Thursday 10 November 2022
Tuesday 8 November 2022
Jeffrey St. Claire succinct and destructive on Israels serial apartheid elections.
The big winner in Israel’s elections was Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the ultra-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, who is set to be the next Homeland Security Minister. As a lawyer Ben Gvir defended Israeli nationalist terrorists in the courts, threatened the late PM Rabin before he was assassinated by a rightwing Zionist, and has been convicted 8 times for incitement and related felonies. In his victory speech, Ben Givr vowed: “It is time that we will be back the owners of this land, it is time that our kids will feel safe to walk around the streets.”
+ Still it’s unlikely that the Israeli elections will change much. It will continue on pretty much the same thuggish, defiant, unrepentant course set by Ariel Sharon. Governments come and go with greater frequency now but the oppressive Zionist imperative remains. What will have to change is the rationale of the US for supporting such a brutal regime that flaunts human rights and international law with the impunity of an NYPD street cop. It no longer has the hollow liberalism as represented by Yair Lapid to hide behind. The violent racism that was once implicit is now explicit. At most, it will give the Biden administration the chance to issue a few entirely performative press releases remonstrating against some atrocity before approving the next Israeli aid package.
+ 2,747,943: number of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
+ 0: number of Palestinians living in the West Bank who were permitted to vote in the Israeli elections.
+ 687: the number of houses and buildings Israel has demolished in the West Bank this year.
+ Thomas Friedman took to his usual pasture in the NYT to graze over the re-election of Netanyahu and concluded that the “Israel We Knew is Gone.” Who’s this “we” you’re talking about, Friedman? And what “Israel”? The Israel of Sabra and Shatila? The Israel that ran over Rachel Corrie? The Israel of phosphorus bombs in Gaza? The Israel of an Apartheid Wall? The Israel that shot Linda Abu Akleh in the head? History ain’t changed.
Extract from his weekend Counterpunch throwaway Roaming Charges goodie.
Sunday 6 November 2022
Israeli Apartheid and breaking of UN Resolutions
+ 2,747,943: number of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
+ 0: number of Palestinians living in the West Bank who were permitted to vote in the Israeli elections.
+ 687: the number of houses and buildings Israel has demolished in the West Bank this year.
I’m thankful to Jeffrey St. Claire from Counterpunch for the abbé.
Wednesday 2 November 2022
Thursday 27 October 2022
Monday 10 October 2022
Biden Confirms that P.M. is Dangerous Truss.
Tool or Fool?
“The link between falling oil prices over the summer and the successful Russian evasion of sanctions on its oil exports should be obvious, but apparently eluded Liz Truss when she met President Joe Biden in New York on the margins of a UN General Assembly meeting last month.
An account of the meeting by my brother Andrew Cockburn, the Washington editor of Harper’s magazine, reveals that Truss asked Biden for two things: a strong effort to bring down world energy prices and a total embargo on Russian oil exports. Biden was surprised that Truss did not understand that her requests contradicted each other, since taking Russian crude off the market would inevitably raise the price of oil. After the meeting, Biden told his aides that he found the new British prime minister to be “really dumb”, and not to be taken seriously.”
The above is an extract from an article by Patrick Cockburn which can be found in full in Counterpunch. at :- https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/10/how-the-wests-sanctions-on-russia-boomeranged/
Monday 19 September 2022
Liz Truss - Danger, Sing Out a Warning .
hospitals.
hospitals.
It seems that what Conservative governments have treated us to since 1979 may be like a walk in the park compared with what Truss is about to be unleash on us before 2025. Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.
She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.
The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.
On Friday, the Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, will outline a mini-Budget to deliver promises made by Ms Truss during her Tory leadership campaign to cut taxes.
The mini-Budget is expected to reverse a 1.25% rise in National Insurance and scrap a 6% increase in corporation tax at a cost of £30bn. A cut in the basic rate of income tax may, it's reported, be on the cards.
The announcement comes at a crucial time. Living standards are dropping at their fastest rate in decades and a recession may be imminent.
And on average, we have been underperforming against major economies over the past 15 years, while income inequality has widened.
All prime ministers promise to make us better off, but they differ in how they intend to do it.
Ms Truss's pitch echoes the small state mantra of those on the right of her party: "Cut taxes to reward hard work and boost business-led growth and investment."
The theory is that by allowing businesses and workers to retain more cash, they should spend and invest more which, in turn, should bring in more tax revenue. Cut red tape, and they have the freedom and incentive to do even more - what's termed supply-side reforms. Another name for this is trickle down economics or what your author terms piss all over you in extremis.
Great Britain today – England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland — is dirtier and more run down than it was a half century ago; its four nations are more divided internally and from each other; and its people are poorer, fatter and grumpier. British unions are weak, and large corporations are strong. Industries are hardly regulated, resulting in disasters such as the multiple bank failures of 2008 and the Grenfell Tower Fire in 2017. With at least 10% of the current U.K. labor force precarious (gig workers, part-timers, and zero-hour contract employees) and double that number coping with in-work poverty, the gap between rich and poor continues to rise: The modest increase in median income in recent years has all gone to the richest 1/5th, while the poorest 1/5th has seen a decline in real wages. The U.K. is among the most unequal countries in Europe.
Changes in the British capitalism since the early 1970s are in fact so profound, that some have argued that the country is in the vanguard of a new, global socio-economic order, variously called “rentierism,” or “techno-feudalism.” Britain doesn’t any longer derive its wealth from making things or even delivering services, the argument goes, but from “rents” from property holdings, patents, and information, or else from speculation in financial instruments, commodity futures, or currency exchange. The British rentier and financial elite, with multiple homes, yachts, planes, and foreign bank accounts, are like the nobles of old, aloof from the commoners, while holding over them the power of economic life and death. They are an extended Royal Family. (I am grateful to https://www.counterpunch.org/author/stephen-f-eisenman/ an American with strong British affiliations for the final two paragraphs)
Tuesday 13 September 2022
Pineapples - Rebecca Faust
Ripeness is all, says Lear & it reminds me
of learning how to choose a pineapple.
At the roadside stand, the strong girl
with the long sharp machete
showed me what to do: first, turn
the fruit over & breathe deeply in.
At the roadside stand, the strong girl
with the long sharp machete
showed me what to do: first, turn
the fruit over & breathe deeply in.
Not dizzy?—not ready. If you get drunk
on the scent, then start hoping
this is the one. Set the fruit upright
at sight level to look straight across
at its quilted squares,
each pierced with an eye. When it’s ripe,
the pineapple’s eyes
—& you will see this with your own eyes—
will be fully open. That is when
to strike the flesh with the blade,
when to split the fruit, discarding the pith.
No more bitter pith.
This is the time, eyes fully open, to slurp
the golden syrupy flesh,
juice running sticky & thick down
your arms, lips & chin—come, Love.
It’s time to begin.
on the scent, then start hoping
this is the one. Set the fruit upright
at sight level to look straight across
at its quilted squares,
each pierced with an eye. When it’s ripe,
the pineapple’s eyes
—& you will see this with your own eyes—
will be fully open. That is when
to strike the flesh with the blade,
when to split the fruit, discarding the pith.
No more bitter pith.
This is the time, eyes fully open, to slurp
the golden syrupy flesh,
juice running sticky & thick down
your arms, lips & chin—come, Love.
It’s time to begin.
Saturday 10 September 2022
Tuesday 30 August 2022
Sunday 28 August 2022
Saturday 27 August 2022
The truth that the media hide.
Recent direct action against premises of U.K. firm selling Israel drones and why Sunak will never be voted in by the Tory shires.
William has been a naughty boy, hence the move back to HQ.
Wednesday 20 April 2022
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