Jeremy Corbyn wins two Labour leadership election victories but will be enough for the Blairites?<

Jeremy Corbyn wins two Labour leadership election victories but will be enough for the Blairites?

By Dark Politricks
Dark Politricks

Jeremy Corbyn wins yet another Labour election victory but will it stop the Blairites attempting another coup?

Guess what…

Jeremy Corbyn has won his Labour Leadership election battle against the unknown (to me at least until this content), Owen Smith.

I don’t find it a surprise, I don’t find it a shock I find it a waste of time and a stupid exercise by Blairites and their followers who they co-erced into joining their coup as a massive custard pie in the face. They have really wasted some important months when they should have been attacking the Tories on

• BREXIT and what’s happening with it (I have no clue).
• Our new PM Theresa May and how she has gone back on many of David Cameron’s policies – which should really trigger a general election but as the Labour party were in no fit state to fight one they got away with it/
  The re-introduction of Grammar Schools.
• The possibility of Scotland holding another referendum to leave the UK.
• China building our nuclear power station and security issues around this.
• So many other items to mention.

This is what satirist Jonathan Pie thinks about the re-election of Jermey Corbyn.

This year he won with 61.8% of the vote to Smith’s 38.2%.
Last year he won with 59.5% of the vote against the other 3 candidates.

This must tell you something. Maybe that the people and the Labour members want him as their leader no matter how much the press attack him all the time and try and portray him as unelectable?

Are the Blairites mad, do they not realise that the Labour party and the part of the country who are left wing actually WANT Jeremy Corbyn as the leader. Not some air brushed, PR managed, speaker phone in a suit, controlled by HQ who says what he is told to, and has no real opinions or beliefs of his own?

We don’t want constant US led war, like a puppy on a lead.

“Lets go bomb this country now UK our Special Friend”, and then afterwards whilst the people are all still fighting in a civil war, or forming new terrorist groups we can later control for our own ends, we can let all the US corporations get the oil rights such as Halliburton.

Plus all the contracts to rebuild the roads and hospitals that we bombed for no reason in the first place can go to US companies formed for exactly this reason.

Special Friend? The only thing special about our relationship with the USA is that we get to sleep in the wet patch afterwards and have little say when the “special” part is about to start.

We don’t want to to give banks money at 0% interest rates whilst we all have to suffer with 10%+ or if your stuck then WONGA or 1 of the hundreds of pay day loans that have sprung up much more.

Is that not a sign something is wrong?

When the public have to pay 1000s of % APR for their money? Do you know the pay day loans interest rates at the moment.

• WONGA – 1,177% APR
• Satsuma Loans – 1575% APR
• Sunny – 1,299% APR
• Square Today Short Term Loan – 1265% APR

I could go on, but that seems wrong to me, especially when all these payday banks are owned by the same main banks at the top anyway. It seems to be one of our only growth industries in the UK at the moment along with online Bingo, Poker and Gambling sites. That doesn’t say much for our economy does it?

If your a normal person, I consider myself normal believe it or not, then we don’t want our economy to built on services that milk the common person so that big banks get even richer and the poor poorer. No, we want to re-focus it so that we have a skilled manufacturing base, a decent job for university and apprentices to enter into after work not fill the shelves at Lidl.

We want high tech, high skilled people and a way for those who have fallen off the track due to ill health or long term joblessness to get back into those jobs through free training. Not punishment by taking away benefits because they have an extra room in their flat, or they don’t have a computer so that have to spend their meager benefits on bus fares into town to use the library to search for jobs as they currently have to do.

Call me stupid but we don’t want to privatize everything from education to the NHS. Privatising the National Railways when you think about it can’t be competitive anyway due to not having the ability to have 2 trains running on the same line at the same time to the same place. Isn’t that what competitiveness should all be about?

Unless you are going to allow each railyway company to build their own tracks through the country (which would take decades due to planning permission and all the rest) then you should make our railways a decent public transport option for the nation by making them fast, on time, reliable and cheap. If you did all that more people would leave their cars at home, help the environment and use the trains like they do in Spain and France.

Why is it in Spain I could travel overnight and back to a place the same distance as London for a couple of pounds on a clean railway when here it costs me the best part of twenty pounds, and more if it’s overnight?

No it has to be all about money and putting it into the pockets of companies after we have sold the rights for a few billion. It’s a stupid mentality only dreamt up by the Tories and Blairites.

The same goes for education. Education should be for life. People should be able to re-skill throughout their lives without forking out thousands in loan repayments. You should be able to go to University for free, another Blairite scheme that has just expanded the cost of education to those that can afford it again and again.

Cut the amount of money we spend on a useless Trident scheme that relies on US GPS (so they could turn it off if we went rogue), and the trillions we have spent on wars over the last decade and we could easily afford free education for all for life.

If you are unemployed you should be able to get onto any workplace training scheme or educational course you want for free.

It costs a lot more to have a jobless person claiming benefits for their home, pocket and council tax for years on end than it would for a year or two at a college.

We also have to admit that some of the things Blair and his cronies and followers did that were very bad for the country and it’s future as well as the world’s e.g Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and voting in the Tories time again won’t sort that out.

PFI was a nightmare for a start, one that will cost over £200 billion in the next 35 years. This will lead to hospitals and schools going broke if not already due to these huge debts they are with debts for the next 20+ years. Yes we may have build a lot of new schools and hospitals due to PFI, but the one thing we didn’t build was houses – why not?

Was that because we couldn’t find a way to allow the private sector to milk the taxpayer as they do with the others. Currently schools and hospitals have to pay contractors up to £100 or more to change a single light bulb if it breaks in a classroom instead of just calling out their handy man to do the job for them.

I remember being at school with a handy man who did all the odd jobs around the place and we all loved him more than the teachers.

He did everything that needed to be done and he cost a hell of a lot less than what schools are currently paying for fixing anything broken at the moment.

Just think of the waiting time for the private contractors to arrive for one, and then the inflated costs all to fill their pockets. What is the point apart from a one off payment from the private company to fill whatever gaping hole the treasury currently has and then face decades of debt?

Of course it doesn’t worry the MP’s who put it into action as they will be long gone by then. They are probably working for the same companies who are running the PFI schemes they helped push through parliament with their votes no doubt.

Also I don’t want to bail out the banks without jailing the directors as Iceland did. The people who led us into the 2008 crisis in the first place should be punished like any other criminal. I want some justice for all this mess and austerity everyone is facing.

Why are we giving banks money at 0% when we could be making National Bonds for investments in house building that will return a nice profit for investors, much needed jobs flooding in and most of all provide the housing people need?

These are all things Jeremy Corbyn wants to do. I can’t find a fault in it so please leave your comments to what is so stupid about these policies please.

From the Guardian

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged to “wipe the slate clean” after winning a convincing victory in Labour’s bitter leadership battle, securing 62% of the vote.

Speaking after the result was declared in Liverpool, Corbyn thanked his rival, Owen Smith, and urged the “Labour family” to unite after the summer-long contest.

“We have much more in common than that which divides us,” he said. “Let’s wipe that slate clean from today and get on with the work we’ve got to do as a party together.”

Corbyn secured 61.8% of the vote to Smith’s 38.2%. The victory strengthens his hold on a party that has expanded dramatically since the 2015 general election and now has more than 500,000 members. In last year’s contest, he won 59.5% of the vote.

Corbyn won a majority over Smith in every category – members (59%), registered supporters (70%) and trades union affiliates (60%).

 

View the original article at the main Dark Poltricks web site at Dark Politricks where you can get even more #altnews and daily politics away from the lamestream media

By Dark Poltircks

© 2016 By Dark Poltircks

Can the US Government go to war in Syria if they are officially “shut”

Can the US Government go to war in Syria if they are officially “shut”

By Dark Politricks

Not being an American I have no idea why you put up with your duopoly of parties controlling the stage. Over here in the UK we may have 3 main central parties but we also have Greens, Independents, Socialists, Nationalists, UKIP and so on.

These parties may never win the grand prize – the chance to kiss the feet of the US President and send our boys to die fighting wars that have nothing to do with us, but they are gaining traction in European and National polls. I only hope the same happens in the US.

What I want to know is this. If the Federal Government is officially “closed for business” and the Department of Defence is a Federal institution. How can any war with Syria happen now there is no Government and no $$$ in the kitty?

Is Israel be shitting it? Are they busy pulling strings and plopping secret million dollar bills into Congressmen purses. All to ensure they vote for a return to normal state of play: massive debt that can never be payed off, war, socialism for the rich all whilst fucking the poor?

Can the POTUS declare war on a nation when the Federal Government is official closed? Or can the POTUS under his national emergency acts, NDAA, PATRIOT CRAP ACT and all the other NAZI style acts enacted after 9.11 still have the power to overrule Congress and send your sons and daughters to die on another Middle Eastern battlefield for reasons they won’t actually reveal.

No mention of a Greater Israel. No mention of al-Qaeda being allies in at least 4 of the US wars in the last 30 years:

• Afghanistan in the 80’s when bin-Laden was lauded as a hero freedom fighter.
•  Serbia in the 90’s when we went to war on the wrong side and instead helped the terrorist organisation known as the KLA. Who were also helped and funded by al-Qaeda. Kosovan gangs if non Europeans don’t know are now one of the biggest criminal enterprises known in Europe. Specialising in drugs and people smuggling.
• Libya, when we recently rejected our new found friendship with Gaddafi to let ex Gitmo detainees and known al-Qaeda / LIFG terrorists kill, rape and plunder what was once Africa’s most successful country in terms of birth survival rates, education, health and many more factors that indicate a life worth living. What did we replace that with? Gangs of terrorists ruling regions, kidnapping Presidents, killing US ambassadors and summarily executing people they consider Gaddafi loyalists.
• And of course Syria. Where the Axis of War has secretly been helping the Free Syrian Army and their Islamic brothers chop off heads, eat hearts and lungs and execute people who refuse to convert to Islam.

We don’t exactly have a good record when it comes to picking sides in wars and this is the best reason why we should be staying out of them unless the threat of invasion is imminent.

Therefore to all those people who have constantly said “Get the Government out my life” I say, well your now lucky enough to be living in your dream land.

I just hope that due to the US Government officially being shut and broke now, means they won’t be propping up evil dictators like those in Saudi Arabia, or funding al-CIAduh terrorists in their battles with ex dinner party guests.

What are the chances this will happen?

Are the UK Government using PPI and Banks as a way to put money back into peoples pockets?

Are the UK Government using PPI and Banks as a way to put money back into peoples pockets?

By Dark Politricks

I just saw an advert on Channel 5 USA (a UK channel) in which a PPI Claims company said that if you had taken a loan out within 15 years and had added Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) then you could attempt to claim it back.

Now I had taken a load of loans out in my youth, with PPI, and when the first adverts started appearing the adverts were only saying that you could claim the money back if you had taken a loan out within the past 3 years. I didn’t do anything because my loans were 10 years old.

However it seemed that the time length that you could claim for was extending and extending every few months. It seemed to coincide with the UK finances getting worse and our GDP going down and inflation going up.

First I started seeing adverts for 5 then 7 years and then when I first saw an advert earlier this year for 10 years I was straight on the phone. I shouldn’t have gone through one of the “specialist PPI companies” however it was money I wouldn’t have got back if I hadn’t of attempted it in the first place – so in reality it was literally free cash in my pocket.

From an initial 3 years to 15 years is a long time and I have a feeling that the government is hoping that PPI payouts will help stimulate the economy by putting money back into people’s pockets in a stealthy Keynesian method without any government minister having to  admit to it of course! Austerity, Austerity – that is the only way says our supposed economic wizard George Osborne.

It is Georgey boy who’s claim that our deficit and debt would be reduced through his spending cuts and VAT tax rises would have started working by now. Anyone with half an eye can see they blatantly haven’t done the job.

Their are no private jobs rushing in to fill all the public ones he is gutting. He is forcing people off disability allowance onto job-seekers (a much lower benefit) and making them look for jobs that don’t exist.

He is introducing “bedroom” taxes  for the poor so that people with extra rooms have to give up more of their money or move across  the country to places where one bedroom flats exist. All the while he is cutting public services and yet at the same time he has reduced the top rate of tax for the richest people in the country. What happened to “We are all in this together”?

The politicians know the banks were mainly to blame for our current crisis and the UK is one of the most indebted nations on the planet.

This doesn’t only include Government debt but personal debt as well. All through the later 90’s, and the years of the Labour government, people were re-mortgaging their houses and spending the money or having loans literally thrown at them by the banks. I know for a fact I and many other people I know were.

After the first law suit over PPI was won by someone years ago the banks have had to set aside billions in case they had to pay out more to future customers who were mis sold PPI.

From The International Business Times

PPI has become the biggest mis-selling scandal to hit UK banks and they have repeatedly underestimated the scale of the problem.

Britain’s biggest retail bank, Lloyds Banking Group Plc , has set aside 6.8 billion pounds for PPI compensation. Barclays Plc has set aside 2.6 billion and RBS has provisioned 2.2 billion.

So far the banks have set aside around £20 billion and the payouts so far amount to £8.9 billion.

Payment Protection Insurance was meant to protect borrowers against redundancy and sickness , but it was often sold to customers who didn’t want or need it or who couldn’t claim it even if they took it out. People such as those with certain medical conditions or people who were self employed. Often, like myself, I had PPI added to my loans or credit cards without my knowledge!

The worst thing, in my mind anyway, was that if you had to claim (as I did once) the money from the insurance only lasted for a year. Plus the amount the insurance cost you worked out exactly the same as if you had added an extra years worth of  loan to your original debt. It was a total con!

Because the UK finances are in such a state and recent news reports show customers are holding back from buying goods. I have a sneaky feeling that the government is secretly hoping that the PPI payouts will be a way of putting cash into potential shoppers pockets to stimulate the economy. The added benefit of course is that it’s all at the cost of the banks who caused the mess in the first place.

To me it sounds like a good plan. The banksters are the ones who caused the mess and I am not joking when I said they used tot literally  throw loans at people.

For instance I was given a £5,000 loan when I left college with no job or way of paying it back. Then every year the same bank would give me an extra £5,000 – £7,000 loan and overdrafts up to £3,500 to pay back the outstanding amount and give me some more spending cash! It was truly a time when “debt was good” and people didn’t think about the future.

As a young man who didn’t really think he would have to pay back the money anyway (I had a bit of death wish back then, plus the money management skills of a frog) it seemed like free money and I grabbed whatever the banks would offer me. One of the things I often feel our schools let the population down with is real world lessons in living. How to manage money, how to look after yourself, how money works, how to use logic and reason and think for yourself.

Young men are worse than woman who are often taught these skills from their mothers so if the schools are not teaching the boys and they are not getting taught at home they are left to the mercy of the loan sharks and banksters. Shuffling money from one account to another to pay off monthly repayments and sticking to the minimum payment to keep them off your back is not exactly “good” money management!

Unlike other people I know who “went missing” for 5+ years and now have mortgages and are debt free. I honestly OR  stupidly (pick your own word) decided to pay off my debts. Even thought this took over 6 years I managed to do it. Therefore when I saw the opportunity to reclaim all the PPI which amounted to around £5,000 I took it.

Some credit cards I didn’t even realise I had PPI on at the time and on other banks I had no details apart from the name of the bank but their customer service department returned a list of 6 loan accounts taken out within 7 years. I used one of these companies on TV but didn’t realise they took a THIRD of the money as recompense for doing the job you could easily do yourself.

Luckily for me they forgot about one loan and I got £2,000 all to myself without deductions but I would recommend anyone who has ever taken a loan out in the last 15 years to check if they can reclaim the PPI on it.

The Government is not helping us and the banksters who caused the mess are still making billions therefore we should not feel sorry for them in the slightest.

Just remember if the EU can order the Cypriot government to just take 10% of any bank savings without your say then who is to say the UK government won’t do the same?

I would expect the time you can claim for any PPI to continue to go up and up until either the banks have dolled out all the money they said they set aside years ago but haven’t given out yet. Or until the UK GDP rises above a single percentage point for more than 3 months in a row!

To anyone thinking of claiming their PPI back I would definitely recommend everyone to do the work themselves. It is not hard.

You can just write t o the banks customer complaints department and ask for all your loan details that had PPI on them, then write a letter back saying you want your PPI money for any of the following reasons:

1. You were not informed that the PPI protection would only last a year.
2. The PPI was added without your consent.
3. You were self employed which meant the PPI wouldn’t cover you.
4. You were depressed or had another medical complaint that would have meant the insurance would not be paid out.
5. You were not informed you wouldn’t get the insurance if you were sacked.
6. The PPI insurance was not fully explained to you at the time. Most of the employees who sold the PPI will be long gone and those that remain won’t remember what  they said when they sold it to you. Therefore this is probably the best one to use as they will not be able to re-call what they said when they sold the loan to you.

A good thing to do is to write off to one of these PPI companies, get a payment pack sent to you and see what sort of questions they ask you to answer. All they do is use the answers and send the paper work off to the same places you could easily do. Therefore use these packs as a guide and write to the same Financial Ombusdman yourself if  the Bank doesn’t pay out after your first letter of complaint.

Remember – this could be your chance of getting out of any recent debt. If they are going back 15 years then I would guess that the majority of adults in this country would have had a credit card or loan within than time. Even if you don’t think you took PPI out it is worth checking in-case the bank added it on without your knowledge.

View the original article “Are the UK Government using PPI and Banks as a way to put money back into peoples pockets?” at www.darkpolitricks.com

Send Dark Politricks.com examples of police brutality or ways to prevent the machine rolling over us this way!

Send Dark Politricks.com examples of police brutality or ways to prevent the machine rolling over us this way!

By Dark Politricks

This site is a “power to the people”, free speech, anti war on terror, anti Big Brother site that hates stupid laws and regulations and resents our subservience to supra national entities like the EU, the World Bank, the G20 and the move towards globalisation that means jobs are taken away from middle class people like ourselves and given over  to slave workers in China and India who will work for a pittance.

Our country is full of stupid laws that need repealing. There was a gleam of hope when the Liberal Democrats got into power with their much vaunted Freedom Bill but after Tory interference it was watered down to a charter against rouge car clampers.

There was no removal of the unfair extradition treaty to the US or the return to the right of silence without it being brought up in court. No repeal of anti privacy laws that allow countless agencies to enter your house without a warrant and nothing that let us protest when and how we want. Permit to Protest – you must be joking!

Our stupid drug laws fill prisons with people needing treatment not punishment before re-sending them back out to the community to rob and steal to fund their habit again.

Our NHS is a known beacon for anyone around the world wanting free and often expensive health care which we tax payers have to pay for.

And to top it off all the banksters who broke our country in half are carrying on using our pensions as casion chips for their gambling whilst we suffer with closed libraries, schools and other cuts in public services. Why are the people who had nothing to do with the economic collapse being asked to pay for it? Why are future generations being made to pay for the mistakes of the rich current generation?

Our cops are bent as a nine bob note and get away with crimes every day If it wasn’t for the rise of people carrying video cameras around with them and mobile phones many police abuses would not get noticed or recorded for us to see.

Therefore if anyone has any films of policeman acting against their mandate e.g beating people up unnecessarily or breaching their role to “protect and serve” then please send them this way so I can display them

If anyone has ideas on how we can help roll back the surveillance state being built around us then please let me know so I can share those ideas with my readers.

If people have knowledge on using computer systems without being tracked by the authorities then please let me know. Details such as using open Wi-Fi networks and proxies, removing your battery from your phone to stop being GPS/GPRS tracked, preventing iPhone and Google from storing and uploading your data to any policeman with the right tools and using block lists to bypass ISP’s that sniff P2P torrent packets to see what you are downloading. Plus using special software to super encrypt your messages without Microsofts’s back door accessing them all or just using disposable email addresses and proxy server chains to post your messages on Twitter or Facebook anonymously without being tracked. This is all valuable information.

If you have it then please let me know! I have already listed some ways to beat some tracking and logging by the authorities but much more can be done.

 

Also if people know of corrupt, inefficient or wasteful local government departments or councils, or members of such institutions, then please let me know who these people are and what they have done. These are people who live off our tax money.

They are there to serve us NOT themselves. I have personally written letters to MP’s and Government officials and got respones – many have been blatant lies or attempts to placate me so I will vote for them at the next election. Our government is full of crooks and career politicians.

Remember if we don’t stick together and pool our knowledge the machine will continue to roll over us until we are nothing but dust!

So send me any dirt you can find!

 

View the original article “Please send me examples of police brutality or ways to prevent the machine rolling over our liberty!” on darkpolitricks.com.

f President Obama is a bad President then what will Mitt Romney be like?

If President Obama is bad then what is Mitt Romney?

By Dark Politricks

Last week was the GOP conference in which they inaugurated Mitt Romney as their choice for Republican presidential candidate. This was the man that during primaries no Republican commentator really wanted and in the end he was the least bad choice out of a very bad lot. As soon as he was anointed though they all changed their tune pretty fast as all they care about is getting President Obama out of office and handing over the country to corporations and banksters.

Despite Ron Paul sticking it out to the end of the GOP debates he has been overlooked and out of the nominees he was the only one who offered some real choice for the public if nominated.

I’m not saying that I agree with everything Ron Paul stands for but personally I think America needs some form of “America United” ticket that would bring the massively obvious culture war to an end and hopefully restore civil liberties, end the wars, end the FED, end the unauthorised spying and now authorised detention without charge or even execution on Presidential demand.

A ticket of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich would have brought Libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, Liberals and independents together to vote for a return to an America which wasn’t constantly at war and didn’t go around the world invading countries because it thought it was “exceptional”.

Hopefully he will stand as an independent or if possible on the libertarian ticket although I think it’s too late for that. Apart from that you have Roseanne Barr and Cindy Sheehan on the Peace and Freedom Party ballot which won’t be on enough ballot papers to even make a dent in the billions of dollars thrown behind Mitt Romney and his attempt to hand the USA over to the Corporations. It looks like the American public are going to get more of the same – just under a different name.

Therefore apart from little differences there is not much choice between Romney and Obama as both are globalists, beholden to the banksters, warmongers and debt drivers and voting Republican really won’t make much difference to your life apart from if your poor as you will probably find yourself in a Middle Eastern desert somewhere fighting another war the country doesn’t want or even need.

From the seemingly non-educated, racist, totally dumb and sometimes loony ideas or comments mentioned by some of the other delegates during the debates and interviews it was clear that Romney was going to be the least worst option from the selection of Republican nominees.

It is also clear to me as an atheist that American Christians will forgive even the most despicable actions as long as the person involved “repents” or pretends to. I know Christians are supposed to forgive so how about forgiving some of the thousands of locked up victims of the war on drugs and ending capital punishment? That would be true forgiveness.

Now I am no Obama fan, I was glad he was voted in purely for the fact that it showed that America could and would now vote for a black President but on the policy side of things I think he has let the country down badly by breaking all the promises he made on the campaign trail.

Some of these promises he could have just enacted when he had control of the Congress and Senate but he chose instead to form bi-partisan support and was rebuffed on many of them. Then after the landslide victory that saw his control of the house fall away to dimwits like Michele Bachmann and co he has had to fight twice as hard to get any policy through. Maybe that was the plan.

It was clear from day one that many Republicans didn’t want to even give Obama a chance despite their passing over to him the worst economy since the great depression and a huge amount of debt as well as two wars, a rendition and torture program that has blackened the USA’s name around the world and a massive TARP balout scheme that enraged many from Tea Partiers to Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Seemingly Clint Eastwood and many other Americans forget that it wasn’t Obama but George Bush that started the longest war in America‘s history in Afghanistan, a war that is now plagued by constant attacks by Afghan troops on NATO soldiers.

They also seem to forget that it was George W Bush that turned Clinton’s legacy into a huge mountain of debt due to his tax cuts to the rich, TARP and his war on terror. It’s truly amazing that only 34% of Americans realise that it was Bush not Obama that passed TARP!

If you read up on the history of US national debt you will find that it is Republicans that usually ramp up the debt to fight wars.

World War II saw the US entering new debt territory never seen before starting at 4% of GDP in 1941 it increased to as much as 122% of GDP in 1946 at the end of the war. The next 35 years saw successive governments try to bring down the debt, but then came the Republican God President Reagan. He increased the federal debt by over 50%of GDP to win the Cold War – a money war of attrition the USSR just couldn’t win.

President George W Bush was the next Republican to increase the debt to fight his war on terror, give tax cuts to the rich and bail out the banks.

President Obama was then handed a bad hand that no incumbent would chose to take on willingly and his increasing of the the debt has mainly to be fund economy revival plans after the crash of 2008 – plus the funding and expansion of Bush’s wars.

Whilst it is true Obama has increased the debt ceiling to amounts not seen since the World War he was passed a huge burden from the previous administration and with low growth, a credit crunch and a stalled economy he attempted Keynesian economic policies of borrowing to grow GDP to get out of the hole he was in. Some say Keynes is wrong, others like Paul Krugman say that President Obama just didn’t spend enough on the stimulus in the first place. Whatever the answer the debt mountain may have increased under him but it was definitely not created by Obama.

However President Obama has failed on a number of promises he gave when he was campaigning for his first election and the “change” we expected didn’t turn out as we hoped it would.

He has failed to bring Wall St into line after they recked the economy and instead passed ineffective and bloated laws like the Dodd-Frank act. Many believe he should have re-enacted the Glass Steagall Act and split the banks back up into gambling banks and banks for us “little people” who want to save, borrow and be safe in the knowledge our money won’t be gambled away by an automated front running high frequency trading bots using our money as bets on that biggest of gambling dens known as the US Stock Exchange.

He has failed to repeal the Emergency laws Americans are still living under since 9.11, dictatorial powers that allow him to assassinate Americans abroad without a trial and seemingly label protesters as terrorists just so they that cannot protest against him as we just saw with the arrest of James Tyson 0n his way to protest outside the Democratic National Convention.

Drones now fly the skies of America and the TRAPWIRE system has every American under surveillance at all times.

America is not the place it was before Obama OR George Bush took over the Presidency.

So I don’t think Obama is a good President and I have wrote such in many articles including (but not limited to) who is worse Obama or Bush, The very non liberal Democratic party, Amerika a modern day East Germany, Does the American public want more of the same, or more of the same under a different name, and Is President Obama really a Communist or is he more of a dictator?

So please don’t call me an Obama fan because I’m not!

However when it comes to a choice (a non choice really) between Obama and Mitt Romney you should ask yourself the following when casting your vote in the US Presidential Election 2012.

1. Who is more likely to get your country into a war with Iran in the next 4 years Obama or Romney? The British Royal family send their sons into war zones to fight, Prince Harry into Afghanistan and Prince Andrew in the Falklands. However I cannot seem to recall an active US President who  ever had their children in the military and active war zones during their Presidency. If you can think of one please let me know.

2. If the market was let free to run as it (and the Koch brothers) want it to, and a company like Bain capital came along to the place you worked and sacked you because they were going to offshore your job to India or China – who would you trust more to look after your jobs and keep them in America. Would you just put your hands in the air and go “well that’s the free market for you” or would you protest the off-shoring of US jobs that Bain Capital has been so good at during the years and is still doing.

3. Are you worse or better off now than 4 years ago? Are you worse off or better off than you were before Ronald Reagen took office? Before he started his supply side economic experiment and his economic war of attrition with the USSR which saw the countries debt rise, the country turn from an exporting nation to an importer, a country in debt to China and now one mired in constant war.

4. What is more important? Letting already very rich people (billionaires and millionaires) have more money through tax cuts or asking them to pay a little more to help get the country out of the mess it is in. The tax rates during Republican Presidencies in the past were in the 70-90%. Why should they be so low now. Just look at the following graph to see how low the top rate of tax is compared to historical rates during both Republican and Democratic presidencies.

A history of the top rate of US income tax over the years.

5 Should the boss of a company be able to pay less tax than his secretary? Only the rich can afford fancy lawyers and accountants to ensure they can use offshore accounts and only pay capital gains tax instead of the normal rates of income tax everyone else has to pay.

6. If you were born a poor child to a single mother in a poor part of town with no money logic dictates that you wouldn’t have the same life chances as a rich child born into privilege. Life just isn’t fair as people say. The poorer child is more likely to end up in prison, die young from poor health, get a worse education and have less opportunity to meet the “right people” and succeed in life.

If you believe in a meritocracy where everyone has the same chance to succeed in life with hard work and a fair even playing field where law breakers (e.g banksters) go to jail and companies don’t get the law retrospectively changed once it’s been found out they have broken it then how does this happen without some kind of intervention by government. Do you think that the governments job is just to let these people live in squalor and probably commit crimes against you just to survive? Or should they try and even out the playing field a little and give everyone the opportunity to succeed in life whether they were born rich or poor?

7. If you think Obama has told lies – what about Romney. He basically invented Obamacare which his state is happily using but rails against it on a national platform. He has flip flopped on more issues than people can count. Could you trust a man,  a “multiple choice” President, who’s answer on a question changes depending on the time of day, his age and the questioner?

8. Do you think a super rich business man who has paid hardly any tax to the country he hopes to run. A man who aims to be the front man for the Koch brothers and give even more money to the top 1% is a man who can be trusted to keep your job safe? Do you think you are more or less likely to have your job off-shored to China or India under Obama or an expert in off-shoring jobs – Romney?

9. Were you born into money or had to earn every penny you own? Have you ever had nothing, I mean zilch. Slept on park benches and friends floors because you had no-one to help you.

What if you lost your job, then your house and family due to your job being off-shored or your company going under. Who do you think is more likely to help you out a Democratic or Republican government. Or do you think the government should not give a flying fxxk about you and just leave you to rot away until you commit a crime that hurts another American citizen and puts you in prison at the expense of the tax paying population?

10. Do you really think life will change a lot if Romney is elected. What things will actually change in your day to day life. Do you trust him to keep any of the few promises he has made so far on policy such as abolishing Obamacare whilst keeping it in his own state?

Let me know the answers in the comment section to the question: If President Obama is bad then what is Mitt Romney?

Will a European Revolution emerge out of the Greek tragedy

By Dark Politrcks

I’ve just watched a documentary about the problems facing the Greek people at the moment during these times of austerity and supposed “solidarity” between Euro nations.

Some facts from the documentary include:

• 1 in 3 Greeks are now living below the poverty line.
• Over 50% of young people are unemployed.
• New measures have meant that charges for public services that were once free – for example any visit to the hospital now incurs a charge even if you are skint.
• Whole government departments are being shut down with the poorest Greeks suffering the most. For example they have just closed down the social housing department. This is the department that manages housing for the poorest people who might have no jobs, money or place to live. I cannot even imagine living in a country without a social housing department. Thousands of people have lost their jobs and  millions of poor people will be affected by the closure of this department.

We all know the reasons for the Greek crisis but the person making the documentary didn’t seem to realise the reasons the Greek people were in the position they were.

The complaints of the people on the streets were those heard all around the world from the Occupy Movement to the real Tea Party to protest movements all across Europe.

• Why should the poor and middle class pay for the mistakes of the Government?
• Why are  the banks bailed out with tax payer money but then carry on with their casino banking ways. Not providing loans to small businesses whilst betting and losing millions daily on the stock exchange casino.
• The bailouts are not for the benefit of the people suffering to pay them back they are going straight to pay off debts to other countries and banks. All the while the people suffer austerity measures and the future generations are thrown away to pay off the mistakes of the current banksters and corrupt politicians.
• Corrupt politicians have taken the shilling to allow corporations build, permits given, eyes turned and so on even if their corrupt measures mean more suffering for the people.
• Massive tax evasion has left a big hole which would help pay back debt straight away. From the poor to the rich tax evasion has been a national pass time according to some. Apparently 15 billion euros a year in Greece are lost through tax evasion and a new law being brought in means if even €1 is evaded the person faces jail time.

Proud people who once had jobs and money are now going to the many free charity doctors, food handout outlets and clothing swaps that have cropped up all around Greece.

People covered their faces in shame as they saw the camera as they didn’t want people to see how far they have fallen, from someone with a job and money to someone siting in a handout shelter.

The Greek circle of doom is one of debt piled upon debt, job cuts and tax increases all to stay in the magical club of prosperity the EU.

1. Who will pay these taxes if there are no jobs?
2. Who is going to pay to go to the hospital when you are injured but have no money?
3. Who wants to work but can’t find any jobs because the tourism industry has collapsed and the government is decimating public service jobs?
4. Who wants to survive on food handouts and get their clothes from charity shops and clothing swaps?

We now how the Greeks got in this mess and they should never have been let into the EU in the first place if it wasn’t for that moralist of banks Goldman Sachs helping to hide Greek debt so that they could pass EU tests.

Who went to jail for this massive fraud that has caused immense suffering and will do for years ahead?

We all know the EU was a political project and that the politicians and globalists behind the scenes want to keep it alive at all costs even if millions of people across Europe don’t want to. The Euro is a failure and a single Europe has been a politicians wet dream of politicians from Roman times, to Napoleon, Hitler and now the string pulling puppet masters of Europe.

The question is how long before these politicians realise this massive failure or new ones are elected that will demand real change?

I already know the answer never.

With their nice fat wages, pensions and benefits that are all designed to effect even the most populist politician and bring them into the “establishment fold” politicians ethics and morals are easily turned to dust. I could count on both hands the politicians I know around the world that stick to their words and vote according to their principles rather than their party line or because promises are made to benefit them personally.

If change comes to Europe it will be through a popular revolution as people can only put up with so much before they resort to kicking off.

Whatever happens in Greece will spread across Europe like wildfire. To Spain, Portugal, Italy and if the northern countries start suffering even more then I can see a popular revolution across Europe easily spreading by the younger generation as it’s the youth who’s future has been sold off to pay for the older generations mistakes.

They will take things into their own hands. There is only so much hopelessness a person can take, and a person with a head full of ideas but no outlet for them will find revolutionary groups attractive prospects for their thoughts and dreams.

We are having it bad at the moment in the UK but nothing like Greece.

However if it gets to the stage where whole European countries are going bankrupt and debt piled upon debt is seen as the only answer then we are in for major trouble and we aint seen nothing yet.

If the youth in London riot for fun, joining in looting and arson just because “they can” then imagine what it will be like if Greek austerity measures hit us full on hard like a steam train.

As the poor in Hackney watch from their council flats as the banksters continue to reap in huge rewards even as story after story of banking failures, missing billions, bad bets and hidden fraud fill the papers then they won’t stay happy for long.

When their council homes are taken away and charges increased or cut altogether for public services people rely on then it is only a matter of time.

The Euro has failed the question is how will it be dismantled by the votes of politicians or by the bare hands of the suffering people.

Quiz Are you only against an American police state when “your man” is in the White House?

By Dark Politricks

This a pop quiz to see if you are a free thinker who chooses your morals independently of whether “your guy” is in the White House or someone who sees right and wrong whichever side of the coin is in power.

1. Are you someone who is attacking Obama‘s expansion of the war on terror. His increase in drone strikes and failure to close Gitmo. The  killing by Presidential decree and implementation of civil liberty destroying measures such as increased Internet Spying and the implementation of the NDAA?

2. Were you doing the same when George Bush was implementing the PATRIOT ACT and using warrant-less phone hacking. Allowing his Vice President to have a personal execution team to take out enemies of the state and using extraordinary rendition and torture to gain information from prisoners who were mostly innocent people sold to the Americans by the Afghan warlords. Were you decrying  the implementation of drone attacks which de-link the close up smell and emotion of a killing from the deed turning it to nothing more than a real life video game? Did your protests stop when a Democrat “you could believe in” entered the White House and then carried on the Bush policies?

3. Are you someone supporting the Occupy Wall St’s desire to have real banking reform, stop bailouts of casino banks that waste billions on bets or “hedges” like JP Morgans’s recent London Whale and want to close the disparity between the top 1% and the rest of America. Do you mind that during the worst depression of our lifetime the wages of those in the top percent of the country have increased by staggering amounts whereas the lowering, devaluing dollar that means lower and middle class families are seeing real price increases, inflation and lowering living standards?

4. Were you supportive of the original Tea Party and Ron Paul when they were making some of the same claims. Did you change your support of economic policy when Bush left and Obama entered the White House. Do you think it matters who sleeps in the White House bed when the FED can print money, loan out billions to foreign and domestic banks on a whim and devalue the dollar in your pocket without any political oversight?

5. Is it moral or ethical to kill an American citizen without any judicial process even if they are not in America at the time of the killing?

6. What about if they were in America? Should the President be able to sign your death warrant like an English King without your knowledge and without any recourse to  court?

7. Is it okay to kill a Jihadist in Pakistan by drone attack because a CIA agent “thinks” they have the right person in Langley, Virginia?

8. Is it still okay if 50 innocent Pakistani villagers, woman and children are also killed at the same time?

9. What about a thousand people? What number is a legitimate figure for “collateral damage” in these kinds of attacks?

10. What if you later find out that the Jihadist wasn’t killed at all and it was a case of mistaken identity. Was the attack still justified? What recourse should the families of the dead victims have against the American government who is supposedly not at war with Pakistan?

11. If a gang of burglars broke into your house in the middle of the night, shot your dog dead, beat you with sticks and de-humanised you in front of your family. Should you have the right to fight back, to kill if necessary to protect your family and possessions?

12. What if the gang wore SWAT uniforms and were following a false tip phoned in by a jealous neighbour or they thought you were smoking marijuana. Should the fact that the state is the gang of thugs killing your pets and beating you make any difference to your right to defend your family and your property?

13. Do you think Obama is bankrupting the country by increasing national debt?

13. What about President Bush or President Reagan? Does your perspective of national debt change depending on whether you are a Republican or Democrat or is debt, debt no matter who is President? Both Bush and Reagan increased the national debt by huge amounts – what is the difference between  a Republican increasing debt and a Democrat?

14. Do you think Obama wants to turn your country into socialist Cuba by having a health policy that actually allows poor people or those with existing conditions to get affordable health care?

15. What would you do if you lost your job due to a bank bailout and a house repossession caused by policies enacted under George W Bush and you couldn’t afford your health insurance?

16. What would you do if you broke your leg or had a serious disease. How would you treat your condition? Would you use the most expensive health care system in the world by turning up at your local Hospital Emergency department?

17. Do you think that a healthy work force is a productive one? Or should people born into poor families through no fault of their own be left to suffer and die due to lack of money?

18. Do you think war should be decided by Presidential decree alone or that Congress should vote on every decision that sends peoples children into harms way? Should Congress vote according to their conscience or their parties line on the matter?

19. Do you agree with the wars in Iraq and Libya. Were you against the war in Iraq when Bush was President and for the war in Libya when Obama was? Why was  that?

20. Do you want your country to turn into a modern day Police state where all communications are listened to, automatically filtered and then decisions about whether you can leave and enter the country or travel by plane decided by a text message or email?

21. Should the TSA be able to touch your wife’s breasts and touch your children’s bodies all in the name of protecting the homeland from terrorists disguised as 4 year old white boys and 80 year old grannies?

22. Should people be able to speak out about government abuses, criminal acts and actions that break international law if they feel that the people have a right to know? Does the law apply to everyone or just the serfs and not the landowners?

23. Should these whistle blowers be punished for breaking “secrets act” laws or praised for following their conscience?

24. Should the American government force private companies to stop trading with people and organisations that try to bring the truth to the people. Knowledge and misdeeds that your government would rather you didn’t know about such as the illegal bugging of UN dignitaries or the massacre of innocent people in a war zone?

25. Do you want to live in a world where it is increasingly hard to tell the difference between your once free country and a banana dictatorship that kills opponents on a whim, uses torture and prison without trial, prints money to cause inflation and goes to war to distract the people from real problems at home?

26. Do you really think that by electing Mitt Romney as the next US President anything will really change?

27. If Mitt Romney is elected do you think jobs will suddenly come flooding back to America from all those companies like his own and Apple who offshore them to Chinese cheap labour camps?

28. Will Romney stop the FED printing money and will the government never raise the national debt under his presidency?

29. Do you think that he will stop or expand the war on terror and increase it more to the homeland by naming US Citizens as domestic terrorists. Do you think you are on one of the government watch-lists right now?

30. What can you do about it?

Please put your ideas in the comment boxes.

Who owes the most European Debt?

By Dark Politricks

Lets see who owes who money in the big ponzi scheme of European debt.

Democracy in Europe is now just a pipe dream – the banksters now control who runs your country

By Dark Politricks

Here is a quick question, especially if you are Greek or Italian, who runs your country?

Do you really think you are an independent state that is controlled by democratic elections and the will of the people or have you now realised the power of the Eurocrats who will literally do anything to keep their dream of a European Super State alive?

Apparently “the markets” as they are ubiquitously called on TV news stations everywhere seem to have more say in EU countries affairs than even the current leaders of Europe and the EU. Even  Sarkozy and Merkel seem to bend over whenever those banksters feel the urge to rape a European country to tears.

It seems that if the markets are worried, then your Prime Minister, directly elected by the people must go.

If the markets are deliberately driving up the price of your bond yeilds then hey ho, no need for a new election to get a taste of what direction the people of  your country wants. Off they go to be replaced by EU approved Eurocrats and globalist economist friends of banksters the world over.

If I was an Italian or Greek I would be very anoyed that my country was now literally being ruled by the will of the EU and the banksters that ruined the world economy only a few years back.

We all know the EU and Euro are political experiments that must not fail.

The European Super State is a flawed idea that came from good intentions but is one that is rejected by most European people.

From the ashes of the 2nd world war in which Europe once again fell into a massive blood letting that had regularly occurred for centuries immemorial. The peoples of Europe decided to come up with an enterprise to entwine the massive industrial strength of Germany in with it’s neighbours and prevent future wars between European nations from ever re-occurring. This idea was a European Super State, built in stages so as not to scare “the people” but at the end would result in one giant country ruled by the two main players i.e Germany and France.

The common market was not a bad idea and neither was the he ability for workers to move across Europe to where the work was required, free movement of labour, something which I myself have done when I went to live in Spain for a while.

However the Euro is and always will be a bad idea in it’s current form.

Europe is a huge patchwork of countries with different languages, cultures, histories and behaviours. The only thing we have in common is our shared history of fighting each other.

Northern countries like Germany and the UK have nothing in common with southern countries like Greece, Italy and Spain except the fact we both like to holiday in those countries. Even on holiday our differences are noticeable from the restaurants we eat at, the activities we enjoy, and the very well known fact that Germans awake at 6am so they can steal all the sunbeds before we English have even awoken from our drunken slumbers.

Without politicial union and a common fiscal policy the Euro is doomed to fail and I hope it does. However I don’t believe the powers that be will allow it to as the idea of political union is too important for them.

What we are now witnessing is a common problem – reaction – solution situation being played out in front of our eyes and I have no doubt the problem initiated by globalist banksters to wreck the economy will cause the desired re-action – mass unrest in European nations of which we have seen so much of already.

Then as a solution the Eurocrats and globalists, with the markets holding multiple guns behind their banks of course, will demand closer political union between EU nations as the only possible solution that will save Europe from itself and possible future wars.

We have already heard Angela Merkel threaten that if the Euro failed then war was a possibility and this should be taken as no unlikely threat. Europeans have been killing each other for thousands of years. I can only hope for once that if there is another European war we Brits stay out of it for once.

Democracy seems to be dying in Europe.

The EU is one of the most undemocratic institutions ever imagined into existence and now that we have “the markets” deciding who should be leaders of our nations we have lost even the right to allow the people to vote and decide the future of their country.

I give Gordon Brown credit for one thing – at least he kept the UK out of the Euro against the wishes of Tony Blair. Hopefully the crisis over the channel will ensure that we never contemplate joining it again.

If there is any hope to be had at all and that is the fact that people all across the world are awakening to the fact that we control nada, nothing, zilch.

Elections are just illusions to placate us and the real power brokers are slaves to the banks and the markets. If the Occupy Wall Street and other protest movements achieve anything then hopefully it will be the spread of this knowledge to those uneducated about these matters and then maybe we will join together and do something about it.

Hopefully this will include taking our countries back from the banksters who ruined them and continue to control us all. If I were Greek or Italian I would be severely pissed off that my ancient nation, the same nations that created and modelled the democratic systems we still use all over the world today ,have been usurped by the say so of foreign globalist interests.

Hermain Cain – basically it’s your fault that you’re not clever enough to corrupt the government and fraudulently trade on Wall St

By Dark Politricks

When I heard Herman Cain say the other day about the Occupy Wall St protesters:

”Dont blame Wall Street. Dont blame the big banks. If you dont have a job and youre not rich, blame yourself.”

I had to laugh for what he really meant was this:

“If you don’t have a job, don’t blame Wall St for being cleverer than you.”

“Don’t blame Wall Street for buying off politicians, spending millions ensuring that Congressmen, Senators and Presidents look the other way by offering them cushy jobs when they leave office or paying for their elections”

“Don’t blame Wall Street for building super computers that hook into the mainframes of the stock exchange so that they can front run trades and steal billions from honest investors through High Frequency Trading.”

“If your too stupid to build your own high frequency trading super computer, buy off the government and then have the balls to hold a gun to their head when you realise you have bankrupted the country. Too stupid to demand the tax payers bail you out when you destroy the world economy through your own greed then it’s your own fault stupid!”

God, what a simple mistake to make. And I stupidly thought America was a free capitalist society in which hard work makes winners and theft, bribery, corruption and fraud led to prison sentences.

If you don’t know what High Frequency Trading and front running is all about then here is a description from maxkeiser.com

“High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits — and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.”

“High-frequency traders also benefit from competition among the various exchanges, which pay small fees that are often collected by the biggest and most active traders — typically a quarter of a cent per share to whoever arrives first. Those small payments, spread over millions of shares, help high-speed investors profit simply by trading enormous numbers of shares, even if they buy or sell at a modest loss.”

Over the last decade there has been a huge increase in the amount of high frequency trading that the big banks (those people clever enough to build super computers) engage in.

There has also been a huge increase in derivatives, so much so that the volume of financial transactions has increased to more than 70 times the size of the world economy.

Many serious commentators and economists from all political angles from Austrians to Keynesians and Conservatives to Liberals believe that this volume is dangerously large and de-stabilising, and that many of these transactions are, in the words of Lord Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority, ‘socially useless’ e.g they literally have no benefit to you and me or society in general.

The only people who benefit from these high frequency trading algorithms and front running are the big banks like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Instead of trying to make the best investments for their clients they are basically using their customers investments as indicators of future market movement and through their super computers tied into the stock market they can literally use this inside information to their own benefit by making their own trades before the customers they are supposed to be helping.

Many of the most speculative, risky and socially useless transactions are based on very small profit margins, meaning that even at a very low rate such as 0.05%, a Financial Transactions Tax would shrink the size of the market by reducing the profitability of the most risky transactions. Many economists support a Financial Transactions Tax for this reason alone.

And here is Max Keiser again explaining why Wall Street is basically based upon a zombie computer system in which automated trading BOTS trade against each other making huge profits for the big banks whilst you silly little people who weren’t clever enough to build such super computers lose out constantly.

Due to these automated trading BOTS the average length of any trade is currently fractions of a seconds at the very most.

This means that recent calls by groups like Occupy Wall Street to implement a “Robin Hood Tax” make lots of sense if these taxes were targeted at those parts of the financial system that employ high frequency trading methods.

Long term investors, Pension funds and people who buy stocks as a long term investment could be excluded from this Robin Hood Tax but stocks that were held for only a few seconds at a time as these high frequency trades often are would be taxed and could raise a large amount of revenue to pay back the people who have so far bailed these banks as well as continuing to pay for the banksters huge salaries and fat bonuses.

As the Robin Hood Tax site says on the question of why tax the financial industry?

• Because it’s responsible for a big part of the mess we’re in.
• Because it has an obligation to all of us to help clear it up.
• Because it is the most profitable industry on earth, 26 times more profitable than the average business.
• Because it is under taxed – so it can afford to do so. A tiny tax on the financial sector could generate £20 billion annually in the UK alone. That’s enough to protect schools and hospitals. Enough to stop massive cuts across the public sector. Enough to transform lives around the world – and to deal with the new climate challenges our world is facing.
• Because so far, the cost of the financial crisis to the UK economy, as calculated by the International Monetary Fund, is that UK government debt will be 40% higher. That 40% equates to £737 million pounds, or £28,000 pounds for every taxpayer in the country. Having to pay back that debt means cuts in vital services on which millions of people around the country rely.
• Because according to the Bank of England, the fact that the government will not let the big banks go bust means that they effectively get a subsidy of £100 billion pounds from the UK tax payer each year. But the banks have already started to report record profits and pay themselves enormous bonuses once again. The 2010 bonus pot for the UK was £6 billion pounds, enough to pay the salaries of 340,000 nurses in the UK, or provide free healthcare for 250 million people in developing countries.
• Because the IMF and many other financial commentators believe that the financial sector is under taxed, and has grown to become dangerously large and destabilising for the global economy, as we saw when the crisis hit in 2008. FSA Chairman Lord Turner has described a portion of the financial sector as ‘socially useless’.
• Because it’s time for the financial sector to make a greater contribution to the society it serves.

When people like Herman Cain complain about the people camped outside Wall St calling these “too big to fail” banks the “wealth creators” of the country they are right.

The only difference is that they create wealth for themselves and not you or me. I hope you take that into consideration if you are thinking of voting for someone like him in the next election.