CLASS WARFARE

The US School System - The dumbing down of America

2012-01-10T21:41:00.003Z

Charlotte Iserbyt is to be greatly commended for having put together the most formidable and practical compilation of documentation describing the deliberate dumbing down of American children by their education system. Anyone interested in the truth will be shocked by the way American social engineers have systematically gone about destroying the intellect of millions of American children for the purpose of leading the American people into a socialist world government controlled by behavioral and social scientists.

What is so mind boggling is that all of this is being financed by the American people themselves through their own taxes. In other words, the American people are underwriting the destruction of their own freedom and way of life by lavishly financing through federal grants the very social scientists who are undermining our national sovereignty and preparing our children to become the dumbed-down vassals of the new world order. It reminds one of how the Nazis charged their victims train fare to their own doom.

One of the interesting insights revealed by these documents is how the social engineers use a deliberately created education crisis to move their agenda forward by offering radical reforms that are sold to the public as fixing the crisis which they never do. The new reforms simply set the stage for the next crisis, which provides the pretext for the next move forward. This is the dialectical process at work, a process our behavioral engineers have learned to use very effectively. Its success depends on the ability of the change agents to continually deceive the public which tends to believe anything the experts tell them.

Dowload the ebook Dumbing Down of America

The death of Osama bin Laden and its implications

2011-06-01T23:05:00.003+01:00

The May 1^st presidential announcement of the execution of Osama bin Laden has been fêted as a great tactical victory by the White House, by Western governments and the world’s media. The longed-for news saw a wave of nationalistic, back-slapping hysteria in the

and the killing has served as a sorely needed propaganda tool to enhance the standing of the

military in the eyes of the domestic public.

Despite world-wide celebrations and Obama’s rise in popularity at home and the propaganda value of the killing, there is no evidence that the death will have any impact on the flagging military and political situation of the US in South Asia, the Middle East and other theatres of high tension.

The Socialist Party are not conspiracy theorists, but we note that the initial White House bin Laden story was so amateurishly broadcast, that within three days it had been altered several times, making it seem that Obama was involved in a game of Chinese whispers with his advisors. And what stands out is the nonchalant and haughty clumsiness of this and similar official announcements, as if the White House has become so convinced of its ability to hoodwink us that practically no attempt is made to make reports credible. So long as the US has an agenda then it can be sold with any version of a story, regardless of its credibility.

So just what agendas does the news of a dead bin Laden story help promote? Well, firstly, and not surprisingly, within a few hours of Obama’s statement, CIA director Leon Panetta ominously suggested that bin Laden’s death would trigger new 9/11-type attacks from al Qaedians seeking revenge for the death of their leader. Paradoxically this can only increase the demand for more profits from the military-industrial complex, whose lobbyists will waste no time in promoting the case for more investment in the US war machine.

Homeland Security jumped on board and posited that the killing of bin Laden would inspire “homegrown violent extremists” (inclusive of environmentalists and anti-war protestors) to acts of political fanaticism.

Helping with the post-Osama spin, Senator Hilary Clinton seemed all too keen to help boost the profits of the military/security complex and the authority of Homeland Security, by asserting that bin Laden’s death was testament that the war on terror was paying off and must be allowed to carry on, unfettered, until the enemies of the US are no more.

Elsewhere, others in the Obama administration quickly seized on the Pakistan achievement to promote their own sinister agenda, with Americans reliably informed that their doubts on the use of torture were misplaced and that bin Laden was actually found as a direct result of information gleaned by the CIA’s torture of captives

Some have suggested the death of bin Laden affords the US an escape strategy from Afghanistan, bringing closure to a decade of embarrassment in the country. To be sure, the US’ attempts to create a pliant puppet regime in Kabul are failing. The Taliban, indeed, al Qaeda, is no nearer defeat than ten years ago and still notching up US casualties. Quite significantly, in the latter regard, at Kabul airport on 29^th April, nine high-ranking US military officers were assassinated by a "reliable" Afghan fighter pilot That this attack happened in an ostensibly high security area, implies that no place in Afghanistan is secure from attack by the Afghan resistance, that anyone is vulnerable, and that not even allied Afghan military personnel can be trusted.

With the US tied down in an unpopular war in Afghanistan, domestic woes rising and his political standing falling, it would seem Obama was desperate for a military success story, moreso considering 9/11 is now a decade ago and years of rampant military expenditure are factoring high in the current budget deficit.

Undoubtedly, the ‘War on Terror’ will continue to serve many interests, with politicians promoting the concept at every opportunity to justify overseas military excesses and to keep the public in a state of mild panic. It is thus worth looking at the concept of terrorism itself and to judge the definers by their own definition.

The US Army Manual definition of terrorism is “the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence, to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature, through intimidation, coercion or instilling fear.”

This is quite close to the British government’s definition, which is “the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting, and is intended to influence the government, or intimidate the public, and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological case.”

When these two definitions are considered, then it becomes clear that the very creation of government terrorist-related propaganda, pumped daily by a fawning media, is itself an act of terrorism on us. Make no mistake, the war on terror is intended to frighten us – to get us all paranoid about a freedom-loathing bogeyman who is just waiting to come and destroy all we hold sacred – and to get us to fall in line behind the wider objectives of US and British foreign policy, which are in reality the objectives of a small corporate elite who really call the shots in both countries.

George Bush was every bit the terrorist when he introduced the “Shock and Awe” strategy of 2003 and indeed when he announced “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. Likewise with Tony Blair who announced to a terrified British public that Saddam could reach Britain with his WMDs within 45 minutes – a fact that that later proved to be total fallacy.

It is, perhaps, important to set the war on terror in context. America, for 45 years, terrified us with the threat of the Soviet menace, meanwhile expanding its reach all over the world.

When the Kremlin’s empire collapsed, America suddenly found itself deprived of its hegemonic credentials, no longer able to use its anti-communist passport to interfere in global affairs from Cuba to Vladivostok – the end of the cold war meant it was stamped null and void.

It now needed a new propaganda framework through which to assert its authority on the international stage, a new enemy, a new bogeyman to protect us all from – and the first bogeyman who reared his head was Saddam Hussein, who invaded Kuwait within two years of the Berlin Wall falling, sparking the first Gulf War and the start of the US obsession with Iraq that has lasted 20 years. Saddam would later be joined by Osama in 2001 after 9/11, the events of which all of us are now over-familiar with.

Notably, the language and jargon used to discuss the war on terror, all its definitions, is chosen by the US political elite. Likewise it is the US that gets to delineate the ideology of the enemy, whether it be fascist or communist or militant Islamic. In the case in question it would have been insensitive in the extreme to declare a war on Islam, so North Korea had to be incorporated into Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, less the entire Islamic world rise up against the USA.

The US has certainly benefited from the war on terror, extending its reach like no empire in history. It now has in excess of 700 military bases around the world, and these bases can be found in 177 of the world’s 193 UN recognised countries. More likely, it seems the war on terror has everything to do with full spectrum dominance and the desire of the US capitalist elite to control the world’s mineral wealth, trade routes, foreign markets, areas of influence and to maintain the strategic sites from which all these sources of profit can be defended. Little wonder there are many who claim that if Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to create him to get into Afghanistan.

Then why Afghanistan? The Caspian Basin, which the country borders, contains an estimated $12 trillion dollars worth of oil. It is not the case that he US wants this oil for itself, but needs a presence in Afghanistan to be able to control just who does have access to it.

There are real contenders for US economic supremacy, namely India, Russia and China, all with a growing and insatiable thirst for oil to lubricate the wheels of their own profit machines. By controlling as much oil as they can, the US gets to stack the odds in its own favour.

But before you can mobilise to take over the world’s scarce resources you first need to terrify your people. You need them on your side. You need their consent, their support and their approval of you as the champion of freedom.

This is why George Bush could so cleverly tell the American people: “They hate our freedom, our freedom of religion, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with one another,” and that “you are either with us or with the terrorists.”

This was not just Orwellian double-speak. This tactic came straight from Nazi Germany and from Joseph Goebbels:

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie ... The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the governments of George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Tony Blair have told and repeated a “lie big enough" to confirm Joseph Goebbels' statement, and the American and British people have come to believe it. It is the "War on Terror."

Whilst we were informed that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were in retaliation for 9/11, it is now clear that the Bush administration had them clearly in mind upon taking office, and set in motion as early as Feb. 3, 2001, some seven months before 9/11 and thus had nothing to do with terrorism.

9/11 presented a fantastic opportunity. In the ensuing anger and bewilderment, the bush administration could disguise its objective and the true nature of its intended wars and swing into action.

In Afghanistan, the duplicity of the "War on Terror," however, is clearly revealed if we consider a few simple facts:

In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of capturing the terrorists. Taliban offers to hand over Osama bin Laden, if the US could provide proof he was responsible for 9/11, were dismissed.

Neither the CIA nor the FBI have ever stated that Osama bin Laden was behind 9/11. Although bin Laden was on the FBI’s list of most wanted men, it was for something unrelated.

A quite recent survey in Afghanistan’s Helmand province found that 97% of people interviewed had not heard of 9/11 almost 10 years after the event.

The War on Terror has not only validated the US passport - allowing it to play the role of globo-cop to further the interests of its own capitalist elite - pushing aside anyone who gets in its way - it has also strengthened the hand of the state at home also. For out of the war on terror came the Patriot Act (USA) and the Terrorism Act (Britain) which put civil disobedience on a par with a felony. Any one of us can now be charged under anti-terror legislation if we step out of line and challenge the power of the state and, with it, the capitalist system which it overseas.

Orwell’s words come only too readily to mind when contemplating White House pronouncements: “Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future.”

Poem - Thoughts after watching pickets on TV

2011-02-21T23:28:00.004Z

Well, this site has been inactive too long, not least because I couldn’t remember the bloody password or email address that opened it and also, its fair to say, that my spirit has been kicked to f**** for some time.

Anyway, this is me re-launching Class Warfare with a recently unearthed poem that I penned twenty-plus years ago, in the wake of the Battle of Orgreave.

Thoughts after watching pickets on TV

Disheartened miners knew just who to blame.
Perhaps they found analogy in Scargill’s name –
a vengeful shark? “But then, just when w’ thought that it
was safe t’ go back in t’ pit, w' saw’
a comrade gettin' fisted off the law.
‘E nearly got away but slipped in horse’s shit”

Most viewers watched with empathy the charge
of mounted police on humble moles and serg-
eants urging desk-acquainted cops, “advance and cosh.”
The angry pickets, lacking MUFTI train-
ing, hurled abuse and bricks and sticks in vain.
It seems they weren’t as disciplined, nor half as posh.

I watched in shock the state-rewarded thrust
Of wooden batons on some miner’s crust.
His temple spewed the colour of his politics.
He grabbed a sound recordist’s coat and said,
while pointing to his coal-seem-gaping head,
“I ‘ope your bleedin’ camera’s catchin’ all of this.”

What was that army beating shields and chant-
ing one in unsion? Some muffled rant
intended to un-nerve their foe? Will right-wing press
explain away the carnage here without
the commie imagery – the front page clout
at Marx – neglecting to include the Russian mess?

Will evolution give the miners thick-
er skulls to help absorb those downward sick-
ly thuds, or elongate the long arm of the law?
Will miners one day grow immune to pain,
or will they calmly compromise and gain
a mole’s buck teeth, his quite efficient digging paw?

BNP elected official gets arse kicked for telling porkies

2009-09-25T17:32:00.007+01:00

Richard Barnbrook - the BNP's third highest elected official and their only member of the London Greater Assembly (pictured doing a Monty Python Holy Grail impression) - has been exposed fabricating two murders in a high profile BNP campaign. He has been found guilty of bringing both the Greater London Authority and the Barking and Dagenham Council into disrepute - his lies show the depths the BNP are willing to stoop to in their propaganda war.

Because of the severity of his lies, Barnbrook has been suspended by the Council for a month, forced to submit a written apology to the Greater London Authority and made to undertake "training." This is just the tip of the iceberg - the BNP has been capitalising on fear for years in an attempt to take over working class communitiues But this time is different - this time we have proof in black and white that their campaign is entirely based on fear, falsehood and hatred.

Barnbrook is right to be concerned about people in Barking and Dagenham who carry blades, and who think nothing at all about posing for pictures with them.

Biden and Powell Warn of a Generated Crisis

2009-01-23T13:51:00.003Z

Nostradamus, eat your heart out! Colin Powell and Joe Biden, both on the same day, are talking about a crisis that will occur in January 2009, on or around the 22nd. Can someone define a “generated crisis”? All that's missing from these videos is reference to the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land

2009-01-17T22:35:00.008Z

U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Sut Jhally & Bathsheba Ratzkoff / U.S. / 2003 / 80 min

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites--oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others--work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.

Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one. The documentary also explores the ways that U.S. journalists, for reasons ranging from intimidation to a lack of thorough investigation, have become complicit in carrying out Israel's PR campaign. At its core, the documentary raises questions about the ethics and role of journalism, and the relationship between media and politics.

Interviewees include Seth Ackerman, Mjr. Stav Adivi, Rabbi Arik Ascherman, Hanan Ashrawi, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Neve Gordon, Toufic Haddad, Sam Husseini, Hussein Ibish, Robert Jensen, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Karen Pfeifer, Alisa Solomon, and Gila Svirsky.

New York Zionists celebrate the deaths of Gazan children

2009-01-16T17:28:00.008Z

This film perhaps makes more sense in light of the US political elite’s response to the bloodshed in Gaza.

You just knew in advance of the vote on US Resolution 1860 on the 8th January that it was going to be shit on by the US. Of the 101 Israel-related irresolutions voted on at the UN, 65 have been critical of Israel; none of the Palestinians. Israel has observed none of them. The US has scuppered them all. What is instructive is that the US so blatantly looked for the tiniest breach of UN resolution to launch a war on Iraq.

Ironically, Condoleza Rice who assisted in the preparation of the aforementioned resolution was eventually instructed not to vote fort it. Seemingly, according to the boastings of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, when he heard the US intended to vote on the resolution he demanded to get Bush on the phone, and refused to back down after being told that Bush was at that moment giving a lecture in Philadelphia. In double-quick time, Bush interrupted his lecture to answer Olmert's call, so Olmert has claimed, and to be told which way the US was expected to vote at the UN.

Now cast your mind back a few years. On the morning of September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit------and he went on reading. Hit for the second time by a plane, that is – having been informed before he entered the class that one plane had already hit the twin towers. The US was so clearly under attack by hijacked planes and Bush sat for seven more minutes, the book My Pet Goat, being far more interesting.

Now, here we have Olmert calling Bush and demanding he comes to the phone and Bush responds in an instant? Jeez, who is cracking the whip in the USA?

Israeli politicians have been boasting for years about the respect they command in the US and their power and influence there. Consider the line form my last posting: “A member of the Israeli war party once commented that New York has only two Senators representing it in Congress.

LIkerwise, you needed no crystal ball to know that The House of Representatives would vote in support of Israel. Indeed, they voted 390-5 for a resolution that backed Israel in its Gaza onslaught, affirming "Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza." A day earlier, the Senate overwhelmingly supported Israel and its right to defend itself against terrorism.

The US Senate (8th January) voted 100% on a non-binding resolution promoted by the influential Israeli lobby AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee), and effectively endorsing Israel’s war on Gaza. The resolution, entitled “A resolution expressing solidarity with Israel in Israel’s defense against terrorism in the Gaza Strip” recognizes “the right of Israel to defend itself against attacks from Gaza” and reaffirms “the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas”.

Is it any wonder New York Zionists can thus celebrate on the streets? Is it any wonder they feel so unashamed of their ostentatious shows of jingoism, when Israeli state violence is so clear;ly endorsed by Congress and indeed the president?

Oh, here’s Bush again, having been told that a second plane had hit the twin towers:

The Zionist House of Representatives

2009-01-12T10:55:00.009Z

A member of the Israeli war party once commented that New York has only two Senators representing it in Congress. Israel has fifty. The same goes for the House. Of Reprobates s. They just voted a "two thumbs" up for Israel's military assault on Gaza.

It's hard to get Congress to agree on anything, especially in matters relating to the future and physical and economic health of the US. However, one thing both sides of the aisle can agree on - consistently and overwhelmingly - is that anything the Israeli war party wants to do is fine by them.

You really should see this following video.

Regardless of his politics, you just have to admire Ron Paul for telling it like it is – in this instance that Hamas was largely an Israeli invention and that militant Islam can be placed at the doorstep of US foreign policy.

Uncensored Video Report From a Doctor In a Gaza Hospital

2009-01-07T12:10:00.002Z

Dr . Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor in Gaza, tells Sky News that the number of civilians injured and killed in Gaza proves that Israel is deliberately attacking the population.

Transcript:

“Just a little bit more than an hour ago the Israelis bombed the central fruit market in Gaza city and we had a mass influx of about 50 injured and between 10 and 15 killed. At the same time they bombed an apartment house with children playing on the roof and we had a lot of children also. So this is really like speaking from the dumps of Inferno, it’s like hell here now, and it’s been bombing all night. Until now close to 500 people have been killed and the number of casualties is getting to 2,500 of which 50% are children and women.

Are your hospitals reaching capacity? Can you deal with these people?

We have been doing surgery around the clock. I have just talked with one of my colleagues in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit), he's not been sleeping for three days and the hospital is completely overcrowded, we are running 6 - 7 Ors (Operating Rooms) and there are injuries you just don’t want to see in this world… children coming in with open abdomens and legs cut off. We just had a child that we had to amputate both legs and an arm. And their only crime is being civilians and Palestinians living in Gaza. The relief now is not more doctors and more drugs; the relief now is to stop the bombing immediately, this cannot go on, it’s a disaster.

You’ve talked about the civilians, the women, the children, the men who aren’t involved in this, but are you also getting casualties that are Hamas fighters?

To be honest, we came on New Year’s Eve in the morning. I’ve seen one military person among the tenths… I mean hundreds that we’ve seen and treated, so anybody who tries to portrait this as a totally clean war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza, and we can prove that with numbers. And you have to remember that the average age of the Gaza inhabitants is 17 years, it’s a very young population, and 80% are living below the poverty limit of the UN. So this is a poor and very young people, and they are able to escape absolutely nowhere, because they cannot flee like other populations can in war time, because they are fenced in and they are in a cage, so they’re bombing 1.5 million people in a cage… young people, poor people and, you know, you cannot separate between the civilians and the fighters in such a situation.”

Barak Obama - No Real Change in the Whitehouse

2009-01-01T14:53:00.003Z

Judging by the ubiquitous media-generated euphoria that greeted the Barak Obama victory in the US presidential election, you could be forgiven for thinking that the class struggle had ended in the USA. Across the globe, the world’s media intimated that this was the dawn of a new age and hundreds of millions of workers breathed a sigh of relief, convinced President Obama will now undo all the wrongdoing carried out by President Bush and generally improve the quality of their lives and the safety of the planet.

The first thing to note, however, is that this had been the most expensive American election so far. The pooled cost of the Republican and Democratic campaigns was a cool $1 billion. The McCain camp raised $340 million whereas the Obama team secured $640 million.While Obama’s team boasted that most of their money came from small $100 and $200 donors, in truth the great bulk of his financial support came from Wall Street and the US corporate elite and was way in advance of that given to John McCain, suggesting the US capitalism plc feels its profits are best protected via Obama. The US power elite bankrolled the Obama campaign and for no other reason than that they know he will have to repay their loyalty.

An estimated 64 percent of the US electorate turned out to vote – a record by all accounts - 62.3 million votes. The majority of the extra voters were Blacks and Latino, not only drawn to the ballot box by the longing to oust a reactionary Republican regime, or by Obama’s promise of ‘change’ but, moreover, because Obama was non–white. Socialists could only watch on and comment that this election was not a race issue, but a class issue and lament their selective amnesia. One time Secretary of State Collin Powell rose through the ranks covering up the My Lai massacre and famously presented false evidence to the UN in furtherance of the US justification for the invasion of Iraq. Consider too his successor Condoleezza Rice, the zealous maid-servant to Bush’s imperialist strategy.

To be sure, Obama was not breaking any mould, despite his hope-fused rhetoric. The vast majority of voters, indeed workers the world over, were heartily fed up with Bush’s wars, his imperialist conquests, the US disregard for international law and the increasing pariah status this had earned America and sincerely wanted to see the back of it. The signs, however, that Obama was more of a wolf in sheep’s clothing were already there, not least in the Senate where he sanctioned every increase in funding for the Iraq war that George Bush requested.

Furthermore, like Bush, Obama is a supporter of the death penalty. He is pro-pollutant nuclear and coal industries and, whilst the Guardian could optimistically run a headline “Obama will move to veto Bush laws” (10 November), has not mentioned eradicating repressive legislation such as the Patriot Act, homeland security, the Military Commissions Act, internet control, and wiretapping and spying on the US populace.

It certainly looks like the Bush administration’s imperial ambitions will continue under Obama. He has already spoken about building up US military power by 20,000 troops and has declared his intention to cut troop numbers in Iraq and transfer them to a surge in Afghanistan and indeed spread war to nuclear armed Pakistan. All of this will be, as under Bush, carried out to further the interests of a profit-hungry corporate elite and veiled in pompous patriotic oratory about spreading democracy and American values and fighting the “war on terror.” Undoubtedly, Obama will soon be using the hackneyed theme of social unity to wage the class war internally and abroad on behalf of a small power elite.

He also undertaken, to “isolate Hamas”, elected in democratic elections that were verified by an international team of observers and, picking up the baton from Bush, used his first press conference as president-elect to likewise cock a snook at the US National Intelligence Estimate and evidence presented by the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear intentions, and accused Iran of the "development of a nuclear weapon" and vowed "to prevent that from happening."

If Obama apologists think President Obama will put a halt to the blood letting they are going to be sorely disappointed. Make no mistake; whilst the left are fond of castigating Republicans as the masters of war, the truth is that historically the Democrats have started far more wars than the GOP. More recently, under the last Democrat to hold office, President Clinton, one million Iraqis are said to have died under US enforced sanctions, 500, 000 of them children. Sorties over Iraq were flown every single day Clinton was in power. Yugoslavia was mercilessly bombed and a much needed pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was bombed on the pretext that it was manufacturing Chemical weapons, and villages in Afghanistan were flattened because Bin-Laden was presumed to be living there. And who could forget the US invasion of Somalia, with troops storming the beaches live on prime time TV!

Who will make up the Obama administration is at the time of writing speculation, though we do know his Chief of Staff is Israeli army veteran Rahm Emanuel, popularly viewed as Likudist hawk and that his National Securtiy Adviser will be architect of the Mujahedeen Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Not only is Obama incapable of ushering in significant change, bar a few miserly reforms, but neither is there anyone he can bring to his administration capable of bringing the change that was so promised in his election campaign for no other reason that changers do not get confirmed by the Senate. There exist quite influential interest groups – the AIPAC, the military security complex, Wall Street etc to hinder the advancement of such undesirables

The hope many have in Obama to implement policies that will benefit the class that matters is misplaced. His political rawness means he will be manipulated by more experienced advisers, little different from the neo-cons, maybe even key figures from the Bush administration, and pressured by a corporate elite who funded his victory to execute policies that fit in with their own agenda.

The outcome of US elections carries one truth: namely that whichever candidate becomes president, he has but one remit once in office – to further the interests of the US corporate elite. It’s just not a feasible option for any newly elected president to entertain any idea other than guaranteeing a safe playing field for the domestic profit machine and doing what’s needed to try to ensure the US maintains its global hegemonic status.

Hemp In a Sane Society (2)

2008-12-24T12:01:00.001Z

Wikipedia informs us that the custom of putting up a Christmas tree can be traced to 16th century Germany, though neither an inventor nor a single town can be identified as the sole origin for the tradition, which was a popular merging of older traditions; in the Cathedral of Strasbourg in 1539, the church record mentions the erection of a Christmas tree.

Back then the guilds started putting up Christmas trees in front of their guildhalls: a Bremen guild chronicle of 1570 reports how a small fir was decorated with apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers, and erected in the guild-house, for the benefit of the guild members' children, who collected the dainties on Christmas day.

But, nuff of that bollocks…after all the Xmas tree is used to help the workers decorate their homes during the festival of the birth of the Christ-child, to help them numb the pain of their oppression. Whilst many will defend the growing of conifers for use during Xmas festivities, there is another “green tree” of sorts, which has had a bad press and which needs far more promotion by workers – a wee tree that has countless uses and benefits; one that could feed and clothe and help house millions of the world's poor and increase the standard of living for everyone., and which this blog has covered in the past. Just one snag, for various reasons, our masters oppose its mass cultivation. The following film explains…

Why is the massively valuable and versatile hemp plant illegal in the United States and indeed elsewhere? Three reasons. Making hemp illegal:

1. Provides make-work for a vast army of "law enforcers" who then are available to be used for other social control work

2. Protects the market share of numerous well organized lobbies: alcohol makers, plastics and chemical manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and cotton growers (still a powerful economic force in

America

200 + years after the Civil War.)

3. Gives fascist minded politicians yet another way to control the population

Zombie Nation - mass neuro-toxicity

2008-12-22T12:05:00.005Z

Two themes I often return to on this site are mind control and food adulteration. This video focuses on both. It commences with a Dr Russell Blaylock talking about the “chemical dumming down of society” to make people generally gullible, unable to think for themselves and dependent on governments and moves onto mass neuro-toxity via mercury poisoning and water fluoridation (a theme covered elsewhere on this site). The film also refers briefly to the work of Edward Bernays (again covered elsewhere on this site), a champion of water fluoridation.

Bernays helped the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and other special interest groups to convince the American public that water fluoridation was safe and beneficial to human health. This was achieved by using the American Dental Association in a highly successful media campaign.

Call it conspiracy theory if you want, but if our leaders thought there were chemicals they could get us to ingest on a daily basis, chemicals that could indeed “dumb is down”, make us more manageable, do you think they would hesitate in using them?

The film cites a source I’m yet to confirm, although there are many references to it in cyber space. It suggests that the fluoridation of water was first introduced in nazi concentration camps and quotes a Charles Perkins, a chemist, who wrote the following to the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 2nd 1954: 'in the 1930s, Hitler and the German Nazis envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass control, which was submitted to, and adopted by, the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would induce sterility in women and so on. In this scheme of mass control sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.'Still with Bernays, these quotes from his 1928 book Propaganda show why he was so useful to the ruling elite of his day, and indeed right now.

Still with Bernays, these quotes from his 1928 book Propaganda show why he was so useful to the ruling elite of his day, and indeed right now.

p37
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons-a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million-who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.

p59
Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities .. about immigration who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?

p60
A presidential candidate may be "drafted" in response to "around popular demand," but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting L.. around a table in a hotel room.

p61
A man buying a suit of clothe imagines that he is choosing, according to his taste and his personality, the kind of garment which he prefers. In reality, he may be obeying the orders of an anonymous gentleman tailor in London. This personage is the silent partner in a modest tailoring establishment, which is patronized by gentlemen of fashion and princes of blood. He suggest to British noblemen and others a blue cloth instead of gray, two buttons instead of three, or sleeves a quarter of an inch narrower than last season. The distinguished customer approves of the idea.

But how does this fact affect John Smith of Topeka?

The gentleman tailor is under contract with a certain large American firm, which manufactures men's suits, to send them instantly the designs of the suits chosen by the leaders of LondonBoston, and Philadelphia wear them. And the Topeka fashion. Upon receiving the designs, with specifications as to color, weight, and texture, the firm immediately places an order with the cloth makers for several hundred thousand dollars' worth of cloth. The suits made up according to the specifications are then advertised as the latest fashion. The fashionable men in New York Chicago, man, recognizing this leadership, does the same.

Women are just as subject to the commands of invisible government as men. A silk manufacturer, seeking a new market for its product, suggested to a large manufacturer of shoes that women's shoes should be covered with silk to match their dresses. The idea was adopted and systematically propagandized. A popular actress was persuaded to wear the shoes. The fashion spread. The shoe firm was ready with the supply to meet thee created demand. And the silk company was ready with the silk for more shoes.

p63
The new profession of public relations has grown up because of the increasing complexity of modern life and the consequent necessity for making the actions of one part of the public understandable to other sectors of the public. It is due, too, to the increasing dependence of organized power of all sorts upon public opinion. Governments, whether they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist, depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts and, in fact, government is government only by virtue of public acquiescence. Industries, public utilities, educational movements, indeed all groups representing any concept or product, whether they are majority or minority ideas, succeed only because of approving public opinion. Public opinion is the unacknowledged partner in all broad efforts.

The public relations counsel, then, is the agent who, working with modern media of communications and the group formations of society, brings an idea to the consciousness of the public.

p71
The systematic study of mass psychology revealed t7 students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas, Walter Lippmann, and others who continued with searching studies of the group mind, established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose. If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?

p73
If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences.

p.74

But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with "the interests" seemed necessary corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.

By playing upon a old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass group emotions.

p75
It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud( who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in business, or a means of pleasing his wife.

This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.

p75
Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.

p84

... while, under the handicraft of small-unit system of production was that typical a century ago, demand created the supply, today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable. This entails a vastly more complex system of distribution than formerly.

p109
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of 3 the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

Fortunately, the sincere and gifted politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.

p110
The political apathy of the average voter, of which we hear so much, is undoubtedly due to the fact that the politician does not know how to meet the conditions of the public mind. He cannot dramatize himself and his platform in terms which have real meaning to the public. Acting on the fallacy that the leader must slavishly follow, he deprives his campaign of all dramatic interest. An automaton cannot arouse the public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can. But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can lead is the expert use of propaganda.

Whether in the problem of getting elected to office or in the problem of interpreting and popularizing new issues, or in the problem of making the day-to-day administration of public affairs a vital part of the community life, the use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life.

p119
It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave to the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but know how to sway the public.

p120
Good government can be sold to a community just as any other commodity can be sold.

p120
One reason, perhaps, why the politician today is slow to take up methods which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry to the media of communication on which his power depends.

The newspaperman looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.

p123
Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.

p123
The criticism is often made that propaganda tends make the President of the United States so important that he becomes not the President but the embodiment of the idea of hero worship, not to say deity worship. I quite agree that this is so, but how are you going to stop a condition which accurately reflects the desires of a certain part of the public? The American people rightly sense the enormous importance of the executive's office. If the public tends to make of the President a heroic symbol of that power, that is not the fault of propaganda but lies in the very nature of the office and its relation to the people.

EARTHLINGS (DOCUMENTARY)

2008-12-21T00:25:00.006Z

I've embedded this must-see film in the Socialist TV blog and, having just watched it for a second time, am convinced it needs a wider airing. This is one serious film - though if you’re squeamish keep away from it. I think our relationship with other earthlings is something socialists have never considered fully in their imaginings of a future society. Will we eat meat, fish? Will we wear leather? There are few better places to start that debate than by watching this important documentary

The website created to promote it says

EART HLIN G S is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers." The film is narrated by Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoe nix (GLADIATOR) and features music by the critically acclaimed platinum artist Moby .

With an in-depth study into pet stores, puppy mills and animals shelters, as well as factory farms, the leather and fur trades, sports and entertainment industries, and finally the medical and scientific profession, EARTHLINGS uses hidden cameras and never before seen footage to chronicle the day-to-day practices of some of the largest industries in the world, all of which rely entirely on animals for profit. Powerful, informative and thought-provoking, EARTHLINGS is by far the most comprehensive documentary ever produced on the correlation between nature, animals, and human economic interests. There are many worthy animal rights films available, but this one transcends the setting. EARTHLINGS cries to be seen. Highly recommended!

EARTHLINGS has taken five years to produce. What began as a series of Public Service Announcements on spaying and neutering pets, evolved into a feature-length film on every major animal-related issue. Writer/Director Shaun Monson began the process by shooting footage at animal shelters in South Central L.A., Long Beach and North Hollywood. The PSAs were soon completed as his interest moved to other problem areas, like food and scientific research. In time, he accumulated a small library of material from several animal welfare organizations, and started editing. The process was a slow one. As footage gradually came in, Joaquin's narration was recorded (in stages), and a soundtrack was added. Along with all of Moby's music, some original pieces were also written for the film. In 2005, EARTHLINGS premiered at the Artivist Film Festival, (where it won Best Documentary Feature), followed by the Boston International Film Festival, (where it won the Best Content Award), and most recently at the San Diego Film Festival, (where it won Best Documentary Film, as well as the Humanitarian Award to Joaquin Phoenix for his work on the film).

Shoes hurled at Bush

2008-12-14T22:04:00.013Z

My God, what on earth could have incensed this Iraqi journalist - Muntadar al-Zeidi - to hurl his shoes at the world's greatest defender of freedom and democracy, namely President George W Bush? Said Bush, moments later: "I dunno what the guy's cause is." Hmmm, maybe the 1.3 million dead Iraqis since Bush authorized an invasion of Iraq on behalf of US oil interests? Its a toughie. Jeez, some reporters are just so damned unappreciative

Nonchalantly, Bush said that all he knew was that it was a size 10. I also take a size 10 and have a penchant for Dr Marten boots, and I know I'd not have missed. Seriously though, how many people on this planet would have just loved to see that first shoe hit Bush straight in the mouth, dislodging a row of teeth and sending them hurtling down his throat.? That figure must run into at least 5 billions. Bush also said: "This doesn't represent the Iraqi people". What? Well...er...not if 10 million of them regret the shoe was not filled with dynamite, Mr Bush. A shoe in the mouth for this merchant of death and destruction? Nothing compared to what should be done to the gloopy, blood-soaked bastard.

The journalist screamed as he threw shoes: "This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog!! This is from the widows, orphans, and those killed in Iraq!" No doubt this poor journalist will now be banged up for kissing Bush thus. I'd give the guy a medal and a horseshoe to throw next time. Meanwhile this and similar videos on Youtube will be the most viewed and shared in years (as I write, this one had 245 hits).

Bugger Christmas

2008-12-09T18:19:00.012Z

They’re closing down Woolworths in Jarrow, indeed all over the country; sacking in excess of some 30,000 workers. The company has gone into administration, with debts of £385 million. Saturday gone, the Jarrow branch had a sale on – 50% off everything, so naturally the place was choc-a-block, with queues stretching all the way back to the River Tyne (I know, I exaggerate, but you get the picture). People stood in the queue with their arms full, looking impatient and frustrated. Christmas only weeks away and these poor workers here looked sick of their lives, all of them hoping they can get through this period of unfettered, wallet-emptying consumerism with their sanity in tact.

The usual thing round here, bar the credit cards and the loan from the DWP social fund (that is if you’re on income support, otherwise you can fuck off and apply for a crisis loan, in which case they’ll tell you ever louder to “fuck off”) is the Provident loan. They give their loans to anyone, no questions asked and the interest rate is a staggering 68%. I know parents who have taken out a loan from the social fund as well as the “provi” loan. The former is interest-free and is deducted from your benefits at source. The two together amount to a hefty millstone when you’re struggling to survive on benefits.

So, if you’re on state benefits, it’s like your whole year centres on Xmas day, if not preparing for it then paying for it and having to do without essentials just to meet the loan agreements. You get your loans out just before Xmas and 50 weeks later you’re still paying them off and doing without other essentials throughout that period. I jest not – for many families, Jesus Christ, or rather what takes place in his name, has them skint year in, year out. I know parents who quite literally dread this time of year, who curse its approach. Do they know it’s Christmas? as Bob Geldof and friends once sang? Too fucking right they do – they pay for it every day of their adult lives.

And how this wonderful consumer society serves the poor; forever exposing the emptiness of our lives and kindly providing the means by which our lives can be enriched, proving that we too can enjoy happiness over Christmas, just like the well-to-dos. As the Citizen Advice Bureau has found, interest on this ‘happiness’ can rise to as much as 1800 per cent a year – a happiness that’s cheap at half the price…eh?

And just where the fuck would we be without the advertising industry who continually alert us to needs we never even knew we had and who constantly remind us that our lives are really less satisfactory than we had hitherto imagined? I looked through an electrical store recently and was amazed to find items I honestly never even knew existed. Jeez, where’ve I been this last year? Thank God for PSPs, Nintendos, ipods, male face creams and the myriad gadgets we have amazingly managed to live without for 2 million years. Just how the fuck did our species survive without them? Sheesh! Consider this - according to the Worldwatch Institute, we have used more goods and services since 1960 than in all the rest of human history! Have all of these pleasure-inducing goods contributed to a general human happiness? No, over the same period, 25-year-olds in Britain have become ten times more likely to be afflicted by depression. The WHO recently estimated that by the end of the decade depression will be the second commonest disease in the developed world.

The unrelenting onslaught of advertising exerts constant pressure on parents in particular who, fearful their kids will be labelled, belittled and humiliated if their pressies are not up to scratch when they compare notes in the school yard, are more than ready to satisfy the most outlandish wants and bugger the cost and inconvenience for the next 52 weeks. To hell if that present you’ve just paid £250 for will end up in a cupboard after a few weeks, the novelty having worn off – to be sold for £50 on ebay in a few months time – you just can’t let the neighbours know your hard up.

And the sad thing is, we all know Christmas marketing is just one big profit-oriented scam, benefiting manufacturers, stores, and huge corporations, while driving individuals into debt. We all know it’s a game of winners and losers. You don’t need a degree in ethics to realise that the Chrimbo "wish lists" and "gift exchanges", the giving in que demeans the real concept of giving. We know this annual orgy of consumption – 40% of what we buy is binned, unused – is detrimental to the environment, filling landfills with useless packaging and discarded gifts. We know Christmas means misery for millions of families, depression for hundreds of thousands – the Samaritans say they receive an 8% increase in calls between Christmas day and New Year. Yet still we tag along with the damned charade, still we passively acquiesce in the madness. Even socialists take it seriously, for fuck’s sake. I know SPGB members, my comrades, who actually send out the conventional Christmas cards.

Seems the workers just need this annual fix, this distraction from the rat race, even if they do know its all bollocks

Me, as ever I’m pissed off with the unified bleatings of friends, family and associates, who mockingly call me "Scrooge" when I fail to fully endorse their ritual orgy of consumption or utter the hackneyed “are you set for Christmas yet?” type of remark. For I’m one of those dole wallahs with kids and grandkids, a single-parent to boot, who can say “Jesus Christ has got me skint.” And being a devout atheist, a Marxist, it smarts just that little bit more when you know you have to fucking conform – and phone up the ‘provi woman’ - just to save your kin humiliation.

So forgive me if you hear me say “Fuck Christmas! Stick yer Christmas tree up yer arse and put a match to that wee straw-filled manger.” To be sure, the class war is not suspended at Christmas as the religiously devout and profit mongers would have us believe. Indeed, the shameless robbery of our class is only accentuated when there are profits to be had.

If you’re looking for that anti-Xmas card, make your own like I do and use these pics below, courtesy of class warfare. Click to enlarge. Happy solstice :-)

Hemp in a Sane Society

2008-12-08T23:52:00.007Z

Any socialist will tell you of the insanity of modern production, of the great barrier to commonsensical productive methods and the use of natural resources in the service of humanity - namely profit - and of planned obsolescence and waste. One thing the establishment of world socialism will usher in is environmentally sustainable resources and eco-friendly productive processes and within a system in which the artificial barriers to production have been removed. And one natural resource that will undoubtedly be widely cultivated for the use of humanity is hemp. Hemp is a weed – most commonly associated perhaps with marijuana – but it has tens of thousands of uses. Watch, if you will these videos below.

Imagine a building material that is stronger than cement yet SIX TIMES lighter? Better yet, one of its key ingredients is the waste product of a plant that literally grows like a weed and is 100% environmentally safe and friendly – hemp. Well, Big Brother says we can't have it - because it's "dangerous to society."

The manufacture of traditional cement is incredibly energy intensive, so much so that many cement companies seek and receive legal variances to not only burn coal, but also medical waste and used automobile tires as fuel for their kilns.

After oil refineries and chemical plants, cement factories are the most polluting factories in the world, spewing tons of micro-particles containing toxins like arsenic and mercury into the air.

To be sure, the mass growing of hemp in no way implies that workers everywhere will be stoned all day long. Industrial hemp contains less than 1% of THC the psychoactive component of marijuana. So, trying to get high on industrial hemp is akin to trying to get drunk on Irn Bru.

Hemp is the world's strongest natural fibre. It has been used to make cloth and rope for over 10,000 years. Hemp was the first crop ever cultivated for textile production.

Hemp cloth is stronger, longer lasting, more resistant to mildew, and cheaper to produce than cloth made of cotton. Hemp ropes are known for their strength and durability. The original Levi Strauss jeans were made from a hempen canvas

In 1941 the Ford motor company produced an experimental automobile with a plastic body composed of 70% cellulose fibres from hemp. The car body could absorb blows 10 times as great as steel without denting. The car was designed to run on hemp fuel. Because of the ban on both hemp and alcohol the car was never mass produced.

Then hemp production started to impinge on other people’s profits and the big money people struck out to protect their interests. Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst led the crusade to ban hemp. Hearst owned millions of acres of prime timber land and a machine that simplified the process of making paper from hemp had just been invented. Hearst used his power as a publisher to create public panic about the evils of hemp and marijuana. Another big money player Pierre DuPont held patent rights to the sulfuric acid wood pulp paper process. In 1937 DuPont patented nylon rope made from synthetic petrochemicals. Along with Duponts backer Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon the big money people prevailed and near the end of 1937 Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. By placing a prohibitively high tax on hemp production it destroyed the industry. This was done to protect these big money interests of the timber, petrochemical, and cotton industries. Hemp was briefly re-legalized during W.W.II. The U.S. government produced the movie Hemp for Victory to encourage farmers to grow hemp.

Industrial hemp can replace cotton. Cotton is typically grown with large amounts of chemicals that are harmful to people, wildlife and the entire environment. Close to 50% of all the world's pesticides are sprayed on cotton. Hemp grows well in a wide variety of climates and soils. It requires far less fertilizer and pesticides than most commercial crops.

All parts of the hemp plant are useful. Hemp can be used to produce everything from fuel to soap. The oil from hemp seeds has the highest percentage of essential fatty acids and the lowest percentage of saturated fats.

Industrial hemp can yield 3-8 dry tons of fibre per acre. This is four times what an average forest can yield. It can replace wood fiber and help save our forests. Trees take approximately 20 years to mature - hemp takes 4 months. Paper made from hemp lasts for centuries, compared to 25-80 years for paper made from wood pulp.

Moreover, hemp is the perfect source for fuel. It produces more biomass than any other plant. It further can be used as a highly nutritious food source and in the production of medicines.

Needless to say, at the moment the mass cultivation of hemp, though it makes sound commonsense and helps solve a hundred human needs, will be opposed because it interferes with powerful interests. But fear not; the master class will not have it their own way forever. Socialism and the mass cultivation of hemp is on the cards as soon as the workers wake up and organise. And if the master class want to battle it out for the future of the planet, I'm sure we can find a first use for that hemp-based rope - nooses to hang the buggers with.

Advance copy of Identity

2008-12-07T14:58:00.003Z

A friend on the "inside" copied me this. Click image to enlarge.

BNP finally come clean in Voice of Freedom

2008-12-03T09:19:00.006Z

Click on image to enlarge

As referred to above, here is the Young, Nazi and Proud video. The ending, where Mr Collett is confronted with remarks that he made earlier in the programme, is classic - rather reminds me of something Omar Khayyam wrote: 'The moving finger writes; and, having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back or cancel half a line. Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.' Way to go, you Nazi bastard!

Meanwhile in Berlin......

2008-11-22T00:11:00.000Z

BNP Membership list now globally available

2008-11-19T23:15:00.006Z

The worst kept secret of all time

The Guardian today and most papers this week have covered the BNP membership list leak. To the dismay of the BNP, their entire membership list, hitherto supposedly a secret on a par with the true assassins of JFK, was posted on the internet, allegedly by a disgruntled ex-member of high rank. The organisation, needless to say, has suffered a collective panic attack, afraid people will know who they are. I personally was surprised to see there were 25 listed in my Jarrow parliamentary constituency - I thought there were more judging by the numbers turning up at their local meetings.

The list has been kept a secret on the left with activists reluctant to share it – so much for free access to the benefits of civilisation (or in this case uncivilisation) – and, whilst it has been removed from UK sites, it is available from overseas sites via: http://wikileaks.org/ The Wikileaks links to the said list have proved so popular that the site crashed tonight and the home page ran a simple message: Wikileaks is overloaded by readers looking for the BNP membership list.

Whether this gauges the number of people curious to see if old Mrs Jones down the road is a closet storm trooper, or if the site is being accessed by BNP members keen to see their name in print is anyone’s guess.

The list is even available on the Pirate Bay and Minova torrent sites and as I write have 225 and 190 seeders respectively. News now is that the membership list will be given away free with The Sun this coming Saturday.

The membership list has now even been google postcoded. You simply type in your postcode and find out your nearest neo-nazi . Click on their name and a map appears directing you to their home. No doubt the members of Antifa are having a field day. Bloody marvellous when its easier to locate your closest fash than your nearest PayPoint outlet - you'll know what I mean if you're trying to get your gas card charged up in Hebburn

Of course, its not the socialist way to suggest BNP members are supporters are targeted. Whilst their ideas are noxious and abhorrent, they can never be countered by violence or the threat of it, regardless of the violence they are associated with, not least because they are a symptom of class society and the myriad social problems it throws up. The BNP can only be defeated on the battlefield of ideas and this site provides plenty of ammunition in this regard.

And if you believe that your average BNPer will give you an intellectual run for your money, consider this piece from the Scotsman, and reported on the Stop the BNP site:

"The brightest children go on to vote Liberal Democrat or Green, according to a survey.

"The study by Edinburgh University researchers has found that childhood intelligence is linked to voting preferences and political involvement in adulthood.The study – which looked at voting patterns in the 2001 general election – found that those with higher IQ ratings were more likely to vote Lib-Dem or Green in an election.

"The survey – including cognitive tests at ages five and ten – was followed up with a study of voting habits at 34. Those who voted Green had an average IQ of 108.3, with Lib-Dem voters just behind at 108.2.

"Conservative and Labour voters were further behind – with scores of 103.7 and 103.0 respectively, while voters for Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru scored an average of 102.5. Scottish National Party voters had an average IQ of 102.2. The research also showed that British National Party voters had the lowest average intelligence – scoring just 98.4. Non-voters were found to have an average IQ of 99.7."

Class Warfare can only lament that no socialist was included in the research

Tainted Food Alert in the US (video)

2008-10-29T16:55:00.003Z

In China, ANYTHING made with Chinese-manufactured milk powder before September 14th was PULLED from their store shelves. In the US, these products are still being sold!

Foods at risk: ANY food manufactured in China and potentially any food containing milk powder. US food manufacturers imported millions of pounds of milk powder from China before September 14th. The FDA continues to this allow to be sold. This includes chocolate, cookies, cakes, and even things like packaged macaroni and cheese.

Background

Mike Mozart is a product designer who also runs a video blog about new developments in the toy industry. His reviews are normally light, cheerful affairs and completely apolitical.

If he appears distraught, it's because he is. Tis is serious. Mozart has discovered that the US is the ONLY country that still permits potentially melamine-contaminated food on its shelves. Even China has removed these products from its stores. This poison that killed and injured thousands of people, mainly children, may be in US food.

A few facts:

1. Melamine was added to food products manufactured in China to simulate protein content. These food products were imported into the US by the ton.

2. Melamine itself is bad, but much worse - and not reported - is that melamine is an industrial product, not a food product and often comes contaminated with a wide range of dangerous industrial toxins.There is no such thing as ‘food grade’ melamine. None of it is suitable for food.

3. The widespread practice of adding melamine to powdered milk products has killed and seriously injured thousands of children in China. Melamine injuries children by damaging their kidneys. There has already been a reported spike in kidney stones in American children.

Last year, when melamine was found in pet food sold in the US and traced to death in animals, it was headline news. This news, potentially far more serious, is being censored.

4. The Chinese government knew this contaminated food was on the shelves killing children and said nothing so as not to put a damper on the "Olympic spirit."

5. As much 20 MILLION POUNDS of food manufactured in China that contains milk powder was imported into the US this year. Also, it's not clear how many US food manufacturers use milk powder manufactured in China in their products.

6. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refuses to test for melamine contamination - or if is has, refuses to make the results of these tests available to the public. Further, the FDA refuses to force food manufacturers to remove the contaminated food from its shelves, something they are completely capable of doing.

7. Why is this being done?

Mozart theorizes: a) to prevent a scandal before the election and b) to avoid further deterioration of the US stock market. He could have added another: profit before human safety.

Are these motivations plausible?

Needless to say, the FDA has demonstrated over and over again throughout its history that it is a political agency designed to protect well connected corporate law breakers and has next-to-zero interest in the public welfare. Knowing the parties involved - China, the FDA, the Bush administration, the US news media, and corporate America - you can be sure that none of them can be trusted to look out for the welfare of the workers.

Vote Rigging in the US

2008-10-28T15:51:00.005Z

We all know the story of the 2004 US presidential election. The exit polls showed Bush was in for a kicking at the polls; John Kerry was to be the next US president, winning by a million-and-a-half votes, but by midnight in US the news was that Bush was in the lead and, next day, lacking legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded and bowed as Bush took the helm for another term. Bush was officially given a mandate to continue shredding the US constitution, increasing his own powers and those of the surveillance state, while pandering to the US corporatocracy and the merchants of war.

Those who cried foul were dismissed as conspiracy theorists by the press and nutters in “tin foil hats” by the GOP. The news media, Congress, and the Democratic Party, whilst well aware of the nationwide irregularities on election day, have never even attempted to do anything about it. Likewise, here’s a government hearing - never reported by the news media - that sums up the status of the security of the US voting system, while being suggestive of a vote rigging scam that should have sent Bush not to the White House but into the dustbin of history.

The possibility of rigged voting machines aside, there was undoubtedly a colossal and synchronised attempt to subvert the popular will of the US people. All over the US, Across the country, Repuke election personnel used a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election.

In Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the vast majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 - more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. Indeed, a staggering one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 turned up to cast their vote only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn’t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put Kerry in the White House. But Ohio was not unique. Irregularities were reported all over the country with voters finding they had been disenfranchised via registration challenges, faulty machines, turned away because voting queues were too long or one of the many other hurdles put in their way by Repuke election officials.

If this film is anything to go by the Repuke’s will be doing all in their power to see McCain takes over from Bush. Not convinced? Check out these films previously posted on this blog here : Don't be too surprised if McCain and Palin "win" next week. No matter how unlikely the outcome, the

news media stands ready to pump out a plausible

Recycle Life (Shelley's art project)

2008-09-01T21:33:00.004+01:00

I'm posting this for my daughter Shelley. This was her final project of a three year art course at College. Anyway, she passed with a triple distinction, being also the only one on the course to choose to do a film. She even went to the lengths of getting the logo she designed tattooed onto her ankle.

Hope you do well when you start Uni this month, bonny lass. Love you xx

Oh, for anyone reading this, she'd be obliged if you could share her link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuXYVLTisW4 Thanks.

US Combat Troops - Comfortably Numb

2008-08-28T23:19:00.011+01:00

I’ve written several times on this blog about the mental state of combat troops; i.e. about their colossal suicide rate or about the way the US Department of Defence is toying with the idea of medicating soldiers to desensitise them to combat trauma. For instance

Hidden cost of the allied invasio n and Guilt Free Soldier and Suicide epidemic among US vets

My argument has always been the same, namely that humans are not naturally aggressive, that we are not predisposed to dish out violence and that governments, realising this, will do anything to conceal the true cost of war, particularly with regards combatants and their inability to handle the stress of front line combat. Today’s Herald informs us that one in six American soldiers in Afghanistan and one in eight in Iraq, that the Pentagon claims to know of, are on daily doses of prescription antidepressants, sleeping pills or painkillers to help them cope with the stresses of combat. The Herald reports:

“The findings mean that at least 20,000 troops are on medication such as Prozac or diamorphine while serving in the front line or on equally dangerous convoy escort or driving duties in conflicts where insurgents regularly target the supply chain.

“While the vast majority would have been barred automatically from combat roles in earlier wars on medical and safety grounds, the pressure to provide up to 200,000 soldiers at any given time for the two major deployments has led to a relaxation of the rules.

“The Pentagon admitted that medication was tolerated because those sent to Afghanistan or Iraq were 'younger and healthier than the general population' and had been screened for mental illnesses before enlisting.”

Common sense suggests that the real reason that medication is tolerated is because the US has garrisons totalling 180,000 men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan alone; there to secure its control of world oil, resources and to start dismissing those found to take mind-controlling drugs, or giving them administrative posts, as is the case in the British army, means the only way they could maintain their oil empire is via conscription. And if your troops are comfortably numb, then what the fuck so long as they are doing their job and keeping open the oil pipelines. Which means that any legit or self-prescribed drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services back home soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours and this costs $$$$. But what the hell, there are profits to be had and natural resources to secure.

Drug use is nothing new by any means. If soldiers are not self-mediating then their top brass are seeing they are psychologically fit to kill people they have no real grievance with. Generals, history shows, have plied their troops with medicinal palliatives at least since George Washington ordered rum rations at Valley Forge. During World War II, the Nazis fuelled their blitzkrieg into France and Poland with the help of an amphetamine known as Pervitin. The U.S. Army also used amphetamines during the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, mental trauma has become so common that the Pentagon may expand the list of "qualifying wounds" for a Purple Heart — historically limited to those physically injured on the battlefield — to include posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Power of Conformity

2008-08-23T21:50:00.010+01:00

Candid Camera was a popular television program in the US in the 1960s. The program used the classic methodology of naturalistic experiments in social psychology as the source of its humorous scenarios. The resulting programs were not only entertaining, but also potentially instructive. For example, how independent is the average person when confronted with the all-powerful "consensus of the group?" Not very.

Creating a consensus quickly is the goal of every "shock and awe" propagandist. That's why it's often true that "a lie makes it half way around the world before the truth gets its pants on."

Professional liars - and I could tell you a few recent stories of them - have their stories worked out well in advance and then pump them out hard and fast long before thoughtful, honest analysts have the chance to ask even the first question.

Once the consensus is pointing in one direction, it becomes very difficult to take, hold and promote a contrary point of view, even if that point of view is accurate and the consensus is completely false.

That's why it's prudent to assume that ANYTHING you "know" that is consensus-based and was produced and is continuously supported by the so called "mainstream" news media (news, PR and/or propaganda) is probably the product of a calculated attempt to mislead.

As a simple rule of thumb, the proper response to ANYTHING that makes its way to the network news or the front page of a major newspaper is to ask yourself two questions: "Whose propaganda is this?" and "What facts are they withholding and skewing in a calculated attempt to mislead me?"

One of the most important skills in the propagandist's bag of tricks is controlling where your audience places its attention. In magic, it's called "misdirection." In politics, it's called setting the agenda.

Once you realize that EVERYTHING that's featured by the news media is most likely someone else's propaganda and that the key to successful deception is misdirection, you are well on your way to liberating your mind from a ton of nonsense and misinformation and, in the process, perhaps saving your own life some day.

Take this short test and see how powerful misdirection is and how it works:

Perception is limited - always. The challenge is not to perceive everything, it's to perceive what's important. The primary tool of the propaganda system (also known as "the news media") is misdirection, having you pay attention to the wrong things.

Cherie the class warrior

2008-05-18T15:03:00.006+01:00

If you knew her only as the daughter of the “Scouse git”, the antagonistic son-in-law of the bigot Alf Garnett in the BBC’s Till Death Is Do Part, you could forgive her claiming to be “a socialist”. But no, Cherie Blair is the wife of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair and stands boldly by everything he has done as PM.

I raise the matter because yesterday’s Guardian carried a full page piece on her; well, actually an interview by Martin Kettle and headed Yes, I am a socialist. However, nowhere is this statement qualified! I mean, nowhere does Kettle report her advocating common ownership and democratic control of productive wealth, abolition of the wages system, free access to the necessaries of life. There is not one single sentence that puts her within a million miles of the socialist camp. Indeed, the interview presents a person standing in stark contrast to every socialist principal I know.

Only into the second paragraph of the article we are told Cherie is a devout Catholic, attends mass regularly, so clearly believes the problems facing humanity can be sorted by divine intervention, by her and Tony praying to God, rather than by the workers uniting and taking control of their own destiny, sorting out problems themselves and with available technological and scientific resources that have been liberated from the constraints of the market system.

Asked whether it was right for Britain to invade Iraq, she says “Absolutely” and insists that her husband is “a man of integrity…doing everything he could to avoid war.” Perhaps she was in a coma at that point, in the run up to the invasion, when her husband presented to parliament and the British public the now notorious dossier on Iraq, entitled Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, and which turned out to be a report the British security services had largely plagiarised from a 10 -year-old piece a student had posted on the internet. Perhaps both she and Tony were asleep that cold February morning when two-million marched through the streets of London demanding no to war?

She says: “I’m probably the only person in the country who insists my husband is a socialist”. What, Cherie? And you’re a QC? Does that one voice in 65 million not suggest that Tony might just be a recognised die-hard defender of capitalism? NO? Well how about the standing ovations he received from CBI conferences? Perhaps the way he was quickly snapped up by the legendary and famously corrupt investment bankers JP Morgan when he stepped down as PM? NO? Okay, how about the mountain of sleaze, the cash for honours, the unreformed Tory anti-trade union legislation, student fees, treatment of the elderly, the decimation of the NHS and the education system? How about the fact that the press recently reported that the rich-poor gap in the UK is now the widest its been in 40 years and that Labour came to power claiming that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer under the Tories?

Look, it’s not just that nobody believes that Tony is not a socialist. The truth is that nobody believes the bloody Labour Party is socialist. It’s common knowledge that the present incumbents in Number 10 are further to the right than the Tories ever were; that back in 1997 Tony whipped of Thatcher’s clothes and left her standing there bollocks naked. I mean, Milton Friedman praised your husband, not Karl Marx.

I’ve not rambled here, Cherie, as much as I could have. Suffice to say that as a QC, with your level of legal insight, you could have ripped to shreds, under cross examination, any defendant making a preposterous and wholly improvable statement about themselves and made them appear imbecilic. Just be careful about how you bandy that "socialist" word about!

Apologies for inactivity

2008-03-27T18:03:00.001Z

Apologies to regular class warfare visitors. My PC has been out of action for a while - problems with the CPU overheating - and I hope to be posting again shortly.

Masked cops try to provoke violent riot

2008-03-15T21:37:00.001Z

This is absolutely fuggin disgusting and begs the question just how many protests that have turned violent have actually been started by undercover cops? Though it has long been suspected, this time there exists video footage that cops do actually do this. No doubt It happens all the time.

A peaceful demonstration turns violent, the TV news flashes pictures of mayhem, the issue is completely forgotten, and the protesters are entirely discredited and their cause undermined.

Is it really a surprise to know that police*engineer* these outcomes?

Here we see three masked police, posing as radicals, caught red handed trying to provoke violence at a meeting of the so called" Security and Prosperity Partnership" in Quebec. The whole episode was caught on video

Brasscheck TV comments:

It's the oldest trick in the book and the French have a phrase for it: "Agent Provocateur".

Bizarrely, US protesters NEVER seem to get their heads out of their arses and see it coming no matter how many times it gets pulled on them.

In contrast, one labor leader at the Montebello meeting of the so called "Security and Prosperity Summit" in Quebec earned the title "leader" and not only detected this crap as it was talking place, but confronted the government-employed criminals involved and forced them to stand down.

This kind of activity isn't legitimate police work. It's thug-for-hire work on behalf of fascists.

Next time you see one of these hulking morons with a mask on his face holding a rock or stick, rip off his mask and photograph him. Don't expect a shred of help from the gutless news media exposing these vermin. They'll never follow up on the story, but the photographs are a deterrent.

Police State Britain - no one can be trusted

2008-03-07T23:25:00.005Z

A quick flick thorough today’s British papers shows Police State Britain is functioning well.

The Telegraph today tells us the familiar story of Jared Ahmad, 27, arrested after completing a 20-minute journey to Salford Crescent, Greater Manchester. He claims, and I don’t doubt him, having been in that predicament myself, he was unable to buy a ticket because there was no ticket machine at the station at which he got on the train, and no conductor on board his train.

In their wisdom, the ever vigilant British Transport Police arrested him, banged him up in cell and took both his fingerprints and a sample of DNA. Both will now be stored on a national police database. There again, he did have a non-British, Moslem-sounding sounding name.

The Mail informs us that two pensioners, Mr and Mrs Richards, the latter wheelchair bound, were accosted by shopping centre security guards in Hull. The guards spotted 79-year-old Anthony Richards taking a photograph of his wife at the entrance of a new £200 million retail centre and were having none of it. They were ordered to put the camera away.

Mr Richards and his wife Betty were told the ban on people taking photos was to stop terrorists gathering intelligence, and staff were instructed to follow "anyone acting suspiciously".

There you go then, how suspicious can you get? You just can’t be too careful these days. Those pensioners might well have uploaded those snaps to the internet for Al Qaeda to see.

Mr Richards rightly observed it was load of bollocks: “It's quite ridiculous. It makes you wonder what is happening to the world. They don't stop people taking photographs in Paris of the Eiffel Tower or the Millennium wheel in London.”

This said, me and another comrade, out getting stock footage for a socialist video we were planning, did get pounced on four times by cops who ordered us to stop filming or face arrest, on one occasion taking our names and radioing them in to se if they tallied – in Trafalgar Square, outside the Houses of Parliament, across the river from the Houses of Parliament and just up from Buck House.

I digress…Shopping centre manager David Laycock backed his guards' vigilance. He said: "It's our duty of care to check that all pictures taken are for legitimate reasons. Photographic reconnaissance is a proven potential risk," he said. "It is not realistic for security staff to assess who might be taking photographs innocently or otherwise. “

Again, utter bollocks. Anyone ever been on Google Earth? You can bloody well zoom into any building in Britain, and quite close up, and measure distances in feet and inches of all the alleys and back roads in the vicinity. Any terrorist wanting to attack a shoppie could get the lay-out in five minutes flat. You can even zoom into Guantanamo Bay!

Mr Richards, meanwhile should thank his lucky stars his name is not Ahmed. They’d have had him in a headlock, handcuffed and his DNA taken in a jiffy.

Famine or Feast? Britain alone wastes 20 million tons of food a year

2008-03-06T20:30:00.004Z

Crikes, the story would have passed me by if Alan’s blog hadn’t alerted me to it. I’m getting slack in my old age. Hot on the heels of two earlier postings (here and here) on world food shortages and how the UN is begging for $500 million to help provide food assistance to the world’s starving millions, comes news that Britain is throwing away half of all the food produced on farms, according to the starkest estimate yet of the amount of edible produce we

The Independent reports: “About 20m tons of food is thrown out each year: equivalent to half of the food import needs for the whole of Africa. Some 16m tons of this is wasted in homes, shops, restaurants, hotels and food manufacturing. Much of the rest is thought to be destroyed between the farm field and the shop shelf.”

The cost of the waste is put at a staggetring £20 billion ($40 billion) and eighty times the amount that the UN is asking for to feed the starving largely in Africa and Asia.

Forty-four per-cent of the population of Burundi is starving – that’s bout 4 million people. The food thrown away in the UK last year would meet the equivalent of Burundi's shortages more than 40 times over.

Lord Haskins of Skidby, a former government adviser on rural affairs and chairman of Northern Foods has urged governments to press their citizens to help "avoid disaster by dramatically reducing the ... unacceptable levels of food waste, which are a shameful feature of most modern consumer societies". He called recent controversy over supermarkets' free distribution of plastic bags "a red herring". He argued, "If consumers ate a bit less and wasted a bit less you'd help to solve the problem. If the world was vegetarian then you'd solve the problem completely." One-third of wheat grown globally is fed to livestock reared to end up on the dinner table.

Tony Lowe, the chief executive of FareShare, the national food charity, said: "Unfortunately, we live in a world where many people do not have access to food in general, and good-quality food specifically, while at the same time millions of tons of perfectly fine food are being disposed of. In the UK alone, the extent of food poverty is staggering, as millions of people with low or no income find it harder to access affordable, nutritious food."

If this is the amount of food wasted in tiny Britain, then it begs the question just how much is thrown away each year globally. Whilst we have over 800 million on this planet chronically malnourished, the simple truth must be that the earth produces enough food to make the planet morbidly obese. As ever, the profit motive kicks in and whether you are obese or emaciated depends, as ever, on your purchasing power.

Meanwhile, the Independent provides a list of ten tips to help cut the waste mountain. Note this is not ten tips to stop global hunger, like abolishing capitalism, freeing production from the artificial constraints of profit and establishing a global system of free access to the necessaries of life! While critical of the current global food “crisis” the Independent simply accepts capitalism is here to stay and suggests individuals change their personal habits. The master class gets off ‘scot free’ again!

Blair is awarded the Medal of Freedom

2008-03-05T22:44:00.006Z

"What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy,
The soul's calm sun-shine, and the heart-felt joy,
Is virtue's prize: a better would you fix?
Then give humility a coach and six,
Justice a conq'ror's sword, or truth a gown,
Or public spirit its great cure, a crown.“
(Alexander Pop, Essay on Man, EPISTLE IV)

There must be a lot of people out there who get the words “freedom”, “peace”, “war and “terror” all muddled in their heads. I mean, it was only a few years ago that the two biggest promoters of international terrorism on behalf of US oil interests, namely Messrs Blair and Bush, received a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. According to the provisions of Nobel, the winner of the Peace Prize "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” See what I mean?

Now we hear news that Tony Blair is honoured this evening by a Texan university with strong links to President Bush (his missus went there). The university will hand over to the greedy, money-grabbing bastard thousands of pounds to give them a talk about utter bollocks.

As The Sunday Times reported:

“Blair has turned down an honorarium that goes with the Medal of Freedom but has asked for a cash fee to speak to students and children from deprived backgrounds after the award ceremony.

“He will become the sixth recipient of the medal awarded by the Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas since it was inaugurated in 1997 in honour of a Republican senator and foreign affairs adviser to Bush’s father.”

Reminiscent of the conditions of the Nobel prize, this Medal of Freedom, presented every two years, goes to those who have “furthered the cause of freedom throughout the world”. With such Orwellian double-speak, the university found they could present the award in previous years to Bush’s father and also to presidential hopeful John ‘bomb, bomb, bomb’ McCain, Margaret Thatcher, General Colin Powell, and General Tommy R Franks. So Blair is in good company and, if “Medal of Freedom” refers to the number of lives you take away multiplied by the lies you tell then he’s very deserving of it. So if any readers have their eyes on this medal in two years time, you’d better start killing like there’s no tomorrow, lying like a bastard and kissing arse as if your life depended on it.

Although Blair has found time to collect the Medal of Freedom this week, he has not yet arranged to pick up the Congressional Gold Medal awarded by the US Congress for his support in the “war against terror”

For Blair the big attraction is the money – nah, not the flogging of the medals on ebay, but the multi-thousand dollar speakers fee. Seems it was only five minutes ago I was blogging and spouting off about the £millions he is lined up to make since stepping down as Prime Minister. Presumably the money he is raking in from JP Morgan is just not enough.

His missus has also latched on to the money-for-talking game. It was only a few weeks ago that the Telegraph reported that she was being gven £75000 for doing three talks.

Back in 2005 Cherie was criticised for accepting $30,000 [£15,000] for a 90-minute talk in Washington while her husband was over in the US trying to persuade Bush to cancel African debt.

That same year she embarked on a lucrative speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand. Speeches included slides and questions and answers about her husband’s role as a father. And whilst in Melbourne there was anger after it was reported that her £17,000 fee for speaking at a charity dinner dwarfed the £6,774 which was raised for a fund for dying children.

Beats me why anyone would pay a penny to listen to anything either of the Blairs have to say on anything. As PM from 1997-2007, Blair bent over backwards to serve the interests of capitalism, lying to and betraying the workers who elected him at every opportunity; the fact that he lasted 10 years, despite oozing sleaze from every pore, suggest just what a good job he was doing for Britain’s corporatocracy. And when George Bush wanted someone, anyone, to sanction his invasion of Iraq, it was Blair who could be depended upon the come up with the “45 minute” dossier he presented to parliament and the British people as a pretext for the invasion, and which has now been proved fraudulent.

Medal? I’d give the sod the Royal Order of Pinocchio, like the one Bush was presented with.

Harry, the blood-drenched hero of Helmand

2008-03-01T18:40:00.011Z

Your print off and keep poster of Hero Harry (click to enlarge)

‘PRINCE Harry’s army comrades hoisted him on their shoulders after learning he was being withdrawn from Afghanistan yesterday – singing: “He’s ginge, he’s loud, he’s done us f****** proud.”

‘Emotional squaddies who had fought side-by-side with the hero royal during his ten-week frontline tour continued: “He’s here, he’s mean, his gran’s the f****** Queen. Nice one Harry.”’ (The Sun yesterday)

The Sun, in 11 pages of sycophantic coverage of the Harry the hero of Helmand story (inclusive of a pull-out poster), proudly reported yesterday that Harry had killed 30 Taliban fighters - a far cry from his earlier comments, when the press reported his words on hearing he was being posted to Iraq: ”I’m shitting myself”.

The Sun was not alone in prostrating itself in front of this blood-soaked parasite, the servility was ubiquitous: The Dailly Mail gave ten pages to the story, Daily Star (5 pages), Daily Express (10 pages), Daily Mirror (14 pages), Daily Telegraph (5 pages), The Times (7 pages). How much of this coverage of Harry’s exploits was given over to the millions killed as a direct result of the post 9-11 invasion of Afghanistan, or to the real reason that country was invaded – oil? What, you really need me to answer this for you? A cursory look at The Sun’s coverage would suggest the whole “Harry in Afghanistan” thing was stage managed; one huge photo-posing opportunity to boost the popularity of the royals and to gauge public support for what is becoming a very unpopular war.

Thirty deaths, Harry? Well done! But...how the hell do you know it was thirty? Did you run over and count the blood-stained corpses and say “this one’s mine, that too…?” Thirty? I wonder how many widows and orphans that means?

Did you kill them in hand-to-hand combat? No – in any such fight any one of that thirty would have torn you a new arse. Your killing was done long distance, with a machine gun and whilst you and your comrades-in-arms were better fed, better trained and much better equipped and no doubt outnumbering the enemy. Seriously, does anyone think you would have been allowed into any conflict situation where the odds were not stacked 100-1 in your favour? Bollocks!

So he’s back home, because he is now a target for the enemy, his cover blown. Whoa, is this not an occupational hazard of a soldier – to kill or be killed?

Undoubtedly, the standing of the royal family has received a huge boost thanks to Harry’s killing spree in poverty-stricken Afghanistan, and no doubt postal workers will be giving themselves hernias humping the postal bags up to Buck House, cram-packed with fawning and congratulatory letters from Britain’s ageing royalist population who have swallowed all the shite about Harry fighting for freedom and democracy.

Yup, this site is not only against war, and waste and want, it's against royalty. But unlike many anarchist and lefty sites, it does not see the royal debate as simply meaning “do we shoot them or do we hang them?" Neither does this site campaign for the abolition of the monarchy as if this was a single issue worth one millilitre of workers' sweat. Class Warfare takes a more considered view, recognising that if the monarchy were to go we would merely carry on living in a republic as wage slaves, every aspect of our lives subordinated to the priorities of the profit system.

That there are many prepared to support this outmoded institution is the problem (checkout the picky at the end of this posting, one of many The Sun has on its website…nauseating!). That there are members of the working class prepared to accept unearned privilege and its necessary opposite undeserved poverty, prepared to defend and support a symbol of power and hierarchy, prepared to demand that their fellows share these submissive values, shows how collectively immature we are as a class, and the real battle facing socialists. If we truly respected ourselves, our class, there would be no question over whether or not to kowtow to the House of Windsor.

A thousand years or robbery and butchery by their ancestors have placed the royal family at the top of the social pile – the great-great-offspring of the biggest bunch of murdering thugs who ever walked. A thousand years of revelling in the brute force allowed them by society where the art of being human was underdeveloped. That the descendants of bloody sword-arm rule are still in place shows that the process of social development is still incomplete.

To this day, the symbols of monarchy - the ermine, the mace and the fabulous diamond-encrusted crowns - are merely echoes of the warlord-plunder origins of the institution. Deprived of any real power these days, they serve instead as part of the vast machinery promoting the ideas of hierarchy, leadership and subservience in ways far more effective than Orwell could have imagined. A machine designed to enforce the subordination of the vast majority to the tiny privileged minority!

In ancient Rome they had bread and circuses to do that; pleasing the populace by keeping stomachs full and seeing people in the arena being worse off than themselves. Today we have the dole and monarchy placating the crowds with a TV to see people better off than themselves.

The monarchy is the capstone in the arch of power. The pinnacle of the greasy pole which little leader-wannabes climb in admiration, desiring to be like them. Each one waits their turn patiently, for a fleeting moment of recognition by the paragon of leadership. We are taught from childhood to look upon the monarchy as a mirror of ourselves, reflecting virtue, honour and duty;
when, in fact, it is a fun-house mirror that makes us look like pygmies.

The real issue is not one about whether we are for or against the monarchy, but rather whether we are for or against ourselves, our class; whether we are pathetic sheep that need leaders and monarchs to look up to, because we are so unsure of ourselves and our worth. A little, perhaps a lot, of maturity is needed; time to discuss how we can run our own lives for ourselves, without leaving it to others. And when that happens, when that maturity comes, we together will run past the monarchy like a juggernaut, ignoring it for the miserable and anachronistic side show that it is. Then we will have mastered the art of being human.

In Laughter, Truth?

2008-03-01T12:26:00.004Z

Introducing the next US president. Why wait until November? It's probably the most accurate portrayal of elections in the USA, and funny too.

WATER WARS

2008-02-29T22:42:00.005Z

Foreign Policy In Focus reprints an excerpt from Chapter 5 in Maude Barlow's latest book, Blue Covenant The Global water crisis and the coming battle for the right to water:

“The three water crises – dwindling freshwater supplies, inequitable access to water and the corporate control of water – pose the greatest threat of our time to the planet and to our survival. Together with impending climate change from fossil fuel emissions, the water crises impose some life-or-death decisions on us all. Unless we collectively change our behaviour, we are heading toward a world of deepening conflict and potential wars over the dwindling supplies of freshwater – between nations, between rich and poor, between the public and the private interest, between rural and urban populations, and between the competing needs of the natural world and industrialized humans.”

At the moment, 215 major rivers and 300 groundwater basins and aquifers are shared by two or more countries, creating tensions over ownership and use of the precious waters they contain. Coming across this link I was immediately reminded by Fred Pearce’s piece in last November’s New Statesman

Pearce observes that in the last three decades, the global population has doubled and water consumption has increased threefold. - “largely because, tonne-for-tonne, modern ‘high-yielding’ crop varieties often need more water than the old crops” - sparking a real danger that quarrels over the most necessary of resources could erupt into violence.

Says Pearce: “A typical Westerner consumes, directly and through thirsty products like food, about a hundred times their own weight in water every day. That is why some of the great rivers of the world, such as the Nile, Indus, Yellow River and Colorado, no longer reach the sea in any appreciable volume. All their water is taken”

“Many parts of the world, notably the Middle East, are running out of water to feed themselves. In response, a vast global trade is emerging. Not in water itself, but in thirsty crops like grains and sugar and cotton. Effectively the UK imports 45 cubic kilometres of water every year embodied in such crops – much of it from poor and arid lands.

“Economists call this the ‘virtual water trade’. Many countries would starve without it. But as more and more countries run short of water, the trade will be disrupted. And the threat of wars over water will grow."

Focusing on the crisis in the Middle East, Pearce notes: “Israel’s relations with its other neighbours are poisoned by its insistence on controlling the watershed of the River Jordan, its main source of water. The 1967 Six Day War was, according to former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s memoirs, fought as much for control of the River Jordan as for land. Israel hangs onto the Golan Heights less for military reasons than because it is where the river rises.”

A cursory reading of the broadsheets uncovers a constant “constant drip-drip of stories about water riots in Pakistan, Mexico, India, China, Indonesia and elsewhere. The world is awash too with disputes over international rivers that threaten to become full-blown wars as water shortages grow”.

Many a current water-fuelled dispute is the legacy of colonial rule argues Pearce: “The 1947 partitioning of India split control of the River Indus. Now India and Pakistan are at odds over a new Indian hydroelectric plant that, Pakistan claims, threatens its British-built irrigation schemes, which supply most of the country’s food. India’s control over the Ganges causes both floods and droughts in downstream Bangladesh.

“In Africa, Britain left behind a Nile treaty that gives all the waters of a river that flows through ten countries to the two most downstream: Egypt and Sudan. Egypt now threatens to wage war on anyone upstream -- such as Ethiopia - who takes so much as a pint pot of water from the river.”

Meanwhile, ongoing quarrels concern Chinese dams being built on the Mekong in Southeast Asia, and complex conflicts in central Asia, where upstream hydroelectric dams that keep the people of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan warm in winter disrupt water supplies for the huge cotton plantations of downstream Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

Elsewhere the Iraqi and Syrian government are set to contest Turkish dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates and which threatens the water supply to millions

In a section of her book, Maude Barlow focuses on the how the water problem is becoming a major issue for US foreign policy planners, and which is worth quoting at length:

“Water has recently (and suddenly) become a key strategic security and foreign policy priority for the United States. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11, protection of U.S. waterways and drinking water supplies from terrorist attack became vitally important to the White House. When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, it gave the department responsibility for securing the nation’s water infrastructure and allocated US$548 million in appropriations for security of water infrastructure facilities, funding that was increased in subsequent years. The Environmental Protection Agency created a National Homeland Security Research Center to develop the scientific foundations and tools to be used in the event of an attack on the nation’s water systems, and a Water Security Division was established to train water utility personnel on security issues. It also created a Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center for dissemination of alerts about potential threats to drinking water and, with the American Water Works Association, a rapid e-mail notification system for professionals called the Water Security Channel. Ever true to market economy ideology, the Department of Homeland Security’s mandate includes promoting public-private partnerships in protecting the nation’s water security.

“…Water is becoming as important a strategic issue as energy in Washington. In an August 2004 briefing note for the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a think tank that focuses on the link between energy and security, Dr. Allan R. Hoffman, a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of Energy, declared that the energy security of the United States actually depends on the state of its water resources and warns of a growing water-security crisis worldwide. “Just as energy security became a national priority in the period following the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973–74, water security is destined to become a national and global priority in the decades ahead,” says Hoffman. He notes that central to addressing water security issues is finding the energy to extract water from underground aquifers, transport water through pipelines and canals, manage and treat water for reuse and desalinate brackish and sea water – all technologies now being promoted by U.S. government partnerships with American companies. He also points out that the U.S. energy interests in the Middle East could be threatened by water conflicts in the region: “Water conflicts add to the instability of a region on which the U.S. depends heavily for oil.

“Continuation or inflammation of these conflicts could subject U.S. energy supplies to blackmail again, as occurred in the 1970s.” Water shortages and global warning pose a “serious threat” to America’s national security, top retired military leaders told the president in an April 2007 report published by the national security think tank CNA Corporation. Six retired admirals and five retired generals warned of a future of rampant water wars into which the United States will be dragged. Erik Peterson, director of the Global Strategy Institute of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Washington that calls itself a “strategic planning partner for the government,” says that the United States must make water a top priority in foreign policy. “There is a very, very critical dimension to all these global water problems here at home,” he told Voice of America News. “The first is that it’s in our national interest to see stability and security and economic development in key areas of the world, and water is a big factor with that whole set of challenges.” His centre has joined forces with ITT Industries, the giant water technology company; Proctor & Gamble, which has created a home water purifier called PUR and is working with the UN in a joint public-private venture in developing countries; Coca-Cola; and Sandia National Laboratories to launch a joint-research institute called Global Water Futures (GWF). Sandia, whose motto is “securing a peaceful and free world through technology” and that works to “maintain U.S. military and nuclear superiority,” is contracted out to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin by the U.S. government, to operate, thus linking water security to military security in a direct way.

“The mandate of Global Water Futures is twofold: to affect U.S. strategy and policy regarding the global water crisis and to develop the technology necessary to advance the solution. In a September 2005 report, Global Water Futures warned that the global water crisis is driving the world toward “a tipping point in human history,” and elaborated on the need for the United States to start taking water security more seriously: “In light of the global trends in water, it is clear that water quality and water management will affect almost every major U.S. strategic priority in every key region of the world. Addressing the world’s water needs will go well beyond humanitarian and economic development interests. . . . Policies focused on water in regions across the planet must be regarded as a critical element in U.S. national security strategy. Such policies should be part of a broader, comprehensive, and integrated U.S. strategy toward the global water challenges.”

“Innovations in policy and technology must be tightly linked, says the report, no doubt music to the ears of the corporations that sponsored it. GWF calls for closer innovation and cooperation between governments and the private sector and “redoubled” efforts to mobilize public-private partnerships in the development of technological solutions. And, in language that will be familiar to critics of the Bush administration who argue that the United States is not in Iraq to promote democracy, but rather to secure oil resources and make huge profits for American companies in the “rebuilding” effort, the report links upholding American values of democracy with the profit to be gained in the process: “Water issues are critical to U.S. national security and integral to upholding American values of humanitarianism and democratic development. Moreover, engagement with international water issues guarantees business opportunity for the U.S. private sector, which is well positioned to contribute to development and reap economic reward.” Listed among the U.S. government agencies engaged in water issues in the report is the Department of Commerce, which “facilitates U.S. water businesses and market research, and improves U.S. competitiveness in the international water market.””

The latter paragraph says much. There’s profits to be had! And note Coca-Cola’s ominous and timely entrance. What is of key importance to the main players here is less that clean and fresh water is available to humanity – they don’t give a fuck for human life, evidenced by US foreign policy since 1945 to say the least – but the amount of bloody profit the trade in water can generate. If they could not make a cent, they’d show no interest at all and sod the millions dying of thirst. If they’re thirsty they can always buy coca-cola.

In an age when we have the scientific and technological know how to enable us to solve almost all our problems, it is indeed an indictment on capitalism that so many humans, living on a planet, seven eighths of which is covered in water, have so little access to it; more, that a tiny minority wish to profit by controlling our access to it.

A sane, moneyless society, in which the artificial constraints of profit have been removed from production, in which the satisfying of human need is paramount, in which people have free access to the benefits of civilisation, humanity would address water shortages with the building of more reservoirs, water channels, water desalination plants, making obsolete all current processes that waste water.

Gulag America

2008-02-29T10:13:00.009Z

Today, America crossed an ominous threshold. One of out every one hundred American adults is incarcerated. In jail. Behind bars. Right now. 1 of 100. This is unprecedented in American history, unprecedented anywhere.

The story is covered by the Associated press and comes via the Raw Story website:

“Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

“According to the report, the inmate population increased last year in 36 states and the federal prison system.

“The largest percentage increase — 12 percent — was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state's crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state's inmate population has increased by 600 percent.

“The Pew report was compiled by the Center on the State's Public Safety Performance Project, which is working directly with 13 states on developing programs to divert offenders from prison without jeopardizing public safety.

“The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.

“‘For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling,’” the report said. ‘While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.’

“The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails — a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.

“The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.”

What's going on? We better start figuring it out because there is every indication that Bush & Friends want to push those numbers even higher (continued below video)

And why?

Privately owned jails and other profit motives.

See (below) how a for-profit business operates a new kind of prison that incarcerates infants and small children. Now. Today. Not a paranoid fantasy. A new growth industry for America.

Running prisons is now big business - and we know how big business operates...

1. Find corrupt politicians (not hard to do)

2. Pay them off or cut them in

3. Reap the rewards

HUTTO

Prototype for a nationwide concentration camp system

Did you know that the US federal government has not only set up but is also currently operating a prison that holds entire families - including infants, children and nursing and pregnant women?

It's located in Taylor, Texas and it's operated by Corrections Corporation of America, a privately owned corporation.

This short film by Matt Gossage and Lily Keber is one of the only public reports on this prison. Otherwise this subject has been entirely censored by the US news media.

For more on Hutto, click here.

UN ASKS FOR $500 MILLION TO SAVE THE WORLD'S STARVING - or just one thousandth of the cost of the war in Iraq

2008-02-26T23:50:00.003Z

"There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before." (Josette Sheeran, head of the World Food Programme, The Guardian, 26th February)

Class Warfare take up the story of the global food crisis where it left off yesterday. The UN has announced it wants $500 a year extra to deal with the crisis. And it is a crisis! $500 million may sound a lot…well, it is…But it only provides food aid to about 75 million people in 78 countries, less than one tenth of those in dire need of it. Moreover, the figure pales into significance when compared to the cost of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, currently standing, as I write, at almost $498 billion. In other words the UN, hoping to save life, is asking for 1000th of what Washington has spent destroying life in Iraq.

Officials at the UN’s World Food Programme argue that increases in the global price of basic foods are caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of factors: a rise in demand for animal feed from increasingly prosperous populations in India and China who have found a penchant for new meat stuffs, the use of more land and agricultural produce for biofuels, and climate change. Little wonder that for many of the world’s impoverished, up to 80% of their income goes on food

The UN could have cited other factors, such as a system that produced for profit not need, a system that creates the artificial scarcity of commodities in order to maintain profits.

Needless to say, there have been food riots in Mozambique, Morocco, Yemen, Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing for the first time in two decades.

Other countries has moved to head off food-fuelled protest. Russia has responded to the crisis by freezing the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil for six months. Thailand is also preparing a freeze on food staples. After protests around Indonesia, Jakarta has increased public food subsidies.

For its part, India has banned the export of rice except the high-quality basmati variety. Interesting that the better quality rice is destined for the shelves of wealthier countries – far too bloody good for your average Indian prole, especially where there are profits to be had. What, give them the good stuff? Nah, they’d only eat it!

Prospects for the future look bleak, with climatic change anticipated to have a heavy impact in coming decades, with the growing demand for biofuels expected to take more land away from food production and with the rising demand fore meat products. The latter factor is all the more insane when it is considered that it takes 10 kilos of feed to produce one kilo of meat.

Throughout Africa NGOs and top scientists are calling for a moratorium on new biofuels projects as millions of acres of prime agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa are switched from food to fuel. The Food and Agriculture Organisation have reported that 100 million tons of cereals are being diverted to the production of biofuels each year, a figure excessively unacceptable on a continent that has a long history of producing cash crops to service foreign debt. In the US, 60 million tonnes of maize is produced for the biofuel industry. The figure might mean nothing but it is a figure that is more than double the entire UK cereal crop.

The WFP is holding an emergency meeting this coming Friday in the hope it can further address the problem. Needless to say there will be no levelling of criticism at capitalism or its insane production motives, nor a call for an end to a system that prioritises profit over human need. Once again, the mechanisms of capitalism will once again be asked to solve a problem they bloody well help create. I wonder if they'll consider, though, the fact that 78% of the world's starving live in countries that actually produce a food surplus?

UN predicts food aid rationing

2008-02-25T23:39:00.000Z

The Financial Times has reported that the UN’s World Food Programme, charged with relieving hunger in underdeveloped countries, is drawing up plans to ration food aid in response to spiralling prices.

"The World Food Programme is holding crisis talks to decide what aid to halt if new donations do not arrive in the short term.

"Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, told the Financial Times that the agency would look at ‘cutting the food rations or even the number or people reached' if donors did not provide more money. ‘Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up,’ she said.

"WFP officials hope the cuts can be avoided, but warned that the agency’s budget requirements were rising by several million dollars a week because of climbing food prices."

Back in November, Josette Sheeran said (Guardian, 3rd November 2007):

"There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."

One major factor, impacting food prices and mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is that pertaining to the growing of crops to supply the biofuels industry.

As Food First reports today on its home page.

“FACT: Ethanol is helping drive food prices out of control without lowering the price of gas – Corn planted for ethanol competes for farmland with corn for food production and with other food crops. This drives up the price of all food crops, especially those that contain corn products—which is most of our processed food. Meat is more expensive because our beef cattle eat corn, not grass. Food prices have increased by 25% over last year! Gas prices still went up by 80%...”

The insanity is that the UN is introducing rationed food aid programmes because it exists as part of a system in which the rationing of commodities is the order of the day. Indeed, rationing has been the order of the day since capitalists realised they could make huge profits by limiting supply.

Food shortages are very much rooted in a system that manipulates supply and demand to keep prices high. Stories are legion about farmers being paid to take land out of production, of governments stockpiling food, to keep prices low. I remember not so many years ago writing a lengthy letter to the local press screaming my anger at the EC’s decision (back then) to destroy 3 million tons of fruit and at the cost of £52 million, because, quite simply, too much had been produced and, it if it was allowed to enter the market, prices would have crashed. And now arable is being used for the biofuel matket!

And its nothing new. This has gone on for decades. John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), set against t backdrop of the Great Depression, highlighted the issue in California, where tens of thousands of hungry, migrating farmers and their families, encountered mountains of rotting fruit, guarded by law enforcement officers instructed to shoot anyone who dared pick so much as a decomposing apple.

Organisations like Food First (Institute for Food and Development Technology –) are clear that the world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. “That's enough to make most people fat!” they assert. And this estimate does not take account of many other universally eaten foods—vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Indeed, if all foods are considered together, sufficient is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs. Put that on a platter in front of most people and ask term to eat it and the thought of it makes them quite nauseous. This much is asserted in a 2006 document entitled 12 Myths About Hunger (downloadable in pdf format).

The document further observes how “the problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most ‘hungry countries’ have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.”

In other words, if you’re hungry in this world it is inevitably because you lack the purchasing power to buy food. The golden law of capitalism as ever comes into play – “can’t pay, can’t have”. Poor people simply do not constitute a market; no profit can be had for them. It is far simpler, and far more lucrative, to create an artificial shortage which maintains prices at a profitable level. And with biofuel crops entering the equation of late, the problem is only exacerbated.

And closer yet again to the full surveillance society

2008-02-24T23:32:00.008Z

Yesterday BBC news online reported that the Home Office had rejected calls by the police to introduce a mandatory DNA database of all UK citizens, arguing that the suggestion “would raise significant practical and ethical issues.”

Already there are £4.5 million people in Britain on the DNA database. Since 2004, the data of everyone arrested for a recordable offence - all but the most minor offences - has remained on the system regardless of their age, the seriousness of their alleged offence, and whether or not they were prosecuted. In countless cases, if you go to court and you’re found totally innocent, they still have your damned DNA, a profile of your personal genetic make up.

Not enough, say the police who, to highlight there case, point to recent solved murders thanks to their DNA database. Right wing reactionaries have backed police calls for such a database, citing that hackneyed argument that if you’re doing sod all wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. Which misses the point by a mile.

There’s nothing radical at the moment in the government resisting police pressure for a DNA database. They simply realise its gonna be one helluva palaver to get DNA samples from almost 6o billion people, a lot of whom will kick off big time were they to be threatened with penalties for failing to comply, or coercion. They'll bide their time until they come up with a better way to get around this.

So if you’re thinking that here is the British government defending our civil liberties, forget it. They're still after their surveillance society. Yesterday’s Guardian, for instance, tells us that:

“Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to 'profile' suspects.”

One thing I did not know was that last summer the EU made a deal with the US Dept. of Homeland Security to provide Washington with 19 pieces of information on all passengers between Europe and the USA, inclusive of credit card details and mobile phone numbers. The bastards!

Not enough, says the British government, who want the system extended to sea and rail travel, to domestic flights and those between EU countries. And is the reactionary British government the only one in Europe to argue for this measure? Yes! Twenty-seven member states were questioned on whether the system should be extended for “more general public policy purposes”, aside from the alleged war on terror and crime, and only Britain put its thumbs up. Britain further wants the authority to exchange the information gleaned, your most personal details, with third parties outside the EU.

Things have hotted up since the ID Cards Act was passed two years ago this March. Throughout 2007, in many cities, Identity and Passport Service (IPS) interview centres were opened to question first-time applicants, such as teenagers, before giving them a passport.

Towards the end of last year we were informed that that post offices and travel agents are likely candidates for mass ID card applications and fingerprinting. The Financial Times reported: "The Post Office said it was looking very seriously at developing the ability to record data electronically at its 14,150 outlets", whilst the IPS said that, "outlets were likely to be used to help speed up the enrollment process to obtain new biometric passports and identity cards, providing services such as application checking and finger-printing."

In October of last year we learned that General Register Office (GRO) in England and Wales, charged with overseeing the recording of births, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths, will become part of the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) from 1 April 2008. This moves it from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to become an Executive Agency of the Home Office. According to the IPS, “working as one organisation will allow us to explore the possibility of integrating passport, identity card and life event registration processes. This would reduce red tape and make life easier for people, as well as strengthen the integrity of our systems."

Under the Identity and Passport Service, the 285 registry offices in England and Wales that are owned and run by local authorities will be implicated in this change, plus the Home Office will carry out some registrations centrally and maintain the central record of registration data. So getting rid of 'red tape' really means the centralising of data originally collected for statistical purposes and policy-making for the population as a whole, which will now be used for tracking individuals as well.

And then you read today’s Mail on Sunday and wonder just what the fuck is going on!:

“Motorists will be targeted by a new generation of road cameras which work out how many people are in a car by measuring the amount of bodily fluid it contains.

“The latest snooping device on the nation's roads aims to penalise lone drivers who abuse car-sharing lanes, and is part of a Government effort to combat congestion at busy times.

“The cameras work by sending an infrared beam through the windscreen of vehicles which detects the unique make-up of blood and water content in human skin. “

Seemingly, some unscrupulous individuals have had mannequins in their passenger seats or photos in the windscreen. Interesting! How long before drivers cotton on to the idea that if the cops a have device that measures the amount of bodily fluid in a car, the simple way out is to still have the mannequin , but with eight pints of water inside of it? I ask you!!

Well, looks like this blog is gonna have a busy year keeping track of all the new legislation and moves to barcode us all. Sometime I bloody despair! They do it so slowly, so damned subtly, that the majority of people don’t realise what is going on. Little by little the workers are becoming acclimatised to the Big Brother Society, in which they will have your DNA, your fingerprints your credit card details… everything… everything will eventually be known about everyone.

They’re telling us all that we are not to be trusted, none of us, that we need to be surveilled constantly and that it is all in our own interests. As I’ve argued on here before, trust is a two-way thing, so why should we trust them one bloody inch? Lets chuck the whole damned spectacle back in their faces and destroy their damned system to boot.

Police State moves to the school bogs

2008-02-23T23:56:00.008Z

School removes CCTV cameras from children's toilets after furious protest from parents

No sooner do I post a blog item about the police state moving into the classroom, than we come across news that the police state is moving into school toilets.

I had to read that headline above twice! This piece comes from the Daily Mail

But its true. Seemingly The cameras were installed at Lipson Community College in Plymouth, Devon, which has 1,400 pupils. And allegedly without the knowledge of staff and governors…which, as Chair of Governors at a local school, I find hard to fuggin believe for the simple reason that the school will have in place a definite policy authorising the Chair at least to countersign sign any contracts. And I know any contractor would have had to sign into the school, via the secretary’s office, to be issued with a visitor pass. This stuff is national school policy now. Surely then the matter would have been reported straight to the principal. It’s just utter bollocks that workmen could have entered a school to fit cameras, in the bloody bogs, too, without the governors or the head knowing in advance.

But here, we are told a member of staff was able to order the contract unsupervised.

The principal responded, when questioned: “Someone made an error…”

What!….an error!?! And no one is being reprimanded we are told.

What I find amazing is that the kids just didn’t climb up and smash the camera down. Rather, they either refused to use the toilets or stayed away from college and complained to their parents.

I can only suggest the widespread use of cameras in the UK – an estimated 4.5 million in Britain at the moment – has acclimatised kids to the surveillance society, resulting, in this instance, in kids not protesting en masse at school, or even showing the damned initiative to sabotage the bloody cameras themselves. Where the rebellious spirit that kids used to have? Where the class warriors of tomorrow?

And would any court in the land have dared challenge their right not to be surveilled whilst having a pee or a pooh, and condemned them for destroying the intrusive spy cams? I doubt it.

Socialist TV

2008-02-23T12:47:00.004Z

A new blog site is in the making at Socialist TV

It's tag line states it is: "Televising the revolutionary case against capitalism and promoting the socialist case for the establishment of a global social system in which the earth's natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled, and in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation"

And its introducton states the site "aims to focus on film/video presentation of arguments for Socialism. If a video, not produced by socialists, nevertheless argues an aspect/s of the Socialist case, it will be used."

So far it contains 4 videos produced by members of the SPGB.

Howard Zinn on Human Nature and Aggression

2008-02-21T22:57:00.005Z

Not a revolutionary socialist by far, here's Howard Zinn putting the boot into the idea that humans are naturally aggressive. He clearly articulates the idea that humans do not readily go to war, that workers have to be persuaded via massive propaganda campaigns and when that inducement fails then coercion, via the draft, is the only option. Zinn then argues that when human aggression does manifest itself, the cause is rooted in environmental factors.

An updated Zinn talk on the subject could well have cited the number of soldiers who desert, who commit suicide (in the US its reached epidemic proportions among Iraq War vets), and who suffer mental breakdown (The Pentagon recently repotrted that some 40% of front lien troops have mental health problems).

KOSOVOIL INDEPENDENCE

2008-02-20T23:39:00.003Z

Kosovo’s declration of independence, whilst allegedly violating international law, quickly won the support of Washington. Unilateral western-supported independence mocks the 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1244 which only permits Kosovo's self-government as a Serbian province; the resolution recognizes the "sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia;" only a new UN resolution in compliance with international law can change that legally.

Why the US haste in particular? Are there profits to be had…perhaps mineral wealth at stake here? No, I’m not being cynical – the history of US foreign policy this past 60 years has shown unequivocally that if the US starts taking an interest anywhere its corporate elite smells megabucks.

Global Research posits an answer in a piece entitled: Large Potential Albanian
Oil And Gas Discovery Underscores Kosovo's Importance and from which I quote:

“On January 10, Swiss-based Manas Petroleum Corporation broke the news. Gustavson Associates LLC's Resource Evaluation identified large prospects of oil and gas reserves in Albania, close to Kosovo. They're in areas called blocks A, B, C, D and E, encompassing about 780,000 acres along the northwest to southeast "trending (geological) fold belt of northwestern Albania."

“Assigned estimates of the find (so far unproved) are up to 2.987 billion barrels of oil and 3.014 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. However, because of their depth, oil deposits may be capped with a layer of gas. If so, Gustavson calculates the potential to be 1.4 billion barrels of light oil and up to 15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Further, if only gas is present, the discovery may be as much as 28 trillion cubic feet. In any case, if estimates prove out, it's a sizable find.

“..In December 2007, Albania's Council of Ministers allowed DWM Petroleum, AG, a Manas subsidiary, to assist in the exploration, development and production of Albania's oil and gas reserves in conjunction with the government's Agency of Natural Resources.

“This development further underscores Kosovo's importance and the cost that's meant for Serbia. Since the 1999 US-led NATO war, it's been all downhill for the nation, the region and its people:

- Kosovo is part of Serbia; at least it was; since 1999 it's been a Washington-NATO occupied colony stripped of its sovereignty in violation of international law;

- it's been run by three successive US-installed puppet Prime Ministers with known ties to organized crime and drugs trafficking;

- it's the home of one of America's largest military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel; the province/country is more a US military base than a legitimate political entity;

- its part of Washington's regional strategic objective to control and transport Central Asia's vast oil and gas reserves to selected markets, primarily in the West.”

I can just see Tony Benn saying “told you so” as he emphatically taps out his pipe.. I remember him (maybe back in 1999) speaking in Trafalgar Square, when the Kosovo war was kicking off, arguing against Britain getting involved militarily, that this was a western imperialist war to get access to Kosovo’s oil. Maybe those pundits who slagged him off in the press are digging out their old articles from the time.

Over on Counterpunch, John V Whitbeck looks for the Palestinian link:

“The American and EU impatience to amputate a portion of a UN member state…. contrasts starkly with the unlimited patience of the U.S. and the EU when it comes to ending the 40-year-long belligerent occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (no portion of which any country recognizes as Israel's sovereign territory and as to which Israel has only even asserted sovereignty over a tiny portion, occupied East Jerusalem). Virtually every legal resident of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip seeks freedom -- and has for over 40 years. For doing so, they are punished, sanctioned, besieged, humiliated and, day after endless day, killed by those who claim to stand on the moral high ground.

“In American and EU eyes, a Kosovar declaration of independence from Serbian sovereignty should be recognized even if Serbia does not agree. However, their attitude was radically different when Palestine declared independence from Israeli occupation on November 15, 1988. Then the U.S. and the EU countries (which, in their own eyes, constitute the "international community", to the exclusion of most of mankind) were conspicuously absent when over 100 countries recognized the new State of Palestine, and their non-recognition made this declaration of independence purely "symbolic" in their own eyes and, unfortunately, in most Palestinian and other eyes as well.”

I’m not into nationalism, or supporting the right of small nations to self-determination, but the guy’s got a point.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger (video) – the making of a war criminal

2008-02-19T21:38:00.001Z

"A fascinating, bombshell documentary that should shame Americans, regardless of whether or not ultimate blame finally lies with Kissinger. Should be required viewing for civics classes and would-be public servants alike." -- Brent Simon, Entertainment Today.

Granted, Kissinger is just a front man for powerful interests, but nevertheless he personally sanctioned millions of innocent deaths – all sacrificed on the altar of US corporatocracy. Did they arrest and charge him as a war criminal, with crimes against humanity? No, they gave him a Nobel Peace Prize…There again, they also nominated Bush for the same humanitarian award.

The very fact that Henry Kissinger was selected to head the commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks should make this documentary, `The Trials of Henry Kissinger,' required viewing for any student of politics

Based on a book by Christopher Hitchins, the film shows many former Kissinger supporters - including Nixon speech-writer, William Safire - calling the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State secretive, a liar and even a war criminal.

Kissinger's Cold War schemes of bombing Cambodia, the genocidal invasion of East Timor by Indonesia and the coup and related atrocities in Chile are all well researched in this 80 minute film.

Amongst the many documentary interviewees is René Schneider Jr. His father, Gen. René Schneider, was head of the Chilean military when Allende was first elected. The general was killed during an attempt to kidnap him, as he was staunchly committed to the constitution, and would not bow to a coup against Allende. Evidence points to Kissinger directing that botched kidnapping.

Towards the end of the film, Schneider is asked if he planned to press charges against Kissinger for his role. His response was, `we are considering it.' The date when charges finally were first reported in the New York Times was Sept. 11, 2001. The $3 million civil suit against Kissinger quickly faded into the background in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

Cyber-police home in on Wikileaks

2008-02-18T23:30:00.006Z

Wikileaks is a website running on modified MediaWiki software which allows whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, allegedly without possible retribution. It claims that postings are untraceable by anyone attempting to do so. It was launched in December 2006 and, as of November 2007, had contained over 1.2 million documents. It provides mirrors which can be used during outages. (Wikipedia)

I’ve always believed the masterclass would perceive the internet to be too powerful a weapon in the hands of the oppressed majority, and that by hook or by crook they would close down sites that challenged their interests or, indeed, make an attempt to close down the internet system altogether. The internet is just too powerful a medium not to attract constant master class attention. In seconds you can access the most up-to-date information, disseminate it further, and contact thousands, millions at the press of a key. Out there in cyberspace are tens of millions of documents our masters would rather we did not have access to. Thousands are added everyday, shared, links posted, info downloaded. As an instrument of subversion the internet is unsurpassable. And one thing is sure, there are more sites, blog sites, forums, putting the boot into injustice, deceit and fraud than there are promoting it.

In the past, many reputable radical sites such as Znet and Counterpunch have been attacked, even by the FBI, only to reappear. Sites the world over have been hacked, closed down, only to resurface.

Counterpunch today alerts us to the plight of Wikileaks (this is the new site link). The role of the site its mission statement points out is to develop “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis. Our primary interests are in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we expect to be of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact.”

The site is the brainchild of a band of hardy journalists, the whistle-blowing variety. They have leaked documents, via Wikileak, such as The Secret Rules of Engagement in Iraq, the 2003 and 2004 Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, and evidence of serious banking fraud in Kenya that apparently swayed the Kenyan elections. The site has offended the Chinese government enough that they are attempting to censor it, as is the Thai military junta.

As you can imagine, it was not long before it attracted the attention of those with powerful interests to safeguard. Stephen Soldz, writing for Counterpunch reports:

“Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by lawyers for the Cayman Island's Bank Julius Baer. It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice "by email" and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet. The result was this totally unprecedented attempt to totally wipe out the existence of Wikileaks.

‘"Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court."

“There have, of course, been previous attempts by the U.S. Government and others to block publication of particular documents, most famously in 1971 when the Nixon administration attempted to block publication by the New York Times of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. But trying to close down an entire site in this way is truly unprecedented. Not even the Nixon administration, when they sought to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, considered closing down the New York Times in response.

“If this injunction stands, it will set an incredible precedent for all of us who use the web to unveil misbehaviour by the rich and powerful. Fortunately, Wikileaks is fighting this unconstitutional attack on press freedom, aided by six pro bono attorneys in San Francisco. While Wikileaks has so far not issued any particular call for support, all who value freedom should stand ready to offer whatever support they need.”

The founders of Wikileaks, knowing that governments and institutions will go to extreme lengths to censor the truth, have created an extensive network of cover names from which one can access their materials or continue leaking the secrets of governments and the corrupt rich and powerful. Thus, everything is available at Wikileaks.be, among other names.

Let the leaks continue! But for how long is anyone’s guess. In the 21st Century global police state, with governments increasingly clamping down on collective and individual freedoms, I feel its only a matter of time before the bastards pull the plug on the whole damn internet system.

The Police State moves to the classroom

2008-02-17T23:49:00.003Z

I once had an argument with the head of the local comp. She was arguing that my daughter had no trust in the staff and that this was unacceptable. I argued that trust was a two-way thing, that the staff had less trust in kids, abused their positions of authority and that she, as head, was in charge of an institution based on fear and coercion. Asked to elaborate, I told her that the kids are supervised ever minute of the deay, at break in the school yard, during lunch in the dinner hall, in the corridors, changing rooms and that staff even entered kids’ toilets to check on them; that kids are told what time to start school, what time to finish; that they are penalised for having faulty uniforms, not doing homework, coming in late, answering back. Their duty was to comply with authority, to know their place and to prepare them for the labour market. Kids did not come to school dressed in uniform, adhering to all the rules, because they wanted to, but because they and, more importantly their parents, feared the consequences if they were to do otherwise.

I could have added that schools require kids to prepare themselves for life in the police state, where mistrust of the lower elements was also the order of the day and where they would continually be required to acquiesce in their own oppression every day of the year, to submit to the whims of the master class, particularly in regards to social control, but that argument took place before they began fingerprinting kids and mooted spot searches and metal detectors in schools.

I should’ve guessed it wasn’t long coming, especially after they introduced a fingerprint scanning system in the local comp and without the consent of parents, whose kids were fingerprinted.

The Independent today informs us that schools will be very much preparing kids for life in the police state, where cops have increasing powers. An article on knife crime in schools commences:

“Parents will be told that they must allow their children to be searched at any time within school premises if they want to get them into the schools of their choice, under new plans to rid Britain's classrooms of the scourge of knives.

“The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, will put the battle against illegal weapons at the top of her agenda when she unveils her Tackling Violence Action Plan tomorrow. The blueprint for tackling knife-related violence will include a radical move to give police hundreds of metal detectors to catch young people carrying hidden weapons in schools, clubs and pubs.

“The proposal to introduce "airport-style" security, particularly in schools identified as facing the greatest danger from the knife-crime epidemic, represents a remarkable U-turn for the Government, which had previously dismissed the idea as an overreaction.”

Back in January, The Independent reported that teachers had backed the introduction of metal detectors in schools.

“Although the initiative carries disturbing echoes of some US cities, where high-school pupils are routinely scanned for weapons, head teachers said it could help to tackle violence in high-crime areas

“Metal detectors are still relatively rare and hugely controversial in US schools, but they have been used, particularly in rougher inner-city neighbourhoods, for at least 20 years with some success.

“Reliable statistics are hard to gather, but studies down the years suggest that about 10 per cent of US schools use metal detectors – either the door-frame style commonly found in courts and other sensitive public buildings, or hand-held ones that school officials are able to use at their own discretion.

“The proportion is much higher in urban areas – particularly Chicago, which installed detectors in every middle and high school a few years ago.”

This is a disturbing vision of the future. Not only does your kid get to be fingerprinted at school, as now, his/her details stored and he/she having to have his/her dabs scanned before even getting a school meal (as mentioned in a previous posting on this blog), but they will face spot searches, yanked from class to be frisked by some over-zealous teacher, as well as having to go walk through metal detectors.

How long before kids are urged to report to staff on any subversive comment heard at home, being rewarded with a wee medal when they do?

If you’re gonna implement a full police state, what better way than to start with kids and acclimatise them to incessant surveillance from an early age!

Check out also Fingerprinting in schools

Spielberg's spiel/War Made Easy (film)

2008-02-16T23:35:00.003Z

“African oil is of national strategic interest to us and it will increase and become more important as we go forward… We don’t foresee anything stopping the Chinese from increasing their equity participation in oil, and I think it probably would be problematic if they were the dominant player.” (Walter Kansteiner,

Assistant Secretary of State for Africa)

So world famous film director Steven Spielberg has resigned as artistic adviser to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing because China has failed to use its influence to stop Sudan’s war in Darfur!

Said Spielberg, justifying his stance: “China's economic, military and diplomatic ties to the government of Sudan continue to provide it with the opportunity and obligation to press for change,

What bollocks! What hypocrisy!

Could this be the same Spielberg who, speaking at a press conference in Rome back in September 2002 voiced support for Bush’s war against Iraq, alongside quick-witted scientologist Tom Cruise ? Yup, none other!

And what was Spielberg’s response to media questions as to his views on the nearing US invasion? He confidently replied: “Bush’s politics has been solid, grounded in reality, willing to uproot terrorism wherever it may be found."

Spielberg, fully aware that Iraq had been bombed back into the stone age in the first Gulf War, having fought a ten year proxy war for the US against Iran prior to that, and since the Gulf war of the early 90’s had suffered daily aerial bombardment, wanted another merciless bombardment of Iraq?

While he singles out China for attention, what about US complicity in the crisis in Darfur. Where the shot over the bows of the Bush administration?

The Independent last week, highlighted US connivance in the war in Darfur in a lengthy piece on Somalia.

The Indy points out how US General John Abizaid visited the Ethiopian prime minister, Meles Zenawi, in November, 2006 and that Ethiopia invaded Somalia the next month.

Moreover…

"The US provided key intelligence from spy satellites CIA agents travelled with the Ethiopian troops, helping direct operations US forces have carried out at least four attacks inside the country in the past 12 months."

Spielberg suddenly cares about refugees in Darfur? What about the 4 million Iraqi refugees? The 850,000 Somalia refugees, victims of a US-authored humanitarian catastrophe? He rants about China supplying Sudan with weapons, but where his criticism of the reactionary regimes the US arms? What about the recent $20 billion arms deal with Saudi-Arabia, one of the worst human rights abusers in the world?

One wonders whether Spielberg is simply an agent of US foreign policy. China may well be arming a reactionary regime, but its real crime is that at the moment it has the biggest stake in Sudanese oil.

Rant over!! Film next!

______________________________________________________________

War Made Easy

War Made Easy exposes a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

Food for thought

2008-02-15T23:53:00.007Z

Class war has been out of action for two days – fighting the battle on the local front...well, producing the second issue of my local community action group’s publication The Lukes Laner, writing, edition, laying out, doing graphics etc and placing it with a printer…and, as ever, attending incessant meetings and forums and making bureaucrats look incompetent. Amongst one of the projects we have got off the ground here, at last, is to provide a fresh fruit and vegetable outlet, operating from the CA one day a week. Basically you place an order (for a box of veg or fruit) and pick it up two days later. Good stuff too, cheaper than the supermarkets, largely grown locally, and just what is needed on a deprived housing estate suffering high levels of obesity; for if you want a fresh apple, a carrot, cabbage, then its a friggin' four mile round trip.

Still, been checking up on the blogs of fellow comrades. Darren, waxing lyrical over the cult of the personality made me smile inwardly. I always loved his tongue-in-cheek humour and miss the times we’d spend sleepless nights exchanging anecdotes, jokes and working together at No 52.

Alan’s blog had me scurrying to the fridge, looking for ingredients for a sarnie. He alerts us to two items on the issue of food that show the insanity of world food production under capitalism.

The first is the UN Report , telling us that 75% of the world’s crop varieties have vanished

The second refers to a piece on the Democracy Now site, where acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food but “edible food-like substances.

Says Pollan, speaking in a lengthy interview about the adulteration of food for no other reason than that there is profits to be had:

“…to understand the economics of the food industry, you can’t really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine cents. There’s no money in that, because it doesn’t have any brand identification. It’s a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time.

”So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents—and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.

”… every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make—and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen...

“… And we’ve known this for a hundred years, that if you eat this Western diet, which is defined basically as—I mean, we all know what the Western diet is, but to reiterate it, it’s lots of processed food, lots of refined grain and pure sugar, lots of red meat and processed meats, very little whole grains, very little fresh fruits and vegetables. That’s the Western diet—it’s the fast-food diet—that we know it leads to those diseases. About 80 percent of heart disease, at least as much Type II diabetes, 33 to 40 percent cancers all come out of eating that way, and we know this. And the odd thing is that it doesn’t seem to discomfort us that much.”

What a fucked up world we live in. Did you know that 78% the world’s starving people live in countries that actually produce a food surplus? And they’re starving because they have no purchasing power; they do not constitute a market. Can’t pay, can’t fucking have.