The document reveals that in coordination with the Gulf states and Turkey, the West intentionally sponsored violent Islamist groups to destabilize Assad, despite anticipating that doing so could lead to the emergence of an ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
One former carer said she had calculated that she had effectively been paid £200 a month less than the minimum wage while working for the company, after her travel time had been taken into account
It is important to remember that public order intelligence gathering by the police is carried out with a deliberate purpose: what some criminologists have called ‘strategic advantage’ and ‘strategic incapacitation’.1 Intelligence is used to understand the structures, sustainability and strengths of protest groups, in order to develop ways to undermine them.
The most recent escapade, of course, was the 2011 war on Libya. I say “war on Libya,” because contrary to the conventional mythology of a precision-guided humanitarian war to save Libyans from Col. Gaddafi’s brutality, the NATO military intervention deliberately destroyed the country.
Some readers might object that the BBC, Guardian and the Independent are not right-wing at all, but centre or even left-liberal. But, as we have shown in numerous books and media alerts, these media organisations are embedded in powerful networks of big business, finance and establishment elites.
As long as the media represent the span of interests of the 1% – from the psychopathic Murdoch empire to the capitalism with a little heart of the Guardian Media Group – our politicians will range from the Blue Tories of the Conservative party to the Red Tories of the Labour party. And we will remain enslaved.
If Labour were really acting for the “99%” of us, who have had to suffer at the hands of the unbridled greed of a small minority of society for far too long, they would have a manifesto that began to negotiate a path to economic & industrial security – a move away from the reliance on the FSI and towards class justice for the people of the UK.
Contrary to the accusations of laziness and apathy, therefore, the decision not to vote of those who profess anger towards the system represents true democracy: exercising the right to vote for ‘none of the above’ because, in frank terms, ‘none of the above’ stand for them; representing instead the ruling and corporate classes – the ‘establishment consensus’: the continuation and entrenchment of the status quo.
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 six-month humanitarian bombing of Libya engineered to prevent a highly hypothetical “atrocity crime” ended up “liberating” at least 10 times more people from their lives than the previous skirmishes between Col. Gaddafi’s troops and weaponized “rebels”, most of them hardcore Islamist militias, now free to wreak jihadi havoc from eastern Libya to northern Syria.
Thus Putin’s opinions and political plans become the decisive factor in areas such as Russia’s foreign policy. If the phrase “without Putin, there is no Russia” is an exaggeration, then the phrase “what Putin wants, Russia also wants” reflects the situation quite accurately in my opinion.
Voting is a pitifully slow and ineffective way of creating change. In reality, the only thing that has ever created change is collective action; we think that action should be direct. Direct action is not just a tactic but a transformative way of taking back power for the people and beginning to re-organise our world.
