Where Is Our Jeremy Corbyn?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_is_our_jeremy_corbyn_20150913/
Posted on Sep 13, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Jeremy Corbyn waves in London after he was elected the leader of the
Labour Party on Saturday. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)
The politics of Jeremy Corbyn, elected by a landslide Saturday to lead
Britains Labour Party after its defeat at the polls last May, are part of
the global revolt against corporate tyranny. He had spent his long career as
a pariah within his countrys political establishment. But because he held
fast to the socialist ideals that defined the old Labour Party, he has risen
untarnished out of the ash heap of neoliberalism. His integrity, as well as
his fearlessness, offers a lesson to Americas self-identified left, which
is long on rhetoric, preoccupied with accommodating the power
elitesespecially those in the Democratic Partyand very short on courage.
I will not support a politician who sells out the Palestinians and panders
to the Israel lobby any more than I will support a politician who refuses to
confront the bloated military and arms industry or white supremacy and
racial injustice. The Palestinian issue is not a tangential issue. It is an
integral part of Americans efforts to dismantle our war machine, the
neoliberal policies that see austerity and violence as the primary language
for speaking to the rest of the world, and the corroding influence of money
in the U.S. political system. Stand up to the masters of war and the Israel
lobby and you will probably stand up to every other corporate and neoliberal
force that is cannibalizing the United States. This is what leadership is
about. It is about having a vision. And it is about fighting for that
vision.
Corbyn, who supports negotiations with Hamas and Hezbollah and once invited
members from those organizations to visit Parliament, has called for
Israels leaders to be put on trial for war crimes against the Palestinians.
He has expressed support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement
(BDS) against Israel and the call for an arms embargo against that nation.
He would scrap Britains Prevention of Terrorism Act, which, like the
Patriot Act in the United States, has been used to target and harass
Muslims. He wants the United Kingdom to withdraw from NATO. He cannot
conceive of any situation, he has said, that would necessitate sending
British troops abroad. He was a vocal opponent of the invasion and
occupation of Iraq and a founder of the Stop the War Coalition. He denounced
the United States for what he called its assassination of Osama bin Laden,
saying the al-Qaida leader should have been captured and put on trial, and
he assailed the British government for using militarized drones to kill two
British jihadists in Syria in August. He advocates unilateral nuclear
disarmament and has urged the elimination of Trident, his countrys nuclear
weapons system. He opposes any British military intervention in Syria and
wants to put pressure on our supposed allies in the regionread Saudi
Arabiathat support Islamic State. He has called for talks with the leaders
of warring factions in Iraq and Afghanistan to end the conflicts.
There is no solution to the killing and abuse of human rights [in the
Middle East] that involves yet more Western military action, Corbyn has
written. Ultimately there has to be a political solution in the region
which bombing by NATO forces cannot bring about. The drama of the killings
and advances by ISIS in the past few weeks is yet another result of the
Bush-Blair war on terror since 2001. The victims of these wars are the
refugees and those driven from their homes and the thousands of unknown
civilians who have died and will continue to die in the region. The
winners are inevitably the arms manufacturers and those who gain from the
natural resources of the region.
And that is just his foreign policy.
Corbyn says he will back significantly increasing taxes on the wealthy and
ending the unfair tax breaks of corporations. He is for imposing safeguards
to protect those on welfare and instituting a maximum wage for corporate
executives in order to fight grotesque levels of inequality. He would
install widespread rent control to stop what he calls social cleansing
caused by gentrification. He has called on the Bank of England to carry out
what he terms a Peoples Quantitative Easing, demanding it invest billions
in housing, energy and other infrastructure projects. He supports the
creation of a sanctuary in the Antarctic to prevent mining and oil drilling
there. He opposes fracking. He calls for government investment to build
renewable energy based on solar and wind, and global regulation to prevent
the export of carbon products. And he would end the steps to privatize parts
of his countrys universal health care system, known as the National Health
Service.
As Labour veered to the right and became dominated by corporate money and
neoliberalism under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Browna process
also carried out by the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton and Barack
ObamaCorbyn became a rebel in his own party. Between 1997 and 2010, as a
member of Parliament, where he has held a seat since 1983, he voted against
bills or challenged positions championed by the new Labour Party
leadership more than 500 times. Blair, who detests Corbyn, warned that if
Labour backs Corbyn in the next election for prime minister (which is set
for 2020 but can be held any time a no-confidence vote occurs in
Parliament), it will face annihilation at the polls. Corbyn responded by
suggesting that Blair should be prosecuted as a war criminal for his role in
the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Corbyn, in the course of his roughly 40 years on the fringes of the British
political establishment, has called for the abolition of the British
monarchy and has described Karl Marx as a fascinating figure who observed a
great deal and from whom we can learn a great deal. He wants to nationalize
energy companies and renationalize the post office and the rail service.
Without exception, the majority electricity, gas, water and railway
infrastructures of Britain were built through public investment since the
end of WWII and were all privatised at knock-down prices for the benefit of
greedy asset-strippers by the Thatcher and [John] Major-led Tory
governments, he wrote in a column for the Morning Star newspaper.
He has raised the possibility of the U.K. leaving the European Union, citing
the EUs draconian assault on the Greek people in the name of austerity.
Look at it another way, Corbyn said. If we allow unaccountable forces to
destroy an economy like Greece, when all that bailout money isnt going to
the Greek people, its going to various banks all across Europe, then I
think we need to think very, very carefully about what role they [the EU]
are playing and what role we are playing in that.
Corbyn has proposed a National Education Service that would, with increased
taxes on corporations, provide free universal education starting with day
care and going up through vocational schools, adult education programs and
universities. He would abolish the British equivalent of charter schools and
end the tax-exempt status of the elite private schools. He would bring back
state funding for the arts. He issued a statement in August titled The arts
are for everyone not the few; there is creativity in all of us. It is worth
reading.
The arts community in the United States, like that in Britain, is in deep
distress. Actors, dancers, musicians, sculptors, singers, painters, writers,
poets and even journalists often cannot make a living. They have few spaces
where they can perform or publish new work. And established theaters,
desperate to make money to survive, produce tawdry spectacles or plays that
are empty pieces of entertainment rather than art. The war on the arts has
been one of the major contributions to the dumbing down of America. It shuts
us off from our intellectual and artistic patrimony, contributing to our
historical and cultural amnesia. The parallel removal of the arts from
school curriculums, now dominated by vocational skills and standardized
testing, has cemented into place a system in which Americans have been
taught what to think, not how to think. Self-expression and creativity,
disciplines that make possible self-awareness, transcendence and the
capacity for reverence, are anathemas to the corporate state. The imposed
dogma of neoliberalism must be unquestioned.
Under the guise of a politically motivated austerity programme, this
government has savaged arts funding with projects increasingly required to
justify their artistic and social contributions in the narrow, ruthlessly
instrumentalist approach of the Thatcher governments, Corbyn wrote in the
August statement. During the 1980s, [then-Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher
sought to disempower the arts community, attempting to silence the
provocative in favour of the populist. The current climate of Treasury value
measurement methodologies (taken from practises used in the property market
and elsewhere) to try to find mechanisms appropriate to calculating the
value of visiting art galleries or the opera are a dangerous retreat into a
callous commercialisation of every sphere of our lives. The result has been
a devastating £82 million in cuts to the arts council budget over the last 5
years and the closure of the great majority of currently funded arts
organisations, especially outside London.
He went on:
Beyond the obvious economic and social benefits of the arts is the
significant contribution to our communities, education, and democratic
process they make. Studies have demonstrated the beneficial impact of drama
studied at schools on the capacity of teenagers to communicate, learn, and
to tolerate each other as well as on the likelihood that they will vote. The
greater involvement of young people in the political process is something to
be encouraged and celebrated. Further, the contribution and critique of our
society and democracy which theatre has the capacity to offer must be
protected. To quote David Lan, dissent is necessary to democracy, and
democratic governments should have an interest in preserving sites in which
that dissent can be expressed.
Corbyn says he would also reverse the government cuts that gutted the BBC.
He understands that the destruction of public broadcasting, which is
designed to give a platform to voices and artists not beholden to corporate
money, means the rise of a corporate-dominated system of propaganda, one
that now controls most of the U.S. airwaves.
I firmly believe in the principle of public service broadcast and am
fearful of following the path tread in the United States, where PBS has been
hollowed out, unable to deliver the breadth of content to compete with the
private broadcasters, and where Fox News has as a result been effectively
allowed to dominate and set the news agenda, he wrote. I want to see the
Labour Party at the heart of campaigns to protect the BBC and its license
fee. When we [Labour] return to power we must fully fund public service
broadcasting in all its forms, recognising the crucial role the BBC has
played in establishing and supporting world class domestic arts, drama, and
entertainment.
Corbyn became a vegetarian at the age of 20 after working on a pig farm and
witnessing the abuse, torture and slaughter of the animals. He champions
animal rights. He does not own a car, bicycles almost everywhere and is
notoriously frugal, usually filing the lowest expense of any member of
Parliament. His favorite novelist is the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe,
who wrote Things Fall Apart, an exploration of the destructive force of
colonialism. Corbyn speaks fluent Spanish and comes from a left-wing family.
(His parents met at a rally in support of the Republicans fighting Francos
fascists during the Spanish Civil War.)
He is acutely aware of the problem of male violence against women. He would
halt the governments closure of domestic violence centers for women, fight
discrimination against women in the workplace and bolster laws against
sexual harassment and sexual assault. He says his Cabinet would be 50
percent women.
Corbyns ascent to the head of the Labour Party has already triggered a
backlash against him by the forces of the neoliberal political order. These
forces are determined to prevent him from becoming prime minister. The
entrenched elites within his own partya number of whom have already
resigned from party leadership positions in protest of Corbyns
electionwill seek to do to him what the Democratic establishment did in
1972 to George McGovern after he won the partys nomination. The rhetoric of
fear has already begun. Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday tweeted: The
Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security
and your familys security. This battle will be ugly.
Corbyn, like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, is part of the new
popular resistance that is rising up from the ruins of neoliberalism and
globalization to fight the international banking system and American
imperialism. We have yet to mount this battle effectively in the United
States. But we, especially because we live in the heart of empire, have a
special responsibility to defy the machine, held in place by the Democratic
Party establishment, the war industry, Wall Street and groups such as the
Israel lobby. We too must work to build a socialist nation. We may not win,
but this fight is the only hope left to save ourselves from the predatory
forces bent on the destruction of democracy and the ecosystem on which we
depend for life. If the forces that oppose us triumph, we will have no
future left.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Where Is Our Jeremy Corbyn?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/where_is_our_jeremy_corbyn_20150913/
Posted on Sep 13, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Jeremy Corbyn waves in London after he was elected the leader of the Labour
Party on Saturday. (Kirsty Wigglesworth / AP)
The politics of Jeremy Corbyn, elected by a landslide Saturday to lead
Britains Labour Party after its defeat at the polls last May, are part of
the global revolt against corporate tyranny. He had spent his long career as
a pariah within his countrys political establishment. But because he held
fast to the socialist ideals that defined the old Labour Party, he has risen
untarnished out of the ash heap of neoliberalism. His integrity, as well as
his fearlessness, offers a lesson to Americas self-identified left, which
is long on rhetoric, preoccupied with accommodating the power
elitesespecially those in the Democratic Partyand very short on courage.
I will not support a politician who sells out the Palestinians and panders
to the Israel lobby any more than I will support a politician who refuses to
confront the bloated military and arms industry or white supremacy and
racial injustice. The Palestinian issue is not a tangential issue. It is an
integral part of Americans efforts to dismantle our war machine, the
neoliberal policies that see austerity and violence as the primary language
for speaking to the rest of the world, and the corroding influence of money
in the U.S. political system. Stand up to the masters of war and the Israel
lobby and you will probably stand up to every other corporate and neoliberal
force that is cannibalizing the United States. This is what leadership is
about. It is about having a vision. And it is about fighting for that
vision.
Corbyn, who supports negotiations with Hamas and Hezbollah and once invited
members from those organizations to visit Parliament, has called for
Israels leaders to be put on trial for war crimes against the Palestinians.
He has expressed support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement
(BDS) against Israel and the call for an arms embargo against that nation.
He would scrap Britains Prevention of Terrorism Act, which, like the
Patriot Act in the United States, has been used to target and harass
Muslims. He wants the United Kingdom to withdraw from NATO. He cannot
conceive of any situation, he has said, that would necessitate sending
British troops abroad. He was a vocal opponent of the invasion and
occupation of Iraq and a founder of the Stop the War Coalition. He denounced
the United States for what he called its assassination of Osama bin Laden,
saying the al-Qaida leader should have been captured and put on trial, and
he assailed the British government for using militarized drones to kill two
British jihadists in Syria in August. He advocates unilateral nuclear
disarmament and has urged the elimination of Trident, his countrys nuclear
weapons system. He opposes any British military intervention in Syria and
wants to put pressure on our supposed allies in the regionread Saudi
Arabiathat support Islamic State. He has called for talks with the leaders
of warring factions in Iraq and Afghanistan to end the conflicts.
There is no solution to the killing and abuse of human rights [in the
Middle East] that involves yet more Western military action, Corbyn has
written. Ultimately there has to be a political solution in the region
which bombing by NATO forces cannot bring about. The drama of the killings
and advances by ISIS in the past few weeks is yet another result of the
Bush-Blair war on terror since 2001. The victims of these wars are the
refugees and those driven from their homes and the thousands of unknown
civilians who have died and will continue to die in the region. The
winners are inevitably the arms manufacturers and those who gain from the
natural resources of the region.
And that is just his foreign policy.
Corbyn says he will back significantly increasing taxes on the wealthy and
ending the unfair tax breaks of corporations. He is for imposing safeguards
to protect those on welfare and instituting a maximum wage for corporate
executives in order to fight grotesque levels of inequality. He would
install widespread rent control to stop what he calls social cleansing
caused by gentrification. He has called on the Bank of England to carry out
what he terms a Peoples Quantitative Easing, demanding it invest billions
in housing, energy and other infrastructure projects. He supports the
creation of a sanctuary in the Antarctic to prevent mining and oil drilling
there. He opposes fracking. He calls for government investment to build
renewable energy based on solar and wind, and global regulation to prevent
the export of carbon products. And he would end the steps to privatize parts
of his countrys universal health care system, known as the National Health
Service.
As Labour veered to the right and became dominated by corporate money and
neoliberalism under Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Browna process
also carried out by the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton and Barack
ObamaCorbyn became a rebel in his own party. Between 1997 and 2010, as a
member of Parliament, where he has held a seat since 1983, he voted against
bills or challenged positions championed by the new Labour Party
leadership more than 500 times. Blair, who detests Corbyn, warned that if
Labour backs Corbyn in the next election for prime minister (which is set
for 2020 but can be held any time a no-confidence vote occurs in
Parliament), it will face annihilation at the polls. Corbyn responded by
suggesting that Blair should be prosecuted as a war criminal for his role in
the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Corbyn, in the course of his roughly 40 years on the fringes of the British
political establishment, has called for the abolition of the British
monarchy and has described Karl Marx as a fascinating figure who observed a
great deal and from whom we can learn a great deal. He wants to nationalize
energy companies and renationalize the post office and the rail service.
Without exception, the majority electricity, gas, water and railway
infrastructures of Britain were built through public investment since the
end of WWII and were all privatised at knock-down prices for the benefit of
greedy asset-strippers by the Thatcher and [John] Major-led Tory
governments, he wrote in a column for the Morning Star newspaper.
He has raised the possibility of the U.K. leaving the European Union, citing
the EUs draconian assault on the Greek people in the name of austerity.
Look at it another way, Corbyn said. If we allow unaccountable forces to
destroy an economy like Greece, when all that bailout money isnt going to
the Greek people, its going to various banks all across Europe, then I
think we need to think very, very carefully about what role they [the EU]
are playing and what role we are playing in that.
Corbyn has proposed a National Education Service that would, with increased
taxes on corporations, provide free universal education starting with day
care and going up through vocational schools, adult education programs and
universities. He would abolish the British equivalent of charter schools and
end the tax-exempt status of the elite private schools. He would bring back
state funding for the arts. He issued a statement in August titled The arts
are for everyone not the few; there is creativity in all of us. It is worth
reading.
The arts community in the United States, like that in Britain, is in deep
distress. Actors, dancers, musicians, sculptors, singers, painters, writers,
poets and even journalists often cannot make a living. They have few spaces
where they can perform or publish new work. And established theaters,
desperate to make money to survive, produce tawdry spectacles or plays that
are empty pieces of entertainment rather than art. The war on the arts has
been one of the major contributions to the dumbing down of America. It shuts
us off from our intellectual and artistic patrimony, contributing to our
historical and cultural amnesia. The parallel removal of the arts from
school curriculums, now dominated by vocational skills and standardized
testing, has cemented into place a system in which Americans have been
taught what to think, not how to think. Self-expression and creativity,
disciplines that make possible self-awareness, transcendence and the
capacity for reverence, are anathemas to the corporate state. The imposed
dogma of neoliberalism must be unquestioned.
Under the guise of a politically motivated austerity programme, this
government has savaged arts funding with projects increasingly required to
justify their artistic and social contributions in the narrow, ruthlessly
instrumentalist approach of the Thatcher governments, Corbyn wrote in the
August statement. During the 1980s, [then-Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher
sought to disempower the arts community, attempting to silence the
provocative in favour of the populist. The current climate of Treasury value
measurement methodologies (taken from practises used in the property market
and elsewhere) to try to find mechanisms appropriate to calculating the
value of visiting art galleries or the opera are a dangerous retreat into a
callous commercialisation of every sphere of our lives. The result has been
a devastating £82 million in cuts to the arts council budget over the last 5
years and the closure of the great majority of currently funded arts
organisations, especially outside London.
He went on:
Beyond the obvious economic and social benefits of the arts is the
significant contribution to our communities, education, and democratic
process they make. Studies have demonstrated the beneficial impact of drama
studied at schools on the capacity of teenagers to communicate, learn, and
to tolerate each other as well as on the likelihood that they will vote. The
greater involvement of young people in the political process is something to
be encouraged and celebrated. Further, the contribution and critique of our
society and democracy which theatre has the capacity to offer must be
protected. To quote David Lan, dissent is necessary to democracy, and
democratic governments should have an interest in preserving sites in which
that dissent can be expressed.
Corbyn says he would also reverse the government cuts that gutted the BBC.
He understands that the destruction of public broadcasting, which is
designed to give a platform to voices and artists not beholden to corporate
money, means the rise of a corporate-dominated system of propaganda, one
that now controls most of the U.S. airwaves.
I firmly believe in the principle of public service broadcast and am
fearful of following the path tread in the United States, where PBS has been
hollowed out, unable to deliver the breadth of content to compete with the
private broadcasters, and where Fox News has as a result been effectively
allowed to dominate and set the news agenda, he wrote. I want to see the
Labour Party at the heart of campaigns to protect the BBC and its license
fee. When we [Labour] return to power we must fully fund public service
broadcasting in all its forms, recognising the crucial role the BBC has
played in establishing and supporting world class domestic arts, drama, and
entertainment.
Corbyn became a vegetarian at the age of 20 after working on a pig farm and
witnessing the abuse, torture and slaughter of the animals. He champions
animal rights. He does not own a car, bicycles almost everywhere and is
notoriously frugal, usually filing the lowest expense of any member of
Parliament. His favorite novelist is the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe,
who wrote Things Fall Apart, an exploration of the destructive force of
colonialism. Corbyn speaks fluent Spanish and comes from a left-wing family.
(His parents met at a rally in support of the Republicans fighting Francos
fascists during the Spanish Civil War.)
He is acutely aware of the problem of male violence against women. He would
halt the governments closure of domestic violence centers for women, fight
discrimination against women in the workplace and bolster laws against
sexual harassment and sexual assault. He says his Cabinet would be 50
percent women.
Corbyns ascent to the head of the Labour Party has already triggered a
backlash against him by the forces of the neoliberal political order. These
forces are determined to prevent him from becoming prime minister. The
entrenched elites within his own partya number of whom have already
resigned from party leadership positions in protest of Corbyns
electionwill seek to do to him what the Democratic establishment did in
1972 to George McGovern after he won the partys nomination. The rhetoric of
fear has already begun. Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday tweeted: The
Labour Party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security
and your familys security. This battle will be ugly.
Corbyn, like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, is part of the new
popular resistance that is rising up from the ruins of neoliberalism and
globalization to fight the international banking system and American
imperialism. We have yet to mount this battle effectively in the United
States. But we, especially because we live in the heart of empire, have a
special responsibility to defy the machine, held in place by the Democratic
Party establishment, the war industry, Wall Street and groups such as the
Israel lobby. We too must work to build a socialist nation. We may not win,
but this fight is the only hope left to save ourselves from the predatory
forces bent on the destruction of democracy and the ecosystem on which we
depend for life. If the forces that oppose us triumph, we will have no
future left.
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