Stop Spending Our Future!

Although the figures in the video apply to the USA the same pattern of reckless spending is going on in Gordon Brown's Britain:

... The debt is getting out of control and we and our children will have to pay it off. In the UK there is little sign of any make-work Keynesian projects that are being planned in America, and in fact Mervyn King slapped-down Gordon Brown when he suggested a 'fiscal stimulus' to create jobs.

The capitalists here only want to fund rescue packages for the financial sector and their capitalist interests. Obama, with a new political mandate paid for by his chums on Wall Street has secured some fiscal stimulus for the US economy, but the costs are huge overall and most of the money is shoring-up bank balance sheets, as here.

Really its just populist cover for looting taxpayers of huge sums of money for generations to come and it is splitting elite opinion.

Conservatives/Republicans only want to loot taxpayers for their private gain, they don't want any social or welfare spending, they want that slashed.

... Ordinary American people know that both political parties are ripping them off.

The important thing to note is the huge scale of the crime by people using bought political power, in my opinion. Until ordinary people wake-up to what is being done to them they will not oppose capitalist looting for private gain. And as with WWI and WWII it's ordinary people who will have to service and pay-off these huge debts through higher taxes and slashing cuts in welfare, social care, health care, education - in fact the very things society needs to function.

Medialens

Perhaps I should add ... that the government, here and in the US, could simply have nationalised the banks. They're insolvent anyway so it would not have cost taxpayers anything, but it would have wiped-out capitalist share-holders.

They could have cleaned-up their books and put deflating toxic assets in a holding bank, underwritten by taxpayer guarantees.

They could have prosecuted these Ponzi-scamming thieves and jailed them for hundreds of years and used the banking sector under public ownership for the good of society. They've done none of this.

They've simply looted taxpayers and rewarded those that bankroll them into political positions of power with huge bonuses and pensions.

I hope people remember that the next time they vote, as they will also be losing jobs, homes, and the means of their subsistence thanks to voting capitalists into political power.

Medialens

Capitalism versus Socialism
Poll confirms massive anti-capitalist shift in US public opinion

In periods of intense economic crisis, tranformations which normally require years or decades can take place in weeks or months. A new U.S. poll taken in early April astonishingly shows that U.S. adults under 30 are approximately evenly divided on the question of socialism-versus-capitalism. According to a telephone poll by Rasmussen 33 per cent of the under-30's prefer socialism, 37 percent prefer capitalism, and 30 per cent are undecided.

more...

President Evo Morales calls for 'reparations to the earth'



At UN forum on indigenous issues, Bolivian president calls for global economic overhaul 10 hours ago.

President Evo Morales outlined a plan at the UN on Tuesday to rescue the world from environmental degradation and injustice. Drawing connections between free-market economics, excessive consumption, environmental problems and social injustice, the Bolivian leader urged the world to “put an end to the exploitation of human beings and the pillage of natural resources” by rejecting free-market theory and reallocating the money spent on war to fighting environmental and climate problems.

Ol' Macky's back in Town

Resulting, no doubt, directly from a vituperative and abusive style deliberately intended to intimidate and defame any opposition to the deranged ramblings of the person or persons calling themselves 'Imam Grouik-Grouik' (IGG) the mainstream media in France and Belgium has at last taken notice and identified IGG's nauseating sites (most of which continue to be hosted by Blogger despite a flood of complaints made to them that IGG preaches a litany of religious and race hatred in direct contravention of Blogger's Contents Policy).



Though initially ambivalent in her feelings towards the banning of the IGG-backed demo last 11 September in Brussels, an article by Marie-Cécile Royen of Belgium's weekly, Le Vif, correctly identified IGG's Blog Cochon du Halal to be on the extreme-right and though while not ostensibly supported by the 'big names' of France and Belgium's extremists is still part of a highly-active network of European sites preaching division, religious (and by association racial) intolerance between white Europeans and mainly North African immigrants from the Maghreb.

IGG's blog is part of a wider, racist spectrum with blatantly pro-Hitlerian and white supremacist groups like Stormfront, Blood and Honour at one polarity extending through others like Udo Ulfkotte's Pax Europa and SIOE (Stop Islamization of Europe), Anders Gravers' Danish SIAD Party, Forum Mot Islamisering (FOMI), the Dutch No Sharia Here, the German Akte Islam, the Irish Centre for Vigilance Freedom, the Italian Lysistrata, the Hindutva Hindu Unity, to minority race extremist parties like the Flemish Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), the opportunist Bruno Mégret's so-called Mouvement National Républicain (MNR), the chauvinist Chrétienté-Solidarité, the Opus Dei-like Europae Gentes and the more 'accepted' end including Le Pen's Front Nationale and other mainstream European politicians such as Holland's Geert Wilders (article below) who are busily cashing-in on a wave of media-driven Islamophobia in Europe.

Somewhere along this ominous front are Britain's own extreme-right, racist parties including the BNP, National Front and smaller, virulently anti-Muslim groups such as God Help Britain. Fomenting collective hysteria and calculatedly promoting wildly distorted caricatures of their chosen victims these groups, like vultures, feed off the carrion of discontent left behind by the capitalist, mainstream political status quo.

We have seen how the inevitable rise of disaffection and seething anger caused in the poorer sectors of society, the politically marginalised, by New Labour's 'neo-liberal' monetarist policies has led to traditional Labour supporters voting BNP and National Front as a protest and a call to be heard by politicians comfortably ensconced in a new managerial aristocracy which, knowing very well how to look after its own interests, scorns and abuses the very people its positions of privilege depend upon.

Cushioned by wealth and insulated from the rest of society this new Aristocracy has created for itself a bubble of consensus thought and behaviour which, while entirely real to the apparatchiks within it, is completely alien to all those who are the victims it preys upon, beginning with the millions of innocents its military-industrial machine kills daily in its imperialistic adventures abroad to the poor and disadvantaged living directly outside its gated residences back home.

With the calculated and cynical purpose of self-preservation at all costs this new Aristocracy was responsible for fabricating and promoting an entirely phony 'War on Terrorism' in which the fostering of Islamophobia through national, tribalistic xenophobia played a major role. Using refined methods of promoting the Goebbels Big Lie technique, seven days a week, year in year out, using the vast array of media outlets available, this new Aristocracy fomented fear, loathing and hatred throughout its controlled communities across the planet.

Leading to the entirely fake 'War of Cultures' which the new Aristocracy along with its secret services has brought us where the more deranged elements of white, cultural supremacy described above play a significant part promoting an ugliness ostensibly denied by the Aristocracy but fostered by it all the while. This is precisely what the German playwright, Bertholt Brecht, warned us about over seventy years ago when predicting that with the collapse of the capitalist system would be unleashed from its chest of horrors the fascists and the Nazis who, while pretending to listen to popular discontent, would continue to promote capitalism in a more virulent and bellicose form.

Brecht's song, Mack the Knife, was a satire written around the return of the extremist right into mainstream politics. And, guess what folks, while the left, socialist and Marxist poseurs were playing with their favourite toy train sets Macky came back in style among what used to be called the working classes before it was made jobless and unwaged.

While even the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) of the 'seventies had the political nous to create an anti-Nazi League and send the National Front back under the stones from which it had crept, today there's no sign of it, the SWP having moved onto pastures new to prey on what is jokingly called the anti-War movement.

Today, there are few socialists fighting the new fascists and Nazis of another generation although, of course, there remain many honourable individuals just as committed to that struggle as ever. But the old lesson that Brecht taught an earlier generation, that as long as capitalism exists so will fascism, imperialism and racism, seems to be lost on the contemporary armchair Left who while dwelling on the nostalgia of the Battle of Cable Street over seventy years ago appear singularly incapable of removing themselves from their computer screens for any real social action. So shall they reap the whirlwind whence, through a dereliction of political duty and human obligation, they scattered their seeds so carelessly.

And characteristic of the blinkered, Little Englanderism which has been and still is rife through all sectors of British society even the apparently organised Muslim groups on the Internet appear totally uninterested in the storm of race hate that is brewing and building like a pressure cooker in continental Europe and which will inevitably blow over onto this island. In trying to promote the appearance of moderation and the approval of their patrons on the BBC's Heaven and Earth show these Muslim Uncle Toms are their own worst enemy, interested primarily it seems in their own self-promotion.

What, finally, will it take to get the message across to all these sleep-walkers that Macky's back in town?

*********

The Legacy of Cable Street



The Battle of Cable Street



London's East End: A Cradle of Immigration

Economic Armageddon Is Coming
By Joel S. Hirschhorn

Stop being a compliant consumer. Face the ugly truth. Don’t get fooled by the stock market. Accept the need for the mistreated middle class to become the revolutionary class. The British military establishment's most prestigious think tank sees what too few over-consuming Americans are willing to anticipate. Unjustified and mounting economic inequality is planting the seeds for global economic conflict ...

Now Read On

A Terrifying Truth
by Dave Lindorff

It wasn’t too long ago that the death of socialism, the triumph of capitalism and the end of history were being widely hailed.

What a difference a few years and a few fractions of a degree in world temperature change makes!

We may still be contemplating the end of history, but of a different sort. It is suddenly becoming painfully obvious that the pursuit of profit and the philosophy of growth for growth’s sake and of dog eat dog is about to kill us all off.

Now that it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that the earth is headed for a global heat wave the likes of which hasn’t been seen in hundreds of thousands and perhaps tens of millions of years — the kind of killing heat that in the past has led to mass extinctions — it is ludicrous to talk about things like carbon trading and raising vehicle mileage standards.

We need a revolution in the way we human beings live and the way we treat each other.

There is no way that the world’s 6.5 billion people — and especially the 2 billion of them who live in wealthier societies — can continue to consume energy at even close to the level that we have been consuming it. There is no way we in the developed world can continue to live the way we have been living, in oversized houses, heated in winter and cooled in summer. There is no way in the northern hemisphere we can continue to have teakwood or mahogany-floored living rooms and eat strawberries in December.

There is no way that we can continue to squander trillions of dollars on war and military spending every year.

No way, that is, if we plan on leaving a livable world for our children and grandchildren.

The so-called “green” politicians who talk about instituting carbon-trading schemes, about driving hybrid automobiles, about buying fluorescent light bulbs, and about turning down the thermostat and wearing sweaters, are deceiving us or themselves.

None of this is going to save us.

What will save us is recognizing that the age of consumer-driven capitalism is over.

We either come up with a new way to organize society, in which production is based upon real needs, not upon manufactured needs, and in which scarce resources are made available to those who need them, not just to those who can afford them, or we will all be doomed — or at least our progeny.

The peoples of the world — especially of the developed world, but really everywhere — need to recognize that unless our expectations are changed, unless our selfish desire for more is curbed, unless wasteful production is ended, we are all likely to be on that extinction list.

So where are the leaders of boldness and vision in politics, media and academia who are ready to tell the truth? Where are the people who are willing to listen to, and reward that truthtelling?

This is not an “inconvenient” truth we need to confront. It’s a terrifying truth.

We need to change everything, and we need to do it quickly, too.

Here in America, that means an end to subsidies for suburban sprawl. There should be no more federal or state funds for road building and road repair. If people want to live miles away from where they work, let them pave their own roads. That’s the only way to get people to realize they’re going to have to start supporting funding for mass transit, and to start thinking about living near where they work. We need to end subsidies for agribusiness, which has virtually decimated local agriculture to the point that prime farm states like Pennsylvania and New Jersey now import all their food from the West Coast. Ridiculous!

We need to levy a massive tax on gasoline, so that no one will buy cars, and so that those who have them will drive them only rarely. Large, heavy vehicles for personal use should be outright banned. Trucks too should be heavily taxed, so that products will reflect the true cost of the environmental damage that shipping them around causes.

Electricity and home heating fuels should also be heavily taxed, with some kind of a rebate program for low-income families, so that people will stop heating and cooling large homes.

As these things are done, there clearly will be massive dislocation. People who live in hot climes like Florida or Arizona will no doubt decide they can’t afford to cool their homes, and will move north. People in cold regions may decide it’s too expensive to heat their homes and will move to more temperate zones. Companies like the Detroit automakers will go bust or shrink enormously. Power plants will be shut down. Oil companies will go bankrupt.

That all has to happen, but it doesn’t mean people have to starve. We as a society need to demand a government that will help those who are displaced by the crisis to relocate and to find new productive ways to earn a living. A huge government program of investment in alternative energy systems would be able to hire many of those whose jobs are lost by the shutdown of the carbon economy.

A new ethos needs to be developed. Conspicuous consumption, egoism and the so-called “American Dream” of having it all for one’s self and one’s family need to be replaced with a new—actually a very old—concept: communalism.

Instead of thinking of ourselves as consumers and competitive free agents, we need to start thinking of ourselves as passengers on a boat that is sinking. If we all run for the lifeboats and life preservers and fight to see who can be saved, the life vests will be torn and ruined and the lifeboats will fall into the sea and sink. In the end, we’ll all go down. If, on the other hand, we change tack, recognize that we’re all in this together, and make orderly plans to save ourselves collectively, we may all be able to get away.

To succeed, we need to acknowledge that everyone is at risk, everyone is contributing to the common goal of survival, and everyone will be taken care of.

The same approach needs to be taken in the larger world. If the poorer nations believe that they are going to be abandoned to catastrophe and famine, they will do two things: continue to try and survive by the old strategies of wasteful energy use and environmental destruction, and of mass migration to safer havens. The first response — for example the continued destruction and burning down of rainforests for wood and cropland and ethanol feedstocks — will threaten us all with ever worsening global warming. The second will lead to overcrowding of more fortunately situated nations, and a drain on their resources.

The only answer is again for all the wealthy nations, and those that are better situated by geography to survive climate change, to commit themselves to helping the more threatened nations and societies. This is not a matter of altruism; it is the simple logic of survival.

But before we can start making the huge changes that are called for — really the dismantling of the whole capitalist system and the freemarket ethos — we need to start hearing, and demanding to hear, the truth — from scientists, from politicians, from business leaders, from the media, and ultimately from ourselves.

For starters, let’s stop kidding ourselves that the latest UN report on climate change is the real story. That report, ominous as it sounds, doesn’t tell the half of it. The report was first watered down by the scientists who reviewed it, and then it was censored by the governments that feared its findings. For one thing, it didn’t even mention that all the projections for warming during this century don’t even take into consideration the role that hundreds of billions of tons of methane gas underlying the Arctic and Antarctic permafrost and trillions of tons of methane lying in the form of frozen hydrates deep under the ocean could play if that super global warming gas should start pouring out into the atmosphere.

We are in a situation where it is wholly inappropriate to act on optimistic assumptions. Rather, we need to consider worst-case scenarios, and start planning and acting with those in mind. That means, for example, that to keep that methane fiasco from occurring, we don’t want the permafrost to go away in the polar regions, we don’t want the oceans to warm precipitously and we don’t want the ice caps to melt away. That means we have to act much more dramatically than just worrying about coastal erosion and lowered crop yields might lead us to do.

This is a crisis that isn’t going away. It is a crisis that isn’t going to be solved with band-aids. It is a crisis that isn’t going to be solved by smooth talk. And it is a crisis that will get worse the longer we take to recognize its true gravity, and the longer we take to face up to the revolution that needs to take place if we are to prevent it.

And that is the truth.

from Atlantic Free Press

Capitalism & Other Kids' Stuff


LINK

Written and produced for the World Socialist Movement by Paddy Joe Shannon, this 51-minute video is an excellent introduction to the 'reality' of the world as we find it today and the real possibility of another reality in a post-capitalist society.

"Most of reality is politics," he reminds us. The human being is, by nature, a political creature. So what kind of reality has politics created? A Blue Pill matrix reality where we are all conditioned into believing that capitalism is not only right and proper but that it's the only way of life.

Within this 'reality', more precisely a consensus-reality, all politicians play the same game of administrating the capitalist system. They all have the same frame of reference, they all think within the same box. They, like we, are all imprisoned in the same cell.

The Blue Pill reality which created a hell on earth is now collapsing all around us. A native American word for it is "Koyaaniskaatsi," or breakdown. Breakdown at every level, macrocosmic and microcosmic. According to the Mayan calendrics this matrix reality comes to an end within the next four years!

Perhaps that's why the idea of a post-capitalist society based on equality and common ownership is now more real than it ever was. Money has already been all but abolished within contemporary capitalism which, given its way, will replace it with magnetic-strip credits on an ID card or personal microchip.

A world of proles and, in cases like me, 'non-persons.'

But capitalism will continue to insist on the gross inequality of wealth ownership that creates so much misery on a Prison Planet of haves and have-nots. Globalization is its new imperialism under another name.

Only we can change it. Only the prisoners have it within their power to free themselves.

Start with this video!

World Socialist Movement