Seeing through the false dichotomies of the extreme-right

One of the problems with defenders of right-wing demagoguery is the way that so many of them only seem to be capable of thinking in the crudest black and white terms.

Here are a few examples of the ridiculously over-simplistic false dichotomies that are regularly lobbed at me by the kind of people who seem to talk solely in tabloid style rhetoric.

If you don't love Trump, then you automatically must love Clinton. 
I don't love Clinton, I think she was just about the worst candidate the Democrats could have fielded against a demagogue like Trump. I liked Bernie Sanders and think he would have easily punctured Trump's ludicrous anti-establishment balloon by being an actual anti-establishment rebel, and that he would have won the "rust belt" states and the Presidential election.

If you don't think Brexit is the best thing since sliced bread, you must adore the EU. 
I don't love the EU. I've written more critical analysis of the EU and stuff like the TTIP corporate power grab than 99% of Brexiters. The problem of course is that being aware of many of the EU's flaws is not the same as wanting to sign a blank contract with the Tory party to make things up as they go along in order to suit their financial backers' interests. I said it before the referendum and I'll say it again: Quitting the EU for a shambolic self-serving Tory Brexit is exactly the kind of situation that the phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fire" was invented for.

If you don't love the fearmongering rhetoric of extreme-right demagogues like Farage, Bannon and Le Pen, then you must sympathise with Islamist fanatics. 
I don't have sympathy for violent, murderous or hate-filled fanatics of any kind. I firmly believe that Islamist fanatics and extreme-right hatemongers are two sides of the same despicable coin. I also think that the only way to avoid the appalling human suffering of the ideological "clash of civilisations" that both of these groups of fanatics crave, is for Muslims and non-Muslims to come together in solidarity against this appalling minority of divisive hate-filled extremists.

Sadly the state of education in the UK (and the US) is so weak these days that millions of people actually buy into these ludicrously over-simplistic false dichotomies rather than applying a few basic critical thinking skills and looking for more sensible answers of their own.

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Who is to blame for President Trump?

The election of Donald Trump represents a howl of outrage from millions of people who have felt abandoned by the political system. There was no sense or strategy to it, it was just a gigantic "fuck you" to a political establishment who have spent the last four decades pandering to the interests of the super-rich and allowing the erosion of the American middle class and the annihilation of American industry.

The racists, misogynists, fascists and xenophobes obviously came out in force to back the most bigoted presidential candidate in modern times, but there's more to it than that. Of course the bigots in America won the greatest victory of their lives, but they clearly didn't achieve it on their own, there's simply not enough of them.

The smug mainstream media consensus is already being formed that the "uneducated white working class" are to blame for this result, but this particular blame-game ignores a number of other much more significant culprits.

The most obvious culprits to start with are the Republican party elite who allowed their own party to be hijacked by a bigoted and mentally unstable demagogue. A few notable exceptions refused to endorse Trump but the majority of Republican politicians decided that it was in their own self-interest to clamber onto the Trump bandwagon and cheerlead for him, despite knowing full well that he's the most dangerously unhinged candidate ever to run for President.

The problem with blaming the Republicans is that their recent history is stuffed full of terrifyingly unsuitable Presidential candidates. Richard Nixon is rightly remembered as the most dishonest President in history (until now at least). Ronald Reagan was a B movie actor who was clearly suffering dementia by his second term in office. Then there was George "Dubya" Bush who somehow managed to make Reagan look like a towering intellect in comparison. Then in 2012 there was Mitt Romney. Just imagine the insanity of thinking it's a good idea to put forward a ruthless vampire capitalist like Romney when the nation was still suffering the fallout of the global financial sector meltdown!

The problem with blaming the Republicans for selecting bizarre and terrifying presidential candidates is that it's like blaming the sun for setting at night or attempting to stop the tide from coming in by shouting at it. It's just what they do.

If we're looking for a particular voter demographic to blame for Trump, then there's a much more obvious one than the white working class scapegoats. The white evangelical Christians came out in force to back the least Christian presidential candidate the US has ever seen, and they're getting an astonishing free pass from the majority of the media elite for their hypocrisy. The exit polls suggest that Trump won the evangelical Christian vote by 81% - 16%. In the key swing state of Florida the margin was an even more emphatic 85% - 13%.

Trump is a divisive, arrogant, intolerant, sexist, abusive, casino-building, multiple divorcee and sexual predator, but millions of so-called Christians flocked to the polls to give him the strongest evangelical endorsement of any presidential candidate in decades.

It's actually pretty easy to understand working class Americans sending a massive "fuck you" to the political establishment after the four decades of neglect they've suffered, but it's almost impossible to comprehend the sheer hypocrisy of a bunch of hard-core Christians flocking to the polls to vote for a deeply unchristian bigot like Donald Trump, especially when a significant number of evangelical ministers came out and warned them not to.

But then again blaming white evangelicals for their abject hypocrisy is as futile as blaming the Republican Party for putting forward yet another crackpot presidential candidate. White evangelicals flocking to the polls to vote Republican is as reliable as the Republicans picking terrifying presidential candidates for them to vote for.

In my view the most blameworthy people of all are the Democratic Party elitists who worked tirelessly to undermine Bernie Sanders and rig the Democratic primaries against him. These people deliberately crushed the Sanders revolution simply because they believed that it was Hillary Clinton's turn to be President.

The polls clearly showed that Sanders had a much better chance of defeating Trump, but the Democratic Party elite and pretty much all of their anti-democratic super delegates sided with Clinton, but it was much worse than that. The evidence is absolutely clear that elite Democrats deliberately rigged the contest to ensure that Bernie Sanders couldn't win the Democratic nomination.

The folly of derailing Bernie Sanders' unprecedented grass-roots democracy campaign in favour of appointing the most pro-establishment Wall Street friendly candidate imaginable is all too obvious now that Trump has won, but it was always a deeply risky gamble given the revolutionary mood that has been growing in global politics since the global financial sector insolvency crisis.

People all over the world have been crying out for alternatives to the complacent political elites who allowed the global financial sector meltdown to happen in the first place, then even more unforgivably loaded the cost of the crisis onto the backs of ordinary people whilst allowing the super-rich minority who actually caused the crisis to carry on making themselves even richer than ever.

Incredibly the Democratic Party elitists decided to completely ignore this revolutionary mood and install their favoured Wall Street backed puppet candidate rather support the guy who was running an inspirational grass-roots anti-establishment campaign that was tapping into the public anger at a political system that was no longer seen to serve the interests of ordinary people.

We'll never know whether Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump because the Democratic Party elitists colluded with Clinton to prevent the possibility. However we can still be reasonably confident that Sanders' anti-establishment grass-roots democracy campaign would have taken an awful lot more wind out of Trump's anti-establishment rhetoric than Hillary Clinton's insipid, uninspiring "more of the same", "be thankful for the crumbs you've got" campaign.

There's no point in blaming the bigots and racists (they were always going to vote for Trump). There's little point in blaming the Republicans for once again putting forward a lunatic Presidential candidates (that's just what they do). There's no point in blaming the white working class for saying a big "fuck you" to a political system that has callously neglected them for the last four decades. The most blameworthy people are clearly the out of touch Democratic Party elitists who deliberately colluded with Hillary Clinton to destroy their own anti-establishment candidate (who had much better and more believable anti-establishment credentials than the bigoted billionaire Trump).

It's bad enough that they destroyed their own anti-establishment candidate, but the decision to crush Sanders is even worse considering they did it in order to put forward a living embodiment of the despised political elite.

Everyone who supported the Sanders campaign will remember the disgustingly displays of smug sneering contempt from Clinton supporters as it became clear she was going to win the nomination. These arrogant and patronising displays of outright contempt towards Sanders' genuine grass-roots political revolution and everyone who supported it was what lost the Democrats an election they should have won as a landslide.

The Democratic Party elitists rigged their leadership contest in favour of their pro-establishment candidate and then they sneered at all those who wanted to change the system to make it fairer and more responsive to the needs of the people. By doing this they took away the opportunity for America to restructure itself in a coherent and democratic manner and left the masses with the appalling choice of their chosen "more of the same" candidate, or sending a massive and utterly reckless "fuck you" to the political establishment.

By creating such an appalling choice for the electorate the out-of-touch Democratic Party elitists ended up handing the keys to the White House to a terrifyingly unstable right-wing demagogue.

In hindsight can any of them honestly say that President Trump is a better outcome than the idea of President Sanders that terrified them so much that they rigged their own internal party democracy in order to prevent it?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The US is turning against the Prison Industrial Complex, but it's thriving in Britain

On Thursday 18th of August 2016 the US Department of Justice made a hugely significant announcement that they are planning to end the use of private prisons after a report found that private prisons are less safe and provide inferior correctional services than government run facilities.

The huge growth in the US prison population, the widespread use of private prisons in the US and the use of prisoners as cheap labour is a phenomenon commonly referred to as the Prison Industrial Complex. This describes the situation where private companies that profit from running prisons and exploiting prisoners as cheap labour lobby for ever harsher laws in order to boost the prisoner population and their own profit margins.

Civil rights campaigners and hip-hop artists have been complaining about the Prison Industrial Complex for years, noting how non-white people are far more likely to be imprisoned for non-violent offences like drug possession.

When it comes to private prisons the conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious. Government operated prison services have an interest in reducing prisoner numbers through correctional services like education, apprenticeships, anger management courses etc because a lower prison population means either lower taxes, or tax revenues that can be spent on other valuable services like education or infrastructure. Private prisons have an interest in keeping prisoner populations as high as possible in order to boost their profitability, meaning that any efforts to rehabilitate prisoners and reduce the chances of re-offending are utterly counter-productive.

The obvious scope for corruption was highlighted by the appalling 2008 "kids for cash" scandal where two Pennsylvania judges were caught taking bribes from the owner of a private youth detention company in return for sentencing kids for utterly trivial offences like mocking a teacher on MySpace and trespassing in a vacant building!

Another scandal broke in 2016 when an undercover reporter from Mother Jones wrote a damning expose on the private prison business. This was followed soon after by the damning inspector General's report into the private prison business.

The US Senator Bernie Sanders has campaigned against private prisons and the Prison Industrial Complex for decades. Here's his response to the announcement that private prisons are to be phased out.

"It is an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on earth. Due in large part to private prisons, incarceration has been a source of major profits to private corporations. Study after study after study has shown private prisons are not cheaper, they are not safer, and they do not provide better outcomes for either the prisoners or the state.   

We have got to end the private prison racket in America as quickly as possible. Our focus should be on keeping people out of jail and making sure they stay out when they are released.  This means funding jobs and education not more jails and incarceration."

The the announcement that the US Department of Justice is planning to let all of their private prison contracts expire over the next five years resulted in an immediate slump in the stock values of private prison companies like GEO.

Even though the evidence against the private prison industry has been compelling, the announcement of the phase-out of private prisons in the US is still surprising because of the predictable freefall in private prison stocks. It's clear that taking away their opportunity to get rich on the back of the US taxpayer, and by exploiting prisoners as free labour is going to make a lot of rich and powerful people very angry indeed.

It's also surprising because the obvious insanity of private for-profit prisons in the US has long been seen as one of the factors that makes the radically right-wing US version of capitalism so much worse than the more social democratic versions of capitalism.

The irony for British people is that we'll no longer be able to high-horse about American capitalism being so much more rabid than our own version because our governments have imitated the US system by introducing a load of private prisons and detention centres in the UK, and they've also been allowing private companies to undercut the legitimate employment market by taking advantage of the UK prison population as a cheap source of labour.

Instead of getting angry about their lost opportunity to profiteer out of the US justice system, these companies could consider shifting their attention to the ongoing Tory marketisation of the UK justice system.

The Tories are creating huge profiteering opportunities by carving up and privatising all elements of the UK justice system. They're not just intent on building more and more privately operated prisons and detention centres and allowing private companies to use prisoners as cheap labour, they've also been busy trying to privatise front line police services (Theresa May is a big advocate of police privatisation), court facilities and services, electronic tagging (subject to a massive £180 million tagging fraud by G4S and Serco), and probation services. They've also been trying to reform legal aid in order to drive smaller specialist practices out of business and hand a bigger market share to multinational behemoths like Serco, G4S and Capita.

The conflicts of interest are absolutely obvious when the privatised police unit that makes the arrest, the forensic science unit, the legal aid lawyer, the courtroom facilities and services, and the private prison are all operated by the same small cabal of corporations, then upon release the probation officer and the electronic tagging company are run by the same corporations too.

If a rare display of evidence based policy making drives the private prison profiteers out of the US justice system, they can be assured that the Tories will welcome them with open arms to help them with their project to turn the UK justice system into a conflict of interest riddled free-for-all for corporate profiteers.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Criticism of Israeli policy ≠ anti-Semitism

In April 2016 I was accused of having anti-Semitic views after posting a clip of the Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders talking about Israel.

The sheer irony of getting accused of anti-Semitism by an Israel apologist for daring to share a clip of a Jewish man (Bernie Sanders) criticising Israel's deadly bombardment of Gaza in 2014 is quite staggering. 

If I really was an anti-Semite would I really be so impressed with Bernie Sanders' mediating language that I'd share it on my Facebook page? Would a bigoted Jew-hater really approve of Bernie Sanders so much that they'd like to see him become the first ever Jewish President of the United States (as I would)?

Here's what Bernie Sanders said in the clip I shared:

"If we are ever going to bring peace we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity ... I believe it [Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2014] was [disproportionate] ... We had in the Gaza area some ten thousand civilians who were wounded, and some 1,500 who were killed."

If I'm apparently an "anti-Semite" simply for expressing agreement with Bernie Sanders' views, does that mean Bernie Sanders is an anti-Semite by extension? Will partisan Israel apologists call him a "self-hating Jew" because he dares to express an opinion that not everything the Israeli state has ever done is perfect?

In my view the only way the Israel-Palestine conflict will ever be resolved is if the US government stops supporting the worst excesses of the Israelis, and accepts the proposition that Palestinians are people too. Bernie Sanders apparently shares this view, and I applaud him for it. As a Jewish man his sympathies are obviously going to be drawn towards the people of the Jewish state, so it obviously takes a great deal of humanity for him to be able to see things from both sides of the conflict, and to want to mediate in an even-handed manner.

If that kind of approach makes Bernie Sanders a "self-hating Jew"  in the eyes of some, and me an "anti-Semite" for agreeing with him, then so be it. I'm not going to shut up and say silent simply because some highly partisan Israel apologists are going to smear me for daring to express an opinion they don't like. 

It doesn't seem to matter how often it is pointed out to "anti-Semitism" wielding Israel apologists that

Criticism of Israeli policy ≠ anti-Semitism

they keep on using this outrageous "anti-Semite" smear to try to shut down legitimate criticism of atrocities committed by the Israeli state.

It doesn't matter how legitimate or even handed the criticism of Israeli policy, time and again these people - who know no better debating tactics than slinging ugly smears in order to try to silence dissent - turn up to spew their ugly partisan bile.

The really awful thing is that this disgusting bad faith debating tactic is very effective. Fear of being hit with this kind of toxic smear is enough to scare off a lot of people from expressing their opinions on the Israel-Palestine situation, because nobody ever likes to be called a disgusting bigot on a public forum (even if the accusation is completely unfounded).

This tactic of using "anti-Semite" smears to scare moderate people away from contributing to the Israel-Palestine debate is very effective in polarising the debate so that in many cases the vast majority of people left contributing are people expressing extremely partisan views in favour of one side or another, which is absolutely no recipe for a mediated settlement to be achieved.

I'm not sure if keeping the debate as polarised as possible in order to diminish the chances of a fair negotiated settlement is the objective of people who use these "anti-Semite" smears. I guess probably not, most of them probably just see it as a convenient way of shutting down legitimate criticism that they don't want to hear. However, whatever the intention of this kind of appalling smear tactic, it's clear that by hounding anyone who expresses anything other than undiluted praise for Israel, extreme polarisation of the debate is a logical consequence.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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Bernie Sanders was right about Panama

The leak of the Panama Papers has vindicated Bernie Sanders stance against tax-dodging. In 2011 Sanders strongly criticised the Panama Free Trade agreement while his rival for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination Hillary Clinton voted in favour of the Panama free trade agreement.

Here's what he said to Congress on October 12th 2011.

"Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade US taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens. The Panama free trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and in other countries." [source]

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration Hillary Clinton not only voted for the Panama free trade agreement, she also publicly advocated it, and congratulated President Obama when the deal was passed saying "these initiatives are the leading edge of a job-creating trade agenda that will open markets, level the playing field for our businesses and workers, and champion America’s working families in an age of tough global competition".

The confidence with which Clinton celebrated this deal with one of the most notorious tax havens in the world is staggering. As Bernie Sanders pointed out during his speech opposing the deal, the Panamanian economy is only 0.2% of the size of the US economy, so anyone talking up a free trade agreement between the two countries in terms of being some kind of jobs bonanza is clearly being disingenuous. As for the bits about "levelling the playing field" and "championing working families" they're utterly absurd black=white assertions. How on earth is a trade agreement with a notorious tax haven where wealthy US citizens and corporations stash their ill-gotten gains good for ordinary working families?

After the initial furore over the high profile politicians implicated in the Panama Papers had died down, the media team who are carefully stage-managing the release of information quietly announced some of the first American names in the Mosack Fonseca client list which included:

• Robert Miracle (convicted fraudster)
• Benjamin Wey (indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015)
• Igor Olenicoff (found guilty of stashing $200m in offshore accounts in 2007)
• Anthony J. Gumbiner (guilty of SEC fraud in the 1980s)
• John Michael 'Red' Crim (found guilty of a $10m tax fraud in 2008)
• Jonathan Kaplan (found guilty in 2007 of accepting a $400,000 commercial bribe) 

It's astonishing that back in 2011 Hillary Clinton used such misleading language to celebrate a free trade deal with an economy that provides a bolt hole for criminals like those listed above to stash the ill-gotten gains they've ripped off from American working families (either directly through fraud, or indirectly by dodging their taxes meaning either services have to be cut, or other American citizens have to make up the shortfall).

It's also worth noting that the vast majority of Republicans (in Congress and in the Senate) supported Barack Obama's Panama free trade agreement, while the bulk of the limited opposition in both houses came from Democrats.

Here is what Bernie Sanders had to say after the Panama Papers came out:

"I was opposed to the Panama Free Trade Agreement from day one. I predicted that the passage of this disastrous trade deal would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore. I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.  

My opponent [Hillary Clinton], on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster.

The American people are sick and tired of establishment politicians who say one thing during a campaign and do the exact opposite the day after the election. “It is time for real change. As president, I will use my authority to terminate the Panama Free Trade Agreement within six months. My administration will conduct an immediate investigation into U.S. banks, corporations and wealthy individuals who have been stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes. If any of them have violated U.S. law, my administration will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law."

In stark contrast to the empty tough-talking rhetoric about tax-dodging from UK Prime Minister David Cameron, it's possible to actually believe Bernie Sanders is serious about confronting the problem because he's got an actual track record of opposing tax-dodging, and opposing free trade deals with notorious tax haven economies.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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