JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalCorbyn is looking stronger by the day, even as the attacks continue.
Why don't the Blairites unite and run a candidate in a new leadership election?
Bastards and cowards, is all one can say of this tiny minority whose contempt for democracy is evident and whose influence is on the wane.
At the point of the vote, there were many.
I was here and debating a bunch of'em. That was the last time we had a major pre-war propaganda mobilization (rather than just starting it on the down low and seeing if anyone notices), and you may concede that a lot of Americans generally respond to that shit. And even if Bush is the usurper in chief, that's our CIA and Pentagon backing up those claims and they exist to defend us. You'll probably remember how dramatically war opposition dropped off immediately after the bombing started because now it was real and it's our country and our boys going to war, gosh darn it, sacrificing so that we can have our freedoms and freedom isn't free, etc. etc. etc... Don't tell me you don't hear any of this any more around here. I suppose we could go deep into the search and reconstruct a more precise picture.
The Wilpons didn't actually lose any money with Madoff - curious, no?
They actually lied about it at first, acted all outraged that their long-running family friend proved to be a financial pirate, and even claimed they had to cut the team's budget because of it, but later stories have established they somehow, magically, were among those who did not lose money with Madoff.
It takes a very special kind of fucked-up rich-privileged-people logic to come up with that Bonilla deal. As if 10% a year forever is some kind of divine right of the rich. Despite this kind of idiocy, they manage to keep failing up, like all good well-connected New York oligarchs (see: Trump). Like the Yankees, the Mets got about $400 million in subsidies, tax breaks and infrastructure spending to support their new stadium. Bloomberg bestowed upon them the project to demolish Willets Point and replace it with high-end development.
They are horrible people and a big reason why I can barely stand it any more to watch my beloved Mets. And what the fuck is Daniel Murphy doing in a Nationals uniform?!
A certain minority on this site supported the Iraq war authorization - Jeremy Corbyn did not.
You may remember the U.S. version of the vote to go to war in Iraq had substantial Democratic support, although about half of the Democrats in Congress were against. To an extent this was also reflected on this site, although the majority were against the push to war and remained so in the aftermath.
Quite a few posters on this site (whom I take as indicative of the U.S. liberal-left spectrum) continue to show no problem with a bellicose line that risks new wars in a lot of places. There is a tendency among some to still see Iran as a dangerous enemy, but for some reason Saudi Arabia's even worse outrages and evident danger to "our" interests tend to be ignored.
Not as many, but a not-insignificant number celebrated the brief-lived, CIA-backed, oligarchs' coup d'etat against Chavez in 2002. You may have seen 14 years of daily slag-stories on Venezuela since then, with relatiely far fewer about U.S.-backed death-squad governments killing thousands and displacing millions in Colombia, or killing tens of thousands in Mexico with support of the Bush regime's Merida Initiative. The impeachment coup against Zelaya in Honduras in 2009 also had its backers on the liberal-left spectrum, as did the later destruction of Libyan society.
I didn't notice support for this year's impeachment coup against Dilma, since the government that emerged from that couldn't be more obviously right-wing and illegitimate, but there was plenty of uncritical slinging of the pre-coup propaganda about her supposed corruption. And of course last year's EU strangling of the leftist hopes for relief in Greece had its loud backers too.
These are some of the things I keep in mind as today we see a pretty shocking number of U.S. liberals, including a few here, deliver the UK oligarch and Blairite line in support of the ongoing party leadership coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn. The long-standing leftist MP and committed antiwar campaigner won last year's election among Labour members overwhelmingly, and has been a big fat target ever since.
Corbyn campaigned against Brexit (but without calling for stricter limits on migration and acceptance of refugees, like many of his opponents in Labour). His constituency produced a higher turnout than in last year's election, with an overwhelming vote for Remain. But now the Brexit win is somehow his fault, say a bunch of well-connected Blairites whose own constituencies in many cases voted for Leave.
The leftovers of a dozen years of Blair and Brown's continuation of Thatcherist politics and the losers of last year's election under Milliband don't like that the Labour Party now has a leader whose power is based not in elite approval but in real popularity with the members. They see the Tories entering a potential melt-down, and yet they choose this moment to tear their own party apart. Such patriots are they.
Don't they to want to win the possible early election? Apparently not if that means a real leftist government will come to power and reverse the neoliberal course of privatizing health care and education, of letting the rich and the big corporations do always as they will.
The front-benchers' showy resignations from the shadow cabinet in the immediate wake of Brexit, and the coup attempt by a non-binding "no confidence" vote that is supposed to trump the members' will, has been in the works for months. But suddenly Hillary Benn and Co. are in a rush. They seem to have realized the Brexit pretext provides the last, best hope for ousting Corbyn before a general election, but he has stood fast so far.
Curiously, none of them seems too enthusiastic about running as the opponent to Corbyn in a new party leadership election, which would be a legitimate way of replacing him. A clear challenger has yet to emerge. Angela Eagle wants to do it, but she'd be crushed. Party deputy Tom Watson is considered a stronger candidate, but he's trying to "compromise" by getting Corbyn to chop off his own head without a vote of the members, which would have the added benefit of putting the "interim" reins of leadership in the hands of... Tom Watson.
Since Corbyn's so terrible, why don't they want to put the question to the members?
If you google Corbyn's name right now, a whole bunch of UK corporate press invective sliming him every which way appears. You can find laughable "throw the kitchen sink" stories about how his supposedly overgrown house garden exemplifies his weak leadership style, and, on the bloodthirsty side, a Daily Mail front page that announces "Labour Must Kill the Vampire Jezza Right Now," which includes a photoshop of Corbyn as Dracula in a coffin. (Interesting headline, given that a British MP was literally assassinated on the street less than two weeks ago.)
But here's the problem:
Jeremy Corbyn would easily defeat likely leadership challengers, poll shows
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-election-poll-support-angela-eagle-dan-jarvis-tom-watson-2016-eu-a7113036.html
He's far ahead of all potential challengers with full party members, and that is not yet counting the trade unionists and "3-pound" members who will also get to vote and are even more overwhelmingly for him.
The smear campaign against Corbyn is partly being orchestrated by an agency associated with Alastair Campbell (whom many Americans only know as the character Malcolm Tucker from the great film "In the Loop"
, the so-called wizard who also put together the PR for UK entry into the Iraq war coalition. In a few days, Campbell will be among those exposed when the long-awaited official "Chilcot Report" on Iraq is filed.
Chilcot is expected to provide devastating evidence on the Blair government's use of fabrications and fear-mongering to join the Bush-led unpardonable war of aggression against the nation of Iraq, which caused so much suffering, destroyed that society and set up the conditions for the present horrors of the Middle East, including the existence of an "Islamic State" actually holding territory in the ruins. Blair may actually become the first leader to be prosecuted for the associated war crimes -- a move that Corbyn unforgivably said he would support, if the evidence is there.
The potential of seeing the international fugitive Blair in the dock, potentially paying for his crimes -- something you'd think many of us would welcome for its potential that we might one day see the same treatment accorded to Bush and Cheney -- is another piece of the context for why the Labourite front-benchers (almost all of whom voted for the 2003 aggression in Iraq, insofar as they were already in Parliament) are in such a rush to behead Corbyn now, and screw democracy and what the members think.
Suicide attacks are an ancient military tactic.
Not to make any excuses for "religion" or specifically Islamist variants.
(Whatever "religion" is, since it's often so hard to distinguish from "culture" or any other form of "indoctrination," and is useless as a general term given the variations in ideas associated with it, from love to kill your neighbor.)
Before the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, the secular/atheist Marxist rebel group was responsible for the majority of suicide attacks worldwide over a period of decades. For some reason they couldn't afford cruise missiles, so they indoctrinated live humans to act as delivery systems for explosives and created heroic narratives around their sacrifice. It's not like they lacked for precedents.
War is the real producer of such phenomena.
It's worse than that, really.
What Corbyn did last year to win the party leadership was the equivalent of sweeping every primary. Well, it was a different process altogether, but anyway he won a big majority of a clean and fair election against all other opponents combined, no runoff needed.
If you want an American metaphor for what the putschists are now attempting, it's as if a portion of the superdelegates, who a) used to be in the governing faction, b) consider themselves the only legitimate and responsible rulers, and c) think of the (left) majority as children, were trying to lock 3,000 other delegates out of the convention -- taking as their excuse that it's Corbyn's fault that an unrelated hurricane damaged their precious neoliberal ideology (with help from racists). It doesn't matter that Corbyn was with Remain, or that only 31% of Labour voters (according to polls) supported Leave.
Also, this is coming two weeks before an official report is to be submitted that will very likely provide a basis for prosecuting their beloved former leader, Blair, for launching an illegal war of aggression. This is their last gasp. They are pretty much the most unpopular grouping in UK politics. They do not give a shit about winning an election, they just want "their" party back.
Brexit just an excuse for planned Blairite coup.
No one is more responsible for the Brexit vote than the Blairites who continued the Thatcherist program and created the conditions for an overwhelming anti-establishment vote (though the vote itself was misguided and basically on the wrong question). These people were preparing to wage suicide attacks against Corbyn from the beginning. They saw his election as an affront to their elitist privilege and the neoliberal creed. Brexit was just the opportunity to pretend to have an issue. The idea that the Leave vote was Corbyn's fault rather than their own is absurd.
It's good to see these people go now rather than exploding a leftist government under Corbyn. He should survive the parliamentary challenge (the tough part because that's where this brood is concentrated, they have far less sway among the members), and if it comes to a vote of the members he will prevail handsomely. That is probably why they will not take it that far, if they can't topple him through this present uprising of the parliamentary faction they know they'll lose an actual vote.
With a bit of luck the early part of Prime Minister Corbyn's tenure will also see the conviction and life imprisonment of the war criminal, Tony Blair.
You are assuming that Paulson gains votes for anyone.
Paulson's approval will almost certainly represent a net loss of votes - including among "conservatives" and "right-leaning indies" (precisely the kind of people who despise Wall Street banksters and the plunder of 2008 that the Bankster King Paulson pimped out as a "bailout" .
This person's "stature" is mainly as a widely-known villain. He does absolutely no favors to anyone through his endorsement. He should have shut up if he wanted to help Clinton. (It's possible sabotage, though I doubt this miscreant is that self-conscious.)
To call him "conservative" or any other kind of political is absurd. He is a bankster, first and last. He made hundreds of millions as a Goldman Sachs CEO - which inevitably means, for literally starving people around the world - and then paid off by getting into the cabinet and providing hundreds of billions in bailouts when his bankster buddies crashed the world - including the incredible $13 billion to the coffers of Goldman on the AIG deal.
What other endorsements would you like to see Clinton get? Cheney's, perhaps? How about GWB's, straight up? It would be as if you put a big flashing sign that said "The Establishment Motherfuckers You Despise Are United for Clinton." If you really support her, pray that these stupid freaks realize that they should STFU with their "endorsements."
Your post is remarkably naive.
"Financial services" is the flag the pirates present until they get close enough to slit your throat. "Wall Street" long ago degenerated into a self-service fraud factory extracting all profit out of the productive sector. Fuck the U.S. economy, the executives and traders are about their own personal enrichment and they will happily see a city burn if it triples their bonus, just as a poacher will kill a six ton elephant and leave it to rot just for 20 lbs of ivory. None of them even see collective interests among themselves, or give a shit about this abstraction, the "economy." Dick Fuld made $400 million in five years and got to keep it, you think he cares about what happened to Lehman? He certainly wouldn't care about YOU. And these are the predators you expect to back Elizabeth Warren in a moment of rational self-enlightenment? Ha ha ha ha ha! They paid for their Clinton and a nice Clinton who would never harm their plunder operation is what they want, not Warren who is the closest thing to an enemy they can conceive at the level of the Senate.
1) They aren't getting their way, they are losing.
2) They are setting it up for Clinton to do it - and she will, no question.
3) They fear it might not be Clinton in the end, and hope to suck Obama into it.
All as a matter of speculation, of course.
Fucking fuckers.
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