The Media: Railroading the Electorate

The Guardian correspondent, Jonathan Steele, continues to plug the insane Guardian line of opposing the UK referendum decision to leave the EU. He goes so far as to say the Labour Party manifesto should declare that an incoming Labour government would abort the negotiations immediately. There will be no Brexit and no talks about how to achieve one!

Steele and his paymaster, the Guardian, seem to think it makes sense to defy a democratic decision, taken by 52% of the electorate, to pander to the 48% who did not get the result to remain in the EU that they wanted. He backs this up by saying over 60% of Labour supporters voted to remain, and are now "in despair", he claims. That is, of course, utter rubbish. Even if it were originally true, many of those Labour remainers are now pig sick of the LibDems and Greens harping on in defiance of a decision we have already taken--TO LEAVE!

Moreover the "two thirds of labour supporters" actually includes mostly urban liberals tempted to Labour by the Liberal Labour focus-group mentality of the Blairite years when winning the election was more important than having socialist policies. Traditional Labour Party members were already asking, "what is the point of winning then implementing Tory policies?". Quite! And the result was an erosion of faith in Labour and consequently loss of support in successive elections until we were conned into the unelected ConDem coalition of 2010 that led to our present sorry state (and the deserved collapse of the Liberal Democrats!).

Steele and the Guardian will be glad to see the present continuous false emphasis on Brexit and the perpetual attacks on Corbyn confusing the electorate to the extent that they achieve a similar collapse of Labour. We need to remember that most of the traditional Labour areas outside the metropolitan zone are the very areas (and some LibDem areas) that voted to leave, and the reason is plain--it is because the neoliberal policies of all the main parties for more than 50 years neglected the concerns of the voters in those deprived places--the "rust belt" of the UK--abandoned since Thatcher to decay with no prospects for their futures.

Labour must campaign vigourously for the votes of those neglected working people, and to persuade them that the Party is not backward looking, as the media are trying to persuade the young, but has a policy of "back to the future" to restore all that was good that Labour brought in after WWII and that successive right wing governments have been eroding ever since, and especially in the last 7 years.

The media and the present government in power are doing their utmost to persuade people that Corbyn is an ineffective leader, but that is not true. He has put forward a prospective programme that would benefit us all (except the over rich!), none more than the young! What is true is that the media are refusing to cover what Labour is offering, so the policies that everyone agrees are what are needed are not being associated with the Labour leader and his party in the minds of the electorate. Instead only negative associations are being propagated.

It is quite deliberate. One lesson that is always difficult to get over is that the media are not, and never have been fair. They offer biased views constantly, one of which is, of course, that they are actually fair, and it would be undemocratic to change the situation. The hacking scandal and the Leveson enquiry prove otherwise. An important question we should always ask when considering potential bias is, "who benefits from this opinion being accepted as true?" (Cui Bono? in Latin). In other words, in this case is the beneficiary of the view or the policy the rich or the poor? If it is not beneficial to poor people, or if it is vastly more beneficial to the rich, then there is cause for doubting it as a fair viewpoint. Why? Because the newspapers are owned by a handful of very rich people who run them for the benefit of their own kind--the very rich! Note, the VERY rich, not the slightly richer than the rest!

The Morning Star is the only daily paper in the UK to be biased toward the ordinary people, and the Peoples World is the equivalent in the USA. Yes, they are biased too, but they are biased against the rich. But an unbalance can only be corrected by an opposite force. If you must read media like the Guardian, then the opposite pan in the scales should be equally weighted by reading the Morning Star (or Peoples World) to get a balance.

The media are trying to railroad the electorate into a dead end by bad mouthing the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, though the failures of Labour are the failures of Corbyn's predecessors like Tony Blair (who always has a platform in the anti-Corbyn media). Corbyn, like the late Tony Benn, does not engage in slagging matches. That is not a sign of weakness but of strength. Anyone dismayed by Corbyn's fairness and politeness has the answer, as did Benn, in his policies, in the issues. Corbyn's policies address the issues important to working people, May and the Tories aggravate them because they aim to benefit the rich, and that they do at the expense of the poor!

Should the Poor be allowed to Die, or the Rich?

Al Dahler, a retired Air Force veteran highlights in the Virginia Newsleader the latest propaganda of Republican bloodsuckers. According to Robert J Samuelson writing in the Washington Post, America’s budget deficit is the fault of elderly Americans, people who are too greedy—they depend on social security and medicare to keep themselves alive. The Wall Street bailout had nothing to do with it. Irresponsible tax cuts for the 1 percent of Americans, who are already so well off they haven’t a clue what to do with their money, are also innocent of blame. The US permanent war economy, that has gotten worse since Bush and Cheney held the reins of power, naturally has no role at all in wasting the country’s wealth. The fault, according to the unspeakably selfish US right wing, rests with the poor and old folk, who should recognize they taking up some of the wealth that the rich could salivate over counting it again.

The poor have always been at fault. The conservative gospel is that the poor, the unemployed, the people unable to afford health insurance and the handicapped are scroungers, refusing to work to better themselves as all Americans should. Did they, the greedy rich? Some may have done but most have inherited wealth left to them by their enterprising fathers, grandfathers and even more distant ancestors. Far from money trickling down, the rich employ clever managers, not being clever enough themselves, to accumulate more money in exchange for a share of it called bonuses.

These rich billionaires have nothing in common with any of the remaining 99 percent of the population, but they fool those with aspirations to riches, many of the middle classes, and those unable to see that they are dupes of the rich, encouraged in their American Dreams, but with zero chance of ever realizing them. The Republican lie is that everyone is responsible for themself only and their immediate family, having no responsibility for anyone unable to work because they are elderly, sick or simply unable to get a job in the face of millions of unemployed better able and qualified than themselves.

These conservatives, so fond of boasting of their godliness, would have joined the crowds demanding the crucifixion of their “Lord” Jesus Christ, had they been there at the time. After all, this Jesus wandered around with a gang of ex-workers, ex-fishermen, ex-tax collectors and even ex-prostitutes, and, although described as the son of a carpenter, he never seemed to have built anything of wood himself. Moreover, he repeatedly backed the poor against the rich, so was obviously in the opposite camp from the parasites who drain us of our our fair share of the national product.

They have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love others.

Jonathan Swift, paraphrased

If the Christian God were incarnated today, he would be organizing and addressing the OWS demonstrations, and once the state decides to clamp down on the occupiers of Wall Street, he as a leader would have had his death sentence again.

Veteran Dahler noticed that the sentiments of president F D Roosevelt were closer to those of Jesus than the odious hypocrites calling themselves Republicans. He said:

The test of progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who have little?

It is as plain as day that for the last thirty years the US has ceased to progress, and has instead slid backwards. Republican candidates, trapped by the hypocritical piety of the religious right, have to deny the validity of the theory of evolution, because these so-called Christians have decided that their God is so feeble He cannot bear it. Yet despite it they do believe in evolution applied to society. It is wrong that the cleverest and most ruthless ape should eventually have human brains, but it is right that the cleverest and most ruthless entrepreneurs should have all the wealth—give or take a percent or two. They call this application of “nature red in tooth and claw” to society “Social Darwinism”.

Society exists to protect each of us from the hazards of living separately in the wild. Being together allowed us to use our intelligence and our new found ability to respect each other and cooperate together to do remarkable things like building civilization. It required us to be concerned with others in our society even when they were not coping too well. Without assistance from us, they would have seen no sense in remaining with us, and our ur-band of mutuality would have soon fallen apart.

That is what these Republicans are advocating now. They have no concern for the poor and those unable to cope with pressures that most of the wealthy 1 percent could never imagine experiencing day in and day out. Jesus Christ ordered Christians to help the poor or be damned. But now Republicans cry in outrage that elderly people should have medical care as a reward for having contributed to society all their lives. They say they owe them nothing. Their idea of society owes them nothing. They have outlived their welcome and should do the decent thing and die! If they do not, then they will be charged large premiums to cover their health insurance, and as they will not be able to afford such expenditure, they will die in any case through being deprived of care. Limited health care leads to shorter lifespans, relieving the pressure on the social security system, and leaving more money for the rich to stash away.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton are fond of encouraging people in countries whose regimes they do not like, mainly because they assert their right to what is their own, to riot and even rebel, as in the case of Libya, to establish their basic human rights. Well, we have human rights too, and if Arabs have a right to rebel and kill their former leaders, H G Wells must have been correct to say that we have the same right. Wells, author of War of the Worlds, was a mild mannered man but wrote in despair, towards the end of his life, that we shall get nowhere in bringing about a fairer world until the rich were swinging from the lamp posts. Indeed, if it is a necessity in Libya, then why should it not be a necessity in the US? The fact is that revolution is one way societies end when they become too unjust. The greedy 1 percent of the USA are inviting their own destruction.

They could pay off much of the national debt themselves if they wanted to avoid it!