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There are at least three people in the news this week we shouldn’t waste too much sympathy on. The first of them is Kim Kardashian. The robbers, who forced their way into the $16,000 a night Paris apartment she was occupying, are reported to have made off with $10 million in jewels, including a diamond ring worth $4 million.^[1]

Frankly, it’s almost an obscenity to own that much in jewelry. To spend $4 million on one diamond ring is disgraceful, as is the $53 million she apparently ‘acquired’ (to suggest ‘earned’ seems inappropriate) last year as the highest paid “celebrity” reality television “personality”.

Is it not time to realise that reality TV was invented as a way of producing cheap programming: more profit for the media companies and inferior entertainment for the masses? It was never intended to pay contestants huge sums. But then, no-one really expected such low-end television would be so popular. The obsession with so-called ‘celebrities’ is a strange quirk of the human race.

No doubt the jewels were well insured.

Wells Fargo Chief Executive, John Stumpf, was obviously stumpfified this week as he now has to relinquish $41 million in bonuses after his bank defrauded customers by opening two million non-existent accounts in their names and charging them for it. That’s such a shame for Mister Stumpf as his salary is a mere $19.3 million. How will he survive?

According to California’s treasurer John Chiang:

“Wells Fargo’s fleecing of its customers by opening fraudulent accounts for the purpose of extracting millions in illegal fees demonstrates, at best, a reckless lack of institutional control and, at worst, a culture which actively promotes wanton greed.”^[2]

Wrong, Mister Chiang, at best it’s a whole cartload of criminal offences for which Mister Stumpf, and others associated with the racket, should go to jail for a very long time. But, of course, they won’t because the very rich only do jail time if they rob other very rich people – as per Bernie Madoff. Robbing the less-well-off is only deserving of a slap on the wrist for getting caught.

We should definitely not feel sorry for Mister John Stumpf.

Finally, let’s purge any positive feelings we may hold for the latest reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher (or, could it be Mother Theresa?) British Prime Minister, Theresa May, who this week struggles to persuade the British people that all will be well now that she’s named the date of the divorce from Europe. Sadly, that statement’s caused the pound to sink to its lowest for thirty years, though not everyone’s complaining:

Big companies like BP, GSK, Rio Tinto et al make most of their money in dollars but report their profits in pounds. As the pound falls to its lowest level against the dollar for 31 years, those dollar profits are worth more in pound terms. A goldilocks scenario for big multinationals headquartered and listed in the UK…”^[3]

Yet again the corporates make it big. We can, however, feel much sympathy for the millions of U.K. pensioners living abroad whose fixed income pensions have been shrinking drastically following the Brexit result, and the consequent actions of the British government.

It’s just one more case of the rich getting richer and….well, you know the rest.

Theresa May was supposedly a supporter of the U.K. remaining in the E.U., but recent revelations show that was not necessarily the case:

Former PM David Cameron felt “badly let down” by Theresa May during the EU referendum campaign, his former director of communications has said…in a book – ‘Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story Of Brexit’.

Sir Craig Oliver said the then home secretary failed to back the Remain campaign 13 times and was regarded by some as “an enemy agent”…

Sir Craig says Mrs May only came “off the fence” in favour of Remain after Mr Cameron became “visibly wound up” and gave her a dressing down over the telephone.

“Amid the murder and betrayal of the campaign, one figure stayed very still at the centre of it all – Theresa May. Now she is the last one standing,” wrote Sir Craig, who was Mr Cameron’s director of communications for five years.

Sir Craig’s book suggests Mr Cameron was left uncertain over whether Mrs May favoured staying in the European Union. He said Mrs May was referred to dismissively by aides as “submarine May” during the campaign.^[4]

It turns out that ‘submarine May’ misled the British people into believing she was part of the ‘Remain’ group, when in truth she was in favour of Brexit. It explains why those Brexit politicians hopeful of grabbing the top job were so happy to step aside and let May walk into number ten Downing Street unopposed. And, why her cabinet is now almost totally composed of ‘Brexiteers’.

We should not waste sympathy on deceitful Theresa May, or John Stumpf, or Kim Kardashian. Each has gained wealth and power at the expense of ordinary folk. They don’t need our sympathy and neither would they bother to ask it from those they consider of a much lower order than themselves.

Perhaps she should instead consider why we, as human beings, have a need to raise such individuals to a status they don’t deserve; why we allow their domination of news headlines and media attention. It might just teach us something about ourselves.

^{[1] “Kim Kardashian West robbed of millions by Paris gunmen” BBC, October 3rd 2016}

^{[2] “Wells Fargo chief forfeits $41m amid corruption probe” BBC, September 28th 2016}

^{[3] “Why rising shares aren’t a sign of joy” BBC, October 4th 2016}

^{[4] “David Cameron ‘let down’ by Theresa May, says former PM aide” BBC, September 25th 2016}

They all thought he was a goner, those arrogant, middle-class, Labour MPs who worship the ghost of Tony Blair, supported the Iraq War, and sold their souls to corporate, neoliberal, idealism. Angela Eagle was the first to challenge him, but she was forced aside in favour of Owen Smith because he was ‘more electable’, or so thought the snob-nosed parliamentarians who still dare to call themselves members of the British Labour Party.

They were wrong. Despite all their efforts to oust him, Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as leader of the Labour Party by a massive 61.8% of the rank-and-file members. The snob-noses were so sure they could oust him. Now they’ve retired to lick their pride and plan their next moves.

If there’s one glaringly obvious fact to be gleaned from this leadership election it’s how far politicians have removed themselves from the public they’re supposed to serve. It was the public who re-elected Corbyn, not some committee of parliamentarians over Armagnac brandies in the plush leather of the Commons Bar. Few so-called Labour MPs back Corbyn’s leadership, and the vast majority wanted him ditched with all possible speed.

It begs the question: why?

The Labour Party began life as exactly that – the party of those who laboured for a living, as opposed to those who by inheritance were ‘landed gentry’, or well-heeled business types. The Tory, or Conservative Party, would look after their interests. As Wikipedia rightly informs, after a landslide victory over the Tory Churchill government in 1945, the Labour Party under Prime Minister Clement Atlee introduced massive reforms:

The Bank of England was nationalised along with railroads (see Transport Act 1947), coal mining, public utilities and heavy industry. During this time British Railways was created. A comprehensive welfare state was created with the creation of a National Health Service, entitling all British citizens to healthcare, which, funded by taxation, was free at the point of delivery. Among the most important pieces of legislation was the National Insurance Act 1946, in which people in work paid a flat rate of national insurance. In return, they (and the wives of male contributors) were eligible for flat-rate pensions, sickness benefit, unemployment benefit, and funeral benefit. Various other pieces of legislation provided for child benefit and support for people with no other source of income. Legislation was also passed to provide free education at all levels.

Jeremy Corbyn still believes in these basic rights. His ‘New Labour’ critics, and the Conservative Party, are hellbent on demolishing what’s left of them and turning them over to corporate control. Tory and ‘New Labour’ governments have sold off the railways and all the utility companies. Coal-mining is virtually non-existent thanks to Thatcher, most heavy industry has been sold off to ‘private enterprise’ and moved abroad, unemployment and other benefits are continually eroded, and the National Health Service is under dire threat of privatization if the present Tory government eventually gets its way.

The snob-noses bemoan Labour’s lack of electability with Jeremy Corbyn as the leader. They may have a point, but it’s not Corbyn’s fault. The problem lies with those members of the British electorate who have quite good standards of living, a well-paid job, nice car, 50-inch TV – you know the sort of thing – there are a lot like that in Britain today. Sadly, there’s also a few million with next to nothing. Through no fault of their own they’re caught up in the poverty-trap of high-price rental housing, minimum wage jobs (if at all), heavy tax burdens, and credit sharks that raise their cost of living with grotesquely high interest rates, virtually unregulated by a succession of Conservative governments.

It’s the former quite-well-to-do lot that are the problem. Yes, they’d probably vote Labour in a general election if another suave, Cheshire-cat grinning, Tony Blair-type rose to prominence again. But it would only be as a change from the Tories for a while, because the policies of Blair’s “New Labour” were almost identical with the Tories: in a nutshell – neoliberalism.^[1]

One very sad fact is that those who are doing quite nicely in Britain today have totally forgotten the reason why. If it hadn’t been for the Labour Party they’d still be toiling for tuppence an hour, working eighteen hours a day, dying by the age of thirty, and spending any spare time they have scrabbling through the waste bins of the wealthy searching for a morsel of stale bread to stave off starvation.

The other very sad fact is that if the Tories, or the ‘New Labour’ parliamentarians, have their way the ‘doing-quite-nicely’ brigade will eventually find themselves not doing quite so well because the politicians they voted into power believe in the neoliberal ideal of ‘trickle-down’ economics, and a ‘trickle’, by definition, means a ‘ very small flow’, a ‘dribble’, or a ‘drip’.

Anyone wishing to view the effects of ‘trickle-down economics’ has only to visit a city like Detroit in Michigan, U.S.A., to see the boarded up properties, derelict factories that once produced automobiles by the thousand, the violence that moves in when prosperity goes out the window. No free health service here, and precious little in the way of welfare. But the wealthy of Detroit are doing very nicely, thank you. Of course, they don’t actually live in Detroit anymore.

Already, with the threat of ‘Brexit’ on the horizon, there’s political chatter in the U.K. parliament of possible ‘welfare benefit cuts’, re-financing (read: cutting back) of the few remaining ‘government services’ (a somewhat inaccurate phrase given that they’re funded by taxation), a possible slowdown of the economy (who’s next for the dole-queue?)…etc..

Probably the only person in Britain today who could send the neoliberals packing is Jeremy Corbyn. He believes in ‘Old Labour’, government that serves the people rather than big business, and a fair deal for all. He’s a Socialist, and proud of it.

Unfortunately, the snob-noses are probably right: he’ll never be elected Prime Minister. The British suffer from serious memory loss. Despite TV dramas like Poldark, or Garrow’s Law, they’ve forgotten what life was like before the Labour Party.

The real Labour Party, that is – not the fake one created by the snob-noses of Parliament over their Armagnac brandies in the Commons Bar.

^{[1] “Neoliberalism – A Definition In Under 2,000 Words” Sparrow Chat, July 19th 2016}

It’s been five years since the start of the civil war in Syria, so Western media informs us. In fact, there’s been unrest in Syria for generations, and many wars both civil, and against the French occupiers after WW1. In the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood, a powerful Sunni faction, organized a series of armed revolts against the secular government – notably after 1973 when the then President Hafez al-Assad rewrote the Constitution to state that henceforth the President of Syria was no longer required to be a Muslim.

The country had suffered countless murders and violence between Sunni and Shia elements throughout Assad’s reign, and nothing changed when his son, Bashar, succeeded him in 2000, despite attempts by the new president to introduce political reforms. Sunni elements, resenting Assad’s Alawite connections, constantly disrupted his reform policies, resulting in the imprisonment of many leading activists for fomenting revolution.

It’s likely the undercurrent of discontent would have continued in this manner for many years were it not for intervention by the U.S. administration of George W. Bush. After the attacks of 9/11 powerful elements within the Bush administration set out to destabilize the Syrian government via a prolonged media campaign, increasing sectarian tensions, and financing of political dissidents. Both the Bush administration, and later the Obama administration were, and still are, guilty of providing arms and finance to rebel jihadist groups bent on overthrowing the Assad government.

The U.S. has fostered a policy in Syria similar to that carried out in Libya and Iraq – the overthrow of the leadership to achieve a further foothold in the Middle East as part of its determined domination and subjugation of the region. In both latter cases, Libya and Iraq, the result has been an influx of Islamic extremist militants and the rise of ISIS.

Blinkered vision, or perhaps simply the arrogant attitude that American military dominance must win out in the end, has caused the Obama regime to continue support of anti-Assad rebels. This, despite a secret (leaked) report in 2013 by a joint U.S. army and intelligence group, which stated that the overthrow of Assad would result in catastrophic consequences, due to the U.S. government supported rebel groups being composed of jihadists intent on imposing Sharia law, and amalgamating with ISIS, to claim the country as part of the new caliphate. This report has been totally ignored by the Obama administration:

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’ ^[1]

In contrast, the Russian leadership has recognised the chaos that would ensue throughout Syria if Assad were deposed, and has chosen to support the Assad regime. U.S. interests have made much propaganda from this fact, painting the Russian attitude as anti-West and accusing Vladimir Putin of fomenting another cold war. Putin is demonized as public enemy number one, when in fact the true enemies of freedom and democracy reside much closer to home – within Washington, D.C. and the U.S. government.

So-called “hawks” both inside and outside government have been pushing for U.S. control of the Middle East for many years. 9/11 was a dream come true for them as it provided the excuse to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan. The resulting rise in Islamic extremism, as both countries collapsed into anarchy, provided further excuses for attacking Libya, and now, Syria.

All these military interventions were carried out under the guise of “spreading American values of freedom and democracy.” It’s a sad fact that many Americans believe this propaganda, but the evidence belies it. America is hellbent on empire building. There are two reasons: to further strengthen its position in the world and open up new markets to its corporate interests, and to severely weaken Russia’s standing, and that of China and the upcoming superpower, India.

Russia has been in America’s sights since the end of WW2 and the U.S. was instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Union by providing weaponry, including ‘Stinger’ missiles, to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the ten year Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s – a deliberate policy by the Reagan administration to manufacture a “Vietnam-style” bog-down of the Russians that would severely limit their capabilities elsewhere.

The recent diplomatic effort by John Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to produce a ceasefire in Syria is to be applauded. Without cooperation between the two nations this war is no more than a lethal chess game with the Syrian people as the pawns. Unfortunately, there are those who have no wish for a ceasefire to succeed. America’s recent bombing of Syrian army forces, ostensibly by mistake, may well have been a deliberate attempt by the Pentagon to thwart the ceasefire agreement.

Equally, the destruction of the aid convoy last week was a deliberate act purposed to thwart peace moves. America and Russia accused each other of being the perpetrator. One must ask who had most to gain? America is arming Syrian rebels in an attempt to bring about the overthrow of president Assad. Its media, and that of its allies, constantly demand, “Assad must go!”

Russia, on the other hand, has much to gain from ending the war with Assad still in power. It has a naval base at Tartus on the Mediterranean, leased to it by the Assad regime and has been an ally of the Syrian government since 1944. There would appear to be no logical reason for Russia to wreck the ceasefire, but powerful factions in Washington would be happy to see it sabotaged:

The Obama administration has proposed a new agreement on Syria to the Russian government that would deepen military cooperation between the two countries against some terrorists, in exchange for Russia getting the Assad regime to stop bombing US-supported rebels…Under the proposal, which was personally approved by President Obama and supported by Secretary of State John F. Kerry, the American and Russian militaries would cooperate at an unprecedented level, something the Russians have sought for a long time…

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was opposed to this plan, officials said, but was ultimately compelled to go along with the president’s decision.

For many inside and outside the administration who are frustrated with the White House’s decision-making on Syria, the new plan is fatally flawed for several reasons. One administration official complained that the plan contains no consequences for the Russians or the Assad regime if they don’t hold up their end of the bargain. Fifty-one US diplomats signed a dissent letter this month calling on the White House to use targeted military force against the Assad regime as a means of increasing the pressure on Assad and giving the US real leverage. ^[2]

Certainly, in public Ashton Carter is ‘compelled to go along with the president’s decision’, but he’s a ‘hawk’ and an advocate of preventive war. There are known rifts between the Pentagon and Obama and in the chaos that is Syria ‘mistakes’ can be made, as evidenced by that convenient aerial attack on Assad’s forces – an act specifically called for by fifty-one (so-called) U.S. diplomats only two months ago.

The last thing America’s ‘hawks’ want is an alliance with Russia. They would utilise any measures they could get away with to prevent it happening.

While the U.S. media has already conveniently judged Russia to be the instigator of the attack on the aid convoy, thus persuading most Americans and much of the Western world it’s a foregone conclusion, the facts tend to point a finger in the opposite direction. Of course, the U.S. media has never dealt in facts. Opinion-givers (often erroneously referred to as ‘experts’) are the mainstay of its news organisations and an ideal format for the spread of propaganda.

The fate of Syria and its people hangs suspended between two powerful adversaries. In between is the jihadist nightmare of ISIS. If, as America’s hawks demand, Bashar-al-Assad is defeated, the result would be an escalation of civil war and the probable establishment of an ISIS-controlled government, with its accompaniment of torture, execution, and sexual enslavement. The only way to prevent it would be a huge U.S. force invading the country and taking control. That would initiate a serious conflict with Russia. Perhaps that’s what the ‘hawks’ have in mind, but it’s unlikely the American people would agree.

Whatever the eventual outcome in Syria, it’s the pawns that will lose out in the end.

^{[1] “Military to Military Seymour M. Hersh on US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war” London Review of Books, pages 11-14, January 7th 2016}

^{[2] “Barack Obama plans new military alliance with Russia in Syria” Independent, June 30th 2016}