CAPITALIST FRONTS

WAYNE MADSEN—It was Blair who was behind the concerted media and propaganda campaign against Corbyn. Corbyn suffered from the same sort of insidious attack from Labor’s right-wing tendency as that suffered by past traditional baseline socialist Labor politicians like Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, and Tony Benn. Individuals like Blair and his ilk conveniently forget that the Labor Party was formed at the turn of the last century by colleagues of Karl Marx, someone who definitely saw no place in a workers’ party for those that sought their exploitation.

RAINER SHEA—Marxism is presented [by Animal Farm] as a theory of naive idealism, which in practice leads to cynical tyranny. The main tenet of Animal Farm, though, seems to be that humans are no better than animals; that ‘human nature’ decides all. Some people are born to rule and others to be taken advantage of; all efforts to change the system will only lead to something worse, so we should be grateful for what we have. Unfortunately for Orwell, there is a blindingly obvious flaw in the plan. He uses different species to represent the different classes, but while it may be true that some animals are cleverer, quicker, stronger than others, and naturally inclined to prey on those that are weaker, the class structure of our society is a reflection of no such natural difference. Mankind is one species.

TONY SUTTON—If the system is so obviously flawed, then how does capitalism continue to get away with such shameless, self-centred behaviour? That’s the question that Rosenthal confronts in the early sections of Rebel Minds, where she analyses the physical and mental torment created by ever-increasing demands of profit-hungry bosses on workers who have become numbed by mindless and meaningless, drudgery in jobs that barely pay their bills.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The mass media’s stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it?

In this segment of “By Any Means Necessary” hosts Jacquie Luqman and Sean Blackmon are joined by Gilbert Mercier, Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post and the author of “The Orwellian Empire” to talk about Typhoon Phanfone hitting the Philippines killing at least 16 people, at least a dozen people dying in Australia as over 12 million acres of land continue to burn, and at least 200 homes being destroyed after forest fires swept through a residential area in the Chilean port city of Valparaiso on Christmas Eve.