Manufacturing consent – Page 8

Dictatorship: Are We There Yet?

Published on November 28, 20081 Comment

I keep asking that.

But I think finally we are undoubtedly on the cusp of it (or in that annoying phrase that seems to have become hip recently, on the flex), when a squad of not just any old plods, but armed antiterrorist police is sent to arrest legitimately elected member of parliament and shadow immigration minister Damien Green, search his home and office, take his DNA, impound all his personal or business data and hold him incommunicado for 9 hours while the ruling party briefs assiduously against him in the media, on a spurious suspicion of ‘conspiracy to commit public malfeasance in office’ (ie receiving leaks of how incompetent Jacqui Smith, Phil Woolas and other Home office ministers are).

I’m amazed they didn’t taser him for good measure, pour encourager les autres.

But why? What could have posessed them to do such a disgusting, antidemocratic thing? Why would a New Labour prime minister rip up the constitution (such as it still is) and begin arresting the opposition, for all the world like some nascent Mugabe?

It appears that Green was treated like a terrorist simply for doing his job and exposing government wrongdoing and incompetence in the public interest. Since when has that been an offence? Exposing government wrongdoing is what an opposition MP does. That’s why the communications of MP’s are privileged; so that political police pressure like this can’t be brought to bear on the people’s representatives when they are doing their duty.

Privileged communication is the bedrock of the parliamentary system Parliament is said to be jealous of its privileges and ready to fight to the death to protect them; an MP cannot be arrested while in the precincts of the House, for instance.

Why, then, did the parliamentary authorities, the sergeants-at-arms, allow the Metropolitan Police into Green’s parliamentary offices to leaf through privileged communications at will, unless they had political clearance at a very high level – say from a Home Secreteary or PM – to do so?

Labour ministers like that lying little ratfaced sycophant, immigration minister Phil Woolas, are all over the papers, radio and tv this morning, disclaiming any political motivation for this unprecedentedly shocking act. “Ooh no, wasn’t us guv, nothing to do with us. Dictatorial, authoritarian, Stalinesque? Oh no, we don’t accept that. Blame the Met and Ian Blair, he’s retiring, he’s a a handy scapegoat. Jacqui Smith? Who she?”

Bollocks. They can deny it till they’re blue in the face but I’m in no doubt that the order to arrest an opposition MP came right from our very own ~~Rosa Klebb~~ the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, angry at having her own and her colleagues’ mendacity exposed.

Smith has shown herself quite happy to use the law to pursue her political priorities. Smith is perfectly prepared to use the power of the state against the individual for partisan purposes too, and freely admits it. Here she is speaking of manipulating the law and the police against the populace for purely partisan political ends:

I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.

That car of theirs – is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out

And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, “it’s all on the database.”

As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid

And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?

No stranger to dictatorship she; it comes as absolutely no surprise that Smith concentrated her political studies at Uni on East Germany.

Here she is on the BBC yet again, within the past 5 minutes, still asserting that no minister had anything to do with it and it was all David Normingtonof the Cabinet Office.

In a statement, the Metropolitan police said:

‘The investigation into the alleged leak of confidential government material followed the receipt by the MPS (Metropolitan Police Service) of a complaint from the Cabinet Office.’

Yes, from Normington the highest ranking Home Office civil servant, who of course didn’t even speak to the PM or Home Secretary about something so momentous as the arrest of an MP.

Oh, sure.

But the order for Green’s arrest has to have come from Gordon Brown, if not at his instigation, then at least with his entire approval. They can deny it till doomsday; the order for Green’s arrest came direct from New Labour, no matter how much they dissemble; not only that, it came direct from the Cabinet Office and therefore direct from no 10; and most of all it came direct from our unelected prime minister, Gordon Brown, unless, of course, the police are lying. And I wouldn’t put it past Mandelson to allege that either.

Wingnuts In The Workhouse

Published on November 10, 20086 Comments

Things are getting a little bit Dickensian for some wingnut bloggers.

Roy Edroso at Alicublog writes the sad story of the crash and burn of a wingnut blogger post-election: after having placed his faith (and his family’s future security) in the simple business formula of repeating rightwing talking points online like a parrot in return for ‘donations’ from readers, blogger Kim DuToit is surprised that his plan failed. But how could such a moneymaking scheme ever possibly have failed?

So strong was this blogger’s belief that blogging would rescue him from a life of wage-slave misery and potentially degrading manual toil (isn’t that what the bleks are for?), South African import DuToit spent seven fruitless years pursuing his dream of national punditry, during which time all it gave him was gout:

I hadn’t thought about Kim du Toit — celebrated author of “The Pussification of the American Male” and other two-fisted screeds on self-reliance — for quite some time when pure, blind luck led me to this fascinating essay by his wife, explaining why Mr. du Toit will soon cease blogging, despite an alleged flood of reader protests: “The truth is folks, we can’t afford it.”

Astonishingly, blogging has not been the bonanza the du Toits might have wished for, and as Mr. du Toit is unable to “contribute to our financial requirements” with a more traditional job because of his gout, times have grown hard. Mrs. du Toit cashed in her IRA last year, but that money was all spent on a “last hurrah around the world with our kids,” lap-band surgery for their daughter, household repairs, and servers for Mr. du Toit’s blogging.

“We’ve staid-off bankruptcy, but just barely,” says Mrs. du Toit. “The truth is, we spoke to an attorney about bankruptcy, but we’d be forced into a two year commitment of repayment, not debt forgiveness, and the kid’s college would be the expense we’d have to stop under that scenario.”

More…

Let me get this straight.

After deliberately getting themselves into humongous debt and deliberately wasting what few assets they had on a] personal pleasure and b] a business that had yet to show any return (other than the aforementioned gout), these people now want the whole lot written off and show no intent to repay anything at all? There’s conservative self-reliance and pioneer moral fibre for you.

“So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began to contract a quantity of debt.”

Dickens, Great Expectations

A commenter to the post likens the DuToits to Dickens’ Veneerings; I think Dickens would have recognised them as more general but no less self-interested types. They’re Pecksniffian sanctimonious hypocrites (“Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there”) whilst and at one and the same time they’re Mr Micawbers, with their an unshakeable faith in a providential turning up of something: but most of all what they are is Pip from Great Expectations, with his secret grandiosity and feelings of entitlement but without the charm.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Great Expectations

I wonder how many more smalltime wingnut bloggers are getting a visist from the skeleton truth about now? Dare I mention Pyjamas Media?

I might feel a bit sorry for the deluded idiots. Yes, even the DuToits: they thought the Republican reich would last forever, they thought that if they could just be strident enough, loyal enough and vicious enough that the rightwing media gravy train would slow down specially for them, just in time to catch their free ride to fame, fortune and future Fox punditry.

I might feel sorry for them, but I don’t. That’s because this yummy schadenfreude is so delicious. Please sir, can I have some more?

Comment of The Day

Published on October 18, 20082 Comments

The very, very honorable John McCain’s on the ground, under the media radar campaign of vicious robocalls and 3rd party funded racist scaremongering has succeeded.

It’s succeeded in siccing the ultra-right’s flying buttmonkeys of Weimar Republicanism on, of all things, a voter registration charity, ACORN.

ACORN has found itself not only investigated by the FBI and publicly accused of terrorism and anti-Americanism, but also has had its premises and staff attacked and threatened. Why? For trying to get people to exercise their constitutional right to do the very thing the country was established for, choose their own future by voting.

There’s your McCain campaign strategy in a nutshell. Attack the vote itself. Cast doubt in advance on the validity of the process of voting; focus on fraud, even though there isn’t any, thus potentially invalidating the actual election result in the mind of a sizeable proportion of the electorate even before it happens. Tell them it’s all a big conspiracy that the media is complicit in, hire dimestore fascist rabble-rousers like Palin to whip those people into a frenzy of expectant bile and better still tell them that those people – that one- are not real Americans, thus tapping into the primal fear of an immigrant-descended population, that they are not real Americans themselves.

Voila, McCain’s got the country between a rock and hard place if Obama wins. It’ll be like the preppy riots, but much bigger, much more downmarket and with more guns.

I say ‘if’ he wins; the McCain ‘clean hands’ backup plan (I think this is a fair inference to make, what with the bile and the whipping up and Palin and all the maverick, lone wolf imagery and that) appears to be the hope for the fortuitous appearance of a lone assassin. A hope which is being nudged ~~a little bit~~ quite a lot:

John McCain, final presidential debate:

“I’m proud of the people who come to our rallies.”

All of this preamble explains why I find this comment to a TPM post about reporters being attacked at Palin rallies to be either amazingly sweet and naive or conversely, amazingly heroic and rational. Or both. I’m not sure; but it is quintessentially American.

It is very important that we stay firm but calm. We need to follow Senator Obama’s example and stay cool but take action.

This assault, the vandalizing of the ACORN offices… the beyond ‘outrageous’ ground game/robocalls/mailers that McCain is using now may feed this ugly frenzy. People are believing lies and for most of them this is what is making them afraid and full of hate. We have to remember it is because they are believing ‘lies’. Lies that have been repeated over and over again until they get talked about like rumor and urban legend and seem to be true.
We can understand that they have been manipulated and are being used. We can understand that if we were believing what they were believing we might feel just like they do.

I think most of us here know that the answer is get out their and fight to win the election. As Senator Obama said when a crowd started booing McCain… we don’t need your boos… we need to VOTE. So, as ChronoSpark and many others on TPM are doing I would rather use my energy fighting to win than ‘booing’ about what they are doing!

Yes, Yes, Yes WE Can!

McCain may have some really nasty people on his side willing to do anything to win but Senator Obama has US!

Awww, bless – but I would reply, yes, very nice, Obama has ‘YOU!’. But do ‘YOU!’ have guns?

The Invisible Hand of The Market, Now Visible – In Your Pocket

Published on September 21, 2008

And you can’t do anything to stop it.

If you get mugged on the street, you can call the cops. But quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What can you do, who can you call, when the protectors of the public purse blatantly rob you right under your nose?

The banking barons, the Republicans and their Democratic congressional accomplices together are making sure there’ll be no opposition to the biggest and most blatant theft in living history; tagged on to to the end of the bill that steals nearly a trillion dollars from the American people to give the already obscenely rich is this handy little para:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

[Via Atrios.]

Trans: “We’re taking your money and you can’t do anything about it because it’s the law, and the law says that the law doesn’t apply to us but only to you”.

What will the victims be left with after all 900 billion of their tax dollars have gone offshore to repay China and to stuff tax-free accounts in the Caymans or Paraguay?

In return for licensing the biggest fraud in US history (one in which a sitting President himself, and his family, are implicated via AIG and the reinsurance market) the federal government will have a lien on everyone’s house via their control of their mortgage or their revolving home equity loan or their insurance. That’s an enormous hold over individuals which exponentially increases governmental power to squash potential dissidents.

I’m sure they’ll use it wisely.

The irony of it all is there’s bugger all actual money to steal in the first place – the public accounts’re virtually empty, wars and natural disasters can be quite expensive. No, what they’re doing is draining the overdraft account and maxing out all the credit cards, even the little ones.

George Bush has said the bailout is a “pivotal moment for America’s economy”. Indeed it is – so not only have the banks become the government and vice versa, the American public will be penniless and in hock to the feds if this bill passes. They’ll also be wage slaves forever to pay back the billions that other countries’ sovereign wealth funds are lending the nation so it can be stolen in the first place.

Yet still the rump of the right wing, who will be equally affected, can see no wrong in it: and those who can see the wrong in it can do nothing but keep calling their elected representatives in the hope they’ll see sense. Who else can they call?