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Showing posts from April 3, 2022

UK Energy: Government Goes Nuclear

 

The Last Thing we Need is a Long War

What we can do is raise the demand for peace and for the British government to get off its bellicose high horse. Tory machismo at the expense of other people’s lives needs to be replaced by serious support for a diplomatic end to the war. Even President Zelensky knows the danger. There is a Nato camp, he said last week, which doesn’t “mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.”

War Crimes. Whose Crimes?

When they commit them, they are war crimes . When we do it, it’s fighting insurgents and terrorists; it’s a mistake or they were rogue soldiers involved; or it’s a collateral damage. I think the article concludes with a utopian vision in the current international balance of powers and the prospects of more wars and instability. Who is going to make the ICC function impartially in every war?  One needs to question the existing regimes East and West and interconnect wars with major social and political-economic issues engulfing the world. Listing war crimes committed by ‘liberal democrats’ and authoritarians, does not go beyond recalling events that have become common knowledge and exposing hypocrisy and double standards that many ordinary people have already noticed. More than ever the type of journalism required today is radical, ‘extremist’ journalism in a very extremist world; as Mark Mazower put it, we urgently need a journalism that is able to “ overcome  the frangmentatio...

Discriminatory Love

I have lived in this area for 18 years. I have never seen ‘love’ extended to Iraqis and Afghanis adorning shop windows in London, for example.

Ukraine and Imperialism

I disagree with Callinicos’s position on Syriza though. It sounds an ultra-leftist stance for me, and he does not specify when Syriza should have been opposed before the capitulation of Alexis Tsipras or after. A reply to Paul Mason

Iran-US: When Friends Fall out

“Even if I’m cut to pieces, the people won’t let your British lackey rule. You slaves!” The Times ran a series, likely drafted by the notorious academic spy Ann Lambton, describing the oil nationalisation crisis as a product of the faulty “Persian character", while “the horse-faced Oriental” Mosaddegh was a hysterical symptom of an old feudal order that couldn’t take responsibility for its own shortcomings. Can the prime minister, a seasoned politician three decades his senior, not see the British themselves are ruthless? That they are trying to starve the people into submission with sanctions? That they provoke the religious fundamentalists who shot him, leaving him with this shattered leg, forever leaning on a cane to just get across a room? In the service of US and British geopolitical interests

Madeleine Albright

 Her awful, awful career

We Are All in It Together

US chief executives are on track to reap record rewards this year, raising the prospect of fresh clashes with investors and employees as the gap between their earnings and those of their staff widens to a historic multiple in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.  For the 280 S&P 500 companies that have reported figures this year, the median chief executive’s pay has jumped to a record $14.2mn for 2021, up from $13.5mn in 2020, according to ISS Corporate Solutions, a data provider.  Equilar, another data company that tracks chief executive rewards at the biggest companies by revenue, said the median among 196 companies that have reported this year has rocketed 20 per cent to $14.3mn, after having dipped to $12mn in 2020. Among the largest executive pay packages to have been announced were David Zaslav’s $247mn at Discovery, Pat Gelsinger’s $178.6mn at Intel and Andy Jassy’s $212.7mn at Amazon — which was made public the same day workers in New York voted to form Amazon’s firs...

Counting the Cost of the Iraqi Invasion of Iraq