Author: R J Adams

There’s a time for debate. There’s a time for well-researched, deliberate, reflection. There’s a time for pure, unadulterated anger. Today is undoubtedly a time for the latter.

The spotlight is not on the US, but across the Atlantic. Yet again that shower of pompous, wealth-laden, arseholes, known collectively as “Her Britannic Majesty’s government”, are displaying unadulterated arrogance by attempting to throw blame onto NHS workers already victimized by government mismanagement, while continuing to line their fat wallets with corporate cash, and systematically drain the National Health Service of its last vestiges of efficiency.

^{Jeremy Hunt – UK Minister for Health}

Today, it was announced, staff members of the NHS (read: doctors and nurses) will be held criminally accountable for any wilful neglect of patients. Big Chief of the stuffed shirts comprising this apology for a government, David Cameron, said:

…health workers who mistreated and abused patients would face “the full force of the law” in a package of measures…^[1]

No doubt, it will be left to government lawyers to determine whether any neglect is ‘wilful’, or simply the result of an over-stressed doctor clocking up his 100th hour on duty that week.

Having decimated the NHS, systematically reduced its funding to a point where only skeleton staffing numbers can exist, all for the sole purpose of providing the excuse necessary to hand the whole service over to corporate enterprise, Cameron and cronies are now reduced to creating a climate of fear among NHS staff, who are already struggling to cope, thanks to willful mismanagement by the very people now imposing fear of imprisonment, for probably no more than human failing due to work related stress.

It was Winston Churchill who said, “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job.”

Within the NHS that could be re-phrased, “Give us the staff and we’ll be able to do the job.”

Cameron and Co have no idea what’s involved in the proper functioning of a National Health Service. Why should they? They’ve never used it. They pay for private medical care. All they’re interested in is balancing the books. And the only way they know to do that is by cutting back on staff and salaries. It’s the same with the economy. It’s in a mess, let the poor people pay to get us out of it.

Perhaps it’s time a law was enacted making wilful neglect of the economy a criminal offence, or the wilful neglect of public services. Maybe then Cameron and Co would make the effort to govern Britain more responsibly. If only they knew how.

Meanwhile, still desperately endeavoring to make his name as an international leader, David Cameron has traveled to Sri Lanka in an attempt to intimidate President Mahinda Rajapaksa into setting up an independent enquiry into alleged human rights abuses against Tamils since the end of the war in 2009^[2].

‘Either do that, or a UN Human Rights Council enquiry will,’ threatened Cameron.

^{President Rajapaksa with his ‘Ministers’}

President Rajapaksa’s response was, “Piss off! People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

He has a point. How about human rights abuses in Iraq, Mister Cameron – just for starters? And we’ll promise not to mention Northern Ireland (we’d hate to cast aspersions on your predecessor, Margaret Thatcher^[3]), or, of course, those old colonial days of the Raj, when Sri Lanka was still known as Ceylon.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa is no saint. It’s likely he, and his relatives, were responsible for many of the human rights abuses suffered by Tamils of late. He’s not a nice man.

But then, it takes one hypocrite to know another.

^{[1] “Doctors and nurses may face jail for neglect” BBC, November 16th 2013}

^{[2] “Sri Lanka President Rajapaksa defiant on rights row” BBC, November 16th 2013}

^{[3] “UK-assistance-to-Sri-Lankan-Police_1983.pdf”}

Typhoon Haiyan is now officially the most severe weather system of its type ever to make landfall. A major nation has been virtually wiped off the map. It will take years, decades, for the Philippines to recover.

Wild fires, drought, floods, tornadoes, so severe they create new records of intensity with every year that passes, and regularly afflict the Americas and Australia. The oceans are rising and warming. Greenhouse gases are poisoning the atmosphere at a rate barely comprehensible.

And still they do nothing.

Who should the people of the Philippines blame for this ransacking of their nation? Who, or what, can they hold accountable for the sudden death and destruction that has robbed them of their families, their homes, their livelihoods?

Should they, perhaps, blame their God?

Or, should they hold responsible those who years ago were warned of the consequences of human pollution, and did nothing?

And are still doing nothing.

Those who had most to lose from legislation that, had it been enacted in time, would have averted, or at least lessened, the catastrophic weather patterns we now experience, chose to block that legislation by corruption, blackmail, and bribery of our lawmakers. In turn, those lawmakers – our politicians – turned their backs on the people and took the thirty pieces of silver showered on them by the corporate rich.

It may be human nature to blame a deity in time of tribulation, but no deity was responsible for those ten thousand dead in the Philippines, or the 170,000 who died in the tsunami of December 2004 in Indonesia…

…or the 15,883 deaths resulting from the Japanese tsunami of 2011.

Mankind is wholly responsible. The greedy rich, and those who feed from the crumbs scattered from corporate dinner tables, are the real culprits. Only they had the power to do something. They did nothing. Only they had the means to turn the atmospheric tide. Instead, they chose mammon.

It will get worse. Even now, while quietly hinting at global warming as a possibility, Western media still hedges with the stock phrase, “No-one can say for sure…”.

It will come to America. It won’t be called Typhoon Haiyan, but it will come. It will create devastation on this continent such as has never been witnessed before. It will make Katrina resemble a breeze on a summer’s day.

Will they still do nothing then? They probably will, when they finally realize their own, fat, corporate hides are in jeopardy. Then they’ll get around to doing something.

Then it will be too late.

Have you noticed it’s the time for sanitizing one’s legacy. Two decrepit old political has-beens have just published books designed to make us all go, “Ah, bless ‘im, he really is a nice man, after all.”

I am, of course, referring to that evil mastermind of the George W Bush years, Dick Cheney: the true president, in all but name. His latest work, “Heart – An American Medical Odyssey” is, as they say, on the bookshelves.

Mike Lofgren, a one-time Republican staffer with twenty-eight years service in Washington, writing in his book, ‘The Party Is Over’, states:

…After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was as much a legislative mess as it was an enduring monument to American gullibility and deliberately induced fearfulness. President Bush and his advisers, meaning Dick Cheney, did not want a cabinet department at first. Bush and Cheney preferred to keep homeland security functions under the executive office of the president, which would have made it free of legislative oversight…[p31][my bold]”

With his latest book, Cheney is trying to tell us he really does have a heart. He truly does, he purloined it from someone else who sadly wasn’t able to choose who got it.

In a recent interview with USA Today, when asked about President Obama’s ‘personal leadership, his political agenda and, especially, his handling of national security’, Cheney responded:

“His priorities are radically different from mine…I’d put defense first and foremost. The Constitution and the oath of office, the first thing you need to be focused on is defending the nation. All the highway money, food stamps and education, and everything else we like having the government do, don’t amount to a hill of beans compared to our inability to defend the nation.”^[1]

Defend the nation against whom, Mister Vice President? Eighteen Saudi Arabian religious nutters hell-bent on getting their own back for your invasion of their holy land? Perhaps if your citizens were properly educated to the real truth of American diplomacy…

…and properly fed, they’d force you to remove your US jackboots from Mecca out of respect for the cultures and beliefs of others.

And, how many hungry Americans today would give their right arm for your hill of beans?

Following in the ‘I’m really a Mister Nice Guy’ footsteps of Richard Bruce Cheney is the ex Chairman of the FED, Alan Greenspan. Now eighty-seven years old, Greenspan has just published his own book, “The Map and the Territory”…

In an interview on ‘The Daily Show’ this week Greenspan refuted any idea that he knew what the banks were up to prior to the economic crash of 2008. Does he really expect us to believe that?

Steven Pearlstein, writing in the Washington Post, succinctly makes the point…

What we find, however, is that Greenspan’s journey of discovery brings him right back to where he began — to an unshakable faith in free markets, an antipathy toward market regulation, and a conviction that progressive taxes and social spending are to blame for slow growth, stagnant wages and exploding deficits.

Those who have followed his career know that it was Greenspan who gave the green light to bank consolidation, Greenspan who pushed financial deregulation, Greenspan who advocated new global rules that would have reduced bank capital reserves and Greenspan who blocked efforts to crack down on abusive subprime lending. But if you are looking for him to accept any responsibility for the crisis that ensued, you will be sorely disappointed.^[2]

Here we have one of America’s top economists (if not, the top), who for thirty years was chairman and president of Townsend-Greenspan & Co., Inc., an economic consulting firm in New York City; has also served as corporate director of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa); Automatic Data Processing; Capital Cities/ABC, Inc.; General Foods; J.P. Morgan & Co.; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company; Mobil Corporation; and the Pittston Company (now ‘Brinks’, revenue $3.886 billion FY2011), has obviously hob-nobbed with top bankers and other aristocrats of the finance industry, yet has the gall to suggest he didn’t know what the banks were up to. Pull the other one, Mister Greenspan. Ayn Rand may have captivated your economic heart, but some of us are made of sterner stuff and less easily cajoled.

Incidentally, Alan Greenspan was also director of the Council for Foreign Relations from 1982 to 1988. A prominent member of that organization is Brian Williams, the $10,000,000/yr anchor and managing editor of NBC’s ‘Nightly News’ program.

A close associate of Williams, and one of NBC’s long-standing reporters and commentators, is Andrea Mitchell, probably best remembered for her ‘role’ in the ‘who outed Valerie Plame’ case.^[3]

It’s pure coincidence, of course, but Mitchell just happens to be the wife of Alan Greenspan.

What, you might ask, has that to do with anything?

Possibly nothing. But Brian Williams, the oh-so-perfect maestro of the tear-jerking sob-story Americans love so much, is constantly referring to NBC employees as members of ‘our great NBC family’, while refraining from any explanation as to just how far-reaching the branches of that ‘great NBC family’ truly are.

Well, the Big Daddy parent of the ‘Great NBC Family’ just happens to be the General Electric Company of America.

Yes, you’ve guessed it – the wealthy relative who makes really crap light bulbs, and even crappier nuclear power plants.[see previous post].

Small world, isn’t it?

My guess is there’ll be many more, as the years creep on, who’ll feel the need to sanitize their public legacies.

^{[1] “Cheney book documents his struggles with heart disease” USA Today, October 21st 2013}

^{[2] “Alan Greenspan still thinks he’s right” Washington Post, October 18th 2013}

^{[3] “Andrea Mitchell – Drunk Again?” FDL, March 13th 2007}