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David Corking

Kimberley Strassel Says the British Conservative Party Is No Example for the GOP - WSJ.... - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB123932431194107313.html

Culture

shared by David Corking on 15 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The next election will instead be a referendum on a worn-out Labour movement. If Conservatives win, it will be because the party has made itself less offensive to the electorate than those currently in charge.
  • He instructed the party to do "social action" projects (say, helping renovate youth centers), to show it cared about ordinary Britons.
  • Beyond this bold agreement with the status quo, the party has refused to articulate its own agenda, lest any part go down badly with voters.
  • David Corking on 15 Apr 09
     
    Thats how it looks to me right now as well. We shall have to see what the campaign brings.
David Corking

The Iain Dale interview | LabourList.org | April 2009 - 0 views

www.labourlist.org/alex_smith_iain_dale_interview

education culture politics

shared by David Corking on 12 May 09 - No Cached
  • Boris Johnson, the test case for a Tory government. He’s overturned the tariff on gas-guzzlers; he’s only building social housing in already deprived areas, he praised the sub-prime mortgages in America; he destroyed cycle lane budgets but still called himself green. And those are the very few things he has done…Good. I like politicians who don’t legislate a lot.
    • David Corking
      David Corking on 12 May 09
       
      Great exchange!
  • I don’t regard it as a Socialist Conspiracy, but I do regard it as a monolithic bureaucracy where not enough is spent on direct patient care. To my mind, you could break it up into smaller geographical units, decentralise it more efficiently on a regional basis.
    • David Corking
      David Corking on 12 May 09
       
      Is this a vote _for_ the postcode lottery?
  • I was selected as a candidate by a very conservative constituency – having told them I was gay. If you’d said to me ten years ago that that could happen I’d have laughed. Margot James herself was selected in a marginal seat. I willingly pay tribute to Labour on gay rights
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I hit back. Having said all of that, I’ve always had a soft spot for Derek, and he shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that he set up LabourList up and it’s going to go on without him,
  • David Corking on 12 May 09
     
    I would love to increase the number of teachers by 20%. I would love to, and to be fair to the Labour government have done a lot on that. But to just say that everything's perfect and we need to spend every pound that we're spending now is just being an ostrich.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Truthdig - Reports - Socialism Without a Soul - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...90310_socialism_without_a_soul

politics

shared by The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 28 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy on 28 Mar 09
     
    Commentary on the notion that the Bush Administration and neocons were pro-free enterprise.
Bakari Chavanu

Socialism Today - Capitalism: costing the earth - 0 views

www.socialismtoday.org/...carbon.html

politics capitalism

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • THE 2007 STATEMENT from the United Nation’s climate panel, the IPCC, that the average temperature on earth must not rise more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels or an incalculable disaster will take place, was a powerful reminder of the nature of the problem.
  • The main reason is that as the oceans warm up they lose the ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Another horrific truth is that there is more carbon beneath the permafrost of the polar regions than in the entire atmosphere. Experts say that if the emissions of carbon dioxide, sulphate and nitrogen dioxide continue as they are today, this bomb will explode within the next 100 years.
  • Does this mean that emissions are dropping? Not at all. So what does this trade mean in practice? An Oxford academic who studied the scheme, Adam Bumpus, concluded that "this regulation is ultimately there to facilitate the markets – it’s not about making cheap reductions, it’s about making a lot of money"
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Therefore, so the theory goes, the buyer pays to emit greenhouse gases while the seller is rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than their quota. There is only one problem. It does not work like that.
  • The market always chooses the easiest means to save a given quantity of carbon in the short term, regardless of what action is needed for long-term reduction. The result is that the system reinforces technological lock-in. For instance, small cuts may often be achieved cheaply through making a technology a little bit more efficient, whereas larger cuts would require massive investments in new technology.
  • The problem with most of the established green organisations is that they seek mechanisms, such as emissions markets, green taxes, green laws or other technical fixes to the problem of polluting fat cats.
  • The carbon trade system is bad in itself. But the fact that governments or other capitalist controlled bodies allocated the emissions permits in the first place, the logic of the market meant that they handed out too many permits out of fear of being in a disadvantage with competing capitalist powers. Today, there are more permits in circulation than there is capacity to pump out greenhouse gases!
  • MANY CDMS ARE about dams. The push for mega-dams has been justified by both development banks and multinationals as being necessary for the development of Africa and to combat carbon emissions. While governments, such as the US, Britain and China, announce mighty plans to electrify Africa, and other ‘aid’ schemes, the companies set in action the Boot model – Build, Own, Operate and Transfer – emptying the rivers of Africa to feed the growing energy needs of Europe, etc. And it is a very lucrative business when they can earn more carbon emission credits in the process. Large dams provide electricity for multinational companies, water for mining, and irrigation for large-scale foreign-owned farms.
  • In a study of 50 dams in Africa, professor Thayer Scudder, formerly the leading resettlement consultant for the World Bank, found that landlessness affected 86% and joblessness 80% of the displaced people. Lack of food security impacted on 79% of the people displaced by these ‘green dams’.
Brett Tatman

Obama Receives An "E" For Effort - 0 views

www.freshconservative.com/..._Receives_An_E_For_Effort.html

conservative obama nobel nobel peace prize tcot socialism norway

shared by Brett Tatman on 10 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Brett Tatman on 10 Oct 09
     
    President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is kind of like Kristen Stewart winning an Oscar for her acting abilities in Twilight. Except the latter would never happen, which sort leads me to believe that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is in many ways a much more reputable and prestigious institution...
Bakari Chavanu

Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views

www.michaelparenti.org/capitalism%20apocalypse.html

politics economy capitalism

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  •  The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.
  • Some eighty  years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
  • In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.
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  • The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.
  • About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses.
  • Any nation that is not “investor friendly,” that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside  the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as “a threat to U.S. national security.”
  • Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.
  • Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.
  • In the corporate world of “free-trade,” the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.
  • To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing  some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.
  • There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself.  Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace. 
  • Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.
  • These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.
  • Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as “a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back “with money that wasn’t there,” as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.
  • The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it.  In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint.
  • Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them.  The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.
  • Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.
  • But the 2008-09 “rescue operation” offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve.  Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.
  • In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen.
  • If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.
Bakari Chavanu

Skepticblog » Capitalism-A Propaganda Story - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...capitalism-a-propaganda-story

comment politics micheal moore micheal shermer

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  • When Michael Moore said that capitalism should be replaced by democracy, it didn’t make the most sense, I agree. However, it is well known that the economic system of socialism change how effective a political system works. Captialism, when allowed to go to extremes can also interfere with our political system.
  • Suggestion #1 Shermer should stay out of politics and economics. #2 He and all of you should read this: How the Servant Became a Predator, Finance’s Five Fatal Flaws By William K. Black Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City
  • Michael Moore is a fantastic skeptic. He doesn’t fall for the cultural mythologies of our age. The fervor that some people hold for their favorite economic systems is much akin to that held for religions. People get bent all out of shape when someone is sacrilegious enough to point out the problems and disconnects within their worshipped system. Some people think that there is some kind of magical something or other to their economic system that makes it function automatically. When you go looking for the “man behind the curtain”, you find out how frail the system really is.
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  • The microeconomics that drive the lives of ordinary people and businessmen do not necessarily coordinate with the macroeconomic needs of a nation.
  • In this latest installment in his continuing series of what’s wrong with America, Michael Moore takes aim at his biggest target to date, and the result is a disaster. The documentary is not nearly as funny as his previous films, the music selections seem contrived and flat, and the edits and transitions are clumsy, wooden, and not nearly as effective as what we’ve come to expect from the premiere documentarian (Ken Burns notwithstanding) of our time. And, most importantly, the film’s central thesis is so bad that it’s not even wrong.
  • Even if people were more educated individual behavior is determined by the structure of society.
  • I fail to see how businesses only operate without coercion. Businesses only operate without coercion if they have been coerced to do so. There are many examples in history of businesses taking as much control of their employees’ lives as possible. It is only due to government regulation that we do not have more businesses treating employess as property as some coal mines once did.
  • If we ask which economic system produces the greatest human well-being, the overwhelming evidence is already in: we know economic libertarianism doesn’t work. The only serious question, the only question for critical thinkers, is what balance between state and market (assuming we can even make a meaningful distinction between them in some cases) is ideal?
  • Both are idealistic, purist and pseudo-rational systems of belief that were the basis of the greatest ideological divide of the 20th century. I think it’s time we grew up from both and set about the hard task of finding out how to really make an economic system work for us, and not the other way around.
  • In general, libertarians seem to have a blindspot when it comes to noticing the self-serving aspects of their beliefs. They often spout words like “liberty” and “freedom” without even considering that they might be truly wanting “liberty” from responsibility toward others and “freedom” from paying back the society that has often served their interests quite well.
thinkahol *

I Remember America | Truthout - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/i-remember-america

to Wall Street Journal: a speech Wednesday Mr. Obama will propose cuts entitlement programs including Medicare Medicaid changes Social Security discussion has largely left Democrats Republicans in Congress. He also call for tax increases people making ove

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Apr 11
     
    Ac­cord­ing to the Wall Street Journ­al: In a speech Wed­nesday, Mr. Obama will pro­pose cuts to en­tit­le­ment pro­grams, in­clud­ing Medicare and Medicaid, and chan­ges to Soci­al Secur­ity, a dis­cuss­ion he has lar­ge­ly left to De­moc­rats and Re­pub­licans in Con­gress. He also will call for tax in­creases for peo­ple mak­ing over $250,000 a year, a pro­pos­al con­tained in his 2012 bud­get, and chang­ing parts of the tax code he thinks be­nefit the wealthy. Until now, Mr. Obama has been lar­ge­ly ab­sent from the rag­ing de­bate over the long-term de­ficit. The White House has done lit­tle with the re­com­menda­tions of its own bi­par­tisan de­ficit com­miss­ion. And Mr. Obama's 2012 bud­get didn't offer many new ideas for tackl­ing en­tit­le­ment spend­ing, among the bi­ggest long-term drains on the feder­al bud­get. The White House move caught De­moc­rats in Con­gress off guard, ac­cord­ing to aides, and de­tails of the pre­sident's pro­pos­als were sketchy. Mr. Plouf­fe said the pre­sident will name a dol­lar amount for de­ficit re­duc­tion, al­though the White House would­n't pro­vide specifics. In­troduc­ing taxes into the dis­cuss­ion has the poten­ti­al to com­plicate the re­solu­tion of com­ing bud­get fights, specifical­ly the need to raise the debt ceil­ing, a move needed to pre­vent the U.S. de­fault­ing on its debt.
raiseyourvoice

Raise Your Voice Against Political Leaders| Political Issues, Social Issues| Complain a... - 0 views

www.molitics.in/raise-your-voice

Raiseyourvoice currentpoliticalissues socialproblems complaintagainstleaders indianpolitics socialissues molitics

shared by raiseyourvoice on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • raiseyourvoice on 25 Jun 19
     
    कब तक शांत रहोगे, कुछ तो कभी बोलोगे ही ना (फेसबुक और insta स्टेटस के अलावा) अगर सच में शासन-प्रशासन से परेशान हैं तो Raise Your Voice के मदद से आवाज उठाईए। #RaiseYourVoice against political dogmatism.
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