Working Britain Was Shut Down To Make The Country A Haven For Bankers

The Downfall Of Margaret Thatcher.
The introduction of the community charge for local government sounded the death knell for Thatcherism.
Abolishing the old rates system, the charge, quickly dubbed the Poll Tax, was worked out on a flat rate where the number of people living in a house determined its charge rate.
Middle England was incensed that a man living in a semi would end up paying the same as a millionaire in a huge mansion down the road.
This sparked Thatcher’s downfall.
The charge divided her party and was an electoral liability which led to her resignation.
The Poll Tax was replaced by the Council Tax system.
( Wilfred Soon )

Mrs Thatcher And MPs’ Expenses.
In 1980, Margaret Thatcher was warned there was a risk of a public scandal over MPs’ expenses.
Government Ministers feared abuse of the system was so serious that some MPs should be prosecuted.
The minutes of a Cabinet meeting held on February 14, 1980 say: “There was reason to suspect abuse by MPs, and this gave rise to a risk of scandal. If a serious abuse were uncovered, it might be necessary to prosecute the MP”.
Thatcher and her despicable bunch did nothing.
And for the next 30 years these greedy pigs continued to fleece the taxpayer and kept their snouts deep in the trough.
( Fred O. Wilson )

The Media’s Act Of Hypnosis That Keeps The Crimes Of Our Leaders Out Of Sight.

A recent poll asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The answers they gave were shocking.
A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed.
Scientific studies report that up to a million Iraqi men, women and children died in an inferno lit by the British government and its ally in Washington.
That’s the equivalent of the genocide in Rwanda.
And the carnage goes on. Relentlessly.

What this reveals is how we in Britain have been misled by those whose job is to keep the record straight.
The American writer and academic Edward Herman calls this ‘normalising the unthinkable’.
He describes two types of victims in the world of news: ‘worthy victims’ and ‘unworthy victims’.
‘Worthy victims’ are those who suffer at the hands of our enemies: the likes of Assad, Qadaffi, Saddam Hussein.
‘Worthy victims’ qualify for what we call ‘humanitarian intervention’.
‘Unworthy victims’ are those who get in the way of our punitive might and that of the ‘good dictators’ we employ.
Saddam Hussein was once a ‘good dictator’ but he got uppity and disobedient and was relegated to ‘bad dictator’.

In Indonesia, General Suharto was a ‘good dictator’, regardless of his slaughter of perhaps a million people, aided by the governments of Britain and America.
He also wiped out a third of the population of East Timor with the help of British fighter aircraft and British machine guns.
Suharto was even welcomed to London by the Queen and when he died peacefully in his bed, he was lauded as enlightened, a moderniser, one of us.
Unlike Saddam Hussein, he never got uppity.

When I travelled in Iraq in the 1990s, the two principal Moslem groups, the Shia and Sunni, had their differences but they lived side by side, even inter-married and regarded themselves with pride as Iraqis.
There was no Al Qaida, there were no jihadists.
We blew all that to bits in 2003 with ‘shock and awe’.
And today Sunni and Shia are fighting each other right across the Middle East.

When Nelson Mandela died, the BBC went straight to David Cameron, then to Barack Obama.
Cameron who went to South Africa during Mandela’s 25th year of imprisonment on a trip that was tantamount to support for the apartheid regime, and Obama who recently shed a tear in Mandela’s cell on Robben Island – he who presides over the cages of Guantanamo.
What were they really mourning about Mandela?
Clearly not his extraordinary will to resist an oppressive system whose depravity the U.S. and British governments backed year after year.
Rather they were grateful for the crucial role Mandela had played in quelling an uprising in black South Africa against the injustice of white political and economic power.
This was surely the only reason he was released.

We all live in an information age – or so we tell each other as we caress our smart phones like rosary beads, heads down, checking, monitoring, tweeting.
We’re wired; we’re on message; and the dominant theme of the message is ourselves.
Identity is the zeitgeist.
A lifetime ago in ‘Brave New World’, Aldous Huxley predicted this as the ultimate means of social control because it was voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom.
Perhaps the truth is that we live not in an information age but a media age.
Like the memory of Mandela, the media’s wondrous technology has been hijacked.
From the BBC to CNN, the echo chamber is vast.

Today, liberal democracy is being replaced by a system in which people are accountable to a corporate state – not the other way round as it should be.
In Britain, the parliamentary parties are devoted to the same doctrine of care for the rich and struggle for the poor.
This denial of real democracy is an historic shift.
It’s why the courage of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange is such a threat to the powerful and unaccountable.
And it’s an object lesson for those of us who are meant to keep the record straight.
The great reporter Claud Cockburn put it well: “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied”.
Imagine if the lies of governments had been properly challenged and exposed as they secretly prepared to invade Iraq – perhaps a million people would be alive today.
( John Pilger, 05.01.2014 )  ..  stopwar.org

The Iron Lady Movie.
The film (The Iron Lady) suggests that Thatcher stood up bravely against a male establishment and she was a women’s champion.
Nothing was further from the truth.
Thatcher mobilised every arm of the state against striking miners and coalfield women who were defending their jobs, their children’s futures and their communities.
Anyone watching this film needs to be able to distinguish the facts from the fiction.
If your children cannot find work today, remember what Margaret Thatcher did to smash industry.
( Toni Bennett )

Working Britain was shut down by Margaret Thatcher to make the country a haven for bankers, and look where that got us.
It made some people rich, but it impoverished the nation.
( Rose Winfold )

Margaret Thatcher Treated The Miners Like Traitors.
Men whose ancestors had fired our nation’s industrial power and fought our wars.
“They don’t share our common values”, she said., “They are the enemy within”.
Thatcher destroyed our nationalized industries and the thousands who worked in them, supposedly to liberate the economy.
In 1984 the Conservative government went to war against the enemy within.
Miners, they were called.
The men who dug out coal to keep our lights on and our homes warm.
On March 5, 1984 the miners started a strike to protect their communities from calculated destruction.
Margaret Thatcher went for her ultimate prize, the dismantling of organised labour she felt was stopping her millionaire friends from becoming billionaire friends.
She changed the laws to stifle collective protest, stockpiled fuel, killed the case for coal, and ensured her media pals portrayed the striking miners as violent thugs and the police as knights with shining batons.
A year later, with 11,000 miners arrested, 8,000 charged with civil offences, 200 imprisoned, and ten killed.
She’d finally won.
The miners were history.
As were the proud, hard-working communities they came from.
Sentenced to a life of poverty, benefits and drugs.
How those miners must feel now when they see the treatment handed out to the real enemy within.
The reckless bankers who truly have brought the country to its knees.
Men whose unchecked wealth was part of the prize awarded for crushing the unions a generation ago.
Margaret Thatcher and her Tory chums left entire communities and British manufacturing swinging in the wind.
Their motto is “greed is good” and there’s no such thing as society.
The Tories still look down on the working class.
They see them as expendable labour units.
They regard their fat-cat banker mates as the true wealth-creators, as rulers of the world.
The Tories voted against ending poverty pay when Labour introduced the minimum wage.
David Cameron conveniently chooses to forget it was his party which oversaw the decline of coal-mining and the closure of the pits.
What remains are communities on benefits, still struggling years later, children growing up with no hope and turning to drugs and crime.
They failed to consider, or simply didn’t care about, the legacy of despair that would inevitably follow the decimation of working-class communities.
( Len Firswood )

Royal Mail.
If you joined the scramble for these shares then sold them on, bragging about your ‘nice little earner’, I hope you’re happy.
And if you still see privatisation as the answer to all our ills, then you, my friend, are ill.
( Brian Reade, 29.03.2014 )

A Lone Whistleblower Reveals A “Child-Rape Assembly Line” Among Sects Of Fundamentalist Jews.
Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, the lone whistleblower among the Satmar, a powerful Hasidic sect, who recently was the victim of a bleach attack in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg, who is 63 with a long, greying beard, recently sat down with me to explain what he described as a “child-rape assembly line” among sects of fundamentalist Jews.
He cleared his throat. “I’m going to be graphic,” he said.

On a visit to Jerusalem in 2005, Rabbi Rosenberg entered into a mikvah in one of the holiest neighbourhoods in the city, Mea She’arim. “I opened a door that entered into a schvitz,” he told me. “Vapours everywhere, I can barely see. My eyes adjust, and I see an old man, my age, long white beard, a holy-looking man, sitting in the vapours. On his lap, facing away from him, is a boy, maybe seven years old. And the old man is having anal sex with this boy.”

Rabbi Rosenberg paused, gathered himself, and went on: “This boy was speared on the man like an animal, like a pig, and the boy was saying nothing. But on his face – fear. The old man looked at me without any fear, as if this was common practice. He didn’t stop. I was so angry, I confronted him. He removed the boy from his penis, and I took the boy aside. I told this man, ‘It’s a sin before God, a mishkovzucher. What are you doing to this boy’s soul? You’re destroying this boy!’ He had a sponge on a stick to clean his back, and he hit me across the face with it. ‘How dare you interrupt me!’ he said. I had heard of these things for a long time, but now I had seen.”

Rabbi Rosenberg believes around half of young males in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community – the largest in the United States and one of the largest in the world – have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders

Ultra-Orthodox Jews who speak out about these abuses are ruined and condemned to exile by their own community.
Dr. Amy Neustein, a non-fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish sociologist and editor of ‘Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals’, told me the story of a series of Hasidic mothers in Brooklyn she got to know who complained that their children were being preyed on by their husbands.

In these cases, the accused men “very quickly and effectively engage the rabbis, the Orthodox politicians, and powerful Orthodox rabbis who donate handsomely to political clubs.”
The goal, she told me, is “to excise the mother from the child’s life.”
Rabbinical courts cast the mothers aside, and the effects are permanent.
The mother is “amputated.”
One woman befriended by Dr. Neustein, a music student at a college outside New York, lost contact with all six of her children, including an infant she was breastfeeding at the time of their separation.

Seven years ago, Rabbi Rosenberg started blogging about sex abuse in his community and opened a New York City hotline to field sex abuse complaints.
He has posted appeals on YouTube, appeared on CNN, and given speeches across the U.S., Canada, Israel, and Australia.
Today, he is the lone whistleblower among the Satmar.
For this he is reviled, slandered, hated, feared.
He receives death threats on a regular basis.
In Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, advertisements taken out by the self-described “great rabbis and rabbinical judges of the city of New York” have denounced him as “a stumbling block for the House of Israel,” “a public rebuker and preacher of ethics” who “persists in his rebelliousness” and whose “voice has been heard among many Jewish families, especially young people in their innocence, drawn to listen to his poisonous and revolting speeches.”
Leaflets distributed in Williamsburg and Borough Park, the centres of ultra-Orthodoxy in Brooklyn, display his bearded face over the body of a writhing snake. “Corrupt Informer,” reads one of the leaflets, followed by the declaration that Rabbi Rosenberg’s “name should rot in hell forever. They should cut him off from all four corners of the earth.”

The powerful men – and it is worth noting that this community is regulated by men only – who govern the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism would rather their adherents be blind in their faith, their eyes closed to the horrors Rabbi Rosenberg is exposing.
Like the Catholic establishment, the rabbinate seeks to cover up the crimes, quiet the victims, protect the abusers, and deflect potential criticism of their institutional practices.
Those who speak out are vilified, and the faithful learn to shut their mouths.
When the father of the seven-year-old boy whom Rabbi Rosenberg rescued from the Jerusalem bathhouse showed up to collect his son, he couldn’t believe his son had been raped. Trembling, terrified, he whisked his son away to get medical help, but was still too scared to raise a formal complaint.
According to Ben and Survivors for Justice, “The greatest sin is not the abuse, but talking about the abuse. Kids and parents who step forward to complain are crushed.”
( Christopher Ketcham, 12.11.2013 )  ..  vice.com

The Social National Party Of Ukraine (Now Called ‘Svoboda’), Is A Fascist Party Styled On Hitler’s Nazis.
In the new Ukrainian government politicians linked to the far-right have taken posts from the deputy prime minister to head of defence.
The Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy.
He oversees national security for the nation having previously served as security commandant during the anti-government protests in Kiev.
Parubiy was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.

The Social National Party would go on to become Svoboda, the far-right nationalist party whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok was one of the three most high profile leaders of the Euromaidan protests – negotiating directly with the Yanukovych regime.
Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist street-fighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.

Inside Right Sector was an alliance of hardline nationalist groups including Patriot of Ukraine and the paramilitary group UNA-UNSO, who have fought against Russian troops in Chechnya and Moldova.
Their members paraded in balaclavas and wore uniforms bearing far-right insignia, including the wolfsangel.
The initial actions of the interim government have included forcing making Ukrainian the only official language of the nation and making moves to remove a law which forbids “excusing the crimes of fascism”.

The anti-Russian far-right in Ukraine strongly associate themselves with the legacy of Stepan Bandera and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
In 2010 Viktor Yushchenko made Bandera a “hero of Ukraine”, despite charges of Nazi collaboration and ethnic cleansing by the controversial figure.
Smaller far-right groups from Scandinavia have confirmed they have been travelling to the region to offer support and learn from the “national revolution”.
( Brian Whelan, 05.03.2014 )  ..  channel4.com