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Radical Centre, Extinction Rebellion, Green New Deal

In Archive
March 26, 2019

 

The Radical Centre

Radix, which has a piece in today’s City AM, is a radical centre think tank.

But what does the radical centre stand for?

A glance at the Radix website tells me Market Fundamentalism – but not soft on Ireland.

Screen Shot 2019-03-26 at 13.53.09.png

An Irish hard border is inevitable to protect the single market from toxic US goods.

Listen to Belgian Green MEP Phillipe Lamberts:

Northern Ireland is the perfect opportunity for US multinationals to poison European food markets with hormone beef and GM plants.

Surplus US rice that was formerly destined for Bangladesh under USAID can be sent to central Europe via Ireland.

The US government highly subsidises this kind of thing. And the cost of production per unit drops very low. The US food will undercut everyone’s.

But will the EU and Ireland erect a hard border on Friday?

If they don’t they’ll damage the integrity of the single market.

I assume Ireland won’t be booted out of the EU just yet, but risk of contagion from diseases caused by illegal US food, drugs and chemicals goes up substantially in two days’ time.

Tariq Ali wrote about the Extreme Centre in early 2015.

Tom Watson – whom this blog has criticised – would appear to be the archetypal centrist. Pro-war and utterly thuggish, he pretends to be of the left. This is especially interesting now that the arch-centrist technocrat Oliver Letwin is reputed to be taking over from Mrs May along with anti-immigrant Yvette Cooper and warmonger Hillary Benn. Taking back control. Screen Shot 2019-03-26 at 14.39.56 (Taken from today’s Financial Times Brexit Bulletin)

And what about Extinction Rebellion?

They claim to be in Open Rebellion against the government. Meanwhile they are co-operating with the police and with NGOs! Is it a real rebellion or is it a shadow rebellion? Just as “Israel” claims to not have a death penalty while killing and denying equality to Palestinians, so too can Extinction Rebellion specialise in calling itself a rebellion while attracting political, NGO, media attention and funding, without providing any solutions or significant overall costs to its organisers. Here is a video of Swedish Climate poster child Greta Thunberg with Extinction Rebellion:  Here she is with Macron: Screen Shot 2019-03-26 at 15.34.05.png She’s here with Al Gore:

Now Nominated for an Oscar, sorry a Nobel Prize:

More good info at Wrong Kind of Green

Controlled opposition and infiltration of radical movements is part and parcel of left activism in the UK.

The Green New Deal

The Green New Deal was a paper written by the New Economics Foundation back in 2008.

It has since captured the public’s imagination because it has become the rallying cry of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

One of the Green New Deal’s original authors is economic thinker Ann Pettifor.

Ann wrote an article in the Guardian after Ocasio-Cortez talked up the Green New Deal.

She is currently working on a book about how to finance the Green New Deal.

I think there is some confusion going on between the Green New Deal and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

MMT likes Full Employment. I can’t tell the difference between that and communism. It is apparently somehow quite anti-inflation. But at a time of AI, Bullshit Jobs and major discussion on Universal Basic Income, the big question is who will do the jobs that need to be done that aren’t currently being done such as renewable energy and the caring professions – and what will happen to all the people currently working in industries that pollute like oil and nuclear energy? This last question is one of transition. And it matters.

This is an interview I did of Ann for Real Media in 2017 ( I have since left)

Rise of the Working Class Shareholder

David Webber’s Rise of the Working Class Shareholder about how Trade Unions can use their pension fund money to push for human rights, workers’ rights and environmentalism, may hold the key to how to finance the transport, food and energy solutions that a green new deal would form part of.

David Webber’s The Rise of the Working Class Shareholder from Lucinda Rivera on Vimeo.

We are reading David Webber’s book in the Heretical Finance Reading group
 this Monday at 1630.

Here is the recently launched European Green New Deal:

This Green Jobs event is happening in Parliament on the 1st April:

It’s organised by NEF the New Economics Foundation.

Here is their podcast on the Green New Deal:

I don’t get on well with the people at New Economics Organisers Network and the New Economics Foundation. I find them like most think tanks and NGOs to be full of shit. My personal experience was that they are fascist control freaks so I am nervous abut anything associated with them. But it is still probably worth listening to their podcast which is not anywhere near as loaded as what many of these individuals are like in person. I have known Ann Pettifor for many years and we get on, I regard most of the rest of the NEON / NEF collective as outright fascists.

Here is Novara on the Green New Deal.

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