Last Straw

Finally. Let’s hope this guy is good.

Here’s another reason why I opposed the Nato bomb­ing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Give war crim­in­als like Blair an inch and they’ll take the rope and go on to invade the rest of the world:

Wood told the inquiry that some min­is­ters and even the then prime min­is­ter, Tony Blair, used to privately claim that the Nato bomb­ing of Kosovo in 1999 provided a use­ful pre­ced­ent for going to war in Iraq.

In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cor­por­a­tions had the same con­sti­tu­tional rights as a per­son. This was the begin­ning of the end of any mean­ing­ful form of demo­cracy in the U.S.

David Korten alludes to the reason:

The private-benefit cor­por­a­tion is an insti­tu­tion gran­ted a leg­ally pro­tec­ted right — some would claim oblig­a­tion — to pur­sue a nar­row private interest without regard to broader social and envir­on­mental con­sequences. If it were a real per­son, it would fit the clin­ical pro­file of a sociopath.

The basic design of the private-benefit cor­por­a­tion was cre­ated in 1600 when the Brit­ish crown chartered the Brit­ish East India Com­pany as what is best described as a leg­al­ized crim­inal syn­dic­ate to col­on­ize the resources and eco­nom­ies of dis­tant lands to bene­fit wealthy investors far removed from the social and envir­on­mental con­sequences. That design has ever since proven highly effect­ive in advan­cing the private interests of the world’s wealth­i­est people at enorm­ous cost to the rest.

The private-benefit cor­por­a­tion uses its eco­nomic power to privat­ize (intern­al­ize) gains and social­ize (extern­al­ize) cost.

The power afforded to cor­por­a­tions in the U.S. has, until now, been slightly cur­tailed by lim­its imposed on cor­por­ate spend­ing in polit­ical cam­paigns. In a sweep­ing decision a right-wing major­ity U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to lift these limits.

Cor­por­a­tions, and the rich behind them, finally own Amer­ica. Demo­cracy for the rich.

The 20^th cen­tury has been char­ac­ter­ised by three devel­op­ments of great polit­ical import­ance: the growth of demo­cracy; the growth of cor­por­ate power; and the growth of cor­por­ate pro­pa­ganda as a means of pro­tect­ing cor­por­ate power against demo­cracy.
—Alex Carey, Tak­ing the Risk out of Democracy

Soli­citor Daniel Machover, after politi­cians — includ­ing Gor­don Brown — hatch a plan to insu­late fel­low politi­cians from uni­ver­sal jur­is­dic­tion:

I feel hon­est revul­sion at the idea of a case where a judge has gran­ted an arrest war­rant and a politi­cian gets on the phone and apo­lo­gises. They have got to stay out of indi­vidual cases and legal decisions.

Of course Gor­don Brown and the gov­ern­ment he is a part of played an integ­ral role in the inva­sions of Iraq and Afgh­anistan. He’s just look­ing out for his own kind.

Tony Blair has admit­ted on TV his inten­tion was to com­mit the inter­na­tional crime of uni­lat­eral war for regime change. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Asked if he would have gone on had he known there was no WMDs, he replied:

I would still have thought it right to remove [Sad­dam Hus­sein]. I mean obvi­ously you would have had to use and deploy dif­fer­ent argu­ments about the nature of the threat.

Two world wars, tens of mil­lions dead, the sub­sequent entrench­ment of inter­na­tional law under the Charter of the United Nations and Tony Blair thinks that the decision to go to war should come down to his own per­sonal beliefs about right and wrong.

Click through to read more and view a video excerpt of the interview.

The Chil­cot Inquiry into the Iraq war is already run­ning a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign that it “won’t be a whitewash.”

But you only need to real­ise that its mem­bers were appoin­ted by Gor­don Brown — one of the per­pet­rat­ors — and read the terms of ref­er­ence to real­ise this is a white­wash before it even starts.

Guard­ian gagged from report­ing UK par­lia­ment: The Guard­ian has been pre­ven­ted from report­ing par­lia­ment­ary pro­ceed­ings on legal grounds which appear to call into ques­tion priv­ileges guar­an­tee­ing free speech estab­lished under the 1688 Bill of Rights. Update: Trafigura drops bid to gag Guard­ian over MP’s question.

No Right Turn on the NZ National/ACT government’s oppos­i­tion to a new bill that would make it a national crim­inal offence for any New Zea­l­and polit­ical leader to “plan, pre­pare, ini­ti­ate or execute an act of aggres­sion” in viol­a­tion of the UN Charter. … when Wayne Mapp says he doesn’t want our for­eign policy to be subject […]

Open let­ter from the Camp for Cli­mate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Super­in­tend­ent of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police Service. Worth read­ing in it’s entirety.

Could be interesting. Jon Hen­ley for The Guard­ian: The Met­ro­pol­itan police have announced a new strategy for next week’s Cli­mate Camp  –  put­ting women officers in charge of the oper­a­tion. Will this avoid the viol­ence seen at the G20 protests? Per­haps the most noted Amer­ican researcher into gender dif­fer­ences in poli­cing, Joseph Balkin, observed that “police­men tend to see […]