Friday 13th Pepsi Trump Horror Show
The Forest was shrinking, but the Trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle was made of Wood he was one of them. — Turkish proverb
What the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed with great precision, was access to history, even at the price of destruction. — Hannah Arendt
Thursday night exit polls showed a massive swing to the Nasty Party. As the results poured in, exit poll confirmed. I turned off the coverage, it was too depressing.
A nightmare.
A decade of the Nasty Party — zero hours employment, pay less than living wage, poverty, mass closure of libraries, food banks, serfs working for apps, human robots in Amazon warehouses, class warfare, mass transfer of wealth to the rich, tax dodging on an industrial scale, austerity, neo-liberalism, shock doctrine, NHS on point of collapse, disintegration of rail infrastructure.
Labour offered a radical progressive future, a green new deal.
But hey what the fuck, let’s vote for Pepsi Trump.
What went wrong? Why did people on the doorstep say No Jeremy Corbyn?
Why?
Wherever Jeremy Cobyn went, he was greeted by rapturous applause, he related to people, in debates he was calm and measured, had good grasp of the issues
The problem therefore was not Jeremy Corbyn. The problem was the perception of Jeremy Corbyn.
We had the most vicious smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn. And it was not only the usual suspects, Murdoch and The Scum. It was fake-Left Guardian, too often the originators of the smears.
Then we had back bench Labour MPs who thought they had a sinecure for life, wanted to go back to the good old days of corrupt Labour, who spent their time sabotaging Labour, aided and abetted by the media, especially BBC News and fake-Left Guardian, only too willing to grant them a soapbox.
Again we have to ask why?
Those in power were scared shitless of radical change. The Deep State was under threat.
Had Labour a leader who would tinkle at the edges, policies that were businesses as usual, the choice of Tweedledum or Tweedledee but no real change, they would have been happy.
Therein lies the dilemma. Labour must not lose sight of the prize, dealing with tax dodgers, bringing in a fairer society, a green new deal.
In the meantime, take to the streets, direct action, form the resistance.
Laura Pidcock a sensitive analysis questions where next?
There are a lot of vulnerable people who are going to be abandoned, the homeless, facing eviction, benefits stopped on a whim.
Activists have to be there helping them. Everyone has a statutory right to be housed. Help them fight the useless jobsworths in local housing departments.
When benefits are stopped, Appeal to a Tribunal.
Contrast with Keir Starmer, a disaster as Shadow Brexit Secretary pandering to the EU Fifth Column, who wishes to take us back to the bad old days of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown demonising those on benefits, instead of help ten years for benefits cheats. On the other hand a year in prison for Members of Parliament who fiddle their expenses would be reasonable.
Work with other progressive groups for example Extinction Rebellion, UK Uncut, Global Justice Now.
At local level build from grassroots not top down diktat.
Our town centres are collapsing. Support local businesses not corporate chains, help recycle money within the local economy.
Why drink disgusting coffee in tax-dodging Starbucks and other corporate chains when nearly every town these days has one or more speciality coffee shops with baristas and owners passionate about coffee serving excellent coffee? [see The Little Bicycle Coffee Shop]
Help to establish and support local open coops then network. Shift the local economy to collaborative commons, establish local currencies. If no local currency encourage use of Fair Coin.
We need a complete overhaul of local democracy which is anything but democratic. We need open meetings, public participation, independent councillors, these citizen controlled Town Halls to network across Europe, create a network of independent self-functioning city states.
To those who say it was democracy, I suggest visit an exhibition in Berlin at the foot of the Berlin Wall which drawing upon Nazi archives shows how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to power. Adolf Hitler was elected.
In Hungary and Poland, Fascists have been elected. They are shutting down a free press, destroying the judiciary.
When Pepsi Trump failed to attend the Channel 4 Climate Debate and in his place a block of melting ice, unnamed Tory sources threatened to remove the broadcast licence of Channel 4.
We have had Laura Kaunsberg and Robert Peston act and still acting as Pepsi Trump propagandists, drip drip drip of propaganda from unnamed sources. If not on record then do not regurgitate as news. Otherwise being played like a fiddle.
Facebook is a threat to democracy. Data is being collected, psychological profiles drawn, then used to manipulate people.
That facebook app, game, quiz, survey, is harvesting data. Who obtains that data, what is it being used for? You grant access not only to what you are doing, but to what your friends are doing. Each person on average connected to 150 to 300 people. This data is collected in real time.
Ten likes, facebook knows more about you than the people you work with, one hundred likes more than family members, three hundred likes more than your partner.
With a facebook app harvesting user data, plus phone records, airline miles, mortgage applications, census returns, Cambridge Analaytica were able to select a person at random, pull up their photo, where they lived and worked, kids, where go to school, the car they drive, who they voted for, and with the help of Google maps zoom in on their house. Then as they had their phone number, call them and hold a conversation.
In the aftermath of Adolf Hitler coming to power there was a lot of soul searching how and why, how do we prevent history repeating itself?
One of those asking was Hannah Arendt. We are facing what she called the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob.
That is what we are now seeing, the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob.
Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica realised break society then reform it in the image you want, Naomi Klein calls it shock doctrine.
Facebook provides the means.
At an open hustings, candidates can be challenged. Even a dire programme like BBC Question Time there is the occasional intelligent response from the audience. Conversations that take place within closed facebook groups are rarely challenged. We used to quarantine villages to stop disease spreading. In a closed facebook group, targeted messages based on psychological profiling, minds are contaminated, within the facebook group, the contagion, the warped thinking, become the norm. People unwittingly act as messengers of false information, act as disease vectors to spread their contamination to wider society.
An example of this was the false information spread about Ian Lucas.
There is a whole world of lies online about political candidates that they don’t know about. Locally, they can become a received wisdom which is impossible for a candidate to rebut.
We can though fight back. Facebook must be broken up, stripped of Instagram and WhatsApp.
- do not put personal data on facebook
- no live links of location data
- do not tag friends
- never games quiz or survey
- do not use instagram or whatsapp
If you have put personal information on facebook, overwrite with fake data, then a few days later delete.
We Voted to Leave EU. Those protesting in London, waving EU flags and wearing silly EU hats on their heads at best deluded fools. Labour by not backing Brexit handed to Tories on a silver platter. Parties that acted as an EU Fifth Column showed contempt for the electorate. LibDems said they would ignore the Referendum result were led by Jo Swindle from oblivion into oblivion. Green Party who said we must have a second referendum managed to retain there one and only seat. People do not like being told they were too stupid to understand, that they are racists, that they have to vote again because they delivered the wrong result. Anti-EU is not anti-Europe, yet the deluded ones with the silly hats were incapable of seeing the difference. EU is a cartel for Big Business, a democracy-free zone that is hated across Europe, that is leading to a rise of Fascism across Europe.
A cartel for Big Business, a democracy-free zone, may have had some merit in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, but no longer. DiEM25 are attempting to democratise the EU, but even if they succeeded, which is not very likely, it would still be a remote body lacking accountability.
EU is on the point of collapse. When it does it is likely to turn very nasty, a repeat of the 1930s and all that followed. We must therefore plan now for the collapse of the EU, to replace with a network of cooperating democratic sovereign European countries.
Yes, Brexit has been handled badly. Once it was decided to Leave, that should have been recognised, open public meeting across the country to reach a consensus on a post-Brexit future, then hard negotiations with EU with full backing of Parliament and the country. No lessons were learnt from Greece.
Were Brexit resolved, we had already left, the election would have been about that post-Brexit future and Labour would probably have been returned with the majority now enjoyed by Pepsi Trump, free to do whatever he chooses.
But people were sick of Brexit they wanted it out of the way, done and dusted, and serial liar Pepsi Trump was the only one offering that.
People long for stability and consistency. Pepsi Trump may be a serial lair, but he is a consistent serial liar.
Donald Trump welcomed the result, said Britain was desperate for a US trade deal. How desperate? Is the NHS on the table, lowering of food standards, lowering of workers rights, trashing of the environment?
What of the climate?
Five more years of no action on climate. We have seen COP25 collapse with no firm commitment to cut carbon emissions by the levels required, zero carbon by 2030. The climate will not wait, the planet burns whilst corrupt politicians fiddle. What we can guarantee is cataclysmic chaos, brought about by climate change and the rapid deep cuts in carbon emissions that will have to be made.
The longer we leave action, the greater the impact, the deeper the cuts will have to be. How much more flooding, when do we act, do we wait until London is flooded?
I fear for this country. I also feel ashamed.
I know how they felt in US when Donald Trump was elected.
