Rape Culture: The UK Failure to Prosecute Rape

Abandoned Survivors

Press TV (2017)

Film Review

This is a 2017 Press TV documentary about the British failure to successfully investigate and prosecute rape cases. The statistics they uncover are appalling:

• Between 2013-2017, Britain experienced a 150% increase in rapes. During this period, only 3% of rape complaints went to trial.
• Between 2016-2017, Britain experienced a 30% increase in rapes, simultaneous with a 30% cut in police resources.
• British police accuse rape victims of lying in 20% of cases.*
• In 30 years, Rape Crisis London has experienced only one successful rape conviction.
• Only 5.7% of suspected rape suspects go to prison for their crime.
• Convicted sex offenders (including child molesters) only spend an average of four years in prison (sentences are much shorter than for theft and drug offenses, presumably due to their low economic impact).
• Most convicted rapists re-offend (ie commit rape) within one year of leaving prison.
• Increasingly British gangs employ rape for vendettas because the sentences are so short.

Although the film is limited to an examination of the British criminal justice system, the US and New Zealand experience similar low prosecution rates for rape.

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*”Why It’s So Unlikely Any Woman Would Lie About Being Raped” – see https://www.usnews.com/opinion/civil-wars/articles/2018-01-10/women-dont-lie-about-being-raped

The film can’t be embedded because YouTube has banned Press TV from their platform. You can view it free at  http://presstvdoc.com/post/15961

The Deep State vs Jeremy Corbyn

This film (released about a week ago) is about the collusion between British intelligence and the mainstream media to block Corbyn from becoming prime minister on December 12 – despite overwhelming public support.

The film begins with vignettes from prominent British and international prominent Jews, such as Noam Chomsky, Bernie Saunders and Norman Finkelstein shredding the outrageous smear (repeatedly echoed by every media outlet, including the BBC) that Corbyn and the Labour Party are viciously antisemitic. As with Bernie Sanders the radical policies Corbyn promotes pose a grave threat to a powerful elite that includes the British banking and arms industry, as well as the pro-Israel lobby abetting the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation of Israel.

British intelligence has been using the mainstream media to peddle disinformation about the Labour Party since 1948, when MI5 faked a document linking them to the Communist Party.

Filmmakers go on to castigate the British media for failing to confront the outright lies expounded by Corbyn’s Conservative and Liberal Democratic opponents. This section includes a clip of one of Boris Johnson’s ministers calling for the UK to replace the National Health Service (NHS) with a US-style system of private insurance. Another clip depicts Corbyn displaying leaked documents from Johnson-Trump trade negotiations that include the  the right of the US to bid on private contracts to run specific NHS services currently run by the British government.*

The film ends by reminding us of the true purpose of rigged political polls (currently showing Johnson with a strong lead) – namely to demoralize Labour supporters and discourage them from coming out to vote. They point to 2017, when Conservatives ended up with a minority government, despite all the polls predicting a strong Tory majority.

*In the week since the film was released, the mainstream media (based on an anonymous source on Reddit) is blaming the Russians for leaking the documents to Corbyn.

 

 

 

1965-75: The Decade that Nearly Dismantled Capitalism?

Global Revolt – Part 1 The Wave

DW (2018)

Film Review

This is a four-part documentary series, based on archival video footage, of a global uprising that took place between 1965-75. Although the uprising began with student protests opposing the Vietnam war, disgruntled workers and farmers joined in with students in France, Italy, Chile and Brazil and Japan. The main weakness of this series is the absence of a unifying thread. Although the historical film footage is superb, the scattershot approach and the misidentification of various Operation Gladio programs (as genuine leftist movements) makes it impossible for the viewer to draw any real conclusions.

Part 1 mainly focuses on the US anti-Vietnam War movement. However it also briefly examines the youth uprisings that occurred in the UK, Italy, Germany and Japan, as well as the first international conference of the Non-Aligned Movement* in Havana in 1963.

For me, the most interesting part of the film was the International War Crimes Tribunal Jean Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell organized in 1967 to investigate US war crimes in Vietnam.

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*Operation Gladio is the code name for a CIA/NATO backed paramilitary network that carried out thousands of false flag terrorist operations in Cold War Europe. The goal of these operations was to justify repressive government legislation against grassroots anti-capitalist organizers. It was exposed in a 1992 BBC documentary:

**The Non-Aligned Movement is an organization of sovereign countries that refuse to ally themselves with or against any of the major power blocs (US, Russia, China).

Pipelinistan: Is the Novichok Psyops an Effort to Shut Down Nord Stream 2?

Politics, Power and Pipelines – Europe and Natural Gas

DW (2018)

Film Review

This documentary concerns Russia’s controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, due for completion by the end of 2019. The EU, the UK and the US have been working hard to shut down Nord Stream 2, and various commentators believe the current Novichok psyops is an effort to pressure Germany to back out of their agreement with Gazprom.

The Nord Stream 2 project is a partnership between Russian state-owned Gazprom and five private energy companies from Britain, Germany, France and Netherlands. It will transport natural gas directly across the Baltic Sea to Germany. The existing Nord Stream 1  pipeline system transports Russian gas to western Europe mainly via Ukraine.

Since the 2014 US-sponsored coup in Ukraine, there has been considerable conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Nord Stream 1 – involving Ukraine’s non-payment of fuel charges, their failure to maintain the pipeline and illegal diversion of gas supplies. Russia totally shut down gas supplies to Ukraine in 2009 and 2014 for non-payment, resulting in very cold winters for Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary at the other end of the pipeline.*

Two prominent Germans are part of the Nord Stream 2 consortium, former German Chancellor and Social Democratic Party leader Gerhard Schroder and former Stasi member and Putin friend Mattias Warning. The latter serves as the company’s Managing Director.

Despite their determination to become more independent of Russian gas and oil, Poland and other Eastern European states are dismayed that Nord Stream 2 will bypass them. Ukraine is distraught because it stands to lose $2 billion annually in transit fees.

The EU is trying to stop Nord Stream 2 by claiming regulatory authority, **which Russia and German dispute, as both Nord Stream 1 and 2 are external pipelines.

The US also opposes the pipeline, as it prefers both EU countries to buy its more costly fracked LNG (liquified natural gas). They have threatened economic sanctions on countries that sign new energy agreements with Russia.

The US also opposed Nord Stream 1 (completed in 1973), fearing it might lead to a closer relationship between West Germany and Russia. Former German chancellor Willy Brandt strongly championed Nord Stream 1, over US objections. He believed trade and detente*** were a preferable strategy for bringing down the Iron Curtain. It now appears he was right.

The filmmakers raise legitimate concerns about Russia investing so heavily in yet more fossil fuel pipelines (Gazprom is also building a pipeline via Turkey to Italy and Greece) in a period when the planet urgently needs to end fossil fuel use altogether.

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*On March 3, 2018, Russia announced it was ending fossil fuel contracts with Ukraine altogether, raising grave concerns for countries at the other end of the pipeline. See Russia’s Gazprom to Terminate Gas Contracts with Ukraine

**Detente is a cold war term referring to the easing of strained relations.

 

Biological Warfare: The US Germ Warfare Attack on North Korea in 1952

Dirty Little Secrets

Al Jazeera (2010)

Film Review

Dirty Little Secrets is about an apparent biological warfare attack against North Korea in January 1952. The attack involved US bombardment of North Korean villages with canisters containing insects infected with typhoid, anthrax, plague and cholera. At least 30 witnesses report seeing insects crawling in the snow next to hollow bomb canisters. Following the attack, many North Koreans died of infectious illnesses that resembled plague and typhoid fever.

The US categorically denies the attack ever happened. North Korea, in turn, insists the US must acknowledge and apologize for this war crime before it agrees to nuclear disarmament.

The evidence compiled by an independent Japanese investigator is pretty damning:

• Thirty-six US airmen who were shot down and captured, wrote detailed confessions admitting to their participation in the attacks. On their return to the US, they retracted the confessions after being threatened with court martial.
• Declassified documents from the National Archives reveal the US shielded Shiro Ishii, the Japanese scientist who perfected this method of germ warfare, from war crimes charges after he agreed to sell his secrets to the US.
• Other declassified documents reveal that in 1947 Fort Dietrick scientists expanded on Ishii’s work using flees and mosquitoes.
• In 1951 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued an order calling for testing germ war fare under “operational warfare.”
• An independent international commission (including scientists from France, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, Russia and the UK) investigated after the Korean War ended and produced a 600 page report confirming the attack occurred.

The Telegraph also features an excellent article on the same topic from 2010: Did the US Wage Germ Warfare in Korea

 

Reconciling Heathrow’s Third Runway with UK Climate Commitments

BBC News reports the British cabinet has just approved the extremely controversial third runway at London’s Heathrow airport. It will allegedly bring billions of dollars of economic benefit to Britain’s economy and create tens of thousands of new jobs.

Oh really? Big business is always promising pie in the sky economic benefits and job creation for big infrastructure projects that seriously disadvantage the rest of us by evicting us from our homes and otherwise destroying our quality of life. Experience teaches these economic projections aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Thanks to the growing complexity of the global economy, economists can predict what the economy will do next month – much less 20 years from now.

The inimitable George Monbiot says it all in an October 18 opinion piece in the Guardian: “In a world seeking to prevent climate breakdown, there is no remaining scope for extending infrastructure that depends on fossil fuels.”

As Monbiot rightly points out, there’s no way Prime Minister Theresa May can allow Heathrow to build a third runway and simultaneously uphold the Paris climate change agreement Britain signed last year.

Subsidizing Air Travel for the Rich

He cites last year’s Airports Commission report, which offers two possible strategies for ensuring the new runway (and extra flights) won’t conflict with the climate pledges Britain made in Paris. The first is for the rest of the economy to make extra cuts in greenhouse gases to accommodate aviation. Already the Climate Change Act imposes a legal target of 80% reductions by 2050. But if flights are to keep growing as the commission expects, those cuts would have to rise to 85%. This is fundamentally unjust. The large majority (75%) of Heathrow’s international passengers are holiday travelers. As they also have a mean income of £57,000, this option makes everyone else pay for the holidays taken by the well off.

The second option they offer is a carbon tax on aviation. An analysis by the Campaign for Better Transport suggests that the tax required to reconcile a new runway with Britain’s carbon commitments is somewhere between £270 and £850 for a return flight for a family of four to New York.

IMF Calls for Carbon Tax on Aviation

The International Monetary Fund is also calling for a carbon tax on aviation and shipping to help the industrialized world meet the carbon reduction goals it agreed to in Paris. Emissions from planes and ships, presently accounting for 4% of global emissions, are steadily increasing. Unlike other forms of transportation, it’s impossible to replace jet fuel with more carbon neutral energy sources such as electrification.

As Monbiot points out in his article, it makes absolutely no sense to spend billions of dollars on this infrastructure boondoggle and then price people out of the air travel market with a carbon tax. For this simple reason, he predicts the third runway won’t happen. The current timeline proposed by the Department of Transport is so long and convoluted, construction on a third runway couldn’t start before 2020. I suspect Monbiot is right – that it won’t happen at all.

photo credit: Liberal Democrats Brian Paddick with London Borough leaders campaigning against Heathrow expansion via photopin (license)