alanjjohnstone
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If you read the media headlines, one would believe that yet again Israel bombed Gaza to retaliate in self-defence against Palestinian aggression.
Only when you read deeper that the reason for the primitive balloons carrying crude incendiary devices was actually in response to Israeli provocations of Zionists marching into a Palestinian district, shouting “Death to the Arabs”.
But as usual, the media prefers to present the reverse course of events hoping people don’t read the sub-text.
Put trade with China foremost says Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan at Australia’s biggest oil and gas industry conference, being held in Perth.
https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/stop-antagonizing-china-suggests-australias-top-exporting-state/
Beseeching the federal government to stop talk of conflict and trade retaliation, McGowan asked: “How is it in our interests to be reckless with trading relationships that fund and drive our prosperity and our nation forward?”
Western Australia exported A$104 billion ($80 billion) worth of goods to China in 2020, making up 71% of Australia’s goods exports to China.
An article on the Israeli lobby among academics
Middle East Studies Association (MESA) V. Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA)
US aircraft carrier group led by the USS Ronald Reagan has entered the South China Sea.
“The South China Sea is pivotal to the free flow of commerce that fuels the economies of those nations committed to international law and rules-based order,” Rear Adm. Will Pennington, commander, Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group said.
I always wonder the average American’s reaction if one of the Chinese aircraft carriers patrolled off the west coast of America or if Iranian navy battleships entered the Gulf of Mexico to visit Venezuela to claim freedom of the seas.
I see Biden’s G-7 gift to Johnson was a bike.
Perhaps Johnson will now also become a member of the socialist-less Clarion Cycle Club?
In return, Biden got a photo of a mural of Frederick Douglass, painted on a wall that happens to be around the corner from an old school of mine in Edinburgh, which may now become as famous as a Banksy.
Jack, I wonder why evangelical rapture Zionist-Christians in their attempts to turn the USA into a theocracy are rarely treated with the same vitriol as Muslim fundamentalists.
MS, I believe that there is reliable research that it is American purchased and smuggled weapons that are arming the criminal cartels in Mexico. And American banks that are laundering their illicit cash.
We are much on the same page, MS.
However, I will add a caveat.
Despite its impressive recent re-armament programme, China still is militarily weak compared to the US and its allies. But in its efforts to try and equalise their respective armed forces, China’s enemies perceive it as a threat hence their sabre-rattling.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57466210
Nato leaders meeting for a summit in Brussels have warned of the military threat posed by China, saying its behaviour is a “systemic challenge”. China, they said, was rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, was “opaque” about its military modernisation and was co-operating militarily with Russia. Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg warned China was “coming closer” to Nato in military and technological terms.
Link to the Jacobin interview with Chomsky and his political position of today.
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/noam-chomsky-class-war-universal-health-care-climate-justice-denuclearization
The first thing we should remember is that the Sanders campaign was a remarkable success. Within a couple of years, Sanders and others working alongside him have managed to shift the range of issues that are at the center of attention very far toward the progressive side. That’s quite significant. They did so with no funding, no corporate support, no media supportPeople are voting just out of frustration if they vote at all. Remember, almost half the population didn’t even bother. So, unless there’s a constructive alternative, people aren’t going to join a movement. Yet during the Sanders campaign, most liberal commentators said, “His proposals are very good. But they’re too radical for the American people.”
What proposals are too radical? Take a look at Sanders’s programs: the top one was universal medical care. Do you know of any other country that doesn’t have universal medical care? One of the chief correspondents at the Financial Times, Rana Foroohar, wrote a column in which, half-jokingly, she said that if Sanders was in Germany, he could be running on the Christian Democrat program, the right-wing party. Of course they’re in favor of universal health care — who isn’t?
The other program is free higher education. Again, you find it almost everywhere, and in the most high-performing countries: Finland, Europe, Mexico, it’s all over the place. That’s too radical for the American people? I mean, that’s an insult for the American population that’s coming from the left end of the mainstream spectrum. Well, the Left — the authentic left — ought to be able to break through that and say that Sanders has programs that wouldn’t have much surprised Eisenhower.I don’t like the system, you don’t like the system, but it exists, and we have to work within it. We can’t say, “I don’t want it. Let’s have another system that doesn’t exist.” We can only build a new system through pressure from inside and from outside.
So, for example, there’s no reason to avoid working to create an alternative political and social framework by creating a new party or worker-owned enterprises and cooperatives. The point is that there is a whole array of options open to us — and they all have to be pursued.Q Do you think it’s still useful to think about socialism as a sort of political horizon?
NC It’s useful, but there are some facts we have to remember. One of them is timescale. We have a decade or two to deal decisively with the environmental crisis. We’re not going to overthrow capitalism in a couple of decades. You can continue working for socialism — but you have to recognize that the solution to the climate crisis is going to have to come within some kind of regimented capitalist system, not the neoliberal system.
Well, freedom can be implemented by worker control of the enterprises of which they are a part. You can get it in one step, as in worker-owned enterprises, which are proliferating — but you can get it by a series of steps, like [Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders’s proposals for worker representation on corporate managing boards.
Worker representation is not very radical. Germany has it — a conservative country — but it is a step forward. You can move forward beyond that with actual direct action on the ground — for example, creating worker-owned enterprises — to changing the way in which the capitalist system works.And there is Chomsky in a nutshell. An advocate of Richard Wolff’s cooperatives. On our SOYMB blog a comment left is that we must answer that sort of reform to counter it prevalence.
So the staunch unionists see it as breaking a tie with the UK, treating it separate, and the reason they protested recently.
While Sinn Fein see this preservation of the single market as part of their project for a united Ireland and don’t want to see that broken.
But is Johnson’s actions sufficient to end the Good Friday Agreement and have the return to violence which I think is the main concern of NI people?
Or is it the customary posturing by the polarised politics of NI?
China accuses the G7.
“Stop slandering China, stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, and stop harming China’s interests.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57466576
To be truthful, I fear this New Cold War much more than the US-USSR and the present Russia stand-off rivalry.
I think China is very much more an economic threat to various Western nations’ businesses than Russia ever was or will ever be.
If they cannot defeat China in the market, as the G-7 are now collaborating to do, there is only military force left to maintain their hegemony, a fierce Far East Asian regional war but involving major global powers.
Another Nostradamus prediction of my pessimistic prognosis.
More on the alleged lab-leak Versus the natural origins hypothesis
while Ebola was first recorded in 1976, we do not know how it emerged. Tracing the origin of a pathogen is laborious – it took 14 years for conclusive evidence that Sars arose from a virus transmitted from bats to civets to humans. The fixation on the origin of Covid is a distraction. It does not advance our understanding, nor address how we ought to proceed. While China may have questions to answer on its lack of transparency, fostering conspiracy theories is not conducive to overcoming the pandemic, nor to maintaining a spirit of collaboration.I wonder if somebody can explain the implications of the NI situation for me and the respective attitudes of the two communities. I don’t quite grasp it.
It seems that neither is happy for their own reasons but I am curious about what their future options and actions might be.
For a couple of years after I left school I worked at a lowly level in air traffic control but I was able to read the first-hand accounts of UFO reports.
I was immediately struck by the frequency of sightings by people who had just left the pub and were on their way home.
Posadas when he wasn’t promoting nuclear war to clear the way for socialism suggested that a civilisation capable of inter-galactic travel must have achieved a socialist society to accomplish it.
But the fact that some US politicians consider it a national security issue does reveal the paranoia they suffer from.
Nancy Pelosi has an answer for you, James…false equivalency
“Drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all.”
Jewish House Democrats issued their own criticism.
“Equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided,” they wrote in a statement. “Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organisations that engage in terrorism at best discredits one’s intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice. The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups. We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words.”
It reminded me of this cartoon
