A new painting and other associated nonsense

I made some new art to shove up your (eye) balls

US EMPIRE MAP

It took ages but I’ve finally finished this map of US empire (link to larger version), charting US military and CIA/US government foreign interventions since 1900 (excluding WWI & WWII), as well as US military bases and CIA torture black sites.

You can order a limited edition print from my website shop. I’m doing them up to A1 in size which looks incredible (if I say so myself.)

The map was inspired by this 1886 map of the British Empire (right) while the information comes from various sources but an incredibly useful source was William Blum’s brilliant book Killing Hope, which I highly recommend (the much shorter The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins is also very good). I’ve made a work-in-progress spreadsheet listing information and links about all the interventions which you can find on my website here.

I had to leave out a lot of nefarious stuff or else it would never have been finished. From CIA assassinations that were not part of a coup, US-backed death squad massacres, to US government threats, sanctions and other forms of political pressure that have bent other nations to America’s imperial will.

For kids growing up in the 80s and 90s we got sold a glittering story about the USA’s belief in freedom and democracy, when in actual fact the real story of US power in the post-colonial period has been a fiercely anti-democratic, authoritarian nightmare, that has killed tens of millions of people, ravaged continents and, like other empires before it, left nations permanently destabilised, economies wrecked and environments devastated.

For decades I understood the story of the Cold War to be an ideological battle between capitalism and communism, but now I see it as a battle between newly independent ex-colonies and a burgeoning new empire that was determined to have access and control over their resources and markets, or else it would overthrow, invade and massacre anyone who got in their way. The USA’s violence was not just against communists, but *anyone* who stood up for the rights of workers or the rights of nations to control their own natural resources. The friends of US Empire meanwhile, have consistently been neo-fascist dictators, terrorists and far-right death squads.

Order a print here!

IT COULD BE YOU

I’ve made my own scratch cards! Impossible to win on them obviously. You buy the card for £20, £50 or even £100, scratch it off and find out how much you lost, and get a refund for the difference. The highest ‘prize’ you can ‘win’ is the cost of the card.

Another suitable product for my online shop there. Simply packed-full of useful items that website!

Anyway, order one here why not, treat yourself, you never know!

BEYOND PARODY

Painted this quick one on the day BP announced they are walking back their already water-thin commitments to renewable energy and investing billions more in getting as much oil and gas out of the ground as they can in order to set fire to your grandchildren.

These corporations only think in terms of quarterly profits when the damage they are doing will take hundreds of thousands of years for nature to undo, if ever.

They are the symptom of an economic system that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, one that prioritises the greed of a few short-lived individuals over the abundant natural wealth of a planet that could be shared by all for as long as there was anyone here to share it.

A big part of the reason BP is doing this is its share price has dropped low enough that it may be a target for a buy-out as its share price makes the company almost worth less than it’s assets. This is something we will see more of in years to come as the oil giants eat each other in order to be, as one internal Shell document described, “the last man standing”.

These corporations know the end is nigh, whether that’s for them or the planet, is up to us to decide.

SOCIAL MURDER – NOW IN RED

Starmer’s godawful right-wing Labour party continues their spiral into abject cruelty and class war against the poor with an announcement of £5 billion in disability welfare cuts.

They’ve now even abandoned the pretence that this is due to their made-up neoliberal “fiscal rules”. Starmer has said that pushing sick and disabled people further into crushing poverty is the “moral” thing to do. When its clear to anyone with an ounce of moral fibre that taxing the obscenely wealthy and/or the entire Labour frontbench resigning in disgrace would be the moral thing to do.

(Left is a Labour update to my 2019 Tory is a Feeling painting. I’ve also upgraded the t-shirts in my shop of this design with the option of adding an iron-on Labour rosette.)

The idea that voting for this Labour government was the “lesser of two evils” is even looking shaky since cuts to disability benefits is what caused literal Tory vampire Iain Duncan Smith (!) to resign from the Tory government similar “indefensible” £4 billion cuts in 2016.

So at the very least, Starmer-fans, you’re going to have to admit that your side is more evil than Iain Duncan Smith.

I also made this little graphic yesterday after reading about how 100,000 more children are now in poverty since Labour took power.

The quote is a genuine quote from Reeves in 2022. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the Labour Right are some of the worst people in the country, they are the enemies of the working class as much, if not more so, than the Tories. If you want an insight into who they are and how they shitehoused the public into the current calamity, watch The Labour Files Al-Jazeera documentary on youtube.

HELL BUS CARBON OFFSET SCHEME

Congratulations to Pam Slack for winning the raffle to be the Hell Bus offset certificate recipient for 2024!

They’ll offset the CO2 generated by the Hell Bus driving around England for a year by not buying a bus and not driving the bus they didn’t buy around England for a year.

I’m reopening the competition for 2025, which you can enter here. Each £1 counts as an entry. Winner will be drawn around February 2026.

2024 ZINE