How much longer will we take it?

[Dan Hot]

A great article by John Pilger:

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=593

[Metalattakk]

error, page not found

Link is wrong.

[upolian]

This page has been reserved for future use

[changilass]

This is why its always a good idea to summerise what is in a link. At least others have a slight chance of knowing what you are on about, and there is also the chance that someone else may be able to find a link that actually works.

[Corrie 3]

A great article by John Pilger:

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=593

Not so hot Dan...?

C3....roll:

[Dan Hot]

Edit:
Looks like they are updating his site. I check it again later..

[changilass]

Why not just give us an idea of what it is about, rather than relying on the site coming back up.

[ducati]

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a contender for the most pointless thread of the week

[Corrie 3]

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a contender for the most pointless thread of the week

I agree Ducati but.........."How much longer will we take?"
(ps, did you know there are Vampires in Portgower?)...lol

C3...

[Aaldtimer]

Link is wrong.

Works for me on both PC and laptop!

[Metalattakk]

Works for me on both PC and laptop!

Oh really?

Copy and paste the article then, smart-arse!

[Aaldtimer]

Oh really?

Copy and paste the article then, smart-arse!

The party game is over. Stand and fight4 Nov 2010In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the disenchantment with parliamentary politics as the British "coalition" government pursues its devotion to 'an extreme political cult of money worship'. He suggests there is only one course of action now.

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

These days, the stirring lines of Percy Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy may seem unattainable. I don’t think so. Shelley was both a Romantic and political truth-teller. His words resonate now because only one political course is left to those who are disenfranchised and whose ruin is announced on a government spread sheet.

Born of the “never again” spirit of 1945, social democracy in Britain has surrendered to an extreme political cult of money worship. This reached its apogee when £1 trillion of public money was handed unconditionally to corrupt banks by a Labour government whose leader, Gordon Brown, had previously described “financiers” as the nation’s “great example” and his personal “inspiration”.

This is not to say Parliamentary politics is meaningless. They have one meaning now: the replacement of democracy by a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born. The old myths of British rectitude, imperial in origin, provided false comfort while the Blair gang, assisted by venal MPs, finished Thatcher’s work and built the foundation of the present “coalition”. This is led by a former PR man for an asset stripper and by a bagman who will inherit his knighthood and the tax-avoided fortune of his father, the 17th Baronet of Ballentaylor. David Cameron and George Osborne are essentially fossilised spivs who, in colonial times, would have been sent by their daddies to claim foreign terrain and plunder.

Today, they are claiming 21st century Britain and imposing their vicious, antique ideology, albeit served as economic snake oil. Their designs have nothing to do with a “deficit crisis”. A deficit of 10 per cent is not remotely a crisis. When Britain was officially bankrupt at the end of the second world war, the government built its greatest public institutions, such as the National Health Service and the great arts edifices of London’s South Bank.

There is no economic rationale for the assault described cravenly by the BBC as a “public spending review”. The debt is exclusively the responsibility of those who incurred it, the super-rich and the gamblers. However, that’s beside the point. What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state. It is a coup, a “shock doctrine” as applied to Pinochet’s Chile and Yeltsin’s Russia.

In Britain, there is no need for tanks in the streets. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms it is said to hold dear, bourgeois Britain has allowed parliament to create a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. Powers of arrest and detention have never been greater. The police have the impunity to kill; asylum seekers can be “restrained” to death on commercial flights and should fellow passengers object, anti-terrorism laws will deal with them. Abroad, British militarism colludes with torturers and death squads.

The playwright Athol Fugard is right. With Harold Pinter gone, no acclaimed writer or artist dare depart from their well remunerated vanity. With so much in need of saying, they have nothing to say. Liberalism, the vainest ideology, has hauled up its ladder. The chief opportunist, Nick Clegg, leader of the minority Liberal Democrats, gave no electoral hint of his odious faction’s compliance with the dismantling of much of British post-war society. The theft of £83bn in jobs and services matches almost exactly the amount of tax legally avoided by piratical corporations like Rupert Murdoch’s. Without fanfare, the super-rich have been assured they can dodge £40bn in tax payments in the secrecy of Swiss banks. The day this was sewn up, Osborne attacked those who “cheat” the welfare system. He omitted the real amount lost, a minuscule £0.5bn, and that £10.5bn in benefit payments were not claimed at all. The Labour Party is his silent partner.

The propaganda arm in the press and broadcasting dutifully presents this as unfortunate but necessary. Mark how the fire-fighters’ action is “covered”. On Channel 4 News, following an item that portrayed modest, courageous public servants as basically reckless, the presenter Jon Snow demanded that the leaders of the London Fire Authority and the Fire Brigades Union go straight from the studio and “mediate” now, this minute. “I’ll get the taxis!” he declared. Forget the thousands of jobs that are to be eliminated from the fire service and the public danger beyond Bonfire Night. Knock their jolly heads together. “Good stuff!” said the presenter.

Ken Loach’s 1980s documentary series, Questions of Leadership, opens with a sequence of earnest young trade unionists on platforms, exhorting the masses. They are then shown older, florid, self-satisfied and finally adorned in the ermine of the House of Lords. Once, at a Durham Miners’ Gala, I asked Tony Woodley, now the joint general secretary of Unite, “Isn’t the problem the clockwork collaboration of the union leadership?” He almost agreed, implying that the rise of bloods like himself would change that. The British Airways’ cabin crew strike, over which Woodley presides, is said to have made gains. Has it? And why haven’t the British unions risen as one against totalitarian laws that place free trade unionism in a vice?

The BA workers, the fire-fighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; and listen to the public’s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.

[Ricco]

Nope - finds part of a page... header only, no content.

[squidge]

Power to the people; where is wolfie when you need him. Seriously tho the man has a point. Apathy and self interest appear to be the order of the day. I'm allright jack who cares about you. This hammering of welfare recipients really really makes me cross. The idea that those on jobseekers allowance for more than a year will lose 10% of their housing benefit is mad. Jobless is bad enough but homeless too? A year is when people need more help not beating about the head with a big stick. So... A call to arms then lol. Is anyone going to be joining?

[ducati]

Like I said, pointless

[Gronnuck]

The BA workers, the fire-fighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the NHS workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement, potentially the greatest popular resistance ever. Look at the web; and listen to the public’s support at fire stations. There is no other way now. Direct action. Civil disobedience. Unerring. Read Shelley and do it.

Us Brits are too Conservative by nature to take direct action or instigate civil disobedience. But we do whinge, in fact we might well be the World Champions at whinging!

[ducati]

Of course if any, or all of that dribble is true then this thread is probably covered under some or other sedition or anti terrorist legislation and we will suddenly disap

[Mystical Potato Head]

Us Brits are too Conservative by nature to take direct action or instigate civil disobedience. But we do whinge, in fact we might well be the World Champions at whinging!

Any stranger taking a read through the pages of the org general section would probably agree with that statement.
As Captain "Wild" Bill Wichrowski said,the attitude spreads like a virus.