Salvaging the Narrative

Posted on October 31, 2015 by camelotkidd

Even our elected representatives are starting to figure out that the war on terror narrative is bull-shit.

Here Tyler Durden, at Zero Hedge laying out the grisly details.

“One point we’ve been particularly keen on driving home since the beginning of Russian airstrikes in Syria is that The Kremlin’s move to step in on behalf of Bashar al-Assad along with Vladimir Putin’s open “invitation” to Washington with regard to joining forces in the fight against terrorism effectively let the cat out of the proverbial bag. 

That is, it simply wasn’t possible for the US to explain why the Pentagon refused to partner with the Russians without admitting that i) the government views Assad, Russia, and Iran as a greater threat than ISIS, and ii) Washington and its regional allies don’t necessarily want to see Sunni extremism wiped out in Syria and Iraq. 

Admitting either one of those points would be devastating from a PR perspective. No amount of Russophobic propaganda and/or looped video clips of the Ayatollah ranting against the US would be enough to convince the public that Moscow and Tehran are a greater threat than the black flag-waving jihadists beheading Westerners and burning Jordanian pilots alive in Hollywood-esque video clips, and so, The White House has been forced to scramble around in a desperate attempt to salvage the narrative.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Class-Warfare

Posted on October 27, 2015 by camelotkidd

The free-market economic policy our leaders have chosen for us–neoliberalism–requires coercion to make people participate. Enforcing market obedience is something I’ve written about at CK before. It’s also one of the salient points made about early capitalism in Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece, The Great Transformation.

Political theorist Corey Robin also notices that neoliberal policies don’t just appear out of thin air. He examines Chile, where President Allende, a democratically elected leader, was overthrown by the military with savage free-market economic doctrines imposed at gunpoint.

“Whether we call it primitive accumulation or the great transformation, we know that the creation of markets often require or are accompanied by a high degree of coercion. This is especially true of markets in labor. Men and women are not born wage laborers ready to contract with capital. Nor do they simply evolve into these positions over time. Wage laborers are often made—and remade—through violence, coercion, and force. Like the labor wars of the Gilded Age or the enclosure riots, Pinochet’s Chile was about the forcible creation, at lightning speed, of new markets in land and labor.”

Neoliberalism could not succeed without a coercive state to enforce the market diktat. Libertarians, like Rand Paul and his papa, pretend that the market confers freedom but that’s true only if you have capital. Libertarians also pretend that democratic government is an evil oppressor of the wealthy. However, the US government is hardly a jack-booted thug when it comes to the wealthy. In fact, the US government works tirelessly in promoting policies favored by capital.

Even more, our wealthy elite are situated inside the US government to an enormous degree, moving back and forth between corporations, think-tanks and foundations that are likewise intertwined with the state. They represent finance, oil, and the military/intelligence/industrial complex. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? They’re the deep state, and their existence has evolved into something of an open secret. Hollywood loves them some deep state, with movie after movie portraying an intrepid hero battling an evil and mysterious cabal. Not to mention TV shows, look at what’s making a return–The X Files–a show that was all about the deep state. 

Of course the X-Files never really tried to examine the evil cabal behind the Smoking-Man and what they wanted from their evil schemes. Perhaps this topic was not broached because in real life the US deep state ensures policies that benefit the 1%, especially when it comes to foreign policy. In case you haven’t noticed, the US pursues regime change in countries that fail to pursue economic and political policies that our wealthy elite demand. US foreign policies of regime change since WWII bears this out. Examining the history it’s clear that governments and leaders that attempted to pursue economic policies at odds with elite US opinion were demonized, sanctioned and ultimately overthrown and or assassinated.

An amazing article by Professor James Petras, examines the military coup in Argentina in the late 1970’s that was carried out with US approval. Petras makes quite clear the coup wasn’t carried out just so the military could seize power for itself. No, the most powerful members of Argentinian society deployed the military to overthrow a democratic government that had strayed from serving its true masters.

“According to the documentary evidence presented by the Argentine Central Bank, immediately after the military seized power, the leading manufacturers presented the military with a comprehensive list of all the trade union leaders, delegates and activists to be eliminated.  In other words the capitalist class give the military their ‘marching orders’.  They dictated who was to be arrested, tortured, killed and/or disappeared.  The military executed the orders of the capitalist class – of the 30,000 Argentines who were murdered the vast majority were unarmed industrial workers involved in workplace industrial action.”

The history of the Argentinian elite using the military to murder their political opponents gives a whole new meaning into the term class-warfare. That the US was complicit should have all Americans outraged. This should also be a cautionary tale. With economic inequality at record highs who’s to say that that sort of thing couldn’t happen here?

Update: In light of this new information, I’m inclined to view presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s newspaper column in 1978 in a whole new light.

“Reagan portrayed Videla’s junta as the real victims here, the good guys who were getting a bad rap for their reasonable efforts to protect the public from terrorism.”

I also think the US air traffic controllers union got off easy compared to the alternative.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My Pet Goat

Posted on October 21, 2015 by camelotkidd

That Trump fellow sure is making things interesting with his recent statements. “Say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time.” Trump’s attack forced Jeb Bush to defensively claim that his brother, President George Bush, “kept us safe.”

The idea that President George Bush kept us safe has always been ludicrous. He ignored a memo from US intelligence entitled ”Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,’‘ before 9/11 and while the attack was happening sat reading My Pet Goat to school children in Florida. And Jeb Bush’s answer to this problem, to try to make 9/11 about the aftermath, isn’t going to help him much. The aftermath was the failed Iraq War, which had nothing to do with 9/11.

That someone has finally called bullshit on the idea of President Bush keeping us safe is a good start but it seems to me that everyone is still missing the fundamental contradiction in the war on terror narrative. The fundamental contradiction is Sunni terrorists, as represented by al-qaeda, rather than being mortal enemies are and have always been either proxies or patsies. That’s right, every presidential administration since Carter has either employed Sunni terrorists as proxies to carry out covert US foreign policies, or like Bush in seizing upon al-qaeda’s attacks as a pretext to advance already agreed upon plans for Middle-East conquest. These plans are summed up nicely by the Project for the New American Century, whose assortment of neoconservative luminaries wrote openly of desiring “a new Pearl Harbor,” in order that they might reconfigure the Middle-East. Of course they got their Casus belli with 9/11.

For much more on the neoconservatives plan to remake the Middle-East in their splendid image check out this, and this, and this, and this. The one redeeming behavior of the neoconservatives, if that’s what you can call it, is that they are vain and tend to leave a vast paper trail.

With the Obama Administration continuing to employ Sunni-terrorists in Syria as proxies, this fundamental contradiction in the war on terror narrative takes on increased significance. During the Cold War Democrats lived in fear of being labeled as soft on communism by Republicans and shied away from any compromise with the Soviets less they be tarred with appeasing the enemy.

Now that the Cold War has morphed into the war on terror, where America’s mortal enemy is supposedly al-qaeda, the Obama administration is not just compromising with al-qaeda but wielding them as a battlefield proxy in Syria and there is silence from the Republicans. In fact, the Republicans are urging them on.

A CNN op-ed that Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a leading voice on national security issues, wrote on Oct. 13, 2015, was particularly chilling. McCain called on Obama to support our moderate fighters in their struggle against the Syrian government, and going further in his bellicosity, urged Obama to inflict severe pain on Russia and Putin regardless of the consequences.

Of course, McCain and the Republicans, and Democrats like Obama pretend that we’re supporting moderates rather than terrorists in Syria and that we’re only doing it to bring about democracy but that’s a load of crap. McCain and Obama understand the ugly reality of the US palling around with terrorists, it’s only the American people who are in the dark.

This has to stop. If the American people discover that the Obama Administration is working with al-qaeda there will be hell to pay. Shit, the whole reason we went to war forever was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, in the wake of 9/11 that explicitly targeted al-qaeda.

“Under U.S. domestic law Obama justifies his attacks on the Islamic State in Syria (which is illegal under international law) with reference to the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists as passed by the United States Congress on September 14, 2001. According to that AUMF: That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist …”

I’m pretty sure the AUMF was a giant bait and switch. In the wake of 9/11, what were our policy makers like Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld concerned with? Give yourself cookie if you answered Iraq. I’m also pretty sure that the so-called war on terror is simply an excuse to wage an endless war and pursue the sorts of militaristic foreign policies that our deep-state demands.

All powerful and aggressive empires prize control over everything else. And their policy elites know that the biggest potential stumbling block to exercising control over the resources and/or strategically located territories they covet comes in the form cohesive polities—secular nation-states in our era—located on top of those precious materials and key pinch points. Conversely, they understand that they can actually exercise more control of the things (both material and strategic) they desire when such places are mired in internecine conflicts which, of course, eventually engender the creation of “failed states”.

The 2016 Presidential campaign has the potential to blow the lid off these falsehoods. The Donald, odious as he obviously is, reminds me of a classic Greek play with the appearance of Deus ex machina, an unexpected intervention of some new event, or character.”

If the US is still a democracy then the present US foreign policy of employing Sunni terrorists as proxies needs to come out of the shadows to be openly debated.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Next Phase

Posted on October 7, 2015 by camelotkidd

It’s back.

Like the monster in a B-grade Hollywood movie that refuses to stay in the grave, the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), the so-called trade treaty that many of us had assumed dead, was ratified in Atlanta this weekend.

Trade ministers from 12 countries announced the largest trade-liberalizing pact in a generation on Monday. In a press conference in Atlanta, trade ministers from the US, Australia and Japan called the the Trans-Pacific Partnership an “ambitious” and “challenging” negotiation that will cut red tape globally and “set the rules for the 21st century for trade”.

The TPP is not a trade deal as much as a corporate coup where our benighted rulers deploy trade policies, on behalf of corporations, rather than tanks to crush democracy. One of the provisions in the TPP–the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)–is a surrender of state sovereignty to corporations (see here, here, and here). It allows for secret arbitration panels to effectively overrule national regulations by allowing foreign investors to sue governments over lost potential future profits in secret arbitration panels.

Historically, the TPP represent the next phase of primitive accumulation, where member nations herd their citizens into corporate enclosures. The problem that neoliberal advocates always face is that neoliberal policies are wildly unpopular with citizens, hence the use of force by governments to ensure compliance.

Greg Grandin, author of the Empires Workshop, makes the connection from the TPP to the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the President of Chile in 1973, and imposition by force of radical free market economic policies under dictator General Pinochet. Grandin argues that the passage of the TPP will complete what the coup in Chile started.  Before the coup, President Allende recognized the grave threat that state supported corporations represented and spoke out eloquently about the risks Chileans faced in their experiment with democracy.

“We are faced by a direct confrontation between the large transnational corporations and the states. The corporations are interfering in the fundamental political, economic and military decisions of the states. The corporations are global organizations that do not depend on any state and whose activities are not controlled by, nor are they accountable to any parliament or any other institution representative of the collective interest. In short, all the world political structure is being undermined.”

Chile represented the first neoliberal “free market” experiment that was imposed by a military coup with US blessing.

Today what had to be imposed by tanks and torture in the 1970’s can be carried out via so-called trade treaties. The ISDS portion of the TPP allows corporations and investors to sue governments before tribunals of corporate lawyers to demand taxpayer compensation for any domestic law that investors believe will diminish their expected future profits.

By signing this treaty governments are essentially surrendering their sovereignty and renouncing democracy.

Of course, the TPP is not a done deal. Despite the success of the negotiations, the TPP still has to be ratified by lawmakers in each country.

Although the U.S. Congress voted to give President Obama “fast-track authority,” meaning the body gave up its power to amend the agreement and must simply vote yes or no, that is not a guarantee that the TPP will get the votes it needs. And, here’s where the fun begins–the attempt to pass the TPP will happen smack dab in the middle of a crazy presidential campaign where candidates from both parties are claiming to be against it.

Here’s Democratic candidate Bernie Sander speaking against the TPP.

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a disastrous trade agreement designed to protect the interests of the largest multi-national corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, the environment and the foundations of American democracy. The TPP is a treaty that has been written behind closed doors by the corporate world. Incredibly, while Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry and major media companies have full knowledge as to what is in this treaty, the American people and members of Congress do not. They have been locked out of the process.”

On the other side, GOP front runner Donald Trump opposes the agreement, which could put real pressure on House and Senate Republicans not to approve it.

Despite the spectacle the fight over the TPP provides we must never forget what’s at stake. Historian Greg Grandin reminds us of the connections between trade treaties, neoliberalism and the ongoing dirty wars waged by the US in foreign countries.

 “..as the Obama administration makes its final push for the TPP, it’s worth taking a moment to realize why all those people in Chile—and in Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and throughout Latin America—died and were tortured: to protect the “future profits” of multinational corporations.”

Update: Here’s Lambert at Naked Capitalism with a pithy summery of what the elite want from a so-called trade treaty like the TPP.

“…what the trans- and post-national squillionaire parasitroids who have injected their controlling, neoliberal, TINA-flavored ideological venom into the hive mind of our political class really want — is the destruction of national sovereignty in favor of global rule by the corporations they own.”

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Chickens Come Home to Roost

Posted on October 1, 2015 by camelotkidd

This is awkward.

By bombing Islamic terrorists in Syria, Russia has exposed the US’s war on terror for what it really is–a war of terror. The dirty little secret of the Syrian conflict is that the US and their allies have been employing the Nusra Front, which is the al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, as their proxy force to bring about regime change there.

Here’s Marcy at Emptywheel deconstructing this hairball.

“This attempt to distinguish ISIS from the CIA-backed rebels will quickly lead to an awkward place for the Administration and its allies, not least because making any distinction will require providing details on the vetting process used to select these forces, as well as addressing the evidence of cooperation with ISIS or traditional al Qaeda in the past. Plus, the more the US argues these groups that aren’t entirely distinct from al Qaeda are entirely distinct from ISIS, it will make the Administration’s claim that the 2001 AUMF against Al Qaeda authorizes it to fight ISIS (in related news, DOJ just denied USAT’s FOIA request for 3 OLC documents making that case) really wobbly.” 

Wow!

This might mean that the Obama Administration will have to tell the American people that the war on terror is a giant hoax.

Or, not.

Man, the neoconservatives are going to be pissed, as their beloved regime change operation in Syria just got a lot more complicated. Shit, imagine the language that Victoria Nuland is using around the dinner table tonight with hubby Robert Kagen. I bet the expletives are really flying.

Update: Veteran journalist Robert Parry has much more on how the neoconservatives have turned justifications for the war on terror upside down in their efforts to overthrow the Syrian government.

“Ultimately, President Barack Obama will have to decide if he wants to cooperate with Russia and Iran in beating back Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other jihadists – or realign U.S. policy in accord with Israel’s obsession with “regime change” in Syria, even if that means a victory by Al Qaeda. In other words, should the United States come full circle in the Middle East and help Al Qaeda win?”

Update 2: Here’s B, at Moon of Alabama, discussing in much more detail US and Israeli support of Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria.

The CIA mercenaries in Syria – 10,000 men trained, armed and paid under a secret program – are directly cooperating with al-Qaeda and the likewise terrorist Ahrar al Shams. The NYT finally acknowledges this in two pieces today. The first says:

The fighters advancing on that [northern] front were not from the Islamic State but from the Army of Conquest, a group that includes an affiliate of Al Qaeda known as the Nusra Front and other Islamist groups, including several more secular groups that have been covertly armed and trained by the United States.

The Israelis are now also admitting that they work with al-Qaeda:

Together with some local militias Nusra is in charge of most of the 100-kilometer border with Israel on the Syria side of the Golan Heights. In recent years, Nusra slightly toned down its militant ideology due to the influence of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which provide it with financial support.
…
Nusra is in control of most of the border but so far has reached a tacit understanding not to turn its weapons against the Jewish state.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Revolution Blues

Posted on September 29, 2015 by camelotkidd

In the US we have a neoliberal political and economic consensus among elites that has produced deregulation for corporations and banks, tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthy, punitive austerity for the poor, and a violent, militaristic foreign policy focused on dominating the Middle-East by use of terrorist proxies.

Let’s tally just a few of the recent outrages, shall we?

We have the US military working with pedophiles in Afghanistan and working with terrorists in Syria. We also have the largest US energy corporation–Exxon/Mobil–hiding it’s own evidence of global warming since 1977. And, just to top it off, we have a US justice department that’s more concerned about prosecuting international soccer officials than prosecuting rogue bankers who destroyed our economy.

This is our country if we care to look—endless war, unabated political criminality, economic looting, social upheaval, surveillance and cyber terror, and a military/intelligence/financial deep-state.

Does anyone examining this state of affairs honestly think that the best days are ahead for America?

Americans are starting to notice that these policies have not only failed, but are making them poorer and the world they inhabit far more dangerous. For evidence of these sentiments, look no further than the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders benefitting, as they are, from the contempt voters feel for present US economic and foreign policies.

Here at Camelotkidd posts about political-economy, foreign policy and the deep-state are interesting and informative but they’re also a way to expose the rotten core of America’s ruling consensus. In fact, that’s the whole point of this blog–to delegitimize the existing political and economic order in that we might begin to transform it into something better.

One of the best writers and futurists, John Michael Greer, comments on the challenges we face going forward and how we’re also going to have to create an entirely new narrative to describe this transformation.

“As the neoliberal consensus shatters and the failure of its policies becomes impossible to ignore any longer, another world is not merely possible, it’s inevitable. The question is purely what ideas, visions, dreams, hopes, and shuddering terrors will shape the world that will emerge from neoliberalism’s smoldering corpse—and that, dear reader, will be determined in part by what you yourself are willing to imagine, to work for, and to struggle for, during the difficult years ahead of us.” 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Epic Fail

Posted on September 28, 2015 by camelotkidd

Here’s what our efforts in Syria have amounted to.

“The West is more hated than ever. A recent poll found that 80 per cent of Syrians believe we created the Islamic State — a common belief, incidentally, throughout the Middle East (and not entirely inaccurate). So it took Washington and its reactionary Gulf allies four years and billions of dollars to end up eating humble pie. They have now effectively admitted that Moscow was right about Syria all along. In the process, they have undermined any humanitarian credibility our military adventurism may still have had after the Iraq nightmare.”

This is what the neoconservatives in charge of US foreign policy have wrought.

Savor it.

Will any one pay any price for this epic fail, or will they saunter on to a new and more exciting failure?

Personally, I’m betting on new and more exciting failure, since the neoconservatives never say they are sorry and never ever get held responsible for their ongoing failures.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote from the Great Gatsby seems about right in describing them.

“They were careless people—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Update: It just gets better and better.

“In another embarrassing setback for one of President Barack Obama’s centerpiece strategies for defeating the Islamic State, the Pentagon said Friday that the commander of U.S.-trained Syrians appears to have turned over his pickup trucks and weapons to al Qaeda militants in exchange for protection within days of re-entering his homeland.”

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Boy Play”

Posted on September 23, 2015 by camelotkidd

Thought I’d become inured to “war-on-terror” blowback.

Boy was I wrong.

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Of course, we have to allow the rape of young boys because the Taliban(who we’re fighting in Afghanistan) wants to outlaw this odious practice, just as they want to ban the opium trade, by the way. This definitely poses a problem for US policy, since if the Taliban is for something we, by definition, must be against it.

That guy Orwell wrote something about this sort of crazy up-is-down, endless war situation, I think.

What was the name of that book again?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ahmed

Posted on September 22, 2015 by camelotkidd

14 years since 9/11 and we’re still so deathly afraid of terrorists that we freak the fuck out and arrest and handcuff a teenage honor student for making a clock and bringing it to school. To no ones surprise, his name was Ahmed Mohamed.

Home of the brave, indeed.

That’s what’s going on in the homeland. Meanwhile, in the Middle-East we’re busy palling around with terrorists as part of a foreign policy that makes less and less sense with each passing day. Many have commented on the fact that America has, “descended into a morass of fearful confusion,” with the arrest of Ahmed but few have noticed the fundamental contradictions in the whole war on terror narrative. We’re scared to death of scary-brown terrorists here in the homeland yet we’re busy employing Al Qaeda, our supposed arch-enemy and also scary-brown terrorists, in Syria as a force to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Close US allies, especially Saudi Arabia, also sponsor terrorism and terrorists, according to no less an authority than Vice President Joe Biden. Biden claims that Saudi Arabia and the other Arab gulf states “poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into … Al Nusra and Al Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world,” groups that eventually morphed into ISIS.

Noted MIT Professor of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, comments on this support for terrorists by US allies and what sort of Frankenstein monster they have created. “Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Quranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. The ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jehadi flames.”

I’m really starting to think there’s something to the whole deep state thing with the schizophrenic nature of US policy towards Syria in utilizing Sunni terrorists as a means to carry out regime change while simultaneously bombing them. Why, it’s almost like there are two centers of power vying for control over US foreign policy.

To fully comprehend how the war on terror narrative was rewritten–from fighting Al Qaeda to utilizing them–a good place to start is The Redirection, by Seymour Hersh, written in 2007, during the last years of the Bush administration. It’s scary how prescient that article was.

When one examines the US history of employing Sunni terrorists for foreign policy objectives, a pattern emerges. It turns out that employing terrorism is a brutally efficient and cost effective means of advancing American objectives. These objectives amount to fragmenting states and destroying social bonds across societies, all the better to plunder resources and control political trajectories.

The only problem with this approach, in addition to the obvious moral quandaries, is that the neoconservatives who have formulated and are busy carrying out these horrible policies are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Pretty much everything they have touched has turned to shit. They have an epic record of failure yet not one of them has ever been held accountable. Even more alarming is that even as they lurch from one catastrophe to the next they still wield powerful levers of power within the US government and elite media.

In the meantime, we are left to stew in the “Islamaphobia” and racism stirred up by the neoconservative architects of the endless war on terror. Given that American citizens live in a sea of ignorance, these sorts of crazy incidents like the arrest of Ahmed for bringing a clock to school will become normalized.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

There is an Alternative

Posted on September 14, 2015 by camelotkidd

Turns out that there is an alternative, after all.

“Something astonishing has just occurred in British politics. On Saturday, the Labour Party elected Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old, unabashed socialist, as its new leader. Corbyn won a staggering 59.5 percent of the vote in a four-way contest. He is the most left-wing leader in Labour’s history, a serial dissenter within the party, a man who nobody ever thought would win the leadership election.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment