Labour leader Keir Starmer addressing 400 business leaders at the Kia Oval, London, during the launch of Labour Party’s plan for business, February 1, 2024
BRITAIN’S ruling class is eager to carry on the pretence that there is real choice under their political system.
Capitalism promises us that it’s the politicians that call the shots, there are real differences between those politicians and that we’re the ones that elect the politicians and they’re answerable to us.
But as with most tricks, when looked at too closely, reality and the nature of the fraud become clear.
Nowhere is it clearer that there is no real difference between the ruling-class parties than the imperialist consensus on questions of foreign policy, militarism and war.
Rather than questioning the Tory government’s policy or strategy on the burning issues of Palestine or Ukraine, Keir Starmer has bent over backwards (not hard when you’re spineless) at each and every turn to not only stymie any criticism, but to heartily endorse Tory policy.
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Britain is a proud western democracy — the oldest in the world in fact: you can stand as a candidate for whoever you want; you can vote for whoever you want; just as long as they enthusiastically cheerlead genocide in 2024.
Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. UK halts aid to UNRWA in Gaza over Israeli allegations that 12 staff from a total of 13,000 were involved in the 7 October 2024 attack on Israel.Zionist Keir Starmer supports Israel’s Gaza genocide.
On the morning of January 17, Argentine President Javier Milei gave his first speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The far-right libertarian was sworn in on December 10, 2023 and since then has launched all-out attacks on the working class through presidential decrees and omnibus laws, all of which have been vehemently opposed on the streets.
Milei began his speech at Davos by telling those present: “I am here to tell you that the West is in danger. All over the world, leaders who must defend the values of capitalism assume a vision that leads to socialism and poverty. “The main leaders of the world have abandoned freedom for so-called collectivism, which is the cause of the problems.”
The strongest argument of his speech was going to be that capitalism is the only tool to end hunger and poverty in the world, although he added: “the leftist thinking attacks capitalism for being, according to them, unjust. They say it is bad because it is individualistic and they fight for social justice. This concept has become fashionable around the world, but social justice is an unfair, violent idea, because taxes are coercively collected. Nobody pays taxes voluntarily. The State is financed through coercion. If a company generates a good product it will do well, if the State punishes the capitalist for being successful it destroys their incentives, and the cake will be smaller. Collectivism ties the entrepreneur’s hands.”
He also spoke of enemies, who for him are those who use the State as a tool: “everyone. There are no substantive differences. Socialists, conservatives, communists, fascists, Nazis, social democrats, centrists. They are all the same.”
In this same sense, Milei attacked two of the most important agendas at the Davos Forum, gender inequality and climate change: “The first of these new battles was the ridiculous and unnatural fight between men and women. Libertarianism already establishes equality between the sexes. The founding stone of our creed says that all men are created equal, that we all have the same inalienable rights granted by the creator, among which are life, liberty and property,” he maintained.
He went further and said: “the only thing that became of this agenda of radical feminism is greater intervention by the state to hinder the economic process, giving work to bureaucrats who do not contribute anything to society, be it in the format of women’s ministries or international organizations dedicated to promoting this agenda.”
In the same sense, he denied human responsibility for climate change: “another one of the conflicts that socialists raise is that of man against nature. They maintain that human beings damage the planet and that it must be protected at all costs, even going so far as to advocate for population control mechanisms or the bloody agenda of abortion.”
Finally, the only praise in Javier Milei’s speech was for the businessmen, whom he treated as heroes and also told them: “do not let yourself be intimidated by the political caste that wants to remain in power. You are heroes, you are benefactors, let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral, do not give in to the advance of the State, The state is the problem itself, you are the protagonists of history. Long live fucking freedom!
The president returned to Argentina on Wednesday on a commercial flight, after a couple of meetings and a bold speech that was not very widely accepted in Davos. He will face a massive national strike on January 24, called for by all the major trade unions and confederations in Argentina in opposition to his pro-capitalist, pro-businessman policies.
This article was first published in Spanish on ARG Medios.
I need to start opposing USUK’s intention to start WW3 in support of Israel and the status quo, injustice, genocide, war crimes, and in opposition to human rights and democracy, about how UK not only does not have a mandate but is acting despite huge demonstrated opposition to it’s actions.
An Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft developed by Joby Aviation Inc. is seen outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during the company’s initial public offering on August 11, 2021, in New York. (Photo: Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images)
The Future Can Do Better Than Air Taxis for the Super Rich
Just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs.
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane, it’s… Wall Street’s electric air-taxi future!
Earlier this month, a flying machine from the California-based Joby Aviation became the first “electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft—“eVTOL”—to go airborne from the Downtown Heliport that services Lower Manhattan’s financial district.
Joby is now expecting, by sometime in 2025, to be regularly ferrying high finance’s finest from Wall Street to JFK Airport in a mere seven minutes. Mere mortals taking autos and subways routinely spend well over an hour making the same trip.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
Joby’s new one-pilot, four-passenger eVTOL figures to be only the first of many corporate efforts to speed New York’s deepest pockets on their electric way to destinations both lucrative and exotic. A host of corporations—from China’s eHang to Germany’s Volocopter—already have big plans underway for zipping the world’s richest up and over congested city streets.
But just imagine if all the investments and expertise going into turning our skies into air-taxi lanes for the richest among us were instead going into air-speed services that actually meet real public needs. Imagine air taxis, for instance, ferrying critically injured rural residents to distant emergency care.
Those sorts of efforts will have to wait. The vast wealth of our wealthiest is instead bending innovation and expertise to servicing the already rich. And that bending, new research out of Oxfam details, is keeping our planet’s richest entertained at a vast environmental cost.
The world’s wealthiest 1%, Oxfam’s latest research reveals, are now generating more carbon emissions than all the world’s poorest 66% combined. The carbon emissions from this 1% will—between 2020 and 2030—“cause 1.3 million heat-related deaths” worldwide.
The world’s bottom 99%, Oxfam adds, would have to consume away for 1,500 years to match the carbon output that billionaires now produce in a single year.
But, even so, the political impact of the super rich actually outpaces the impact of their personal energy consumption. Only our richest “have the wealth, power, and influence to protect themselves.” And that same “wealth, power, and influence,” the new Oxfam study lays out, is keeping governments worldwide doing no more than “incentivizing incremental change” in energy policy instead of phasing out fossil fuels and investing massively in renewable energy.
We must not let ourselves treat climate and inequality as “separate issues,” environmental activist Greta Thunberg adds in her foreword to Oxfam’s latest appraisal of our world’s environmental and economic crises.
“Either we safeguard living conditions for all future generations,” she relates, “or we let a few very rich people maintain their destructive lifestyles and preserve an economic system geared towards short-term economic growth and shareholder profit.”
The “twin crises of climate and inequality,” Oxfam’s Climate Equality: A planet for the 99% report goes on to spell out, are “driving one another”—and only “a radical new approach” stands any chance of “overcoming the catastrophe unfolding before us.”
That “radical new approach” must take on “the disproportionate role that the richest individuals play in the climate crisis through their emissions, investments, and capture of politics.”
How can we best realize this badly needed “new approach”? We would need, argues Oxfam, to start aggressively taxing our super rich and the corporations that fuel their fortunes “to help pay for the transition to renewable energy.”
Just one example: Some 45 major oil and gas corporations averaged annual windfall profits of $237 billion in 2021 and 2022, dollars that overwhelmingly funneled straight into rich shareholder pockets. Governments worldwide, Oxfam notes, could have increased global investments in renewable energy by 31% had they taxed this windfall profit at 90%.
The new Oxfam study surveys a wide range of other options the world’s nations could pursue to subject the rich to serious taxation. Govrnments could, for instance, levy “steep and progressive” tax increases on the incomes of the ultra rich—as well as on their property, land, and inheritances. They could raise taxes on corporate profits, fossil fuels, and financial transactions—or levy entirely new taxes on “high-emitting luxury travel.”
The world, in other words, could have plenty of money for social and climate spending “if rich-country governments were willing to implement bold and progressive tax reforms.”
“We cannot allow the richest countries to claim that they cannot afford to raise the trillions needed,” Oxfam ends up concluding. “Mobilizing this money simply takes political will.”
An activist holds up a sign against capitalism during scattered left-wing protests in Kreuzberg district on May Day during the novel coronavirus crisis on May 1, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
“Whenever it’s claimed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, it really exposes the lack of imagination and willingness to develop a better future, not the lack of alternatives.”
“Can you imagine a place where growth is linked to life and justice rather than profit and the economy?”
That’s one of the key questions at the heart of a new publication by Greenpeace which lays out a series of detailed alternatives to rapacious capitalism that dominates the global economy and ruling governments worldwide.
Titled Growing the Alternatives: Societies for a Future Beyond GDP, the report puts a target on neoliberalism’s obsession with gross domestic product and how skewed understandings of what’s considered valuable undermine efforts to build happier, more equitable, and efficient societies.
“Today, a country’s economic growth is used as an indicator of living standards,” the report states. “In other words, the higher a country ranks on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) list, the better the prospects for that country. But that is far from reality when the wellbeing of people and nature is considered.”
The report argues that “the focus on economic growth has led to an anachronism that prioritizes planet-depleting activities and inequalities while overlooking wellbeing.”
According to Paula Tejón Carbajal, the Alternative Futures Campaign lead at Greenpeace International, “Whenever it’s claimed that there are no alternatives to capitalism, it really exposes the lack of imagination and willingness to develop a better future, not the lack of alternatives.”
Greenpeace says that even while GDP remains the economic index most countries use to measure economic health, “its one-size-fits-all approach rewards waste and pollution and does not take into account vital aspects such as people’s wellbeing or the limits of nature.”
The report states:
The world today faces multiple crises that pose an existential threat to the future of human civilization. The modern industrialised world depends on the over-exploitation of nature, which is destroying the Earth’s ecosystems, triggering catastrophic climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These are related problems with devastating consequences that have been building for decades. This is due to the collective failure of governments and businesses to act with sufficient urgency to counter the status quo of a system based on infinite growth, and dependent on fossil fuels, extraction, overproduction, overconsumption, and waste.
Across three detailed chapters, the group’s publication focuses on numerous principles for “wellbeing economies” that challenge the supremacy of economic growth GDP, including: “people and planet over profit and growth”; “equitable distribution of wealth and power”; “wellbeing at the core”; “the common good”; “circular economies”; “nature restoration”; and “real participatory democracy.”
In a world beset by war, human rights abuses, astronomical levels of inequality, and the fast-moving threat of rising temperatures and the climate crisis, Greenpeace argues that the alternatives to profit-at-all-costs capitalism are not only available but plentiful.
“All the examples we have gathered exist, work, and prove that there is a dynamic landscape for many alternative futures,” Tejón Carbajal said.
While the Greenpeace report was made available online last month, it was officially presented Wednesday during a virtual event attended by more than 160 people worldwide.
“In a world wracked by polarization, inequality, climate change, ecological breakdown, and a crisis of hope and imagination, we can’t use the same thinking that created the problem in the first place. Greenpeace calls for governments and global institutions to drive their decision-making according to sufficiency and the wellbeing of people and planet, so that what we really value becomes the new measure of success and can thrive and flourish across the world,” added Tejón Carbajal.
“To create a sustainable and just future for all,” one section of the report concludes, “we must move beyond GDP and develop a measurement framework for wellbeing, inclusion, and sustainability.”
