[Campaignforrealdemocracy] [project2012] Re: [Dem-Village] A Pair of Beauties

[Mark Barrett]

+1 Amaia

On 13 December 2011 07:25, Amaia Arcos <amaia.arcos at googlemail.com> wrote:

> Yeah Mike, weirdo Libyans being all happy about not having to endure
> disappearances and public executions. Weird people of Benghazi rising
> randomly in some mind-control experiment via which the west played them in
> order to aid their evil, evil plan.
>
> It's not like western countries didn't have any good deals with Gaddafi
> already, poor guys got no Libyan oil so they had to manipulate an entire
> half of the country to rise in arms and enter a bloody war.
>
> I know how manipulating and interventionist western powers are but get a
> grip, you cannot make everything fall into your prejudiced categories. Had
> you had time for following the Libyan revolution from day one and from the
> bottom-up, you would have been desperately crying and praying for a no-fly
> zone like Benghazi people were (begging for weeks before Sarkozy decided he
> could get something out of all this and decided to "help").
>
> Every time you guys come up with crap like this, you make the whole
> "social justice" movement look like an ignorant bunch of people who don't
> even bother to get properly informed. It's kind of insulting for the rest
> of us.
>
>  On 13 December 2011 00:03, Mike Raddie <raddie23 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Thanks for this Mark.
>>
>> I normally have a lot of time for Fisky but in this piece he’s either
>> been lazy in his research or extremely naïve in the reasons for the forced
>> regime change in Libya.
>>
>> “The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs
>> of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property
>> rights to their entire nations.” To claim that Gaddafis believed that they
>> had property rights to their entire nation belies the fact that Gaddfi did
>> more to distribute Libya’s riches to the people than any other nation in
>> modern history. That he housed every family in the country, even before his
>> own parents, shows his commitment to the many egalitarian reforms
>> introduced after the revolution forty years ago.
>>
>> The standard of living in Libya was the highest on the continent and
>> arguably better than many western nations. This interview with Don DeBar (
>> http://bsnews.info/_Interview1.html  ) shows the kind of things Libyan
>> people took for granted, like free housing, free education, free health
>> care, subsidized food, fuel, car purchases, the payment of $5,000 to every
>> woman who gave birth, the $50,000 interest free loan given to every
>> newly-wed couple, and the incredibly low taxes (VAT of 0%, income tax of
>> 15%). All of this has become a distant dream now that the west have
>> installed their oil industry puppet at the head of the new national
>> council.
>>
>> 4/ From what we've been reading, Libya has a much better welfare state
>> than most western nations. Can you confirm our research into this?
>>
>>   * Free health care - if an operation is not available within the
>> country, the patient is flown abroad for treatment and Libyan govt picks up
>> the entire bill. True. And also funds travel and board for the patient's
>> family.
>>   * Free education - Libyan students choosing to study abroad get their
>> university fees and and living expense paid for (not a student loan) -
>> True. All that is required is that the student is accepted for admission by
>> the university.
>>   * Income tax = 15% (apart from farm labourers and agricultural workers
>> who pay no income tax) Correct.
>>   * VAT = 0% Correct.
>>   * Fuel, food and even car purchases are all subsidised. AND Promoted.
>>   * Most people own their own home free of mortgage - ALL people own
>> their homes free of mortgages, rent or taxes.
>>   * All infrastructure projects are funded using the Libyan Sovereign
>> Wealth Fund - some foreign investment - WITHOUT EQUITY - was allowed for a
>> part of the past decade.
>>   * Most importantly, Libya has no national debt (apart from annual
>> current account) and so is not indebted to the IMF / World Bank and BIS -
>> Correct. Although these have stolen billion of Libyan assets in the past
>> months.
>>   * Gaddafi was planning to introduce a new currency - the gold dinar -
>> which would be used to free the continent from colonial / imperial
>> enslavement. The plan was for all African oil producing countries to sell
>> oil and possibly other resources in this new currency. Obviously this would
>> be a huge threat not only to the petro dollar hegemony but to the euro as
>> well. Correct. See detail above.
>>
>> Libya never had a national debt in the last 40 years – the Libyan state
>> owned bank created whatever money it needed and spent into the economy as a
>> debt-free money supply. Rather than people being slaves to money, money
>> served the Libyan people – this is how they were able to build the man made
>> river project which brought water to every part of the nation. This is how
>> they were able to install their own telecommunications satellites, lowering
>> the cost of internet, mobile phone and satellite broadcasting for most in
>> Africa.
>>
>> Now the Libyan central bank has been privatized and is owned by the
>> moneyed vultures Fisky rightly describes as the dictators of the west – if
>> it weren’t so sad, the irony would be laughable. Sorry Robert, but this
>> kind of lazy ‘journalism’ is not what I expect from people like you.
>>
>> So what’s next for Libya? See http://bsnews.info/_WhatsNextForLibya.html
>>
>> Government of the people, for the people and by the people?
>>
>> With regard to national and regional politics, we'll see the end of
>> popular peoples assemblies or committees and with that the hope of Libyan
>> people ever having real control of their day to day lives and their
>> communities again. We may see elections but not until a long, protracted
>> and ruthless civil war has sapped the Libyan people of their will to fight
>> and centralized the political power into the hands of a few.
>>
>> Within 5 years and with a national debt that has spiraled from zero to
>> potentially hundreds of billions of dollars, the country will be entirely
>> at the mercy of the private, international banking cartel. All government
>> spending will be subject to the whims of western elite interests and the
>> bankers who do their bidding. External forces like the IMF will be able to
>> impose austerity measures as in most European countries today.
>>
>> Finally, we'll see the emergence of a wealthy, political class with ties
>> to big oil companies and international banks, insisting the way forward is
>> to privatize any state run company that they’re able to squeeze some profit
>> out of.
>>
>> RIP Jamahiriya 1977 - 2011. “RIP Libya. The Rothschilds own you now.”
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 12/12/2011 22:10, "Mark Barrett" <marknbarrett at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  Thanks to Occupy's sharp eyes saw this (below) along this:
>> *Tom Hodgkinson: 'Boris ought to know his Plato'
>> *
>> http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tom-hodgkinson-boris-ought-to-know-his-plato-6273528.html
>> and thought they were both rather good ;)
>>
>> *Opinion |  Bankers are the dictators of the West
>> *
>> Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot
>> than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I
>> say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have
>> about the world financial crisis.
>>
>> But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the
>> collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East
>> cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions
>> and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal
>> disaster.
>>
>> Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal
>> distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle
>> East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western
>> capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the
>> disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring"
>> book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have
>> been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in
>> Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.
>>
>> The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western
>> reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so
>> anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so
>> desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are
>> merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is
>> somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and
>> then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand
>> for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators
>> actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the
>> Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads
>> all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt
>> belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family),
>> Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died
>> to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.
>>
>> And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are
>> indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against
>> "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in
>> the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy:
>> they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their
>> democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative
>> traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and
>> dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think
>> tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation
>> rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
>>
>> The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West.
>> Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe –
>> they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power
>> have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as
>> false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after
>> decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the
>> Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the
>> UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for
>> their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy
>> Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.
>>
>> I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it
>> helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are
>> interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank
>> and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who
>> AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their
>> poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by
>> threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European
>> nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in
>> the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive
>> me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into
>> the French than Rommel did in 1940?
>>
>> Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC
>> and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities
>> as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations – Inside Job
>> started along the path – into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds
>> me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover
>> the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by
>> an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American
>> "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the
>> good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists".
>>
>> The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the
>> Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social
>> "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and
>> Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the
>> West – our governments – have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs,
>> we can't touch them.
>>
>> The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week
>> that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found
>> themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them
>> was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers
>> did tell us? And our reporters, too?
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
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