If the Nation can issue a dollar bond it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good also. . . . It is absurd to say our Country can issue bonds and cannot issue currency. Both are promises to pay, but one fattens the usurer and the other helps the People.
It’s not about the dead, nor is it even really about Assad. It is about destroying Syria and achieving geopolitical objectives which have been thus far unattainable due to the stubborn resolve of Damascus and its military. Ultimately, this war is about remaking the Middle East, no matter how many bodies it takes. Sadly, the dead of Douma are little more than tinder to those desperate to set Syria and the region ablaze.
“The people have the power, all we have to do is awaken that power in the people. The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.”—John Lennon
If the U.S. government’s hope was that the combination of Kerry’s hasty judgment and the DNI’s supportive “Government Assessment” would pin the P.R. blame for MH-17 on Putin and Russia, the gambit clearly worked. The U.S. had imposed serious economic sanctions on Russia the day before the shoot-down – but the Europeans were hesitant. Yet, in the MH-17 aftermath, both U.S. and European media were filled with outrage against Putin for supposedly murdering 298 innocents.
Above all else, what has been proved by the bitter experience made by Greek workers with Syriza is that it is impossible to defend anything—jobs, wages, essential social services—without breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic and political life. It demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class against the major corporations and banks and their government.
The Labour leadership campaign of Jeremy Corbyn will be remembered for several notable reasons, not least the descent of the UK’s corporate media into unremitting farce, with the Guardian in its role as vanguard of the ‘liberal left’ decisively leading the pack.
As one reads through the hundreds of articles mentioning the four Labour candidates, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that serious, much less harsh, criticism of the New Labour triumverate is not on the agenda. It just becomes obvious that there are no forces within the Guardian willing to support such a focus.
Befitting his own campaign for a new, healthy and open politics, Corbyn can only but welcome more critical scrutiny of a media that’s urged people to support ‘sensible’ New Labourism, kept readers in step with ‘neoliberal reality’ and waged such a campaign of hostility towards Corbyn himself. And remember, this is not just the right wing press, it’s the Guardian, Independent and others claiming to be serious about progressive change.
The ideas and vision that Jeremy Corbyn represents, for so long buried beneath a ton weight of Thatcherite ideology, have risen from their slumber and are now part of the mainstream political discourse again, breathed new life by thousands of young people who demand a real and humane alternative to the thin gruel that passes for reality today.
People’s quantitative easing is instead a highly directed process where the debt that is repurchased has been deliberately created and issued either by a green investment bank or by local authorities, health trusts and other such agencies for the specific purpose of funding new investment in the economy at the time when big business and financial markets are completely failing to deliver the scale of investment that is needed to get the UK working again and to restore our financial prosperity.
The Greek government was thus broken Mafia-style at the knees, until it was forced to abandon its national sovereignty and watch its public treasures sold off piece by piece. Suspicious minds might infer that this was a calculated plot designed from the beginning to throw Greece’s prized assets onto the auction block, a hostile takeover and asset stripping for the benefit of those well-heeled entities in a position to purchase them, including the very banks, hedge funds and speculators instrumental in driving up Greek debt and destroying the economy.
Like some mysterious figure who suddenly arrives in a Hollywood Western film, Jeremy has turned up in the wind-blown, parched town and taken on the oppressors. I am sure his bold initiative will be rewarded. Indeed, in the growth of a more confident left, it already has.
