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Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has reacted angrily to claims that Arsenal are unhappy about his relationship with Arsenal Fans TV.
Reports on Monday suggested that there was some consternation about the striker’s captaincy within the club because of his interactions with AFTV.
The Gabon striker has liked some controversial Instagram posts from the channel’s account – including one calling for Unai Emery to be sacked – which is reported to have left teammates and staff ‘unimpressed’.
Aubameyang has obviously read the reports as he reacted when he arrived in Gabon on international duty, posting on Instagram:
“I just arrived in Gabon and heared a lot of ‘bullsh*ts. I talk with who I want whenever I want and if somebody’s not happy with you…you already know.”
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This year, the Kar-Jenner clan is doing Christmas bigger than ever before. Kim Kardashian West took to Twitter on Friday, Dec. 1 to announce that what we can only imagine will be a major new holiday tradition for her family.
“25 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS BY @ELIRUSSELLLINNETZ STARTING TODAY…” she wrote before dropping an adorable new photo (and what we believe will be the first of 25 we see this month).
In the pic, an adorable Saint West sands among a pile of presents wrapped simply in brown paper and white ribbons. The almost-2-year-old wears nothing but a pair of cuffed jeans and looks over his shoulder into the camera. Also seen in the image is a massive evergreen Christmas tree.
Based on Kim’s tweet, we may have 24 similarly sweet images headed our way this month. Could they possibly be in lieu of a single joint Christmas card? According to momager Kris Jenner, Kim was in charge of the duties this year.
“This week Kim is CEO because she’s organizing the Christmas-card shoot,” she told People.
RELATED: Kimye’s Romance Travels to New Heights at Chrissy Teigen’s Birthday Bash
Could this be how the Kar-Jenner clan announces some big news this December, perhaps Kylie Jenner or Khloé Kardashian’s pregnancies?
We’ll have to wait to find out!
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“It’s weird bringing out an album and not being single. Because when I brought In the Lonely Hour out, I was so lonely. But now I’m singing songs about another guy, but I’m quite happy. So it’s quite weird,” he added.
RELATED: Sam Smith Loves to Rock a Killer Pair of Heels, Reveals Gender-Fluid Identity
Smith says there are about four or five songs about that particular ex on his new album. “The rest are about other people. A song for every boy,” he said.
We can’t wait to hear what music Smith makes about his new romance with Flynn.
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We are facing deep-rooted climate, social, and environmental crises. The current dominant economic system cannot provide solutions. It is time for system change.
For Friends of the Earth International this means creating societies based on peoples’ sovereignty and environmental, social, economic, and gender justice. We must question and deconstruct the capitalist logic of accumulation.
The climate catastrophe is interwoven with many social and environmental crises, including oppression, corporate power, hunger, water depletion, biodiversity loss and deforestation.
Equality and reciprocity
At its heart sits an unsustainable economic system, the sole aim of which is endless growth and profit. This system concentrates wealth, power, and obscene privilege with the few.
Corporations and national elites are empowered by that very system to exploit people and their livelihoods with impunity.
We must tackle climate change and the associated social and environmental crises by taking rapid and bold action to address the common root causes; privatization, financialization and commodification of nature and societies, and unsustainable production and consumption systems.
The magnitude of the crises we face demands system change.
That system change will result in the creation of sustainable societies and new relations between human beings, and between human beings and nature, based on equality and reciprocity.
Expansion of capital
But we cannot create these societies and assert people’s rights without increasing people’s power. We need to reclaim politics.
This means creating genuine, radical, and just democracies centered around people’s sovereignty and participation.
International law must put people above corporate profit, ensuring binding rules for business and mechanisms that guarantee access to justice for victims of transnational corporations.
System change calls for an articulation of the struggles against oppression; that is, patriarchy, racism, colonialism, and class and capitalist exploitation.
It demands commitment to the struggle against the exploitation of women’s bodies and work. We are witnessing how the expansion of capital over the territories leads to increased violence against women alongside the violation of their rights.
Economic justice
Gender justice will only be possible when we recognize women as political subjects, stop violence against women, strengthen women’s autonomy, advance the principles of feminist economy, deconstruct the sexual division of labor, and reorganize care work.
A transformation of the energy system is fundamental to system change. It entails democratic answers to the fundamental questions: for whom and what is energy produced? And a total departure from fossil fuel reliance and corporate control.
This must be a just transition, founded on workers’ and community rights. It is not only about changing technologies and renewable energy, but about public and community ownership and control, therefore addressing the root problems of a system that turns energy into a commodity and denies the right to energy for all.
It requires equity and justice, especially for those already impacted by the changing climate in the global South.
Genuine system change would radically transform the food system toward food sovereignty and agroecology: valuing local knowledge, promoting social and economic justice and people’s control over their territories, guaranteeing the right to land, water and seeds, nurturing social relations founded on justice and solidarity, and recognizing the fundamental role of women in food production, to provide an effective way to feed the world, and a counter to destructive industrial agriculture.
Biodiversity and forests are best protected by the communities who live in them. Protecting forests can address climate change by maintaining natural carbon stores and reducing the amount of carbon released through deforestation, while providing communities with food, fibers, shelter, medicines, and water. Just eight per cent of the world’s forests are managed by communities; it is vital we secure community rights over forests and livelihoods.
Popular mobilization
System change must address people’s individual and collective needs and promote reciprocity, redistribution, and sharing.
Solutions include public services achieved through tax justice, social ownership and co-operativism, local markets and fair trade, community forest management, and valuing the wellbeing of people and the planet.
People all over the world are already living or implementing thousands of initiatives which embody justice and challenge the capitalist logic. Now we must expand them.
And that requires commensurate international and national public policies that empower people to fight for a democratic state that ensures rights and provides environmentally and socially just public services, and active popular participation; a state that guarantees peoples’ rights to water, land and the territories, food, health, education, housing, and decent jobs.
We all need to support local and international resistance, engage in popular mobilization, strive for policy change and upscale the real solutions, the solutions of the people. This is system change.
Karin Nansen is Chair of Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental federation, and a founding member of REDES / Friends of the Earth Uruguay.
I have just arrived in Hiroshima with a group of Japanese “Okinawa to Hiroshima peace walkers” who had spent nearly two months walking Japanese roads protesting U.S. militarism. While we were walking, an Afghan peace march that had set off in May was enduring 700km of Afghan roadsides, poorly shod, from Helmand province to Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul. Our march watched the progress of theirs with interest and awe. The unusual Afghan group had started off as 6 individuals, emerging out of a sit-in protest and hunger strike in the Helmand provincial capital Lashkar Gah, after a suicide attack there created dozens of casualties. As they started walking their numbers soon swelled to 50 plus as the group braved roadside bombs, fighting between warring parties and exhaustion from desert walking during the strict fast month of Ramadan.
The Afghan march, which is believed to be the first of its kind, is asking for a long-term ceasefire between warring parties and the withdrawal of foreign troops. One peace walker, named Abdullah Malik Hamdard, felt that he had nothing to lose by joining the march. He said: “Everybody thinks they will be killed soon, the situation for those alive is miserable. If you don’t die in the war, the poverty caused by the war may kill you, which is why I think the only option left for me is to join the peace convoy.”
The Japanese peace walkers marched to specifically halt the construction of a U.S. airfield and port with an ammunition depot in Henoko, Okinawa, which will be accomplished by landfilling Oura Bay, a habitat for the dugong and unique coral hundreds of years old, but many more lives are endangered. Kamoshita Shonin, a peace walk organizer who lives in Okinawa, says: “People in mainland Japan do not hear about the extensive bombings by the U.S. in the Middle East and Afghanistan, they are told that the bases are a deterrent against North Korea and China, but the bases are not about protecting us, they are about invading other countries. This is why I organised the walk.” Sadly, the two unconnected marches shared one tragic cause as motivation.
Recent U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan include the deliberate targeting of civilian wedding parties and funerals, incarceration without trial and torture in Bagram prison camp, the bombing of an MSF hospital in Kunduz, the dropping of the ‘Mother of all bombs’ in Nangarhar, illegal transportation of Afghans to secret black site prisons, Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and the extensive use of armed drones. Elsewhere the U.S. has completely destabilised the Middle East and Central Asia, according to The Physicians for Social Responsibility, in a report released in 2015, stated that the U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone killed close to 2 million, and that the figure was closer to 4 million when tallying up the deaths of civilians caused by the U.S. in other countries, such as Syria and Yemen.
The Japanese group intend to offer prayers of peace this Monday at Hiroshima ground zero, 73 years to the day after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city, instantly evaporating 140,000 lives, arguably one of the worst ‘single event’ war crimes committed in human history. Three days later the U.S. hit Nagasaki instantly killing 70,000. Four months after the bombing the total death toll had reached 280,000 as injuries and the impact of radiation doubled the number of fatalities.
Today Okinawa, long a target for discrimination by Japanese authorities, accommodates 33 U.S. military bases, occupying 20% of the land, housing some 30,000 plus U.S. Marines who carry out dangerous training exercises ranging from rope hangs suspended out of Osprey helicopters (often over built-up residential areas), to jungle trainings which run straight through villages, arrogantly using people’s gardens and farms as mock conflict zones. Of the 14,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in Afghanistan, many to most would have trained on Okinawa, and even flown out directly from the Japanese Island to U.S. bases such as Bagram.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan the walkers, who call themselves the ‘People’s Peace Movement’, are following up their heroic ordeal with protests outside various foreign embassies in Kabul. This week they are outside the Iranian Embassy demanding an end to Iranian interference in Afghan matters and their equipping armed militant groups in the country. It is lost on no-one in the region that the U.S., which cites such Iranian interference as its pretext for building up towards a U.S.-Iran war, is an incomparably more serious supplier of deadly arms and destabilizing force to the region. They have staged sit-in protests outside the U.S., Russian, Pakistani and U.K. embassies, as well as the U.N. offices in Kabul.
The head of their impromptu movement, Mohammad Iqbal Khyber, says the group have formed a committee comprised of elders and religious scholars. The assignment of the committee is to travel from Kabul to Taliban-controlled areas to negotiate peace.
The U.S. have yet to describe its long term or exit strategy for Afghanistan. Last December Vice President Mike Pence addressed U.S. troops in Bagram: “I say with confidence, because of all of you and all those that have gone before and our allies and partners, I believe victory is closer than ever before.”
But time spent walking doesn’t bring your destination closer when you don’t have a map. More recently U.K. ambassador for Afghanistan Sir Nicholas Kay, while speaking on how to resolve conflict in Afghanistan said: “I don’t have the answer.” There never was a military answer for Afghanistan. Seventeen years of ‘coming closer to victory’ in eliminating a developing nation’s domestic resistance is what is called “defeat,” but the longer the war goes on, the greater the defeat for Afghanistan’s people.
Historically the U.K. has been closely wedded to the U.S. in their ‘special relationship’, sinking British lives and money into every conflict the U.S. has initiated. This means the U.K. was complicit in dropping 2,911 weapons on Afghanistan in the first 6 months of 2018, and in President Trump’s greater-than-fourfold average increase on the number of bombs dropped daily by his warlike predecessors. Last month Prime Minister Theresa May increased the number of British troops serving in Afghanistan to more than 1,000, the biggest U.K. military commitment to Afghanistan since David Cameron withdrew all combat troops four years ago.
Unbelievably, current headlines read that after 17 years of fighting, the U.S. and Afghan Government are considering collaboration with the extremist Taliban in order to defeat ISKP, the local ‘franchise’ of Daesh.
Meanwhile UNAMA has released its mid-year assessment of the harm done to civilians. It found that more civilians were killed in the first six months of 2018 than in any year since 2009, when UNAMA started systematic monitoring. This was despite the Eid ul-Fitr ceasefire, which all parties to the conflict, apart from ISKP, honoured.
Every day in the first six months of 2018, an average of nine Afghan civilians, including two children, were killed in the conflict. An average of nineteen civilians, including five children, were injured every day.
This October Afghanistan will enter its 18th year of war with the U.S. and supporting NATO countries. Those young people now signing up to fight on all sides were in nappies when 9/11 took place. As the ‘war on terror’ generation comes of age, their status quo is perpetual war, a complete brainwashing that war is inevitable, which was the exact intention of warring decision makers who have become exceedingly rich of the spoils of war.
Optimistically there is also a generation who are saying “no more war, we want our lives back”, perhaps the silver lining of the Trump cloud is that people are finally starting to wake up and see the complete lack of wisdom behind the U.S. and its hostile foreign and domestic policies, while the people follow in the steps of non-violent peace makers such as Abdul Ghafoor Khan, the change is marching from the bottom up.
Maya Evans is co-coordinator for Voices for Creative Nonviolence UK and has visited Afghanistan 9 times since 2011; she is a writer and a Councillor for her town in Hastings, England.
The Trump administration’s contempt for women’s and reproductive rights was on full display on Friday as the State Department released its annual report on global human rights, which critics said excluded numerous violations of reproductive freedoms and access to contraception.
“Reproductive rights are human rights, and omitting the issue signals the Trump Administration’s latest retreat from global leadership on human rights,” said Joanne Lin, Amnesty International’s national director of advocacy and government relations, in a statement. “Human rights defenders should view the reports with a critical eye, and fight against any effort to obscure or diminish violations of human rights wherever they may occur.”
In addition to treating women’s rights violations as though they don’t exist, the report recharacterized Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, dropping the term “occupied territories,” and shifted attention away from societal discrimination faced by LGBTQ communities around the world, mentioning only incidents in which governments failed to protect these groups.
Human Rights Watch catalogued a number of significant omissions on its Twitter account in an effort to “[fill] in some of the most critical gaps,” saying the report “guts the analysis of sexual and reproductive rights, reflecting the Trump administration’s hostility toward these issues.”
The group’s reporting on social media included accounts of rampant domestic violence in Brazil, a total ban on emergency contraception in Poland, and the deaths of women in Nepal from the practice of “chhaupadi”—the expulsion of women and girls from their homes during menstruation.
As Common Dreams reported, human rights groups denounced the State Department’s decision earlier this year to eliminate mentions of reproductive rights in its report, when the department announced it would replace the section that has focused on the issue in past years with one entitled “Coercion in Population Control.” The section now details only forced or “unethical” sterilization and omits mentions of abortion, contraception access, and maternal mortality.
“From the beginning, this administration has sent the message that the United States will no longer prioritize efforts to hold the global community to account for human rights,” Lin said. “Reports of the omission of key passages pertaining to sexual and reproductive rights, women’s rights and the rights of marginalized populations, combined with the administration’s deference to known human rights violators like the governments of Saudi Arabia and Turkey, make us skeptical that these reports present a full picture of human rights around the world.”
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As open internet advocates pressure governments and major tech companies to respect the free flow of information online and users’ privacy, World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee spoke Wednesday about how his creation has gone “from utopia to dystopia in 29 short years,” and how it can be reimagined “to empower the hopes we had for the original web.”
Noting that experts say 2018 is first year that more than half the world’s population will be connected to the internet, Berners-Lee gave a lecture at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in which he outlined the underlying principles that guided the web’s development in the 1990s and proposed a more positive future than its current path suggests.
“The assumption we made in the ’90s was that, if we succeed in keeping an open web and a neutral internet, there would emerge a cornucopia of constructive, collaborative things and the world would become better,” Berners-Lee said. Speaking about the prevailing mindset among his colleagues at the time, he said they believed it wouldn’t matter “how much junk” was out there.
“It’s not email, it’s not forced upon you,” he said. “You only have to read what you want to read. If there’s a lot of bad stuff out there, it’s okay because you don’t have to read it. What could go wrong?”
Like many inventions, over nearly three decades, the web has evolved in unexpected ways, which has led Berners-Lee to call for the creation of “a new web,” or a reimagining of the internet as we know it so that it can live up to its founders’ expectations.
Such an endeavor would entail bringing together “the brightest minds from business, technology, government, civil society, the arts, and academia” to establish a system “in which people have complete control of their own data; applications and data are separated from each other; and a user’s choice for each are separate.”
The overarching goal? “To build a new web which will again empower science and democracy.”
“Let’s re-de-centralize the web,” Berners-Lee declared. “It was designed as a de-centralized system, but now everyone is on platforms like Facebook,” he added, detailing how social media can be polarizing to a degree that it threatens democracy.
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“We read things from narrower and narrower circles, and meet more people just like us. These people support the views we express, which validates us and makes us feel more and more sure of our opinions, and makes others seem more and more weird,” he explained. “Social media maybe fun for the individual but destructive of society.”
His comments build on concerns frequently raised by open internet and digital privacy rights advocates regarding how tech companies such as Facebook manage user data and try to control what information users can access—whether through charging premiums to view certain content in the absence of net neutrality protections or acting as a gatekeeper of news.
“This year we’re approaching 50 percent of the world being is on the web,” Berners-Lee concluded. “We have to continue fighting to keep the internet open and free.”
Arms control experts are raising concerns about a possible loophole in the Trump administration’s new arms export policy, arguing that it gives the administration further cover to sell weapons to some of the world’s worst human rights violators.
When it was issued in April, the Trump administration’s Conventional Arms Transfer policy was widely panned by critics for prioritizing the profits of weapons companies ahead of transparency and human rights concerns. The White House was blunt about its intentions, promising that the executive branch would “advocate strongly on behalf of United States companies.”
But one change in particular may make it easier for American companies to sell weapons to governments that routinely kill civilians in conflicts by discounting killings that the governments claim are unintentional. The change could have a significant impact on sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — the top two U.S. weapons clients — both of which are engaged in a destructive bombing campaign in Yemen.
The loophole hinges on the insertion of one word in a section that is otherwise identical to the Obama administration’s conventional arms policy, which was issued in 2014. While the previous policy prohibited arms transfers to countries that perpetrate “attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians,” the Trump administration policy bars such transfers to countries that commit “attacks intentionally directed against civilian objects or civilians” (emphasis added).
Read the full article at The Intercept.
Alex Emmons is an intern for The Intercept, in Washington D.C. He was formerly a human rights activist with Amnesty International and the ACLU.
Amid the political hurricane around Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and the actual storm devastating North Carolina, Donald Trump’s administration struck a significant blow to the nation’s refugee program this week that garnered far less attention. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday announced that the U.S. would reduce the cap on its refugee program to a new low of 30,000 people in 2019. This is the second such reduction by the administration. In 2017, this year’s limit was reduced from 110,000 to 45,000, and only about 20,000 people have so far actually been admitted. By comparison, in the last year of President Barack Obama’s tenure, the U.S. admitted more than 80,000 refugees.
In his speech justifying the dramatic cut, Pompeo claimed that the U.S. has a “longstanding record of [being] the most generous nation in the world when it comes to protection-based immigration and assistance”—a questionable claim—and went on to announce the new and far lower cap, which he attempted to justify “in consideration of both U.S. national security interest and the urgent need to restore integrity to our overwhelmed asylum system.” Pompeo put a positive spin on the dramatic reduction, saying, “The improved refugee policy of this administration serves the national interest of the United States,” without explaining how. He ended his speech by pompously claiming, “We are, and continue to be, the most generous nation in the world.”
A day later, apparently in response to a letter by Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin stating that the president needs to consult Congress when making such changes, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said that the 30,000 figure Pompeo had announced was only a proposal.
But whether or not Trump obtains congressional permission to reset refugee limits, he is doing so by fiat, and quietly through internal changes. Melissa Keaney, a staff attorney with the National Immigration Law Center, explained to me in an interview that the discretionary destruction of the refugee program is essentially a backdoor implementation of Trump’s “Muslim ban.” “For individuals from these Muslim-majority countries that have been targeted through the latest version of the Muslim ban—[they] are feeling the worst repercussions. Their numbers are 98 percent worse than they were under the Obama administration,” she said.
A recent Reuters investigation found that the government has slowly whittled away the program “through procedural changes made largely out of public view” and that “the administration has reshaped the U.S. refugee program, slashing overall admissions and all but halting entry for some of the world’s most persecuted people, including Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians and Somalis.” The administration has done so in various ways, including through reassigning the staff of the Refugee Assistance Program. For example, Reuters reports, “it has reduced by nearly two-thirds the number of officials conducting refugee interviews.” As a result, the Reuters investigation found that only “251 Somali refugees have been resettled in America this year, a 97 percent drop from the 8,300 admitted by this point in 2016.”
Additionally, the Trump administration’s national security justification for cutting the refugee program’s scope is not based in fact. Trump’s executive order implementing his Muslim ban after his inauguration triggered a review of the existing refugee resettlement program. According to Reuters, “the review concluded that refugees from all countries could safely be allowed to enter with some tightening of vetting, according to seven current or former U.S. officials who helped formulate or were briefed on the findings.” However, “White House staff, including [Stephen] Miller and [John] Kelly, were not happy with that conclusion.” So Trump and his cohorts ignored the results of their own review and spun a “national security” imperative out of thin air to implement what they wanted to do all along: curtail the entry of brown-skinned foreigners, and especially Muslims.
Keaney’s organization, the NILC, is involved with three different lawsuits against the administration over the unfair and discriminatory application of the refugee resettlement process. “All the plaintiffs in our current lawsuit challenging this refugee ban have waited years,” she said. “They’ve gone through all the hurdles and hoops that they have to undergo in terms of medical screenings, security screenings,” all of which take years. Many of the NILC’s plaintiffs had reached the very last step of the United States’ extremely stringent vetting process before being allowed entry when Trump took office—and quickly shattered their families’ dreams of being reunited. Although the NILC won a preliminary injunction against the suspension of the refugee program, none of its plaintiffs has been admitted into the country so far. To Keaney, this is a clear indication of “the corruption that we’re seeing under this administration, an administration that believes itself to be above the law.”
Pompeo’s claim that the U.S. is the most generous country in the world is also hollow. The top five nations where refugees end up living are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran and Ethiopia. These nations have smaller populations than the U.S., so the proportional burden on the state is even higher. The U.S. then accepts so-called resettlements of refugees from such countries where they have been granted asylum. The U.S. program for resettling refugees peaked in 2016, when it was the world’s most generous, probably as a result of receiving a higher number of applications as the global refugee crisis began exploding. But after Trump slashed the program, Canada is now outpacing the U.S. in the number of people being admitted. Canada’s population is one-tenth of the United States’.
At the same time that the U.S. is dramatically scaling back its refugee program, the global refugee crisis continues to grow. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that there are 25 million refugees worldwide. The majority are from Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan—three nations where the U.S. has interfered. The U.S. has bombed Syria on a semi-regular basis under the guise of the “war on terror,” and Afghanistan continues to be the site of the United States’ longest official war.
In his speech, Pompeo made no mention of how our country’s wars fuel the refugee crisis, nor did he mention the government’s own review of the refugee program that contradicts the administration’s assertion and policy.
Ultimately, the slow death of the United States’ refugee program must be seen as part of the larger project promoted by Stephen Miller and his ilk to foster the whitening of America. According to Reuters, “Refugees admitted to the United States from the small European country of Moldova, for example, now outnumber those from Syria by three to one, although the number of Syrian refugees worldwide outnumbers the total population of Moldova.” Because national security is not an issue, according to the government’s own internal review, the only other reason to suppress the number of refugees being resettled in the U.S.—and to do so disproportionately against Muslim refugees—is to pander to the racist elements of Trump’s political base and to realize his and his staff’s white supremacist views.
Sonali Kolhatkar is a columnist for Truthdig. She also is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. She is the former founder, host and producer of KPFK Pacifica’s popular morning drive-time program “Uprising.” She is also the co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a U.S.-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the social, political, and humanitarian projects of RAWA. She is the author, with James Ingalls, of “Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence” (2006).
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While British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Autumn budget rollout was accompanied by much fanfare and lofty promises—”the era of austerity is finally coming to an end,” proclaimed U.K. finance minister Philip Hammond—the specifics of the budget detailed on Monday were met with a mixture of disgust and alarm by the Labour Party and environmentalists, who argued that the plan is stuffed with “half measures” and tax cuts for the rich but zero policies to address the human-caused climate crisis.
“Cannot believe how out of touch this government is.”
—Caroline Lucas, Green Party MPHighlighting May’s recent speech declaring that deep cuts to public spending are over, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn excoriated May and Hammond for delivering a “broken promise budget” that vows “quick fixes while austerity grinds on.”
“Far from people’s hard work and sacrifices having paid off… this government has frittered it away in ideological tax cuts to the richest in our society,” Corbyn said. “The government claims austerity has worked so now they can end it. That is absolutely the opposite of the truth—austerity needs to end because it has failed.”
Just ahead of May’s big budget unveil, the Labour Party tweeted out a video that portrays May and her cabinet as cruel plutocrats and condemns their record of slashing life-saving programs for vulnerable in order to deliver massive gifts to the ultra-wealthy.
Watch:
Though May’s Autumn budget does call for some increases in social spending, critics said these boosts will not be nearly enough to recover from years of Tory austerity.
“Your budget is an insult to our young people’s future.”
—MomentumWhile touting the budget’s proposed increase in education spending, Hammond boasted that schools will now be able to afford “the little extras they need”—a remark that was quickly denounced as an insult to British schools that are facing massive teacher shortages and cutting hours due to lack of funds.
“Cannot believe how out of touch this government is,” Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the U.K. Green Party, wrote on Twitter. “Schools don’t just need money for ‘little extras’—they are struggling to pay staff, upkeep buildings, and provide vital support to children with special needs.”
The grassroots left-wing group Momentum added that, in May’s budget, “schools are getting less money than the pot hole fund.”
“We have oversized classes, lack of basic stationery, and a cap on teachers’ pay,” the group wrote on Twitter. “Your budget is an insult to our young people’s future.”
May’s budget was similarly denounced by environmentalists as an appalling insult to the planet, given that—in his speech detailing the Autumn budget—Hammond didn’t bother to mention the climate crisis once.
Hammond did, however, announce that the budget will maintain special tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry.
“Three weeks since the world’s leading climate scientists said governments have just 12 years to turn the tide on the catastrophic and irreversible consequences of climate change, the chancellor has delivered a budget that reads as though he missed the memo,” Greenpeace U.K. declared on Twitter, referencing a recent United Nations report warning that the world must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 to avert global catastrophe.
“It’s unforgivable that Hammond failed to even mention climate change,” concluded Lucas of the Green Party. “It’s not clear what planet Hammond is living on—because he’s certainly doing nothing to protect those of us living on this one. His deluded budget was built on a fantasy future where the technical revolution will solve all of society’s problems. Our children will never forgive him.”