fahrenheit451:348

It's easy, often too easy to get caught up in the hyperbole and strident faux-rhetoric that accompanies what passes for war these days.

Routine, indiscriminate usage of emotive language and graphic imagery, in the end do not enhance a particular narrative, they overwhelm it.

The US / EUNATO engineered regional imbroglio emanating from what is still left of the sovereign,independent nation state of Syria underlines the old adage about chickens coming home to roost.

The ruling metropolitan elites sojourning in their western ivory towers do in fact have a low tolerance for when things get, shall we say, a tad more squeamish than they had anticipated let alone planned for.

They always invariably make the same miscalculation ,they always invariably end up shoving their collective heads up their own asses and hope that their specious pseudo-moralistic pronouncements and irritatingly middle class superficial hand wringing shows concern for the orphans,widows,the aged .etc. who are ineluctably maimed and butchered and eviscerated and become an endless stream of online content for the on-going pornographic installation art exhibition that is a world run by the failing ruling elites.

A Century on from the imposition by the triumphant Allies of the Sykes -Picot delineation of the defeated Ottoman Empire's vassal territories have a lot to answer for.Slicing and dicing previously coherent contiguous ethno-linguistic entities into a myriad of contradictory and confusing irrational new entities remains the very epitome of Western imperialist stupidity.

The insane / absurdist revival of Ottoman delusions of grandeur by Erdogan and his coterie of oligarchs and gangsters in the guise of a modern, developing Turkey,are a tragedy of immense historic importance that is hastening inexorably toward their self-created and realised demise.Sooner rather than later.Whether they cleanse all of Syria's north east of terrorist Kurds or not and if the buffer zone and relocation of 2 million Syrian war refugees eventuates or not.

The following gleaned from, Focus Economics tell you what you need to know about Turkey.

Turkey Economic Outlook

October 1, 2019

The economy shrank again in Q2, although less severely than in the first. A slump in fixed investment and a fall in private consumption, amid elevated unemployment, inflation and currency weakness, led the contraction. For its part, the external sector’s performance improved, although this was only largely due to weak domestic demand. Turning to the third quarter, the economy is expected to have shrunk once more: Industrial production fell again in July, although it did so at the softest pace in nearly a year. Moreover, August’s manufacturing PMI remained in contractionary territory, suggesting that the sector is not yet out of the woods. Similarly, retail sales contracted again in July, while private sector credit growth was negligible in the same month. More positively, the Central Bank’s second large rate cut in September ought to boost credit growth and support economic activity.

Turkey Economic Growth

The economy is expected to recover towards the end of this year and into next year on the back of looser monetary policy and a supportive base effect. However, geopolitical tensions and currency volatility remain downside risks, while still high unemployment is likely to weigh on household consumption. FocusEconomics Consensus Forecast panelists expect the economy to shrink 0.8% in 2019. Next year, however, our panel projects economic growth of 2.2%, which is down 0.1 percentage points from last month’s forecast.

Turkey Economy Data

	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
Population (million)	76.7	77.7	78.7	79.8	80.8
GDP per capita (USD)	12,386	12,026	10,898	10,805	10,542
GDP (USD bn)	950	934	858	862	852

During the same period, the official exchange rate of the Turkish Lira to the USD rose from 2.15 to 1 to 3.79 to 1.
A national economy in recession paying practically double for its fuel & energy imports  (all denominated globally in USD) ,let alone all the other stuff Turkey itself uses but doesn't manufacture domestically.Tanks,Guns,Aircraft,Munitions of all kinds.

Turkey is probably in a more economically parlous state at the start of this Syrian misadventure than Japan was back in 1941 when it attacked Pearl Harbour.

Now, go figure.

fahrenheit451:177

I'm sure some famous,infamous,oft-quoted Chinese general wrote something along the lines of, the purpose of warfare is to convince the enemy in their own minds that they cannot win. And of course it was an irascible Lutheran Prussian general whose maxim that, War is the continuation of politics by other means, strikes an all too familiar chord today.
Once Article 50 was promulgated by Parliament,the metropolitan elitist organised and led Remain campaign knew that their anti-democratic, seditionist cause was on the ropes and facing imminent collapse.Politics is war and the sinister forces of globalist-neoliberalism were never very likely to accept the verdict of the Judiciary and Parliament let alone as well as a binding referendum on the matter. Their best and only hope lies in a continuation by any and all means,however subversive and destabilising,of the conflict ensuring that the war over #brexit goes on.
Even the now lawful triggering of Article 50 that set in motion a defined two year timeframe for withdrawal negotiations- no agreements being reached after the set two years would mean the UK exiting the EU and going immediately onto WTO rules for Trade- even that has now been called into question by the very metropolitan and shadowy foreign interest groups and organisations that insisted on everyone abiding by and adhering to Article 50.
The MSM and other social media platforms are abuzz with newly engendered,fevered speculation over the synthesised concept of  a " Transition Period ". And this from those supposedly leading on brexit. Cliff edges,hard brexit, labour shortages,here ,there and everywhere throughout the national economy are now the weapons of mass deception being deployed on a rapidly recurring hourly basis by Remain.
A few days ago it was Bloomberg.com sounding the trumpets of doom on a shortage of agricultural labourers ; today its the George Osborne edited London Standard on waiting and bar staff. :-
" Brexit is causing a crisis in the hiring of bar and restaurant workers, a top hospitality boss has warned.
Leslie Kwarteng, a senior general manager at three of central London's most popular restaurants, said it is becoming increasingly difficult to hire waiting on and bar staff since the Brexit vote.
The 29-year-old runs the iconic Quaglino’s restaurant in the heart of London’s Mayfair, rooftop venue Madison, which has terraces looking out onto St Paul’s Cathedral, and swanky eatery and lounge bar 100 Wardour Street in Soho. "
Clearly,the tried and trusted capitalistic method of offering higher wages and improved working conditions has yet to occur to this particular denizen of the squalid,wheedling,greedy,corrupt sector of congenitally incompetent and arrogant UK bosses and business leaders.
The shame is that no-one on the democratic populist side who actually won the Referendum has ever read,nor would be perhaps even capable of understanding the works of Macchiavelli or Clausewitz or that Chinese general.
In any given situation,the most determined wins.

fahrenheit451:176

The problems faced by those opposed to the UK's departure from the EU are not my concern. It is axiomatic that nothing worthwhile can ever be achieved without pain and sacrifice. The restoration of the UK's national sovereignty is precisely such a worthwhile undertaking and I am content for that necessary burden of pain and sacrifice to be shouldered exclusively by all those opposed to Brexit.  It goes some way to mitigating the shame and dishonour of our now 45 years long abject subjugation to the tyrannical despotism of the Franco-German European Union.
The insidious,shrill demagoguey of the Remain campaign continues unabated. The metropolitan elitist led Remoaner rabble are still helmed by the 200+ Labour MPs who never rescinded their allegiance to the plainly seditionist #LabourIn ,who so unexpectedly lost out to the democratic will of the sovereign Electorate,something that took them and their sinister globalist corporate confederates completely by surprise on June 23 2016.
 Bloomberg.com carried the black propaganda headline , " Even Immigrant Managers Fear Brexit These Days ".
Like we should even give a f***. The gist of the Remoaner stance being summed in the Bloomberg article up by :-
" The potential departure of EU migrants means tough times ahead for countless British businesses, including Traditional Norfolk Poultry, one of the companies Bloomberg is tracking through the Brexit process. Set in rolling farmland in East Anglia, the company relies heavily on migrant labor to oversee the farming and processing of more than 5 million turkeys and chickens every year. And it depends on people like Migut to recruit and manage workers who often don’t speak much, if any, English.

 “It’s getting worse and worse. We just can’t find people,” said Mark Gorton, the company’s co-founder. “They’re just not there to recruit.”

Gorton says he and his staff talk about trying to hire more Brits at their weekly meetings, but they can’t even find enough east Europeans to fill vacancies. He tries to move workers off of the minimum wage—7.50 pounds ($9.80) an hour—as soon as he can to retain staff. He’s done away with the requirement that all workers speak English as he struggles to find people."

Even the dumbest Leftist, Another Europe is Possible, marxist-manque ought by this late stage acknowledge the efficacy of the iron law of economics;supply and demand. Capitalists are forced against their own ideological prejudices and personal consciences to actually increase their offer on wages in a vain attempt to attract the necessary numbers of workers.They can of course brutalise and exploit those workers later, on other terms and conditions once they've got them to swallow the bait on remuneration.
It was ever thus. 40 years of stagnant and declining levels of real wages, the rapid cancerous spread of Zero Hours precarious casualised employment are inextricably linked to ever increasing levels of globalisation. None of which is ever in the interests of the workers.
Neither is the EU pantomime of  " freedom of movement of labour ". A heretofore one country's jobless becomes several other countries' problem in so far as the jobless mendicants from Latvia,Lithuania,Romania,Bulgaria, Poland's moribund dysfunctional economies have displaced those who would otherwise have been employed in ,for example,the UK.
The aggregate total of officially 30,000,000 jobless throughout the EU remains undisturbed; the Titanic continues to founder,only the deckchairs have been rearranged.

fahrenheit451:126

Contemporary western PC leftist-liberalism has created and is perpetuating a Statist leviathan and a totalitarian ideology. Its ultimate expression is ineluctably economic in its realisation across civil society. Unrestricted labour market competition is represented in official language or newspeak as some wholly specious immaterial notion which they call" equality ". Its most immediate expression is embodied in the EU's " freedom of movement ". This is in practice a neoliberal mechanism that perpetuates the necessary conditions for the existence of a " reserve army of labour " which is a fundamental requirement in order for capitalism to maintain its own existence. There is no intrinsic mystery about the basic laws of capitalist economics.The greater the number of available units of labour ( workers ) you have competing for a finite and decreasing number of job vacancies,the lower the general level of wages needs to be in order to attract applicants.Supply and demand. Helping to naturalise this state of affairs is an ongoing ideological process initiated and conducted by metropolitan academic elites through the various apparatuses of the state which by turn is itself wholly committed to the goals of the hegemonic project of the global corporate ruling elites. And so we come to the political / industrial dispute in which the EHRC is currently embroiled.

The Equality & Human Rights Commission was established in 2007 to help eliminate discrimination, reduce inequality and protect human rights in the UK

( The EHRC has offices in Manchester, London, Glasgow and Cardiff. It is classed as a non-departmental public body (NDPB) sponsored by theGovernment Equalities Office, which is part of the Department for Education (DfE). As an NDPB it is separate and independent from Government but still accountable for its use of public funds. )

EHRC has been accused by a union of targeting disabled and ethnic minority staff after 10 people were sacked by email and given one day to clear their desks.PCS claimed seven of the sacked staff members were of black or minority ethnic origin, and six were disabled

The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said dismissal at such short notice was "unprecedented" in the civil service and government agencies. However, the staff had previously been threatened with redundancy.

The dismissal, emailed while PCS and United members were striking over cuts to the Commission, said: “I therefore give you notice of the termination of your employment by reason of redundancy…Your last working day will therefore be Friday 10 February 2017.”

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka called the decision "reprehensible."

“That this has happened at the government body charged with upholding human rights and fair treatment in our society is an absolute scandal and we will continue to fight it," he said. 

The irony in all this, is the role played by the official Trades Union movement which itself is historically tied to implementing the ideological fetishisation of  PC multiculturalism, human rights and the entire farrago of equality for this that and the other personal pecadillo. The time honoured adage "Hoist by their own petard " springs to mind. The busybodies busybody swallowing its own tail ; who investigates the investigators.Who indeed carries out an Inquisiton into the Inquisiton itself? 

fahrenheit451:110

Ken Loach's current film , " I, Daniel Blake " has had a significant an impact as any film in the last 30 years. As someone who was wrongly sanctioned in 2015 by politically motivated scoundrels,thieves and liars ;a placement Charity, Interserve and DWP - I know what it feels like to get shat on from the great heights of a Stasified state apparatus. I won my Sanctions Appeal on October 1st 2015. I still maintain and refresh my dedicated facebook page ,#DansLaMerde which served as the fulcrum for a pretty effective social media campaign which I conducted from April 2015 when I was first denounced and recommended for punitive sanctions. Comments to a more recent report on the ineffectiveness and massive implementation expenses of the Benefits Sanctions Regime, argued that the very existence of foodbanks helps to encourage DWP staff to issue Sanctions against claimants. Two years ago  at thoughts.com ,kulturist no.446 on 8 December 2014, I addressed not too dissimilar concerns aired in Parliament.

The trouble with " moral outrage " is that you need to identify who in fact is generating it and what the supposed object of the " outrage " is.  People suffering  Hunger ; that's a good one to start with. In conditions more shocking than can be seen in Congolese refugee camps ; wow,that's another one. Let's complete the picture ; The Church of England and two of the three largest parties in parliament all agree on the aforementioned. Blimey, it's serious after all. The Daily ten plagues Mail asserts its usual place in the media ruck and maul of such issues with :-

" The all-party Commons group on hunger warned that some parents spend far too much money on cigarettes, alcohol, takeaways and other ‘non-essential items of expenditure’ because they lack basic budgeting skills.

Many more cannot cook even the simplest meals for their children – leaving them to go hungry.

The MPs call upon teachers to do more to report parents from chaotic households so they can receive help from ‘troubled families’ units.

However, they conclude: ‘We should not leave the duty resting with schools. Parents have duties, and these duties are not abated by the chaos resulting from their lifestyle.’

The report, Feeding Britain, is released today. Chaired by Labour MP Frank Field, the all-party group calls for:

• A new publicly funded body, also to be called Feeding Britain, to work towards a ‘hunger-free’ UK with the help of eight Cabinet ministers;
• Bigger food banks to distribute more free food, and advise how to claim benefits and make ends meet;
• A rise in the minimum wage, and the provision of free school meals to children even during school holidays;
• New measures to make it harder to withhold benefits, including ‘yellow cards’ instead of outright bans; and
• A request from the Government for food bank funding from Brussels.

As a Christian,revolutionary activist and campaigner I argue that it would be politically counter-productive and socially regressive to implement any single one of the five bullet points mentioned above.For in truth there is no food crisis ,there are no shortages.No-one is starving in Britain.Lost in their own little Narnia-worlds of soon-to-be-nice to one another again; heretics and traitors to the Reformation and heretics and traitors to the cause of Organised Labour are trying belatedly to save ,not the masses from further suffering,but rather the Ruling Elites from their own hubrisitc follies that have brought us all to the edge of something rather wonderful and exciting;not seen in this country or in Europe properly since the 1640's.
They act and posture naively , as if all of this has nothing at all to do with the inexorable logic of  the immutable historic Laws governing the accumulation and centralisation of Capital and the attendant and necessary socio-economic developments that accompany such remorseless economic Laws. The point of the global system of Usurer-Capitalism is the continuing,unabated and increasing exploitation and pauperisation of the mass of the proletariat and sub-proletariat as a natural consequence of the inherent and intrinsically dysfunctional division of wealth and appropriation thereof by the 1% Ruling Elites. Their sole purpose of all of this, is for their own self-gratification and self-aggrandisement ;the fulfilment of their immutable historic destiny of the 1% ; to utterly consume as much of  the planet's wealth irrespective of any implied social/humanitarian cost to the 99 % and the state of the planet itself. The point of exploitation is,as Orwell pointed out, exploitation.

 

fahrenheit451:088

GDP is the main measure of UK economic growth based on the value of goods and services produced during a given period.

My  " facts " are harder than your " facts ". That's about the infantile level of public political discourse in Britain regarding the actual state of the national economy. For years now the DWP ( Department of Workslavery & Penury ) has bleated on and on and on ad nauseam about the record numbers of people " in work ". Their latest stats put it at close to 32 million or something like that. Who cares? It really is Ministry of Truth stuff.  Great news citizens of Oceania, the chocolate ration has been increased! Wherein fact the hapless Winston Smith had just disposed of all written records showing that the chocolate ration had been in fact decreased only the previous year and  he had just consigned those records to the oblivion of the Memory Hole. And still the punitive-Sanctions imposing, human rights and human decency shredding DWP carry on announcing in triumphalist overtones ( ( weirdly reminiscent of the Argentine military junta of 1982 and its successes in the Falklands ) that more and more people are in work or have taken up self-employment. But in the end Capitalism has to maintain rationality and objectivity; if a business is doing badly and making losses or insufficient profits they do get found out and punished by the marketplace in the end. To be pedantic, companies do really need to sell whatever it is they are in business to sell. Governments and the political classes in general don't get this.Neither do the far from impartial,far from dispassionately objective civil service bureaucrats who manufacture propagandistic pigswill that wouldn't have passed for credible even in Maoist China. And so the declining and increasingly moribund western capitalist democracies are atrophying economically,socially and culturally.Insane, indiscriminate punitive social welfare regulations actually inflict quasi-legal punishment on citizens deemed not to be sufficiently actively,in the opinion of a bureaucrat,  "searching " for additional hours of work. There are no, ( how shall I phrase this bearing in mind pseudo-effete/genteel aspirational middle class sensitivities might be involved ?) fucking jobs,ok? geddit? Across the entirety of the , (the UK is still in there at the minute) 28 satrapies of the European Union,there are officially some 30 millions unemployed. The UK's apparent phenomenal jobs growth, which alas the more deluded Brexiteers are harping on about as being an indicator of some outworking of special economic thaumaturgy, is utter fantasy. Gross Domestic Product has barely recovered to its 2007 levels. There are now a million workers on zero hours contracts. Inner EU migration is still in full flow.Vast numbers from south of the Danube and east of the Oder are in effect continuing their colonisation of British society. The tyrannical European Union's great shibboleth of  " freedom of movement of labour " needs to be taken down. take that down, you take the entire EU down.

Footnote:-

On this day,September 15,1940,when that which was necessary for national survival was accomplished, the grandchildren  of those Heroes alas turned out unworthy of the inheritance and life which those Heroes had helped in securing.

fahrenheit451:085

I did originally think it a spoof. Some sort of meta-modernist work of installation art.But I guess on reflection, Black Lives Matter were being serious. They staged a sit-down protest on the runway at London City Airport.The following gleaned from The Sun online :-

They ( BLM ) wrote: “Climate crisis is a racist crisis. 7/10 of the countries most affected by climate change are in sub-Saharan Africa.”

“The UK is the biggest per-capita contributor to temperature change & among the least vulnerable to its affects.

“At London City airport a small elite is able to fly, in 2016 alone 3,176 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean #Shutdown.

“By 2050 there will be 200 million climate refugees. Black people are the first to die, not the first to fly, in this racist climate crisis.”

Ultra-left diehards will find this very much to their particular ideological tastes. Reductionism, I believe its called. Everything in life and society in general,every kind of social phenomena can be subjected to a quasi-forensic analysis using a Marxist-Leninist ideological frame of reference. Political Correctness (PC) was incubated in the pseudo-Marxian womb and we all know what utterly devastating consequences that has wreaked on an unsuspecting and naive world. Branding the contentious notion of ” Climate change ” with an equally contentious notion of ” racism ” really is ideological alchemy. Marxism as thaumaturgy.

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.

 

fahrenheit451:079

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.