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Nov 12
Today’s Scotsman editorial blithely assumes that Europe/the UK are in a position to pour more money down the Ukraine sewer when, as is likely, Trump abandons the neocons’ doomed “Project Ukraine.”
The war started in 2014 when America toppled Ukraine’s democratically elected leader and installed a US puppet who unleashed neo-Nazi militias that terrorised and killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. All the US/NATO had to do was call off the neo-Nazi attack dogs, guarantee autonomy for the Donbas and not bring Ukraine into NATO. It refused.
Trump’s win is an existential crisis for the EU and UK, whose leaders openly rooted for Harris. Starmer sent Labour Party stormtroopers to campaign for the Democrat, which is blatant interference by a foreign government in US politics.
And Trump won’t forget neophyte Foreign Secretary David Lammy calling him “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic” and a “neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath.” A bit of projection going on here?
The crop of weak and incompetent European and UK leaders who’ve mindlessly cheered on the latest US/NATO misadventure are in full-blown panic mode. They know they’ll no longer be able to hide under America’s skirts. Without US backing, NATO is a chimera.
Europe and the UK don’t have the resources to prop up the collapsing Zelensky regime. They lack sufficient manufacturing capacity.
They aren’t producing modern weapons.
Their militaries are small and not fighting fit.
They’re not technology leaders.
They’re not pumping oil and gas.
They’re not major food producers. And yet Macron and Starmer fatuously proclaim they’ll put Ukraine in the “strongest possible position going into winter.”
Yeah, right. 90% of Ukraine’s generating capacity has been destroyed. The UK Chancellor says the Treasury can’t afford £2bn for the Winter Fuel Allowance which would help keep UK pensioners from freezing, but it can find the money to help Ukrainians???
Nor do European countries have the capacity to rebuild a destroyed and depopulated Ukraine, whose carcass is already being picked over by disaster capitalist vultures.
If the UK/Europe had an ounce of sense and/or cared about their people, they would turn their attention and diminishing resources to fixing the dismal state of their own economies.
The lights are blinking bright red. Come on, Scotland, end the union.
Nov 13
My son Jackson’s blog is where he publishes his original poetry, which I highly recommend. He published this piece today with an accompanying note on the poetics of atrocity. I’m reproducing it here with his permission.
Note: I’ve chosen to republish this piece, which I’m not sure was as understood as I had hoped when I wrote it last month. It is the duty of artists not merely to rebel against evil in abstract or idealistic terms, but to interpret its atrocities directly. Such we see in the poetry of Wilfred Owen, or Los Desastres de la Guerra of Francisco de Goya. Photography and videography are invaluable for tribunals and historians. But the war against evil is fundamentally spiritual, and art is the expression of the spirit. And language is, above all artistic media, particularly effective in awakening and impressing conscience, as it proceeds from the human spirit with the least interposition of extraneous interpreters, allowing for greater precision in the expression of feeling. This may be easily demonstrated by example. If you wish to communicate your thoughts to someone, and are given the choice of doing so via painting, sculpture, music, or language, which would you choose?
It is the capacity of language to decipher our spirits directly - absent the power of telepathy - which makes it the supreme arbiter of conscience, and ultimate moral reference in the arenas of culture and religion.
It lays a duty on all writers to act as the interpreters of atrocity.
Sinite pueros venire ad me, et nolite eos vetare
Israel's fire had eaten his hair and skin,
Shredded his legs, burnt out his eyeless and mouthless face.
Cries tore his throat with alien horror, and I
Thought: It is his soul, crying with horror within
His annihilated flesh, crying for grace –
Crying: let me live, O God, letting this body die.
Nov 14
Why does the US allow dual citizenship for top officials but Israel doesn’t?
US-born and bred Ron Dermer, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States from 2013-2021 and Strategic Affairs Minister since 2022, was required by Israel to renounce his US citizenship before taking up these positions. The logic behind this requirement is hard to dispute - top governmental officials of any nation cannot serve two masters.
Dermer gave up his US citizenship in 2005 to become the economic attache at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.
Another Israeli Ambassador to the US, US-born Michael Oren, also relinquished his American citizenship. Both are committed Zionists.
However, Amos Hochstein, the US “peace” envoy to Israel and US Senior Advisor for Energy Security, was born in 1973 in Israel. He served in the IDF as a tank crewman until the mid 1990s and took part in Israel’s 1993 invasion of Lebanon.
In a 2012 interview, Hochstein’s wife said, “My husband is Israeli…” At that time, Hochstein was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Diplomacy in the US State Department.
I could find no information on whether Hochstein has renounced his Israeli citizenship. When he’s been asked, he’s not responded.
It’s unclear if current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, an avowed Zionist who has been dubbed “Israel’s lawyer,” holds an Israeli passport.
There have been some moves to require members of Congress to renounce their dual citizenship or, at a minimum, to disclose it. Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) proposed that:
dual citizens elected to United States Congress should renounce citizenship in all other countries. At a minimum, they should disclose their citizenship in other countries and abstain from votes specifically benefitting those countries.
Massie disclosed that every Republican member of Congress, except for himself, has an AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) babysitter to ensure they don’t deviate from Israeli interests. The same is probably true for many Democrat members and explains the 58 standing ovations Congress gave Netanyahu during his July address.
In the last Congress, Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) proposed H.R.7484 - Dual Citizenship Disclosure Act, which would require Members of Congress who are foreign nationals to file a statement with the appropriate congressional ethics committee describing their status as a foreign national. Failure to comply would result in a fine of $2500. AIPAC has ensured the bill has ZERO co-sponsors.
What about the UK? UK law allows dual citizens to hold elected office. Boris Johnson only renounced his US citizenship in 2016 while serving as Foreign Secretary. The civil service allows dual citizens but imposes some restrictions for reserved posts. Even MI5 and MI6 allow dual nationals, but again, with restrictions for sensitive positions.
The Ministry of Defence allows dual nationals with some exceptions but applicants to the Ministry of Defence Police must be sole UK nationals. When perusing the Ministry of Defence Police website, I came across this vacancy:
It couldn’t be clearer - the UK considers Scotland a REGION.
I don’t know of any UK law requiring MPs and top government officials to disclose nationality status. At a time when Israel, the UK’s “ally", is committing a genocide with UK government support, don’t you think this information should be available to the public? But I’m sure that Labour/Conservative/Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel is working hard to keep that information under wraps.
Nov 15
Rachel Reeves is honouring her pre-election pledge to the City of London oligarchs - to protect and enhance their obscene wealth at the expense of ordinary people.
In her Mansion House speech she pledged to cut financial regulations which was music to oligarchs’ ears. The City of London not only doesn’t understand how to generate economic growth but has zero interest in doing so. Reeves has put all her growth eggs into the private sector basket where they will be duly broken by private greed.
She wants to increase private investment
by working in partnership with business and specifically, with the financial services sector… financial services must play a central part in our economic vision… and our plans for economic growth. Because I know that this sector is the crown jewel in our economy.
She knows nothing if she thinks the money laundering City of London is an economic crown jewel. Money isn’t a commodity, but merely a unit of exchange created by the government. The UK has ceded economic control to a creditor oligarchy that has been destroying the UK economy for decades. The only growth that will happen on Reeves’ watch is growth in inequality, poverty and social instability.
In his recent book, The Collapse of Antiquity, the economist Michael Hudson describes what happened to ancient societies that allowed creditor oligarchies to take over - they failed.
The ancient Babylonians understood that debt grows exponentially, whereas the means to pay off the debt - crops or the size of a herd - don’t, but grow in an S curve that tapers off.
This means that over time, debts will exceed the ability to pay. To prevent this from happening and the resulting social instability, rulers would periodically cancel the debts and redistribute the land that had been taken to satisfy repayments, thus restoring balance to the economy and society. It was a reset. Without it, economic growth would have been stifled and the people would have revolted.
In today’s western neoliberal economic order, the creditors are firmly in charge. There’s no debt forgiveness but debt enslavement. Neoliberal ideology says that free markets know best, so governments need to stay out of the way so the markets can work their magic. Except it hasn’t worked for the vast majority of people, just for a minority at the very top.
Having wealth is not like having bananas. With bananas, the first one is the most satisfying - the second isn’t as good, and the third even less so because you become satiated. In economics, this is called diminishing marginal utility.
But wealth is different. The more you accumulate, the more you want. It becomes an addiction and has a name - money lust.
As wealth accumulates and isn’t redistributed, society becomes increasingly polarised. All income and control over labour flows to the parasitic creditor oligarchy, which kills the host - the productive economy - and impoverishes the population. The society eventually collapses.
This is what’s happening to western economies. The rise of the creditor oligarchy - the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector - has led to deindustrialisation and the shrinking of the state sector. Instead of reinvesting profits in people and productive capacity, these predator capitalists reward shareholders, drive up share prices with stock buybacks and reap huge bonuses for themselves. They are like vampires who suck the lifeblood from the economy.
Rachel Reeves and her boss, Sir Keir, are the vampiric oligarchs’ useful idiots. That’s why, contrary to their pre-election promises, things are getting worse.
But there’s an alternative to neoliberal financial capitalism. The nations whose leaders the west has assassinated, debt enslaved, sanctioned, bombed and invaded because they had the temerity to resist neoliberalism, are uniting within BRICS to challenge the failed western model.
BRICS is in the process of replacing it with alternative institutions based on respect for national sovereignty, trade, development and cooperation, not hegemonic domination, indebtedness, sanctions and war.
That’s why more and more nations want to become members. A future sovereign Scotland should join the queue.
Nov 19
It’s a truism that a society that beggars its children beggars its future, yet successive UK governments have done just that. The Guardian reported yesterday that 1 in 3 children and a quarter of all adults in the UK live in poverty.
The future of a child growing up in poverty is grim. They’re more likely to end up in care, commit crimes, and abuse drugs. They will experience poor mental and physical health, earn less, and achieve below their potential, compared to their more affluent peers.
The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) estimates that child poverty cost the UK £39 billion in 2023 but suspects the true figure could be substantially higher.
Let’s lay the blame where it belongs - on the UK government. It not only imposed years of needless austerity, slashing benefits and starving public services of resources, but it also sold off public assets and infrastructure, driving up their costs and reducing their effectiveness. Leaving the Single Market didn’t help, either.
Scotland’s poverty rate is below that of England and Wales largely because the Scottish administration has mitigated the worst of government policies. But that’s cold comfort to the 30% of Scottish children who are deprived of life’s essentials.
Which brings me to Multibanks, the brainchild of Gordon Brown. Remember him? He’s the one who told us on the eve of the 2014 referendum that staying in the UK would guarantee a more just society, in particular for our children:
Now, tomorrow, the vote I will cast is not for me. It is for my children. It is for all of Scotland’s children. It is for our children’s future.
Here’s how that’s worked out:
Brown’s brainchild is to team up with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon to set up and supply Multibanks, warehouses where the poor can queue up for items that are surplus to Amazon’s requirements.
In the run-up to Christmas, Brown enlisted Scottish actor Peter Capaldi to do an ad where he begs the public for donations for these Victorian behemoths that further stigmatise the poor and do nothing to address the reasons people are in poverty. It was showing at my local cinema last week.
He says “there’s no quick fix to poverty.” Yes, there is. It’s called government.
But along with his LINO (Labour in Name Only) compatriots Starmer and Reeves, Brown no longer believes it is government’s responsibility to ensure people have the means to live decent lives without having to resort to a food bank or Multibank to survive.
An independent Scotland would be able to give every child what they need - not just to survive but to thrive. The status quo isn’t working for Scotland and especially not for our children. While we remain in the failing UK, we are impoverishing their future. And that’s criminal.
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