The Comment Factory

Richard writes the most popular left-wing blog in the UK, Lenin's Tomb, and recently graduated with a BA in Politics, Philosophy and History, first class.

richardseymour@thecommentfactory.com
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Capitalism: A Love Story does not involve the emotional crescendos of Moore’s previous output. Think of the jarring juxtaposition, in Sicko, between the entranced exploration of European health systems and the bitterly cold treatment of America’s poor by the healthcare giants. There are shocking, appalling moments in Capitalism, but these are interspersed with stories of resistance as Moore’s cameras film people preventing the eviction of local families, and capture workers at Republic Windows and Doors as they force the Bank of America to back down and fund their severance packages

Serious question. Will Hutton likes Cameron’s ideas. The current editor of the New Statesman says he takes Cameron’s claim to progressivism seriously. The centre-left Prospect magazine has been carrying puff-pieces for Philip Blond’s ‘Red Toryism’, the bland mood music for Cameron’s leadership. Some liberals really want to believe the best about Cameron’s conservatives.
Yet we have [...]

I’ve been following this developing campaign, uniting charities, NGOs and trade unions, with interest. Politically, it taps into a very good instinct. The bankers got rich pursuing speculative profits through various intricate schemes that placed national economies in tremendous danger (example of which), and have been rewarded with bail-outs. If there is going to be a shortfall in funding for public services, they should pay for it. This isn’t the only justification for imposing such a tax

The current speculative attack on the Euro is a very powerful vote against EU states that investors (capitalists) do no believe have moved swiftly enough to cut their budget deficits. The rules of the Stability and Growth Pact agreed among EU member states say that budget deficits must not exceed 3% of GDP. Those rules [...]

The Home Office’s findings, quoted above, indicate that they would at least partially be evidence of the extent of racist discrimination by the institutions of criminal justice. In other words, the very evidence that the state continues to oppress ethnic minorities, not least young black men, is what would be being used to damn them

New Labour has run, in many ways, the most right-wing administration since the Second World War. This is true in terms of its privatisation of housing and public services, in terms of its tax cuts for the rich and services to the City, in terms of its warmongering, and on any number of other axes that you could name. It has adopted neoliberal economics, neoconservative foreign policy, and the New Right’s agenda on race relations

Obama knows this perfectly well, which is why he was blustering some while back about not running for office to serve a bunch of fat cat Wall Street bankers, and may also explain some of his tentative moves to lightly tax and regulate the parasites. Indeed, in the wake of the loss of Massachusetts, Obama has talked up his reforms yesterday, promising a ‘fight’ with Wall Street firms who tried to sink his proposals. These are not radical reforms – if the multi-millionaire Tory shadow chancellor George Osborne approves of them, they aren’t that radical

There will be some real violence, alongside the desperate efforts by starving people to secure food and water for themselves. There is no society in the world that doesn’t have violence on a regular, daily basis, never mind in the middle of a horrendous tragedy and a reloaded military occupation. But what we are seeing here is the entirely justifiable expropriation of hoarded goods in stores and other situations being used to characterise the situation as a security crisis

For years, UN ‘peacekeepers’ have slaughtered thousands of Haitians, and the residents have been put through rigged election procedures. Lavalas members, priests, and activists have been subject to political imprisonment and murder, some of them characterised as ‘gang’ members. This is all for the aid of sweatshop bosses such as Andy Apaid, and the multinationals principally based in the US and Canada that benefit enormously from the exploitation of Haitian labour. This process of capital accumulation is what has driven Haitians out of a devastated rural economy and into impoverished slums with a tinpot infrastructure, and left them vulnerable to this extraordinary catastrophe

Until the so-called underpants bomber failed to strike, you would have been hard pressed to find much information on the Yemen insurgency outside of Press TV. Of the Anglophone media, only the wire services seemed to pay much attention to the Houthi rebellion, and Saudi air strikes against it. US involvement in the Saudi air strikes, some of them ostensibly against ‘Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula’, started to be reported this month. Now this clueless bampot/false flag (take your pick) and his combustible loin cloth have been taken into custody (I’ll let you riff on how it could have been a ‘dirty bomb’), the former reported as saying that he was trained by ‘Al Qaida’ in Yemen. So, Obama has his opportunity to come out openly and demand more US attacks in Yemen

The brutality of Operation Cast Lead shocked some of Israel’s most devoted supporters, and divided the pro-Israel camp. Even as it was happening, some of the most shocking accounts of IDF conduct were emerging. These included sealing off a neighbourhood, bombing and shelling it, blocking medical and humanitarian entry, and knowingly leaving children to slowly die next to their already deceased relatives. They included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances, and the repeated targeting of schools

At the 3 degrees rise predicted by the UN on the basis of current negotiating positions, you can declare the game over. That is potentially the tipping point beyond which it is impossible to regain any control over global temperatures, the point at which positive feedback mechanisms cause temperatures to increase exponentially. I cannot adequately describe the full horror of such a scenario – the food shortages, the droughts, the floods, the fleeing of millions of people from newly uninhabitable territory, the intensified geopolitical competition over basic resources, the extinction of half or more of the species on the planet… it’s just unthinkable. But, as Copenhagen shows, unthinkable horror is exactly what the rulers of the world have in store for us