Headline News 29/07/2017

Headlines:

The American Healthcare Crisis Reveals the Fundamental Flaws in the Western Capitalist System

Pakistan Supreme Court Ousts Nawaz Sharif to Protect him

American-backed War in Yemen Creates Unimaginable Humanitarian Crisis

Details:

The American Healthcare Crisis Reveals the Fundamental Flaws in the Western Capitalist System

The dramatic defeat of the Senate healthcare bill by the surprise vote of Senator John McCain is another demonstration of the chaos in American politics at this time. According to the website fivethirtyeight.com:

What happened in the Senate early Friday morning was a rarely seen political event of the sort last observed in September 2008, when a financial bailout vote unexpectedly failed on the House floor. Republican leadership thought they’d lined up the 50 votes necessary to pass a “skinny repeal” health care bill in the Senate. They had only 49.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has had plenty of failures, along with plenty of successes. But it’s rare for Senate or House leadership to send votes to the floor unless they know the outcomes ahead of time and even more unusual for them to fail in such embarrassing fashion.

The so-called ‘democratic’ system implemented in the world today is actually a method for resolving interests of competing factions of the Capitalist elite. As such it should more accurately be called oligopoly. Legislation, and other actions of ruling, are closely managed by elite interests. But they are failing in America over the issue of healthcare.

America’s healthcare issues have no easy solution. Capitalism has enabled the privatised health industry to grow rich and fat at the expense of the poor. But the simultaneous consequence of the Capitalist ideal of personal freedom has been the failure of the family, leaving the state as the only guarantor of financial support to the poor and needy, effectively a faulty socialist solution to a basically capitalist problem. Personal freedom means that the individual takes care of himself or herself alone, without responsibility for others. In most Western countries, the only familial obligation that can still be legally enforced is responsibility for one’s own children, before they reach adulthood.

Twentieth century Socialism failed because of the unmanageable burden of spending placed upon government budgets. The ‘Affordable Care’ initiative of Obama, more popularly known as ‘Obamacare’ attempted to push responsibility back onto individuals and their employers. Even so, the healthcare costs of the American government exceed even its military budget, which is by far the largest in the world. Healthcare and other ‘social’ costs such as pensions are the largest components of government spending in other Western countries also, so the West as a whole is facing a crisis of unmanageable proportions, made even more severe by changing demographics resulting in a higher proportion of the elderly. The West know that their systems will collapse within the next few decades if fundamental changes are not made. But they have nowhere to go: no conceivable combination of Capitalist and Socialist measures can extricate them from the disaster of personal freedom upon which their entire civilisation has been rebuilt.

Pakistan Supreme Court Ousts Nawaz Sharif to Protect him

The Pakistan Supreme Court did what the Supreme Court does best – it brought to a close the political crisis over the Panama leaks providing a compromise judgement for all involved. According to the Dawn newspaper:

The all-powerful Sharif family, which has ruled the country for the past several decades, suffered a major setback on Friday after the Supreme Court declared that thrice-elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was “not honest” and disqualified him as a member of parliament.

A five-judge Supreme Court bench headed by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa disqualified the prime minister, not on corruption allegations or the issues highlighted by the petitioners in the Panama Papers case, but on the basis of new evidence unearthed by a specially constituted Joint Investigation Team (JIT).

The unanimous verdict centred round the discovery that the erstwhile prime minister was chairman of the board of Capital FZE, a UAE-based company, and had receivables in the form of a salary from that company, which constituted assets — a fact he failed to disclose in his nomination papers for the 2013 general elections.

The Supreme Court verdict, based on a very narrow legal technicality, provides Nawaz Sharif with comfortable leverage to challenge the decision. And, public opinion, and the political opposition, are placated with a change of faces at the top. Meanwhile, the real power equation shows no change. The PML-N government continues to rule, ostensibly until the end of its term next year, and Nawaz Sharif retains de facto control over the government, with discussion of his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, becoming Prime Minister within a month following by-elections for Nawaz’s vacated parliament seat.

The Pakistan legal system is a continuation of the British system that was in force in combined India prior to independence. The British legal system, here and abroad, is really designed more as a system of arbitration, compromise and political management rather than as a principled system of justice. The lengthy drawn-out court procedures, the multiple opportunities for appeal, the referral to precedent rather than written law, all enable manipulation and political interference in favour of the parties concerned. This is in stark contrast to Islam, where justice is delivered irrespective of the strength and interests of the parties involved, or the expectations and desires of public opinion.

Corruption is inherent to the democratic Capitalist ruling system that dominates the world today because ruling is seen as resolution of interests not rights. In more advanced countries, the real power brokers are the special interests beyond the formal system, and a great deal of their corruption has in fact been legitimised through various practices such as campaign finance, revolving doors, and post-office speaking tours and directorships. Corruption cannot be eliminated from the world until the man-made system of secular democratic Capitalism is replaced by the worship of Allah alone, through the establishment of the righteous Islamic Khilafah State on the method of the Prophet (saw).

American-backed War in Yemen Creates Unimaginable Humanitarian Crisis

As is typical of all wars fought or backed by the West, they are accompanied by widespread humanitarian suffering that the world has not witnessed since the time of the Mongol invaders almost a thousand years ago. According to the Guardian:

“Children are bearing the brunt of the conflict in Yemen, with 80% in desperate need of aid and 2 million suffering from acute malnutrition, the UN has warned.

The impact of war and hunger on the country’s 12.5 million young people has been compounded by what the directors of the World Health Organization, the UN Children’s Fund and the World Food Programme described in a joint statement as “the world’s worst cholera outbreak in the midst of the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”.

“This is a children’s crisis,” said Bismarck Swangin, a communication specialist for Unicef Yemen. “When you look at the number of children who are staring at death due to malnourishment, and now that is compounded by a cholera outbreak, children are not only being killed directly as a result of the conflict, but more children are at risk and could die from indirect consequences.”

Two years of conflict between the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels have taken a heavy toll on Yemen, causing widespread internal displacement and leaving millions facing famine.

Destruction to the country’s infrastructure has meant that 14.5 million people, including nearly 8 million children, do not have access to clean water and sanitation. The number of cholera cases in Yemen is expected to reach 600,000 by the end of the year.

Swangin said half of all suspected cases – and a quarter of all cholera-related deaths – affected children. He described horrific scenes in health clinics and hospitals, with children lying on the floor unable to move their limbs and parents standing by helplessly.

“When you ask the mothers, they just look up to the sky and say, ‘We just leave it to God’. This is all the women can say, this is how helpless the women feel,” said Swangin.”

The brutality of the West, despite their rhetoric of humanitarian values, is on full display today in all of their engagements in the Muslim world. Last week it was learnt that 40,000 perished in the war to retake Mosul, which compares to historical reports of 50,000 slaughtered by the Mongols.

During the time of the Islamic Khilafah, when it was the world’s superpower, wars were limited to military conflict alone. Such was the influence of the state that its civilisation became the model for the entire world, so that even non-Muslims fighting non-Muslims in Europe would adhere to practices of ‘chivalry’ that the Crusaders learnt from their Muslim opponents. Even now, Salahuddin Ayyubi (ra) is revered in the West as a leader of honour and generosity towards his adversaries, despite being the one responsible for their elimination from Muslim lands.

But Muslims must note that the bloodthirsty vengeful wars of the West would be impossible without the cooperation of our own agent ruling class, who support the Americans and others by spending the blood and treasure of the Muslim Ummah. In Yemen, it is the Saudi regime that is spearheading the war, destroy wealth and lives to serve American strategic objectives for the region.

Yes, America is the superpower today. But its power is not such that it can colonise Muslim lands unless it is fully supported by agent rulers that infest the body of the Ummah. But these agents must beware that the Ummah is shaking and arising itself from its comatose slumber and is close to overthrowing these tyrants and reclaiming its true role in the world.