If taxpayers are to fund corporations, why shouldn’t they demand that those businesses observe certain conditions of basic fairness? The publicly funded train operators should pay their staff living wages, provide decent pensions and sick pay. And all recipients of public money should be banned from using elaborate structures to avoid paying tax.
The irony is hard to miss. The United States government, which wages war all over the world on the phony pretext of defending “democracy” and “human rights,” increasingly relies on the methods of martial law in response to any indication of social unrest within its borders.
In fact, the lack of concern regarding the militants’ gains in Syria exposes the fundamental deceit at the heart of Western foreign policy. The elites claim to be fighting radical Islamists, yet in Syria they’re doing everything they possibly can to ensure that the side that’s fighting radical Islamists, the secular Syrian government, is weakened and eventually defeated.
If you also need a reminder of how all this dysfunction kills any chance of social change, take a good, honest look around. While we bask in the glow of our “fans” regularly tuning in to our livestreams or sharing our photos or quoting our statuses, every form of life on earth is under assault with no hint of imminent reversal.
In the name of ‘counting every casualty,’ the Pentagon is systematically undercounting deaths from the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on drugs,’ in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America. Complicit in this great deception are some of the world’s most respected anti-war activists.
The destruction of Libya is not only not ‘detail’, it is arguably the defining fact, and crime, of Clinton’s life. If an official enemy were responsible and under discussion, the idea that one could simply pass over, or take as read, their destruction of an entire country would be unthinkable.
And the political fare on offer is all manufactured and presented to placate big business, to court corporate approval and to ensure that the ways in which we vent our dissatisfaction is safely-boundaried by QuestionTime-type ‘participation’.
For example, during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Clinton joined her Secretary of State predecessor (female and person of color) Condoleezza Rice and other neocons in ramming the false propaganda of Saddam/Osama and WMD down the throats of a frightened, gullible and revenge-seeking US population. While Secretary of State, Clinton never met an invasion or coup (i,e: Honduras, Libya) that she didn’t absolutely adore.
Much of this death has been justified in the context of fighting tyranny and terrorism. Yet thanks to the silence of the wider media, most people have no idea of the true scale of protracted terror wrought in their name by US and UK tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before this shocking video surfaced, however, most of the local press coverage, per usual, followed the police’s official narrative and amplified a storyline that, in retrospect, was entirely made up.
True democracy – a community sharing resources fairly and working together for peace, security, justice and prosperity – is antithetical to the ideology of the profit motive. For this reason, rule number one of the corporate media’s version of reality is to present at all times the illusion of freedom, the idea that people are actually in control of their societies, economies and leaders.
‘Israel is a gangster state. It holds the world record in the breach and defiance of international law. It regularly massacres and terrorises the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza, which even David Cameron has described as an “open prison”. Its courts uphold racism as state policy. It has re-elected a congenital liar as its prime minister….’
