fahrenheit451:083

A flurry of social and mainstream corporate media activity accompanied Jeremy Corbyn's  recent launch of his " Digital Manifesto ". One paragraph in particular struck me as more than just a little sinister in its implications.

 

" We will develop a voluntary scheme that provides British citizens with a secure and portable
identity for their on-line activities. The Digital Citizen Passport will be used when interacting
with public services like health, welfare, education and housing. "

 

Clearly we're deep inside Humpty-Dumpty territory where words mean precisely what those who use them want them to mean, no more and no less. " We will develop a voluntary scheme.." The use of the royal " we " in this particular context refers to a notionally future Labour Government where Corbyn, presumably is Prime Minister. Repeat apres moi develop a voluntary scheme.Presumably participation in the development of the scheme itself will be voluntary, as will the actual participation once this scheme is implemented. This scheme, " The Digital Citizen Passport " will be used when interacting with various public services. Where does that place the,currently estimated, 6 ,000,000 digitally excluded citizens? Surely the customary face to face interpersonal, over the counter transactions will be allowed to continue, won't they? In which case why introduce a digital citizens passportat all? Is the current blight of mass digital exclusion to be tackled first and every household and every citizen included via a government backed programme?

There will have to be either a very steep learning curve or a very long lead time ahead of implementation. Then again virtually all politicians of all persuasions adopt that insufferably haughty manner whenever trumpeting the next big thing that they'll be involved in bringing to pass.

Can't wait for the, what was it again? oh yeah, digital citizen passport..

 

fahrenheit451:082

In spite of the British Electorate's continuing, unambiguous, disdain of mass immigration, all major political parties ( as well as the plethora of non-parliamentary Leftist parties ) support and promote mass immigration. Quite why this should be so remains at best, somewhat of a mystery and at worst a systematic,conscious betrayal of the fundamental economic interests of the Electorate as a whole. Immigration is the Great Shibboleth of British political discourse. Even in the aftermath of the groundbreaking historic vote for Brexit, idiots such as Jeremy Corbyn argue, ad nauseam, that it's incumbent upon the British people to get used to the idea of large numbers of immigrants permanently altering the British way of life.Why? because in his view ( and that of the rest of the Labour Party ), immigration is a good thing which brings with it benefits to wider society. An ageing workforce is one threadbare unsubstantiated claim they make, as is NHS staffing levels and how dependent the NHS is on immigrant workers. As if by some inexplicable act of thaumaturgy workers with the prefix " immigrant " are somehow intrinsically morally superior or have an innate noble quality about them that are simply absent in the bog standard british worker. It is, surprisingly, politicians of the Centre Right to whom it has fallen to be the ones to explain the basic laws that govern the operation and functioning of capitalist economics. Immigration increases and intensifies competition within national labour markets and depresses wages. And as we have seen in the UK economy as a whole, since even before the onset of the Recession in 2007/08, labour market competition galvanised by unrestricted EU migration has been at its most intense at the unskilled, entry level industrial end of the economy. Official data such as it is, puts the current aggregate figure of unemployment amongst the EU's 28 member states at around 30,000,000.It has always been the case that the EU's " freedom of movement " for labour, has simply been a mechanism for allowing and facilitating the transferring of jobless from one country to those countries where the national economies have fared better; generally from south to north and since 2004 from east to west. The bankrupt, rustbelt economies of the former Warsaw Pact, Poland chief amongst them, have been major beneficiaries:-

Poland's unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in July 2016 from an all time high of 20.70 percent in February of 2003.Unemployment Rate in Poland is reported by the Central Statistical Office of Poland (GUS).  It was in 2004 that Poland along with Hungary,Czech Republic, Slovakia,Estonia,Latvia and Lithuania became full members of the EU. Britain was only one of three existing member states that allowed these new member states immediate access to its national labour market. 

The recent accession of the even more economically sclerotic and dysfunctional Bulgaria and Romania has exacerbated beyond measure the chaos and turmoil engendered by inner-EU migration. Quite where the benefits to the host nation state are supposed to accrue from in all of this, is the question the Left and most other political parties refuse steadfastly to answer let alone engage with in a rational and meaningful discourse. And yet, despite all the specious and convoluted posturing, attempted manipulation and snake oil salesmanship of the Pro-mass Immigration lobby, the vast majority of British People have never actually believed one goddamn single word told them by the establishment or by their political representatives on this issue.

 

fahrenheit451:081

NATO is when all's said and done, merely a convenient instrument by which the United States carries out its foreign policy objectives. These imperial policy goals are enacted through a flexible combination of of political sophistry, economic intimidation and military acts of aggression. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan,Iraq,Libya,Syria,Iran,Ukraine are amongst the most recent targets. Each " intervention " with or without any additional  legitimising UN authorisation, has brought about far wider and longer lasting  geopolitical ructions than perhaps even the most hawkish Washington neocon warmonger could possibly have contemplated. A direct Turkish military invasion of Syria was, most likely, not on the neocons list of what could possibly go wrong list when they set about engineering the destruction of what is now disparagingly in the West called , " The Assad Regime ". Likewise Russia being granted operational capabilities on Iranian airfields was another scenario Washington couldn't see coming. The emergence of ISIS/Daesh, the rise of ethnic Kurdish militias inside Syria. Flashpoint upon flashpoint until what the underlying neocon policy objectives were to begin with are now enmeshed in an ungovernable vortex. Despite all its proselytising Commentators and Experts intellectual /quasi-philosophical pretensions about " order " and predictability, the capitalist system is itself predicated on continuing chaos and greater or lesser degrees of innate instability. The Ruling Elites and their fervent, obedient acolytes of the political class believe as an article of faith, in the efficacy of " market forces ". Profit and loss. Thaumaturgy for the 21st,century.The neocon global military strategists and thinkers are there to formulate policies that are intended to reinforce the economic doctrines and practices of neoliberalism. Which in essence equate precisely with the defined policy objectives of the western industrialised liberal democracies under the hegemony of the  United States.  It's a good thing therefore that this depraved and dysfunctional nostalgia for a western dominated unipolar world is being successfully,albeit incrementally challenged by the likes of China; of whom it was widely reported the other week:-

China’s official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary that recent visit by Guan Youfei, the Chinese military official charged with overseeing international cooperation, signaled Beijing’s willingness to boost military cooperation with the Damascus government.

And I bet that wasn't on the US State Department's Top 10 list of what could possibly go wrong in Syria either.

fahrenheit451:080

And on it rumbles, on and on and on. One of British politics' bona fide dinosaurs, Ken Clarke has, as is his wont, now embroiled himself in the ongoing Article 50 farrago. As reported across the media on Saturday 20 August, Clarke in his upcoming book, alludes to 100 Tory MPs being prepared to block what is popularly referred to as the triggering of Article 50 ( of the Lisbon Treaty which came into effect on December 1, 2009).  The parliamentary Labour Party for example, split roughly 200 to 20 MPs in favour of Vote Remain. The Liberal Democrats, SNP, Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru also lined up on the Remain side. So the idea that the House of Commons could quite comfortably torpedo Brexit remains a plausible threat and a clear and present danger. It would be mischief on the grandest possible scale. Whether or not the H.o.C. has the collective cojones to actually do this, is I believe balanced on the proverbial knife's edge. In any political campaign for any given objective, momentum is just about everything.Winning an argument is not the same as defeating the counter argument; ideally both occur at round about the same time otherwise a surly,quasi-defeated opponent will seek to recover all the ground lost in the initial campaign struggle. And if they're allowed to get away with that, it's the quasi-victorious side that finds itself on the defensive and the entire matter of legitimacy of the victory just won is called into question. And then on it rumbles and on and on.  The once axiomatic dictum that History is written by the Winners is itself undermined. At this moment in time the Losers are actively preventing the Winners from  getting on with writing that history.Of course once upon a time the State took a much more jaundiced view on matters of who won got to write history. In some ways it's a pity that we got rid of the Sedition Act 1661.

• causing hatred or contempt, or incit[ing] disaffection against the Crown, the government, constitution, either House of Parliament or the administration of justice;
• to incite subjects to unlawfully attempt to alter matters of the church or state that were established by law;
• to incite crime or disturbances of the peace; raise discontent or disaffection amongst the Crown’s subjects; or
• to promote feelings of ill will and hostility between different social classes of the Crown’s subjects.

Now that was one heck of a piece of robust legislation and so practical and purposeful, don't you think?

fahrenheit451:079

The western " Left ",such as they are, were long ago  comprehensively ideologically emasculated. Over 50 years of unadulterated petty-bourgeois liberal indoctrination has ensured that the Left's fundamental position on the Ownership and control of the Means of Production,Distribution and Exchange got taken down. An engineered deluge of effete bien pensant ephemera such as the intellectualised, pseudo-moral sophistry of being Politically Correct; the espousal of meta-fictions such as multiculturalism and the (from a Class Conscious revolutionary position ) incongruous and ultimately incomprehensible support for mass immigration have proven all too effective against the Political representatives of the proletarian cause. The principles and objectives of the Ruling Elites-the owners and controllers of the Means of production et al. have endured. Trades Unions, for example, whose first organisational principle is to defend, maintain and seek to improve the wages and working conditions of their members, were transformed by their passive acceptance of an aspect of the dominant ideology.The Trades Union movement and their political representatives have long since welcomed, supported and still advocate intensive competition in the national labour market. The objective Class purpose of Competition is to lower the price of that good,service or commodity around which competition takes place. Global Corporate Usurer-Capitalism is not some uniquely quasi-moral, do-gooding phenomenon that strives to bring about universal peace and brotherhood.The Ruling Elites and their satrapies within the political class, have managed to reify the otherwise rationally preposterous fiction of immigration, as some intrinsically noble and worthwhile,life-affirming expression of the human spirit. Why would they want to do that other than as a useful and necessary tool to maintain downward pressure on wages? Given the objective Historic materialist developments and prevailing conditions, accusations of treachery or cowardice or opportunism or collaboration with the Class enemy would of course be perfectly understandable; however I think that the Trades Union and Labour movement as a whole, and not just its ephemeral " Right wing " ( as some would have it) are shills for the dominant ideology, accomplices to the exploitation and pauperisation of the majority of mankind. It therefore follows that all their fixtated, pseudo-leftist/liberal  prattle about imagined phenomena such as Racism, Islamophobia , multiculturalism, immigration, equal rights for this that and t'other are complete and utter bollocks ,always were ,always will be.

fahrenheit451:078

Quite what " democracy " is let alone what it is meant to be, have all gotten more than just a bit attenuated these last few weeks. A Court of Law has decided that the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party is legally entitled to determine who is to be excluded from voting in the Party's upcoming leadership election. Meanwhile, LabourIn  ( around 200 of their MPs ) the leading force of the Remain campaign during the EU Referendum, have continued unabated their attempts to have the Electorate's decision to vote to Leave annulled one way or another. The struggle such as it is, appears to be coalescing around the problematic of when, if ever Article 50 is to be invoked; as indeed one might have thought rationally it must and in all likelihood no later that early in the new year 2017.  So it goes. Tragedy and farce are the keynotes of the Labour Party.The Party's leadership contest exhibits those qualities as does the Judicial imbroglio into which Labour has harried the UK's decision to Leave the European Union. Times they are a changin' and those who fail to adapt successfully to the altering circumstances are more than likely to find themselves sidelined as irrelevant to those new conditions. One commentator's view of  the significance of the Brexit Vote was that it  was on a par with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That at least lends appropriate gravitas to the whole matter and gives a proper perspective on the contemporary hiatus afflicting our creaking, first-past-the -post parliamentary system. We appear to be in a slow-motion cataclysm. So it goes.

fahrenheit451:077

So what was that all about,eh? The UK's referendum on its continued membership of the EU. The anticipated outcome, on the morning of June 24th was for a majority and probably quite a hefty one in favour of Remain. Official received wisdom and opinion was so entirely convinced of this reassuring result that no-one, not a solitary MP,for example, had even remotely contemplated the alternative, a majority voting in favour of Leave. Historic sea changes often occur at such unlikely junctures in the seemingly routine, normal course of events. An election more or less, a change of Party in government, downturns in the economy.None of these types of occurences by themselves necessarily cause or signal a fundamental shift of any kind. That's how the Ruling elites prefer things to be. And then one of History's wildcards, in this case the sovereign British electorate, comes along and votes by a majority of 52% to 48% in favour of  the UK leaving the EU. The government then really has to commence negotiations to withdraw the UK from the EU. When precisely such negotiations, referred to as Article 50,commence depends solely upon the Prime Minister exercising the Royal Prerogative. Bummer. Once Article 50 is invoked a prescribed timeframe for withdrawal negotiations goes live. So it all comes down to when the Prime Minister exercises that Royal Prerogative. Which is precisely the way the Ruling elites and the political class and the infinite plethora of experts want things to go. Arrogance and hubris,however are behavioural/psychological traits intrinsic to the Ruling elite and the political class in general. They cloud and distort and ultimately poison political judgement and weaken entrenched positions. #Brexit really has triumphed!

fahrenheit451:076

Ain't democracy wonderful? Isn't mass participation by the ordinary electorate in public political discourse and a degree of activism a welcome indicator of the health of the body politic? Where are the corporate media Commentariat who are usually the first to applaud such happenings? Where for heaven's sake are those opinionaters who professionally feign to take an oppositional stance and their plethora of incisive leader articles and espousals of the immutable virtues of democracy? Well, in the case of The Republic of Turkey and its legitimate,constitutional government..all the aforementioned are precisely nowhere. Millions took part on Sunday 7 August in a Pro-democracy rally in Istanbul that repudiated the Military putsch attempt of July 15. Millions.  Mature Realpolitik discourse and polemics doesn't sit well with what passes these days for the western democratic pluralist tradition. Not that the West's authentic defenders of such traditions would  be capable any longer of discerning any lingering vestige of that which they once believed they were upholding let alone defending.  Turkey and its Political leadership has been consigned to the proverbial " doghouse ". Not that it matters too much or is of any significant concern to the Turkish state at the present moment. The truth, I would venture, is that the World is in a no more perilous or precarious an existential state than it was in the latter half of the 19th.Century. Wars, regional conflicts, trade disputes, population upheavals,diplomatic and political shennanigans and a plethora of domestic national instabilities contrived by unsympathetic outside influences and covert agendas. Plus ca change. 

fahrenheit451:075

As the ISIS/DAESH contagion has spread, so too has the deployment of NATO forces. And in the last few days, the number of official announcements as to the " success " of aircraft and " special forces " of various NATO member states has also increased. Libya and Iraq seem to be front and centre of Washington and its satrapies' current round of bellicose media pronouncements as to the much vaunted efficacy and impact of  US imperialism's aggression. Not Syria though, where the hydra-headed multiplicity of identities which are in effect Al-Qaeda in disguise, are maintaining their brand of psychotically deranged carnage against an encircled and besieged civilian population long since dissuaded of any romantic notions of  domestic political reform, let alone liberation from any such arrangements driven by moronic jihadi nihilists. Even the, newly awaiting-Brexit, lost sovereignty in remission, UK has managed to wade in with its two Tornado strike aircraft. Those self same two Tornadoes lionised by that idiotic, now former shadow foreign secretary Son of Benn, during his stupefyingly crass and verbose parliamentary petomainage that legitimised the UK's volte-face in assisting  the US to bomb Syria.  Ho-hum, such are the quotidian concerns of everyday Imperialism, the footpads to Global Corporate Capitalism's Ruling Elite Moriarty - the Napoleon of Crime.

fahenheit451:074

There is something sinister afoot across the eastern half of the continent. Countries such as Estonia, Croatia,Latvia and the Ukraine have held official ceremonies and public celebrations in connection with the rehabilitation of individuals and groups who had until recently been condemned by post WW2 History as Nazi collaborators or outright Nazis in their own right. The most recent such incident being quoted by B.92,Belgrade :-

Croatian cabinet minister praises Ustasha terrorist

The unveiling of a monument honoring Croatian Ustasha terrorist Miro Baresic has been attended by two Croatian ministers, the N1 broadcaster has reported.

SOURCE: BETA MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 2016 | 13:16

Croatia’s ’40’s nostalgia mania seems to be in overdrive, as their Highest Court also recently annulled a 1946 war crimes verdict handed down by Tito’s Yugoslavia against the Croatian Cardinal Stepanic. Estonia and Latvia have both held high profile reunions and demonstrations  honouring the members of their respective nations’ Waffen S.S. Divisions and the contribution they claim to have made in Europe’s war against Bolshevism. As for the Ukraine, the deluded fantasist imbeciles catapulted into power in the EU/NATO instigated coup have also binged on revisionist nostalgia that have recast the fascist mass murderer and terrorist chieftain Bandera as some kind of national liberation hero. All of this hive of activity is deadly serious, perhaps more serious than the western liberal warmongers would care to imagine. If the  definitive regional / global tipping point for all out war hasn’t been reached yet, then clearly it will be reached very soon because this US neocon bellicose strategic nonsense has no other end point other than conflict with Russia and not soon thereafter with China over in the Pacific. The intertwined EU and NATO, with Berlin on its own revisionist helter skelter toward an abyss it wishes that we all eventually jump into, is a mightily daunting prospect. Brexit and a growing, exponential series of ructions against the EU hegemonic project are perhaps the only brakes we have that might slow down this apocalyptic adventurism at present.