#Brexit = #NoMoreUK =#FUK

 

With regard to the recently held referendum in Great Britain, the highly respected and truly inimitable authority that is the roving reporter Pepe Escobar writes on his Facebook wall that “THE WRITING ON [the] FUK’s WALL . . . Those two-bit Game of Thrones/House of Cards Tory clowns STILL can’t see the writing on [the] FUK (Former United Kingdom)’s wall. Brussels hardball is here to stay. NO single market access without freedom of movement, respecting the competence of the European Court of Justice and a “contribution” to the EU budget almost equivalent to what the UK pays today. [The]FUK (Former United Kingdom) gets a status equivalent to Norway, Iceland and [Lichtenstein]. And a trade deal similar to what the EU has with Singapore, Japan and Canada. That’s it. Those Tory clowns simply had no clue Brussels would definitely use Brexit as an example to prevent a domino effect, showing to assorted Europhobes that leaving IS painful. The governor of the Bank of England apparently got the picture: ‘economic post-traumatic stress disorder’. The Economist Intelligence Unit (EUI) says [the] FUK’s economy will contract 6% by 2020. Investment (China included) will decline 8%. Unemployment will RISE. And public debt will reach 100% of FUK’s output. Eastern and Northern Europe are trying hard to soften the ball for [the] FUK. But who gives a damn what Estonia’s president thinks about it all? Even [the] FUK supporters agree there should be no special favors – because that would be a Godsend to Frexisters and Nexiters. But as I said before, everyone is irretrievably pissed, pissed off, pissed beyond belief with the English – and not necessarily the Brits (everyone loves Scotland). Mark Rutte, Dutch Prime Minister and not exactly the brightest bulb in the room, at least nailed it; England has collapsed ‘politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically’. He should add ‘footballistically’as well. Someone should propose Gareth Bale for PM”[1]

  Is there anything else left to add, I wonder. And, as it turns out, the equally incomparable Nafeez Ahmed did, even before the ballots were cast and fully counted: “Nigel Farage has jumped off an economic cliff screaming ‘Independence Day!!!’, and he’s taking us all down with him. While Brexit will almost certainly usher in a new wave of austerity and impoverishment, it’s far from clear that Remain would avoid it. Wherever you stand on the outcome of Britain’s EU referendum, hard economic reality is going to bite – and it’s going to bite hard. The #VoteRemain camp made a point of highlighting the numerous warnings from economists that a UK exit from the EU would trigger an economic crisis. The #VoteLeave camp insisted that this was a doom-mongering lie. It wasn’t. Last night, over Twitter, I predicted that the Leave campaign would win by a narrow majority – but that the victory would grow hollow very quickly as its immediate economic impact kicked in [:] ‘So here’s a #brexit scenario: 1. #VoteLeave wins by slim majority 2. #VoteLeave victory create crisis in Cameron’s leadership. 11:26 PM – 23 Jun 2016’.[2]  Dr Ahmed then adds the following: “So far, my little forecast has turned out to be uncannily prescient. The pound is in free-fall, so far hitting a thirty-year low. Stocks have slumped, and look to decline further. Banks are shifting their money, and their jobs. David Cameron has resigned, virtually in tears, a fitting end perhaps to a shambolic premiership. But he also put off invoking Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which would formally begin the EU exit process. I’ve said that by next week, escalating economic turbulence and the inadequacy of contingency measures to keep it in check will dramatically shift the euphoric mood to one of increasing foreboding about the economic slowdown”.[3]

And finally, Dr Ahmed opines that’ll be “just the beginning folks. Over the next few weeks, we’ll watch as a pound in free-fall drives up inflation, and squeezes the spending power of the average consumer. Who’s that going to hit hardest? The lower middle and working classes, of course. The impact will hit the profits of businesses, big and small, and squeeze wages too. As the UK’s GDP growth – already tepid – freezes over, this will in turn have global impacts: the Eurozone, particularly the northern countries like Denmark and Finland, will be drawn into the downwards spiral; so will parts of southern Europe, already teetering on the precipice. And China, which is seeing its economy hit the brakes, will suffer when the European slowdown triggered by Brexit reduces demand for Chinese exports. It’s the global transmission of these shocks, and their capacity to mutually intensify, that will push the UK off the edge, taking large swathes of the global economy with it. The government will have little choice in this context except to try mitigating the deepening economic crisis – but this simply won’t be possible within the current model of neoliberal capitalism, without repairing the damage done to the UK-EU trade relationship. In the words of The Economist: ‘A lot depends on the kind of trade deal Britain can negotiate with the EU and how quickly. If Britain gets a quick deal with no big reductions in its access to the single market, the grimmer scenarios for the world economy may not come to pass. But markets do not seem to be counting on it.’ And that’s the crux of it. In coming weeks, the mess inside the government that is Cameron’s rather pathetic legacy will be grappling with how to keep the promise of exiting the EU, while staving off the protracted financial collapse that would inevitably follow”.[4]

united kingdom exit from europe relative image

 

 

[1] Pepe Escobat @Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/pepe.escobar.77377?fref=nf.

[2] Nafeez Ahmed, “Brexit is about to usher in Third World Britain” The Canary (24 June 2016). http://www.thecanary.co/2016/06/24/brexit-usher-third-world-britain/.

[3] Nafeez Ahmed, “Brexit is about to usher in Third World Britain”.

[4] Nafeez Ahmed, “Brexit is about to usher in Third World Britain”.

Stupid is as Stupid does: Farage in the U.S.

‘Once, young conservatives in the US looked across the ocean to Margaret Thatcher. Now the model is Nigel Farage. According to The Guardian, the garrulous chain-smoker has become the model of trans-Atlantic conservativism to many on the right. The Brexit vote was greeted with jubilation by many on the American right. On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh praised the vote as a nation of people rising up against the ruling class and the elites, while Fox TV’s Sean Hannity described the Leave vote as “the British people, in their very polite way, showed Obama their middle finger”. And while Donald Trump vocally endorsed Brexit, many vehement Trump opponents on the American right also did so as well. Ted Cruz called the result “a wake-up call for internationalist bureaucrats from Brussels to Washington DC that some free nations still wish to preserve their national sovereignty”. As the American right combines long-standing suspicion of big government and growing hawkishness on immigration, the admiration for Farage and UKIP in the US is only likely to grow. Published on Jun 28, 2016′.

Seen from this side of the world. one cannot but be struck by the fact that people across the pond oftentimes, if not all the time, appear to be totally clueless. As such, Mister Farage has been biting the hand that feeds for the past 17 years, pocketing his MEP salary and stashing it away in an offshore tax haven . . . Farage, it turns out, set up a “trust fund in an offshore tax haven which could have enabled him to cut his tax bill. Farage, who previously condemned tax avoiders in a speech to the European parliament, said that he paid a tax adviser to set up the Farage Family Educational Trust 1654 on the Isle of Man”.[1] Apart from being a populist and jingoistic opportunist, Mister Farage also shows himself to be a first class hypocrite at the end of the day.

And now, Conservatives in the U.S. have apparently discovered this little man as well . . . replacing Maggie Thatcher and rivalling the Drumpf in his appeal to the uninformed and intellectually ill-equipped. This really is a brave new world we live in today . . . Farage to a newspaper that “[m]y financial advisers recommended I did it, to have a trust really for inheritance purposes and I took the advice and I set it up. It was a mistake. I was a completely unsuitable person for it. I am not blaming them, it was my fault. It’s a vehicle that you chuck things in through your life that you don’t need and you build up a trust fund for your children or grandchildren. It was called an educational trust and could have been used for grandchildren’s schools fees, things like that. It was a mistake for three reasons. Firstly, I’m not rich enough to need one and I am never going to be. Secondly, frankly, the world has changed. Things that we thought were absolutely fair practice 10 years, 20 years ago, 30 years ago aren’t any more. Thirdly, it was a mistake because it cost me money. I sent a cheque off to set it up”.[2] In his own words, somebody has thus for years been making the wrong plans for Nigel . . .

 

[1] Rajeev Syal, “Nigel Farage admits setting up tax haven trust fund was a mistake” The Guardian (21 June 2013). http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jun/21/nigel-farage-tax-haven-trust-fund-mistake.

[2] Rajeev Syal, “Nigel Farage admits setting up tax haven trust fund was a mistake”.

Holocaust Denial: Ursula Haverbeck

‘In 2015, Ursula Haverbeck made history in a defiant interview in which she threw down the gauntlet to the biggest taboo of our times. Revisionism . . . on German TV! A seismic event. Published on May 14, 2015’.

Last November, Allan Hall wrote that a “German grandmother aged 87 has been sentenced to ten months in jail for denying the Holocaust and saying Auschwitz was ‘just a labour camp’. Ursula Haverbeck, who is a friend of Gudrun Burwitz – elderly daughter of Nazi S.S. chief Heinrich Himmler – was sentenced in a court in Hamburg for sedition over an interview she gave to a TV station denying that Jews were murdered in extermination camps. In the interview with the ARD network she claimed the death camp of Auschwitz in Nazi occupied Poland, where at least 1.1 million people were murdered, was ‘nothing more than a labour camp'”.[1]

[1] Allan Hall, “German grandmother, 87, is sentenced to ten months in jail for denying the Holocaust and saying Auschwitz was ‘just a labour camp'” The Daily Mail (November 2015). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317083/German-grandmother-87-sentenced-ten-months-jail-denying-Holocaust-saying-Auschwitz-just-labour-camp.html#ixzz3zDF3My4u .

Debunking the Gandhi Myth: Arundhati Roy

‘On The Laura Flanders Show: Author/activist Arundhati Roy on the Annihilation of Caste, B.R. Ambedkar and the Western myth of Mahatma Gandhi. And Glenn Greenwald addresses diversity concerns about his new media venture TheIntercept.com. Published on Oct 21, 2014′.

“It will be distressing to people in the black community who have been taught to valorize him and people on the American left who keep invoking him, but the fact is that all of us including I have been taught that Ghandi’s political awakening happened when he was thrown out of a white’s only compartment in South Africa on the train, and in fact Ghandi believed in racial segregation. His first victory in South Africa was to campaign for a third entrance to be opened in the Durban post office so that Indians would not have to use the same entrance as Kaffers. And all my analysis is not my analysis, I have just reproduced his own writing so there is no interpretation going on here, and he calls them savages and caffers, and people say oh he changed but he did not change you know, he partnered with the British in the war to tighten imperialism in South Africa.”