Daily Archives: November 11, 2016

Angela Merkel on Huffpost – A warning, or hypocrisy?

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Along with many other news sources, I have more or less stopped watching Huffington Post too, a part of the media trash. Nonetheless, this one came out of it, covering Angela Merkel’s supposed not-so-subtle warning. The title was carefully designed to get you interested and click to read further. I did not get it directly from Huffpost since I stopped looking at it. It nonetheless came to me through Facebook shares.

The main theme of this article, whether Merkel meant it or not – implies that Merkel is ready to work with the new president elect Trump, when and if both leaders share a common belief of equal rights to people of all colour and faith.

The article implies that Merkel suspects Donald Trump might not not allow equal human rights to people of skin colour other than white, or to people of faith other than Christianity etc etc.

In that, Merkel is conveniently mixing two issues and blurring a very important national concern for anybody. The two issues are : is supporting human rights the same thing as allowing unlimited immigration from anywhere?

This to me is one of the key elements to the problems in the global politics relating to the war torn middle east today. The so called immigrant issue, for Merkel and EU, involves people from the middle east. Why are they moving to Europe ? Not necessarily because they want free state support, easy money or a better lifestyle. They are moving primarily because their homes, cities, villages and mode of living have been bombed to smithereens, thanks to western manufactured bombs used on them either directly, or indirectly by the west.

Another way to look at it is – Merkel and the rest of warmongers, Hillary and Obama included, believe, rightly, that accepting all these homeless refugees is a moral responsibility, if they wish to continue to bomb more and more middle eastern towns, villages and cities. Accepting these immigrants is a price that the European and American societies must pay, so that the military industrial complex can continue to its business business as usual and the entering immigrants can then work at wages lower than the locals would accept, thus making it even cheaper for the corporations to make a buck.

It would have been smarter, to wake up to the fact that there is another way to solve this problem:

  • Stop the war
  • Stop the bombing
  • Spend the money to rebuild the devastated towns and cities
  • Make sure that the local people get the jobs
  • Ensure local firms get the contracts like the post war Marshall plan
  • Do not allow western firms and tycoons to milk the system again.

If you do all that and make the middle east great again, the people will not only stop wanting to move to Europe or North America, but those that already came would largely want to go back.

This is the first item that Merkel is mixed and made fuzzy.

The next item that she may be making fuzzy is questioning Donald Trump’s right to want to protect his own nation from endless ingress of refugees from exactly those war torn areas where most have been harmed by western war crimes and will likely to have many that hold a grudge against the west because of it. Trump may or may not follow up on what he stated during his campaigns, but what he did state is not that he denies human rights to brown skinned people or people of the Islamic faith – but that he opposes the US governments policy of bombing the shit out of everybody – and wishes to work WITH other nations and not FIGHT with them, and that he opposes endless influx of immigrants precisely from those areas where terrorists are mushrooming up.

I do not at all see this reasoning as a sign that Trump is either a racist, or that he despises people of colour or other religion.

The only thing I am uncomfortable with about Trump in this particular field, is his open declaration of supporting Israel in what appears to me to be a biased tilt towards it and calling out Iran as a demon. But I suspect he said it because he had to say it, and that, somehow, no American politician can rise to power without blessing of Israel – a strange and incomprehensible situation where a tiny tiny tribe of people can have such an overwhelming influence on the supposedly most powerful nation on the planet.

But, Angela Merkel too has been in the same rut, and will not say a word against Israel.

Other than that Israel angle, I see no real evidence that Donald Trump has been either a virulent racist or a virulent anti-Muslim or any-any other faith.

So, either Angela Merkel is a fraud, or Huffington Post is a fraud, or both of them are.

IF you want to address issues with human rights, racism or religious intolerance, Angela and Huffington post, start with Israel and Palestine first. Then, I am willing to listen to you and might stop considering you anything better than trash.

The decline and fall of mainstream media

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Ten years ago, I used to subscribe to, or read often, daily and weekly news outlets such as Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, New York Times etc, as well as many other sources, and web sites, blogs and the social media.

I slowly stopped subscribing and reading the mainstream, as began to realize that these vaunted news sources were not real news, but market manipulations and perceptions of some of the writers, all of whom were stuck to a few universally accepted ideas that I was beginning to doubt – that constant rise of GDP measured in an unsustainable yardstick was the first and only measure of development, that constant upward development was a must, that only news was financial news, war news, sports news, or trivia.

In the last few months, I got thoroughly disappointed by almost all major news sources as I could clearly and plainly see that it was engaging in a concentrated attack on Donal Trump for minor or trivial issues, inflating them and turning him into a demon, while giving the nasty deeds of Obama-Hillary a total pass. I found it increasingly difficult to take any of these news sources seriously.

I came to realize another factor – the Democratic party of Hillary was far to the right of Donald Trump, and in fact, Hillary was likely more a fascist than Trump himself. And yet, even Jill Stein was identifying Trump as the fascist instead of Hillary! The world was gradually turning upside down and black was being painted white and vice versa.

I used to be an instinctive Democratic party supporter, somehow influenced in my school days by the charm of John & Jacqueline Kennedy. But I began to understand, now, that my fixation with the “liberal” wing was kind of wrong because the liberals were pretend liberals, and dishonest to boot.

I came to understand in the last fifteen years, the real dangers of removing the glass-steigel act and implementing NAFTA, the de-linking of currency from gold, and the ability of western economies to create vast amounts of money out of thin air, without any backing, and that all money thus created were in essence counterfeit money, legalized by state governments.

I came to understand the real goals behind the agendas of IMF and the world bank, and the reason WTO failed and the new drive for the west to create regional trade agreement so that difficult components and nations could be bypassed, thus writing down TPP and many other such localized trade deals, all of them designed to make money for multinational corporations and hurt local labour forces and remove the rights of nations to resist these efforts.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

I also came to understand that the war mongering of the US government was more a democratic party gift than a republican one. I remembered that the only ex-president that warned the American people of the threat posed by an all consuming military industrial complex was Dwight Eisenhower, a republican and not a democrat. I also came to understand how the one living Democratic ex-president that to me appeared to be morally straight and willing to call a spade a spade – Jimmy Carter, would denounce Israel’s apartheid policies in his book with regard to the treatment of Palestinians and US governments incestuous relationship with Israel. He identify USA not as a democracy any more, but as an oligarch with unlimited bribery. And now, the democratic party was trying to create as much distance as it could, with Jimmy Carter.

I found it hard to identify reliable news sources anywhere. Aljazeera english remained an interesting alternative, but it was way too far leaned towards Soudi and Qatar Governments and their obnoxious record in human rights and anti-shia blood letting and joining hands with Israel and the US to create a phoney civil war in Syria so the war machine can continue rolling.

I even found google news to be heavily biassed in favour of Hillary and I had to seriously fine tune google news asking it to specifically restrict sources like New York Times, Washington Post and the like.

I now find it amusing that The New York Times is asking me, here, to get back on board and start subscribing again….

Hahhhhh …. not a chance, buddy, you are not a news outlet. You and most others here are all paddlers. What I see is the death of mainstream news, replaced by rubble and a few paddlers, and a promising grassroots movement of a mass of citizen journalists mushrooming up through the social media.
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Thought I’d move all these from ranting on Facebook, into a blog.