The American propaganda claims that the Syrian government deliberately dropped chemical weapons on Idlib. The Russian propaganda says that the Syrians dropped conventional weapons on a terrorist weapons factory that had been producing chemical weapons, hence the gas leak.
This article is not intended to convince you that either of these propaganda narratives is the truth.
Unlike an awful lot of politicians and mainstream media pundits, I'm not claiming to know the truth about an attack that has yet to be independently investigated. There's a chance the Syrian regime did it, but there's also the chance that they're telling the truth and the gas leak occurred because the terrorist weapons factory they bombed was producing chemical weapons.
Anyone who, with a lack of clear evidence, would take the word of western governments, or the western mainstream media at face value is clearly a very gullible person who learned nothing whatever from the propaganda lies that preceded the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
The same goes for the Russian propaganda too. Anyone who thinks that's any more or less inherently believable than the Western propaganda is clearly just as happy to jump to the conclusions they want to believe in as the gung-ho warmongering types who approve of Trump launching military attacks before the facts are clear.
What this article is aimed at, is pointing out how Donald Trump launched his retaliatory military attack on the Syrian government forces without even bothering to establish proof of culpability, that he bypassed the democratic scrutiny of the US congress to do it, that he failed to notify the United Nations of his intentions, but yet, his administration consulted with Israel before they launched their attack.
Politics in the United States has gone completely crackers over the last year or so, but even with all of the alt-right and "alternative facts" type lunacy that's been going on, it seems extraordinary that the American public are meekly accepting the fact that the Trump administration completely bypassed the democratic scrutiny of the US congress to launch this military action, but decided that consulting the foreign government of Israel was a top priority.
If I was an American citizen I'd be asking myself "who do the Trump administration actually work for?" because at the moment it's not entirely obvious.
If they were working for the best interests of the American people then surely they would have sought to actually prove that the Syrian government (rather than the Saudi financed terrorists) were responsible for the poison gas, come up with a battle strategy that goes a bit further than "let's just lob some bombs at it", and then sought to establish a democratic mandate from congress for their coherently planned military actions.
What appears to have happened is that the US did little more than seek the approval of Israel and then went ahead with it!
We all know from personal experience that quickfire hot-headed rage responses often result in appalling consequences. It's clearly best to wait for the evidence of what really happened to come to light, then work out some kind of logical response that actually has the possibility of improving the situation.
If it wasn't absolutely clear before, it certainly is now. America is being ruled by a blatantly unstable hot-head with no respect for democratic and judicial processes. It seems unbelievable to write it, but Trump makes George W. Bush (the trigger-happy warmonger who attacked the wrong country*) look calm and reasonable in comparison!
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* = 0 of the September 11th terrorists came from Iraq, and Saddam Hussain had no links to Al Qaida. Meanwhile 15 of the 19 terrorists that day were from Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis have a long history of funding Islamist terrorist groups (including Al Qaida and ISIS).
were responsible for their own downfall.
My immediate response was:
In order to portray the financial sector as the unfairly criticised innocent victims of the economic crisis, it would take willful ignorance of what actually happened, which was this:
The parasitic "shadow banking sector" lobbied and demanded to be freed from the burden of regulation, which the "orthodox neoliberal" politicians were more than happy to oblige with.
Both sides of the so called political spectrum in the US and UK repealed legislation which was designed to prevent banks from destabilising the economy. Margaret Thatcher's Tories began the deregulation process in the UK in the absurd attempt to create a post-industrial London based financial services economy. The Labour Chancellor Gordon Brown further deregulated the financial sector in the 1990s ceding all democratic control of the Bank of England to the private sector in compliance with neoliberal pseudo-economic theory. In the United States, Bill Clinton's Democrats set about dismantling the legislative firewalls that were put in place in order to prevent another Wall Street crash and George Bush's Republicans intensified the process in the 2000s. The European Union and other countries such as Argentina also set about enacting absurd neoliberalisation reforms and financial sector deregulations.
Once the financial sector were freed from the legislation which was originally put in place to prevent their reckless gambling tendencies from creating economic instability, most of them quickly set about over-leveraging themselves to the max (using mortgage payments, savings and pension schemes as their reserves) in order to make all kinds of insane bets on crap like Spanish and Irish property assets, Greek government bonds and complex derivatives (like Collateralised Debt Obligations) that they clearly didn't even understand.
As long as it was stamped with a decent rating from the (either corrupt or utterly clueless) Credit Ratings oligopoly, they racked up vast debts to throw money at it without bothering to assess the risk for themselves. Trying to absolve the financial sector of responsibility for their own reckless speculation on inaccurately rated and often fraudulent "investments" is as absurd as trying to absolve the customer from blame had they borrowed beyond their means in order to buy a wreck of a second hand car without negotiating any warranty coverage or even bothering to take a cursory glance at the vehicle first.
gross mismanagement of risk.
It is transparently clear that "austerity" is just the same old neoliberal claptrap rebranded as something urgent and necessary, rather than the defunct ideologically driven gibberish that actually caused the economic crisis in the first place.
Massively reducing government spending on infrastructure and causing a dramatic reduction in household disposable income led to the transparently obvious consequence of reduced aggregate demand and economic stagnation, which in turn led to increases rather than decreases in budget deficits and national debts as the pace of cuts failed to match the falls in tax revenues. The harder they cut the "real economy", the bigger the debt burden they ended up creating.
It is clear that for decades the global economy has been run by economic illiterates; by people that don't give a damn about economic history (the most stable and productive period was the mixed economy era, which their craze for greed-is-a-virtue, privatise everything, more riches for the rich and screw the workers, neoliberal pseudo-economics has ruined). They don't bother with vital regulations to prevent anti-competitive practices (monopolies, oligopolies, cartels, information asymmetry, subsidisation of failure...) from developing because the simplistic neoliberal mantra says that "all regulations are evil" and they don't even seem to understand really fundamental economic concepts such as aggregate demand, value multipliers and false economies.
than the bankers themselves, are the politicians that
meekly abdicated their responsibilities to protect
the economy from their reckless gambling urges.
The financial sector are to blame for the economic crisis. They caused it by inflating a giant bubble of "easy credit" and using it to fund their reckless speculative gambling instead of making carefully hedged long-term investments. The politicians that meekly enabled their risky gambling habits by deregulating them, then bailed them out, and are now working to make the "real economy" pay the costs of the financial sector gambling debts through "self-defeating austerity" and even now refuse to prosecute or even re-regulate the banks.
The lessons of history are pretty clear, the free market fundamentalists / neoliberals / anarcho-capitalists (call them what you want) have tended to create the economic crises through enabling risky short-term profiteering and it has been government's job to clean up their messes and prevent them from doing it again, two things that the impossibly compromised "orthodox neoliberal" politicians of the West are abjectly failing to do at present.
So in conclusion, the people that are to blame are the reckless bankers that mismanaged the risk that they are supposedly paid their obscene salaries in order to manage, and the politicians that enabled this reckless gambling spree by deregulating the financial markets.
ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE
What is ... Neoliberalism?
Common sense and neoliberal pseudo-economics
Margaret Thatcher is dead
The Great Neoliberal Lie