Is AI really a threat to the survival of humanity?

AI experts have once again warned that AI represents a potential threat to the survival of humanity, putting it on a par with pandemics and nuclear war.

The smug conspiratorial response from people who aren't AI experts is that the AI experts are deliberately overstating the existential threat to human survival to drum up interest in AI, which they're doing for their own personal profit.

"The tool I've helped create could wipe out humanity" seems like a very odd way of advertising your services if it's actually just a harmless piece of tat that simply creates new memes and writes fake essays isn't it?

However the dangerous applications and consequences of AI are already becoming clear to those who have been paying attention.

One of the most concerning things is the way AI simply invents citations (research papers, news reports, criminal cases ...) to support the assertions it's asked to make.

One teacher set their students the task of getting AI chatbots to write an essay for them, and then finding the errors for themselves. 100% of the 63 AI generated essays contained hallucinated information, fake quotes, citations to invented sources, and/or misrepresented citations to real sources.

A lawyer in the United States was caught using ChatGPT to write a legal filing, which referenced legal cases that did not exist, and when the lawyer asked the chatbot for its source for the fictional legal cases, it lied that they were found on real legal databases.

ChatGPT has already accused multiple innocent people of being criminals, including a law professor it accused of groping students on a trip to Alaska, citing a 2018 Washington Post article. In reality the professor has never been accused of sexual misconduct, he's never even been to Alaska, and the Washington Post article does not exist.

The fact that AI chatbots are capable of ruining people's lives with false accusations, outright lying, and making up false sources is just the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

These AI lies are fairly easy to spot now because the fake sources they cite are so obvious, but when challenged the chatbots have attempted to create the fake sources for themselves, to back up their own lies.

You only have to imagine the potential for chaos when these chatbots get better at lying, and better at creating fake sources to justify their lies.

Imagine somebody gets AI to spread lies about an impending nuclear attack on Russia and China by the United States, backed up by fake news articles, fake maps with fake secret nuclear bases in Turkey or wherever, deepfake video of the US President discussing this nuclear attack strategy ... (or threats of nuclear attack on the US and its allies from China or Russia).

We all know that fake news spreads across social media like wildfire, and the when the truth is revealed it invariably travels at a snail's pace and gets only a tiny fraction of the engagement, so how dangerous could a hoax like this actually be?

AI obviously doesn't have to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war to pose a threat to humanity, this is just a hypothetical example.

Imagine the destructive consequences of ever more powerful AI misinformation tools in the hands of the climate change denial lobby; fascist dictators; genocidal maniacs; stock market speculators; corrupt politicians police, and/or secret services; bonkers conspiracy theorists; scam artists; terrorists; or downright trolls who just want to watch the world burn.

As AI lies become more and more convincing, it's going to become even more difficult for people to discern the difference between reality and fiction, to a point where nothing remains believable.

We already live in a world where the boundaries between truth and fiction have been alarmingly eroded away, with so little pushback and punishment against dishonesty that the biggest political liars of all have already risen to become heads of state of some of the most powerful countries on earth (I don't even need to name them do I?)

But AI has the potential to accelerate the process dramatically, so that stock markets and governments tumble based on AI fakery, and real events and scandals are increasingly ignored and dismissed as fake.

We don't have to get locked into a debate over the worst case scenario of human extinction to recognise the very real dangers.

So what could be done about it?

There's already strong resistance to AI regulation from within the industry, and even if regulation were to be introduced, there would be significant problems.

What would stop AI industries simply moving to the countries that have the least AI regulation?

And if regulation was introduced to prevent AI misinformation, where would the line be drawn?

Banning AI from telling lies is nowhere near as simple as it sounds, because every time someone asks AI to do a funny task like find out who Nathan Fielder's "out of frame" friends are in his viral tweet, they're asking AI to lie about reality.

How do you make a computer programme discern the moral difference between faking an image for laughs, or faking an image to cause a stock market crash or to incite political/ethnic tensions?

So, is AI capable of making humanity extinct?

Nobody really knows. Maybe AI experts are overstating the power of their industry for dramatic effect, or maybe things just keep on getting more and more insane and dangerous from here on, until human survival is genuinely at risk.

But what is beyond doubt is that AI in the wrong hands will clearly have the power to spread conspiracies and lies; crash stock markets; topple governments; cause false persecution; accelerate climate change; trigger wars and ethnic cleansing; and erase the boundary between truth and fiction, which are all legitimate grounds for serious concern.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Technology is already driving inequality, now the AI bots are eroding human creativity

The rise of AI art and chat bots is getting deeply concerning.

The problems are obvious.

If you can generate artwork for your blog, for example, by typing a few prompts into an AI art bot, to almost instantaneously generate free, or ultra-cheap content, why expend the time, effort, and money on commissioning a human to do the job?

As an online writer it's vital to keep hitting the zeitgeist, because the content that shares most is usually the content that's about the topic of the moment, and because these days the news cycle moves incredibly quickly. So it makes sense to generate images as quickly as possible, rather than going through the lengthy process of commissioning real artists to do the work.

Under these circumstances what happens to the human artists, especially the emerging ones who haven't yet built up a client base or sufficient fans to support their work?

Artists were amongst the first to begin feeling the pressure from AI bots, but the AI chat bots are on the rise, and encroaching into written communication too.

Several of the chat bot issues have already been covered in detail by others, like the use of chat bots to cheat exams, people prompting the chat bot to produce hate speech and extremist content, and the fact that chat bots have no morality, so they're capable of outright lying, to the extent of inventing a load of made up citations to add fake legitimacy to their lies, but there's also a growing threat to writers' livelihoods.

The Science-Fiction magazine Clarkesworld is one of the best places for aspiring sci-fi writers to submit their work. They're not only really quick and efficient at dealing with submissions, they also pay well too.

Over the last couple of months they've been completely inundated with AI-generated content, submitted by scammers seeking to get commission fees for bot-written stories.

There's not really much chance that they'd actually succeed, because the bots have a long way to go before they can generate content that's good enough to pass as the kind of high quality sci-fi that Clarkesworld specialises in, but the sheer number of bot-written submissions has overwhelmed them, forcing them to close all new submissions.

As the magazine has outlined in a Twitter thread, there's no obvious solution:

• Chat bot detectors are too unreliable.

• "Pay-to-Submit" policies sacrifice too many legitimate writers, especially those from poor countries and under-privileged backgrounds.

• Third party identity confirmation tools are too expensive, and would create regional holes which would amount to effectively banning submissions from entire countries.

• Paper submissions are unrealistic in this day and age.

• Restricting submissions to those who have already submitted would effectively ban all new authors.

If these are the problems faced by just one publication, then it's obvious how bad things could get across the publishing industry.

For now the main problem is scammers ruining opportunities for real writers by overwhelming submission systems with junk, but as time goes on the fake submissions are going to become more and more indistinguishable from genuine content.

And this problem obviously won't just apply to aspiring authors, it could potentially impact anyone who writes for a living.

As an example, why would media outlets continue to pay substantial wages to so many journalists if future chat bots become capable of writing news articles, reviews, opinion pieces, rabble-rousing polemics, etc, all at the click of a button?

The philosopher Bertrand Russell used to say that if capitalists could be prevented from extracting all of the gains for themselves in unearned profits, improvements in technology could eventually reduce the need for human labour to such an extent that humanity could focus more on the things that make life worth living, such as the creative arts.

Sadly things haven't gone in this direction at all, to such an extent that the 1% minority now takes a bigger share of new technology-generated wealth than the rest of humanity combined; retirement ages are being driven up across the world; wages have been stagnant in real-terms for decades; and ultra-exploitative low-pay gig economy exploitation is rife.

Consider Amazon and food delivery apps.

The technology isn't being used to alleviate humanity from mundane low-paid labour by automating processes, it's being used as a means of extracting obscene amounts of unearned wealth by making workers subservient to the demands of in-work apps.

As workers toil away for a pittance, the owners of the technology that directs their tasks generate literally £billions.

And to make matters even worse, the technological advancements that could have saved us from poverty and the drudgery of mundane labour are now encroaching on the creative arts, and undermining the already limited scope for people to make a living through creativity, rather than unfulfilling grunt work.

Not only is the technology making workers ever more machine-like, it's now also eroding the possibility of escaping this kind of mundane toil by usurping our creative arts.

It used to be the case that humans told the machines what to do. Now the machines increasingly tell us what to do. And as we are forced to become more like the machines, the machines become more like us.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Landlordism is even more exploitative than capitalism!

One of the most commonly-held delusions amongst the property-hoarding class is that being a "landlord" makes them some kind of "capitalist".

It's completely wrong to imagine that landlordism is a sub-branch of capitalism, when it's actually a distinct sphere of economic activity, but it's easy to see how this confusion occurs.

Firstly there's the shockingly widespread misconception that "capitalism" is some kind of synonym for "trade", or "doing business", rather than a specific and defined form of economic organisation involving ownership of the means of production (which it actually is).

Then there's the fact that capitalism and landlordism are both highly exploitative practices that involve profit extraction from other people (employees/tenants), meaning it's easy to mistake one form of living off other people's backs as a version of the other.

The reality of course is that landlordism isn't capitalism, because capitalism is about owning the means of production (materials, facilities, machines) then paying workers below the actual value of their labour in order to extract profit.

I'm no fan of capitalism (to put it mildly) but at least there's some productive output at the end of it!

Landlordism on the other hand creates nothing.

All rentiers do is monopolise existing assets in order to extract unearned profits (whether that's buy-to-let slumlords, or private profiteers monopolising essential services like energy, water, public transport, etc).

Capitalism is a form of parasitism on economically productive activity.

Landlordism is an even purer form of economic parasitism, because it doesn't even produce anything other than unearned profits.

Of course landlords will try to pretend that there is some productive activity involved in landlordism, after all, don't they have to paint and redecorate when old tenants move out?

This is just a con-trick, because if the property was lived in by people who actually owned it, then they'd be much more inclined to invest above the basic bare-minimum, because their motivation is to make their home as comfortable and secure as possible, not to maximise profits by doing things on the cheap, and by cutting corners on long-term maintenance.

It's extremely telling that landlords try to dress up their bare-minimum of investment as some kind of economically productive activity, when it actually represents a reduction in investment on what would probably have occurred had the property never fallen into the hands of economic parasites.

Another common refrain from the idle landlord class is that they're somehow "providing a service" by buying up all the affordable housing, and renting it out to the people they've priced out of the property market!

If rented accommodation is such an essential service, then surely it should be taken under public control, so that it's run for the good of the British economy, and in the best interests of the British people, meaning any profits go back into improving the housing stock, rather than being siphoned off into private pockets?

But the landlordists react in absolute outrage at suggestions the rental market should be nationalised.

How are they expected to survive if they can't idly extract profits merely through ownership of property assets?

How are they expected to survive if they actually have to get a real job, and engage in economically productive activity like the rest of us?

Suddenly the provision of rented accommodation isn't the "important service" they just claimed it was. The only aspect of this "service" they actually attach any real importance to is preservation of the unearned income for themselves!

Of course the landlord class react with hot-headed indignation at those who describe the reality of their grubby, exploitative, unproductive economic parasitism, and desperately try to dismiss this criticism as if it's some kind of radical left-wing conspiracy against noble and honest people like them.

So I'll just leave you with a few quotes about landlordism from people that absolutely nobody in their right mind would ever describe as "leftists":

Winston Churchill
"Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains - and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people. Many of the most important are effected at the cost of the municipality and of the ratepayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare; he contributes nothing even to the process from which his own enrichment is derived." [source]

Adam Smith
"As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed" [source]

John Stewart Mill
"Only the landowners grow richer, as it were in their sleep without working, risking and economising" [source]

David Ricardo
"The dealings between the landlord and the public are not like dealings in trade, whereby both the seller and buyer may equally be said to gain, but the loss is wholly on one side, and the gain wholly on the other" [source]

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

Who actually owns the UK's water supply?

A significant majority of British people believe that the water supply is so vital that it should be run as a not-for-profit public service, but the Westminster establishment consensus is that in England it should continue to be run as a vast profit extraction scheme operated mainly by foreign governments and overseas corporations.

In this article I'm going to give a basic overview of who actually owns the UK's water supplies.

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland

Scottish Water and Northern Ireland Water are both government owned statutory companies, meaning any profits go straight back into public finances.

Welsh Water is owned by Glas Cymru, which is a not-for-profit company. It has no shareholders, and retains any profits for the benefit of Welsh water customers.

So far so good. Two different models of how water companies can be operated for the benefit of the people, rather than for profit-extraction purposes. 

England

England's water supply is an absolute mess. It's broken up into multiple different regional monopolies, operated by various different private entities.

Research by the University of Grenwich found that privatisation of the water supply in 1989 has cost customers in England £2.3 billion per year more than if it had remained under not-for-profit public ownership.

So who are the owners of the private water companies that are raking in all of this profit at English people's expense?

Anglian Water (£1.4 billion)

Anglian Water supplies 2.6 million homes with water, and compared to a lot of others its ownership structure is fairly simple.

Its parent company is AWG, which a subsidiary of the Osprey Group, which is owned by the following:

Canada Pension Plan Investment Group 32.9% (wholly owned by the Canadian government)
IFM 19.8% (Australian investment fund)
Infinity Investments 16.7% (Wholly owned by the UAE government)
First Sentier 15.6% (Australian investment fund)
Camulodunum Investments 15% (UK investment manager)

So one of England's major water suppliers is 49.6% owned by foreign governments, and 30.6% owned by foreign private investors. Leaving just 15% that's run by a private UK-based investment manager.

Northumbrian Water (£820 million)

Northumbrian water supplies 2.7 million homes with water. Its parent company is NWG, which is wholly owned by the Hong Kong based firm Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings.

Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings is mainly owned by CK Hutchinson Holdings, which is run by the billionaire Li dynasty. Additionally there are number of other investment funds involved. Some of them are names which will be very familiar by the end of this article.

CK Hutchinson Holdings 72% (Hong Kong investment fund)
Conyers, Dill and Pearman 5% (Bermuda based offshore law firm)
BlackRock 1.1% (US based investment fund)

Other notable shareholders include: Lazard Asset Management (US investment fund), Vanguard Group (US investment fund), Norges Bank (100% Norwegian government owned bank).

United Utilities (£1.86 billion)

What used to be North West Water was merged with the North West Electricity Board to create United Utilities, which supplies water to 7.3 million people. The CEO took home £2.94 million in 2020.

United Utilities is a Public Limited Company (PLC) with a number of institutional shareholders. These are the owners with stakes above 1% (as of October 2021)

BlackRock 8.6%  (US based investment fund)
Lazard Asset Management 7.2% (US investment fund)

Legal and General Investment Management 4.1% (UK investment fund)

Vanguard Group 4.0% (US investment fund)

Norges Bank 2.9% (100% Norwegian government owned bank)

Impax Asset management 2.5% (UK investment fund - biggest shareholder French bank BNP Paribas)

Magellan Asset Management 2.4% (Australian investment fund)

Pictet Asset Management 2.3% (Swiss investment fund)

State Street Global Advisers 2.2% (US investment fund)
M&G Investment Management 2.0% (UK investment fund)

Nuance Investments 2.0% (US investment fund)
Amundi Asset management 1.9% (French investment fund, mainly owned by French bank Crédit Agricole)

Invesco Ltd 1.7% (US investment fund)
Columbia Management Investment Advisers 1.6% (US investment fund - a division of Amerprise, which is based in the US tax haven of Delaware)
Maple-Brown Abbott Limited 1.3% (Australian investment fund)

Ignis Investment Services 1.3% (UK investment fund)
Nordea Investment Management 1.2% (Finnish investment fund)
Aviva Investors Global Services Limited 1.1% (Investment arm of UK insurance group Aviva)

abrdn plc 1.1% (UK investment fund)
Northern Trust Global Investments 1.1% (US investment fund)
HBOS Investment Fund 1.1% (Subsidiary of the UK-based Lloyds banking Group)
UBS Asset Management 1.0% (Investment arm of the giant Swiss bank UBS)

Severn Trent Water (£1.84 billion)

Severn Trent Water supplies 4.5 million households and businesses. Their CEO Liv Garfield took home a whopping £2.807 million despite the company being fined £800,000 for leaking millions of litres of raw sewage into a Shropshire stream in the same year.

It's another Public Limited Company (PLC) with a number of institutional shareholders. These are the owners with stakes above 1% (as of October 2021)

BlackRock 8.1%  (US based investment fund)

Lazard Asset Management 7.4% (US investment fund)

Qatar Investment Authority 4.6% (100% owned by the Qatari government)

Vanguard Group 3.8% (US investment fund)
Legal and General Investment Management 3.6% (UK investment fund)
Aviva Investors Global Services Limited 3.0% (Investment arm of UK insurance group Aviva)
Impax Asset management 2.7% (UK investment fund - biggest shareholder French bank BNP Paribas)
Maple-Brown Abbott Limited 2.5% (Australian investment fund)

State Street Global Advisers 2.3% (US investment fund)
Norges Bank 2.1% (100% Norwegian government owned bank)

Royal London Asset Management Limited 1.7% (UK investment fund)
Amundi Asset management 1.7% (French investment fund, mainly owned by French bank Crédit Agricole)
Invesco Ltd 1.5% (US investment fund)
First Sentier 1.4% (Australian investment fund)
RREEF America LLC 1.3% (US investment fund)
Fidelity International 1.1% (Bermuda-based investment fund)
Janus Henderson Group 1.1% (UK investment fund)

Wessex Water (£550 million)

Wessex Water supplies 1.3 million homes with water.

It's a 100% owned subsidiary of the Malaysian conglomerate YTL Corporation, run by the Malaysian billionaire Yeoh Tiong Lay, and partially owned by the Malaysian government's pension fund.

Southern Water (£830 million)

Southern Water supplies 2.26 million customers. In 2020 they were fined £90 million for dumping untreated sewage into rivers and coastal waters on over 6,900 occasions. In the same year as this record-breaking fine they paid their CEO over £1 million in salary and bonuses.

Southern Water is a Limited Company owned through Greensands Holdings Limited which is based in the tax haven of Jersey, with the following major shareholders.

JP Morgan Asset Management 40% (Investment arm of the US bank JP Morgan)
UBS Asset Management 22% (Investment arm of the giant Swiss bank UBS)
Hermes Investment Management 21% (UK investment fund)
Whitehelm Capital 8% (Australian investment fund)

The Australian investment fund Macquairie has recently bought up a £1 billion stake in Southern Water. They're most famous for asset stripping Thames Water, paying virtually no corporation tax, lavishing £billions in dividends on its shareholders, lumbering it with huge debts, and flogging it off just months before it was prosecuted by the Environment Agency for pollution.

Thames Water (£2.05 billion)

Thames Water supplies 15 million customers, which accounts for 27% of the UK population. They were fined  £2.3 million in March 2021 for pollution, hit with another pollution fine of £4 million in May 2021, and paid an £11 million fine for overcharging customers in July 2021.

Britain's biggest water company is also its most opaquely structured, with strings of similarly named subsidiaries and shell companies falling under the ultimate ownership of Kemble Water Holdings Limited, which is apparently based on a Reading industrial estate.

It's pretty tricky to track down the owners of this £2 billion company, but they include the following major investors:

Church Water Investments Limited 13.9% (CWIL is owned by L3 Investment Holdings, which is owned by L3 Investment Holdco Ltd, which is owned by the UK-based Universities Superannuation Fund - Why they need such an opaque structure to hide their investment in privatised water infrastructure is anybody's guess)
Omers Farmoor Holdings 12.6% (Dutch investment fund)
Infinity Investments 12.6% (Wholly owned by the UAE government)
Wren House Infrastructure Investments 11.1% (A front company for the government of Kuwait)

Trustees of the BT Pension scheme 11.0% (Pension fund of UK telecoms giant BT)
Cicero Investment Corp 11.0% (US-based private equity fund)
QIC Infrastructure Management 6.8% (Australian government-owned investment fund)
Aquila Sonnet Limited Partnership 6.3% (A single purpose investment vehicle, designed to obscure the identities of the six investors)

South West Water (£500 million)

South West Water supplies 1.7 million customers. It's a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pennon Group, which announced pre-tax profits of £157 million in 2021, and they're sitting on cash reserves of over £3 billion. Instead of using this cash mountain to make improvements and stop repeatedly dumping raw sewage into waterways, they're using it to buy up other water companies like Bristol Water.

The CEO of Pennon Group Susan Davy took home £1.724 million in 2020.

These are the main shareholders in Pennon Group (as of October 2021):

Lazard Asset Management 10.0% (US investment fund)
Impax Asset management 5.8% (UK investment fund - biggest shareholder French bank BNP Paribas)
BlackRock 5.2%  (US based investment fund)
Vanguard Group 4.3% (US investment fund)
Norges Bank 4.1% (100% Norwegian government owned bank)
Pictet Asset Management 3.9% (Swiss investment fund)
Legal and General Investment Management 3.1% (UK investment fund)
Amundi Asset management 2.9% (French investment fund, mainly owned by French bank Crédit Agricole)
Invesco Ltd 2.1% (US investment fund)
Royal London Asset Management Limited 2.0% (UK investment fund)
Fidelity International 2.0% (Bermuda-based investment fund)
Columbia Management Investment Advisers 1.7% (US investment fund - a division of Amerprise, which is based in the US tax haven of Delaware)
Aviva Investors Global Services Limited 1.5% (Investment arm of UK insurance group Aviva)

Charles Stanley & Co. Ltd 1.3% (UK investment fund)
HSBC Global Asset Management 1.0% (Investment arm of the British bank HSBC)

Yorkshire Water (£980 million)

Yorkshire Water supplies 4.5 million people and over 100,000 businesses. It's another one with an extremely opaque ownership structure.

Yorkshire Water is run as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kelda Group. Kelda Group is made up of an intricate network of companies, which includes Kelda Eurobond (which makes vast losses meaning it has to pay no taxes in the UK), before you finally end up at the overall parent company Kelda Holdings, which is based in the tax haven of Jersey.

Kelda Holdings is owned by the following (as of October 2020):

GIC 33.6% (The sovereign wealth fund of the Singapore government)
Gateway HK Water (I and II) + Gateway Infrastructure 30.3% (Three recently formed Hong Kong based private companies, very difficult to find who the ultimate owners are)
Wharfedale Hong Kong Limited 23.4% (Another recently formed Hong Kong based private company)
SAS Trustee Corporation 12.8% (Australian state-owned pension fund)

Conclusion

The people of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland benefit from not-for-profit public ownership.

The water supply of England is used for profit extraction purposes by the following:

Governments: Australia, Canada, Kuwait, Norway, Malaysia, Qatar, Singapore, UAE

Private companies based in: Australia, Bermuda, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Jersey, Malaysia, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, US

You'd have to be beyond delusional to think that this chaotic and opaque system of ownership makes any kind of rational sense for English water consumers.

The only reason it would be arranged like this is in order for private companies and foreign governments to extract as much profit as possible out of England's water customers.

How on earth is it justifiable that the governments of eight other nations can hold direct stakes in England's water supply, while the UK government itself insists that it's unfit and improper for the nation to own and run its own water supply?

What kind of person believes other governments are fit to run England's water supply, but their own government isn't?

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

OR

13 things every Newcastle United fan should know about the club's new owners

In October 2021 the tyrannical Saudi regime completed the takeover of Newcastle United FC, via the nation's sovereign wealth fund. 

Here are 13 things all Newcastle fans should know about their club's new owners.

It's the Saudi state

This isn't just some rich guys from Saudi Arabia who have bought an 80% stake in Newcastle United, it's the Saudi government's Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Their chairman of this fund the murderous tyrant Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who is also the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

No matter how much the Premier League tries to maintain the ridiculous pretence that they haven't, what they've done is allowed the nationalisation of Newcastle United, into the ownership of the world's worst regime.

Sportswashing

The Saudi tyrants have invested their oil money all over the world. They've got stakes in Facebook, Twitter, Formula One, Boeing, Bank of America, Disney, Uber ... Wherever you look in the capitalist system, the Saudi tyrants have probably got a stake in it.

The difference between these investments, and Newcastle United, is that their capitalist investments are aimed at making profits, while their investment in Newcastle United is aimed at improving their public reputation, at a massive cost.

Why do you think they've made that appalling wax-faxed woman Amanda Staveley the figurehead of their ownership, despite her only owning a tiny stake in the venture, rather than one of their own head-choppers?

It's all about massaging their public reputation, and putting a slick westernised veneer onto their barbaric autocracy, rather than making any kind of monetary profit.

We've seen it already with Manchester City, and the way huge numbers of Mancs immediately turned themselves into amateur unpaid PR operatives for the Abu Dhabi despots who took over their club.

MBS and the Saudi head-choppers expect to receive exactly the same kind of sycophantic fawning from Geordies.

War crimes

The despotic Saudi regime has been waging war in neighbouring Yemen since 2014, and they've shown absolutely no respect for the normal conventions of war. 

Probably the most famous war crime occurred when they conducted an airstrike against a bus full of school kids, but they've also used helicopter gunships to attack refugees, and deliberately bombed civilian targets across one of the poorest countries on earth.

One of the most despicable tactics the Saudi tyrants use is the targeting of water supplies and food distribution infrastructure, in order to use starvation and disease as weapons of war against the Yemeni people.

Their absolute disregard for human life in the Yemeni conflict has created what the UN has consistently described as "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world".

Terrorism-spreaders

Ever since the oil money started flowing in, the Saudis have been using it to spread their extremist version of Islam (Wahhabism) across the globe. Wherever you find barbaric Islamist terrorists, you'll find financial and logistical links back to Saudi Arabia.

15 of the 19 September 11th attackers were Saudi, and the ideological figurehead of Al Qaida was Osama bin Laden, who came from a wealthy family that's still well connected in the Saudi regime.

During the 2016 US election Hillary Clinton's emails about the Saudis were leaked, and in them she made it absolutely clear that the US administration knew perfectly well that Saudi Arabia funds terrorist outfits like Al Qaida and ISIS.

Jamal Khashoggi

In October 2018 the Saudi government lured the Jamal Khashoggi to the Saudi embassy in Turkey, where he was murdered and dismembered. The remains of his body have never been found.

The aeroplanes used to fly his murderers in and out of Turkey were owned by PIF, the very company used as a front to buy Newcastle United, and the CIA concluded that the murder was ordered by Muhammed bin Salmen himself.

The reason Newcastle United's new owners killed Khashoggi and hacked his body to bits, is that he was a critic of their regime. He was the son of a mega-rich Saudi arms dealer with connections to the Saudi regime, but he saw the light, recognised the vile tyranny for what it was, and began criticising their political repression, and their war crimes in Yemen.

He was a brave man who stood up for what he believed in, and for that, the owners of Newcastle United ended his life, hacked his corpse to pieces, and hid the remains to deny him a proper burial.

They kill journalists just for criticising their horrific regime.

Misogyny

Probably the most famous piece of folk knowledge about Saudi Arabia in the last half-century is the fact that they hate their own women so much, they wouldn't even allow them to drive cars.

Saudi Arabia is still a profoundly misogynistic society in which women barely have any rights.

They're not allowed to travel or get a passport without permission from their male guardian; they're not free to choose who they marry, and until recently Saudi girls as young as 8 were forced into marriages with adult men; they're barred from all manner of professions; they're banned from studying abroad without their male guardian's permission; they're discriminated against in family courts; and feminist activism in Saudi Arabia is treated as akin to terrorism.

Homophobia

Saudi Arabia is one of the most homophobic regimes on earth, which maintains the death penalty for homosexuality.

They kill people for being gay. Do we really need to say any more than that?

Anti-democracy

In 2019 the Saudi tyrants conducted a barbaric mass-execution of 39 people, including one death by crucifixion. Most of the victims were pro-democracy protestors (including a lad who was 16 at the time he attended a pro-democracy street protest!).

These absolute tyrants literally kill people for supporting the democratic rights that British people take for granted. 

Islamist extremism
 

We already know that the Saudi regime is responsible for spreading their violent, extremist Wahhabist interpretation of Islam across the planet, but within Saudi Arabia they're just as bad.

Apostacy (the "crime" of renouncing Islam) still carries the death sentence in Saudi Arabia. 

Most Saudis who renounce Islam are forced into exile, which is especially hard for women because of the travel restrictions they're subjected to. And even then, they're forced to continually look over their shoulders, because Saudi operatives obviously aren't remotely afraid to carry out extrajudicial killings overseas. 

Corruption

The Saudi regime is notoriously corrupt, and they'll do literally anything to get away with it.

The Saudis even threatened acts of terrorism against the UK in order to pressurise the UK government into scrapping a Serious Fraud Office investigation into the estimated £1 billion that Prince Bandar took in bribes from the British arms company BAE.

The threat of Saudi-orchestrated terrorist attacks on British soil was enough to convince Tony Blair to personally intervene to shut down the corruption probe!

Premier League greed

The reason Premier League approval of the Newcastle takeover took so long wasn't that they had any concerns about the corruption, homophobia, democracy-repression, murder of journalists, misogyny, war crimes, terrorism-spreading, Islamist extremism, or even threats of terrorist attacks against the UK ... it's because a TV company with links to the Saudi government had been broadcasting unauthorised streams of Premier League matches!

Once this company put a stop to their unauthorised streams, the Premier League quickly gave the green light to the worst regime in the world to take over one of England's most historic and storied football clubs!

If you're looking for anyone to blame for the absolute shame of these horrific tyrants taking over your club, look no further than greed-obsessed Premier League executives.

Forget whataboutery

"Whataboutery" is one of the weakest debating tactics known to humanity. It's just a distraction strategy aimed at completely derailing the discussion.

• What about other terrible football owners like UAE/Qatar/exploitative US capitalists/Abramovich?
• What about other repressive regimes like North Korea/Iran/Israel? 
• What about other Saudi investments in stuff like Facebook/Twitter?
• What about Mike Ashley's ruthless zero hours contract exploitation at Sports Direct?

All of these other things are varying degrees of bad. And very many people have consistently highlighted and criticised these other things in the past. But the subject of discussion now is the fact that Newcastle United has been bought out by the worst regime in the world. 

The only reason any Newcastle fan is going "what about ...?" is to distract attention and derail the discussion.

It's a shamefully poor debating tactic, which nobody with even a shred of moral decency would try to use.

Buying loyalty?

The Saudi tyrants believe that just because they've bought Newcastle United, they've bought the Newcastle fans' undying loyalty too.

It's up to the people of Newcastle to show them how wrong they are, and that buying the badge doesn't automatically buy them the respect of the Geordie people.

If Newcastle fans have any decency and dignity whatever, the next home game will be absolutely festooned with pride flags, Yemeni flags, women's rights banners, and pictures of Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by the owners of Newcastle United at the age of 59, so the 59th minute would be a profound moment for the name "Jamal Khashoggi" to ring out around St James' Park, to tell these sick bastards that they might own your club, but they'll never earn your respect if they go around murdering and dismembering their critics.

Will Newcastle United fans put on a show of defiance against the absolutely horrific tyrants who now own their club? Or will the next home game have an absolute party atmosphere, featuring thousands of Geordies giving the worst regime in the world a heroes' welcome with tea towels on their heads?

The game against Spurs on Sunday October 17th will tell the entire world an awful lot about the true character of the Geordie people, won't it?

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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Why you'd have to be an idiot to oppose wage rises when the cost of living is soaring

Wes Streeting is Labour's Shadow Secretary for Child Poverty. Today he's been on the television to agree with the radically right-wing Adam Smith institute that rising wages would be a bad thing because they would cause a "wage price spiral".

Just a Labour Party shadow minister agreeing with a radically right-wing think tank that rising wages would be awful.

Starmer's Labour is an absolute shamblespic.twitter.com/puiw9wg0St

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) October 7, 2021

There are very many reasons that this is a profoundly stupid position for a Labour Party minister to take.

Labour is supposed to be the party of the workers (the clue is in the name), so spouting radically right-wing rhetoric against wage rises is a completely extraordinary thing for a Labour minister to be doing.

Streeting was obviously attracted to the Adam Smith propaganda because it used the term "economically illiterate" to chastise Boris Johnson's Tory conference speech.

But for years people on the left have been using the phrase "economically illiterate" to describe economy-strangling idiocy of 'lets cut our way to prosperity' austerity ruination, but Wes never really had a problem with austerity (he abstained on George Osborne's brutal austerity cut in 2015), but suddenly he's enamoured with the phrase, because a radically right wing think tank pinched it to attack wage rises!

Anyone with any sense knows that Johnson's rhetoric about rising wages is pure bluster. He's been in a party that's overseen the worst decade of wage stagnation in economic history. But it's unbelievable strategic ineptitude for an opposition MP to adopt the position that Johnson's blustering that wage growth is good, so I'll say it's bad.

The supposed justification for opposing wage growth is that it would cause inflation, but this is utterly backwards. The inflation is already happening, largely because of Brexit, so keeping wages repressed at this moment would actually create wage deflation (real terms income cuts).

Imagine being such an economically clueless dweeb that you put the effect before cause like this, and end up calling for wage devaluation, just as the prices of energy, food, and housing are spiralling out of control.

'Derp, the opaquely funded and radically right wing pressure group say Boris Johnson is wrong to say wage rises are good, so I'll argue that wage rises are bad!' - this actually appears to be the way Streeting thinks!

I know thinking is a wildly over-generous description of whatever's going on in Streeting's head, but the thinking seems to be that Corbyn and the Labour left would have supported wage rises for ordinary workers while prices are soaring out of control, so it's the duty of Labour's much-vaunted "new management" to oppose them!

A few months ago the junior Labour minister Alex Sobel criticised capitalism over climate change, and Starmer reacted with indignant fury, forcing him to issue a grovelling apology for offending capitalists!

Today another Labour minister is parroting ultra right-wing rhetoric in order to attack the interests of UK workers, and Starmer says nothing!

In the raging battle between workers and the capitalists who exploit them, Starmer's clearly on the side of the capitalists, even though he's supposed to be the leader of the party of the workers!

Starmer's surrounded himself with such idiots that Johnson doesn't even have to do anything to outflank Labour to the left, and appeal to British workers.

All the Bodger has to do is issue absolute platitudes like 'wage rises are good' (even if he doesn't actually believe it himself) and then watch on passively as the strategically incompetent divs in Starmer's top team rush out to argue that 'wage rises are bad actually', and that what British workers really need is another punishing dose of wage stagnation, supposedly in order to prevent the inflation that's already happened!

This short clip perfectly illustrates the problem with liberal capitalist 'centrism'. These people don't actually stand for anything at all.

They've got no convictions; no firmly held beliefs; no understanding of political or economic history; no empathy for other people; no point that they wouldn't argue with equal vehemence for or against, depending on the circumstances; no reason behind anything they do besides self-advancement and political point scoring.

If Johnson had said 'wage rises are bad', the likes of Wes Streeting, Neil Coyle, David Lammy, and Jess Phillips, would have argued that 'wage rises are good actually'.

David Lammy was on the telly the other day using his oratory skills to attack the idea of transitioning towards a £15 per hour minimum wage, but everyone watching surely knew perfectly well that had he been ordered to argue in favour of the policy, he'd have summoned up the exact same faux passion to say what a fabulous idea it is.

These people believe in nothing.

If their party leader tells them to abstain on Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment", or George Osborne's brutal austerity cuts, or Priti Patel's despicable legislation to allow undercover cops to rape women with impunity, then that's exactly what the Labour right-wingers will do, because they don't believe in anything.

That's why they hated Corbyn so much, and worked tirelessly to sabotage Labour from within between 2015 and 2019, and keep the Tories in power.

They hate people with actual principles with a burning rage, and use the word "ideological" as a slur, as if it's some kind of sickening aberration to actually believe in anything, and have a principle that can't be bought.

They knew that having a principled person lead the Labour Party meant their career advancement options were curtailed, so they burned the Labour house down from within to get rid of him.

They put their own narrow self-interest above the unspeakable agonies of millions of others who were suffering under Tory austerity, Tory wage repression, Tory public service cuts, Tory disability persecution, Tory welfare vandalism ... and now they've succeeded in getting rid of Corbyn, we're stuck with a truly horrific Tory government, and an opposition composed almost exclusively of these dreadful people.

So this is why we're witnessing the strategic stupidity of a Labour minister attacking the interests of workers.

He doesn't know anything; or believe in anything; or care about the history and traditions of the labour movement; or have any strategic plan for winning power and making the nation a better place.

He was simply bewitched by a load of radically right wing nonsense, and then mindlessly regurgitated it for the cameras, without even giving a moment's thought to what he was actually saying.

 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. Access to my online writing will always remain free. If you see some value in what I do, please consider supporting my work with a small donation/subscription.

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