Related: Brexit is Big News
This is bigger:
"Does Brexit foretell a new New World Order?" by Jim Yardley, Alison Smale, Jane Perlez and Ben Hubbard New York Times June 25, 2016
Been reading these a long time, and I suppose it's victory in a way. The Times has sunk to new depths. I mean, there it was, on the web.
My printed headline was a much more benign and unthreatening "After vote, postwar era begins to feel shakier." I suppose they don't want the elite of Bo$ton and surrounding stretches of New England to its deepest reaches spilling their coffee as they recline on a Sunday morning.
LONDON — Britain’s historic vote to leave the European Union is already threatening to unravel a democratic bloc of nations that has coexisted peacefully together for decades. But it is also generating uncertainty about an even bigger issue: Is the post-1945 order imposed on the world by the United States and its allies unraveling, too?
Interesting choice regarding the word imposed. Little slip there, and if it is unraveling I do believe it is by de$ign. Sorry.
Britain’s choice to retreat into what some critics of the vote suggest is a “Little England” status is just one among many loosely linked developments suggesting the potential for a reordering of power, economic relationships, borders, and ideologies around the globe.
Slow economic growth has undercut confidence in traditional liberal economics, especially in the face of the dislocations caused by trade and surging immigration.
Yeah, that forced migration from Obama's wars to hurry along the whole project really backfired.
Populism has sprouted throughout the West. Borders in the Middle East are being erased amid a rise in sectarianism.
Thanks to U.S.- and allied-sponsored ISIS and other groups looking to fragment the region per the PNAC and Yinon lines of thinking.
China is growing more assertive and Russia more adventurous.
I should have highlighted those in red but after a while you grow very, very tired of the war pre$$ and its incessant drumbeating.
Refugees from poor and war-torn places are crossing land and sea in record numbers to get to the better lives shown to them by modern communications.
Like Vermont, and while I'm sure the escape from gunfire and shelling along with missiles and bombs from above is welcome, the agenda-pushing bit about instant diversity is ignoring the absolute culture shock the refugees will be experiencing.
I don't have the answers anymore, except to say that it would have been better not to have begun all these goddamn wars everywhere and why I'm constantly opining about the next wave of them. I fear the inevitable nuclear false flag (dirty I suspect, so the mushroom can always be lingering in the background from then forward -- unless they are used in the official WWIII that people are fearing is on the doorstep) that will kick off such a thing, and here we are.
I guess I'm just one of those New World Order koo.... uh, wait, ummm.
Then again, is the term headlined simply to laugh in our faces as they proceed forward with the next part of the plan. To me it is a Promised Land scenario, where all outcomes serve power.
Accompanied by an upending of politics and middle-class assumptions in both the developed and the developing worlds, these forces are combining to challenge the Western institutions and alliances that were established after World War II and that have largely held global sway ever since.
Britain has been a pillar in that order, as well as a beneficiary. It has an important (some would argue outsize) place in the United Nations, and a role in NATO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank — the postwar institutions invested with promoting global peace, security, and economic prosperity.
I read that list and that highlight thinking they are all the biggest arms dealers on the planet, invested in keeping wars going, wars that have already killed millions upon millions these last 70 years, while the monetary side has promoted the enslavement scheme of debt, poverty, and austerity upon so many that the highlighted phrase evokes a harsh, guttural grunt from these quarters.
Now Britain symbolizes the cracks in that postwar foundation. Its leaving the European Union weakens a bloc that is the world’s biggest single market, as well as an anchor of global democracy.
All these flowery terms they toss around like market and democracy. Sounds soon good.
It also undermines the postwar consensus that alliances among nations are essential in maintaining stability and in diluting the nationalism that once plunged Europe into bloody conflict — even as nationalism is surging again.
That's the thing there. These globalists and their mouthpieces in the pre$$ fear that more than anything. Thus the feeling is made to be feared and something threatening and dangerous, discarding the abuse of the current $y$tem.
“It’s not that this, in and of itself, will completely destroy the international order,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a former US representative to NATO who is now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “But it sets a precedent. It is potentially corrosive.”
Looks like the next votes will be fixed, if there even are any.
The symbolism was pointed in China on Saturday morning, two days after the British vote. In the packed ballroom of a Beijing hotel, China’s new international development bank held its first meeting of the 57 countries that have signed up as members. The new institution, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is designed to give China a chance to win influence away from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
That is why we are getting all this war talk, isn't it?
“History has never set any precedent,” the new bank’s president, Jin Liqun, once wrote of the United States and its Western allies, “that an empire is capable of governing the world forever.”
To be explained momentarily, and you will understand the edit.
Even as European leaders held a flurry of meetings Saturday to weigh a response to Britain’s departure, President Xi Jinping of China welcomed President Vladimir Putin of Russia to Beijing for a brief state visit. More than China, Russia is an outlier to the US-led international system, and Putin — at best a wary partner of China, which itself has severe economic challenges — in recent years has worked to divide and destabilize Europe.
Yes, we know what the dividing lines will be in WWIII and the history book maps -- if any survive to tell the tale -- just by looking at them with one eye and a newspaper with the other., It will be glorious.
Russia has nurtured discord inside the European Union by supporting an array of small, extremist political parties that foment nationalist anger in different countries.
The NYT demonization of Russia has gone back decades, and that war-promoting vessel never stops grinding the ax.
Putin has troubles of his own, including an economy hurt by low oil prices, that could limit his ability to exploit the moment. Still, for him, analysts say, the British vote is an unexpected gift.
Yeah, the drop in oil was supposed to turn Russia into Venezuela, but they have weathered it much better than expected. That's not to say Russia is perfect, but all this Putin bad stuff is the same old slop we have been getting for decades from the NYT.
Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and meddling in eastern Ukraine directly challenged the rules-based international system of respecting national borders and led to a continuing political confrontation with the United States and Europe.
A system those who are implied to be upholding are violating all over the place, starting with its invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was dutifully promoted by the same NYT I am reading now. Wow!!
Oh, btw, they didn't seize it. The Crimeans voted to join, remember? As was their right under the U.N. charter.
I mean, if the NYT is going to distort at best -- some might call it a lie -- what are we to think of any of the garbage they spew forth?
“Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands in glee,” British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The Guardian. “The unhappy English have delivered a body blow to the West, and to the ideals of international cooperation, liberal order and open societies to which England has in the past contributed so much.”
Open societies? England is the most surveilled country on the face of the planet with more cameras per square whatever. NSA over here is having telecom companies collect all the data for them to store.
The end of Pax Americana is not a new theme. Predictions of US decline were rampant after the global economic crisis in 2007 and 2008, amid parallel predictions of the dawning of a new Chinese century.
(Blog editor wells up with tears)
But the US economy steadily recovered, if imperfectly, while China has unnerved many of its Asian neighbors with a newly aggressive foreign policy. Chinese overreach opened a path for renewed US engagement in Asia, the fastest-growing region in the world, as President Obama called for a “pivot” to Asia.
Analysts disagree on whether this pivot signaled a declining U.S. interest in European affairs and contributed to the Continent’s current problems. Part of the Obama administration’s rationale was to extricate the United States from decades of costly involvement in the Middle East at a time when that region was in upheaval.
Yeah, right, he's trying to get out as he sends troops to Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa.
There, the breakdown of the postwar political order has been more fundamental and violent than in Europe. The uprisings of the Arab Spring erupted from widespread frustrations with stagnant, autocratic politics and economic lethargy. But these rebellions failed to yield stable governments, and now the borders drawn by Europeans a century ago in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq have been rendered largely irrelevant.
Who benefited?
The nationalism surging in Europe is not the problem in the Arab world; rather, populations have retreated into greater reliance on sects, ethnic groups and militias. Jihadi groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State have fought national armies and won, providing a religious alternative to the nation-state that has been embraced by some.
Now why did Israel just come to mind?
What's good for the goose is good for the....
Bassel Salloukh, an associate professor of political science at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, said the problems in the Middle East and Europe shared a common origin in the anxieties caused by tectonic shifts in the global economy. But while fear and frustration in the West have shown themselves through democratic elections, brittle Arab states lacked the flexibility to respond.
“Here, we have hyper-centralized, homogeneous, authoritarian states which, when facing these transformations, just exploded,” Salloukh said.
And those explosions were not contained within the Middle East. Refugees have poured out of Syria and Iraq. Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have absorbed several million refugees. But it is the flow of people into the European Union that has had the greatest geopolitical impact, and helped to precipitate the British vote. Stabilizing Syria and permanently curbing the refugee flow could be one of the critical factors in determining whether Europe can steady itself politically.
Before the refugee crisis, the European Union was already an unwieldy and unfinished entity. Its contradictions and imperfections were exacerbated by the economic crisis. Yet it was the onset of more than 1 million refugees marching through Greece and the Balkans toward Germany that may ultimately prove to be the most destabilizing event in Europe’s recent history.
European countries erected border fences despite the bloc’s system of open internal borders. Populist parties raged against immigrants. Britain was relatively insulated, yet British politicians campaigning to leave the European Union depicted an island under siege, mixing the very different issue of immigration from other European Union states with the perceived threat from an influx of poor Muslims. This anti-immigrant strain twinned with the economic anxieties of many Britons who felt left out of the global economy to drive support for the country going its own way.
Israel just came to mind again.
In the wake of Britain’s choice, Europe faces the parallel challenges of holding itself together and of retaining its global influence.
The European Union often frustrates US presidents, yet the disintegration of the bloc would be a geopolitical disaster for Washington.
And now we know why thanks to U.S. archives; it was a CIA project all along.
Even before Britain’s exit, Germany was Europe’s dominant power, and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was Europe’s dominant leader.
Germany, though, has been reluctant to play a diplomatic and military role commensurate with its economic heft. Ever mindful of its Nazi past, and its 40 years as a divided country, Germany often wraps its policies in the mantle of Europe and has developed a pacifist instinct that is a poor fit with the expectations that it must now lead.
I want to stop and comment here on two things: one, it's called a war pre$$ for a good reason. Pacifism and peace is a poor fit, huh? That means the only way to lead is with force, right?
The second thing is a brief comment on the Nazi past. Come to find out, it was the same forces backing opposing sides in that war just as it is today. Neat trick, huh? The problem with Hitler was not his policies, it was him stepping off and making a deal with Russia and weaseling out of the war they had designed. Then they turned on him. The recognition of larger historical forces than those in history books is in no way an endorsement of the man or his policies. It's just putting the time into a more proper focus than the dogma we have all been taught and told these decades.
“There is no point beating about the bush,” Merkel said Friday. Europe has reached “a turning point” and “more and more often, we encounter basic doubts” about ever-greater union.
She has a good point; I need to stop beating around the Bush with the color-coded highlights and lengthy commentary.
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"Confusion among Britons, and in EU, on where to go from here" by Steven Erlanger and Dan Bilefsky New York Times June 25, 2016
LONDON — With British politics in turmoil, there were already clear indications Saturday of a tense and bickering divorce from the European Union.
Britons woke up to a diminished currency and much confusion about the consequences of their vote Thursday to quit the European Union. Meeting in Berlin, European leaders told Britain to hurry up and begin the formal process of exiting the union, while Prime Minister David Cameron said that process could wait until his replacement was chosen in October, and leaders of the “Leave” campaign suggested it could come even later.
There is “impatience and exasperation” in Brussels, among the French particularly.
The EU has other considerable challenges, including the migrant crisis, Greece’s turbulent economy, and sanctions on Russia over Ukraine. European leaders, looking at Spanish elections today and German and French elections next year, want the uncertainty around the British question resolved as soon as possible so they can try to show their own voters that Brussels is capable and on track.
Good luck with that!
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to be conciliatory in the face of facts, said that she was seeking an “objective, good” climate in talks on Britain’s exit, and that there was “no need to be particularly nasty in any way in the negotiations; they must be conducted properly.”
Already weakened politically by the migrant crisis, Merkel was expected to meet Saturday with 20 top officials from her coalition government of center-right and center-left parties. But with elections coming, coalition unity is beginning to falter as the junior partner, the Social Democrats, seek to create their own profile for voters.
The situation in Britain was confused, too. The Scottish Cabinet held an emergency meeting in Edinburgh on Saturday after the first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said it was “democratically unacceptable” that Scotland should be removed from the EU against its will.
Scotland voted overwhelmingly in favor of remaining in the bloc, and Sturgeon, who leads the Scottish National Party that favors independence, reiterated after the meeting Saturday that a second independence referendum was “highly likely.”
She said Scotland planned to enter discussions with EU institutions and European governments to protect its place in the bloc. Sturgeon said she would establish an advisory panel on the legal, financial, and diplomatic implications of the vote.
Fine, go then. Secede from Britain and join the E.U.
Where the print ended and the web added:
As markets plunged over the uncertainty, the credit ratings agency Moody’s lowered its outlook for the United Kingdom, citing the potential for weaker economic growth in the long, messy process of disentangling Britain from the European Union.
So? They called all that mortgage-backed security garbage AAA. Why should anyone listen to them?
The sense of shock was particularly acute in London, a cosmopolitan city and an important financial center, which reacted to the vote with anger, disappointment and even tears.
“I was crying yesterday,” Camila Diehl, 26, who works for a cancer charity in London, said Saturday. “I just can’t believe this is happening. This is not the country I know.”
Diehl, who has a Colombian mother and a British father, said she was worried about what the vote would mean for funding for scientific research. She is now questioning her future in Britain, she said.
Mayor Sadiq Kahn, who supported “Remain,” took to Facebook on Friday, saying he wanted to “send a clear message to every European resident living in London — you are very welcome here.”
“There are nearly one million European citizens living in London today, and they bring huge benefits to our city — working hard, paying taxes, working in our public services, and contributing to our civic and cultural life,” he wrote.
No confusion regarding where the NYT stands on the issue, huh?
And that was where I left it.
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Also see: World markets roiled by Brexit as stocks, pound drop; gold soars
Globe has some front-page commentary today:
"Britain vote a defining moment in year of rebellion" by David M. Shribman Globe Correspondent June 25, 2016
....
Populism, to be sure, is a slippery concept, often mischievous or misleading. It can arise from the right (the anti-immigrant impulse of then Governor Pete Wilson of California, which in 1994 tipped Hispanics against the GOP in a state where the party was once competitive) or the left (the Populist uprising that produced a new political party in the 1892 election). It can be local (the Upton Sinclair gubernatorial campaign of 1934, which was defeated in California), regional (the 1968 third-party presidential campaign of former governor George C. Wallace of Alabama) or national (the “Share Our Wealth” campaign of Senator Huey Long of Louisiana in the 1930s).
Long was a threat to FDR before he was assassinated, and Wallace threatened Nixon and took a bullet. Take care, Mr. Trump. No matter how you feel about the guy, such an event would be a terrible thing to any candidate or president. Were it to happen, however, we will no longer believe the angry lone nut garbage or other false flag scenario that has been scripted and prepared for the pre$$.
It can be led by figures who are soft-spoken (Democrat Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota, who lost 49 states in the 1972 election) or who are fiery and flamboyant (businessman H. Ross Perot, who finished third in the 1992 election).
Perot came under threat from the Bush machine and deserves credit (like Trump) for taking on that criminal family (whose patriarch Prescott supported Hitler), quitting for a couple weeks in the middle of the campaign before supporters got on his ass. He then helped provide the rational for keeping so many secrets safe with the torch of presidency being passed to Clinton. Iran-Contra secrets are safe.
It can occur in nations prone to upheaval (Argentina, where the Perons were principal figures in politics from the 1940s to the 1970s) as well as in nations marked by social peace (such as Canada, where Tommy Douglas and his Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan became pioneers in single-payer medicine in the early 1960s).
Argentina has voted to return to the days of the dictators and debt slavery, and I'm sorry, what was that last bit and how do they feel up there about their health system? Does it equitably care for everyone? It's not something I want to bring here because I no longer trust in the beneficence of my government, but I am curious.
What all these movements have in common are platforms and rhetoric claiming to speak for the people rather than big institutions, for the poor or middle class rather than for the wealthy, for a higher, national interest rather than for established special interests.
The world has seen populist rebellion throughout history, sometimes for great good, sometimes for great evil. Once a tidal wave of this sort starts, it is hard to know what it will wash away or where it will stop — as Europe is discovering now and America may learn come Election Day.
The populism of the American West at the end of the 19th century, for example, was the prelude to a burst of creative reform that eventually was steered not by William Jennings Bryan, the Democrat who railed against the bankers and plutocrats of the East, but by Theodore Roosevelt, who went to Harvard and who lived in a 22-room mansion on Long Island. The populism that swept Italy and Germany in the years between the great wars was racist, destructive, and murderous.
Where is that Democrat today?
There was little question, even before the ballots were counted in the Brexit referendum, that Britain was experiencing a populist moment for the ages, with anti-elitist themes in the air and talk of the people’s will on every tongue.
It was also clear that one slice of British life — the expert class, for want of a better phrase — favored continued British membership in the European Community, while another slice — call it the iconoclast class, for along with blue collar and service industry workers it included established political figures such as former London mayor Boris Johnson, a devout warrior against conventional thinking — just as fervently opposed it.
The collision between these warring sides was illuminated just before the referendum by opinion pieces in two newspapers, the Telegraph, which generally leans right, and the Guardian, which generally leans left. They offered worldviews that were in conflict, one arguing “we can only reach our full potential, if we take back democratic control over the direction and destiny of our country” and the other imploring, “Vote for a united country that reaches out to the world, and vote against a divided nation that turns inwards.”
The morning after the vote the Daily Mail, the London newspaper that considers itself a populist tabloid, produced what it labeled a “Historic Edition” that carried on its front only the huge headline “Take a Bow, Britain” and these words, in large type: “It was the day the quiet people of Britain rose up against an arrogant, out-of-touch political class and a contemptuous Brussels elite.”
These divisions are replicated across the West. In France, the insurgency of Front National leader Marine LePen got a boost with the Brexit victory; she surely will press her anti-immigrant views as next year’s presidential election nears. In Britain, the vote created new divisions, scrambling the political order, adding urgency and perhaps potency to Scottish nationalism, which may come to a new referendum vote sooner rather than later.
The effect on the United States is yet unknown, but already 2016 is etched in history as a campaign year of unusual tension and upended expectations.
Long before Britons lined up for Leave or Remain, Americans divided over the rise of Trump, who criticized his rivals with a venom seldom seen in domestic politics, who expressed views on race seldom shared in public, and who defied the establishment of a political party that itself was a symbol of the national establishment. He belittled the Bushes, the royal family of the Republican Party, even as he ridiculed the very party leaders who control the legislative branch and who would, in a Trump administration, hold in their hands the destiny of the Trump agenda.
If nothing else he is to be thanked for taking on the Bushes. That took guts.
And yet there is little question that Trump will use the British vote as a bludgeon against Clinton, who herself has just completed a battle against a populist insurgency in her own party.
That is that word again to describe a political campaign. I didn't know Sanders supporters were laying IEDs by the side of the road.
The campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was based on anti-establishment forces as adamant as those that propelled Trump to victory, and the hurricane-force winds of the Sanders campaign, which blew away Clinton’s aura of invincibility, pushed the former New York senator to adjust her views on international trade agreements and to adopt an anti-business profile at odds with her recent history and perhaps her inclinations.
Talk is cheap, and his voters could go either way.
Campaigning as a populist is easy; governing as one is far more difficult. Trump has mastered the former. Clinton will argue that the latter is incompatible with American tradition. Thus the great populist moment is itself about to be transformed, into a truly significant November confrontation — an epic test of character, and of ideas and institutions....
That's the problem. The in$titutions are corrupt and have failed the people.
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History will record that I'm surprised he never mentioned Andrew Jackson. How can you have a discussion of populism without him?
Must be because he was from the backwoods:
"Kentucky’s ark defies science but evokes a version of Christianity" by Laurie Goodstein New York Times June 25, 2016
WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. — In the beginning, Ken Ham made the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. And he saw that it was good at spreading his belief that the Bible is a book of history, the universe is only 6,000 years old, and evolution is wrong and is leading to our moral downfall.
And Ham said, let us build a gargantuan Noah’s ark only 45 minutes away to draw millions more visitors. And let it be constructed by Amish woodworkers, and financed with donations, junk bonds, and tax rebates from the state of Kentucky. And let it hold an animatronic Noah and lifelike models of some of the creatures that came on board two-by-two, such as bears, short-necked giraffes, and juvenile Tyrannosaurus rexes.
And it was so.
Ham’s “Ark Encounter,” built at a cost of more than $102 million, is scheduled to open July 7 in Williamstown. Ham and his crew have succeeded in erecting a colossal landmark and an ambitious promotional vehicle for their particular brand of Christian fundamentalism, known as “young earth” or “young universe” creationism.
But it was hardly smooth sailing. The state tried to revoke the tax rebates after learning that Ham would require employees to sign a “statement of faith” that would exclude people who were gay or did not accept his particular Christian creed. Ham went to court and in January, he won.
“The reason we are building the ark is not as an entertainment center,” Ham said in an interview in a cabin overlooking the construction site. “I mean it’s not like a Disney or Universal, just for anyone to go and have fun. It’s a religious purpose. It’s because we’re Christians and we want to get the Christian message out.”
The ark is also intended to serve as a vivid warning that, according to the Bible, God sent a flood in Noah’s time to wipe out a depraved people, and God will deliver a fiery end to those who reject the Bible and accept modern-day evils like abortion, atheism, and same-sex marriage. “We’re becoming more like the days of Noah in that we see increasing secularization in the culture,” Ham said.
Yet his interpretation of what he calls “the Christian message” is derided by most scientists and educators, and resented even by some Christians who consider it indefensible and even embarrassing. Young earthers believe that God created the universe in six 24-hour days, and since all of history is only 6,000 years, humans coexisted with dinosaurs. An exhibit at the Creation Museum shows two smiling children playing in a lush garden next to two petite Tyrannosaurus sexes....
It's a “generation of kids who are scientifically illiterate.”
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I'm having a deja vu.
I think reading the Globe will literally drive you crazy these days. I'd be better off saving the life of a tree.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
The first serving I had was when I sat down to watch Wimbledon this morning, which I used to love, and Chrissy Everett said the voters didn't know what they were doing. Then I changed the channel. Won't be watching any tennis this year.
"After vote, UK’s political crisis intensifies" by Steven Erlanger New York Times June 26, 2016
LONDON — Britain’s political crisis intensified on Sunday after its decision to leave the European Union, with the opposition Labor Party splitting into warring camps and Scotland’s leader suggesting that its local Parliament might try to block the departure.
Many Britons were left wondering whether there was a plausible way for the nation to reconsider its drastic choice.
What part of no do they never get?
They claim to respect the will of the people and all, and yet the vote isn't even dry yet and they want to rewash.
Hanging over the jockeying for power was intensifying discussion of whether the British exit, or “Brexit,” might somehow be avoided or circumvented.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry plans to visit Brussels and London on Monday. Speaking in Rome on Sunday, he said the United States respected the will of the voters and urged Britain and the EU to manage their separation responsibly for the sake of global markets and citizens.
Someone said something?
Neither former London mayor Boris Johnson, the most prominent figure in the anti-Europe movement, nor Michael Gove, the justice minister and one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, has been demanding formal divorce proceedings, leaving open at least the possibility that Britain could negotiate new terms of membership with Brussels and hold another referendum.
Johnson said from the start of the campaign that a vote to leave would push European Union nations into a new negotiation with Britain to keep it in the bloc. Leaders on the Continent have little appetite at the moment for such a deal, and circumventing the clear will of British voters would appear politically problematic for whoever succeeds Prime Minister David Cameron.
The stunning vote has upended politics and exacerbated ideological and regional strains in Britain, leaving the nation with no unifying figure, at risk of coming apart and facing jittery financial markets.
Related:
"Central bank chiefs and policy makers around the world tried to calm the jitters, but...."
Also see: Technology firms cope with uncertainty after Brexit
The clock is ticking on the move away.
The turmoil spread on Sunday to the Labor Party, whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a leftist, now faces a challenge from members of Parliament who have never favored him.
Early Sunday, Corbyn abruptly fired his shadow foreign secretary — the party’s spokesman on foreign affairs — to try to head off a coup begun by some Labor members of Parliament disappointed with Corbyn’s lackluster campaign to keep Britain in Europe.
With the Conservatives in disarray and the possibility of another general election within the year, some Labor legislators see this as a good moment to try to dethrone Corbyn, 67, whom they think would lead the party to electoral disaster.
They have been looking for a way to get rid of this guy because he dared to even suggest and end to the U.K. bombing in Iraq and Syria and the mere thought of some semblance of fairness regarding Israel and the Palestinians.
Well, as the world's string-pullers would say, why waste an opportunity? As Longshanks said in Braveheart, you must find the good in any situation (cough).
Over the course of Sunday, at least 11 of the Labor shadow cabinet’s 30 members, not counting the foreign secretary, resigned as a signal of their opposition to his leadership. Corbyn’s office insisted that he would remain party leader and would beat back any challenge by appealing to grass-roots Labor Party members who elected him overwhelmingly in the first place.
It used to be called democracy, but you know, it's only democracy when you vote the correct way.
After newspaper reports about the planned coup against Corbyn, the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, telephoned him early Sunday to say he and other key legislators had lost confidence in Corbyn to lead the party to victory. Corbyn ended the call by firing him, Benn told the Press Association, a British news agency.
I'm shocked at the use of the word.
“Following the result of the EU referendum, we need strong and effective leadership of the Labor Party that is capable of winning public support,” Benn said. “In a phone call to Jeremy, I told him I had lost confidence in his ability to lead the party, and he dismissed me.”
Corbyn faces a vote of confidence called for on Friday, after the referendum, by two lower-ranking Labor legislators.
“If a general election is called later this year, which is a very real prospect, we believe that under Jeremy’s leadership we could be looking at political oblivion,” Margaret Hodge, who proposed the no-confidence motion, wrote in a letter to fellow Labor legislators.
Corbyn and his allies were reported to be organizing demonstrations in his support. On Sunday morning, his office issued a terse statement: “There will be no resignation of a democratically elected leader with a strong mandate from the membership.”
Like that is some sort of shield?
Adding to the confusion about how Britain would proceed, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said on Sunday that the Scottish Parliament might move to try to block the British exit from the European Union by withholding legislative consent....
That's how my paper usually leaves me. Confused.
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Also see:
Britain’s democratic failure Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is professor of economics and public policy at Harvard University.
Trump’s tariff proposal would gut US export jobs Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is a professor at MIT Sloan, and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
I gue$$ we know of whose opinion is the Globe.
Related:
"Also Sunday, Clinton released a national TV ad attacking Trump for his comments on the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union. The ad, to begin airing this week, slams Trump for saying Friday that his golf courses in Scotland will benefit from the market turmoil."
She's a fine one to be complaining about $elf-$erving corruption, and Trump's right. “We have so many other issues that are more important than this,” although I suspect the ma$$ media might help produce a $care this summer for political consumption.
"New election fails to resolve Spain’s political crisis" by Barry Hatton Associated Press June 27, 2016
MADRID — Spain’s repeated election Sunday failed to clarify the political future of the European Union’s fifth-largest economy, as another inconclusive ballot compelled leaders to resume six months of negotiations on who should form a government.
The conservative Popular Party, which has ruled for the past four years, again collected the most votes in the election but still fell shy of the majority of 176 seats it needs in the 350-seat Parliament to form a government on its own.
With 99.9 percent of the votes counted late Sunday, incumbent prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s party had picked up 137 seats in Parliament. That is better than the 123 it won in December but still means it will need allies if it wants to govern. Its earlier efforts to find support from rival parties after December were fruitless.
I was told then that Spain was going Socialist.
So what happened?
Even so, Rajoy declared he would make a push for power, telling a victory rally in Madrid, ‘‘We won the election, we demand the right to govern.’’
It is unlikely to be as simple as that, however. For the past six months, the main parties have quarreled endlessly over who should assume power. In the end, King Felipe VI had to call another election. A third one, in six months’ time, is still a possibility.
Antonio Barroso, a London-based analyst with the Teneo Intelligence political risk consulting group, said he expected tough negotiations among the parties in coming weeks.
‘‘It was hoped that these elections would bring clarity and that a government would be formed quickly, but I don’t think that’s how it’s going to be,’’ Barroso said.
Spain has never had a coalition government.
The center-left Socialist Party placed second, collecting 85 seats, according to the count by the country’s Interior Ministry. That was five fewer seats than six months ago but the Socialists kept their influence by fending off a challenge from a radical leftist alliance.
‘‘We are the foremost political power on the left,’’ Socialist leader Pedro Sanchez told supporters in Madrid.
United We Can — which brings together Podemos, a two-year-old party that grew out of a grass-roots antiausterity protest movement, the communists, and the Greens — was third with 71 seats.
The alliance, headed by pony-tailed political science professor Pablo Iglesias, had hoped to overtake the Socialists and break the country’s traditional two-party system. The Popular Party and the Socialists have alternated in power for decades.
‘‘We had expected to do better,’’ Iglesias said.
I don't want to say rig job, and how sad that $ociali$ts are afraid of the "radical left."
The business-friendly Ciudadanos party came in fourth with 32 seats. Other, smaller parties won the rest of the vote by Spain’s roughly 36.5 million voters.
Public anger at high unemployment, cuts in government spending on cherished services such as welfare and education, and unrelenting political corruption scandals shaped the two-week election campaign.
It's the same everywhere. All so bankers can loot and live high on the hog.
At a Madrid polling station, many voters said they wanted Sunday’s election to bring a break with the past.
‘‘I’m voting for change, so that our politicians understand that we don’t agree with what they’ve been doing,’’ said Maria Jesus Genovar, a 47-year-old teacher who supported United We Can.
That party wants to improve job security, increase the minimum wage, and strengthen the welfare state and other public services.
But Maria Jose Escos, a 59-year-old government worker, said she had no appetite for the new parties. ‘‘I’d like everything to be like it was before,’’ the Socialists supporter said.
Good luck with that.
Iglesias has said he wants a pact with the Socialists in order to oust Rajoy. But a major sticking point is Iglesias’s insistence on letting the powerful northeastern region of Catalonia stage an independence referendum — a possibility other main parties have rejected outright.
Another one?
What's going on here? Everybody leaving the party?
Ciudadanos is willing to talk to both the Popular Party and the Socialists but wants no deal with United We Can.
Besides tensions over Catalonia, Spanish politics has been dominated by a national unemployment rate of more than 20 percent and an unrelenting stream of corruption scandals, mostly involving members of the Popular Party and the Socialists.
And yet somehow they both got the most votes.
On Friday, all four main candidates made final pleas to voters after a week dominated by the Britain’s decision to leave European Union and leaked recordings that appeared to show a minister asking an official to help him dig up dirt on political rivals.
Rajoy said the People’s Party was the only force that could guarantee a stable, moderate government and urged voters to put aside their ideological differences. Iglesias told Spaniards they had a historic chance to replace the failed politics of the past.
The prime minister set out his commitment to reviving the economy, keeping the Catalan independence movement in check, promoting EU integration, and defeating terrorism.
‘‘Vote for the PP because we’re the only ones that can win the election and continue this path,’’ he said.
Amid a global selloff from the British vote on Friday, Spanish assets took a beating. The extra yield investors demand to hold Spanish 10-year bonds instead of safe-haven German securities jumped 31 basis points to 168 points, the highest in two years, while Spanish stocks slumped 12 percent.
The prime minister has struggled to get his message across in the final days of campaigning.
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In building a NEW New World Order, you will need some BRICS.
