blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
Author: thefreeonline
The Free is a book and a blog. Download free E/book ...”the most detailed fictional treatment of the movement from a world recognizably like our own to an anarchist society that I have read...
How much value does the Davos depraved parasite meeting actually DEPRIVE from the global community.
Check out World Economic Forum, WEF and you’ll be delighted that these ultra rich guys are promoting all sorts of wonderful green and friendly NGOs and gender freedom. But look a bit more and you’ll see all that’s just a cynical mask, hijacking our movementsfor profit and power.
The WEF is really about ‘Stakeholders’ (the majority billionaires and top nazi corporations) trying to take financial control of entire nation States, the WHO and the United Nations….
Its about abolishing cash to control us, monetizing and marketing our water, the air, the plants.. privatizing the whole Biosphere with them as owners….
The WEF is just a tool to help seize financial control from the equally criminal nation States, no matter if it’s BRICS+ or the West, in favour of unelected mega billionaires and followers, soon to be trillionaires.
Five richest men doubled fortunes after 2020, Oxfam says as Davos opens
Charity says billionaires $3.3 trillion richer than in 2020 as annual gathering of business elites take place.
The World Economic Forum was launched by the German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab in the early 1970s to champion ‘stakeholder capitalism’
The world’s richest five men have more than doubled their fortunes since 2020, the charity Oxfam has said, sounding the alarm about unchecked corporate power as business elites hold their high-profile annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland.
Klaus Schwab set up the WEF to promote “stakeholder capitalism”, sidelining citizens and voters in favour of mega corporations.
The five men are worth a combined $869bn after growing their fortunes at a rate of $14m per hour during the past four years, Oxfam said in its report “Inequality Inc.”, released on Monday.
Despite the growth in the fortunes of the five – LVMH chief Bernard Arnault, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffet, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Tesla CEO Elon Musk – 5 billion people have gotten poorer over the same period, Oxfam said.
Billionaires are today $3.3 trillion richer than they were in 2020, while a billionaire leads 7 out of 10 of the world’s biggest companies, the London-based charity said.
If current trends continue, the world will have its first trillionaire within a decade but poverty will not be eradicated for another 229 years, according to the anti-poverty group.
Oxfam International interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar said that nobody should have a billion dollars.
“We’re witnessing the beginnings of a decade of division, with billions of people shouldering the economic shockwaves of pandemic, inflation and war, while billionaires’ fortunes boom.
The arrests came after a Daily Express journalist’, Max Parry, went undercover in the group to report on activities and hand information on alleged plans to the police.
Yemen’s Houthis direct hit without deaths on another ship in Red Sea. US confirms new strike despite world’s “BEST” naval deterrent
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for a missile attack on a Malta-flagged cargo ship in the Red Sea as the United States says it has launched a new strike on Houthi targets amid soaring tensions around the key waterway.
“A Malta-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier, the Zografia was reportedly targeted and impacted with a missile while transiting the southern Red Sea northbound,” the maritime risk management company Ambrey said in an alert on Tuesday.
The Houthis have attacked dozens of vessels since November, including the bulk carrier Zografia on January 16, 2024 [File: Courtesy: MarineTraffic.com]
The Houthis’ military spokesperson, Yahya Sarea, said in a statement that the Yemeni rebels targeted the Zografia ship with naval missiles on Tuesday as it was heading to Israel, resulting in a “direct hit”.
@wlsfargo Gone are the days of aircraft carriers. Ancient history, my friend. Hypersonic missiles render them totally obsolete.
There were no reports of injuries. The vessel had been heading north to the Suez Canal when it was attacked, the Greek Ministry of Shipping and Island Policy said.
Earlier on Tuesday, the US military said it launched a new strike against the Houthis, hitting anti-ship missiles in the third assault on the Iran-backed group in recent days.
According to a US Central Command statement, the strike destroyed four Houthi ballistic missiles that were prepared to launch and presented an imminent threat to merchant and US navy ships in the region.
The Houthi attack on the Zografia involved an anti-ship ballistic missile, the statement said, adding that the ship continued its Red Sea transit after being hit and saying it remained seaworthy.
The Iran-backed Houthis have attacked what they say are Israel-linked commercial vessels since November, disrupting maritime trade routes. The Houthis say the attacks are a response to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
The group has threatened to expand the range of targets of its attacks in the Red Sea to include US ships in response to American and British strikes on its sites in Yemen.
On Sunday, US forces shot down a Houthi cruise missile targeting a US destroyer, and on Monday, a US-owned cargo ship in the Gulf of Oman was hit by a missile.
Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra said the tensions in the Red Sea could “degenerate into something bigger, particularly the potential of war for an Iranian-American confrontation in Yemen”.
“We’re talking about an extremely delicate situation in the Red Sea,” Ahelbarra said.
Earlier, Qatar’s prime minister said liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipments would be affected by Red Sea tensions and warned that the strikes on Yemen risk worsening the crisis.
“LNG is … as any other merchant shipments. They will be affected by that [exchange with the Houthis],” Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“There are alternative routes. Those alternative routes are not more efficient; they’re less efficient than the current route,” he added.
On Monday, the Bloomberg news agency reported that at least five LNG vessels used by Qatar had stopped on their way to the Red Sea.
“[Military intervention] will not bring an end for this, will not contain it. So the contrary, I think [it] will create … a further escalation,” the prime minister added.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
The blocking of key LNG and oil shipments directly affects Europe but may favour the US.
comment: Due to sanctions on Russian gas and the US destruction of Northstream Europe is already largely dependent on highly expensive and doubly CO2 polluting US LNG supplies derived from fracking. With the Suez canal now blocked due to the Houthi blockade and insurance hikes the cost of Qatari and other LNG may shoot up to US levels, making more European industry uneconomicbut promoting US LNG.
A shadowy network of dark-money junktanks is delivering the same disastrous political package around the world.
There are elements of fascism, elements borrowed from the Chinese state and elements that reflect Argentina’s history of dictatorship. But most of the programme for government announced by Javier Milei, the demagogic new Argentinian president, feels eerily familiar, here in the northern hemisphere.
A crash programme of massive cuts; demolishing public services; privatising public assets; centralising political power; sacking civil servants; sweeping away constraints on corporations and oligarchs; destroying regulations that protect workers, vulnerable people and the living world; supporting landlords against tenants; criminalising peaceful protest; restricting the right to strike. Anything ring a bell?
Milei is attempting, with a vast “emergency” decree and a monster “reform bill”, what the Conservatives have done in the UK over 45 years. The crash programme bears striking similarities to Liz Truss’s “mini” (maxi) budget, which trashed the prospects of many poor and middle-class people and exacerbated the turmoil that now dominates public life.
Coincidence? Not at all. Milei’s programme was heavily influenced by Argentinian neoliberal thinktanks belonging to something called the Atlas Network, a global coordinating body that promotes broadly the same political and economic package everywhere it operates. It was founded in 1981 by a UK citizen, Antony Fisher. Fisher was also the founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), one of the first members of the Atlas Network.
The IEA created, to a remarkable degree, Liz Truss’s political platform. In a video conversation on the day of her “mini” budget with another member of the institute, its then director general, Mark Littlewood, observed: “We’re on the hook for it now. If it doesn’t work it’s your fault and mine.” It didn’t work – in fact, it crashed spectacularly, at great cost to us all – but, thanks to the UK’s media, the BBC included, which continue to treat these fanatical corporate lobbyists as purveyors of holy writ, they’re off the hook.
Last year, the IEA was platformed on British media an average of 14 times a day: even more often than before the disaster it helped inflict on the UK. Scarcely ever was it challenged about who funds it or whom it represents. The three peers nominated by Truss in her resignation honours list have all worked for or with organisations belonging to the Atlas Network (Matthew Elliott, TaxPayers’ Alliance; Ruth Porter, IEA and Policy Exchange; Jon Moynihan, IEA).
Now, like US supreme court justices, they have been granted lifelong powers to shape our lives, without democratic consent. Truss also put forward Littlewood, but his reward for wrecking people’s lives was blocked by the House of Lords appointments commission.
Nothing has been learned: these corporate lobby groups still mould our politics. Policy Exchange, which, as Rishi Sunak has admitted, “helped us draft” the UK’s vicious new anti-protest laws, is also a member of the Atlas Network.
What US foreign policy shamelessly amounts to is this: ‘We make the rules so we get to break the rules.”
Have you heard the one about the U.S. government wanting a “rules-based international order”?
It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.
The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”
So, from the outset, the coverage portrayed the U.S.-led attack as a reluctant action—taken after exploring all peaceful options had failed—rather than an aggressive act in violation of international law.
On Thursday, President Biden issued a statement that sounded righteous enough, saying “these strikes are in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea.”
He did not mention that the Houthi attacks have been in response to Israel’s murderous siege of Gaza. In the words of CNN, they “could be intended to inflict economic pain on Israel’s allies in the hope they will pressure it to cease its bombardment of the enclave.”
In fact, as Common Dreams reported, Houthi forces “began launching missiles and drones toward Israel and attacking shipping traffic in the Red Sea in response to Israel’s Gaza onslaught.” And as Trita Parsi at the Quincy Institute pointed out, “the Houthis have declared that they will stop” attacking ships in the Red Sea “if Israel stops” its mass killing in Gaza.
But that would require genuine diplomacy—not the kind of solution that appeals to President Biden or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The duo has been enmeshed for decades, with lofty rhetoric masking the tacit precept that might makes right.
(The approach was implicit midway through 2002, when then-Senator Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearings that promoted support for the U.S. to invade Iraq; at the time, Blinken was the committee’s chief of staff.)
Now, in charge of the State Department, Blinken is fond of touting the need for a “rules-based international order.” During a 2022 speech in Washington, he proclaimed the necessity “to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.”
Two months ago, he declared that G7 nations were united for “a rules-based international order.”
But for more than three months, Blinken has provided a continuous stream of facile rhetoric to support the ongoing methodical killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Days ago, behind a podium at the U.S. Embassy in Israel, he defended that country despite abundant evidence of genocidal warfare, claiming that “the charge of genocide is meritless.
The Houthis are avowedly in solidarity with Palestinian people, while the U.S. government continues to massively arm the Israeli military that is massacring civilians and systematically destroying Gaza. Blinken is so immersed in Orwellian messaging that—several weeks into the slaughter—he tweeted that the United States and its G7 partners “stand united in our condemnation of Russia’s war in Ukraine, in support of Israel’s right to defend itself in accordance with international law, and in maintaining a rules-based international order.”
There’s nothing unusual about extreme doublethink being foisted on the public by the people running U.S. foreign policy. What they perpetrate is a good fit for the description of doublethink in George Orwell’s novel 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it . . .”
After news broke about the attack on Yemen, a number of Democrats and Republicans in the House quickly spoke up against Biden’s end-run around Congress, flagrantly violating the Constitution by going to war on his own say-so.
Some of the comments were laudably clear, but perhaps none more so than a statement by candidate Joe Biden on Jan. 6, 2020: “A president should never take this nation to war without the informed consent of the American people.”
Like that disposable platitude, all the Orwellian nonsense coming from the top of the U.S. government about seeking a “rules-based international order” is nothing more than a brazen PR scam.
The vast quantity of official smoke-blowing now underway cannot hide the reality that the United States government is the most powerful and dangerous outlaw nation in the world.
The Free 