UK: Boris Johnson – A Dangerous Yes Man to Washington

July 26, 2019, EDITORIAL Strategic Culture Foundation http://www.strategic-culture.org (Russia) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/26/boris-johnson-dangerous-yes-man-to-washington/

The clownish figure of Boris Johnson comes with a trunk load of anti-Russia baggage as he arrived in Downing Street this week as new British prime minister.

The dour, hapless Theresa May has been replaced by a guy who seems to think that geopolitics is a circus conducted with custard pies to the face.

His past deplorable comments about the Skripal affair blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for ordering an assassination plot in England last year, plus his outrageous denigration of Russia’s World Cup as comparable to Nazi Germany holding the Olympic Games in 1936, demonstrate that this politician is unfit for office. He can only make relations with Russia even worse.

Moreover, Johnson’s cringing sycophancy to US President Donald Trump adds a whole new disturbing risk of war with Iran.

Everything about this 55-year-old polemist, who made his journalistic career on the back of concocting sensationalist rubbish, speaks of someone who is unscrupulous and a self-serving egomaniac. Added to those “qualities” are his dense stupidity and

UK: Boris Johnson selects extreme right cabinet

26 July 2019, World Socialist Web Site (Australia) https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/26/bori-j26.html

By Chris Marsden and Robert Stevens

Newly elected Conservative Party leader Boris Johnson is now prime minister of Britain’s most-right wing, anti-working-class government since the Second World War.

His is a class war government, with all the main positions filled by representatives of the extreme right of a very right-wing party. On Wednesday evening, Johnson finalised a Cabinet dominated by hard Brexiteers, with former pro-Remain Tories having to sign up to support leaving the European Union on October 31, with or without a deal. He sacked 17 ministers who were either Remainers or allies of outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May.

Johnson nominated as Chancellor Sajid Javid, who favours slashing corporation tax from 19 percent (the lowest rate in the G20) to 12.5 percent and has mooted abolishing altogether the 45 percent rate of income tax paid by the richest.

Among the most significant forces in Johnson’s government are those grouped around Dominic Raab, a clique within the Thatcherite Free Enterprise Group involved in publishing Britannia Unchained in 2012. The collection of articles written by Raab, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss argued for deregulation of trade, tax cuts and hiking up the exploitation of the working class,

Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro …: Quem colocou os psicopatas no poder

31 julho 2019, Página Global (Portugal) https://paginaglobal.blogspot.com/2019/07/quem-colocou-os-psicopatas-no-poder.html#more

George Monbiot

Outras Palavras, Tradução: Inês Castilho

Trumps, bolsonaros e dutertes estão agora em toda parte. Sua ascensão não é fortuita. Em fase de hiperconcentração de riquezas, capitalismo precisa destroçar democracia e instalar, no palco da política, palhaços que distraiam a plateia

Há sete anos, o comediante Roty Bremner reclamou que os políticos tinham se tornado tão chatos que poucos mereciam ser imitados. “Atualmente eles são muito parecidos e sem graça… É como se o caráter fosse considerado uma obrigação”, disse ele. Hoje sua profissão tem o problema oposto: por mais afiada que seja a sátira, é uma batalha dar conta da realidade. O universo político, tão sombrio e cinzento há alguns anos, é agora povoado por inacreditáveis exibicionistas.

Os palhaços assassinos estão tomando o poder em todo lugar. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Narenda Modi, Nigel Farage, Scott Morrison, Rodrigo Duterte, Matteo Salvini, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán e uma horda de outros ridículos homens fortes – ou fracos, como tantas vezes se revelam – dominam nações que no passado os teriam posto para fora da cena aos risos. A questão é: por que? Por que os tecnocratas que reinaram em quase todos os lugares há alguns anos estão dando lugar a bufões