Showing posts with label right_wing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label right_wing. Show all posts

8 September 2016

Libertarian right almost criticizes crony capitalism

The Blog


To demonstrate the libertarian right's failure to ever acknowledge wrongdoing by big pharma and their cronies in the US state, Kevin Carson criticized a recent Reason article.


The libertarian right-wing Reason article, while focusing blame on government regulations rather than the greedy corporations lobbying for regulations, discussed the scandal of Mylan N. V.'s high pricing of EpiPens - a type of medical auto-injector.

The high pricing happened because, as Carson explains, "FDA regulations are specifically tailored to Mylan’s product specifications so as to give it a de facto monopoly on the EpiPen". No one can compete, allowing Mylan to change any price it wants.

Authored by Nick Gillespie, the Reason article had stated, "Mylan isn’t taking advantage of customers. It is simply working a political system to its own advantages."

Kevin Carson countered, ") Mylan is taking advantage of customers by charging an enormous monopoly markup on EpiPens; 2) Mylan lobbies the government to create a rigged monopoly market so it can take advantage of its customers in this way."

Carson sees a persistent denial on the part of libertarian right ideologues to acknowledge how most successes of corporate capitalism depend on the "rigged monopoly" described above. He also draws attention to the way many right libertarians often criticize the market as not being "free" enough, yet cite the same US corporations who stifle competition as examples of success in the free market.

Full analysis: Say the Words, Nick. SAY THE WORDS!!


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3 June 2016

UK war hero declares war on schoolgirl

The Blog


British "Colonel" Richard Kemp, who portrayed himself as a war hero and great military commander to have any relevance, has been caught in a diatribe on Twitter trying to incite hatred against a 15 year old girl.


Anger against Leanne Mohamad for winning a school prize produced not just one, but four tweets all by the so-called Colonel "RICHARD KEMP", who capitalizes his user name like an evangelical crank, hoping to rally condemnation of her. The pro-Israel media slob accused the young girl of "anti-Semitic lies".

Pro-Palestine blogger Thalwen commented that Leanne's only crime was "hoping for freedom" for her people from the barbarism of the Israeli military occupation.

Kemp additonally promoted a video by a pro-Israel vlogger, who issued blatant lies that Leanne's speech in favor of human rights amounted to "an ISIS recruiting video" for siding with Palestinian Arabs and opposing Zionist killers.

While it is creepy enough that a so-called Colonel would want to intervene in a school competition and incite hatred against a child, more disturbing is the way other Zionist fanatics reacted to Leanne. One Zionist cries out that Leanne is "evil" and must be "vigorously condemned and punished"; another racist tweets that all the minority "Muslim filth" in the UK are to blame and longs to "bring on the civil war".

Thanks to smears by far right bigots, racists, and Israeli worms like Kemp who pretend to be British while defending foreign war criminals, the school did in fact censor Leanne, providing another victory over a child for cowards everywhere to revel in.

Although he tries to to portray himself as an impartial military professional in his relations with the media, most of Kemp's time is taken up accusing the media of bias against Israel and trying to come up with reasons why it was okay for Israel to kill kids. With his latest attack on a child, it is also questionable that the overweight and dimwitted 57 year old has any military experience other than trying to prop up the Israeli regime's reputation in the media.


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29 March 2016

Islamophobic ideology gets countered

The Blog


While others take to the internet to express their idea that all Muslims are suicide bombers, Beliefnet contributor Hesham Hassaballa points out the lack of understanding ISIS terrorists actually have about Islam in a recent post.


Citing The Nation and other sources, the blogger noted that many people are obsessed saying ISIS followers are Muslims, as if this is important. They refer to Islam as the reason for ISIS atrocities such as the recent attack in Brussels. These obsessives use such facts to support their claims that Muslims are inherently violent and Islam is a problematic, uncivilized belief.

However, as Hassaballa points out to us, we must remember the reality of the relationship between ISIS and Islam:

  • ISIS does not care if its followers know nothing about Islam
  • They do not know or care what Sharia law, violent jihad or the "caliphate" are
  • Most suicide bombers are politically motivated and have often been non-religious (e.g. the LTTE)
  • They have actually been found buying Islam for Dummies even as they joined the group

The Islamophobia being countered by Hassaballa - which is gaining apparent support among conservative politicians and voters in the United States and Europe - is actually on par with claiming that the source of Nazism or the Ku Klux Klan is being white or Christian.

Proponents of the "Muslims are violent" hypothesis find their connection between Islam and terrorism to be logical, and fail to understand any argument presented against it. If faced with the above argument, they will just assume they are being called a racist or that you really are saying all white people are evil.


One way of looking at this would be to consider, why is "Islamic" important in labeling terrorists in media and political rhetoric? Why not point out if they are a Jew, Christian or Hindu? Why only connect Islam with murder? We also never see victims of terror labelled as Islamic. Only terrorists are ever labelled as Islamic.

While the belief among some westerners that Muslims are violent is disturbing in itself, there are even more ignorant views being carried through social media. Some of them portray the problems of terrorism in the Middle East itself as coming from "Muslims" and proving how dangerous Muslims are, despite the fact that Muslims typically make up 100% of the victims and have inhabited the area peacefully for hundreds of years.

In other words, these bigots only use the word "Muslim" for anyone who commits murder, and fail to use it for the 1.3 million people murdered by US forces in the Middle East during the "war on terror" or the vast majority of victims of terrorism every day.


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5 February 2016

Topple: deport all bigots, not refugees

The Blog


Op-ed writer Steve Topple has appealed to Europeans to learn their history lessons again before calling for Nazi-like collective measures against refugees fleeing conflict zones such as Syria.


Topple does not hesitate to point out the west is to blame for the war in Syria. The west must make space for refugees, as it must face the consequences of its actions and atone for what it has done.

The post accuses Western societies of ignoring their own hand in creating a crisis for themselves, which they now try to shirk responsibility for by wanting to turn refugees away:
The anti-refugee rhetoric appeared to be systematically ratcheted up in nearly every country across the continent, without the smallest whiff of hypocrisy that the West’s agenda had largely contributed to this man-made crisis.
Elaborating on this responsibility, Topple writes that "Western foreign policy is partly to blame for the situation in the Middle East, which is rapidly spiralling out of control. Decade after decade we have geopolitically been led by our unquenchable thirst for oil and gas, regardless of the consequences." Amidst the hysteria spreading through Europe at the inevitable globalization of displacement and misery caused by western military aggression, many have called for all refugees (with particular emphasis on Muslims) to be deported.

Topple has an alternative suggestion of who deport:
Expatriate all the loathsome, lobotomised right-wing bigots and replace them with refugees. 
Because I, for one, would rather we have a diverse, socially-rich, colourful society where the quality of life for everyone was far greater, than an insular, closeted, angry and scared country where the opinions of loathsome, vile bigots whose views belong in a 1970’s sitcom were the norm.
Tackling the specific hysteria of many right wing groups and commentators, Topple strikes back at their assertions:
Oh – and the individuals screaming “Rapefugees!” and “Women and girls aren’t safe!” when discussing refugees after we have just observed Holocaust Memorial Day, may wish to Google “Collective Responsibility” – although I doubt their myopic brains would be able to cope with the resonance.
Although many right-wing figures in the west are obsessed with World War II and the idea of supporting the Israeli apartheid regime to atone for the Holocaust, they are just as interested in committing a new genocide against Muslims. The additional inability to condemn Israeli expansion and ethnic cleansing and to support it, no matter how untenable, shows nothing was really learned from the Holocaust.


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23 October 2015

TPP is big govt propping up big business

The Blog


Right-wing libertarians at the magazine Reason have a chauvinist, statist interpretation of what "free trade" means. They recognize it only in the expansion of US corporate hegemony and the enslavement of poor people.


Kevin Carson, writing at the antistatist think tank Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS), offered that characterization of so-called "free trade" as it was articulated in a recent op-ed found at Reason. The op-ed had praised the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as an accomplishment in free trade, and this was refuted in Carson's responding post at C4SS.

It is Orwellian to call the TPP "free trade", Carson argued. In actual fact, the TPP supports intellectual property (IP) which suppresses legitimate competition and innovation in order to privilege CEOs who ultimately needed no intellect in order to gain possession of such property:

"The draconian IP provisions of contemporary "free trade" treaties serve the interests of global corporations the same way high industrial tariffs served American corporations a century ago."


IP enables corporations to suppress commercial competition in poverty-stricken countries, where the poorest of the poor in the world are contracted to work as sweatshop laborers. Also in the retort to the Reason op-ed, Carson wrote that IP is:

"a form of protectionism that still gives them [corporate stakeholders] a monopoly over selling a particular product in a particular market - but operates at corporate boundaries rather than national ones"


The TPP, and the "free trade" it represents, are effectively then a shift from one (national corporate) protectionism to another (global corporate) protectionism.

Carson sums up his criticism of the TPP and other so-called free trade deals by pointing out the contradiction in the supposed anti-statism of right-wing libertarians. What they are arguing for is necessarily heavier state intervention in the economy. State subsidizing and protecting big business from competition is the object of all IP law, and such intervention has become the basis of most global corporate profit.

Corporations are leeching on the US state, only for right-wing libertarians at publications and bodies like Reason to portray their success as an example of free markets with zero state intervention. As such, Carson mocks, someone who thinks "free trade" agreements reduce the intervention of the state in the economy might as well believe in Santa Claus.


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7 July 2015

Wallerstein: Lat America creeps right

The Blog


The Latin American left may be in a state of self-destruction, social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein has explained in a recent analysis.


The problem originates in the fact that there are actually two "lefts" in Latin America:
  1. ... those persons and movements that wish to overcome the lower standards of living in the countries of the South by using state power to “modernize” the economy and thereby “catch up” with the countries of the North ... the modernizing left
  2. ... those underclasses who fear that such “modernization” will make things not better but worse for them, increasing the internal gaps between the better-off and the poorest strata of the country... the indigenista populations, that is, those whose presence dates from before the time that various European powers sent their troops and settlers into the Western Hemisphere. It also includes the afrodescendentes, that is, those who were brought in from Africa by the Europeans as slaves... These groups began to speak of promoting a civilizational change based on buen vivir – a translation from Incan languages meaning “living well.” They argued for a maintenance of traditional modes of living under the control of local populations
Wallerstein sees this rift as a terrible one for the peoples of Latin America. He laments that "Those persons and groups that have tried to encourage a meaningful dialogue between the two lefts have been seen as very unwelcome by both sides" but encourages that "it may not be too late for both sides to engage in intelligent reassessment of the situation and to rescue the Latin American left from self-destruction".

The problem is that many the poorer "underclasses" seem to be creeping towards rightist causes and groups who ultimately have contempt for them and no desire to safeguard their lifestyles, while the incumbent regimes of Latin America are pursuing increasingly rightist-type policies of repression and ecology-threatening modernization.

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19 May 2015

The Christian fundamentalist bloodbath

The Blog


Islam does not stand out as having the worst problem of extremism, an op-ed at Counterpunch argues


Penned by Robert Fantina for the 15-17 May issue of the US-based investigative publication, the op-ed titled "Dueling Fundamentalisms: Christian and Islamic" argues that reactionary politics has created a bloodbath for which Christians have more responsibility than Muslims:
So it seems that both Christian fundamentalists and fundamentalist Muslims all operate on fear, encouraging their followers to flout law in the name of a god of their own creation. Both cause death and suffering, fundamentalist Muslims on a small scale, with Christian fundamentalists drowning in the blood of their millions of victims.
The op-ed defies a current at the heart of reactionary political movements currently trying to represent Islam as an exceptionally grave threat to civilization. Although Christians are not prone to go around using knives to kill the people they hate, many are still filled with hate and encourage state-sanctioned violence that has killed more innocent people than all the terrorism in the world:
1) Christian fundamentalists encourage war, and vote for government officials who will perpetuate it. The number of people killed in their name and by their actions far exceeds anything ISIL has done or could do if it operated for a century.
Bloodthirsty ramblings by the Christian reactionaries of the United States compare with the most violent sermons of Islamist terrorists. The only difference is that the former have a state at their disposal to legitimize their murderous crusade, whereas the latter only have their own bare hands. In reality, the Christian right of America is morally equivalent to the so-called Islamic State, even if it is more heavily equipped to pursue and justify its dreams of a medieval bloodbath.

This fits with the following video from TYT, which notes the clear parallels between Christian extremists and Islamist extremists, in particular ridiculing the way that both demand each other "convert or die".


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