the invocation of Madaya as proof of the supposed inhumanity of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad has been taken up by much of the world media. The New York Times published a front-page report Friday on conditions in the town, based on accounts that the newspaper said “could not be independently confirmed.”
There is no reason to doubt that conditions are desperate in Madaya, as they are in much of Syria after more than four years of a sectarian civil war fomented and provisioned by US imperialism and its regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. As many as 4.5 million Syrians are in areas that have been cut off from the rest of the country by the battle lines.
If Madaya is the focus of international attention, however, it is because it is encircled by Syrian government forces along with their allies from the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. The town sits at a strategic juncture near the Lebanese border and less than 25 miles from the capital, Damascus.
In the international furor being whipped up over conditions in Madaya, including through the use of photographs of starving people taken elsewhere, little attention is given to the fact that the town is largely controlled by the al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, and Ahrar al-Sham, a similar Salafist jihadi militia.
While conditions of hunger in the town are routinely attributed to the government siege, residents have reported that food supplies have been monopolized by the Al Qaeda-linked groups, which sell them at extortionate prices to finance their operations. On October 18, the International Committee of the Red Cross delivered two months’ worth of food supplies to Madaya, with the government doing nothing to impede humanitarian access to the town. That many are facing hunger is largely attributable to the looting of the aid shipment by US-backed “rebels.”
While the imperialist powers and their media accomplices are directing all eyes to Madaya, they have wholly ignored equally if not more desperate conditions in the predominantly Shia towns of Kefraya and al-Foua in the northwestern province of Idlib, which have been under attack by the US-backed “rebels” since 2011 and under a total siege since March of last year. Starved of supplies and under constant attack, the town has seen 1,700 civilian residents killed.
The indifference of the imperialist powers to hunger and suffering among populations under siege by their proxy forces demonstrates that the invocation of starvation is just one more bid to promote a war for regime change as some kind of humanitarian intervention.
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the launching of the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. Then, as now, phony pretexts were floated by the US government and echoed and amplified by the corporate media to justify a predatory war for control of the Middle East and its strategic oil resources. In this regard, little has changed over the course of a quarter century of uninterrupted American militarism in the region.
In 1991, it should be recalled, the public was told of marauding Iraqi troops snatching Kuwaiti babies out of incubators and leaving them to die in order to ship the devices back to Iraq. A tearful volunteer nurse was brought to Capitol Hill to testify on this atrocity, which seemed to echo World War I propaganda about German soldiers using Belgian babies for bayonet practice.
Only well after the US invasion was it revealed that the “nurse” was, in fact, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US and a member of the oil sheikdom’s royal family, and that the incubator story was a propaganda hoax from start to finish.
In the years that followed, the US imposed draconian sanctions upon Iraq that led to real starvation and unchecked disease. According to some estimates, the sanctions led to the deaths of as many as 500,000 Iraqi children due to a lack of food, medicine and uncontaminated water resulting from the imperialist blockade. Confronted with this appalling death toll in a 1996 television interview, Madeleine Albright, who was then the US ambassador to the UN and soon to be secretary of state, responded, “We think the price is worth it.”
This is the same government now shedding crocodile tears over the alleged use of hunger as a weapon by the Syrian government.
Since then, the United States has annihilated over a million people in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, killed tens of thousands more in the US-NATO war to overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and orchestrated the war in Syria that has left an estimated 260,000 dead and displaced half of the country’s population. These interventions have thrown all three countries and their social infrastructures into a state of collapse.
The recklessness and brutality of the US ruling oligarchy’s militarist attempts to impose its hegemony over the Middle East and the entire planet go hand-in-hand with its destructive role within the US itself, smashing up the country’s industrial base, destroying the jobs and living standards of the working class, and funneling the bulk of the nation’s wealth to a handful of financial parasites.
Neither the escalation of the war for regime change in Syria, nor, for that matter, the toppling of Assad will extricate American capitalism from its insoluble crisis. The unending eruption of American militarism will produce only more death and destruction, intensifying the crisis both at home and abroad and bringing humanity ever closer to a global conflagration.
Monday, 11 January 2016
Cameron's Charade
This bloke has never been serious about getting out of the capitalist organisation called the EU. His paymasters in the City of London would never allow it. This so called renegotiation is a farce, simply meant to placate his own backbenchers and UKIP.
Thursday, 7 January 2016
Corbyn The Coward
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn never misses an opportunity to strengthen the right wing of his party by his political cowardice and overarching desire for compromise at all costs. His first cabinet reshuffle has proved to be no exception.
Wednesday, 6 January 2016
Revolution Or World War (which do you prefer?)
From WSWS
As the year 2015 ends, a general mood of fear and foreboding predominates in ruling circles. It is hard to find a trace of optimism. Commentators in the bourgeois media look back on the past year and recognize that it has been a year of deepening crisis. They look forward to 2016 with apprehension. The general sense in government offices and corporate boardrooms is that the coming year will be one of deep shocks, with unexpected consequences.
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The past year was not lived in vain. Workers all over the world are beginning to draw the lessons, to acquire a greater consciousness of the social and political forces they confront. In this regard, it is significant that the struggle of autoworkers in the US corresponded to a sharp growth in the readership of the World Socialist Web Site, as thousands of workers turned to the WSWS as a source of truth and perspective. This can and will be repeated on an ever-larger scale in countless forms in the coming period.
Political problems are posed with enormous sharpness. That capitalism confronts an existential crisis is now self-evident. The question raised is: How will this crisis be resolved? Which will develop more rapidly, the tendency toward world war and dictatorship or the tendency toward socialist revolution? That is the great question that is posed as the New Year begins.
Thursday, 24 December 2015
No “peace on Earth” in 2015
Anyone who has observed the world in 2015 must expect that 2016 will be a year of unprecedented violence and social misery. But the same processes driving the world to the brink of world war are those that must give rise to social struggle by the working class.
Unlike the professional liars and opinion-makers of the financial elite and its political representatives, the working masses of humanity take the ideals of universal peace and brotherhood seriously. They genuinely hope and strive for a better world, and will fight for it. In the coming period, millions will conclude that an independent political struggle by the working class, armed with a socialist perspective of overthrowing capitalism and reorganizing society on an internationalist basis, is the only means to achieve “peace on earth.”
By Andre Damon of WSWS
This holiday season, people all over the world will celebrate Christmas by expressing sentiments of tolerance and brotherhood. They will exchange gifts and cards, and try to smile a little more, in the distant hope that their individual benevolence might somehow extricate the world, at least somewhat, from the mire it is lodged in.
These genuine sentiments are, of course, goaded on by a good deal of official promotion. Anyone visiting a shopping mall or airport in much of the world over the holiday period will hear Christmas carols piped through loudspeakers extolling “peace on Earth, goodwill to men,” and exhorting them to have a “Merry Christmas.”
The holiday season is always a time where hypocrisy is pressed into service by the political establishment, a “Christmas spirit” created from the collision between religion and frantic merchandising. But there have been few holiday seasons so unhappy for so many people, and in which the spirit of tolerance and benevolence supposedly epitomized in the “Christmas spirit” clashes so obviously with reality.
Not since the end of the Second World War seventy years ago has the absence of “peace on Earth” been so stark, or “goodwill to men” so absent. Numerous public figures, from the Pope to the Prince of Jordan to The New York Times opinion page, have declared that the Third World War has already begun.
American warplanes and drones swarm the Middle East and North Africa, bombing, killing and maiming indiscriminately and driving millions from their homes. President Obama, according to press reports, will spend his holiday mulling over plans to further expand bombing in populated areas in Syria, which will radically expand civilian casualties.
Every major combatant in the first two world wars is again on the warpath. Germany and Japan, are feverishly remilitarizing to assert their influence on the European continent and in East Asia, respectively.
The millions of human beings displaced by war and poverty are greeted by states everywhere with barbed wire and guns. At least five million people were forced to flee from their homes this year, with one million seeking refuge in Europe, as a result of the wars in the Middle East stoked up by the Western powers.
These same powers, the self-styled bastions of tolerance and human rights, have responded to the flood of people desperately in need of aid by closing off their external borders and forcing hundreds of thousands to make their way over the Aegean Sea. Over 3,000 people have died this year seeking to cross into Europe by this route, while over 1,000 of these are children.
For an enormous section of mankind, this Christmas will not be “merry.” In fact, it is hard to imagine any Christmas in recent decades that will be so miserable for so many people.
For millions in the United States and around the world, it will be another year that they are denied by poverty the happiness of being able to afford holiday presents for their friends and loved ones.
Nowhere is this more true than in the centre of world finance, the United States, where one in five US live in food-insecure households and millions of people will struggle to scrape together enough money for a holiday meal. For all the promotion of philanthropic “charity” by the media, one can scarcely imagine a more un-charitable society than contemporary America, dominated by a Dickensian level of cruelty to the poor.
In a suitable symbol of “Christmas in America,” a cafeteria worker in an Idaho middle school was fired last week for “theft” after she gave a hungry child a free meal. “My heart hurts,” she told a local news station. “I truly loved my job, and I can’t say that I wouldn’t do it again.”
All over the world, governments and the media are seeking to counter the sentiments of compassion by whipping up nationalism, xenophobia, communal hatred and paranoia. In the US, the leading Republican presidential candidate is an open bigot, declaring that Mexicans are rapists and calling for banning Muslims from entering the country. Donald Trump’s demagogy was expressed in action when a British Muslim family was prevented this month from boarding a plane to Disney World by the State Department, without any explanation.
In Germany, Angela Merkel, the supposed promoter of the “welcoming culture,” declares that “multiculturalism is a sham.” In France, the ruling Socialist Party, seeking to enshrine a permanent state of emergency into the constitution, is bent on obtaining the power to strip dual citizens of their nationality, a measure last used in France during the mass deportation of Jews under the Vichy Regime during the holocaust.
Anyone who has observed the world in 2015 must expect that 2016 will be a year of unprecedented violence and social misery. But the same processes driving the world to the brink of world war are those that must give rise to social struggle by the working class.
Unlike the professional liars and opinion-makers of the financial elite and its political representatives, the working masses of humanity take the ideals of universal peace and brotherhood seriously. They genuinely hope and strive for a better world, and will fight for it. In the coming period, millions will conclude that an independent political struggle by the working class, armed with a socialist perspective of overthrowing capitalism and reorganizing society on an internationalist basis, is the only means to achieve “peace on earth.”
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