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1,377 thoughts on “Andy Myles”

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  • Mary

    Good to hear that John. Ken Loach has terrific energy too.

    ~~

    Q PS Is Israel allowed under international law to treat Palestinian prisoners as human chess pieces?

    Breaking news
    Israel cancels release of Palestinian prisoners because of Palestinian drive for further recognition at the UN

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-26870132

  • kurtan

    Israel does what it wants making up the rules as it goes along.We are quick to jump on Russia, Libya, Jugoslavia,Mali, but Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain,Qatar have their own rule book.The Semites you dont want next door.
    The UN should be doing something. They don’t. The EU should be doing something, but they give the same allowances as Switzerland has. Strangely enough I read that FIFA might do something to make ISrael treat Palestine and its football players better.
    The beautiful game.

  • A Node

    “Strangely enough I read that FIFA might do something to make ISrael treat Palestine and its football players better.”

    Bet they don’t.

  • Je

    Mary – the Palestinian prisoners were meant to be released several days ago but the Israelis didn’t release them. They already tore up the peace process (such as it was up). The BBC article inverts who was responding to who. Placing the blame on the Palestinians for whatever happens… as the BBC have done time and time again in the past…

  • Resident Dissident

    “It’s the future, Scotland is independent. Scotland’s vast wealth has been syphoned off by Salmond’s immensely rich oligarth friends.”

    From what I’ve heard of Salmond it’s more likely that the Wealth Fund will be bet on the 3:30 at Ayr.

  • Resident Dissident

    http://leftunity.org/a-raft-of-solid-left-wing-policy-conference-report/

    Comedy Gold. Surprisingly Ukraine and Crimea don’t appear to have been discussed. Loved the immediate abolition of VAT – not sure how the £100bn+ addition to the deficit and being thrown out of the EU would be handled – or the resulting increase in interest rates and inflation as a result of Gilts being downgreaded to Junk and £ collapsing for that matter.

  • Ben-Scot NON-collaborator

    The Principle of course, is intact. The ISS is exempt because they need it.

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasa-halts-contact-with-russia-except-for-international-space-station/

    “NASA has been told to suspend contact with Russian government officials because of Russia’s “ongoing violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” according to an agency memo circulated Wednesday. The International Space Station, which is jointly operated by NASA, Russia, the European Space Agency, Japan and Canada, is exempt and not directly impacted by the new guidelines.

    The memo apparently reflects a broad State Department directive to multiple federal agencies that have regular contact with the Russian government. In NASA’s case, the space station represents the bulk of the agency’s dealings with Russia and the exemption presumably means business as usual.”

  • Resident Dissident

    “I see, you do condemned others for the same crime, but reserve the right to apply different “responses”, and/or no responses at all; that normally having different standards, and also having your cake, and wanting to eat it.”

    Your words not mine – where did I say there should be no response?

    My immediate concern would not be with the Crimea but stopping a repeat performance in Eastern Ukraine, and as always with what Putin is inflicting on his own subjects. It is revealing that Putin has suddenly discovered federalization when it comes to his neighbour – but when it comes to his own territory he has a sustained programme of taking powers away from the regions.

  • Resident Dissident

    Last post should have been posted on the Putin thread in response to Macky.

  • technicolour

    Not actually ‘comedy gold’ though, largely, is it, Resident Dissident? Agree the scrapping of VAT had me baffled, but:

    “Other votes in what was easily the section with the most motions included scrapping zero-hours contracts, abolishing destitution and opposing the US-EU transatlantic trade treaty.

    Health

    There was a high level of agreement on health policy, with conference backing the health policy commission’s “10 point plan to re-instate, protect, and improve the NHS”. This includes repealing the Tories’ NHS privatisation law, the Health and Social Care Act, a moratorium on closures, and a focus on the “social determinants of health”, meaning that we must tackle poverty and inequality in order to improve health.

    Amendments added calls to cancel the expensive PFI debts that hospitals have been burdened with, reverse the decline in health workers’ wages and replace Big Pharma with non-profit pharmaceutical production. ”

    I like ‘abolishing destitution’ – should be easy, given the resources. Norway’s on the way:

    http://www.norwaypost.no/index.php/news/latest-news/29385-norwegians-poverty-declines-while-the-rate-increases-across-europe

    But then Norway refused to bail out its banks, nationalising two instead:

    http://www.ted.com/conversations/14656/central_banking_or_nationalize.html

  • Ben-Scot NON-collaborator

    ” nationalising two instead..”

    Careful Tech. You are broaching dangerous ground, 🙂

  • John Goss

    Sharon McCourt says that Left Unity now has nearly 2000 members, quite an attainment in less than 12 months. People are deserting traditional parties because there is nothing for the poorest in society in their manifestos and even less in their delivery of promises. We have three gaffers’ parties.

    http://leftunity.org

  • technicolour

    By the way, in a piece which was supposed to be largely and dully about Bono, there was this quite interesting assessment of what’s happening over there in Africa. Have yet to recheck, but sounds about right:

    “Last week I drew attention to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched in the US when it chaired the G8 meeting last year. The alliance is pushing African countries into agreements that allow foreign companies to grab their land, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets. Ignoring the voices of their own people, six African governments have struck deals with companies such as Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Syngenta, Nestlé and Unilever, in return for promises of aid by the UK and other G8 nations.”

  • Jay

    From left unity
    ….direction as a new party of the left and set up its constitution. This conference looked in more detail at policy areas including economics, health, housing and anti-racism

    Sounds like clear understanding of the social problems effecting us all.

    @ Resident Dissident. Please can you tell me some of your ideas/opinions as to how we can improve on our society?

  • Ben-Scot NON-collaborator

    The puzzling feature of the Putin ‘puppets’ from Kiev is that they have been pushing for austerity, despite the opposition from Kremlin.

    http://consortiumnews.com/2014/04/02/ukrainians-get-imfs-bitter-medicine/

    “It’s a safe bet that most of the Ukrainians who flooded Maidan Square in Kiev in February did not do so because they wanted the International Monetary Fund to make their lives even more miserable by slashing subsidies for heat, gutting pensions and devaluing the currency to make everyday goods more expensive.

    But thanks to the U.S.-backed coup that ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych and replaced him with a regime including far-right parties, super-rich ”oligarchs” and technocrats with little sympathy for the suffering of average people, that’s exactly what happened. Although lacking legitimacy that would come from national elections, the coup regime pushed through the demands of the Washington-based IMF.”

  • mark golding

    Respect Ben.

    Behold a bag of games. You’all welcome to play.

    Mass gatherings, demonstrations;
    > Marches, parades;
    > Flash mobs, swarms;
    > Shutdown harmful corporate and governmental operations;
    > Worker Strikes;
    > Hunger strikes;
    > Sit-ins;
    > Strategic defaults, debt strikes;
    > Foreclosure prevention;
    > Boycotting corrupt corporations;
    > Move your money out of the big banks and the stock market;
    > Use alternative currencies and economic systems;
    > Cancel your cable television and support independent media;
    > Use independent online tools that don’t sell your info / protect privacy;
    > Online civil disobedience, Anonymous operations;
    > Leak information on corruption;
    > Use alternative energy;
    > Build urban and hydroponic farms, or get your food from them;
    > Support local businesses;
    > Join local community organizations;
    > Take part in food banks and help develop community support systems;
    > Start or join intentional and autonomous communities;
    > Experiment with new governing systems, Liquid Democracy;
    > Host teach-ins;
    > Organize socially conscious events;
    > Make conscious media;
    > Guerrilla postering, messages on money;
    > Help inspiring groups and organizations spread their message;
    > Random acts of kindness and compassion;
    > Mass meditations, prayer sessions and spiritual actions.

  • BrianFujisan

    Technicolour…

    RE Bono, and Africa

    ‘Bono’s positioning of the west as the saviour of Africa while failing to ­discuss the harm the G8 nations are doing has undermined campaigns for justice and accountability.’

    It was bad enough in 2005. Then, at the G8 summit in Scotland, Bono and Bob Geldof heaped praise on Tony Blair and George Bush, who were still mired in the butchery they had initiated in Iraq. At one point Geldof appeared, literally and figuratively, to be sitting in Tony Blair’s lap. African activists accused them of drowning out a campaign for global justice with a campaign for charity.

    But this is worse. As the UK chairs the G8 summit again, a campaign that Bono founded, with which Geldof works closely, appears to be whitewashing the G8′s policies in Africa.

    Last week I drew attention to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched in the US when it chaired the G8 meeting last year. The alliance is pushing African countries into agreements that allow foreign companies to grab their land, patent their seeds and monopolise their food markets. Ignoring the voices of their own people, six African governments have struck deals with companies such as Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Syngenta, Nestlé and Unilever, in return for promises of aid by the UK and other G8 nations.

    A wide range of activists, both African and European, is furious about the New Alliance. But the ONE campaign, co-founded by Bono, stepped up to defend it. The article it wrote last week was remarkable in several respects: in its elision of the interests of African leaders and those of their people, in its exaggeration of the role of small African companies, but above all in failing even to mention the injustice at the heart of the New Alliance – its promotion of a new wave of land grabbing. My curiosity was piqued.

    The first thing I discovered is that Bono has also praised the New Alliance, in a speech just before last year’s G8 summit in the US. The second thing I discovered is that much of the ONE campaign’s primary funding was provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, two of whose executives sit on its board. The foundation has been working with the biotech company Monsanto and the grain trading giant Cargill, and has a large Monsanto shareholding. Bill Gates has responded to claims made about land grabbing in Africa, asserting, in the face of devastating evidence and massive resistance from African farmers, that “many of those land deals are beneficial, and it would be too bad if some were held back because of western groups’ ways of looking at things“. (Africans, you will note, keep getting written out of this story.)

    The third thing I discovered is that there’s a long history here. In his brilliant and blistering book The Frontman: Bono (in the Name of Power), just released in the UK, the Irish scholar Harry Browne maintains that “for nearly three decades as a public figure, Bono has been … amplifying elite discourses, advocating ineffective solutions, patronising the poor and kissing the arses of the rich and powerful”. His approach to Africa is “a slick mix of traditional missionary and commercial colonialism, in which the poor world exists as a task for the rich world to complete”.

    Bono, Browne charges, has become “the caring face of global technocracy”, who, without any kind of mandate, has assumed the role of spokesperson for Africa, then used that role to provide “humanitarian cover” for western leaders. His positioning of the west as the saviour of Africa while failing to discuss the harm the G8 nations are doing has undermined campaigns for justice and accountability, while lending legitimacy to the neoliberal project.

    Bono claims to be “representing the poorest and most vulnerable people“. But talking to a wide range of activists from both the poor and rich worlds since ONE published its article last week, I have heard the same complaint again and again: that Bono and others like him have seized the political space which might otherwise have been occupied by the Africans about whom they are talking. Because Bono is seen by world leaders as the representative of the poor, the poor are not invited to speak. This works very well for everyone – except them.

    The ONE campaign looks to me like the sort of organisation that John le Carré or Robert Harris might have invented. It claims to work on behalf of the extremely poor. But its board is largely composed of multimillionaires, corporate aristocrats and US enforcers. Here you will find Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush’s national security adviser and secretary of state, who aggressively promoted the Iraq war, instructed the CIA that it was authorised to use torture techniques and browbeat lesser nations into supporting a wide range of US aims.

    Here too is Larry Summers, who was chief economist at the World Bank during the darkest days of structural adjustment and who, as US Treasury secretary, helped to deregulate Wall Street, with such happy consequences for the rest of us. Here’s Howard Buffett, who has served on the boards of the global grain giant Archer Daniels Midland as well as Coca-Cola and the food corporations ConAgra and Agro Tech. Though the main focus of ONE is Africa, there are only two African members. One is a mobile phone baron, the other is the finance minister of Nigeria, who was formerly managing director of the World Bank. What better representatives of the extremely poor could there be?

    If, as ONE does, an organisation keeps telling you that it’s a “grassroots campaign”, it’s a fair bet that it is nothing of the kind. This collaboration of multimillionaires and technocrats looks to me more like a projection of US and corporate power.

    I found the sight of Bono last week calling for “more progress on transparency” equally revolting. As Harry Browne reminds us, U2′s complex web of companies, the financial arrangements of Bono’s Product RED campaign and his investments through the private equity company he co-founded are all famously opaque. And it’s not an overwhelming shock to discover that tax justice is absent from the global issues identified by ONE.

    There is a well-known if dubious story that claims that at a concert in Glasgow Bono began a slow hand-clap. He is supposed to have announced: “Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.” Whereupon someone in the audience shouted: “Well fucking stop doing it then.” It’s good advice, and I wish he’d take it.

  • Ben-Scot NON-collaborator

    Brian; This is the conundrum of centralized bureaucracies or governments.

    It’s like the music business. If a cult band wants to expand their income or prestige, they start dumbing down their creativity to middle of the road, which is the sell-out their die-hard fans go crazy about.

    Bono is just another bureaucrat making his PR bones off the bones of those he claims to serve.

    It’s enough to make one a cynic. 🙂

  • technicolour

    I found the idea of tentacles of corporate poison swarming over and annexing Africa rather more compelling than under-informed Bono, I must admit.

  • BrianFujisan

    Ben ..@ 11;17

    Well said… though I’m sure his Vastly more Popular identity, and apparent Goody Two Shoes Image…Adds substantially to the Damage…

    And cheers for the Wave of Action Link… 🙂

  • A Node

    BrianFujisan 3 Apr, 2014 – 11:10 pm

    “It was bad enough in 2005. Then, at the G8 summit in Scotland, Bono and Bob Geldof heaped praise on Tony Blair and George Bush, who were still mired in the butchery they had initiated in Iraq. At one point Geldof appeared, literally and figuratively, to be sitting in Tony Blair’s lap. African activists accused them of drowning out a campaign for global justice with a campaign for charity.”

    Totally agree, Brian. Geldof knew what he was doing. He earned his ticket to Easy Street in those few weeks. To call him “a sell out” would imply that he had some principals in the first place. The timing and effect of his ‘live 8’ concerts in the run up to G8 was too perfect. It was as orchestrated as the attack on Gleneagles marchers which gave the media the images of blood-soaked violent hooligans that they needed.

    I was wondering why all the scaffold-mounted TV cameras were ignoring the main gates and pointing at a peaceful field where hundreds of protesters had been allowed to rest in the sunshine towards the end of the march. Then suddenly and simultaneously hundreds of riot cops and dozens of mounted cops appeared from behind the trees and swept through with clubs swinging while 2 or 3 of those double rotor helicopters swooped in like something out of Vietnam and disgorged more uniformed thugs to make a pincer movement. I hadn’t heard of kettling then.

    Geldof is a conscienceless slimeball with a lot of blood on his hands. He’s not stupid or ignorant enough to be unaware that he was stifling a golden and significant opportunity for decent Britain to loudly tell the world what it thought of the mass-murders committed in its name. And even if we grant him the ‘excuse’ that he couldn’t see beyond his colossal ego, he’s had 9 years to reflect. Well, excuse me, but only an arsehole would now claim that because of himself and Blair “Gleneagles, [of all summits, was] the most significant. It achieved so much, the breadth of its success is extraordinary and [is] still reverberating in astonishing ways that shape not only our politics but that of the world.

    Hold onto your supper if you tackle this recent piece he wrote for the Observer”

    “Bob Geldof: Gleneagles G8 summit was a triumph for Africa – and Tony Blair
    The Gleneagles summit helped pave the way for a new world order – and saved millions from needless suffering.”

    http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/mar/02/bob-geldof-africa-tony-blair

    Here’s a sample vomit-inducer:

    “I have no doubt that it is because of Gleneagles that I and colleagues were able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in Africa and create jobs. Who’d have thought? The people you kept alive all those 30 years ago are now being invested in to create the skills, trades and jobs that go with growth.”

    But let’s not miss an opportunity to brown-nose present day politicians too ….

    “This steady commitment has been matched through the Brown government and, to its great credit, the Cameron one. It is an example of coherent, predictive, thought-through government policy”

    And one more …

    “Gleneagles was many things amongst the murderous bombs, the triumph of the Olympic bid and the thunderous roar of Live8 but aside from the global leaders waking up to the new reality of Africa, China, the modern age of communication and its implication, it is Tony Blair’s great lasting legacy – one of which he should be immensely proud. As should Britain.”

    Blaarrrghhhhhh ………..

  • BrianFujisan

    A Node…

    Jeeeezo Man… What a complete bought n Paid for Devil…. ye were Right about the Fkn Sick bucket… What an arse…

    ” that I and colleagues [ and I ] were able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars [ Did I and my Colleagues…And I… Did Mention ME yet ] to invest in Africa and create jobs. Who’d have thought? The people you kept alive all those 30 years ago are now being invested in to create the skills, trades and jobs that go with growth.” [ so that we could keep a healthy Military industrial Complex to Kill them all nowadays ]

    So Whilst I feel ill now… Let me Ask Geldof if we should all be Proud of this –

    One Minister Dr Khalid ash-Shaykli:

    “described large areas of Fallujah where nothing, people, cats, dogs, birds were left alive, alleging that mustard and nerve gasses had been used. InterPress reported people being roasted alive, in unquenchable, jellied fire. Numerous reports during the assault recorded people on fire leaping in to the Euphrates – and continuing to burn. Bodies were found with clothes melted in to the skin – and bodies were found with no injuries at all, giving credence to the accusation of the use of gasses and chemical weapons.”

    “It wasn’t a war, it was a massacre”, wrote an unidentified soldier in militaryproject.org.

    More from that piece by Felicity Arbuthnot @

    http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/fallujah-symbol-of-iraqs-unending-tragedy-profiting-from-destruction-of-basra/

    Bliar should be Hung for what he did to Iraq…and annihilation of Fallujah…with illegal, Fuck knows what other Banned weapons.

    i had a wee peek around… seems quite a few people regard Geldof as Evil…

    And this Extract from Paula Yates wikipedia entry.

    Paula Yates wrote in her police statement that Michael Hutchence was “frightened and couldn’t stand a minute more without his baby”. During their phone conversations on the morning of his suicide he had said, “I don’t know how I’ll live without Tiger”. Yates also wrote that Bob Geldof had threatened them repeatedly with, “Don’t forget, I am above the law”.[10]

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