Tuesday 23 December 2008

The First International

Lots of talk recently about the riots in Greece, and their resultant riots in France. A bit of international solidarity from the Left, but nothing important.

"Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution."
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson to the Greek Ambassador

"What are we? Americans. Behind me is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans."
-- Basil Lambrou Chief Inspector of the Athen's Police interviewing a fresh torture victim

That's the way it works. What you and me are shown isn't what's really going on. There's no nation, no allegiance, only loyalty to cash and power.

Gladio, Condor, the Capitalist International.

Persecution through economic policy

It seems Keynesianly unwise to lower benefits in recession, especially when the government has long abandoned Jim Callaghan's ignorant claim "we can't spend our way out of recession". It's really a chance to take advantage of an opportunity - the idea isn't that employment will go up if benefits go down, that's a delusional idea, the idea is that they want to lower benefits and a crisi-tunity has arrived.

Trauma Based economics, shock doctrine. A far better idea to get people into work from the dole would be to allow people to keep signing on and retain half of any pay they earn. At present you can work while on the dole, up to 16 hours, but you can only keep five pounds, less than one hour on the minimum wage. When there are jobs again people could be convinced into taking the temporary or part times ones far more easily if they didn't mean signing off, then waiting months for the council to sort out new housing benefit claims. If it meant having more money, not just getting and extra fiver a week.

Certainly such a carrot would bemore effective than the stick of the voice stress analyser.

Monday 22 December 2008

Shavertron

The place to go.

Rule of Law

Why was Speedy de Menezes killed? I've heard a few theories, but they don't make sense.

There's no evidence he was involved in 7/7, for example, although the electrical overload stuff isn't without basis, and he was an electrician. That's not enough to link him to it, though. Maybe he knew too much and had to be silenced, but there's no real reason to think so. Nothing marks him out as a potential sacrifice and it wasn't an accident, the surveillance officers confirmed he was the man they were after.

I wish I could find, but I can't, something Craig Murray recently wrote about the former harsh treatment of juries.

Most of our legal institutions are to defend men from the tyranus of the executive, or were. Not just juries but coroners too, which are meant to see to it there are no lies told by Power as to how people died. It doesn't always work, of course. Hence the three inquests into the death of Roberto Calvi.

The judge in the Menezes inquest is a corrupt and foolish coward. Other innocent victims of the police have found similar situations. The man shot in his bed after the police smashed down the wrong door. The Scotsman, I forget his name, who was shot because he was supposedly an armed Irish terrorist rather than a Scot with a chair leg in a bag. At his inquest the police brought across some American chap, turns out it often happens in America that people who seem, according to witnesses and physical evidence, to have been shot from behind with no warning were actually shot in self-defence. Sot hat's alright, then.

Like Speedy they were libelled and blamed for their own deaths.

A growing cult

Scientology, a growing cult reaches dangerously into the mind.

Saturday 20 December 2008

Parenti links

Go and hear some Michael Parenti here.

I'll be back after the weekend. With more letters for the prosaic minds of the Socialist Worker editorial staff.

Taleban encircle Kabul - Socialist Worker

Dear Socialist Worker:


Ttaleban to encircle kabul, your recent headline claims. Hardly surprising. The people of Afghanistan have received nother but pain at the hands of the forces of democracy, turning to the Taleban is the logical course of action.

People tend to focus on the beheadings and the forced beards and so forth, but the Taleban came to power as the most popular and progressive force in Afghanistan after the mujahideen had fulfilled their proxy function for the CIA of eliminating the communists.

The Taleban started as a religious community group who reacted when their local warlords took to the kidnapping of children to re-fill their harems. Perhaps this opposition to paedophilia, combined with their stamping out of the drug trade in 2001, was the ultimate reason for their eviction by the Americans.

It's no coincidence that American military interventions are always on the sources or supply lines of major commodities, most notably oil. Iraq easily fits into this picture but by 2001 estimates of future Caspian oil production were already low enough to preclude the trans-Afghan pipeline as a reason for war. However the American intelligence agencies have long been reliant on drug trafficking and couldn't allow the Taleban to cut off this source of revenue, especially not after setting up the gangster narco-state of Kosovo to keep it going. Drugs are just as important as oil to the mechanisms of global control.

As for the anti-paedophile interventions, that certainly wouldn't make them popular with the powers behind the headline "Homosexual prostitution inquiry ensnares VIP's with Reagan, Bush" or the Jersey abuse, with it's links to Hodge and Blair.

What happened at the trial?

Some of those so-called terrorists were on trial recently and I don't know what happened to them. I've heard both conviction and acquittal. Supposedly they were planning on killing hundreds with their cars full of explosives in London and Glasgow.


Of course the cars were really full of petrol, not explosives, and no lives but their own were ever in danger. Only on that front was it not a typical false-flag attack.


And here's a flashback:


Stop the G2o in London - An open letter to the Socialist Worker

I saw a headline in the Socialist Worker - "Stop the G2o in London". The article, rather short, simply said we should do so and that they'll be there in April.

Dear Socialist Worker:

re: "Stop the G20 in London"

This is typical of one of the problems of the movement, particularly inappropriate to an organisation formerly calling itself the International Socialists.

Stopping the G2o won't get us anywhere. The G2o are a decoy. At the same time of year the Bilderberg group will be meeting, although as of yet I can't say where. Perhaps not somewhere as local as London.

This group, which puts the lie to the elite-fostered seperation of journalism, business and politics or between one nation and another will go ahead with no scrutiny from the media or the global movement that should oppose them.

Sugar and Spice


Project Blue Beam quote

The first step concerns the breakdown of all archeological knowledge. It deals with the setup with artificially created earthquakes at certain precise locations on the planet where, supposedly, new discoveries will finally explain to all people the error of all fundamental religious doctrines. The falsification of this information will be used to make all nations believe that their religious doctrines have been misunderstood for centuries and misinterpreted.

Friday 19 December 2008

Green, MP

Callinicos in the Socialist Worker found it difficult to decide whether to hate the Met or the Tories more, and therefore what his opinion should be on the police breach of the law in the Commons.

I sympathise, although I'm not quite thta hate-filled or reactionary. It's still difficult to say whether I don't mind, after all we don't want Parliamentarians to be above the law as if we were Italians! The rule of law is important. However it has to apply to the actuall powerful, that doesn't include back bench MPs. Or front-bench opposition, it's the police and the executive.

Anyway the police had no warrant and Green was dragged off for something Jack Straw and Gordon made their names doing a few years ago, so I'm against it. The rule of law was flouted by the police here, not the Tories. Here's the words of someone better than me, Craig Murray:

I appeared on Sky News yesterday to talk about the Damian Green case (by webcam from Accra), and was simply stunned when another guest on the programme, some idiot from labourhome.com, cited the arrest of an MP in the chamber of the House of Commons in 1815 as justification for police treatment of Damian Green. That excuse is being spread by New Labour across the media and blogosphere.

When this blog was very new, on 8 August 2005, I wrote that: "These are the most dangerous times for liberty in the UK since the government of Lord Liverpool". http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2005/08/those_of_us_who.html
I never for a moment thought that I would see New Labour use one of the most infamous acts of Lord Liverpool's ultra-reactionary government to justify their behaviour.

The MP arrested was Lord Thomas Cochrane. He was arguably the greatest fighting sailor the World has ever produced - very serious military historians will argue that he was even more daring and innovative than Nelson. This is from the official MOD website:http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/server/show/nav.3881

Cochrane was also a Radical. He was elected to Parliament to represent Westminster - at a time the only parliamentary seat with a broadly democratic franchise. He believed in one man one vote, and the abolition of taxes on food and newspapers, and the destruction of scores of privileges. He was also dangerously (to the government) popular and a war hero.

So Lords Liverpool, Eldon and Sidmouth had him arrested, on patently trumped-up embezzlement charges. There followed a series of trials, acquittals, demonstrations and a popular uprising freeing him from prison, after which he was dragged and arrested from the opposition front bench while about to denounce instances of very real government corruption.
Liverpool of course abolished habeas corpus, public meetings, and trades unions and his governrnent perpetrated the Peterloo Massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. So I suppose it is not a shock to see this near-fascist government quoting Liverpool as a good precedent. Except that this is supposed to be a Labour government, and the entire Labour/Liberal tendency in this country was brought up for six generations to view Liverpool as all that was evil in conservatism. This was the period of Peterloo and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Has anybody in this government even read E P Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class"?

Cochrane escaped abroad and continued to fight for freedom in the most literal way. He helped lead the anti-colonial struggles in Chile, Brazil and Greece. He formed makeshift navies for them, and with tiny resources and near superhuman energy and ability waged long and ultimately succesful naval campaigns against the Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish navies.

The arrest of Thomas Cochrane in the House of Commons was the lowest point of despotism in the UK since the death of Charles I. Those New Labour hacks who cite it in justification are ill-educated fools beneath contempt.

Who's that girl?







Inquest into "Speedy" de Menezes

Quotes from the Socialist Worker:

"I heard them say 'This is definitely our man'"
-- Charlie 2, one of the firearms officers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes claiming that surveillance officers identified Jean Charles as a target

"There was no identification from grey [surveillance] team at any time."
-- Ken, a surveillance officer

"Did officer Charlie 12 shout the words 'armed police' at Mr de Menezes before firing?"
-- Coroner's question to the jury

"No."
-- The jury's answer

"[Cressida Dick] said he shouldn't be allowed to get on the train, and I think the words she used was 'at all costs'."
-- Detective Superintendant Mark Lewindon, officer in Scotland Yard control room

"No, I did not, sir."
-- Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick responding to a direct question at the inquest asking if she had said that Jean Charles should not be allowed to get on the train.

"What we have learnt from the accounts of the tragic events that days reminds us all of th extremely demanding circumstances under which the police work to protect us from further terrorist attack"
-- Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, defending the police after the verdict

Strength

I don't admire stength. I don't think Jesus would approve of doing so, so I don't.

Even so I disagree completely with that glennsacks over the supposedly weak modern movie characters compared to the Gary Cooper types of the past. Some cowboy who rescues a damsel in distress isn't stong, he's a Don Juan focusing entirely on the female, engaging in weak-minded hysterical violence and lacking the empathy (genius, Weininger would call it) to put himself in the place of the men he's wanting to kill.

Romcoms are shit and symptomatic of widespread mental illness, but cowboy films are gnerally just as bad, with the added element of hysterical, pant-wetting violent psychopathologies.

Richard S Shaver quote


Somebody does go round and turn off the faucet. It is the flase phone call to the editor, commanding him in the name of panic to cease and desist from all such dabbling in the non-consequential erotica of UTO reports...because they are under governmental ban..or words to that effect. I don't think ANY of these phone calls actuall source in the US government but that all of them are false.
The US of A will not survive this newspaper failure to report the new properly...will not survive this failure to see a deady enemy behind the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and the similar mind-control phenomena pervading all these horrible murders and kidnapping and raping of our society.
Our country is in far greater peril from "occult" crime than it is from "organized" crime...because the crimes of the sadist madmen seems to have no rhyme or reason behind them DOES NOT make them un-important phenomena. That "organised" crime has a profit motive while tha sadist murders do not seems to have a similar profit motive does not necessarily place them in totally separate categories.
Both are a mad take-over of the mind of man, in fact.
The MO is different, is all.
What damn-kind mankind will get out of it all is concentration camps and zombi-like SS troops marching on the sybnagogues and churches...marching on the simple good-natured society of the well-meaning humans and wiping them out all over again.

"Calamity in London", William McGonagall


Oh, heaven! it was a frightful and pitiful sight to see

Seven bodies charred of the Jarvis family;

And Mrs. Jarvis was found with her child, and both carbonized,

And as the searchers gazed thereon they were surprised.


And these were lying beside the fragments of the bed,

And in a chair the tenth victim was sitting dead;

Oh, Horrible! Oh, Horrible! What a sight to behold,

The charred and burnt bodies of both young and old.

Thursday 18 December 2008

I seem I have neglected a comment

I have heard of Robbie the Pict, in passing.

He was mentioned in George Monbiot's Captive State as a protestor against Skye bridge tolls.

A new beginning

Seems to be all the rage. Thought I'd give it a go.