The looming death of capitalism and the population explosion?

During my extreme left wing era (which probably lasted about two years until I realised they were exactly the same as the extreme right wing, but with a different colour) I used to hold the opinion that people should be marching for the right NOT to work. Work, in my emerging mind, was a form of slavery in which we were beholden to the slave masters; the capitalists.
Strangely enough, that idea of mine, (or did I read it somewhere in one of the plethora of left wing books and journals that I read, or even in the realm of science fiction, of which I was and still am, a huge fan? I'm not too sure.) has evolved into an idea that, at sometime in the future, we won't need to work as the mechanisation of the workplace will be doing the work for us.
There are now tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people who will never be in continuous employment during their lifetime, because of mechanisation. Millions of people have been thrown out of work because of computers. Many of the younger people reading this will not have experience of the armies of clerks that were needed to get the paperwork done. They have mostly all gone. They will not remember the huge swathes of the population who used to work in factories; robots have taken over their monotonous jobs. Times have changed. We, as a global society, do not need all these workers.
So what do we do with all of those people who are excess to requirements? In the past that question didn't arise because we lost so many people through disease, famine and wars that we needed the 'working and middle classes' to keep producing children to fill the gaps left by their premature deaths. The advance in medicine, new surgical techniques, better food production and treaties put paid to this sort of levelling. The advances in technology have put paid to the jobs which have only exasperated the situation. Do we then hold back medical care for sections of the population with the hope that more people will die off? Do we increase global tensions to the extent that massive wars take place again? Maybe we have a combination of both? We cannot un-invent technology so something will have to be done, mostly in first and second world countries, to address this situation. Or do we really need to?
The global society we live in now makes this a problem solely because we live in a global society of capitalisation and finance. Capitalism is not the cure; it is the problem. As a species we can feed, house, educate and give medical care to all the peoples of this small planet while still supporting the advancement of technology. So what is stopping us from doing that? The answer, sadly, is money. Take money out of the equation and there is no 'problem'. Let us remember that 'money' is just the authority to get something done. Money is the lubricant to enable the society to function. Take away the 'society' and we don't need the money. Ironically, the late Margaret Thatcher was right (I paraphrase) when she said that: 'There is no such things as society' but not in the terms that she envisioned. 'There are only people'.
Yet, if we do not feed, house, educate and give medical care to those people who will, increasingly, be unemployable then we will have a breakdown of order. We will have riots and disorder breaking out all over the world. That is not capitalism, which the leaders of this planet espouse, it is, instead, a form of communism. Remember that this is not just affecting the great unwashed of the 'working classes' but, increasingly, the aspirational 'middle classes'. How many university graduates are unemployed, in their chosen profession, looking for work with little prospect of gaining employment in their chosen field? That figure will only increase as technology takes large bites out of their prospective employment as it has already done with the 'working classes'?
There are troubled times ahead and, until we accept the unthinkable, the potential for disorder will only increase. Capitalism will have to go. It has no future within a peaceful society. Capitalism, in the near future, will not save us, it will destroy us.

A draft Constitution for an independent Scotland

I was thinking about Alex Salmond's idea of drafting a constitution for Scotland and decided to get the ball rolling on this one. Those mentioned below are just ideas that need to be kicked around but, also, need to be treated with respect to the peoples of Scotland. I make no apologies for 'stealing' ideas from other countries.

1. The right to practise beliefs, be they religious or otherwise, without fear of reprisal.
2. The right to the pursuit happiness.
3. The right to free speech.
4. The right to defend the constitution from enemies of the state be they foreign or domestic.
5. The right to health and education.
6. The right to be free from oppressive governments.
7. The right to be free from debts not incurred by the peoples of Scotland.
8. The right to challenge laws that are against the constitution.
9. The right to express our sexuality or race without fear of retribution.
10. The right to life and the right to end one's own life.
11. The right to be equal under the law.

These are just for starters. Please feel free to add or even subtract what you want. 

New World Order-Friend or Foe?

We have heard much about the New World Order. What exactly does it mean? It may mean many things to many people but what does it mean to the people who are the professed leaders of the western world? That is more difficult to gauge due to the inherent secrecy of the western world's 'establishment'. There are conspiracy theories abound flooding the internet from the 'Illuminati' to the take over of the world by reptilian  aliens from space. Make no bones about it the secret services of the western world must be laughing their heads off at the gullibility of the public to swallow just about anything. From what I can gather the New World Order is the formation of a world government, for the purposes of this article it is not important what the formation of that world government is. As with all governments they would be transitory and if the first world government is not as democratic as we would like it to be then time will heal that, if that is what the citizens of the world want.

So, how is this 'world government' going to form? The simple answer is with a multitude of deaths. It is happening now. How many wars and 'terroristic' type incidents are happening now? The vested interests, I will come on to that later, know that the peoples of the democratic countries around the world are resistant to change. After being force fed nationalistic policies for decades that brainwashed the peoples into thinking that they actually belonged to a piece of dirt called a nation it is going to be nearly impossible to convince them to dump their nationalistic views and swap that for a world nation. So how are they going to do this? They will use the same technique that they have always used; they will use the idea that there is some threat to their 'nation' and, therefore, we need to attack whoever it is that is that threat whether real or imagined.

I will concentrate mostly on the USA in this article, not because I am against the USA but because it is easier to see the techniques that the USA have used to convince their doubting public. It's easier in the west to rally the populace, like the UK, because you just have to wave the flag and people flock to it like moths to a flame, and, like moths, they invariably get burned.

US Techniques

World War I

I will start off with the first World War because it is easier to see where the technique of coalescing public opinion into national self interest was publicly available. The USA, despite its public protestations, were eager to get into the first World War (more commonly called the Great War) as Woodrow Wilson wanted to be at the table when the war ended so he could put forward his League of Nations idea. (This was one of the first attempts at world government through an independent national agreement instead of empire building.) It wasn't until several ships belonging to the USA were sunk by the Germans who, quite rightly, had the legal and moral right to sink them as they were supplying aid to their enemy, and the 'telegram', which was produced by the British Government, showing that the Germans were trying to bring Mexico into the war on the side of the Germans, was just the excuse that the USA needed to participate in the war. This is, in itself, a 'red herring' because all sides in the war were trying to convince other nations not already in the war to join on their side. After all, hadn't the British been doing that with the USA?
So, on the 6th of April 1917 the USA formally entered the war just in time to meet the near one million German troops back from the eastern front when Russia, because of its revolution, withdrew from the war.

World War II

The USA joined WWII on 8th of December, 1941 after the surprise attack by the Japanese on Hawaii. We all know this, but what we didn't know was that the USA knew approximately when the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. The USA were looking for an excuse to join the fray and seized upon the Japanese plans to allow this to happen. The fact that the USA had broken the Japanese codes and cypher before the attack gives credence to the lie that it was a surprise attack.  Then there was the question of the Japanese radio silence. Evidence seems to support the theory that the Japanese did not have radio silence. [see note 1 in appendix]
One of the most important points was the disappearance of the USA aircraft carriers from Pearl Harbor before the attack. It had already been established that the days of the battleships were already numbered and the future was to be the aircraft carriers. They were the capital ships not the huge battleships of WWI. They were too exposed to aircraft and submarines. So what had happened that the USA aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Lexington & Saratoga) went missing? The Enterprise was returning to Oahu after delivering aircraft to Wake Island and its aircraft engaged the Japanese aircraft attacking Pearl Harbor to little effect. The Lexington was also away delivering aircraft to Midway Island but ordered to search out the Japanese fleet when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened. The Saratoga was at San Diego picking up its aircrew after training.
It was the Japanese who conducted the first military attack by aircraft from a carrier whose target, ironically enough, was the Germans in WWI on the Tsingtao peninsula, China from (more irony) a Scottish built ship, the Lethington, renamed the Wakamiya-Maru from September to December 1914.

Vietnam

The USA's involvement in the Vietnam war was dramatically increased by LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson] after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the USA claimed that the USS Maddox was attacked by 4 North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats. The USS Maddox was on a covert intelligence mission electronically listening to North Vietnamese radio traffic in international waters, claimed by North Vietnam, under a CIA initiated operation called Desoto. The USA already had US troops (Eisenhower had 900 'advisers' in Vietnam which was later troop surged by JFK [John F. Kennedy] but JFK had started to withdraw the troop surge when he was assassinated) in South Vietnam. This was the excuse the USA needed so, when LBJ took over the presidency, he initiated an attack on North Vietnam torpedo boat bases and a fuelling dump. The USA was now fully involved in that war.

Afghanistan

The USA, along with its allies, attacked Afghanistan on 7th October, 2001 because of the 9/11 attacks. It is now obvious that the story given by the US government is so full of holes and inconsistencies that no reasonable person would fully accept the US government's position on this.

Gulf War II

The USA, with the UK and other forces, attacked Iraq on the 20th March 2003 because of the threat to the West of  Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Were there any WMDs found in Iraq? No, none whatsoever. It was all a con for a mass grab of Iraq's oil wealth and for various companies to rip off the Iraqi peoples.

What are the reasons behind a 'New World Order'?

The most obvious one is control of, not only the populace but, the mineral, financial and idealogical resources that world has to offer. However, you may ask yourself what has this got to do with establishing a NWO. Doesn't the first world countries already have this with their bullying tactics and control of world's financial and commodities markets? No, not really, there is still a world wide commercial war out there with national interests at the fore. It's like a boxing ring with a couple of dozen boxers fighting it out with each other while keeping the majority of wannabe boxers out of the ring. At the same time there is a mass of alliances forming in, and outside, the ring with none of the boxers trusting any of the other boxers. This is how the world is functioning just now.

We have over half of the world's population near, at or under the poverty line while the majority of the other half is in a range between copious consumption or hovering close to the other half. It is less than 1% of the world's population that controls over 90% of the world's resources. Not a very pleasing picture of the world in 2013. So, what is the answer? There have been many attempts at creating stability (in a global sense) from empires to totalitarianism be it communism or fascism. None of them have worked. Why? Because of greed and familial (national) interests that supersede everything else in the scramble for control.

So, is a NWO necessarily a bad thing? Personally, I long for a world government where every human has the same rights of freedom as everyone else. A world where wars are a thing of the past. Where poverty is abolished and education is a right, not a privilege. So, is this what they are offering? The truth is we don't know because they are not telling us. So, why are they not telling us? The answer may lie in several answers. I answered one of them earlier on when I wrote about the decades of 'nationalist' brainwashing. Another could be the conflicting interests of national needs and the aspirations of individual nation states.

Let's make no bones about this, a world government is already on the way. If it could be compared to a pregnancy then it would be in its middle term. The world is already forming into blocs under the watchful eye of the UN.

Should we be wary or should we celebrate? So far, when the world has attempted ideas like this in the past, hundreds of millions of people have died. I suspect that celebration is a while off yet; which leaves only one answer...

Appendix

1. Robert B Stinnett, in his book 'Day of deceit' brings forward evidence that radio silence was not observed by the Japanese Naval fleet prior to attacking Pearl Harbor. As expected Stinnett was blasted by a horde of doubters over the evidence he presented in his book. The one thing that supports him is that no one denies that FDR was looking for an excuse to get into the war with Germany, therefore, stating that FDR was not interested in the Pacific seems dubious, to say the least.

Why is the UK in Mali?

Why is the UK in Mali? Going by various pronouncements, by the UK government, it would seem that we are there to aid the French in their rightful task of supporting a democratic government and stopping terrorist groups, like al Qaeda, from spreading their evil Islamist message to all an sundry. I, like many others, fell for that until they started to mention al Qaeda. It was then that I realised I should look at this in more depth. Why did I do that? Well because 'al Qaeda' is a construct of the US secret services, the CIA. There is no al Qaeda and never has been. It was always a ploy, created by the CIA, to focus the US public on a potential US threat so they could bring in laws which took away US citizens' rights under their constitution. Well what about supporting a democratic country? Well, it used to be until a military coup in March 2012 and again in December 2012.
So, why are we in Mali? Doing a little digging I found out that Germany, frightened of the imminent collapse of Fiat and the death of the dollar as a world currency, are demanding their gold reserves back from the USA and France. The Germans have decided that the future for currency reserves is going to be the gold standard, again. So what has this to do with Mali? Gold is mined in Mali and has the third highest gold production in Africa and France needs that gold. Mali also has Uranium, as does its next door neighbour, Niger.
This is not about keeping the evil Islamist terrorists at bay but more to do, in old imperialistic terms, of grabbing a country's mineral resources, not for the benefit of that country [Mali's citizens are amongst the poorest in Africa] but for the benefit of western finance. 

Lost blog

I will have to apologise because, after getting a new computer I lost my link to this blog. I found it by sheer accident.

Should the Unions become apolitical?

There was a time when the Unions and the Labour party were hand in hand but those days seem to be quickly disappearing, especially in Scotland. Could the time be close when the Unions have to seriously think about breaking its ties with the Labour party and forging its own future? After all, the Trade Union political activists of the 1800s were first sponsored by the Liberal party to stand for seats. The Labour party sprang from the political needs of the Unions at the time and managed, in its early days, to further the causes of the working classes and instigate institutions in the UK that fundamentally changed the conditions in the way that working class people were forced to work. As the working classes became more affluent the Labour party had to shift its political policies slightly to the right to keep in step with their core voters. In doing so they abandoned the other working classes to the scrapheap who, through no fault of their own, were now non-working classes. There are whole generations of families who have never seen work and, if current policies continue, never will see work. They are ignored by the Unions because they pay no Union dues, ignored by the government because they don't care, as long as they don't riot, and ignored by the Labour party because their votes are more or less guaranteed, in England and Wales.
So, the Unions have no political, moral conscience when it comes to the long term unemployed which, even though contrary to their initial ideas of socialism for the masses, in reality, is not their concern. Their concern should be for the members of their respective Unions. However, in the past, we have seen horrendous situations were the Union leaders were taking undemocratic steps to follow a purely political agenda at the expense of their members' wishes and needs. It would have to be stressed that at that time the Unions, and the Labour party, were deeply infested with 5th columnists from the old USSR whose ultimate agenda was world domination by destroying the capitalist system from within. The question that needs to be asked is: "Do the Unions need the Labour party or the Labour party need the Unions?". I think the later is the correct of the two because the Unions are the paymasters.
The old needs for the Unions have gone as their political off-shoot, the Labour party, managed to achieve a fair number of their goals. So what should be the role of the Unions now? Evidently their primary function is to look after the needs of their members. Their members no longer need to fight for free education, free NHS, free school meals for poor children. Those battles have been won. There is a wider view of Unions that should be explored with regards to the EU. Too many countries are welcoming immigrants with one hand and on the other moaning to their own citizens about their inability to do anything about it because of EU rules. Decide for yourself which countries in the EU do this. The answer, but not just now, is to have EU wide Unions that can level the pay for tradesmen all over the EU. If a member country goes through a financially difficult period then their trades people can travel to any other part of the EU knowing that they will receive the same wages as their mother country. These are the things that the Unions should be heading to. They should also get out of this mind-set that there is a them and us attitude. Fair enough, the same could be said for the management side. If the company they work for shuts down then everyone loses. It should be incumbent upon Unions to help the company to survive and flourish; not try and grab everything it can.
So, can the Unions politically afford to dump the labour party and move on? I believe they can. The idea that a Union 's only concern is for the welfare of its members within a wider capitalist structure is fundamental to their current aims and, in some cases, survival. The Unions have had too bad a press in recent years and doesn't seem to be able to get over to its potential members the benefits that a Union can give them. There are many, many people who are in the Unions but do not support the Labour party. The Unions will have to, eventually, realise this and change their allegiance back to their membership by dumping the Labour party and forging new links with all who would support their aims.
But I'm not holding my breath for that one. The Unions are a good idea but the way in which they are being run is far too political. Released from it political obligations then I can see the Unions returning to their original function whichwas to look after their members wishes and needs.

The trouble with English education

It's the same all over the world

I was sitting at home with my partner (she works as an EAL teacher at a primary school in an underprivileged area of London) and we were having our usual slagging off of the education system in London while collectively reminiscing about how much better it was in the old days; mine in Dundee and hers in the USSR. I had always known that the English education system was bad. My daughter started school in a primary school in London. I was missing my home town so we moved up to Dundee and when I put her into her new class in Dundee we were surprised to be told by her teacher that she was way behind the other pupils. She quickly caught up but we had to leave Dundee to go to Liverpool as my wife's mother wasn't too well. When we put her into the new primary school in Liverpool we were surprised to learn that she was way ahead of the other kids. She soon slowed down to their level. So, when my partner was telling me some of the things that go on in the school it only added to my suspicions that the English education system is in trouble.

What did surprise me was the amount of physically and mentally disabled children that are in the school. I may be old fashioned in my thinking but those children, for whatever reason, who found it hard to keep up were removed from mainstream schooling and placed in 'special schools'. I know what you are saying about the 'special schools' and I would agree with you on the standard of schooling those types of schools used to provide in the past. That is a fault of the system and not a fault of the idea.

It is stupid to waste precious resources on one to one tuition of severely disabled children in mainstream schools. Not only are those children a disruption to the normal running of a classroom but the, so called, one to one tuition is a TA (teacher's assistant) who never has the time to spend on a one to one situation with the disabled child because she has to help the teacher keep control of a unruly classroom. The object of the education system is to educate the masses up to a standard that is suitable for them to function in our society. Here, in England, they are failing in this basic task in more and more areas and, instead of addressing the real problems the politicians are frightened to tackle this issue head on because of the liberal wishy-washy attitude amongst the English middle classes who have never experienced the real social stigma and rejection of having to go through those types of underprivileged education.

The real bust up of the education system happened way back in the 1960s when the Comprehensive system came into being. There was this wonderful socialist idea that everyone should have the same education. (Strange how some of the leading government Labour ministers, at that time, still sent THEIR children to private schools) Before that the education system was split into two. You had the secondary schools for those whose job it would be to serve in shops and sweep the streets or even work in factories. The academies were for the children of the aspiring working class, and lower middle class who couldn't afford private education for their children, which gave their children a chance to get on the ladder because they were better educated and civilly trained than the great unwashed. The system then was a good system. What turned it rotten was the greed of the middle classes who could have afforded to send their children to private schools but chose to take up those places designed for the upper working classes. Employers would know that if you went to an academy then your standard of education was good and you had shown the ability that, when the need arose, you were able to stick your nose to the grindstone. The idea of encouraging the more intelligent children to advance their education was a sound idea, it was the corruption of people that made it rotten.

This all relates back to the original current concept of integrating disabled children in mainstream education. It is morally degenerate to sacrifice the lives of aspiring children because the English middle classes think that it is a good idea to put disabled children in with non-disabled children. The concept is wonderful but in practise it is destroying the education of our young. Add to that another factor and the reasons why the English education system is in such a mess, in certain areas, becomes more apparent. In the 1950s the UK was in severe shortage of working men and sent out envoys into the old empire to recruit men from the colonies to fill those gaps. The fact that during the war women were more than capable of doing those tasks in the middle of a blitz, but, somehow, were incapable of doing so in peacetime. More likely the government thought, as they still do, that bringing in cheap labour from abroad will keep the wages down of the great unwashed who had the decency to die during two bloody world wars. But that's another story.

So, along came those hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the colonies who were picked because they were fit and could speak English. All fine and good, but they started to bring over their families and parents etc. who weren't as educated or knew English as good as the original immigrants. This fact started to put a strain on the education system as the local authorities would have to employ extra staff to deal with the lack of English amongst the newer arrivals. The situation suddenly got worse when the east Europeans flooded over to the UK, the vast majority to work, as their children would also need special help to integrate in an English school. Just finding out the age of a child and then sticking them in the class of the same age group just will not work if they cannot speak or understand English. I dare any of you to go onto a Russian news site and listen to what they are saying in Russian, with no English subtitles, and see how you get on. You would soon tire of listening to some foreign language that you don't understand. The same applies to these children. Their own boredom will add to the disruption of the classes.

When all of this is taken into account it is no wonder that some schools in England are failing. They are failing because the criteria which decides if they are failing or not does not take into account certain schools which have severe difficulty due to the dumping of refugees into their catchment area.

Areas like those were a blot on the landscape of the political elite, regardless of the colour of their rosette. No one wanted to address the real issues of educating our young as political ideology held sway among the political masses. It was far better if the political elite covered their own backsides and loaded down the teachers with a huge pile of endless and totally worthless paperwork thereby not giving them the time to express what they know is wrong with the system. The English education system, at its heart, is corrupt and due for an overhaul. 

Also @ Scottish Commune????