Samantha Bee updates us on impeachment

I have to say that I find the whole thing utterly depressing, especially watching the craven subservience of the Republicans to Donald Trump. To add to that is the fact that Democrats are now painting a picture of the FBI as if it were an impartial, purely investigative body of great integrity and ignoring its ugly history of multiple violations of people’s civil rights and outright racism, even if it may or may not have done bad things in this particular case.

Let’s just give up on patriotism

Patriotism is a concept that many people think is a good thing but it just doesn’t stand up under close scrutiny, usually ending up in ‘my country, right or wrong’ and defending the actions of a government even when it commits the most outrageous crimes against its own people or those of other countries. Most frequently it is used as a cudgel against those who point out a nation’s flaws, in order to shut them up and as a means of diverting their attention away from global isues of justice.. I agree with Leo Tolstoy who wrote:
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Once the well is poisoned, does adding more poison matter?

One of the more bizarre developments on the right wing of US politics (and this saying a lot given how off-the-charts nutty the right wing has become) is the emergence of a group known as ‘groypers’. They have taken as their symbol an obese version of the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, which is appropriate in a way because the right-wing neo-Nazis and white supremacists had already adopted Pepe as their symbol over the objections of its creator. Groypers are, if you can believe it, even more racist and have ramped up their racism and anti-Semitism to 11.

Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast

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Vote for Labour tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the general election in the UK where the Labour party and its leader Jeremy Corbyn have been subject to a massive smear campaign. Not being British, my views count for little but here is a cartoon by another non-Britisher, an Australian cartoonist who goes under the pen-name ‘first dog on the moon’, that quite nicely sums up my feelings.

As the cartoonist rightly points out, “You know you’re not legally required to like Jeremy Corbyn in order to vote for him right?”

The financial finagling of the British Royal family

The scandal surrounding Prince Andrew and his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and the allegation made by Virginia Giuffre that when she was just 17 she was forced by Epstein and his cronies to have sex with Andrew has put the spotlight on the British Royal family in ways that they would rather have avoided.

In particular, this article by Clive Irving, based on a book What the Royal Family Don’t Want You to Know…And What Do You Do? by Norman Baker, a former government minister and long-time Member of Parliament, looks at the lavish lifestyle of ‘The Firm” as they are called and how they hide it, finance it, and avoid taxes, headed by Prince Charles and his own fortune building empire. This may explain why Charles was so quick to put wraps around Andrew and whisk him away from the public eye for fear that the other shenanigans might also come out. What the article reveals is secret indulgence on a massive scale.
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The future Johnson-Trump deal following Brexit

Lee Fang of The Intercept writes that US health industry lobbyists are just waiting for a Conservative victory on Thursday to shred British consumer safeguards and raise drug prices as part of their demands in the trade deal that the US will agree upon with a Conservative government following Brexit.

Departing the EU could mean that British consumers would no longer be protected by broad EU-wide regulations on chemicals, food, and cosmetics, among other products. Several international corporate groups have pushed to ensure that in the event of Brexit, such safeguards are abandoned in exchange for a regulatory standard that conforms to the norms of the U.S.

Consultants working directly on the Brexit deal in London and in Washington, D.C., have asked to limit the ability of British regulators to set the price for pharmaceutical drugs, lift safety restrictions on pesticides and agricultural products, and constrain the ability for the U.K. to enact its own data privacy laws.
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Dean Baker, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted in an email to The Intercept that such regulatory demands by industry are “always part of trade deals.” Baker said that U.S. trade to the U.K. is relatively trivial, at around 2.5 percent of GDP, making incentives for rushing a trade agreement relatively small.

“On the other hand,” Baker wrote, “paying higher prices for drugs and being unable to regulate the Internet is likely to impose very substantial costs.”

“A government weighing these factors carefully would almost certainly refuse a deal, but a Johnson government that made Brexit front and center is likely to feel strong political pressure to have a deal with the hope few people will pay much attention to the content,” Baker noted. “Johnson could tout the deal as a big success. People would only see the negative effects years down the road.”

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The lies about the Afghanistan war, just like the lies about previous wars

The Washington Post has obtained, under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, an internal report produced by an obscure government agency known as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction that consists of interviews with people intimately involved with the US war in that country. It shows that the American public has been lied to constantly about the progress of the war, given a rosy picture when those on the inside knew that the war was lost almost from the very start.
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The massive effort to stop Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders

One of the features of the rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US is the panic that it has induced among the ruling classes and all the organizations that they use to maintain their grip on power. Normally these groups could exercise their power discreetly in the shadows and let the electoral game play out, knowing that whoever wins will be subservient to their interests. But Corbyn and Sanders are too great a threat to the power structure to ignore or take likely and the rulers have been forced to become more overtly involved in the process in order to stop them.
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