How Hillary could have won

The NYT International Weekly had a front page story yesterday about how Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became the President of Liberia. Liberia is an impoverished African nation of some four million, where 80% of the population lives in poverty, and the rest, including many members of Johnson Sirleaf's extended family, work for the government.

Here's writer Helene Johnson;  Now, as American women grapple with the whys of Hillary Clinton's loss in November's election, the story of how Liberia's women upended centuries of male rule is newly relevant.

That in itself is a dubious proposition. Did Margaret Thatcher's stint as PM of the UK upend centuries of male rule there?

Like most African heads of state, Johnson Sirleaf is a member of the elite Bintu tribe. Collectively they've been to the elite universities of the West and spent quality time networking their careers forward through the corridors of the most prestigious Western financial institutions. In Sirleaf's case, she's been to Harvard, Citibank and the World Bank. It's a pedigree that opens doors among the Western elites.

Couple that with the fact the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy has been meddling in Liberia's politics since the 1980's, and you'd think her election victory would have been a slam dunk.

But it wasn't. It took all that plus dirty tricks galore;

...the women had their own tricks. "You want beer? Just give me your voter ID card and I will buy you beer." A group of women stationed at a bar near a major intersection lured young men in a time honored fashion.

Hmm... what do you suppose that means? Maybe the Clinton campaign was on the right track when they had Madonna offering free blowjobs, but even there they messed up. Madonna is almost sixty years old. If the Dems had had the foresight to offer blowjobs by Katy Perry AND free beer, Hillary would be in the White House today!

Canada PM Harper decries "communism's poisonous ideology"

Oh good grief!

Almost a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Big Steve is still stuck speechifying like a Cold War stalwart?

Harper delivered a proper podium-thumper to the "Tribute to Liberty" annual dinner in Toronto yesterday. Thats a bunch of second generation east Europeans who never got over their parent's fears about the Bolsheviks.

History has moved on, folks.

How modest of Big Steve to claim his spot in history right up there with Mulroney, Reagan, and Thatcher...

It's always nice to know that your leader has his eye squarely on the future.

The Tribute to Liberty folks are all about building a monument to honour the victims of communism.

Personally, I think building a monument to the victims of communism is a great idea.

We could put it in a public square. "Freedom Square" we could call it. Or Liberty Square.

At the other side of the square we could, in the interest of truth, justice, and fair comment, erect a monument to the victims of capitalism.

Communism died an ignoble death in 1991.

Capitalism is still chewing up its victims today.

Ontario needs Tim Hudak?

Yes we do, according to the Toronto Sun.

Hudak gonna set things right by firing 100,000 lazy-ass civil servants!

Chop down the corporate tax rate to next-to-nothing to boot, and by God, there's gonna be a jobs bonanza right here in the promised land!

A million new private sector jobs!

One shudders to imagine the nature of those million jobs. Yes, you could cut the corporate tax rate to zero, and yes, that would attract a few corporate bottom-feeders who would create a few minimum wage jobs. Is that really what Ontario needs?

Hudak's race-to-the-bottom strategy has failed everywhere it's been implemented. This is just the latest recycled version of the old Thatcher-Reagan trickle-down. You remember that; be nice to rich folks and eventually that niceness gonna trickle down on the regular folks...

Rich folks will of course love that strategy. It works for them. It frees up a little more cash to donate to the pols who are prepared to do their bidding.

Here's the trouble with trickle-down economics; the rich get richer and the rest of us just get soaked.

Ontario does not need Tim Hudak.

The mind-boggling hypocrisies of Governor Rick Snyder

Rick Snyder rode into office on a Thatcherite charger proclaiming the usual grab-bag of certitudes we've all been too well acquainted with since the days of Ron and Maggie.

He would get Michigan working again!

Michigan would be free to re-invent itself!

Mr. Snyder won the Governorship of Michigan because on election day 56% of eligible voters stayed home.

During his campaign he assured the good people of Michigan that right-to-work-for-less legislation hadn't even occurred to him.

It occurred to him right after being voted in, and now the good people of Michigan are saddled with it.

Snyder knows that education is broken, and apparently the main problem is that society spends too much money on it. He had a secret team of consultants and advisers brainstorming how to get education spending down to $5,000 per student per year.

Obviously, if spending too much creates a shitty education system it can be improved by spending less!

Then a fund-raising video turns up from Greenhill School where his own kids go. The private school needs donations because the $20,000 per year tuition doesn't cover the expense of a decent education!

That's right! Poor kids in Michigan can get a great education for $5,000 a year. Sanctimonious Snyder's kids deserve better; at least four times better!

That should tell you something about Snyder's world view.

Battle lines drawn over multi-million Mandela estate before the poor bastard is even gone!

One of the little details that the Thatcher hagiographers downplay is her virulent opposition to Nelson Mandela and everything he stood for.

As far as the Iron Lady was concerned, Nelson Mandela was a communist and a terrorist.

Period.

End of story.

This unseemly tale out of South Africa would have had Maggie high-fiving her minders.

And it is an unseemly tale. I am surprised that the left-tilting Guardian would frame this story as being about Nelson Mandela. The story is about some of his offspring, who capitalized on their father's famous name, using the courts to grab whatever advantage they can against perceived business threats.

It's not about Mandela at all.

But apparently the temptation to slander the iconic freedom fighter who spent most of his adult life in prison for his opposition to apartheid was too much even for The Guardian.

The Cardboard Lady; phonier than Phony Tony

The accolades accorded "The Iron Lady" are right next to mind-numbing.

David Cameron claims she "saved" Britain.

Steven Harper claims she ushered in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity.

Gorbachev, Kohl, Clinton... everybody is paying homage today.

Here's a motherlode of stats on the British economy.

If you compare key stats from the year before she took up residence at 10 Downing to stats from the year after she left, you'll see she had some accomplishments.

Total government spending tripled during her tenure. That's a pretty dubious claim to fame for a slash-and-burn union-busting right-winger.

And while she did triple defense spending, public spending on health, education, and welfare grew even faster than military spending.

In the first five years of her reign unemployment doubled.

And of course, taxes on high earners were slashed.

And there is no question that over the course of her tenure the influence of organized labour was exponentially diminished if not outright extinguished.

As for the "era of peace and prosperity," the great victory in the Falklands did for Britain what the great victory over Grenada did for America; open the door to an era of hubristic imperial overreach that both countries pay a steep price for to this day.

Her most disappointing legacy is that she left the door open for "New Labour."

Without the bitter aftertaste left by the Iron Lady, Britons would never have elected Phony Tony.

Then they had a real neo on their hands, and they'll be paying for that gaffe for generations to come.

Karmic justice; Thatcher dead, Scargill lives!

Margaret Thatcher did for Britain what Reagan did for America; these bullying cowards appealled to the base instincts of their respective peoples and with a combination of baloney, bafflegab, and bullshit gained for themselves immense personal popularity whilst simultaeneously steering their countries down the road of neoliberal enslavement.

When David Cameron intones today that Ms. Thatcher "saved" Britain he is correct. She saved the monarchy and the aristocracy, for without her resucitation of the empire delusion that entire lot would have been run out of town long before today.

In fact, had she been stopped before the Falklands "victory" got the juice of jingoistic pride overflowing, the long night of "new" Labour and the catastophic turn of British foreign policy under Blair might have been avoided.

But who knows?.. things might have been worse...

Richard Falk and the New World Order

On the face of it you might expect to find a little truth behind the claims that Richard Falk is an emissary for the New World Order.

After all, he has aligned himself with such ominous sounding entities as the "World Federalist Institute" and the "American Movement for World Government."

And he is a Jew after all. While I don't spend a lot of time studying the various threads of NWO conspiracy theories I am sufficiently acquainted with their overall thrust to appreciate that the chosen people play a central role.

I am also sufficiently acquainted with the work of Richard Falk to know that he is one of those Jews that the Likud crowd love to hate the most.

He is the classic "self-hating" Jew, which of course is the fate of every Jew who disagrees with the Likudniks.

He has, in their view, violated the sacred trust between God and the chosen people by suggesting that Palestinians have rights too, a view that is utterly blasphemous among the crowd of annex-everything fascists who seem determined to drive the state of Israel into the abyss.

Just recently two of the towering geniuses in the Harper cabinet have piled onto the anti-Falk bandwagon, namely Messers Baird and Kenney. They have taken umbrage over statements made by Falk about western corporations that profit from the occupation.

Why these dolts remain in the Harper cabinet is a good question, and I think the answer is that the Prime Minister likes to keep a few buffoons around because they inevitably make him look a whole lot smarter by comparison.

While I am somewhat ambivalent about Falk's position vis-a-vis those companies, I am totally in agreement that pressure needs to be brought to bear on those who profit from the occupation. What that pressure should look like is not for me to judge, but any analysis of the situation must proceed from the fact that the occupation is illegal and immoral, which by the way is the official position of the Canadian government.

Which brings us back to the New World Order.

It seems this has become a catch-all category for a wide range of folks disaffected with the current state of things. Everything from the out-sourcing of the industrial economy to gay marriage is at some point tied into this imaginary NWO.

NWO conspiracy theories thrive in those societies wherein the working classes have suffered a roll-back in their standard of living over the past few generations. Those would be primarily the folks who took it on the chin when the Reagan-Thatcher revolution cemented neo-liberalism as the state religion in the Anglo American universe.

For over forty years we have watched ourselves get poorer while our oligarchs and plutocrats got richer, and rather than hold the oligarchs and plutocrats and the politicians they've bought responsible, we want to blame Jews or Bilderbergers or aliens or Freemasons for the problem.

Which of course is just fine with our masters.

Speeding up the race to the bottom

So I see Mitt is masking the aroma of his namby-pamby tenure as governor of Mass with his choice of a serious slash-and-burn right-winger as running mate. Since a good deal of his track record in Massachusetts lies to the left of what Obama has accomplished these past few years, Mitt certainly needed somebody to give him credibility with the hard right.

What is the "hard right" anyway? One can appreciate the fact that a lot of your one percenters would like less taxation and less spending etc. That's simple self interest. What never fails to amaze me is how that small wealthy elite manages to bamboozle the majority of the populace into seeing it their way.

In November the American voter will be able to choose between a right-wing Obama and a farther right Romney. For the most part the 99% won't even question why neither camp has an agenda that addresses their basic needs; health care, education, food security, housing security, job security. Instead it's all about who will be more willing to cut taxes, cut spending, and bomb Iran.

To paraphrase David Swanton in an essay at Counterpunch, it's a debate about what brand of catfood your grandmother is going to eat, premium or no-name.

Speaking of right-wing twats, none other than Canada's Foreign Minister John Baird got practically an entire section of the Globe and Mail to himself today in a fawning in-depth profile out of all proportion to such a shallow talent. This is the imbecile who unintentially left them snickering the length and breadth of Israel with his tour of the Holy Land not too long ago. "I've brought my own Rabbi..."

Indeed.

The occassion seems to be his current tour of Lebanon and Jordan, where, so we are told, he is reassuring his hosts of our support with the refugee crisis. Not so much as a courtesy call to Israel this time around, and no mention of his personal Rabbi.

He is lauded by the Globe for bringing a no-nonsense sensibility to Canada's image;

He's not only willing to trumpet unabashedly-Tory rhetoric on the world stage, to play up the fighter-bombers of the Royal Canadian Air Force, back Israel to the hilt and blast Iran. He's also prepared to look uncouth to prod Canadian business deals abroad, because hard-boiled economic interests are job one.

Somehow this merits a four page spread in the Globe. We are told his political idol is Margaret Thatcher. That would make sense. The Iron Lady did kick the shit out of unions and teach those Argies a lesson.