The 1945 plan https://www.fdrlibrary.org/address-text
was radical: full employment, housing, health, education and welfare - and FDR
might have achieved it.
America had a thriving economy, and the President had a
fresh electoral validation plus huge personal political capital built up over
twelve years of strong and popular leadership. Had he not died in April, he might
eventually have pushed the program through Congress despite the ‘Conservative
coalition’, who didn’t like it.
Nor did they like Britain’s new Labour government, which had
a similar agenda. The difference was that Britain needed money, and Washington
had the chance to put a spanner in our socialist works. The termination of Lend-Lease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
in September left us facing bankruptcy, but when Keynes went to America to ask
for a grant or gift to keep us going, the answer was no; and it could have
remained ‘no’ had it not been for growing awareness of the Soviet menace. Sir
Christopher Meyers explains:
Relations between Roosevelt and
Stalin had begun to sour in FDR’s last days. When the Wehrmacht transferred divisions
from the Western front to face the oncoming Red Army, Stalin accused the
President (3 April 1945) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stalins-War-History-Second-World-ebook/dp/B08FXYWSKK/ref=sr_1_1
of concluding a separate peace with the Germans, allowing Allied forces to
advance eastwards in return for the prospect of better peace terms. Roosevelt
exploded, writing of his ‘bitter resentment toward your informers’. Also, according
to FDR’s adviser Charles Bohlen https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/12/archives/foreign-affairs-if-roosevelt-had-lived.html
, Roosevelt ‘was profoundly disturbed by the evidences of the Russian violation
of the agreement on Poland and the agreement covering the Balkan countries.’ His
successor had met FDR only twice as Vice-President, and there was a fateful delay
in Truman’s getting up to speed on international developments after being sworn-in
on 12 April.
Influential in the formulation of American policy towards
Europe and the Soviet Union, and in the drafting of the Marshall Plan, was a US
State Department official named George Kennan. He felt his warnings about the
Soviets were being ignored by Truman’s advisers, and when asked by the State
Department to explain recent Soviet behaviour he replied (22 February 1946) with
a ‘Long Telegram’ https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116178.pdf
on the Russian character and outlook and what needed to be done. According to
Heinz-Dietrich Fischer (https://www.amazon.co.uk/American-Figures-Communicate-Through-Memoirs/dp/3643912951/ref=sr_1_1
, p.98):
‘Kennan believed that a
federation needed to be established in Western Europe to counter Soviet
influence in the region and to compete against the Soviet stronghold in Eastern
Europe… In 1949, he suggested a plan for the reunification of Germany, stating
the partition of Germany was unsustainable in the long run.’
Yet it is both more and less than Monnet’s dream. His
purpose was peace; the use of the Community as a passive-aggressive bulwark
against Communist Russia tended in the opposite direction. Even after the fall of
the Soviet Union, there have been (unscrupulous and dangerous, in this writer’s
opinion) ‘voices prophesying war’.
In a later piece, I hope to discuss other cross-currents in
the EU’s goals.
What if Henry Wallace had become Vice-President in FDR’s fourth
term, and suddenly been faced in 1945 with the smorgasbord of difficult
decisions that Truman handled so manfully? As head of the Board of Economic
Warfare (1941-1943) Wallace became embroiled in interdepartmental quarrels that
ended with the dissolution of the BEW; whereas Truman’s Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Committee
proved the latter to be formidably effective, saving the country many billions
of dollars in its war on waste and corruption among defence contractors, through
meetings noted for their absence of grandstanding by inquisitors. How well would
a Wallace administration have tackled the war in the Pacific, the near-meltdown
of post-war Europe, the industrial unrest in America in the switchover to a
peacetime economy… and Stalin?
Roosevelt’s victory in 1944 was conclusive nevertheless; but
there was a bomb that could have gone off under his campaign platform https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1706
:
‘Dewey had learned that decrypted
Japanese communications should have alerted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
the Pearl Harbor attack and was about to make this a campaign issue. Clarke
pleaded that the disclosure would reveal to the Japanese U.S. code-breaking
progress. Dewey reluctantly agreed to keep silent, and FDR was elected to a
fourth term.’
Imagine the impact on America, which Roosevelt had gradually
hauled out of isolationism, of the accusation that he might have prevented the Pearl
Harbor disaster, and maybe even the USA’s entry into WWII? Would a modern
political competitor have shown Dewey’s restraint?
‘I just have a hunch that Stalin
is not that kind of man. Harry says he's not and that he doesn't want anything
except security for his own country, and I think that if I give him everything
I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't
try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.’
This is not simple proof of Roosevelt’s gullibility. Churchill
said of the Hun http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,792515,00.html
that he ‘is always either at your throat or at your feet,’ and while Stalin had
ruled his developing country for 18 years, Roosevelt had ruled his for twelve
already and it was a very mighty nation. FDR had fine ideals, but he was also
tough, even with allies – brutally so with Churchill, when it suited him. Would
Stalin have dared for example, to continue resisting his Yalta commitment https://www.britannica.com/event/Yalta-Conference
to free elections in eastern Europe, if FDR had been there to face him down at
Potsdam https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/post-war-divisions/
in July 1945?
Writing in 1970, the NYT’s C. L. Sulzberger said https://www.nytimes.com/1970/04/12/archives/foreign-affairs-if-roosevelt-had-lived.html
‘It was not the death of a pro Soviet Roosevelt and his replacement by a
reactionary Truman that touched it [the Cold War] off… Roosevelt had reached
the end of his patience at precisely the moment his life was snuffed out.’ Sulzberger
recalled that Churchill had lamented the tragic timing of FDR’s death, coming
as it had when Truman was still getting up to speed with his briefings:
‘It was a tragedy that he had the
initial ignorant period. It was then we lost Eastern Europe... We should have
taken Berlin and Prague where the United States had two armored divisions
stranded just three days' march away.’
It might have been a mistake for Ambassador Harriman to
admit to Stalin (ibid.) that Truman was ‘not
experienced in foreign affairs.’ It was not enough (or perhaps too much) for
the brand-new President to have told Molotov the Russians could ‘go to hell’ if
they did not cooperate over Eastern Europe; but then, Truman was overwhelmed
with a sea of troubles. As he said to reporters the day after learning of FDR’s
death, ‘Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now.’
Truman was in need of good advisers and an integrated
foreign policy. This was to involve the reluctant rescue of Britain, the
salvation of Western Europe, and a long campaign – uniting the ‘free peoples’
of the world - against Stalin’s imperialism; which we shall come to next.
The EU has not been an unmixed blessing, suffering as it
does from idealism. The holy goal of supranational unity and the extension of
its benefits to other lands have led the Community to do things in haste and to
ignore negative regional economic and social effects; but the 1961 Bonn
Declaration made clear that it had also taken on a geopolitical role and
political philosophy in which the United States was explicitly involved. The
game of thrones had become a game of empires.
Practically, Jean Monnet’s project to make a firm
partnership between France and Germany, those mighty historic rivals, has been
achieved long since and is a monument to Monnet’s heroic tenacity and flexible
diplomacy in the pursuit of lasting peace. Yet its precondition was the USA’s
Marshall Plan and earlier aid immediately following the Second World War,
without which Western Europe faced collapse and revolution.
The path to American involvement was not smooth, because
their way is not entirely like ours; and there remains a cultural tension
between transatlantic economic liberalism and European statist impulses. It was
a tension also at work within the United States itself during Roosevelt’s terms
of Presidency, and resulted in a sea-change marked by the new Truman
administration, with implications not only for his country but for Europe and
the world.
FDR rescued the system with his package of measures
including the Banking Acts of 1933 that supported banks but also restrained
them; the job creation schemes under the National Industrial Recovery Act of
the same year; and the Social Security Act of 1935, helping the needy, the
unemployed and pensioners. It seems unlikely that he actually saved the nation
from Depression-era communist takeover – that tends to come in the wake of total
economic chaos or military defeat; but the fundamentalists of the CPUSA opposed
the New Deal and only abandoned their position in 1935 in order to unite
against fascism (similarly, pure-Marxist China was later to condemn the
‘revisionist traitors’ of the USSR under Khrushchev’s 1956 destalinisation
program.)
From the later 1930s, Roosevelt was also resisted from the
Right, by the ‘Conservative coalition’ in Congress, an alliance of Republicans
and Southern Democrats, who saw the New Deal as not in the American tradition
of personal freedom and self-reliance. Even the Cleveland ‘Plain-Dealer’, loyal
to the Democrats since the mid-nineteenth century, switched to endorsing FDR’s
rivals in the Presidential election campaigns of 1940 and 1944. https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/mccrayjh/id/15177.
in the latter, given how the Electoral College works, the Republicans’ Thomas
Dewey could have won, with only half a million more votes in the right areas (p.
2 herehttps://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1065&context=fac_dis.)
Roosevelt’s failing health, disguised from the public, was
becoming obvious to insiders - his doctor had been warned https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/books/review/franklin-roosevelt-his-final-battle-josephy-lelyveld.htmlthat if FDR ran for a fourth term in office,
he would probably not live to complete it, though it is not clear who if anyone
in the Party knew of this -and made
crucial the choice of running mate in 1944.
Henry Wallace had been FDR’s Vice-President during the
latter’s third term. He was an anti-segregationist, which would not have played
well in the Southern Democrat states mired in the largely British colonial
legacy of the slave trade. He was also an advocate of what he called ‘economic
democracy,’ anathema to fiscal Conservatives increasingly fretting about public
debt and taxation. What with his progressive views and his flaky interest in
numerology and Navajo magic, today he might be called a New Ager https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1948/08/henry-wallace-a-divided-mind/306029/
At any rate, he was potentially a vote-loser in the changing political climate,
and too erratic to be an emergency substitute for the Chief Executive. https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/election/article88007192.html
Yet Wallace was popular with the
rank-and-file. At the 1944 Democratic Party Convention he seemed set to secure
renomination but while the crowd was chanting for him the chairman adjourned
the Convention for the day and the Party leadership worked hard overnight to
secure support for Truman. The next day, Wallace scored more votes than Truman
in the first ballot but not enough to win outright; Truman then picked up
enough second choices in the next ballot to secure victory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace#Election_of_1944
The ticket was set for another successful Presidential election campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1944_United_States_presidential_election; but within three
months of FDR’s inauguration Truman was suddenly called on to take over,
inexperienced though learning fast; and ready to steer a more conservative course.
In a later piece, I plan to show how the changing tide
worked out for the USA, Europe and Russia.
In a previous piece about how the pandemic was a very useful smokescreen for the surreptitious advancement of all things green, I laid out several examples.
Even in the short space of time since then other relevant items have surfaced; one in particular was interesting as it was an example of how big business is having more and more of a stake in pushing the green agenda for its own purposes.
The item was about how meat producers in the USA are being bought out by businesses who are in the substitute meat manufacturing game. They see a potential huge market for lab-made beef or other meat substitutes as the climate change lobby push for higher meat prices, and eventually the elimination of cattle as they produce nasty gases that evidently are causing climate change?
With the western world going down this path of de-meatifyng the populace, using climate change and health as factors that they have discovered very few will object to if those two items are the prefix to any green introductions bingo, it is the magic key to doing anything they like, the west having discovered the magic formula will plough on and make this one of those must-do items on the green agenda.
It has been suggested that by 2040 most meat would not be coming from slaughtered animals. The companies benefiting from this will be the lab-meat producers and it has been noted they are hastening the trend in their favour by buying grazing land in the US to force the speed of the changeover to their products.
Companies too are getting in on the act; this is one of the first now many who have joined the anti-meat agenda:
Back in 2009 a Guardian article had this headline:
“The public sector has accepted the need to tackle climate change, but can't go it alone – business and the people must be engaged too“
Of course the public sector went along with it: what have they to lose? and whose money would they be investing anyway? - not theirs.
As consumers are nudged towards non meat or faux meat products with the help of the health fascists making sure that real meat products eventually price themselves out of reach of the average consumer, we are still not told what the costs of the lab produced article will be. Once that tipping point is reached you can guarantee veg prices will rise as the choice will become in effect none at all.
One of the reasons aired for the eventual erasing of real meat is its huge demand for water. That of course depends largely on demand and they are going to restrict and do away with demand so water will be saved. Of course as with much else on the green agenda; that doesn’t take into account the rise of world populations who all need water in one form or another, reckoned to reach 9.4 billion by 2040 from 7.6 billion today and it just keeps rising. The biggest increases are in African countries which cannot or will not sustain themselves and so mass immigration follows which will not stop but increase, bringing the potential earnings ratio ever lower in places like GB. Many surveys show we have been in decline with earnings since the 2008 crash, which again makes almost all the green projects unaffordable for the average man.
I have to state I am not personally against lab produced meat as long as it tastes the same and is competitively priced. The slaughter house side of meat production is something nearly all of us pretend doesn’t happen when we buy our steak. Will it provide the same taste experience or will it be bland and Quorn like? This article suggests it may be OK for certain types of meat, but this one is hardly your go-to in the Co-Op
There is also a push for vertical farming. This is not new: I recall articles on this innovation decades ago, a modern version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The principle is you stack floors of greenhouses on top of one another in a city environment, saving transport costs and land usage, all using hydroponics. This saves hugely on water usage and run-off, but as usual there are big disadvantages that have never been solved: being stacked, unlike a conventional single storey greenhouse, all apart from the top one get uneven light which is no good for producing uniform crops so artificial light has to be used, and you guessed it that needs energy and the linking of solar power and inbuilt windmills just doesn’t cut it, so they are not viable. Other types have been suggested but they all need energy, so save water but need a lot more energy = non viable.
The NHS are involved here by prescribing vegetables as an alternative, so the NHS is also in that push to eliminate meat and turn us all vegan. I would be more impressed if the NHS did what we pay them to do, treat people with diseases and ailments.
Needless to say Bojo is playing it soft by saying he does not think taxing people is the right way to go but will discuss and let everyone know in six months, meaning he will tax sugar and salt in one form or another. Boris has certainly made up for all the U turns Mrs Thatcher didn’t make; he also lies a lot.
I like the bit in that link that says any taxes will go towards more free school meals. that makes it all right then, they have seen what St Rashford has done and jumped on the bandwagon. of course any extra tax neve goes directly to anything, it goes in the pot.
Skyscraper farming, where does all that energy for lighting come from? Not solar that’s for sure. There is also the question of what happens to the land previously inhabited by cattle; grazing land despite what the greenies say is not suitable for arable crops, which is why, obviously, it was grazing land in the first place. So far the answers to that are few and none, the only proposal put forward, from the greens, is the re-wilding of everything, a countryside like the middle ages with wild boar, herds of bloody deer (haven’t we enough?) beavers damming all the rivers, birds of prey such as Golden Eagles and a landscape out of Jurassic Park. Perhaps that is the end game: not being able to access enough water, no energy to power anything, freezing houses in winter as energy becomes limited to off-peak because too expensive at any other time, food limited by price and choice, and an exploding population. Yes, that is the answer: free holidays for all in Jurassic Park and the humans become the food; problem solved.
Which takes me back to the newsletter I spoke about before from Anglia Water on the way forward: we would pay in advance - with no obvious benefits for us - for the renewal of infrastructure for a private company; shares all round, and we will still be asked to share baths etc. in the future to save the planet.
How on earth the average working family is going to be able to afford all these vainglorious projects that our leaders claim are essential to the planet and our well being (?) is a mystery in a global low wage economy. Not one politician to my knowledge has explained how the money will be raised other than ever higher taxes that the many will not pay and the fewer will pay ever more. They talk about sustainability; what they spout is not sustainable. They will either collapse the country - they are not needing much of a push in that direction - or they will have to bin much of this self-proclaimed roadmap into nirvana.
The latter is preferable as very little of it will make one iota of difference to the planet, but as with Covid “if it saves one life” these clowns will plough on, having already tied us to ridiculous agreements. Thanks, Theresa May, your legacy will be noted.
Bang on cue the government announce their ‘greenprint’: all that has been mooted is coming to pass, EVs will not only have to pay tax as petrol cars do but road pricing is coming as well, so not only do EVs cost a lot more and have batteries that currently can’t be disposed of, they will also have double taxes.
HGVs will not be sold after 2040. This could get interesting, it is not an area Deliveroo can step into and help; we await the electric substitute!
Air travel will be carbon neutral, whatever that means; what it really means is that air travel will be for the few as the new fuels will cost more and passengers will pay a carbon tax.
All the usual suspects from green lobby groups naturally support all this as do various think tanks of industry, claiming that our world leading stance on all this will lead to new jobs (and lose many more elsewhere) and reduce our emissions. All this to from a country that contributes less than 1% of the world's CO2 emissions and whose effort to reach carbon neutral by 2050 will have been in vain as the world at large ploughs on and the increasing populations make it all pointless.
You will note in this paper there is not one single word about the big elephant in the room: where is all this extra very expensive energy coming from? We discussed earlier the fact that wind and solar cannot produce enough and even if they could it would be intermittent and we would have rolling blackouts, and that is at current demands; the mere thought about for instance what electric HGVs will require for charging is mind-boggling.
In the video in that link, the usual disingenuous waffle about 50% of our energy being produced by wind power is voiced. As we all know, it only works when the wind blows; even just last week, wind on one day contributed just under 1% of our total energy needs; the difference is made up by buying in energy from abroad, which is hardly a way forward in energy security.
The other item of note and which is already happening is the shutting down of our cities to the motor car. In many ways we can agree on that, but walking or cycling more with an ageing population is not a viable alternative, and unless better public transport is subsidised (more taxpayer's money) many will not be able to afford even that. We can all remember the ticket prices when the buses deregulated; now add on horrendously expensive hydrogen: it is currently 10x more expensive than gas for example. So buses powered by electricity or hydrogen will see prices rocket, unless again they are subsidised, and the subsidy once again falls on those least able to afford it, the taxpayer. They really don’t want the little man to travel anywhere.
The only amusing thing in that video was the appalling state of the city road shown; so much for investment.
Still at least John Lewis have the solution: bring back trams. There is little to say on this other than who is going to support yet another form of transport which requires its own dedicated and electrified lane? Bonkers!
A window into the not-so-distant future, is this from California. Look familiar?
“Last August, after rolling blackouts hit California during a heat wave, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered an investigation."
The report on the root causes of the August blackouts was completed in January. The problem was caused by lack of “resource adequacy” and “planning.” The people making decisions about how much power would be needed in California were routinely underestimating the demand for electricity.
It’s happening again. Summer, it turns out, was unexpected.
The great thing about underestimating California’s power needs is that everybody can pretend the state can run on solar and wind energy, thereby feeling good that we’re doing something to stop climate change. Unmentioned is that California now imports more electricity than any other state, and how that power is generated is somebody else’s problem.”
And as usual in all of this not a single questioning voice is heard. Just why are they pushing this, with the lack of infrastructure to support it, to mention just one problem? A familiar story and oft repeated.
There are several different drivers for this movement, which
is why the results have been patchy. They include:
·Preventing war in Europe
·Developing selected African nations
·Fighting Soviet Communism on behalf of the USA
·Abolishing nationhood
·Building an empire
·Achieving full employment and prosperity
Jean Monnet, an internationalist in outlook from his
business as a French brandy exporter, believed that the way to prevent European
conflicts was to unite the countries, especially France and Germany. He was advising
the French minister of commerce and industry at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference
when the latter put forward a plan for international economic cooperation.
Instead, France was set on ruinous reparations from Germany and the rest we
know.
Again in 1940, as France was falling to German blitzkrieg,
Monnet was in London, urging the unification of France and Britain – joint
citizenship, and joint armed forces, which might have been enough to resist the
Nazis. His idea was tabled for British Cabinet discussion, but the French
government capitulated before the scheme could be considered.
In 1950 his plan of absorbing into a higher authority the
French and German production of coal and steel, key war-making materials, was
announced by Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister; the 1951 Treaty of
Paris established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and Monnet
became its President. Monnet’s ambitions went further, but the French
Parliament rejected a proposal for a unified European Defence Community.
‘Only a united Europe, allied to
the United States of America and to other free peoples, is capable of meeting
the dangers which threaten the existence of Europe and of the whole free world.’
The threat to world peace had shifted from nationalism to
ideology. Of the USA, more later.
‘There can be no European unity
if Europe does not constitute a political entity distinct from other entities.
A personality. But there can be no European personality if Europe does not have
control over the defence of its personality. Defence is always the basis of
politics.’
These developments aroused concern in the British Prime Minister
(ibid., p. 105):
‘Harold Macmillan, alarmed not
least of all by the danger of an autonomous foreign and defence policy
organization of the Six, announced in the House of Commons on 31 July that he
would seek to negotiate Britain’s entry into the EEC.’
Whatever British leaders said publicly in the years to
follow, post-Bonn they knew where the EEC was headed.
9 July: following the coup of 27 May 1960, a Turkish referendum approves a new constitution for the country; this replaces the one from 1924 (and will itself be superseded following another coup in 1980.) Members of the ousted government of 1960 (photo above, source) have been put on trial on the island of Yassiada, beginning 14 October 1960, with verdicts eventually pronounced in September 1961; three will be executed including the former Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; in June 2020 the Grand National Assembly of Turkey retrospectively declares the trials null and void.
9 July: Greece and the European Economic Community sign a treaty making Greece the first nation to become an associate member of the Common Market, later becoming a full member in 1981.
15 July: William A. Fitzgerald, alias Nathan Boya, is the fifth person to survive riding over Niagara Falls. 'Interviewed in 2012 for a National Geographic television special about Niagara Falls daredevils, Fitzgerald revealed his reason for his stunt after decades of silence: He had broken off his engagement to a woman that he felt he had wronged, and he performed the dangerous stunt as a form of penance. Niagara Falls had been their planned honeymoon destination.'
Fitzgerald later moved to Bangkok and wrote novels titled 'Up Against The Wall You Spic Bastard: I'm Going to Blow Your Goddamn Head Off' and 'Wanted by Mafia: Hyawatha Two-Feathers: Either Dead or Alive.'
One of my old friends once told me how an accident saved his life. He slipped in his driveway, and the subsequent CAT scan uncovered a growth on his kidney. That discovery gave him a number of extra years of life.
In a similar way, the pandemic has made issues with our country readily apparent, rather than causing them: access to health care, lack of sick leave, a weak safety net, and the imbalance in the economy.
Forty years ago, a person could work really hard at a union job, and support a family. I read this morning how some celebrity's first job was sweeping up in an Iowa factory, at $12 per hour. Today, that same job would probably earn about the same, even though the total inflation since that time has been something like 400%
Starting in about 1980, a large proportion of GDP has been the banking sector, now reaching 40% Realize that banking, while necessary, is essentially parasitic. Not coincidentally, 40% of the gains of the economy go to 1% of the population, most of whom are in banking and investment. If one looks at gains in the stock market, 92% go to the 10% of the richest.
We have created an unsustainable economy, and not in the way that conservatives would have us believe. In the past 250 years, the Scientific, Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions brought plenty to the wealthy nations, and that plenty has now been sequestered by a handful of largely non-productive individuals.
At some point, the average people will earn too little to keep the system running. If too few people have good health insurance, then the medical system will not do research or treatment, because there won't be enough money in the system. Likewise for energy, information, and all other industries.
If ever there was a sign not all is well in the land it is
the regular polls showing voting intentions. You would like to believe that the
last few years and more would shine a light on the incumbents of our HoC and
the mendacious chicanery that pervades the place and decide none of them - with a
few worthy individuals as exceptions - are worth the price of a lead pencil on
the day.
The recent by election at Amersham was a classic, a Tory
stronghold taken by the Lib Dems. Why would anyone believe the Lib Dems were
any different from the other main stream parties? They have all had their
moment in the sun and all failed us badly, but 'the other lot are worse' is the
excuse for voting for nonentities these days, both individuals and parties,
since Farage decanted from UKIP there
hasn’t been a viable alternative where you can place your X on polling day.
So we have poll after poll showing the Tories, I can’t call
them Conservatives because they aren’t, having a comfortable lead in voting
intentions despite failing to do much at all for the country since taking
power. The Covid period was just a convenient time to hide the fact that apart from
dealing with the virus, badly in many aspects and managing to put the country
into a debt situation at least equal to the last world war, they have achieved
nothing apart from frightening the life out of a large part of the population; bravo.
The problem for the public is those incumbent parties here
and elsewhere in the western world have it all sewn up. Breaking the mould is
extremely difficult: the party apparatus is very good at belittling any
upstarts by lying innuendo and smears, using all those recent words and phrases
such as the catch all 'racist.' With the press and big donor business on their
side and the institutions filled with left of centre ex-university graduates
with political PhDs and no real world experiences, it has become almost
impossible to unseat those who believe they rule by right, the so called
‘heritage’ parties - that title alone should be enough to warn off any intending
voter, the entitlement in that phrase is gross.
Why do populations still believe a single word any politician
from these so called heritage parties says? You would think that past failures
would make people hesitant in giving the same failures another chance when as
recent decades have shown nothing does change.
It is still in the people's hands to vote them all out if they
wished. When Tower Hamlets had its corrupt council scrapped, the indigenous
population in the area was still large enough to stop it happening but even
with previous evidence on what was going on they failed to vote them out and
the Muslim bloc voted them in again.
Apathy was the reason that happened not lack of numbers, the
same has been true up and down the country, people vote one way because they
always have, why, what has been gained from that lazy approach, nothing, other
than being taken for granted by the sitting MP who in many of these areas
doesn’t even have to campaign to retain his seat.
I still live in a constituency like that. The last election
showed the MP to be invisible; he gets fatter, does nothing of value and opens a
few enterprises; if you write to him an anodyne reply by his paid staff is what
you get. Having an MP like that is pointless, there must dozens the same all
over the country; at a guess you could cut out 50% of them and no one would
notice the difference. Belgium after all managed without a government at all for
eighteen months, others have had locked coalitions resulting in no
parliamentary work being done for long periods and it made no difference. Anyone who believes we need all these parasites needs their bumps felt.
Am I being too cruel? I think not. The vast majority put party
and themselves before the people of this country. Look how many said the
right things about getting over the line with Brexit and then reneged at the
last moment for party unity, leaving us with a poorer deal.
Yet time and again come voting day people applaud the ones
who have shafted them, people stand and say someone with no attributes at all
would make a good PM; why so deluded?
What has also become apparent is the usage of postal voting
to ensure the right results in certain areas. It was pooh-poohed at first as
being insignificant; not any more, yet the major parties refuse to do anything
about the misuse of postal voting. Why? Because they both have skin in the game.
The Batley and Spen by-election showed how much postal voting
can sway an election. This chart borrowed from elsewhere gives a graphic
example of how postal voting has increased particularly in areas like this. The
last two figures are worse than they look as the turnout at the by-election was
lower than in the general elections so the postal vote was an even higher
percentage than the last one, virtually double.
Postal voting should not be the default method to put your
cross on a piece of paper. It was never intended (or was it?) to be anything more
than a way of getting people who had genuine difficulties getting to a polling
booth a chance to vote. After all if you can’t be arsed once every four years
to drag your sorry backside to a polling station then you should forfeit your
right to vote.
Labour have painted themselves into a corner with postal
voting as it suits them so well in areas where people are told where to put
their cross and have the voting paper collected from them by community
persuaders.
For the Conservatives to object would open a can of worms
about corrupt spending tactics in many constituencies they have contested in
recent years; the farce of Thanet was still never resolved by a commission
known for talking but never acting.
So now we are stuck with postal voting that cannot be
verified and is abused by ever more of the same and nobody says a word.
It will of course all fall down when those same areas who are
allowed a ‘community’ candidate as a sop to the postal voting practice decide
to start up their own party when the demographic grows and that won't be long. In mainland Europe it has already started; small enough to ignore now, but in
time...
The western world has become indolent. Even when an
opportunity has arisen to change those in power for something truly different
the voters run back to the hen house at the last moment and then moan for four
more years. True, in many cases the full strength of the incumbents and a
compliant press has helped, but have people given up on free thinking? I
believe in the main they have; the ‘I will continue to wear masks forever’
brigade, and there are millions of them, have sadly shown that to be a fact.
They have become inured. Whatever is taken from them, whatever
the cost, they never question why. A neighbour who is a good friend and far from
not seeing what is going on is typical: when the crunch on any issue comes, I
get the ‘I don’t know what to believe ‘ reply; he really would not rather bother
with it all and there lies the problem.
There is an awful lot going on in the background at the
moment that is not public knowledge in any meaningful way. It is all damaging
and a threat to our prosperity or what is left of it. If the voting public
doesn’t wake up soon we are done for, I see no light on the horizon at this
point.
As it stands George Carlin summed up the state of things
well: without something meaningful to vote for you may as well stay at home.
"Alexander" is a young man in middle America with a broad view of the current craziness...
Trump is the figurehead of a doomsday cult.
That might be a bold assertion to some. An slanderous accusation even. Yet every day that passes I cannot think of any other way to describe his following.
I have been watching his political career since he entered the Republican primary. I, like many, thought he had little chance of becoming the Republican candidate, let alone President. Like so many others, I sat there slack-jawed on election night as he was declared President-elect.
Foolish, in retrospect. I should have considered that my distaste for the Democratic party in general and Hilary Clinton in particular was not unique to me.
At the time though I turned to certain internet commentators with my questions. Their claims were myriad and ever-changing: his dress style, his charisma, his refusal to engage in debate, 5D-thinking that could outwit his opponent at every turn. Meanwhile pundits and preachers farther to the right than my sources were providing an altogether different explanation:
The will of God.
That was nothing new, of course. I remember President Bush having similar religious cheerleading. So I didn't pay much attention to the religious aspect of Trump's political bloc.
Over the next 3 years I would drift away from the conservative sources I once trusted to inform me, a story for another time. However, as I shifted to more left-leaning commentators I noticed something...odd, about Trump's core supporters.
So much of their public support of Trump came with openly religious overtones.
Baptist preachers were singing his praises in the middle of sermons. Televangelists with congregations numbering in the hundreds of thousands were leading their followers in prayer to strengthen his reign.
It was from these churches that the prophecy flowed like water.
Trump would make abortion a crime. Trump would overturn gay marriage. Trump would put mandatory prayer back in schools. Trump would take the liberal media off the air. If a right-wing Christian had a political wet dream there was a preacher on their shoulder to promise them that Trump was days away from providing it.
The result was a swirling torrent of religious fervor backing Trump's presidency, one that his underlings quickly capitalized on. Over the course of his four years in office Trump leaned more and more on his religious following, culminating in that deeply ironic photo shoot in front of a church, after protesters had been chased off its lawn with tear gas.
However, it is not for this reason that I claim Trump is the figurehead of a cult.
That fault lies with Qanon.
I don't have time to go over Qanon in all its horrifying degenerate splendor here, I think that's best saved for its own post, but here is what's important for this article.
Qanon is an online movement named after the username Q. Q claims to be a government employee with 'Q clearance', a top secret government clearance associated with the U.S. Department of Energy. Q also claims that this clearance gives him access to the highest level of government secrets, as well as the secrets of a underground shadow government called the Deep State.
The movement is primarily driven by incredibly vague posts left by Q, which are decoded by the community. The posts are so vague, and the decoders are mostly veteran conspiracy theorists. This means the conspiracy itself is too complicated and ever shifting to fully comprehend, but here are some key points.
1. There is an evil shadow government known only as 'the Cabal' comprised of powerful individuals, mostly from the Democratic party.
2. The Cabal is doing outrageously evil things usually involving murdering children and devouring their corpses in satanic rituals (yes, really.)
3.Trump and a few other high-level Republicans are working to expose the Cabal.
4. Any day now Trump will reveal his master plan, and all members of the Cabal, Democrats, and liberals in general will be rounded up and executed.
This movement, as you might have gathered from context, is completely nuts.
That in no way hindered it from melding into the widespread religious exaltation of Trump. Soon every loyal right-wing Christian had their own theory on how Trump was going to wipe America clean of sinners.
One might notice that this sounds an awful lot like a Doomsday prophecy, because it is. An oddly secular Doomsday prophecy, granted, as it would be carried out with guns and death camps as opposed to divine wrath, but the hallmarks are still there.
It was through this lens that Trump completed his transformation in the eyes of the hardcore right-wing Christian from political figure to eminent savior.
From there the movement quickly infected the Republican party.
I am unsure to what extent its adherents hold sway over the party, only that few Republican officials are willing to contradict them, which implies a staggering hold.
Indeed, any perceived insult against Trump's honor is a political death sentence for a Republican at the moment, as exemplified by Mike Pence.
With this as context the events of the January 6th insurrection seem more in line with The Great Disappointment than a standard political uprising.
That is to say that Trump leaving office was not a part of the Great Plan the true Trump believers were sold.
So, just as with the Great Disappointment the preachers of Trump's good word set a new date for the End Times. This new era is being led by Michael Lindell at the moment, though there is no telling how the wind will shift. He is predicting that Trump's imminent return to power, as well as the subsequent purges, will happen sometime in August.
2 July: as refugees continue to flee the German Democratic Republic, East-West tensions mount. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev tells UK Ambassador Sir Frank Roberts six atom bombs could 'put Great Britain out of action' - and nine, for France. Weeks later, at a Warsaw Pact conference, Khrushchev declares, 'We rate Great Britain higher [than six], and we have several dozen atom bombs ready which we will use to carry out a strike against Great Britain and really put it out of action !' First atomic bomb tests: USA 1945, Soviet Union 1949, UK 1952, France 1960 (China coming in 1964) First hydrogen bomb tests: USA 1952, Soviet Union 1955, UK 1957, (China 1967, France 1968)
Immensely destructive: the H-bomb test 'Castle Bravo', at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands,
was 2.5 times more powerful than expected and its fallout harmed many Marshallese.
4 July: Russian nuclear submarine K-19, hastily developed to catch up with the USA, suffers a burst pipe in the cooling system, for which there was no backup. 'Captain Zateyev believed that if the reactor exploded, it could cause the United States and NATO to believe the Soviet Union was attempting a nuclear strike, potentially causing a preemptive retaliation and World War III.' 22 sailors volunteer to go in and fix it; all are dead within two years.
8 July: While swimming naked in the outdoor pool of Cliveden House, Berkshire, Christine Keeler meets British Cabinet minister John Profumo at a house party. She is aged 19 and has previously been a victim of sexual abuse from her stepfather; now she is being introduced to influential people by osteopath and socialite Stephen Ward. At the height of the Cold War, Profumo is Minister for War and begins an affair with her, but he is not the only one: 'When MI5 found out [she] was also sleeping with Ivanov, a naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy in London it was a clear conflict of interests.' Profumo eventually denies the improper relationship in Parliament, is later caught out and resigns.
