Thought for the Day

[buttslinger]

In 2008 we were debating whether or not Banks were too big to fail, and I think for the next 8 years Businesses sat on their money in the stock market, in a pissing match with Obama as to who the American People belong to, big Business or Big Government. Now with Trump at the helm destroying every sensible REGULATION and tossing CEOs 1.6 trillion, there's no question Big Business RULES.
Luckily every other Country in the World faces the same dilemma, when do the WORKERS get to see the fruits of their labor?
When we sent the Marshall plan to Japan, we introduced milk into their diets and they all grew two inches. We told them the way to run businesses, and for a while there Japan was kicking our ass with Sony Trinitrons and Honda Accords. But American Businesses don't follow the rules we taught Japan, American Bosses made rules to make themselves rich. In Japan the lowest factory worker can "shut down the entire line" when he or she spots a mistake. In the USA the Bosses are bragging about their golf score in the office, while pissed off workers screw with the product. So why is the USA still the most vibrant Economy in the World? Nuclear Weapons?
When Republicans say "WE" can't afford Medicare for all, they mean freewheeling Big Businesses can't afford it.

[buttslinger]

For sore eyes:

[Stavros]

I can't recall if the word Collusion has been part of our posts related to the Mueller enquiry, but an article in today's New York Times, confirms that 'collusion' has no precise definition in law and prompts the thought that for once the President may be right that there was no collusion with Russia, but that the more serious allegations remain.
I have found a selection of legal opinion which replaces the word Collusion with the more intense Conspiracy, thus increasing the weight on the President's shoulders, to add to the case that the New York State Attorney General has brought against the President, his family and their charitable foundation.
I don't know if in the latter case he will settle out of court rather than have his behaviour -and tax returns- made public, we shall see. Both on the BBC 2 Newsnight programme this evening, and yesterday on the Radio 4 lunchtime news discussion, defenders of the President sounded desperate and dismissive of the legal issues, not expressing despair at the repeated tweets and comments from the man himself that contradict previous statements and appear to harass the Special Prosecutor. Maybe we are reaching the point soon where he must decide if he is going to stop it all, if he can, and take his chances on the mid-terms.

The legal debate here-
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...llusion-215366

The New York case here-
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ral-violations

[buttslinger]

I'm getting TV ads about K-12 "internet schools" … instead of brick buildings and school buses, kids get to learn in their pajamas in front of the TV-Teacher. I'm guessing this is a Republican plot to save money at the expense of the poor. Marketing cheap education for the masses. Rich kids go to Prep School. Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos doesn't even believe in public school, the great American melting pot.

[Stavros]

The Corbyn situation shows no sign of rest even in the 'Summer Hole' (as the Germans call) it, or the 'Silly season' in the UK.

The latest controversy concerns the visit Corbyn made to the Palestinians Martyrs Cemetery in Tunisia in 2014 when a wreath was laid on the graves of men assumed to have been part of the Black September unit that murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1971. Corbyn says he did not participate in the ceremony for Black September 'martyrs' but the victims of an Israeli air-strike on Tunis -at that time the HQ of the PLO- in 1985. It doesn't get any better when Corbyn is quoted thus:

“I was there because I wanted to see a fitting memorial to everyone who has died in every terrorist incident everywhere because we have to end it. You cannot pursue peace by a cycle of violence; the only way you can pursue peace [is] by a cycle of dialogue.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-wreath-laying

One can easily dismiss the outrage of the world class hypocrite Benjamin Netanyahu, who every year celebrates the terrorist attack on the King David Hotel in 1946 causing 91 deaths and 46 injuries, whereas the Israeli historian Mordechai Golani takes a different view:
Seventy years after the pre-State of Israel Irgun underground militia blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing more than 90 people, historian Prof. Mordechai Golani called the attack "an act of terror that stained our history, leaving it scarred.”
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...rror-1.5414668

No, the real problem is that Corbyn has for most of his political career taken sides in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians choosing the latter because of their 'revolutionary' credentials, something that was important for the 1968 Marxists, Trotskyists and various other left-wing radicals who also defended or justified the actions of the IRA and the Provisional IRA, the Viet-Cong, and so on. From this perspective, Palestinians are victims of Zionist Imperialism or some concoction based on Zionism and American Imperialism choosing Israel as its runway in the Middle East, and so on.

What Corbyn does, however, is simply ignore the question that asks if the PLO was worthy of the claim that it represented the Palestinian people? And if he is so opposed to violence, why offer support to some of the most murderous groups in the Middle East who did not discriminate between Jew and Arab, Muslim and Christian, but killed anyone who got in their way?

Even if you allow for splits in the PLO caused by doctrinal differences between Arafat's Fateh movement and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and yet more splits -the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and smaller groups, the fact is that the various branches of the PLO were as committed to murdering Palestinians as they were Israelis.

Black September, for example, chose as its first victim not a Jew, but the Jordanian Prime Minister, Wasfi al-Tell who had been given the responsibility of throwing the PLO out of Jordan, a bloody campaign that began in September 1970 following an attempted assassination by the PFLP on King Hussein, and a campaign that ended the following year when the PLO removed to Lebanon, where it caused havoc in the domestic politics that were a partial cause of the civil war that broke out in 1975.

Wasfi al-Tell was shot dead in Cairo, around the same time his younger brother living in Amman was also a target though Fateh only succeeded in killing their housekeeper who was, needless to say, a Palestinian.

The PLO, notably in the capital Amman, had behaved with the kind of reckless criminality that has taken many politically motivated 'guerilla' groups away from their root cause - for example, the 'Real IRA' has been ranked the 9th richest 'terror group' (topped at the time by ISIS see the list here
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/n...-30748913.html)

The PLO was responsible for protection rackets, daylight robbery, summary executions, and more rapes than anyone bothered to count. And when the PLO moved to Lebanon, it carried on where it left off in Jordan.

Corbyn may not have read Yezid Sayigh's comprehensive history Armed Struggle and the Search for State (1997), but to do so puts that 'armed struggle' into context, explaining why it became so central to the Palestinian search for justice after 1967, but also why they abandoned it in the 1970s as their primary strategy when it was clear that it did not work and caused them more problems than they were worth. Moreover, by adopting the most militant Palestinians as their favoured clients, Corbyn and the Labour left in his penumbra, and crucially, the Israeli government, ignored the Palestinians actually living under the illegal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza District until they emerged at the Madrid Conference in 1990 as the only sane voices the Palestinians had. Indeed, had the Israelis not chosen extremists -they supported the formation of HAMAS in the first Intifada as a counter-weight to Fateh- they could have reached an accommodation with Haidar Abdul-Shafi and Hanan Ashrawi that would have or could have produced a peace treaty not unlike the one that was eventually signed in 1993, the peace treaty that Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu were, and are committed to destroy.

But that is a 'what if' in history, whereas Corbyn chose his 'revolutionary' friends to maintain his public profile as a committed radical.
But there are times when you must ask yourself, do I need friends like this? And with so many Palestinians to choose from, why choose the ones so closely associated with murder and crime?

[Jericho]

The latest controversy concerns the visit Corbyn made to the Palestinians Martyrs Cemetery in Tunisia in 2014 when a wreath was laid on the graves of men assumed to have been part of the Black September unit that murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1971.

Still, takes the heat off Boris, eh!

[Stavros]

Still, takes the heat off Boris, eh!

Not for long, he doesn't like it when he is not the centre of attention. He will be back with some more flippant nonsense in the Telegraph soon.

[broncofan]

I agree with Stavros' post above, but I guess one element that has been striking for me is that I can't see anything coherent about what Corbyn does.

If he wants to meet with odious people because he doesn't believe in de-platforming people, he would have to not de-platform people. If he wants to meet with Holocaust deniers and people who say blood-curdlingly bigoted things about Jews because he thinks it advances the cause of peace, then he has to actually be consistent about it.

To my knowledge, he has not been willing to meet with ANY Israelis except for maybe the odd Israeli ex-pat who wants to de-stigmatize Holocaust denial. Where are his meetings with Israelis who oppose the occupation? Where are his necessary meetings with equivalently despicable Israelis that are necessary to achieve peace?

The fact is that he meets with these despicable people because they are on his same general "side" (even though he doesn't agree with their more extreme views) and he doesn't find anything disqualifying in the same way he does for so many others.

I know I've covered a lot of people on the left who have said anti-Semitic things but I'd be remiss not to mention Jenny Tonge, who was a Liberal Democrat but claims to bleed for the Palestinians. A few days ago she posted on facebook that she never gets an answer when she asks why Jewish people have been persecuted over and over again through history. The implication was that Jews are so obnoxious that a consistent history of victimization is proof not of how toxic anti-Semitism is, but that the Jews are guilty of something. She may or may not know it, but this is a baldly neo-Nazi trope. One could type into the twitter search bar "Jews 109 countries" and get a sense for how the argument works.

My question is why are there so many people on the left who are advocates for the Palestinians who fall into these patterns. I am not trying to de-legitimize this movement directly or indirectly. The merits of the Palestinians' argument are there regardless of what scoundrel offers support. I've been to a ton of rallies here in the U.S. and never come across someone saying something like that.

As for Boris' comments they are mean-spirited and not something a politician should ever say. I trust that people in Britain can oppose the commemoration of people who castrate and murder athletes, condemn Boris, and Netanyahu all at the same time without the bullshit and obfuscation.

[broncofan]

When you look at Boris Johnson's comments there's nothing to deconstruct. There's no guile, there's no pretense, there's just ridicule and malice. It is the type of jibe a person on the right says because they think nobody will be concerned about it. One almost expects bigotry from many on the right, though it doesn't make it less reprehensible.

It is more surprising to see on the left, but also dangerous because the left must be a bulwark against the normalization of hatred and irrationality. To see people on the left rightly call out Israeli "what-aboutery" and then engage in what-aboutery when it is convenient is dismaying.

It can serve no humanistic principle to castrate and murder an individual who has done nothing wrong out of expedience for a cause or based on some notion of collective guilt. It is not bourgeois or privileged to sympathize with the athletes who were brutalized nor is it heroic (or even acceptable) to sympathize with their torturers.

[Stavros]

I agree with Stavros' post above, but I guess one element that has been striking for me is that I can't see anything coherent about what Corbyn does.
If he wants to meet with odious people because he doesn't believe in de-platforming people, he would have to not de-platform people.

Again, the point of reference here is the 1960s when Corbyn developed his political position, with the depressing fact that he hasn't changed his views since then. I believe the famous JM Keynes goes somethng like 'I make up my mind based on the facts, and when the facts change, I change my mind', yet Corbyn and also McDonnell argue as if there had been no change to capitalism in the last 50 years, as if Labour had not lost four general elections in a row. They have no coherent view of the state, and like most Marxists, are unable to make sense of nationalism or offer a more appealing alternative. They have supported National Liberation movements because they see them as 'revolutionary' even socialist, but a national movements by definition cannot be socialist, something that always undermined their support for a 'United Ireland'.
Unless you believe the 'revolution' for a National cause will then lead to something different, much as the February Revolution led to the Bolshevik Revolution, or the Islamic Revolution in Iran -supported at the time by the Socialist Workers Party ('All The Way With The Ayatollahs' screamed their paper in February 1979)- before the Mullahs took over in another flop for the UK's perennial losers.

The attachment to revolutionary causes is derived from their admiration for Lenin and the belief the Russian Revolution was a triumph, not disregarding the astonishing level of violence it released, but accepting it as part of a sort of cathartic reaction to oppression. What did you expect? It was a revolution! The long list of causes to be supported ranged from the Viet Cong to Salvador Allende, from the Shining Path to the PLO, but it gets more complicated when you factor in the Red Brigades, the IRA/Provisional IRA and Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction because where we never really saw the victims of the faraway 'revolutionary struggles' the European 'guerilla' groups were right here. So they condemn all acts of violence, at the same time believing in the cause. 'Yes, I believe in a United Ireland, but don't approve of the means being used to get it'. And then, in the pub afterwards they tell you they want precisely the revolution they have just said they don't approve of, because there is no revolution without violence.

From here, you get to a position where you don't share a platform with 'racists and fascists' which would endorse their views, or in Corbyn's case, not even the Tories. If he was all but invisible on tv during the EU referendum it was because he would not share a platform with David Cameron, and the only occasion when I think he did appear in a tv debate was when Cameron wasn't there. So the only people he is going to share a platform with on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are committed to one side, which is rather like saying he doesn't believe in a peaceful solution, because a true peace can only be negotiated with both sides, just as two communities locked in such a small space must either find a way to co-habit or face one or two more decades confronting each other with no peace in sight. He enjoys the struggle, and has no plan for peace.

For the same reason, John Hume was treated with contempt by Corbyn and Livingstone in the 1980s, yet it was Hume more than any other party leader in Northern Ireland who worked tirelessly to create a dialogue between communities in Northern Ireland and between North and South which, when the time came, was one of the outcomes of the Good Friday Agreement, in reality a minor triumph for a man the left ridiculed as a waste of time.

Peter Hennessy made the point on BBC Radio 4 last Friday that for the first time in its history, the hard left that had always been a noisy fringe, have taken over the management of the party. Corbyn's primary aim, and he will step down when he thinks he has achieved it, perhaps after this year's conference, or next year, is to re-structure the Labour Party as a Leninist vehicle for his version of the Parliamentary Road to Socialism. This entails building a vibrant membership, which has been achieved now with over 500,000 members, but organized in such a way that instead of the members informing the leadership the aim is for the leadership to inform the members, for the 'delegates' in between to act as cadres explaining the policy platform of the party, in effect issuing them with a party line.

I don't think Corbyn cares too much about anti-semitism, the Middle East or the Americans (another blind spot the British left has never been able to understand), he is focused on building support around a core set of policies on health, housing, education, transport and the utilities that he believes the public are mostly concerned with. The policies are no more radical than those Harold Wilson proposed in 1964 and 1974 or Clement Attlee in 1945, but the party is different, the tone is different, and, crucially, the economic circumstances different and much more fragile than they were in the 1960s, and we have yet to feel the true force of Brexit.

There is a sense of desperation in British politics, rather than optimism, as the cloud of Brexit hangs over us like a sword waiting to fall. I have never before known such a lack of confidence in our political leadership. It is as if they are all useless. And that can't be good. Or maybe I am too much of a pessimist.