Tories, Party Of Welfare State.

  

        Anybody with half a brain cell knows that "austerity" was an ideological decision and not a necessity. It was a determined policy of plundering the public purse to feed the corporate tax havens. Though I have always been aware of the fact that the state feeds and supports the corporate beast with the false platitude that it helps the "economy" (the rich) and brings jobs. Although the facts were there, Somehow I never however thought of the Tory party as the party of a welfare state!!
      The article in "The Canary" explains it very clearly, well worth a read just to sort the facts out in your mind.

 

 

      An extract from The Canary article:

           The Tories run a secret welfare state for rich people that costs taxpayers up to £180bn a year

The long con

       The idea was never to shrink the welfare state. It was always to divert government investment from the human-welfare state for the many to the corporate-welfare state for the few. Imagine it like a long con.
       You create a sense of scarcity, like there just isn’t enough to go around. The coalition government did this with austerity; the Thatcher government did it with previous economic crises. Despite the 2007/8 financial crisis being caused exclusively by the private sector, and the private sector being bailed out by the government, it was reframed as a public spending crisis. And the very debt accumulated in rescuing the economy from casino banking became the excuse to rapidly cut funding for the welfare state.
       Then you begin pitting different needs against each other. Young people’s services versus elderly people’s security. People who were born here versus people who arrived here. People with jobs versus people without jobs. And thanks to the primal fear that people with little have when faced with having even less, a fight ensues. While that fight is happening, you merrily divert as much spending as possible to you and your friends. The best bit? When the scarcity you just created hits and things stop working in the human-welfare state, it just makes your case seem stronger. ‘See, we told you things were bad. This service needs more private-sector involvement to boost efficiency.’
       And so you go on. Every publicly-funded service is up for grabs – a means of siphoning taxpayer cash away from meeting public needs, and towards filling private pockets. In return, you’ve assured your post-parliament career in the revolving door of political and corporate life.

The enablers

        Perhaps the greatest enablers of the corporate-welfare-state long con are UK newspapers and media outlets. Just three corporations dominate 83% of newspaper reach in the UK. That’s just a handful of billionaires dominating the UK press. And they cannot be trusted to play fair when it comes to policies that invest in regular people rather than providing them with government subsidies or tax cuts.

Read the full article HERE: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

How Dare They Nationalise Their Oil!!

       According to Western propaganda spewing from the babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, Iran has been, and still is, the king of the world's evil empire. According to that organ of the state and the corporate juggernaut, the babbling brook of bullshit, all things nasty, all terrorism, all human rights failures, stem from that country. The West's vision of Iran is shaped by nothing more than power and wealth for that elite bunch of parasites, oil is the driving force of that hatred. Some years ago, the people of Iran had the audacity to nationalise their countries oil, and to the West, that is an unforgivable crime. All the wars of the West are for the same reason, wealth and power to that small cabal of obscenely rich moguls who control the world in which we live.

This from The Canary: 

        The US just fired at Iran. But there’s something vital that the media won’t be telling you about ongoing tensions.
On 25 July, the US Navy fired ‘warning shots’ at an Iranian patrol boat in the Persian Gulf. This isn’t the start of World War Three as some media outlets may suggest; but it is a sign of continuing US-Iranian tensions. And it comes just weeks after the release of declassified documents which highlight the issues at the very heart of these tensions. We probably won’t be hearing such historical context in the mainstream media any time soon, though.

Newly released documents show tensions exist for a reason

As Noam Chomsky pointed out in 2013:

-----for the past 60 years, not a day has passed in which the U.S. has not been torturing Iranians… [It] began with a military coup, which overthrew the parliamentary regime in 1953, installed the Shah, a brutal dictator… When he was overthrown in 1979, the U.S. almost immediately turned to supporting Saddam Hussein in an assault against Iran, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, used extensive use of chemical weapons… Right after that, Iran was subjected to harsh sanctions. And it continues right until the moment.

      And in June 2017, newly released documents showed exactly what was at the heart of CIA involvement in the 1953 coup. As Foreign Policy reported:

------the CIA plot was ultimately about oil. Western firms had for decades controlled the region’s oil wealth… [Then, Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad] Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A fuming United Kingdom began conspiring with U.S. intelligence services to overthrow Mossadegh and restore the monarchy under the shah… [Eventually,] Iran’s nationalist hero was jailed, [and] the monarchy [was] restored under the Western-friendly shah…

        The US long denied its involvement in the coup. And Washington only drip-fed documents to the public over the years. But even the 2017 release was incomplete; with a number of original CIA telegrams having either ‘disappeared’ or been destroyed long before. And retired history professor Ervand Abrahamian believes the US was so reluctant to publish this information partly because it “shows how involved the U.S. Embassy was… in internal Iranian affairs”.
As Noam Chomsky highlights, Amnesty International regularly described the shah as “one of the worst, most extreme torturers in the world”. And Foreign Policy stresses that the 1953 coup fueled “a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and [poisoned] U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century”. In 1979, Chomsky says, Iranians “overthrew a tyrant that the United States had imposed and supported, and moved on an independent path”; and as a result, the US has punished them ever since.

      US hypocrisy and self-interest still at play in Iran

      In 2017, current US President Donald Trump is ramping up tensions with Iran. But not because of democracy or human rights. Instead, his hostility is largely because Iran’s regional enemies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, are US allies; because there’s a barely reported conflict occurring over oil pipelines in the Middle East; and because Iran does not bend easily to America’s will.
Indeed, Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia back in May contained no talk of freedom, democracy, or human rights. But it was full of talk about terrorism; full of talk about deals with America’s “magnificent” Saudi “friends”; and full of verbal attacks on Iran. Trump said:

Continue Reading: 

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As The Oil Flows, So Does The Blood.

       We all know that wars are fought not for principles of morality, defending democracy, or freeing "the people", but for the gain of those in power, the controlling of resources for big corporations, and dominance in resource rich territory. Anybody who can't see this, just isn't paying attention. Sometimes the manoeuvring remains shrouded in illusion and the fog of lies, sometimes it comes out quite quickly, but it is always a struggle to get the facts accepted.

       The Saudi lead massacre in the Yemen is one of those charades that the light of truth falls on while it is still in operation. The whole Yemeni slaughter is no more than bombing a clear path for a Western/Saudi backed oil pipeline to by-pass the Strait of Hormuz, and be free from Iranian influence. 

        We will support organisations like al-Qaeda, one day, then bomb them the next, depending how the powerful can use them.

        The following is an extract from a very interesting article on that Western backed Yemeni slaughter, taken from The Canary:

Massive attack

         In an official statement after the April operation, the Saudi-led coalition said that “more than 800 al-Qaeda elements” had been killed in the military confrontation. Mainstream media outlets parroted the coalition claim. The Wall Street Journal referred to a successful “offensive” marking a “new direction for the coalition.” And Reuters described the operation as a “lighting advance” that “routed the militants” from their stronghold. In the official narrative, on the day Saudi-led Yemeni and UAE troops moved to the outskirts of Mukalla, local Islamic clerics and tribesmen were enrolled to mediate al-Qaeda’s withdrawal. AQAP subsequently “fled westwards” in the wake of the frightening military advance.
        A statement from the Saudi embassy in Washington said: Saudi forces are also on the ground alongside the UAE forces in Mukalla… it is a Saudi-led Arab Coalition that is fighting AQAP alongside the US military contingent on the ground. New details about the alleged US and UK-backed assault emerged on Wednesday from an interview with the Commander of the Saudi-led Yemeni forces behind the Mukalla operation.
         In the Al Jazeera interview, Major General Faraj Salmeen al-Bahsini painted a Hollywood-esque picture of a: big number of [AQAP] fighters… destroyed first by the coalition’s warplanes and then by [our] forces on the ground. None of the al-Qaeda fighters was able to flee these camps.
       Al-Bahsini said that the total number of AQAP fighters killed was “probably” much higher than the 800 originally claimed. The general described: precise air strikes by the coalition’s warplanes on [AQAP’s] key positions, gatherings, ammunition depots and centres-of-command rooms.
         There were also, he said, bold coalition navy attacks on hundreds of fighters who were fleeing the city on boats and vessels bound for the Horn of Africa.
Not to mention: special commandos who attacked al-Qaeda from the sea The commandos bravely secured the Dhabah oil terminal from the AQAP barbarians, before rapidly defusing hundreds of landmines.

Except they didn’t.

Attack? What Attack?
        Independent on-the-ground sources have denied there was any such attack. Veteran BBC journalist Iona Craig, who has reported extensively from Yemen, said that the coalition statement was “ridiculous”, as AQAP had already deserted the city before the alleged military ‘rout’: There weren’t even 800 fighters left there. There was no fighting inside the city because al-Qaeda had already left. She described the 800 figure as “a lie that’s not even plausible.” Craig had been in Mukalla a month before the military operation. She said that Saudi-led forces had been secretly negotiating with AQAP for the previous two weeks “to let fighters leave”. Far from being ‘routed’, al-Qaeda “had been given free passage out of the city” by their Saudi benefactors.
         There were sporadic clashes on roads leading into Mukalla, but none within the city itself. She also said that coalition airstrikes were hitting targets that had already been repeatedly bombed.
        Mohammed al-Yazidi, a Mukalla-based writer, said during the operation that locals were surprised at the “prompt and bloodless exit” of AQAP from the city.
         Hisham al-Omeisy, a Yemeni political analyst, similarly reported that there was “no real battle” as AQAP fighters had left the city within twelve hours. Yet, he said: Coalition capitalise, claim huge battle killed 800. In other words, the Saudi ‘victory’ against AQAP in Mukalla was achieved without a single fire-fight in the city.

The US and UK collude in Saudi pipeline plan        While under al-Qaeda’s control, Hadramawt had remained curiously free from Saudi aerial bombardment since the beginning of the war. The province is central to a long standing Saudi plan, supported by the US and UK, to install an oil and gas pipeline route through Yemen to the Gulf of Aden. The idea is to bypass Iranian influence via the Strait of Hormuz. Regional oil supplies must currently pass through the Strait to reach world oil markets.
       The pipeline plan is mentioned in a top secret 2008 State Department cable from the US embassy in Yemen to the Secretary of State: A British diplomat based in Yemen told PolOff [US embassy political officer] that Saudi Arabia had an interest to build a pipeline, wholly owned, operated and protected by Saudi Arabia, through Hadramawt to a port on the Gulf of Aden, thereby bypassing the Arabian Gulf/Persian Gulf and the straits of Hormuz.
        Ousted Yemeni President Abdullah Saleh had originally supported the project, but eventually became its chief opponent.

The full article is a must read HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk