Politics

The Ukrainian presidential elections resulted in a TV actor beating the incumbent (Petro Poroshenko) and a third-time candidate for president (Yulia Tymoshenko) into second and third places, respectively.
The first round of the Ukrainian elections was won by Volodymyr Zelensky, an actor, with no previous political experience – unless you include playing an anti-corruption campaigner who becomes president in a satirical TV show.
The election of Zelensky is yet another sign of the willingness of the working class to stray from the well-worn path the ruling elites would have them follow. Zelensky, however, is no anti-corruption superhero. His campaign was supported and partially funded by one of the many oligarchs who use their financial clout to try and wield political power in Ukraine. This support from Igor Kolomoisky, who owns a Ukrainian TV channel, casts a shadow over Zelensky’s anti-corruption credentials.
The incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, is himself a chocolate magnate and ranks among the wealthiest people in Ukraine. And Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister and presidential candidate, was at one time one of the richest people in the country as a result of her activities in the gas industry.
The rejection of these establishment characters by the Ukrainian working class is an indication of their growing impatience with the high-level corruption in Ukrainian government circles. The fact that they would rather vote for a TV comedian than their current president or their former prime minister is a measure of the contempt felt by ordinary working people for the political elite.
For a truly effective anti-corruption regime to be established in Ukraine they may need to return to the soviet election system, as it was first established in 1905 and 1917 – in which elected representatives do not serve a fixed term but can be recalled and forced to stand for re-election by their constituents at any time. Putting political power back into the hands of the working class, as it was briefly following the successful Russian Revolution of 1917, is a big step, and will require more than the current protest vote for Zelensky. He is not the saviour he portrays in the television series.
Taking political power into the hands of the working class will require a social revolution, and the expropriation of the oligarchs who have been robbing the country for decades. Ukraine is in a uniquely fortunate position as the social ownership of the country’s greatest manufacturing assets is a recent memory for the working class. But it will require democratic workers’ control those assets to prevent them becoming under the control of a political bureaucracy with its own agenda.

Who says the BBC’s World Service, which is part-funded by the British government’s Foreign Office, is biased?

Today the radio service reported on 2 demonstrations in Venezuela – one pro-Maduro and one pro-Guaido – which took place in different areas of Caracas. The emphasis of the report, by Will Grant, was on the grievances of the anti-Maduro demonstrators. His opening remarks were to state the words that he heard the anti-government demonstrators use. Followed by the statement; “This was a day of opposing marches – demonstrations at two different ends of the city, reflecting two starkly different visions for Venezuela.”

We were left to assume the two demonstrations were equal in size. There was no reference to the numbers of demonstrators. Perhaps they were about the same size?. How would we know? Will Grant wasn’t going to tell us. But a few clues came out of his report.

“When the man they want to replace President Maduro arrived – Juan Guaido – he addressed them by megaphone,” reported Grant. A megaphone! Take a moment to think about that fact. He addressed this (massive?) demonstration with a hand-held megaphone.

Grant went on to report Guaido told the demonstration “He would travel the entire country with members of the National Assembly and bring people back from the provinces for another big demonstration in Caracas.” You might think that sounded like a leader trying to give hope to disappointed supporters at a small demonstration. If you thought that, your conclusion could only be reinforced by the words of one of Guaido’s supporters, Manolo, who told Will Grant,

“Every minimal advance is very, very important – every display of popular unity – every display in the streets. This dictatorship won’t be forced out overnight. It will take a lot of work. They are deeply entrenched in power. They have the police, the army, the guns. We are just working people. But although it might look small, it all adds up until we reach our objective of getting out from under this government.”

So even according to one of Guaido’s activist supporters the demonstration Will Grant was reporting “might look small”. It might look small indeed, but you would have to read carefully between the lines of the BBC report to glean that information.

The media are hailing Emmanuel Macron’s election as President of France as a victory for their own bourgeois-liberal agenda. But analysis of the results gives a very different picture.

Macron is a former merchant banker who was recruited by the reformist President Hollande to the position of Finance Minister. The idea that he could attract the support of the majority of working class voters and French youth is laughable. In fact 3 million voters cast blank ballot papers, and a further million spoiled their papers. So about an eights of everyone who cast their votes actively participated in the election just to say ‘A curse on both their houses’.

The abstainers were also notable. More people decided not to vote than in any presidential election in nearly fifty years. The last time so many abstained was in the aftermath of the 1968 revolutionary actions when the right wing had suppressed a rising by workers and youth.

The media may crow about a resounding victory for the centrist consensus. But it is more a case of a defeat for neo-fascism.

You can be sure a lot of the workers who cast their vote for Macron were actually casting their vote for the only candidate left standing against the neo-fascist Marie Le Pen. When the Left candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon was narrowly eliminated in the previous round, opponents of Marie Le Pen were left with the choice of abstaining, voting for Macron or spoiling their ballot paper.

Melenchon had stood on a platform of opposing austerity (or ‘cuts’ as I prefer to call it), calling for withdrawal from the EU and extending workers’ rights. He came within 2 percentage points of defeating Marie Le Pen. And that would have left Macron campaigning for cutbacks and attacks on workers’ rights against Melenchon’s anti-austerity rhetoric.

The French working class did not vote for Macron. To the extent that he got any votes from French workers, they were voting against fascism.

Macron now has the daunting task of trying to impose his neo-liberal programme on the French working class. With youth unemployment standing at around 24% he may find he is sitting on an explosive situation.

They say Americans do not do irony. And of course, they do. But the CIA, on the other hand….

When the US foreign intelligence agency issues press releases about the (shock/horror) attempts by the Russian government to influence the recent presidential campaigns, the irony is lost on them

The CIA have been trying to influence democratic elections all over the world for as long as they have been in existence. The most recent and most blatant example is their involvement in Iraq and Syria. Who decided what kind of democratic institutions would be set up after their illegal invasion of Iraq?

And it was their attempts to destabilise the government of Ukraine that clearly demonstrate their willingness to promote a foreign movement which the USA thinks it can profit from. They admit to spending over $5 billion in Ukraine trying to ensure the government there came into the western sphere of influence. They decline to say where the money was spent. They call it “supporting democratic institutions”. But the democratic institutions they supported are whichever ones were working towards the overturn of the Yanukovich government. $5 billion. To quote Victoria Nuland, the money was spent to help the Ukranian people “in their search for justice, human dignity, security, a return to economic health, and for the European future they have chosen and that they deserve.” Taking sides in an internal political dispute in a foreign country, and funding those who the US sees as acting in its interests. That is what the CIA does. When it is not assassinating foreign heads of state.

There are too many examples of CIA interference to list. The most egregious, like the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1973, resulted in thousands of deaths, torture victims and people ‘disappeared’. No twinges of conscience from the CIA about that success for USA foreign policy.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

How much of a surprise was it to find that Donald Trump had been elected president?

 

To be honest, it was less of a surprise to me this week than I would have thought a couple of weeks ago. Watching from the UK, I could not envisage how or why Trump stood a chance in hell. Arrogance. Bombast. Racism. Foul-mouthed misogynism. Failed business man and tax avoider. Surely no-one in their right mind would vote for this jackass?

But as his polling continued to show him within spitting distance of Clinton, despite all his negatives, it gradually started to dawn on me just how hated was Hillary Clinton. From this distance, it looks like a large section of the US electorate look on Clinton as corrupt. And that corruption is not just that she is in the pockets of the filthy rich, which she undoubtedly is. If that were her main negative, it would be ironic if she were beaten by a man who actually was himself one of the filthy rich.

It seems that many ordinary USA citizens are angry with the existing system. Just like here in the UK, they have been told that the worst of the economic crisis is over. Things are getting better, we hear. Hold on there and just watch everything improve. Wait, and trust us. Some of the pundits have described Trump voters as ‘the left behind’. And that has a ring of truth.

Since World War Two the USA has been run by two parties who differ only in minutiae. We do not trust them. And there is definitely an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality. When everyone in the media, all the established politicians, economists, ‘expert’ think tankers and foreign leaders all agree, you begin to think they must be wrong.

This election is not a vindication of Trump. It is a repudiation of everything Hillary Clinton stands for.

And therein lies the positive aspect to the situation. In a country where working people have had to choose between two capitaist parties, there has been no choice. So the people have rejected the existing order. Admittedly, the only channel they were afforded to express that rejection was an insincere narcissist with absolutely nothing in common with the people who used him as a battering ram against the status quo. But that was the only tool they had. And they used it.

For people who want to see the end of capitalism and the beginning of a socialist economy and a socially equitable society, the message is clear. We need leaders who represent what we really want. If that means creating a new Workers’ Party in the USA (and in the UK for that matter) then so be it.

Where are the revolutionary bolsheviks when you need them?

You do not have to be a trained detective to work out that young black men are much more likely to be stopped and searched than young white men. As Mr Olisa puts it, it is ‘accepted practice’ to stop young black men to try to boost arrest rates for drugs such as cannabis. He said police were more likey to stop a car full of black people in the hope of finding some cannabis, than to stop a car full of white people to look for party goers carrying cocaine.

But the fine Mr Olisa reassures us that it is not racism that motivates these officers. No, it is the ‘performance culture’, the drive to increase your arrest statistice, that is behind it all.

I have news for the chief superintendent. If you try and look good to your superiors by arresting more black people, that is racism.

“When you look at the accumulated data , you see massive disproportionality” he said. But still he springs to the defence of his racist colleagues. He suggests that searches should be carried out based on intelligence. So presumably those officers arresting blacks disproportinately are not using intelligence.

They must be following their gut. Their presumptions. Or in other words, their prejudices.

Which is what most of us call racism.

Mr Olisa is one of the Met’s most senior black officers. He must have learned through his own experience, you do not rise to the top of the racist pond that is the Metropolitan police force by calling a racist a racist. Much more deference is required if your career is to go forward.

So while young blacks in London are having their lives disrupted by the racist intrusion of bigoted police officers, Mr Olisa can draw his carefully moderated conclusions, and excuse his colleagues’ behaviour.

It is not the officers that are racist, he argues. It is the culture.

For those on the receiving end, what difference does it make?

Trophy women are undoubtedly important to Trump and there would have been no bigger trophy than Princess Diana. He told friends he might have had a ‘shot’ at her, describing her as his ‘dream lady’.

In his 1997 book, The Art Of The Comeback, he wrote: ‘I only have one regret in the woman department, that I never had the opportunity to court Lady Diana Spencer. I met her on a number of occasions… She lit up the room with her charm, her presence.’

Diana told me: ‘He gives me the creeps.’

Selina Scott, Daily Mail 30 jan 2016