By Robert J. Burrowes Global Research, November 27, 2018 Have you heard the expression ‘climate change’? That lovely expression that suggests a holiday in a place with a more pleasant climate. Unfortunately, only the rarest individual has the capacity to see through the elite-promulgated delusion that generated this benign expression and its twin notions that […]
Mainstream commentary on Donald Trump invariably reduces him to an individual phenomenon. Be it a twitter comment or a public outburst, everything is about him.
The truth, of course, is that Trump is not some other-worldly demon that crossed into this dimension out of nowhere. Above all, his presidency expresses an entire US political and economic system in crisis.
In the early 20th century, the major economic centres of the world were Germany, the US and Japan. Europe as a whole was secondary; Britain had been in decline since the Victorian era.
Except for the US, these economies were left in tatters by the Second World War. This transformed America from a traditional hemispheric power (e.g. Monroe Doctrine) into the global dominant superpower virtually overnight: after 1945, the US alone accounted for some 50% of world economic output.
By the early 1940s, US policy planners had seen this coming, as…
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On the centenary of the First World War, German chancellor Angela Merkel questioned the future survival of European integration, a project designed to consolidate and salvage European postwar capitalism and close the nationally-divided ranks of its imperialist bourgeoisie.
The absence of a unified policy response to the global financial crisis in 2008 marked the beginning of the end of the project’s modern constitution, the European Union. Never without its dissenters within the bourgeoisie, the project’s divisions have come to a head with crises like the Eurozone, the refugee crisis engineered by US-EU wars, and now the very question of continued membership of EU states: in effect, the spectre of a nationalist breakup of the Brussels empire.
Brexit: Behind the Immigration Smokescreen
A turning point in the European crisis, the slender “no” vote in Britain’s EU referendum defied the dominant Europhilic section of her ruling class and plunged the nation into perhaps its greatest political crisis since the English…
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The winner of multiple awards including a BAFTA, the reportage and filmmaking of Australian journalist John Pilger have highlighted injustices around the world. His latest works, Utopia (2013) and The Coming War on China (2016), respectively highlight the racist policies against indigenous Australia and the growing prospect of nuclear war between America and China.
Based in London, UK since 1962, Pilger first came to prominence with The Quiet Mutiny, a World in Action special that exposed the disintegration of the US army in Vietnam. From then, he made a string of World in Action specials. His prime was when he highlighted the Pol Pot genocide in 1970s Cambodia, which raised $45m in aid.
He went on to highlight two more genocides: the Western-armed Indonesian occupation of East Timor, wiping out 25-33% of the population, and the horrendous US-UK economic embargo on Iraq that, according to UNICEF, killed half a…
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In March 2015, Saudi Arabia launched an attack on Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, to stamp out a Shiite insurgency (‘Houthis’) that threatened to advance Iranian influence in the strategic energy-rich region at the expense of Western-Saudi hegemony. The result has been a humanitarian catastrophe killing thousands and threatening millions with famine. Saudi warplanes have bombed countless civilian targets from factories and markets to hospitals and villages.
US Assistant Secretary John Kerry soon confirmed US support for the war, including “intelligence sharing, targeting assistance, and advisory and logistical support for strikes against Houthi targets”. Riyadh’s command and control centre includes both American and British military trainers/advisers with access to target lists, though they are said to not be directly involved in selecting targets.
Catastrophe: Saudi-led war has killed thousands, threatens millions with famine
The UN soon reported 2300 civilian deaths due to airstrikes alone. The following month, Obama pushed for a series of arms deals with the…
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From the Israel-Palestine conflict to the crisis in Iraq and Syria, very few in the West will have heard of the Anglo-French plot at the root of more than a century’s turmoil in the modern Middle East.
In 1916, as the collapse of the Ottoman Empire appeared imminent, two civil servants – one British (Sykes), the other French (Picot) – plotted the partition of the Middle East between the British and French empires[1], drawing up the modern-day borders of the region.
Sharing a common Islamic identity for 1300 years, the region would now be factionalised along national lines. When he invaded Palestine and conquered Jerusalem, Gen. Allenby is alleged to have said: “Today, the crusades have ended”.
By far the worst fallout was from the partition of the Levant into British Iraq and French Syria. Under the Ottomans, the various ethnic minorities and religious sects of the Levant enjoyed autonomy…
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The theme of the BBC’s Children In Need this year was disadvantaged children in the UK. The BBC presenters, as always, directed their appeals to the general public, not to Prime Minister Theresa May, who has continued her predecessor David Cameron’s vicious offensive against the working class poor.
More than a quarter of UK children now live in poverty. This appalling figure is expected to rise to a staggering 37% (5.2 million) by 2022[1]. If so, child poverty will have almost tripled since the 1960s. None of this was mentioned by Children In Need.
These millions of children’s families, forever the subject of bourgeois contempt (and fear), cannot be stereotyped as ‘scroungers’: 64% are working households[1].
If not the sole cause, the ruling elite’s austerity drive has certainly contributed to this appalling situation. Under David Cameron, tax/benefit changes caused the poorest tenth to suffer a 38% income drop[2], while the…
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