Monday, April 13, 2015

Corporate Capitalism has replaced democracy in western nations

Todays election talking point (Image source)

A few of you may have noticed we citizens of the United Kingdom will soon elect a new government. In less than a month we will cast our votes. Election fever in the media is building to a climax as politicians of all parties and political pundits of all shades of opinion spout endless empty rhetoric about British values and democratic principles and who is best placed to save the nation from bankruptcy, restore the National Health Service to financial good health and address the concerns of medium income people.

So far all of this has failed to inflame passions in the national psyche, the three main parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat are utterly discredited and have totally lost the trust of the voters. The three leaders are firmly committed to globalisation, further surrender of Britsh sovereignty to the European Union and continuing the disastrous 'open doors' immigration policy initiated without mandate by the Labour Government of 1997 - 2010. Supporters of each are clutching as straws from the straw polls to try and claim their party is surging forward while support to the others is crumbling.

It is not so, more important than what the published data from polls tells us is what they don't tell us, i.e. how they allocate the votes of people who have not made up their minds, say they do not intend to vote or simply decline to answer the questions.

To further complicate matters there is the question of upstart parties such as UKIP, SNP and the Greens; in previous elections just bit part players but now looking set to play a significant role.

The nature of our ‘first past the post' voting system, which has ensured many people - myself among them - have never had the prospect of somebody we actually supported being elected as our Member of Parliament, also means that the only parties with a realistic chance of winning enough seats to enable them to form a government without minority party support are Labour and The Conservatives. As in the outgoing parliament, the party most likely to achieve third place, the Liberal Democrats, might hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.

In the campaign so far, leaders of the three main parties have hogged television and newspaper coverage and embraced a cosy consensus based on the need to continue with ‘austerity', open the borders to even more immigrants, give high priority to all issues related to gay and ethnic minority rights and support all military interventions in poor nations launched by the USA. They quibble over the nature or speed of cuts to the public sector and public services but none can suggest how the government deficit might be brought under control without far deeper cuts that any will talk about, or corresponding tax hikes which is another topic that is off limits.

All three main parties are pro-big business, support Britain's further integration into an increasingly federalised European Union and are aligned with the neoliberal economic agenda set by the financial cartel based in the City of London and on Wall Street and by the major transnational corporations. Thus all are committed to signing the iniquitous "Free Trade" agreement being pushed by the corporate puppet Barack Hussein Obama and his corrupt administration in Washington, the Trans - Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TTIP), which will free global corporations from the tiresome obligation to obey national law on trading standards, consumer protection or workers rights.



The irony of course is that no matter which party gets the most seats in Parliament and which leader is named as Prime Minister, exactly the same people will rule Britain as rule now, ruled while Labour were in power and have ruled since the end of World War Two and probably before that. The weird thing is, few of us know their names or what they look like.


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