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Please watch the next two
videos.
Why haven't we seen Rethink
Afghanistan on UK TV? Because mainstream media
broadly support the ruling power of our state.
That means rich people. The Queen gets
£12,000,000 a year from you the tax payer. She
attended a memorial service at St Pauls for our
dead fellow poor people who were murdered by the
rich men and woman who are our government.
Gordon Brown and Mandleson are both unelected.
If you can, please keep
democracy alive and join us on the 24th.
Charity begins at home for the elite
Tuesday 22 September 2009
Jim Jepps
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It is hard to remember a time when
politicians did not complain about all these
layabouts on benefits scrounging off the
state. It was shocking when new Labour's
first home secretary Jack Straw denounced
single mums, the disabled and the homeless,
but he didn't invent mean-spirited attacks
on the poorest in society. He simply gave
those attacks a new, more vindictive twist.
Ever since we've had a welfare state
we've had members of the elite complaining
about the cushy lives that are generously
granted to the sick, the unemployed or the
old.
The workhouses were introduced at a time
when the rich were complaining loudly that
if they were to prevent children from
starving, the least that society could do
was lock them up and make them earn their
keep. Workhouses were not known as the New
Bastilles for nothing.
The current recession might have given
ministers an added incentive to cut the
benefit bill, but they need to be careful
not to believe their own rhetoric.
With a slurry of unnamed ministers
sending out quotes on the end of universal
pension provision and reducing housing
benefits, they have managed the neat trick
of looking vile and incompetent at the same.
They need to remember that welfare provision
has never been simply about generosity to
the unfortunate.
Just like the sewage system and other
public works, the dole was introduced
because the well-to-do cannot live in their
own little bubble no matter how hard they
try.
They could catch cholera or TB just like
everyone else if diseases were allowed to
spread.
Bins are collected for free not because
there is any general principle about the
right to have your rubbish removed, but
because if someone on a street couldn't or
wouldn't pay then the public health hazard
that this would create would be everyone's
problem.
Over time, the rich decided that having
their throats cut by the destitute was less
appealing than ensuring the poor did not get
too desperate. The safety net was also a
shield to prevent murder, robbery and
anarchy.
The trick has always been to pay out
enough to prevent rioting while making the
process of claiming benefits unpleasant
enough to prevent having to pay decent wages
or make workplaces good places to be.
With rising unemployment, there's no
point in the government wasting resources
trying to bully claimants who have no job to
go to. But it is possible to ensure that the
whole process is soul-destroying, leaving
the recipients of benefits feeling like
atomised outsiders.
The government has learned lessons from
the '30s, just as we should.
The unemployed used to have to sign on
every day as a method to ensure they were
instantly available for whatever dangerous,
ill-paid work might be going that day.
The downside was that by collecting all
the out-of-work people in an area in the
same place day after day, organising a
movement of the unemployed became a good
deal easier.
The National Unemployed Workers Movement
(NUWM) became a real force for change last
century not simply because it protested
against genuine social injustice but because
the state assisted it by drawing its
potential audience into one place and
forcing them to stay there day after day
with nothing to do but talk about their
problems.
These days claimants sign on every two
weeks and they are often corralled as
quickly as possible through open-plan
offices under the watchful gaze of security
guards. The need for a new NUWM is still
there, but this time the government has
chosen not to do socialists any favours when
it comes to reaching our audience.
The benefit cheats hotline also plays a
part in the process. It was a clever sleight
of hand by the government which has never
paid for itself.
The few people who do ring up to grass on
someone are actually reporting totally
legitimate recipients of benefits - or
people who don't receive benefits anyway.
It remains in place not because it's an
effective way to prevent benefit fraud - it
isn't - but because it helps to embed in
people's minds guilt by association.
Somehow, because some people defraud the
system, everyone who claims benefits without
being totally miserable is somehow slurred
as dishonest. The insipid message is that
claiming benefits is itself an immoral act
similar to fraud.
During the Thatcher years, not a day went
by when the unemployed were not harangued,
scorned or despised from the Cabinet pulpit,
but welfare spending always rose.
But if she hated the dole so much, why
did Thatcher keep paying it? Not from the
goodness of her heart - that would have
required possessing one.
The truth is that the bullying and the
payouts are two sides of the same coin. It's
cheaper to pay housing benefit than it is to
imprison the destitute and you don't get any
awkward rebellions either.
However, you still need to make sure that
it sounds like you are doing the poor a
favour rather than keeping the lid on
Pandora's box.
The moment the poor realise why the
powerful are handing over money, what
appears to be charity could well be seen as
something very similar to demanding money
with menaces.
And who knows what society's poorest
might demand next if they started getting
ideas.
Beware the assault on journalism
Friday 24 July 2009
John Pilger
I met Eddie Spearritt in the Philharmonic pub,
overlooking Liverpool. It was a few years after 96
Liverpool football fans had been crushed to death at
Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, on April 15 1989.
Eddie's son Adam, aged 14, died in his arms. The
"main reason for the disaster," Lord Justice Taylor
subsequently reported, was the "failure" of the
police who had herded fans into a lethal pen.
"As I lay in my hospital bed," Eddie said, "the
hospital staff kept the Sun away from me. It's bad
enough when you lose your 14-year-old son because
you're treating him to a football match. Nothing can
be worse than that. But since then I've had to
defend him against all the rubbish printed by the
Sun about everyone there being a hooligan and
drinking. There was no hooliganism. During 31 days
of Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry, no blame was
attributed because of alcohol. Adam never touched it
in his life."
Three days after the disaster, Kelvin MacKenzie,
Rupert Murdoch's "favourite editor," sat down and
designed the Sun front page, scribbling "The Truth"
in huge letters.
Beneath it, he wrote three subsidiary headlines:
"Some fans picked pockets of victims" ... "Some fans
urinated on the brave cops" ... "Some fans beat up
PC giving kiss of life." All of it was false.
MacKenzie was banking on anti-Liverpool prejudice.
"Of course, there is a colourful
Fleet Street history of lies, damn
lies, but no proprietor ever
attained the infectious power of
Murdoch's putrescence"
When sales of the Sun fell by almost 40 per cent
on Merseyside, Murdoch ordered his favourite editor
to feign penitence. BBC Radio 4 was chosen as his
platform. The "sarf London" accent that was integral
to MacKenzie's fake persona as an "ordinary punter"
was now a contrite, middle-class voice that fitted
Radio 4. "I made a rather serious error," said
MacKenzie, who has since been back on Radio 4 in a
very different mood, aggressively claiming that the
Sun's treatment of Hillsborough was merely a
"vehicle for others."
When we met, Eddie Spearritt mentioned MacKenzie
and Murdoch with a dignified anger. So did Joan
Traynor, who lost two sons, Christopher and Kevin,
whose funeral was invaded by MacKenzie's
photographers even though Joan had asked for her
family's privacy to be respected.
The picture of her sons' coffins on the front
page of a paper that had lied about the
circumstances of their death so deeply upset her
that for years she could barely speak about it.
Such relentless inhumanity forms the iceberg
beneath the Guardian's current exposé of Murdoch's
alleged payment of £1 million hush money to those
whose phones his News of the World reporters have
criminally invaded.
"A cultural Chernobyl," is how the German
investigative journalist Reiner Luyken, based in
London, described Murdoch's effect on British life.
Of course, there is a colourful Fleet Street
history of lies, damn lies, but no proprietor ever
attained the infectious power of Murdoch's
putrescence. To public truth and decency and
freedom, he is as the dunghill is to the blowfly.
The rich and famous can usually defend themselves
with expensive libel actions, but most of Murdoch's
victims are people like the Hillsborough parents,
who suffer without recourse.
The Murdoch "ethos" was demonstrated right from
the beginning of his career, as Richard Neville has
documented.
In 1964, his Sydney tabloid the Daily Mirror
published the diary of a 14-year-old schoolgirl
under the headline "We Have Schoolgirl's Orgy
Diary."
A 13-year-old boy, who was identified, was
expelled from the same school.
Soon afterwards, he hanged himself from his
mother's clothesline.
The "sex diary" was subsequently found to be
fake. Soon after Murdoch bought the News of the
World in 1971, a strikingly similar episode
involving an adolescent diary led to the suicide of
a 15-year-old girl.
And Murdoch himself said, of the industrial
killing of innocent men, women and children in Iraq:
"There is going to be collateral damage. And if you
really want to be brutal about it, better we get it
done now ... "
His most successful war has been on journalism
itself. A leading Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil, the
Kelvin MacKenzie of the Sunday Times, conducted one
of his master's most notorious smear campaigns
against ITV (like the BBC, a "monopoly" standing in
Murdoch's way).
In 1988, the ITV company Thames Television made
Death on the Rock, an investigative documentary that
lifted a veil on the British secret state under
Margaret Thatcher, describing how an SAS team had
murdered four unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar with
their hands in the air.
The message was clear: Thatcher was willing to
use death squads.
The Sunday Times and the Sun, side by side in
Murdoch's razor-wired Wapping fortress, echoed
Thatcher's scurrilous attacks on Thames Television
and subjected the principal witness to the murders,
Carmen Proetta, to a torrent of lies and personal
abuse.
She later won £300,000 in libel damages, and a
public inquiry vindicated the programme's accuracy
and integrity. This did not prevent Thames, an
innovative broadcaster, from losing its licence.
Murdoch's most obsequious supplicants are
politicians, especially new Labour.
Having ensured that Murdoch pays minimal tax, and
having attended the farewell party of one editor of
the Sun, Gordon Brown was recently in full fawn at
the wedding of another editor of the same paper. Don
Corleone expects nothing less.
The hypocrisy, however, is almost magical.
In 1995, Murdoch flew Tony and Cherie Blair
first-class to Hayman Island, Australia, where the
aspiring war criminal spoke about "the need for a
new moral purpose in politics," which included the
lifting of government regulations on the media.
Murdoch shook his hand warmly. The next day the
Sun commented: "Mr Blair has vision, he has purpose
and he speaks our language on morality and family
life."
And this woman
represents me and you the people of Basildon? What a joke.
Nationalism: Who really benefits when ‘we’re all in it together’?
Esme Choonara argues that nationalism is bad news for the workers’ movement
The slogan “British jobs for British workers” gained
widespread notoriety during the recent unofficial strikes by construction
workers.
The phrase embodies common-sense nationalism – the notion that
if British workers can’t find jobs, then that is because those jobs are being
taken by “foreign workers”.
Many of those involved in the construction strikes abhor
racism. But even the best formulations of the strike’s demands have been shaped
by nationalist ideas. For instance, one Scottish union official framed the
dispute in terms of “the right to work in our own country”.
This argument reflects the idea that Britain is “our own
country” – that we are all part of a British nation, that we share a common
national interest, and that this “Britishness” gives people certain rights that
others do not have.
These notions are presented as if they were natural, but they
come from the very top of society. Every British government tries to defend the
interests of British capitalists against those of other nations – through
economic measures where possible and military means where necessary.
Despite his recent rhetoric against the dangers of
protectionism, Gordon Brown is no exception to this rule. This is why he has
stoked nationalist ideas, including his infamous use of the “British jobs for
British workers” phrase at the Labour Party conference in 2007.
Completing
There is another reason why the ruling class has always been
keen on nationalism – it promotes the notion that workers have a common interest
with everyone else in their firm, their country, or both.
So nationalism benefits company bosses and government
ministers. It helps them to portray the major divisions in our society as being
between different nationalities competing for jobs, resources and political
dominance – rather than being between workers and bosses.
Even before the recession hit, one of the bosses’ favourite
arguments was that workers in Britain had to accept worse pay or conditions in
order to stay “competitive” against rival nations. In some cases they threatened
to move work abroad.
Similarly, the government today tries to encourage a “Blitz
spirit” – the feeling that we all have to rally round the flag and tighten our
belts in the face of an economic crisis that threatens the whole nation.
There is a deeper fit between nationalism and the Labour
Party’s focus on parliamentary politics. Reformism – the notion that things can
or should be improved through the existing system – easily leads to supporting
the existing institutions of the British nation state.
This is why Labour might oppose racism and attacks on asylum
seekers when in opposition, but has a record in office of whipping up racism and
introducing draconian legislation against immigrants.
It is also much easier for Labour to falsely lay the blame on
foreign workers for taking British jobs, housing, benefits or hospital places
than it is to confront and address the real issues – such as the failure of the
government’s own neoliberal policies.
So we can see how nationalism benefits the ruling class – and
why the ruling class embraces nationalism. But nationalist ideology can also
frequently find its way into the workers’ movement.
It can seem easier to fight for a larger share of the world
market than to take on the bosses directly. This can lead to workers rejecting
the idea that they are “in it together” with their bosses, but still accepting
that they are in competition with workers of other nationalities.
This “working class” version of nationalism is often
encouraged by trade union leaders who push campaigns to defend “British
industry”.
Some unions have run expensive campaigns in recent years –
encouraging consumers to “buy British”, or to boycott goods that are being
manufactured abroad.
These campaigns are ineffective. But they are also dangerous,
in that they accept that the enemy is “foreign imports” and, by implication, the
“foreign workers” who make them.
While nationalism is not the same as racism it certainly feeds
it, because it works by encouraging divisions in the working class.
Some on the left believe they can neutralise these divisions
by broadening British nationalism to include black, Asian or Polish immigrants.
But ultimately nationalism can only work by defining certain people as
“foreigners” and excluding them – so the pressure is always against unity.
Of course bosses will try to play workers off against each
other on national lines. But for workers to accept this division is a disaster.
That is why there has been a political fight against nationalism throughout the
history of the workers’ movement.
Ethical principles
It was revolutionary socialists who stood out against the nationalistic
jingoism that fuelled the slaughter of the First World War. And there have been
successive battles to bring generations of immigrants into the trade union
movement.
These traditions all rest on the idea that workers from different backgrounds
and nationalities are not in competition with each other, but are allies in a
common fight against a common class enemy.
This is the spirit at the heart of the anti-capitalist movement, and at the
core of workers’ movements across Europe that have fought together to oppose
European Union legislation that undermines union rights.
The Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky pointed out nearly a hundred years ago
that internationalism isn’t just about abstract ethical principles. Its a
rational response to the fact that the capitalist economy is global in nature –
and so is the class struggle.
Workers have no country. Our fight for jobs and better pay is a fight against
bosses who use us to maximise their profits – and against a system that is only
too happy to play one group off against another in the pursuit of that profit.
If you use Internet Explorer, Information on your clipboard
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Are States really farms and we the livestock?
Click on link:-
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=P772Eb63qIY&
