Showing posts with label Common_Space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Common_Space. Show all posts

12 February 2016

Steve Topple on UK dark money

The Blog


Contributing an article to Common Space on 8 February, journalist Steve Topple criticized the relations between leading UK politicians, corporations, and tax havens.


Particular focus is on Bermuda as a tax haven in the article, with its role in protecting the wealth of unscrupulous corporations and British political campaign donors explained.

Offering a list of the worst offenders, which includes Google shareholders and Conservative donors "Lord Green (serial HSBC wrong-un and Tory crony), Lord Lloyd-Webber (all-round bad-egg and party cheerleader), and Lord Glendonbrook (donated £700,000 to the Conservatives in the past 18 months)", Topple noted that the Labour Party is also blackened by the same financial dependence on tax havens.

Exposing the unethical dark money obtained by Labour Party-affiliated think tank the Fabian Society, Topple wrote:
I wonder why beacons of social democracy the Fabians, then, have accepted £60,000 in donations from Cuadrilla (them of nefarious fracking ventures) – which is registered in Bermuda? Or £13,500 from corporate banking degenerates HSBC – who have eight subsidiaries on the island? Or £26,000 from Iglo Group (Birds Eye, Findus) - which at the time was dodging tax via Luxembourg and the Channel Islands?
Topple additionally criticized civil society organizations for talking about global wealth inequality while using investment over the stock market as a means of combating it, despite the stock market arguably being to blame for such inequality (if we ask the Occupy movement, for example).

In addition, the article mocked people's faith in the corrupt political system in the UK, arguing as follows:
Politicians can wring their silver-crossed palms, bestow us with platitudes, and give rhetorical diatribes about the scourge of inequality all they want, but the truth of the matter is that corporations are now the organ-grinders running the planet – we merely vote for performing monkeys.
The Mont Order, which Steve Topple is a listed member of, holds the same skepticism towards present forms of democracy in the UK and the US, viewing these as shallow performances to keep corrupt elites in power with false appearances of legitimacy.


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17 November 2015

UK govt assassins get bombed by op-ed

The Blog


The killing of Mohammed Emwazi, so-called Jihadi John, by the UK government without a trial is a terrible precedent that opens the door to arbitrary executions by the British state.


Certainly, sentiments that he was a "scumbag" who deserved death or worse for his involvement in the Takfiri militant group ISIL were not misplaced. However, that isn't a sufficient reason for society to throw the law out the window and just trust the government to kill whoever it wants.

Such behavior by the assassins of the British government was recently struck hard in an op-ed by Steve Topple for Common Space, published 13 November. He accused the UK's ruling Conservative regime of demagoguery, using a "self-defense" argument and emotional appeals to the population to justify extrajudicial killings.

The killing, Topple says, shows that the UK government can now summarily execute anyone and not be held accountable. He wrote that the state is now "saying that they can decide who among their citizens are classed as 'threats', summarily do away with them first and then ask the questions later."

Describing the illegal assassinations by the British and American regimes as "psychopathy", the op-ed gave the following warning for all readers to consider:
The precedent it (and the killings of Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin in September) sets should not be underestimated. Who, in the next few years, will be deemed as a threat to national security, requiring action in 'self-defence'? The Marxist PKK in Turkey? The socialist coalition in Portugal which has just overthrown the right-wing government? Domestic extremist Jenny Jones of the Green Party?
As with out-of-control surveillance of the population, the hand of the assassins has been freed by Western governments to kill with impunity, on the basis that the population is sufficiently frightened by the "terror threat" that they'll allow the government to do anything. Ironically, Western regimes make constant references to preserving the "rule of law" to defeat terrorism, but are not afraid to break the law themselves.

In the US, the people are so determined to protect their Constitution from "foreign" enemies that they don't notice their own government violating it on a daily basis.


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18 September 2015

Topple: press "clowns" attack Corbyn

The Blog


Steve Topple has penned an analysis slamming the UK mainstream media's coverage of Jeremy Corbyn's new leadership of the Labour Party and calling for "boots on the ground" activism to derail public reliance on mainstream media.


An unreserved left wing writer, Topple praised Corbyn's party leadership election campaign as "grassroots activism, social media mobilisation and people telling an Establishment organisation to “get stuffed”". However, there is also a warning that these very modern methods used by Corbyn to win leadership of the party might not work on the whole national electorate.

"It was 251,417 people, to be precise – out of an electorate of 45 million", Topple pointed out. Most people still rely on a couple of mainstream television stations as the source of all their news shaping their worldview.

Topple's conclusion that "editorial rooms are not “cut off” from what the public think – they decide what we think, as has always been the case" resembles the arguments advanced in the booklet Media Control by Noam Chomsky. Namely, the idea that we live in fraudulent democracies in which, rather than deciding on the values of the state and putting the questions to our leaders as citizens of a true democracy would do, we instead get all our information stuffed down our throats and told what to believe.


Since all the questions and options posed to "democratic" leaders are pre-scriped in a studio, it is legitimate to question whether these leaders have any mandate from the public at all. According to Glen Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, the problem is worse in the US regime, but many of the facets of this problem have infected the British mainstream press corps as well.

Contacted for comment on his article, Topple explained his meaning of the "boots on the ground" action. The idea revolves mainly around direct action, including possibly DDOS cyber sit-ins, protest actions and strikes, as well as possible offensive cyber actions by groups like Anonymous.

Steve Topple is an anti-establishment writer, prolific Twitter user and contributor to Common Space who has been a listed brother of the Mont Order dissident society since April 2015.




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