Because I said that I support Cuba against any invasion by Trump, the USA or anyone else. Someone mentioned Freedom and Cuba’s jails.
The USA also has jails, and the UK has prisons. UK Citizens here, protesters, were recently being arrested for wearing a Palestine Action-T- SHIRT.
Is that Free Speech in the Capitalist War-Mongering West?
Cuba is a Socialist society, not a communist one, due to sabotage, boycotts, and embargoes.
Have you ever been to Cuba?
What have you witnessed?
**
Someone mentioned the ‘poor people of Cuba’, suffering from ‘tragic control’.
The people of Cuba have free welfare and medicine, unlike the poor people of the USA.
Cuba has a Higher literacy rate per capita than the USA.
It’s one of the most educated populations.
There is less wealth inequality in socialist Cuba; everyone shares the wealth.
What is affecting Cuba at the moment, and has been doing so since the early 1960’s, is the USA blockade and embargo.
When you take a close look at global health and social justice, the differences between Cuba and the United States paint a striking picture of what’s happening in both healthcare and systemic issues. Americans often criticise Cuba for its socialist political system, but the American government fails to mention how the country has made some impressive strides in health and education. With a literacy rate that outshines the US and a healthcare system that offers free, universal services to all its citizens, Cuba shows that it’s entirely possible to put health and education first, even when times are tough.
In Cuba, healthcare is all about prevention. They focus on catching health problems early and managing them before they escalate. The island has about 9 doctors per 1,000 people, which is a huge difference compared to the US, where there are just 2.6. This approach to preventive care not only keeps healthcare costs down in the long run but also results in better health outcomes—like longer life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates—than in the US. Plus, with an incredible vaccination rate of 98% among kids by age two, Cuba has wiped out diseases like polio and measles. And by 2015, they were the first country to stop the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mothers to their babies.
However, you have to recognise that these achievements come with their fair share of challenges. The US embargo limits Cuba’s access to crucial medicines and supplies. According to the Cuban Foreign Minister, the embargo caused about $7.5 billion in damage from March 2024 to February 2025, undermining all the health progress the country has made. Being labelled a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” by the US has also created real fears for banks and organisations when it comes to helping Cuba, even for humanitarian reasons.
The current US foreign policy—with fuel blockades and tariffs—has strained relationships and made it tough for countries like Cuba to get the aid they need. UN human rights experts have called these actions violations of international law, as they undermine hospitals, water supplies, and food security, making life even harder for everyday people. In October 2025, the UN General Assembly condemned the embargo, with many countries arguing that it prevents access to vital resources.
Critics of Cuba did not mention the poor people of Trump’s America, with the 3rd world in its own backyard, who cannot pay for medical treatment, you didn’t mention the poor and homeless of Chile, of some African countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Critics conveniently ignore the controlled and fatal repression of US citizens, the murders against working people’s civil rights activity in the USA, the bombings of black churches, by the Klan and white supremacists implicating the FBI and Edgar J Hoover.
On that flip side, you also need to face the fact that the US is struggling with its own systemic inequalities. Even with all its wealth, many poor Americans endure deep economic injustices. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its criminal justice system often targets marginalised communities, especially people of colour. Problems like harsh policing, unfair sentencing, and terrible jail conditions show just how flawed the justice system can be, leaving too many without necessary support.
A recent critic had not mentioned all the information that the Pentagon papers and files revealed, and more.
Critics of Cuba forget the Assassinations of democratically elected presidents, of leaders of movements for racial equality, and the right to vote in the USA.
And now Capitalist critic’s darling hero, ‘Trump’ whose speeches they admire, Trump’s untrained, unconstitutional ICE agents, are behaving like Nazi brown shirts. Trump’s illegal war against Iran resembles the previous Iraq wars that were waged using lies and deceit.
In comparing Cuba and the US, it’s clear that while Cuba is making great strides in education and healthcare, the US is still fighting against long-standing social injustices and inequities.
The conversation around Cuba’s healthcare isn’t just political; it reveals a lot about how different societies prioritise health and well-being. The USA could learn from what Cuba does well.
I’ll mention more of the ‘poor’ people critics of Cuba seem concerned about.
I’m also remembering the Employer’s blacklisting of British building workers who were sacked for asking for secure, safe, and healthy working conditions. That left those workers and their families poor; they could not get jobs.
I notice a Cuban critic admired a speech of Donald Trump, describing it as eloquent, the man who helps the rich, not the poor, but his Rich friends, tax cuts for himself, the felon, the man who is part of a grooming group led by Epstein. The Cuban critic I argued with seemed to have the same worldview as Trump.
I don’t believe we can talk about communism or socialism without talking about capitalism.
Critics of Cuba seem to be people who don’t want socialism, is that right?
They prefer capitalism. Profit before people.
Do British critics of Cuba agree with privatising our water?
Do those critics think the profit before people, profit before nature, is a motive that works?
Tell me how privatisation and capitalism has succeeded when our rivers are polluted.
The particular critic I discussed these issues with, recognised this fact in his own posts.
According to his own posts, he was ‘dipping’ each day to help end sewage pollution, when it is the water companies who are to blame. It is evident he wants to cure the symptoms but not the causes of pollution.
Capitalism’s selfish greed. The profit of shareholders on water companies!!
I was shocked and angry by a radio news announcement that we are going to bail out a private water company for its failures, with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, when we should be nationalising water companies. We would then be able to invest those profits, which are usually paid out to private shareholders, in modernising our water system.
We should be investing in ourselves, using those profits to improve conditions and bring lower prices, rather than having that money go to shareholders.
The government should have fined and penalised those private water companies and shareholders more for all the sewage and effluent they released into our rivers and seas. Instead, they’re compensating them for their greed and mismanagement.
We are going to bail out a private water company for its failures, with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, when we should be nationalising water companies.
We could then invest those profits, which are usually paid out to private shareholders, in modernising our water system.
What is the Labour government’s argument for this bailout?
They’re just trying to manage and run capitalism better than the Tories. No change then!
Tory governments always privatised the institutions that were making a profit and doing well,
I would vote for nationalising water, railways, transport, and to renationalise our post office (what is called the
‘Royal Mail’ ) and also the banks that have been bailed out by using public money, so they belong to us anyway, also various gas and electric power companies....
Look at the sewerage: all profits go into shareholders’ pockets before being used to fund repairs and an efficient system. Same with railways.
My argument is that those taxes, we’re talking about, this bailout propping up private companies whose shareholders reap all the profits, is taxpayers’ money that could have gone into modernising, renovating, and improving, but has not been used for that.
They should have fined and penalised those water companies and shareholders more for all the sewage and effluent they released into our rivers and seas. Instead, they’re compensating them for their greed and mismanagement.
Privatisation provides rewards for failure…a dividend for investors…
The only side capitalism is on is the side of profit, no loyalties or patriotism, no community benefit-
Just like the railways, telecom, energy, and fishing.
Then they suddenly apply ‘socialism’ to bail out the banks with taxpayers’ money.... those same ‘bankrupt’ bankers scrounging huge bonuses…
We, the taxpayers, should own those banks; we should nationalise the banks that we bailed out.
I noticed that during Covid, working people ran the country: doctors, Bus drivers, fire brigades, NHS staff, Nurses, and took all the health risks. Not banks, not self-serving capitalists, not that Tory ‘business woman’ crook Mone,
With plundered money frivolously spent as quickly as it was stolen from us taxpayers, before the law could make her pay back what she pilfered.
What were they, the capitalists, doing? They were trying to make money from COVID, selling dysfunctional masks, those self-serving Tories and-
Capitalists are as harmful to society as organised crime.
Many of the richest 0.1% – individuals worth more than $40m – want to cut social security and healthcare. They are less supportive of a minimum wage than the rest of the population. They favour decreased government regulation of big corporations.
There’s good reason to be concerned about the impact on democracy if wealthy individuals are exerting influence through their philanthropy, as the choices made by philanthropists tend to reinforce social inequalities rather than reduce them.
Farage, Reform, and Trump are trying to sabotage and defund education. They want to help finance private schools, public schools, where elitists, like Farage and Tice, studied.
Trump’s tax plan, not unlike the Tories and Reform, gives £10bn to the rich, not the poor; the wages of people at the bottom are always “unaffordable” but never the wages of people at the top. Tax dodger Farage is threatening the care workers who looked after us through COVID, and who pay taxes, unlike him.
Capitalism only works for the wealthy; its system has failed us, working people.
We should already own the banks that we’ve bailed out!
The Tories denationalised and sold off things that made a profit, like the Royal Mail, and we are still bailing out companies that fail with public money.
Capitalism ain’t working.
Critics of Cuba don’t seem to know the history of Cuba and its people, the revolution.
They are unable to name one country whose citizens are safer and freer because the USA invaded, because the USA’s corporations wanted that country’s oil/minerals, and took down that country’s government. And installed a puppet government
in its place.
Unlike Cuba. The USA has toppled democratically elected governments and replaced them with dictators.
In the words of the late Peter Ustinov: ‘Terrorism is the war of the poor, war is the terrorism of the rich.’
The criminals are the wealthy corporations that can afford lawyers and who make some laws that favour themselves; the victims are us, the working poor.
It’s ridiculous and dishonest to claim that an attack or a war against Cuba is justified because the government in Cuba is an odious one.’ That is for the people of Cuba to decide. Not Trump, Not the USA.
If we go by Trump’s rules, kidnapping presidents of other countries, then Trump should be kidnapped, and Netanyahu should be kidnapped for war crimes.
The particular critic of Cuba pretended to care about the poor, the impoverished, and those being controlled,
Then, I suggested, he look back at Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. Bush lied, as did his advisors, Cheney, and heads of oil companies, mineral companies; they didn’t care about ’the poor, the genocide.
In Dofa, there was ethnic cleansing; The USA didn’t go in and help those poor people. Why? Because they didn’t have our oil under their soil!
War is Capitalism by other means. Trump ain’t fighting for the poor; he’s fighting for oil, just as the USA has always done.
In Indonesia, Brazil, and Guatemala, funding murder, torture, and genocide.
The CIA hired a 22-year-old Iraqi named Saddam Hussein, who rented an apartment in Beirut and was then moved to Cairo, where he was paid as an agent of Egyptian intelligence and was a frequent visitor to the US Embassy. Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials welcomed him as an ally against Iran.
Many oif us know some of the rest of the story.
OMISSION is the most powerful form of lie.
*The heart of socialism should be the extension of real democracy into every sphere of life.
The US has been undermining democracy for many years.
For decades, USAID, and its Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI), supplied the opposition with funding and training to defeat the Venezuelan socialists.
This included funding and training for opposition students and their organisations; sending NGO representatives critical of the Venezuelan government abroad to drum up international resistance to its policies; and reaching out to supporters of the Venezuelan government through neutral-looking but opposition-led community groups to direct them toward opposition political parties.
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world; it’s socialism.
Critics of Cuba believe in Capitalism….however…We’ve all witnessed how capitalists always want socialism to step in when things go wrong.
Privatise the profits, socialise the losses. It’s the Tory capitalist way and, even worse, austerity will be Reform’s way.
It’s bad enough under Starmer.
They suddenly apply ‘socialism’ to bail out the banks with taxpayers’ money, those same ‘bankrupt’ bankers scrounging huge bonuses....
The Tories and Reform (Deformed Tories) will always give us something to vote against, and I, all of us, will continue to do that.
But I felt at the time, Corbyn gave us something to vote FOR.
Socialism is turned into a dirty word in OUR country and the USA because it threatens people at the top.
Those millionaire newspaper non-dom tax-dodging owners.
New aristocrats, wealthy men pretending to be Farmers to avoid paying inheritance tax.
I believe in People and planet before profit and greed. Equality.
No racism, Equal pay, Public ownership of resources such as water, power, transport, health care, and postal services: libraries, a reliable transport system for all and more.
We should stop property speculation and those developments that break up communities.
We should proceed with as much compassion as possible. I don’t want to dehumanise anyone, as history shows - violence will lead to violence, murder and genocide— to dehumanise anyone is dangerous. That’s what Reform and fascists are doing.
To quote Nelson Mandela:
“A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.”
There’s a class war, alright. The Upper-wealthy class is waging it.
That Class war was declared before any of us were even born!
Which brings us back to your concerns for ‘poor people’.
The real enemy is poverty, austerity and those who impose and perpetuate it. There can be no peace without justice. Capitalist greed is the enemy.
Self-made millionaires who have received help from Tory Government politicians for favours like financial donations to election funds.
The previous government was sabotaging the NHS to see it slowly privatised and destroy the power of organised labour.
The NHS is socialism, free for everyone, like CUBA has, but ours has been undermined.
A rent rise
Is equal to a wage cut
They might raise a wage
But they put a thousand prices up.
Let’s talk about poverty, about being poor in Britain or the USA.
We know what poverty does.
In my experience, the damage of poverty is like the damage of war; it can last a lifetime, spread to loved ones and contaminate the next generation. It stunts children, brings on a host of diseases, “it’s like being in prison”. This prison has invisible walls.
Working a job that denies us a living wage.
Incredibly, although today poverty is more disguised, countless British children still go to bed hungry and are ruthlessly denied opportunities.
When you have little money, with a reduced income you have to budget and prioritise spending, that is what's happening.
Just as we have many poor people of Trump’s capitalist America, with the 3rd world in its own backyard, who cannot pay for medical treatment,
the US is struggling with its own systemic inequalities. Even with all its wealth, many poor Americans endure deep economic injustices.
With Trump Americas debt has risen to some 39 Trillion dollars! American literacy is rife, in a country that is also banning books! Which I've already mentioned Censorship exists. Freedom in America is not happening.
We need grassroots efforts to empower low-income and working-class communities, grounded in mutual aid rather than charity. Charity is not what we want from benevolent despots with strings attached.
Never mind that Tory’s tax plan gives £10bn to the rich, not the poor; the wages of people at the bottom are always “unaffordable” but never the wages of people at the top.
Our behaviour is governed by the work we are ‘forced’ to do. We must alter our behaviour. New jobs must be created.
But what were the capitalist-minded politicians and businesspeople doing during COVID?
What were they, the capitalists, doing? They were trying to make money from COVID, selling dysfunctional masks; those self-serving Tories and Capitalists are as harmful to society as organised crime.
Tory peer Michelle Mone bought a yacht and stole taxpayers’ money!
‘The multi-millionaires (who pay little tax) give/donate money to the Tory party, and in return a thousand million pounds of taxpayers’ money is given back to them.’
We have that wealthy corporation owner, Donald Trump, a man who avoided conscription in the army, a man who did not have to work to ‘earn’ his money but inherited his wealth. This man, who is now the ‘leader’ of the ‘Free’ world, is a man whose rich corporate buddies have hired and ‘paid’ other, so-called, ‘scientific experts’ to speak to validate their mining, their oil industry, and their fracking corporations. So that Trump and his corporate class can have their ‘truth.’
Your hero, Trump, now whines that to criticise him, the president, is treasonable and to investigate him is now called a smear campaign against him!
Farage was never for the working class but on the side of the ruling classes and the rich.
Why shouldn’t bad laws be broken or challenged every day?
Mandela, a freedom fighter against ‘bad’ racist apartheid laws, was called a ‘lawbreaking ‘terrorist.’ Now he is seen as a statesman around the world.
In some cultures and countries, it is against the law to cut down ancient trees for construction purposes. Perhaps that law should be universal.
So, should we forgive the Nazis just because their crimes were deemed ‘legal’ and ‘acceptable’ in this or that country under that regime at the time?
The ruling colonial classes, an organised gang of Tory landowners, who not only colonised much of the world but also many of the British working class, want to dumb us down. Elitist, Steve Bannon and Trump dislike Education and Culture. It is all part of the culture war Steve Bannon spoke of. They all cry patriotism, but not justice.
(See my previous Blog about Steve Bannon and U.S. ultra-conservatives taking aim at Pope Francis.)
Talking about the USA’s warmongering, organised crime, and their terrorist groups, like the CIA and FBI, and their war machine.
Capitalism has toppled governments and undermined democracy.
Its old hidden mantra is ‘profit before people.
The US economy would collapse if poverty were eradicated and if people no longer needed private insurance companies.
I’ve got far more in common with any first-generation immigrant than I have with the
Westminster elitists and greedy capitalist looters who have wrecked and sold our country and the USA.
If builders are homeless, tailors wear rags
And farmers are starving
We'll have to turn things upside down
Take what we make and everything.
The rich have friends in high places
Us poor; we have poverty
Those who think money will do everything
Will do everything for money.
If Politicians were made to work down a mine
There'd be shorter hours and a wage rise.
The vices of the rich are called ‘errors and mistakes’
The vices of the poor are labeled ‘crimes.’
We don't want patches, we're freezing
We want the coat,
We don't want breadcrumbs, we're starving
We want the whole loaf.
We want the bakery.
Tories tried to explain that
It was our fault that our country was in a mess
Then they praised the poor for being thrifty
And asked the starving to eat less.
When you hear them beginning
To say freedom, look around ya
Look carefully; see who it is,
That they want you to butcher.
Trump tells us, 'You’ve got to learn how not
To organize and protest,’
Poverty isn’t a disgrace to us; it’s an inconvenience and a challenge to find salvation.
A good poor man is better than a good rich man because he has to resist more temptations.
I’m both war and peace; the peace within me doesn’t want the war inside me.
Put miners, cleaners, dustmen, and dinner ladies in Ten Downing Street. I’d rather see them elected.
Put Reform and the Tories in the trash bin. Let’s get the trash collected.
The stories we hear and read are just the ones that have been allowed to be told, because all the others have been concealed.
The fight is fixed. The cheats and liars are now in control.
Unfortunately, many poor people will continue to vote for selfish rich people at the expense of other poor people who voted for socialism.
I remember a Tory saying, ‘Mick Lynch should be put in his place.’
What is ‘his place’?
Because intelligent articulate working class people frighten the crap out of the Tories, Greedy and aren’t they saying that we, all of us working people, should be more servile?
Mick Lynch is a working-class hero.
He’s a socialist who is not concerned with his own advancement or status.
He’s not saying what he’s being told to say by his boss on the promise of a promotion.
He’s not beholden to Rothmere or Rupert Murdoch.
The Tory government tried to pit RMT workers against the general public, as if these workers were not part of the general public themselves.
Where were all the interviews with the rail bosses and major shareholders to explain why they deserved to benefit from profits and not the workers or the customers?
It’s not the unions that hold the public to ransom, but the shareholders.
Who was causing the damage to the railways? Not the RMT union. While those calling for pay restraint were earning £6-500,000 a year, including the leader of Network Rail, who is also the chair of the Bank of England, and the Rail bosses, who made £500 million.
We shouted “Solidarity with RMT transport workers’ Union, Not organised greed, press barons and millionaires
who always get help from organised Tory politicians.”
New aristocrats are wealthy men pretending to be Farmers to avoid paying inheritance tax.
The poor English working class is the poor English working class’s worst enemy at the moment.
You can see it in the military. Mates, I went to school with some who joined the army as a career. Some boys and men who went to war realised ‘their side’ was ‘the enemy.’
Corporations are happy with fascists in power-
Not for feeding the Hungry working people, benefiting the homeless—just tax cuts and profits for themselves, the rich.
The only side capitalism is on is the side of profit, no loyalties or patriotism-
Nazis weren’t anti-capitalist. And US capitalism was pro fascist.
Today, it’s the same:
follow the money.
British arms manufacturers end up in the hands of ISIS.
Following the D-Day Landings of early June 1944 – with American soldiers capturing their first German vehicles in Normandy, France – they were bemused to discover that many of the Wehrmacht engines were produced by General Motors, along with the mighty Ford Motor Company, another US transnational, and also Opel, owned by General Motors; this might not have been so surprising. The American magnate Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and a virulent anti-Semite, was an early fan of Hitler.
You/we call this system a Democracy?
Our political system appears democratic, but undemocratic forces largely control it.
Socialism has been sabotaged and overthrown by frightened capitalist nationalist countries who wish to stop its spread. From Cuba and Chile to Grenada and Venezuela- to Gough Whitlam -
Let’s begin with political funding.
Our system permits billionaires and corporations to outspend and outmuscle the electorate.
The great majority of the Conservative Party’s funding comes from a small number of very wealthy individuals.
Just five hedge fund managers have given it £18m over the past 10 years. They’ve started to give money to Reform UK Limited, because they are on the side of the wealthy, not on the side of the poor, which you say you’re so worried about!
The secretive Leader’s Group grants big donors special access to the prime minister and his frontbenchers in return for their money. Courting and cultivating rich people to win elections corrupts our politics, replacing democracy with plutocracy.
Some of the seats in the House of Lords are reserved for hereditary aristocrats. Some are reserved for bishops, making this the world’s only country, other than Iran, in which religious leaders have an automatic right to sit.
The rest are appointments of grace and favour, keeping power within existing circles. Many of the seats are granted to major political donors, reinforcing the power of money.
In any other country, they would call it ‘corruption.’
If Knighthoods can be bought… if knighthoods can also be used to buy people… then what are they worth when given to a champion fool with a selfish cavalier attitude towards poverty?
With a ‘Gallantry’ expressed only to the fortunate, wealthy, and the well off.
Britain first?
No, it’s the tax-dodging wealthy scroungers first.
Russian oligarchs given lordships, Lebedev, the Tories are the primary recipients of Russian cash.
Lebedev was made a Peer in 2021.
He is a mate of Boris Johnson.
-These wealthy nationalist landowning aristocrats and Farage want feudalism.
Austerity was never a necessity; it was a choice by our government.
Can you imagine how much better health care would be if the upper classes had to receive the same level of treatment as the rest of us?
Things would be different if ministers looked after their children
and had to deal with them being ill with a virus,
Or had to care for an elderly relative!
Kids will play together until someone teaches them to hate others.
People teach their kids to grow up to hate.
I’ve met them.
I went to school and grew up with some ‘friends’ who became white van men, who called me ‘wog lover, ‘Gypo,’ and all sorts of names.
I grew up with ignorant working-class racists at school,
Just because they were ‘working-class’ racists didn’t make their racism more ‘authentic’ or their ignorance more acceptable than middle-class racists or aristocratic, wealthy racists and xenophobes.
Those of us working-class people who despise fascism, racism, misogyny, and government corruption, whatever the government is in power, we aren’t responsible for the rise of and behaviour of people from the same working-class background exhibiting those behaviours.
I wouldn’t look down on anyone, and I won’t look up to anyone because of their class,
I’ll look them straight in the eye, if they don’t accept me for myself as honest and open as I want to be, whatever class they are, if they were the queen or a prince or a wealthy person, fuck ’em and their ignorant pretensions.
Travelling and working abroad, being a ‘stranger’, having to survive and learn another language, has helped broaden my horizons and thoughts on all this and much more,
especially racism and xenophobia, homelessness and sharing.
I’ve noticed how certain Black folks aren’t allowed to do well in these social media pages. I recall
Marcus Rashford, a young working-class black footballer who ‘worked hard to better himself and who has become successful, was badmouthed in some posts because he became successful and he campaigned to get free school meals for ‘disadvantaged’ kids during the school holidays, and happened to show up the Tory government, forcing them to make a U-turn.
Because of this, Marcus, the young working-class black man, was labelled by racists as an “overpaid rich man”.
While other black men without as much wealth are also prejudged and are called “muggers, drug dealers, scroungers, rapists.”
You can’t win if you do well, or if you’re unlucky!
Double standards…
Racism.
A toast to Marcus Rashford, a young working-class black footballer who worked hard to better himself. He campaigned to get free school meals for disadvantaged kids during the school holidays, but he showed up as selfish, corrupt Tories, like Michelle Mone. I’m proud of that young man.
Rupert Lowe’s prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance.
It’s the racist calling anti racists racists.
White supremacist racists like him are the reason that incest is not allowed.
But of course, incest is how the fascists like him will try to achieve his mythical indigenous white ‘master race’ that doesn’t exist except in his own deluded, ignorant imagination.
Some ‘professional’ racists like him won’t change because they’ve got too much to lose, apart from their face and their
Affiliations with fascist organisations.
I recall it was the British wealthy, racist aristocracy classes who supported Hitler and Fascism.
Nationalism suits the landowning classes
because it gives us poor working-class people a sense of ownership
without us actually owning anything at all.
It’s the territorial trap of nationalism.
Nationalists need borders
because they need some certainty of where their loyalties end.
The greatest lie of nationalism is that it defends the interests of its nationals. They’d say:
“You might not have land, but at least you have England.”
Some ‘flag lovers,’ who are worried about other versions of ‘their’ flag, are turning the country into uncritical tribalism, the blind flag-wavers seem to be those who want to preserve the past while stopping the future from being born, prejudiced cowards for power, uninterested in community and justice, united by delusions about their ancestry and by a common hatred of their neighbours.
Capitalism finances Fascism.
The only side corporations are on during war is the side of profit.
And Banks. Former Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Montagu “Monty” Norman, who was a German sympathiser, wanted to ensure the German economy could fuel the country’s war machine and that the Nazis had an outlet for their looted gold.
When you follow the money, you realise where big business’s sympathies and interests lie. Arms manufacturers profit most. It’s all about power.
And what money can buy and afford to pay for…Power
And putting the puppets and people they want into power.
Corporations are happy with fascists in power-
Not for feeding the poor, hungry working people…benefitting the homeless no…just tax cuts and profits for themselves…the rich. It’s no surprise that the Daily Mail owner, anti-Semite Lord Rothmere, also supported Oswald Mosley’s fascists.
Many privately owned corporations invested in Nazi Germany- Ford Motors, Coca-Cola. The privately owned Krupp company supported the Nazi regime. It used slave labour, which was used by the Nazi Party to help carry out the Holocaust, with Krupp reaping the economic benefit. He assisted in bringing Hitler to power in 1933.
Powerful German industrialists and bankers had likewise played a part in securing the chancellorship for Hitler, including the magnate Fritz Thyssen (of Thyssen AG, the steel company) and Hjalmar Schacht (Reichsbank president).
US private companies benefited from Fascism.
The Standard Oil Company sent $2 million to Nazi Germany in 1933. We were also making $500,000 a year in helping the Germans to produce gas/fuel for war purposes- Fascism was suitable to American Capitalism’s economic needs.
As I said before,
Nazis weren’t anti-capitalist. US capitalism was pro fascist.
Thyssen, born into one of Germany’s wealthiest families, was introduced to Hitler in 1923 by the country’s former dictator Erich Ludendorff, who persuaded the industrialist to attend a rally where Hitler was to speak. Later on, Thyssen became closely linked with the New York-based Union Banking Corporation, managed by American banker Prescott Bush, who was also a director of the company, which represented Thyssen’s US business interests.
Prescott Bush was the father and grandfather of future presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, who had links to a German firm that was involved in Nazi slave labour and centrally involved in strengthening the Nazi war machine.
American capitalists-industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy. They extended aid to help Fascism seize power, and they helped keep it there.
The only side capitalism is on is the side of profit- no loyalties or patriotism-they did business with Fascists.
Today it’s the same, follow the money…British arms manufacturers end up in the hands of ISIS.
Following the D-Day Landings of early June 1944 – with American soldiers capturing their first German vehicles in Normandy, France – they were bemused to discover that many of the Wehrmacht engines were produced by General Motors, along with the mighty Ford Motor Company, another US transnational, and also Opel, owned by General Motors. This might not have been so surprising. The American magnate Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company and a virulent anti-Semite, was an early fan of Hitler.
Ford operations in Germany recorded booming profits, from 25.8 million Reichsmarks in 1933 to 60.4 million Reichsmarks in 1939.
Ford used his immense power and influence to quash unions, control immigrant workers, and vilify Jewish people.
In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America.
The series ran for 91 issues.
Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled “The International Jew” and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers.
Henry Ford legitimised anti-Semitic racist ideas.
Ford also republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious Russian forgery translated into English. It claimed the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy -- that a group of Jews got together and basically planned the fate of the world, be it financial catastrophe, be it war. This little cabal of Jews controlled the world.
In 1938, Ford received an award from the Nazi regime called the ‘Grand Cross of the German Eagle.’
Ford’s writing inspired Hitler.
Fascists are dehumanising people again. Tribalism.
We have Orangemen, sabre rattling, constipated flag shaggers. When a bunch of Irishmen dress as Englishmen to celebrate a Dutchman, they show their loyalty as Ulstermen.
For many, the reason for bigotry isn’t as important as the act of bigotry when you hate so much that you can’t even remember why you hate in the first place.
It’s Divide and Rule
White privilege does exist. It’s just that the rich, mostly-white, privileged Etonians who run the country are holding back working-class white kids, too, as well as Black working-class kids.
Racism is a factor here-it’s ethnic minorities and the black community that suffer. Minorities are more likely to be in the struggling “class.”
Farage bleated on during the Brexit campaign about Sovereignty
It has always been a myth. Farage is a Thatcherite.
Reformers are deformed Tories.
Thatcher’s Tories sold everything off to overseas corporations,
Who ran our trains before privatisation?
British Rail. Who ran our Royal Mail until they were sold off cheaply?
Our water was sold off to the corrupt Enron corporation and a Malaysian company. Privatised for profit, then asset-stripped.
They are about to allow Trump’s Rich corporate friends, who are already screwing up American poor working people, creating poverty,
To come and send us their Chlorinated chicken....
Their medical insurance companies and Pharmaceutical companies are ready to take over our NHS.
Brexit supporter campaigner and ‘patriotic’ millionaire DYSON is now opening factories in Singapore, which seems to be using EU trading and manufacturing laws to have his trade flowing in and out through the back door.
Other Brexit supporters are seeking citizenship in other countries...those rats who caused our decline are now trying to flee, leaving the ‘sinking’ ship.
It’s Trump’s America First! And by that, he doesn’t mean the American people, but his rich friends.
It’s not the British people first. It’s Capitalism and the wealthy first.
If Farage and Nationalists like you support and like Trump,
I’m wondering about Trump’s economic nationalism, his tariffs, and the recent financial hostility of the United States to the UK, and towards other capitalist countries
Isn’t there now a contradiction for Nationalists?
Because
America first doesn’t mean Britain first,
And “Britain first” doesn’t mean “America first”!
There’s a contradiction there.
Not for Trump and friends, it’s money, profits, Capitalism before any empty, ‘meaningless ‘patriotism.
Those are the other rich scroungers we should be worrying about....
Trump’s ‘America first’! And by that, he doesn’t mean the American people, but his rich friends.
It’s not British people first; it’s Capitalism and the wealthy first.
With Musk, Trump was trying to solve the problem on the backs of the working class and firing them all.
Musk doesn’t care about what the rest of the poor working class suffers.
Trump and Musk are firing employees without notice or a clear plan.
Wholesale firing, calling that ‘efficiency’ is an attempt to fool people…
If you put a tariff in place, you make imported goods more expensive.
(Essential car parts come from abroad; they ain’t made in the USA)
That means people will buy less of it. They’ll shrink their standard of living.
If American companies take advantage of the tariff, which they always do, by raising their prices, that will also hurt the poor working class.
Millionaires want to privatise our NHS.
All fortunes start with a theft.
Just as the profitable Royal Mail was sold off by the Tories at a bargain price and privatised a few years ago.
They’ll denationalise and sell off things that make a profit, like the Royal Mail, and bail out and nationalise companies that fail with public money. All this shows how the system has failed us all.
Capitalism is for the few, not the many, as Jeremy Corbyn has said. It’s been profit before people for years. Capitalism is a big thief helping other organised gangsters get rich.
Capitalism abuses anyone it can, regardless of race.
Fighting Capitalism is a universal struggle.
We obviously badly need those millionaires to run our country, with their noses in the trough,
Favours for back-handers and cash….
Selfish Capitalism.
Now we are realising how much we needed socialism to overcome this crisis, and we have found the money.
It appears that constant attacks on Jeremy Corbyn while he was the leader of Labour were never really about Antisemitism.
But More it was ‘Anti Socialism.’
I recall Jeremy Corbyn said,
“I will be a very different kind of Prime Minister.
Not the kind of Prime Minister who believes he was born to rule. Not the type who thinks politics is a game. I will be the kind of Prime Minister who only seeks power to share power.”
Good people are breaking bad laws.
The women’s right to vote was achieved through breaking the law and social disobedience.
Women didn’t use to have the vote; they had to start protesting to get it.
People protest with foresight, not just hindsight.
I’m using Apartheid law, racist Laws as an example of there being ‘bad laws.’
Why shouldn’t bad laws be broken or challenged every day?
Mandela, a freedom fighter against ‘bad’ racist apartheid laws, was called a ‘lawbreaking ‘terrorist.’
Now he is seen as a statesman around the world, though he was tried and convicted by an apartheid regime court.
We protest to change, improve, and tighten the tax laws so that big corporations are forced to pay their taxes in the countries where they make all their profits?
There are double standards—the law that forces us to pay our taxes, but not those companies.
Yet when we do democratically get the independent Socialist green republican party we all want in power,
We will have to be vigilant.....
so that some ‘coup de ta doesn’t take place....
remembering the Gough Whitlam government in Australia, the Grenada Revolution, and Allende in Chile, among many others.
We have learned what has happened before.
That’s what Trump wants to do in Venezuala, Cuba.
There will be those out to sabotage, maybe possible military involvement.....
The Rothmere Murdoch press and all won’t stop the tar and feathering,
The wealthy corporations aren’t just going to sit back and let us achieve our goals and implement our manifesto without a fight, after we win our democratic election.
The words thwart, scupper, cripple, undermine, disable, and weaken come to mind.
Our struggle must continue...not being pessimistic here, but trying to be unsentimental, faithful but hard-nosed.
You obviously badly need those millionaires to run our country, with their noses in the trough, selling and buying Favours for back-handers and cash.
Money can’t buy you class. But it can buy you a political Party, votes, and a peerage.
And do you recall those Bullingdon Tory boys being able to burn £50 notes in front of your ‘scrounging’ homeless people!
Those Poor scrounging, profiteering private landlords who owned Grenfell Tower. A wealthy property developer’s safety must come first.
Do you recall the poor people who died? That tower was a crime scene!
And every rich, wealthy corporate businessman, Duke and King with billions of pounds and dollars hidden in offshore bank accounts deserves our compassion and support.
Unlike scrounging poor working people, with all their opportunities.
The private healthcare system you Capitalist Tories cherish more than our NHS also fails to meet the needs of older people, as health insurance companies are gaming the system to attract younger, less expensive, and more profitable subscribers.
Hence, no private hospital has a geriatric medicine department or a stroke unit.
Even more troubling is the assumption that the public NHS hospital should assume the burden of very complex patients from the private system, a medical version of the property developers’ greed or creed of capitalism on the way up, and socialism on the way down.
Public taxpayers are funding private hospitals.
Services are entrusted to the lowest-priced, least reliable contractor...so Mrs Thatcher created a system where
The NHS is “buying in” dubious quality services from private firms: far from flogging the NHS to “the highest bidder,” services are entrusted to the lowest-priced, least reliable contractor.
Therefore, a private company under contract is delivering services previously provided by NHS staff, which remain free at the point of use and are funded through taxation, often even featuring the NHS logo on buildings and uniforms.
No wonder some people don’t recognise it as a problem.
So it has been the erosion of the public system, allowing the private sector to take a share of the public budget.
From the outset, they argued that bringing in private providers to the NHS was a way of cutting costs and tried to downplay the extent to which this was at the expense of staff and standards of care.
The real agenda was what we now know as neoliberalism: minimising the scope of the public sector, holding down taxes on the wealthy and big business, and handing profitable contracts to their chiselling mates in the cleaning, catering and laundry industries.
Privatisation was not undertaken to save money or to direct more funds towards patient care. The evidence indicates that it costs money rather than saves it, and standards fall drastically.
Privatisation is a political move to line contractors’ pockets and destroy the power of organised Labour.
Outsourcing low-paid but relatively well-organised hospital ancillary services undermined the trade union strength that had grown in the NHS.
A contractor who didn’t submit the lowest tender wouldn’t be awarded the contract, so Cheapness was the order of the day, not quality!
Which reminds me of those water companies polluting rivers, and railway companies scrimping on repairs and maintenance, and then those privatised railways are disrupted by signal failures, etc.
In Our NHS, The field was then wide open to force through cuts in pay rates and worse working conditions, along with job losses and shorter hours, posing a major threat to the safety and quality of healthcare.
There were early contract failures – a quality check in Cheltenham revealed that 84% of hospital pillowcases and 73% of sheets laundered by Sunlight failed to meet the required standard.
There is considerable evidence of poor performance standards and the impact of private contractors. All of this undermines service quality.
The worst aspects of private contractors were the axing of 40 jobs, cutting full-time staff from 123 to just 15, cutting the pay for most of those remaining on part-time by 50%, and halving the hours for hospital cleaning.
That relentless squeeze on standards also divided some of the Tories’ supporters.
There was a food poisoning epidemic in Stanley Royds Hospital in Wakefield.
A company, Spinneys, was established in 1983 to bid for NHS contracts and immediately secured millions-worth of contracts for catering, laundry, portering, security, and gardening, despite having no prior experience with the NHS. There was a long and growing list of contract failures.
Including Crothalls (the firm that triggered problems in Barking Hospital by cutting hours of work and wages), who were fined in Croydon and Worthing and sacked in Maidstone for failing to meet standards and leaving nurses to do the cleaning; laundry firms Sunlight and Advance; Exclusive Health Care Services and Hospital Hygiene Services with failures in Leeds.
Using the private sector to cut waiting lists won't work.
A private contractor not submitting the lowest tender wouldn’t be awarded the contract so Cheapness is the order of the day, not quality!
We spend 40 billion less than the French do on our healthcare
73 billion less than the Germans,
Part of that reason is that we have a more efficient healthcare system, inefficiency comes from
Having to manage an insurance system where we have a tax-based system where everyone is seen.
There are many many stories of the inefficient bureaucracy of one private patient transferring back to NHS for surgery because private care could not cope,
Meant that the patient died.
Other Patients sued these private hospitals for negligence.3
Outsourced private care is for simpler problems, cannot deal with emergencies, and NHS have to handle the most difficult cases. Deaths occur in private care because private companies want to
Make their profit if they don't hire enough staff! And they only want to treat the most healthy uncomplicated health patients!
I've seen film footage showing revealing scenes of “charity” healthcare in the US. Due to lack of health care. Queues of working poor people getting their basic healthcare sorted, teeth, x-rays, breathing problems. The USA has the third world in its own backyard!
The people of Cuba have free welfare and medicine, unlike the poor people of the USA.
Here in n the UK ours has been sabotaged.
Those poor, wealthy corporate shareholders are terrified because the ‘Communists’ want to change the tax laws so that big corporate companies are forced to pay their taxes in the countries where they make all their profits....
I’d vote for Socialism, taxing the rich to fund our NHS, and nationalising railways, water, the post office, and banks. Socialism was used to bail people out.
It was the Tories who socialised the debt and privatised the profit. Now, Labour’s version of Capitalism wants Socialism to help when things go wrong—bailing out banks and companies that fail with public money. We should already own the banks we’ve bailed out!
Instead of the word altruism, which smacks of ‘charity’ rather than social rights, welfare justice, and equality, I would describe some of those capitalist altruists, those philanthropists, rather as Benevolent despots.
The money donated by philanthropists might be put to better use if it were collected as taxes and spent according to the priorities of a democratically elected government. In which case, should the state be giving tax relief to philanthropists at all? Why is it the rich who decide what to spend their untaxed wealth on?- Do we think it’s OK for any philanthropists to have so much power to advance their own vision of a ‘better‘ society?
Better for whom?
What this rich man is ‘giving away’ in his ‘philanthropy’ is not entirely his own money.
Unpaid wealth taxes more like it.
Many of the richest 0.1% – individuals worth more than $40m – want to cut social security and healthcare. They are less supportive of a minimum wage than the rest of the population. They favour decreased government regulation of big corporations.
Art Pope has used the fortune he has amassed from his discount-store chain to push for a tightening of the law to prevent fraud in elections, even though such fraud is negligible in the US. Pope’s move, which would require voters to show ID at the polls, effectively disenfranchises the 10% of the electorate who lack photo ID because they are too poor to own a car and are unlikely to go to the expense of getting a driving licence or other ID simply to vote. Such voters – many of them black – are statistically unlikely to vote for the arch-conservatives that Art Pope smiles upon.
Charity is very different from mutual aid. Charity has strings attached.
Charity is not what we want from benevolent despots with strings attached.
The fine difference between altruism (which is that love channelled freely)
and charity (which is that love directed with a price of return regard)
The difference between people feeding themselves and each other, and being given food according to a system involving tickets and outside administrators, is the difference between independence and dependence, between mutual aid and charity.
We would refused to let institutional kitchens replace our community kitchens; we refused to allow mutual aid to give way to charity, which would define us as the needy who had nothing to offer, rather than being the community with everything to give each other.
By ensuring that aid is mutual, we involve the people we serve as active community members in the work projects, embracing the principle of solidarity, not charity.
People prefer to care for one another rather than rely on outsiders or be governed by them.
charity is handed down from above and can risk belittling, patronising, and diminishing recipients by underscoring or emphasising the difference between those privileged who have and those who need.
The dynamics of giving and receiving can be complex, leading to strange and uncomfortable exchanges, creating an unwanted interdependence between people.
Giving itself is a gift, rather than some hierarchical act of charity.
Disasters often reveal that survival, whether you live or die, often depends on the strength and health of your community and the fairness of your society
a woman who Works for a homeless charity, who is a member of the Conservative Party made me realise,
That her voting Tory...what better way to make sure she stays in business. The Tories are her job creation scheme.
There’s good reason to be concerned about the impact on democracy if wealthy individuals are exerting influence through their philanthropy, as the choices made by philanthropists tend to reinforce social inequalities rather than reduce them.
It would be absurd to argue that everyone who has described themselves as a socialist can be held accountable for any action that any other person who has called themselves a socialist.
Would you argue that every Roman Catholic who has ever, and will ever, live is directly and personally responsible for the acts of the Inquisition? Or the Conquistadors?
It turned out that supporting universal healthcare during a pandemic and enacting major investments in renewable energy, as we face the existential threat to our planet from climate change, is not just good public policy; it was also good politics. According to an exit poll from Fox News, no bastion of Socialism, 72% of voters favoured the change “to a government-run health care plan,” and 70% of voters supported “increasing government spending on green and renewable energy.”
The lesson is not to abandon popular policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, living-wage jobs, criminal justice reform, and universal childcare, but to enact an agenda that speaks to the economic desperation being felt by the working class.
Black, white, Latino, Asian American and Native American. People are hurting and crying out for help.
All over America, voters approved progressive policies to improve the lives of millions of people:
• Florida voters passed an initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
• Colorado voted to provide 12 weeks of paid family leave.
• Arizona voted to increase taxes on those making over $250,000 to increase funding for public education.
• Voters in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota voted to move away from the “war on drugs” and approved legalising marijuana.
The American people are sick and tired of seeing billionaires and Wall Street become much richer, while veterans sleep out on the streets, our infrastructure crumbles, and young people leave school deeply in debt.
They want a government that works for all, not just the few.
Socialism has given us our welfare state, Free education, and Libraries
Universal healthcare, Social security, Minimum wage laws, Unemployment compensation: many countries with socialist principles have implemented systems like the UK’s National Health Service.
(Which has since been sabotaged by Capitalism. Rich Tories and New capitalistic, not socialist, Labour)
The USA doesn’t have that.
In the USA, private insurance companies take poor folks’ money. Or the US poor get rotten teeth, get ill and are untreated, get worse, suffer, and die.
As I mentioned in Cuba, Socialism has given us the Minimum wage, Price controls, improved health, lowered mortality rates, reduced deaths in childbirth, and raised life expectancy.
Socialist countries achieved better results on the Physical Quality of Life Index, which measures infant mortality, child mortality, life expectancy, the number of people per doctor, literacy, and education.
Our welfare state was never given to us as a gift, nor was the right to vote. Our grandparents fought for those rights as our working-class communities came together in trade unions to fight for safer working conditions and living wages. Capitalism never gave us those things without a fight and a struggle, never.
We saw who ran the country during COVID, working people.
And capitalist organised Tory greed tried to make money out of people’s misery.
Capitalism is crap; it’s not working except for the wealthy.
Tory governments always privatised the institutions that were making a profit and doing well,
such as the Royal Mail.
Then they suddenly apply ‘socialism’ to bail out the banks with taxpayers’ money,(So we should own those banks), those same ‘bankrupt’ bankers-were scrounging huge bonuses.
I noticed that during Covid, working people ran the country: doctors, Bus drivers, fire brigade members, NHS staff, and Nurses, and took all the health risks. Not banks, not self-serving capitalists, not that Tory ‘business woman’ crook Mone,
With plundered money frivolously spent as quickly as it was stolen from us taxpayers, buying yachts, before the law could make her pay back what she pilfered.
What were they, the capitalists, doing? They were trying to make money from COVID, selling dysfunctional masks, those self-serving Tories and-Capitalists are as harmful to society as organised crime.
Westminster elitists and greedy capitalist looters have wrecked our country.
Capitalism isn’t working.
We’ve all witnessed how capitalists want Socialism to help and to intervene when things go wrong.
Privatise the profits, socialise the losses. It’s the Tory way worse, austerity will be Reform’s way.
It ain’t working
I asked you to look at the sewerage: all profits go into shareholders’ pockets before being used to fund repairs and an efficient system. Same with railways.
They should have fined and penalised those water companies and shareholders more for all the sewage and effluent they release into our rivers and seas. Instead, they’re compensating them for their greed and mismanagement.
We are going to bail out a private water company for its failures, with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, when we should be nationalising water companies.
We would then be able to invest those profits, usually paid out to private shareholders, and modernise our water system.
We should be investing in ourselves, using those profits to improve conditions and bring lower prices, rather than having that money go to shareholders.
Capitalism only works for the wealthy; its system has failed us, working people.
We should already own the banks that we’ve bailed out!
The Tories denationalised and sold off things that made a profit, like the Royal Mail, and we are still bailing out companies that fail with public money.
It ain’t working.
We should nationalise water, railways, transport, and the post office.
Look at the sewerage: all profits go into shareholders’ pockets before being used to fund repairs and an efficient system. Same with railways.
Failed.
Drinking water?
Capitalism sold off our water companies, still we’re swimming in turds and sewerage, privatised our energy and trains, our Royal Mail (post office), our fishing was sold, and British sovereignty is a myth. Capitalism has failed.
Mrs Thatcher would have invited the slave owner, Colston, to tea. He would have been a Tory party donor.
And she said striking was OK in Poland by ‘Solidarity’…
but not by British miners…
We had no condemnation of the Johnson-Orban meeting from Jewish Zionist establishment organisations...
They should have done (it seems that they too can’t bring themselves to condemn pro-Israel anti-semites.
There are interesting slants here.
The UK press called socialist Jeremy Corbyn a “Rabid anti-semite!”
The UK press on rabid anti-semite Viktor Orban:
They called him a “Controversial populist.”
More, it was about ‘Anti Socialism.’ Than anti-semitism.
If a Martian farts on Venus? It’s Corbyn’s fault.
Bundism and Zionism held opposite values: optimism versus pessimism; internationalism versus nationalism; integration versus isolation and evacuation.
The Bund accused Zionists of worshipping the same nationalist values as regimes that oppressed Jews and other minorities.
As Poland slid into semi-fascism, the Bund and Polish Socialist Party activists jointly led the political and physical struggle against anti-semitism. Apart from one small faction, Zionists and religious Jews abstained from that fight in the 1930s.
We saw it with Tory PM Mrs Thatcher.
During her time as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher openly called a ‘terrorist ‘ a “true friend”,
She invited a terrorist into her home for tea and personally lobbied against a terrorist’s prosecution for war crimes.
Thatcher’s support for Chile’s former torturer-in-chief, General Pinochet, is no secret; it was something she took pride in. Yet she called Mandela a… freedom fighter against racist apartheid… a ‘terrorist.’
Tory’s double standards still operate,
Thatcher didn’t care about womanhood; she only cared about her own power.
What has held back the ‘white working class’ is not critical race theory. It’s the capitalist class.
White privilege indeed does exist. It’s just that the rich, mostly-white, privileged arseholes who run the country are holding back working-class white kids, too.
They are holding back working-class kids of all Colours.
Posh Reform toffs wanted a token so-called ‘working-class representative.’ So they got working class traitor Lee Anderthol, who was caught getting a fascist friend to pose as an anti-Labour swing voter
Why should being ‘working class’ mean you get a free pass for being a corrupt, deceitful idiot?
Criticism of a state’s criminal actions is not anti-Semitism. Jewish people who support Socialism are told they’re ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. That is anti-Semitism.
Embittered Russians joked that they thought communists had been lying to them about Socialism and Capitalism, but it turned out they were only lying about Socialism.
For those who
Make the rules-
There are no rules.
We might have some socialism here in Europe.
In different forms, free health care, lending libraries, free travel for the elderly- though the right-wingers don’t want to have those.
They want to privatise all + charge us while lowering rich people’s taxes.
Austerity was never a necessity; it was a choice by our Governments. I was never cheerleading ‘socialism’ for my own sake. It was for everyone. At the same time, the working people run the country, doctors, bus drivers, fire brigades, the NHS staff, nurses, and take all the health risks. Some people are living like there is no tomorrow, not a care in the world. So why should they care if their actions harm someone? I suppose there’s a human tendency to make sacrifices for the suffering that is right in front of our eyes, but not the suffering that is distant or difficult to see.
*In Madison, Wisconsin, in 2009, Historian Howard Zinn said:
Let’s talk about Socialism. I think it’s very important to bring back the idea of Socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century, before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million readers of socialist newspapers nationwide. Socialism basically said, “ Hey, let’s have a kinder, gentler society. Let’s share resources. Let’s establish an economic system that produces goods not just because they’re profitable for some corporation, but because they meet people’s needs. People shouldn’t shy away from the word " socialism "; we need to go beyond Capitalism.
Starmer refuses to implement any changes recommended by the Forde Report, to combat racism in ‘his’ Labour party.
He’s expelled Jewish socialists for being the wrong kinds of Jews! That makes him a ‘selective’ anti-Semite. Starmer has not been fighting anti-semitism; he has been fighting anti-Zionism and Socialism.
Suella Braverman calls all British Pakistani men rapists, and she stays on as Home Secretary. Diane Abbot says something unwise about Jews not having faced the same kind of racism as black people, and Kier Starmer doesn’t waste a second in dismissing her as an MP.
Double standards and hypocrisy.
As I said before, Socialism is a dirty word in this country because it threatens people at the top.
People and planet before profit and greed. Equality. No racism, Equal pay, Public ownership of resources such as water, power, transport, health care, and postal services: libraries, a reliable transport system for all, and more.
to have restrictions on the ownership of more than one house-
to stop property speculation and developments that break up communities, rather than strengthen them.
To encourage more local community gardens and allotments to grow local organic foods, and so cut transport costs.
Capitalists always want Socialism to help when things go badly.
When it comes to the magic money tree, there IS one, and it can be used to help the poorest, most vulnerable. Proves that
Austerity was a political choice by this and the last government.
For the U.K. to not be a tax haven for the wealthy.
While working people run the country, doctors, bus drivers, fire brigades, NHS staff, and nurses take all the health risks.
We have voters
trusting newspapers owned by millionaires. Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC interview with Jeremy Corbyn replaced one answer with another to misrepresent his police position, ‘shoot to kill deliberately’. A lifelong anti-racist campaigner and fighter for justice around the world, denigrated, demeaned, and slandered to the point of being reduced to practically a subhuman caricature. I voted for Socialism, taxing the rich to fund our NHS. And nationalise railways, water, post office, banks, for internationalism and more.
In the USA, I can also see a print-out of the report being waved like a red flag at Trump rallies. The word ‘socialism’ reliably sets off sirens in right-of-centre brains.”
He added, “What’s conveniently left out of this formulation is that the vast majority of Democratic candidates this year are not socialists.
It’s ideological- Republicans’ mindset can’t stand the fact that it’s a kind of ‘socialism’ that’s bailing people out.…
Rosa Luxemburg was furious when she discovered the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
“Having failed to halt the storming chariot of imperialism, the German proletariat is now being dragged behind it to overpower Socialism and democracy all over Europe.
She feared that Lenin’s policy had brought about, not the dictatorship of the working classes over the middle classes, which she approved of, but the dictatorship of the Communist Party over the working classes.
The dictatorship of a class - yes, she said, but not the dictatorship of a party over a class.”
I mmentioned Mandela’s thoughts about Cuba before.
“One of Nelson Mandela’s first trips outside Africa after his release from prison was to Cuba in 1991
He wanted to thank Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for their unparalleled support.
Mandela said: “I was still in prison when I first heard of the massive help which the Cuban international forces were giving to the people of Angola. The help was on such a scale that we found it difficult to believe. When the Angolans were under attack by the combined forces of South Africa, the FALA [Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola], who were financed by the CIA, mercenaries, UNITA [National Union for the Total Independence of Angola], and Zaire in 1975.
Mandela said the Cuban intervention “was the first time that a country had come from another continent not to take something away, but to help Africans to achieve their freedom.”
He continued: “We have come here today recognising our great debt to the Cuban people. What other country has shown such a history of selfless behaviour toward the people of Africa as Cuba has? How many countries benefit from Cuban health care professionals and educators? How many of these volunteers are now in Africa? What country has ever needed help from Cuba and has not received it?
How many countries threatened by imperialism or fighting for their freedom have been able to count on the support of Cuba?”
That’s why the USA hates CUBA, the USA is threatened by Cuba’s existence.
The USA has excused murder and genocide many times, by saying it’s for ‘our National security interests’, which means keeping organised greed’s profits secure.
A more accurate one-sentence explanation of him is to say that he was an African man committed to ending colonialism in his land and committed to taking back control of resources that foreign invaders had stolen. When you’re trying to take something back from a thief, it’s quite likely that they will resist, and in that case, you might have to kill them. This is not the objective of revolutionary struggles, but death is often an unavoidable consequence of colonialism.
The exodus of Batista’s ruling elite and the island’s underworld criminal networks to the United States following the triumphant 1959 Cuban Revolution stands as a glaring testament to the parasitic alliance between Yankee imperialism and local despots, a bond forged in exploitation and severed by the people’s uprising.
Batista’s elite, comprising corrupt officials, landowners, and cronies who had gorged on the spoils of a US-dominated economy. Under Batista, a US-backed strongman who seized power in a 1952 coup with implicit Yankee approval, these figures amassed fortunes through graft, kickbacks, and ties to American corporations that plundered Cuba’s sugar plantations, mines, and utilities. The Revolution, led by Fidel Castro’s July 26 Movement, swiftly expropriated these holdings, turning them over to workers and peasants in a bold assertion of economic independence from Wall Street’s grip.
Batista himself fled with hundreds of millions in looted treasury funds, joined by family members and regime insiders who knew their privileges would crumble under socialist reforms aimed at eradicating the inequality perpetuated by imperial domination.
Their rush to Miami and beyond was a desperate bid to preserve illgotten gains in the belly of the beast, where the Eisenhower administration welcomed them as allies in the Cold War crusade against communism, ignoring their bloodstained records.
In no country where Cuba went to help did they force their system on you. And even if they help the communist government to stay in power, then they complain to your president. The so-called democracy of the United States is not better. They were supporting the apartheid system in South Africa, Israel, and the same; the Israeli Zionists never supported Mandela, because they all benefited from the resources, such as diamonds, for example.
When does any nation really get to elect a government that might act in the interest of its citizens?
It’s definitely not something that happens in the US or the U.K. These two-party duopoly systems, where you get to choose between two completely unsuitable, massively imperialist, and double-disaster capitalist parties, are the exact opposite of democracy.
Elections in the West are more like a game show than any actual expression of democracy.
At least the Cubans are represented by people who share the ideals held by the Cuban people. The USA has a long history of overthrowing democratic leaders and people doing good things for their citizens, only to replace them with brutal dictators and murderers.
ask the US advisors of the Atlacatl Battalion, which conducted the infamous El Mozote massacre,
also the Sicilian mafia and Corsican gangsters, who flourished under CIA protection regarding The French Connection,
Ask the British Churchill government who, in Greece, recruited members of the royalist Nazi-trained Security Battalions- ask Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou, who was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1967,
Ask the elected liberal government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, which was removed from office by the CIA in 1954.
More recent repercussions of USA/BRITISH involvement.
Ask the CIA and the U.K.’s MI6 who in Iran overthrew the popular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Iran nationalised its oil industry by a unanimous vote in parliament, ending a BP monopoly that paid Iran only a 16% royalty on its oil.
Ask the CIA who then paid millions of dollars to bribe military officers and pay gangsters to unleash violence in the streets of Tehran, so that the Shah could be returned to rule as a brutal Western puppet until the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
Ask Israel, which continues to build settlements in occupied territory in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention. At the same time, Israel remains beyond the rule of law, shielded from accountability by its powerful patron, the United States.
Ask the most violent of the drug cartels, Los Zetas, which was formed by Mexican security forces trained by US special forces at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Ask them where they got their money.
Patrice Lumumba, the president of the pan-Africanist Mouvement National Congolais, took part in the Congo’s struggle for independence and became the Congo’s first elected Prime Minister in 1960.
He was deposed in a CIA-backed coup led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu, his Army Chief of Staff. Mobutu handed Lumumba over to the Belgian-backed separatists and Belgian mercenaries he had been fighting in Katanga province, and he was shot by a firing squad led by a Belgian mercenary.
Mobutu abolished elections and appointed himself president in 1965, and ruled as a dictator for 30 years. He killed political opponents in public hangings, had others tortured to death, and eventually embezzled at least $5 billion. At the same time, Zaire, as he renamed it, remained one of the poorest countries in the world. But US support for Mobutu continued.
Zaire continued to receive 50% of all US military aid to sub-Saharan Africa.
Ask Chile
Make their economy scream,” yelled Nixon,
Provoking chaos
Condemning the Chilean people to deprivation and poverty,
The CIA provided guns and money.
‘If we let potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile…we will be in trouble,” said Nixon.
Though Allende posed no threat to the American people.
The Marxist Allende was only a Threat to The Copper company and the telephone company.
The CIA jumped in, funding opposition parties and organisations running propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and initiating demonstrations and violent actions against the government.
The US will use violence against its own citizens, as they do to defend US corporate geopolitical interests overseas in Vietnam and Indonesia.
Your organised gangsters, capitalism funding dictatorships, Fascists, again and again.
Organised Gangsters =capitalists just worried about losing rice and raw minerals.
About losing the rubber and the Tin…not about democracy, freedom, or peace.
It goes on and on….
The CIA is arguably the most powerful instrument of international terrorism, of which the record is voluminous.
What do the millionaire-owned press say and do?
“Let’s not discuss the murders of civilians or the suppression of local democratic institutions.”
“Instead, we will report that the Pentagon has brought democracy to that country.”
Of course, newspapers and the media can easily ignore the good things that revolutionary democratic socialist movements achieve. They’ll stick to the made-up story about the threat of communism.
Their successes in alleviating poverty, remarkable by any standard, are unworthy of much comment. This might be particularly true compared to the appalling conditions elsewhere in the region.
The absence of significant press comment on Cuba’s achievements will occur; news reporting can be conditioned by a different set of priorities, which shall conform to an ideological framework that ignores real development success in favour of the stream of disinformation emanating from Washington and London.
The USA, this champion of peace, this crusader for non-aggression, has actually set up hit squads, caused killings, bombings, shootings, and coups around the world. This so-called world policeman claims to be an expert in foreign affairs and managing other countries, while it is subverting and destroying governments that dare to show and demonstrate independence.
The US. government has involved itself or interfered globally, from Iran to Indonesia, resulting in over half a million deaths of what they call ‘communists.’ And they have dispossessed many people of their land, ruining and poisoning it.
“To save us!”
That’s what the US government is always telling us.
To save us from what, from who? From other countries’ freedoms and democracy.
We’re known as the ‘Free World,’ and we, along with the USA, rule with constantly changing euphemisms!
The USA government’s Foreign policy is institutionally committed to the denial of human rights.
Some journalists aren’t truly independent; they are embedded, gaining access to government statements before they become public and to private briefings from ministerial press secretaries.
I’ll betchya that some CIA members write some of the speeches, shaping policy and news, and being closely aligned with the centre of power.
Hold on, that’s what US Transnationalist Steve Bannon did; he wrote Boris Johnson’s speech supporting Brexit.
So much for democracy that soldiers like my schoolmates were sent away to fight and die for!
Here and in the USA, those political parties give up economic power to the same unelected group of financiers.
They don’t pledge to allocate any resources to alleviate poverty. Instead, they’ll be reducing corporate tax…
Your poor people, those poor people you want to help, but only if they live far away, not if they live here in your own country, in your nearest town or village, under this system of inequality, where democracy is bought and sold by oligarchs. Don’t let those poor people spoil your view.
Does receiving donations by political parties have a price?
The politicians who have received gifts, donations, or the odd million dollars have denied any suggestion of a conflict of interest. Democracy?
Not only have those parties acted in the interests of a powerful businessman, but they’re also acting against the interests of the public and the electorate, and have lied about it. Think corrupt Michelle Mone!
John Pilger, an Australian-born Journalist, once said,
‘I’ve found myself with trepidation, self-censoring, with special difficulties.
I could interview Pol Pot’s genocidists with permission from London, but not members of the IRA.’
John recalled when the British state advised Journalists,
‘Don’t explain the conflict, but discredit the republicans as part of the campaign to defeat terrorism.
Don’t teach us that a majority has favoured a British withdrawal from Ireland.”
“Or observe that MI5’s increased role in Northern Ireland coincides with industrial unrest in the rest of Britain.
But instead, project the situation as part of a greater conspiracy by the communist bloc to undermine the whole of the U.K.”
In December 1996, Sean O’Callaghan, a former IRA commander claiming responsibility for more than 70 attacks on security targets, was suddenly released and pardoned. He was immediately put through a £10,000 media training course by MI5, and his former position in the IRA was rewritten to enhance his status. Thereafter, the former IRA leader received extraordinary coverage in Britain on all news programmes. For his handlers in MI5, all went brilliantly.
O’Callaghan’s message was straightforward: ‘The IRA ceasefire was never genuine. The Irish government must admit they’ve been conned. The IRA has to be politically and militarily defeated if there is ever going to be peace.’
O’Callaghan’s insights were almost word-for-word those of the British Government’s propaganda model of the previous 25 years.
The Irish press recognised this, including the conservative Irish Times, and O’Callaghan’s pronouncements were met with proper journalistic caution. In contrast, the. British MEDIA tend to accept the definition of the conflict in Ireland as “terrorism versus democracy.” This has led to a souring of relations between the republican movement and the media, meaning journalists are frequently denied the kind of legitimate contacts that would allow them to assess O’Callaghan’s insights more objectively.
`Brigadier Frank Kitson wrote The government must, above all, promote its own cause and undermine that of the enemy by disseminating its view of the situation. And what better way to achieve this than by the time-honoured use of a grateful collaborator and a malleable press?
The Sunday Times on December 29, 1996, reported that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness have been appointed to the IRA’s army council, intelligence officials say.
There was no corroboration for what was an ‘intelligence plant’. Ten days later, the Observer allowed Michael Mates, the former Northern Ireland security minister, to repeat this unsubstantiated claim and to add that the two men are certainly orchestrating terrorism. ’This, Mates assured the Observer, ‘is all you need to know.”
“ ‘All WE need to know” asked the journalist.
“All you need to know.”
The American public rarely gets a glimpse of the real story, the history of the Civil Rights movement, as if revealing it might weaken consensus.
We never hear that the Black Panthers did community work, such as providing free breakfasts for kids, which helped improve behaviour among participating children who no longer fell asleep in class or cried from stomach cramps due to hunger. The Panthers weren’t all young men in berets armed with guns: most of them were in their late teens and early 20s, and about two-thirds of ’em were women. The children learned to use their forks and knives as they ate eggs, grits, bacon, and toast, all washed down with juice, milk, or hot chocolate. They were also taught to help clear their plates, pack their bags, and walk to school. The children’s academic performance improved.
We don’t get to hear how that ‘nice’ FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover decided to mount an attack and undermine the Black Panthers’ program in 1969. FBI agents went door to door, telling parents that food being provided by the Black Panthers was infected with venereal disease.
We never get to hear the real stories.
I’ve been to Cuba twice.
I got to talk with everyone I met, conversing with my Mexican accent.
You are an anti-socialist/capitalist supporter, and that colours your definitions of socialism and the language you use.
I say To Hell with your US aid
Cut it off
like you did in Peru,
Cut it off as you did in Brazil,
And Threatened Sukarno, Indonesia.
To improve the climate for private investments.
To Hell with your aid, with strings attached,
A Trojan horse.
US AID’s humanitarian missions have often contained hidden political objectives.
Instead of the word altruism, which smacks of capitalism’s idea of ‘charity’ do-gooders, rather than genuine social rights, welfare justice and equality,
I would describe some of those capitalist altruists, those so-called ‘philanthropists’, rather as Benevolent despots. Gangsters.
Why did the US send troops to the Dominican Republic
years ago, yesterday?
-far more freely than in Alabama, where the racists hold sway?
They didn’t really give a damn about the Vietnamese
for their freedom, demonise Ho-Chi-Min,
They just worried about losing rice and raw minerals.
about losing the rubber and the tin…
Those millionaire newspaper non-dom tax-dodging owners.
New aristocrats, wealthy men pretending to be Farmers to avoid paying inheritance tax.
The usual US interference with an ‘undesirable democratically elected socialist UK government. I recall Grenada, Chile, Gough Whitlam- Iran, Syria, the French Connection, etc.
I recall Grenada, Chile, Gough Whitlam- Iran, Syria, the French Connection, many- here’s a recent US threat against Labour’s socialist Jeremy Corbyn.
https://youtu.be/Lwl87RaYks8
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/mike-pompeo-leaked-recording-corbyn-labour-jewish-leaders
There was a US threat against Labour’s socialist Jeremy Corbyn. https://youtu.be/Lwl87RaYks8
And the violence and repression of British Colonialism.
The violence of the British army in Malaya was falsely presented as a great way to handle uprisings. At the same time, the fight against colonial rule in Kenya was misrepresented and twisted as just Mau Mau terrorism against white people.
You weren’t worried about poor coal miners when Thatcher fought against poor people struggling for better pay and working hours, or the Liverpool dockers.
“In Northern Ireland, the quest for basic human rights got turned into a ‘noble’ story about keeping order against IRA violence, with the media boiling it down, simply calling it a complicated conflict between two groups, portraying the British standing proudly as the good guys in the middle.
For 40 years, from an office in London called Bush House, where the BBC World Service is based, a brigadier sent the names of people applying for editorial jobs at the BBC to MI5 for verification. They were vetting.
Journalists with a reputation for independence were often denied BBC positions because they were considered too risky.
************
How is Trump’s action helping the USA?
Who does it help?
Not the American working poor, and hungry, not those who can’t afford private medical bills and insurance.
Trump’s government has always condemned and demonised anyone who ever protested, went on strike, and fought for equality and a living wage in the USA.
Trump and the US government war machine have always had double standards in their cold wars and foreign policy. The US was sending armoured vehicles to Haiti, Grenada, Indonesia, Central America, and other countries to help quash the exact sort of uprising it’s been supporting in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Hong Kong. Using false flag operations.”
We can see the double standards.
The US government, on behalf of the wealthy oil and mining corporations, not on behalf of the American people, but with the help of the CIA, overthrew a democratically elected government whose president had been Salvador Allende. Who had started to renationalise his country’s resources, minerals like tin, had been owned by large American companies they didn’t like what President Allende was doing, so that ‘terrorist’ group the CIA financed strikes to sabotage the economy and overthrow Allende.
That word ‘’terrorist’ again.
We have seen the USA conduct terrorism around the world to destabilise countries from which it wants oil or minerals.
*
I remember when the USA overthrew democracy in Grenada because the people elected and chose the ‘wrong’ government.
*
Trump’s US government is willing to address human rights in other countries while they have issues in their own country.”
*I don’t think we can be wrong in accusing Trump’s US government of hypocrisy for its reaction to the respective protests.
*
Has China, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba and other countries, that the US government has criticised (and tried to undermine).... been gifted a ‘propaganda’ win as Trump’s protest response undermines US ‘efforts’ to protect Hong Kong, US efforts to sanction Iran and Venezuela for ‘undemocratic practices’ and ‘restricting people’s democratic right to protest’?
Tell me who is breaking the law here…
Of course, North American capitalists and right-wingers everywhere feared working-class politician’ Chavez’s beliefs.
I recall when Chavez gave those poor and freezing people in New York free oil to heat their homes, when the US government did nothing to alleviate their problems. It may be a publicity stunt to shame the government of the wealthiest country in the world. It worked.
Socialism has been overthrown by frightened capitalist nationalist countries (The USA) who wish to stop its spread. From Cuba and Chile to Grenada and Venezuela- to Gough Whitlam -
We live in a pantomime democracy where they like us to think we have a choice when, in the end, we really, really don’t.
Who backs Trump
Who does Farage represent?
Who funds Tommy Robinson?
Oligarchs like Musk.
Let’s not talk about the sanctions imposed by the Western world on countries like Venezuela to prevent them from prospering.
Perhaps you don’t like socialism. But forgot to mention.
“Keep ‘em down, don’t let socialism get free rein.” Say the Capitalists.
*
THAT THE US WOULD NO LONGER DISCRIMINATE AGAINST right-wing dictators or governments that came to power through military coups!
In 1964.
THE US demanded that Goulart impose austerity on his own suffering citizens. Instead, Goulart offered a program of land reform and control of foreign capital.
*
He also recognised Cuba. The US cut off aid in an effort to destabilise the economy. Inflation skyrocketed. Goulart seized US properties. US embassy officials prodded right-wing Brazilian officers to overthrow Goulart. The CIA went to work behind the scenes. When the government fell, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon cabled Washington, reporting that the generals had staged a democratic rebellion. This coup was a ‘great victory’ for the ‘free world’. It had prevented a total loss and improved the climate for ‘private investments’.
*
Ask people who live in countries that are and have been victims of US‘ imperialism’ for obvious reasons, Venezuela, Bolivia, Grenada, Chile, are places where there have also been military coup attempts and installed puppet dictatorships.
Ask those what they think of Maduro.
Those who are against Putin invading Ukraine, are they against Trump invading Venezuela?
&
Instead, who does the Western press ask?
Those overprivileged emigres who would/do benefit from living under an oppressive system like Trump’s, like Batista, Marcos, or General Suharto’s in Indonesia, who killed at least half a million people.
US diplomats later admitted providing lists to Suharto of 5,000 radicals and trade union members to be killed.
Instead, who do they ask?
They ask those who would stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s powerful
shielding them from criticism.
Those rich privately educated toffs, like Farage, and those who have paid no tax despite making a profit.
*
Let’s not ask another class of people what they think of Maduro.
Let’s ask: Those who look comfortable, not the poor.
Let’s ask those who could be white South Africans,
We can’t ask Ché, who was murdered by the right, because he helped overthrow the Batista government and introduced a free public health system… and…because he didn’t stop fighting.
Instead, let’s ask those who own and live in the mansions and penthouses of East Caracas, in suburbs called Country Club, in homes appointed with low chandeliers and terrible portraits,
ask those who commute to Miami, where their banks are, and who regard themselves as “white”.
Ask those who are the powerful core of what the media calls “the opposition”.
Ask them what they think of the poor,
Ask them what they think of free health care
Ask them what they think of Maduro.
Let’s ask another class of people what they think of Maduro.
Let’s ask:
Those who look comfortable,
Let’s ask those who could be white South Africans,
Let’s ask
the aristocracy, nobility, and landed gentry,
the elite, Trump, toffs and nobs, Farage, high society, top drawers, upper classes. Sloane Rangers, ruling classes, jet set, the glitterati, the petite bourgeoisie of Constantia and Sandton, pillars of the cruelties of apartheid,
Let’s ask the immoral, unscrupulous, corrupt, base, villainous, unprincipled, nefarious, iniquitous, dishonest, informal, crooked, bent.
*
But let’s NOT ask those who have benefited from Maduro and Chavez’s food programs, healthcare initiatives, and poverty-reduction efforts.
Let’s not ask them what they think of Maduro.
BUT,
Let’s ask those who are dishonourable and want to keep people low-status, who want to bring back servility,
Let’s ask those who want to reinstate slavery.
Let’s ask those people what they think of Maduro.
Assata Shakur, of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, has died at the age of 78 in Cuba, where she received political asylum in 1984.
Eldridge Cleaver was forced into exile in Cuba after this, where he wrote some of his best work. The US government criminalised and systematically dismantled the entire legacy of the Black Panthers, “the Sons of Malcolm “, to free breakfast, being another program created and controlled…
*
It’s simple: USA and its alliés are the good guys and the other - especially Russia and China - are the bad guys. Same in American movies, we are always good.
So if anyone has evidence that we aren’t, they are just traitors. They will say, I will never apologise for the United States of America, I DON’T CARE WHAT THE FACTS ARE
It’s like the USA, which always had double standards in its Cold War. The US was sending armoured vehicles to Haiti to help quash the exact sort of uprising it’s been supporting in places like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and Hong Kong. Using false flag operations.”
We can see the double standards.
Regarding Cuba’s agriculture.
For example, if fuel supplies are interrupted, London will run out of food within days.
Massively boosting local food production slashes fossil-fuel emissions and reduces our dependence on the complex, precarious flow of global trade.
(The Cuban population are already growing organic, diverse crops of food locally, forced by boycotts and trade embargoes on fuel and chemical pesticides)
We need land...reform.
To take land from the absent landowners, landlords, and create more communities’ right to buy and decide to own...to have restrictions on the ownership of more than one house,
to stop property speculation and developments that break up communities, rather than strengthen them.
To encourage more local community gardens, allotments to grow local organic foods, and so cut transport costs, and encourage diversity not just monoculture...so that pesticides are not needed, like the Cubans are doing, (or were forced to do by trade sanctions imposed, they have the largest and most organised organic local home gardening model to learn from.)
As an internationalist…I still want an independent socialist green Republic of Scotland. I’ve become interested in learning about citizens’ assemblies…A Decentralised government
Where grassroots community politics and action mean a more hands-on, local, informed kind of decision-making, issue-based community activities rather than ‘party’ politics, the ‘power’ is distributed. Those assemblies become informed people coming in, ‘experts’, farmers, people with experience and sharing knowledge, to, do that means we have to change ourselves. (Though I’m slightly sceptical, and I wonder if the ‘experts’ idea could become a con)
This idea of local Community, especially today,
It is becoming more apparent that a future sustainable society would mean most of us working
and commuting less, being more involved in our local communities and growing food near to where we live, by shifting towards more localised, diversified food economies around the world, we’d not only reduce the risk of diseases infecting our food supply, but we’d also keep more wealth within communities instead of siphoning it away to multinational corporations. We would instead be feeding the hungry. To encourage more local community gardens, allotments to grow local organic foods, and so cut transport costs, and encourage diversity, not just monoculture, so that pesticides are not needed. Like the Cubans are doing (or were forced to do so by having trade sanctions imposed on them…), they have the largest and most organised organic local home-gardening model to learn from. Everyone in Cuba is a gardener)
Cuba farm gardening
Because of the trade embargo / Cold War against Cuba regarding oil and pesticides, Cuba is ahead of us in hydroponics and the world in growing diverse organic crops locally. No pesticides are needed because there is no monoculture, so pests don’t jump or spread from one plant to another. Therefore, no pesticides are used. Everyone is a farmer, from mechanics to musicians. Much food also grows on rooftops. All of it is grown locally, so no transportation is needed to bring or take crops to the population.
(The Cuban population are already growing organic, diverse crops of food locally, forced by boycotts and trade embargoes on fuel and chemical pesticides)
Food seed sovereignty. Africa, Cuba, no pesticides, everyone farms and gardens. It is becoming clearer that a sustainable society in the future would mean most of us working and commuting less, being more involved in our local communities, growing food near where we live, and spending more time with friends and family—almost everything that boosts human happiness. By shifting toward more localised and diverse food economies worldwide, we’d not only lower the risk of disease-contaminated food in our supply (including US chlorinated meat), but also keep more wealth circulating within communities rather than siphoning it off to multinational corporations. In doing so, we would be feeding the hungry instead—food for thought. Growing Locally involves delivering boxes of fruit to our local food-sharing centre. There’s also the issue of eating local produce to cut down our carbon footprint, but it also ensures we know the source is safe. Human health is inseparable from the health of the natural world; the two are deeply connected.
To encourage more local community gardens, allotments to grow local organic foods, and so cut transport costs, and encourage diversity, not just monoculture, so that pesticides are not needed. Like the Cubans are doing (or were forced to do
by having trade sanctions imposed on them…the trade embargo- Cold War against Cuba re oil and pesticides..) they have the largest and most organised organic local home gardening model to learn from.
Everyone in Cuba is a gardener) Should everyone be a gardener or farmer…or a cook…or a first aider? Cuba is actually way ahead of us in hydroponics.
Growing diverse organic crops locally.
No pesticides needed because they have no monoculture, so no pests jump or spread from one plant to another, so no pesticides are used. Everyone is a farmer... from mechanics to musicians....much food grows on rooftops too.... all grown locally....so no transport needed to bring and take crops...to the population.
Communities are individuals, a collective of individuals, decentralised locals, neighbours,
That’s where our futures lie: community action and the power to change the world for the better through Community public ownership. As a community, we have a strong sense of place and belonging.
And within that idea of Community...support systems
(I’m not clannish, though I like the word tribe) ....but,
I also like kith and kin very much because that connects us,
We see each other and are visible to each other, not merely a statistical number.
‘Percentage’. This includes family, friends, workmates, colleagues, and neighbours, and it’s where we… each of us might also enjoy and create a sense of belonging. I might be talking rubbish, but isn’t this where so-called ‘folk music’ and culture, language, song, and memory stories are born and shared?
The only time this Tory Westminster government loves Community is when it’s volunteers taking on large amounts of unpaid work during the lockdown—charities running food banks. But when the same Community needs financial help, they’re labelled ‘scroungers’ and ‘unfit parents’ by the millionaires’ press.
There are lots of people acting under false flags. I recall things I read about disinformation by the USA as an excuse to bomb Iraq.
When Kuwait officials hired the world’s largest PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, to sell the Iraq war…to manipulate public opinion.
On October 10, at hearings sponsored by Congress’s human rights caucus, a 15-year-old girl testified that she had been a volunteer in a Kuwait hospital when Iraqi troops burst in. She described what she had witnessed: ‘They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die.” Bush cited the story repeatedly, making the case for war: “It turns your stomach to listen to the tales of those who have escaped the brutality of Saddam the invader. Mass hangings, babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor.”
It was later discovered that not only was the young witness lying about having been at the hospital, but she was also the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and a member of the ruling family. By the time the fraud was exposed, the US bombing of Baghdad had already begun!
(There is a pattern here of dehumanisation, with the endorsement of the Gaza bombing, and unverified reports of Babies being beheaded.)
That is another horrific story I looked into.
Then I fear that Israel exaggerated the extent of the atrocities committed by Hamas on the 7th as an excuse to justify their further plans. This wasn’t retaliation.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/what-really-happened-on-7th-october
Evidence is now emerging that up to half the Israelis killed were combatants; that Israeli forces were responsible for some of their own civilian deaths; and that Tel Aviv disseminated false ‘Hamas atrocities’ stories to justify its devastating air assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza!!
I don’t support Hamas.
Or terrorists from either side.
The Palestinian people are not collectively responsible for what Hamas did, and Israel fostered Hamas itself.
Hamas was created from fundamentalist activists and financed by the USA and Israel to divide and split the PLO at the time…to split the Palestinian leadership into two, so they would not be in a position to make any binding agreements.
Netanyahu, especially after 2009, had a policy of actually being complicit in the promotion of Hamas against the PLO. For him, the “danger” was that the Palestinian Authority and the PLO in the West Bank were pressing for a two-state solution. He wanted to undermine them. He wanted first of all to split the Palestinian leadership into two, so they would not be in a position to make any binding agreements.
Hamas would probably not exist today were it not for Israel’s indirect support? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? Hamas is a blowback.
Former Israeli official Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat.
Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than
Two decades ago, the Wall Street Journal in 2009 stated that Hamas is “Israel’s creation.”
Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.”
During many strikes, the press often downplayed the moving and positive support and popularity we strikers received, even though we were poorly paid.
Here in the West, because the poor had no lawyers, it made it easy FOR wealthy and powerful Lords, Barons, Dukes, Kings, Organised Gangsters and Princes to steal the land from us over the centuries. Including our COMMON LAND, through which walls and fences were erected to keep us out. Freedom?
I forgot to mention how much the USA cosies up to and finances countries with bad human rights records.
Because they have copper and oil.
I also forgot to mention how in El Salvador and Guatemala
Reagan’s Freedom fighters routinely raped and tortured, mutilated and dismembered their victims.
Or the My Lai massacre, and when Raymond Bonner, a journalist, tried to expose what had occurred, other pro-Reagan newspapers assaulted his credibility. His paper buckled under pressure, pulling Bonner out.
I neglected to mention the hypocrisy of the USA praising soviet non intervention while it was itself overthrowing governments.
Or how the FBI showed up before dawn at the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and tore it apart. Not because she was accused of a crime or because she was under investigation. But because she was a journalist doing her job. Agents seized multiple electronic devices, even her watch.
Yet they still treated her home like a crime scene.
That is how authoritarian pressure begins.
You do not have to arrest the journalist if you can intimidate them, expose their sources, and send a warning to everyone else watching.
***
It was not until the Freedom of Information Act was passed in the mid-’70s that we began to see the scope of the United States government’s persecution of political activists.
***
Malcolm X had a way of flipping the mirror. He asked questions that embarrassed power. He pointed out how the same people preaching freedom abroad practised brutality at home, how America claimed to hate violence but perfected it when it came to Black bodies. How the oppressor always demanded patience from the oppressed, while never practising restraint themselves.
***
A recent USA placard in Michigan read: “dangerous Freedom over peaceful slavery.”
Trump doesn’t really care about the freedom or sovereignty of the Venezuelan people.
When you scratch the surface of a self-proclaimed libertarian, what do you find? Privilege? Someone who says they’re fighting for the freedom of others, but they’re fighting for freedom for themselves only?
Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “We have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former U.S. Air Force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.
Netanyahu and his party welcome the support of these racists.
Then we have the censorship and the banning of books in the USA.
We have the British Spy Cops, who caused the women they were spying on illegally to become pregnant.
Thatcher’s support for Chile’s former torturer-in-chief, General Pinochet, is no secret; it was something she was proud of. Yet she called Mandela a freedom fighter against racist apartheid a ‘terrorist.’
I’m also reminded of Thatcher, who wanted to break the NUM during the miners’ strike, yet supported Solidarity union in Poland, double standards, and political hypocrisy. Like yours, it’s motivated and very selective criticism.
I ask you again, have you been to Cuba, apart from on a beach holiday, but to talk with Cubans, hitchhike in Cuba, visit hospitals, and see how everyone is a farmer? I have.
Some rightly complain about the lack of democracy in countries,
Afghanistan:
Myanmar: A military junta that took power in a coup, violently suppressing dissent.
North Korea: A highly isolated, totalitarian one-party state.
Syria: Characterised by ongoing civil conflict and absolute executive power.
Eritrea: China: Belarus: Iran: Turkmenistan: Equatorial Guinea:
Monarchies with no democratic elections.
Bahrain – Kuwait – Niue-Oman -Qatar – Saudi Arabia –Tuvalu- United Arab Emirates –
Theocracies
Afghanistan –Vatican City
Republics
Burkina Faso-Federated States of Micronesia- Palau
The United Arab Emirates (UAE), including Dubai, does not hold direct, multiparty democratic elections. It is a federation of hereditary monarchies in which 20 of the 40 seats in the Federal National Council (FNC) are elected by limited electoral colleges chosen by rulers. At the same time, the other 20 are appointed, and political parties are banned.
I’ve noticed how some Countries or Kingdoms are omitted from complaints regarding democracy.
As we’re discussing democracy, elections and those people who vote for the ‘wrong’ governments, or ‘governments that the USA don’t like’.
I’ll remind you how the democratically elected Chilean president, Salvador Allende, posed no threat to the American people.
Allende was only a threat to the wealthy Copper mining company and a Telephone corporation.
The CIA toppled him! and helped install a murderous dictator Augustus Pinochet, many fusaloesred including singer Victor Jara, they broke his fingers to stop him playing and singing to keep moral up in Santiago stadium where they imprisoned and tortured people, teachers, poor workers, trade unionists.
Los desapparacido.
Freedom?
Your hero Trump claims he was acting to secure ‘U.S. national security.’ Still, he’s really acting for the security of big business, profits, and freedom, not for democratic or human rights or for the freedom of normal working Americans or Venezuelan people.
‘U.S. national security’ is a phrase that the USA government has often used as an excuse to curtail other people’s freedoms.
The real reason why the U.S. has murdered and installed puppet governments and dictators in the past.
Trump justifies his strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism.”
Still, Trump announced a full pardon for the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.!
Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison.
Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!”
Revealing Felon Trump’s US Lies, Hypocrisy and double standards!
Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organisations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign. Nobel Peace Prize seeker Trump has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court. For people like Trump, freedom of speech only applies if you agree with the speaker!
The most terrifying part of this episode is not that Trump is threatening CNN. It’s that every other newsroom in America is now taking notice, and some are immediately bending the knee.
Trump’s open contempt for constitutional constraints is emboldened by a cult of personality and empowered by six corrupt Republicans on a Supreme Court that has told him he can openly commit crimes without fear of prosecution.
Frightened people resort to violence when they cannot argue because they do not have an argument...and their beliefs are threatened… That frightened narcissistic megalomaniac is Donald Trump.
The line between “news” and “propaganda” has blurred beyond recognition.
Right-wing billionaires have bought up local newspapers and radio stations, converting once-independent voices into megaphones for MAGA talking points. “Citizen journalists” on social media — and Russian troll farms — parrot conspiracy theories generated by AI-enhanced bots that are then amplified by secret algorithms.
It always starts the same way: with “exceptions,” “investigations,” “national security,” and “fake news.”
Ask journalists and activists in Mexico, where threats and violence have silenced entire newspapers. Or in Russia, where one law criminalised the reporting of the word “war” to describe the Ukraine invasion, and the entire nation’s press immediately bent the knee. Or in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán turned independent press outlets into government mouthpieces. You don’t call out those abuses of freedom. You’re very selective. Is that to do with your own interests?
CBS’s new president, David Ellison (son of billionaire “MAGA Larry” Ellison), reportedly just gave give $15 million to Trump and promised, according to Trump himself, another $15 million in nationwide “free advertising” for his hateful MAGA message.
In other words, the leader—or the so-called leader—of the free world is afraid of freedom. He doesn’t like criticism. Well, guess what? None of us likes criticism. But you don’t get elected to the Senate, you don’t get elected to the House, you don’t become a governor, you don’t become the president of the United States unless you are prepared to deal with that criticism.
And the response to that criticism in a democracy is not to sue the media or intimidate the media.
In the 1970s, Vital
Messages.
Freedom of the press threatened by Trump.
When the truth becomes a crime, then we are all criminals.
***
Seems like the anti-woke libertarians are all in favour of freedom and enterprise in culture, so long as it turns out to be right-wing.
They really hate it when people use their freedom to call out the things they hate, especially if it’s them and their ideology.
Do you believe that “freedom” is more important than life? Are you saying, “My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school?”
There are very powerful, similar, arrogant interests that demand “freedom” to do as they like with the environment, society, and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons…trumps your right NOT to get shot at school!
Unlike Cuba, the U.S. military has often been used to protect American business overseas investments.
Not to assist or bring ‘Freedom and democracy’ to populations. But the reverse!
The arms dealers exert a terrible influence on the promotion of warfare. Pushing governments towards war.
The only side these capitalists are on is the side of profit!
You support these manufacturers.
We should remove the profit motive from warfare, blood money, and incorporated murder.
Donald Trump
politicised his appointment of the Supreme Court judges. They aren’t elected. Democracy? Nah.
If any president can assume all power, neuter the courts + Congress + avoid accountability and being monitored, then you have a despotic dictatorship. There are very powerful interests that demand “freedom” to do as they like, believing that “freedom” is more important than life.
Trump appointed the unelected Supreme Court justices, who reversed Roe v. Wade.
Restricting abortion means more maternal deaths. The American Taliban, pro-lifers, voted against child health and welfare. They care about the foetus, but once a child is born, it can die of poverty; they don’t care.
In the USA, you have the highest maternal mortality rate of all the world’s wealthy democracies. Not in Cuba.
CENSORSHIP.
In the USA, they have banned Huck Finn, a novel set in the pre-Civil War South that examines institutionalised racism and explores themes of freedom, civilisation, and prejudice.
If black children are old enough to experience racism, surely white children are old enough to learn about it?
Racism is not a touchy subject if you’re not a racist.
You would ban books, yet guns are allowed and available.
These are important pieces of literature that explore themes of identity, resilience, and the impact of racism
and sexism. So would you ban history books that mention attacks on black folks, lynchings, and civil rights?
Catch-22” by Joseph Heller. The 1961 antiwar novel was banned by a school district in Strongville, Ohio, in 1972, along with two novels by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. After students filed a lawsuit, a federal appeals court restored access, deciding the students had “the right to receive information which they and their teachers desired to have.”
The only thing you in the USA have succeeded in doing by banning books is making sure every child reads the books you banned.
Now, the St. Marys City Commission is threatening the existence of a public library for simply having an author, Gino’s book in stock.
“It hurts my heart,” Gino said. “The implication is that my existence is so monstrous that it should be withheld from children. And what happens is, you end up with adults like me, who didn’t have good role models or people like them growing up, and the road doesn’t change who you are, but it makes the road much more painful. And it makes the road a lot more dangerous.”
Gino’s message remains firm.
“I really just want to send my support to the trans kids, to the queer kids out there, to the families out there,” Gino said. “The majority does support you, and you are loved, and you are welcome in your space.”
Here’s a list of banned books in the USA:
1984 by George Orwell
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The colour Purple by Alice Walker
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin.
To Kill a Mockingbird
And so why does the American Library Association (ALA) tell us many more books, including the list I quoted, have been banned in public libraries where adults borrow books?
Suppose teachers and parents are prepared for difficult conversations about history and race. It highlights many of the great racial injustices of the past. I can’t help but think it’s better to have such conversations than avoid them.
4,240 unique book titles were targeted for censorship in 2023, which was more than the previous two years combined. It’s an attack on U.S. citizens’ freedom to read. Our communities and our country are stronger because of diversity.
What was it you were saying about Cuba?
Libraries that reflect their communities’ diversity promote learning and empathy that some people want to hide or eliminate.
Seventeen states saw attempts to ban more than 100 books: Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri,
North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. The Christian Taliban govern the USA! Land of the Free? USA- it isn’t. It’s Feudalism.
Interestingly, Republican states banned those books.
While discussing books.
We all saw Trump holding up a book that he had never read. Couldn’t even quote from it. But
We will soon learn that Christ carried a gun and never said, “Turn the other cheek”!
Democracy?
Trump v Biden choice and democracy are myths.
You’re all living in a country where it is safer to be white and wrong than it is to be black and right.
Where Corporations are weaponising climate change
And Growth is an addiction.
You’re in greater danger of not hearing what you don’t want to hear.
In greater danger of fighting for the interests of oil companies, instead of the people.
In the past, the U.S. military has often been used to protect American business overseas investments.
Not to assist or bring ‘Freedom and democracy’ to populations. But the reverse!
Yours, our political system has the outward appearance of democracy, but undemocratic forces largely control it.
We have a pantomime democracy where they like us to think we have a choice when we really, really don’t.
Religious freedom?
We Should Keep Religion Out of Politics,
If you don’t want an abortion, don’t get one.
Freedom of religion is “Hey, that’s against my religion, so I can’t do that.”
NOT
“Hey, that’s against my religion, so YOU can’t do that.”
The USA has a Christian Fundamentalist version of the Taliban.
Violence is the USA’s first language; it was the language that Charlie Kirk used, and that violence begets violence.
There are links to the UK.
Farage has been associated with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a U.S. group central to overturning abortion rights in America.
Just like Donald Trump, he is importing a culture-war agenda that most people in Britain reject.
He isn’t chasing popularity. He’s chasing chequebooks. And under this broken system, money - not policies - can win elections. Democracy is being bought and sold!
You are their PR man!
Regarding freedom of the press.
A small clique of right-wing moguls already owns the UK media landscape. It’s never been more important for the regulator to stand up for media freedom.
Rich Tory donors to GBNEWS.
GB News isn’t a news service, it’s a Tory/Reform Nationalist propaganda service owned by millionaires just as the Daily Mail, Express and Murdoch’s rags are. Not an independent press.
These newspaper owners should have to account for their wealth to their readers and give accounts of how they avoid paying wealth tax...and how all of that affects their political bias and distorted spin on news stories.
I’m for humanity....
I don’t believe in some mythical indigenous white ‘master race’ that doesn’t exist, except in racists and fascists’ own deluded, ignorant imaginations.
Our government don’t criticise the Saudi Kingdom for the lack of free speech because they are our ‘Friends’, they buy UK-manufactured weapons. Revealing the double standards and hypocrisy of the West when addressing free speech and genocide, or not addressing it, because it doesn’t serve their interests, and it’s bad for business.
Leaving the ECHR would remove a layer of international scrutiny and oversight of the UK’s human-rights record.
I refuse the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom; between Jewish identity and ending the oppression of Palestinians. In fact, we believe the rights of Jews and Palestinians go hand-in-hand. The safety of each person depends on the others.
Remember the McCarthy paranoid witchhunts; if anyone was an anti-fascist, they were assumed to be a communist. So much for the USA Constitution and the 5th amendment!
Robert Ellsberg later said: “My father taught us that there are moments when you have to choose between your career, your freedom, your comfort—and your conscience. And if you choose your conscience, you might lose everything else. But you’ll keep your soul.”
Think about what Daniel Ellsberg sacrificed. He had a prestigious career. Financial security. A future. He risked it all for a principle: that the American people deserved the Truth about what their government was doing in their name.
The U.S. military wasn’t interested in preserving freedom or democracy. It was only interested in protecting the profits of those in power and expanding the U.S. hegemony. A US soldier, I heard, confessed and said he was not a Hollywood freedom fighter.
“I was a cog in the imperialist machine. I preyed on the poorest, most exploited people on the planet.”
Methods are sanctioned from the top...but....
We, the people at the bottom, are expected to sacrifice ourselves to protect the king, the big thieves, gangsters, crooks, and organised greed. You have chosen the side of the corrupt, self-serving crooks.
I was blindly, unthinkingly, mindlessly following orders. I was inflicting violence on the poorest people on earth. How is there any morality in that?
“You know how important it is to protect your family. But you may not know that some of America’s poorest citizens cannot afford to arm themselves against those who would limit their freedoms.”
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a German-born historian and philosopher, spent her life examining how freedom is undone not just by violence, but by the quiet decay of Truth itself.
Many wars are not wars fought for safety, for peace or security, but are wars to divide the spoils of empire, a fight for Supremacy…in the name of defending freedom abroad, while at home we’ll be restrained, from striking, from speaking, we’ll be Blacklisted, imprisoned, and detained, denounced as disloyal for having the wrong race or religion or for wanting equality, justice and rights, till it’s considered good citizenship to condemn us…as vermin or Parasites.
“If the flag is truly the symbol of freedom that patriots and others say it is, then it’s impossible to disrespect the flag by exercising the freedoms it’s supposed to represent. If soldiers fight to protect freedom, then it’s impossible to disrespect soldiers by exercising the freedom you claim they are fighting for.
our FREEDOM- to consume
Our freedom -to live in a cage…
in a prison of debts….We’re told-
-that due to our own failings we’ll always go hungry, scrounge and live in squalor up to our necks…
When people of Iraq pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue, Western media praised it as an act of independence and freedom from tyranny. When black people ( and white people) unite to pull down statues of the people who enslaved them, it’s “damage to public property”. It’s about ideology.
Didn’t everyone cheer when the Berlin Wall came down? But the pulling down of a statue of a slave trader is ‘mob rule’? It’s about ideology.
Laughter is the first evidence of freedom.
Do you defend Kneecap’s freedom of expression?
We’re in greater danger of funding crazy mercenaries, freedom fighters.
In modern Hungary and Poland, right-wing governments have dismantled press freedom and LGBTQ+ rights under the banner of “family values.”
The same people who scream about freedom and sovereignty also seem to be the ones slavishly screaming subservience to an unelected monarch. Go and colonise yourself!
Brexit? ‘Dependence’ day more like it, sovereignty is a myth -there’ll be no real food sovereignty-we still don’t and won’t own our fishing rights-it’s already owned and been sold off to foreign private companies. The whole thing is a farce.
• Sovereignty is a myth ...after many years of Tory privatisation. It’s not about sovereignty. It’s not about taking back control. It’s not about British values or British autonomy. It’s about locking deregulation and the demolition of public services in place, by means that cannot be challenged by either people or parliament
Musk, an unelected imposter, is part of the elite,
A billionaire oligarch with his own interests demanding “freedom” to do as he likes. He is misinformed, spreads disinformation, and makes your laws meaningless. So much for the US Constitution-you only quote it when it suits you.
Before the invention of race, colonists and slave owners were more likely to think of themselves as ‘Christian’ rather than ‘white.’ Increasing numbers of enslaved black folks were baptised, making it more likely that they could aspire to political power and freedom. Their Christian identity undermined inferiority, and as a result, slave owners gradually replaced the term ‘Christian’ with the word white in their law books, an intentional step to erect further barriers to equality and freedom. Racism was, therefore, a consequence of slavery, not the cause of it.
Racism is an enabler of the worst forms of imprisonment in colonised countries and is still visible in the West’s disproportionate use of incarceration to manage perceived racialised threats.
It is to repress and control people rather than reform.
There is the suspensive freedom that comes by walking, even a simple short stroll: throwing off the burden of cares, forgetting business for a time. You choose to leave the office behind, go out, stroll around, and think about other things.
With a longer excursion of several days, the process of self-liberation is accentuated: you escape the constraints of work, throw off the yoke of routine. But how could walking make you feel this freedom more than a long journey? … only walking manages to free us from our illusions about the essential.
“I don’t have a problem with people having opinions, but this town has a habit of punishing those with the ‘wrong’ ones. That’s not freedom of speech. That’s a club where you’d better say the right thing, or you’re out.”
Selective freedom of speech.
They say the first thing to die in war is Truth.
Now governments and ideologues are
jamming the signals, sowing confusion.
They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown out the dissident.
Censorship through noise.
People are now saying things like: “My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts.’
There were peaceful protests against injustices. Then there were less-than-peaceful protests after peaceful protests were ignored.
The people of Lancashire were peacefully protesting against fracking, because the Tory government ignored their local democratic vote against Cuadrilla fracking... Who bought votes from the DUP,
Remember that? That thing called democracy?
Double standards.
Just as the USA are for democracy, unless the ‘wrong’ people are elected, as happened in Chile those years ago… when Mrs Thatcher’s friend, torturer General Pinochet, was installed and took power.
Dominic Cummings’s bosses, Matthew and Sarah Elliott, were/are very close friends of Candace Owens and George Farmer, both of the Far Right group ‘Turning Point’. Patel, Baker, Farage, Delingpole, and Jacob Rees-Mogg are also involved. These Tory MPs support a new branch of a ‘sinister’ right-wing U.S. group that is creating a watchlist of “leftist” university professors, which has drawn comparisons to McCarthyism.
It says it espouses “freedom, free markets and limited government” and runs events sponsored by the National Rifle Association. Farmer is engaged to Turning Point USA communications director Ms Owens, a high-profile supporter of the U.S. president and critic of the Black Lives Matter movement,
Former international development secretary Priti Patel said the group represented a “new generation” of Conservative values,
Other members include BeLeave and BrexitCentral founder Darren Grimes, who was fined £20,000 for breaking EU referendum spending laws last year.”
Freedom? With Tory anti-protest and anti-union legislation, as citizens, we should have the freedom and right to change what we don’t like.
Freedom for whom?
The wealthy are organising, so should we, working poor people, be able to?
SOME STATISTICS
Cuba has a Higher literacy rate per capita than the USA.
It’s one of the most educated populations.
Cuba has a near-100 % adult literacy rate (reported at 96.7%–99.8%) due to its intensive 1961 literacy campaign and its prioritisation of education.
Lowest mortality rates,
Cuba’s life expectancy and infant mortality rates are higher than those of the United States.
The highest doctor-to-patient ratio.
Cuba has one of the highest doctor-to-population ratios in the world—
roughly 9 doctors per 1,000 residents, compared to 2.6 in the U.S.
Universal & Free Access:
In Cuba, healthcare is enshrined as a fundamental right; all residents receive services, including complex surgeries and dental care, without co-pays or private fees.
However, economic constraints and the U.S. embargo have led to chronic shortages of essential drugs, equipment, and basic supplies.
Cuba’s preventative medicine is the “cornerstone” of its healthcare system, designed to catch health issues “upstream” before they require expensive hospital care.
Because Cuba is a lower-income nation, it prioritises cost-effective prevention.
Cuba has one of the world’s highest vaccination rates (98% of children fully immunised by age 2), and has eradicated diseases like polio, measles, and tetanus.
Disease Elimination:
In 2015, Cuba became the first country to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis.
The Cuban government blames the U.S. embargo for its domestic instability.
In early 2025, the U.S. implemented a “total pressure” strategy, including a fuel blockade that has severely restricted oil shipments from allies like Venezuela and Mexico.
Cuba’s Foreign Minister reported that the embargo caused approximately $7.5 billion in damages between March 2024 and February 2025 alone.
The U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism” designation (reinstated in 2025) makes international banks wary of handling any Cuban transactions, even for humanitarian aid or medicine.
Global Consensus: For the 33rd consecutive year,
In October 2025,
The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted (165 to 7) to condemn the embargo, with many nations noting that it restricts access to essential goods.
The USA continues to bully other countries regarding their sovereignty.
Fuel Blockade: U.S. Executive Order 14380 (January 2026) imposes tariffs on any country supplying oil to Cuba, leading to a near-total halt in shipments from traditional regional partners.
Humanitarian Impact: UN human rights experts have condemned the recent fuel restrictions as a “serious violation of international law” due to their impact on hospitals, water systems, and food sovereignty.
The USA don’t have Economic justice.
You mentioned your concern for poor people.
Many of the most serious human rights violations in the U.S. occur within the criminal legal system and target people of colour.
This system is plagued with injustices, including policies that improperly and disproportionately criminalise people of colour, poor people, and immigrants, abusive police practices, unfair procedures, and excessively harsh sentencing.
The United States has the largest reported prison population in the world, and many communities live under constant surveillance and fear of law enforcement. Killings by police are rampant. Court processes are often unfair, coercive, and overly punitive. Jail and prison conditions are often unsafe and inhumane.
The US Program investigates such injustices and advocates for changes to ensure that the US meets its international legal obligations while ensuring accountability and community safety.
The US Program’s immigration and border rights work uses a racial justice lens to protect basic rights, ensure that families and communities thrive, and prevent harm. We expose abuses against border communities, migrants and asylum seekers and call for policy changes to meet humanitarian needs. We advocate for fair policies that respond to migrants’ various rights-based rationales for seeking to enter the United States, including seeking protection, responding to the effects of climate change, seeking work, returning to locations where their communities have resided for many years, and reuniting with family members.
USA Foreign Policy… see CIA!
The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.
In gaining data about us all, Musk has trampled on any notion of privacy and dignity, as well as on the explicit and implicit agreements made with our government when we pay our taxes or our student loans. And the possession of that data enables blackmail and further crimes.
In gaining the ability to stop payments by the Department of the Treasury, Musk would also make democracy meaningless. We vote for representatives in Congress, who pass laws that determine how our tax money is spent. If Musk has the power to halt this process at the level of payment, he can make laws meaningless. Which means, in turn, that Congress is meaningless, and our votes are meaningless, as is our citizenship.
In UK, Rupert Lowe wants us to believe his party is a people-powered movement.
So much for UK sovereignty when Restore Limited is financed by Elon Musk, with clear vested interests in shaping politics to suit himself + shaping the political agenda. Our democracy is up for sale to the highest bidder!
Re tax payers and non tax payers, King Charles and Prince William don't pay corporation or capital gains tax despite their vast wealth. This means the UK loses millions of pounds each year—money that could be invested in public services like hospitals and schools.
I will not accept an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control our government, where the wealthiest person on Earth, Mr. Musk, is running all over Washington, DC slashing the Social Security Administration so that our elderly people today are finding it extremely difficult to access the benefits that they paid into.
Where Mr. Musk and his friends are slashing the Veterans Administration so that people who put their lives on the line to defend us will not be able to get the health care that they are entitled to or get the benefits that they are owed in a timely manner. Slashing the Department of Education. Slashing USAID.
And why is all of this slashing taking place? It is taking place so that the wealthiest people in this country can receive over $1 trillion dollars in tax breaks.
Now, I don't care if you are a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent. There are very few people in this country who think that you slash programs that working families desperately need in order to give tax breaks to billionaires.
Addendum:
Now we have Trump ranting about “NATO not being there for us.”
‘Trump, who runs a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
The USA locks up more of its own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the ‘free’ has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail.
The USA’s life expectancy is going backwards. The USA is the only developed nation where that’s happening. The USA’s infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. US kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while Trump sells the gunmaker’s stock to your mates.
The US minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years.
The US has got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges, and the US just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack it.
And the US has got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And Trump is calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
Trump whines, “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.” When exactly was that? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and Australians still showed up for 20 years.
And Trump pulled out at 2 am without telling anyone, leaving them to deal with the mess.
So, before you start calling other countries, like Cuba and Venezuela, poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman.