Skip to main content

Home/ Politically Minded/ Group items tagged Yes

Rss Feed Group items tagged

thinkahol *

The Yes Men Present: The Yes Lab for Creative Activism by The Yes Lab - Kickstarter - 0 views

  •  
    ABOUT THIS PROJECT For years, the Yes Men have been tinkering with side-splitting mischief as a way to fight injustice. Our latest film about those efforts, The Yes Men Fix the World, won lots of awards and was released all over the planet... but it simply did not fix the world.  So a year ago, we decided that showing what we do wasn't enough: we needed to help people to actually do it themselves. We called our idea The Yes Lab for Creative Activism. It's a factory for meaningful mischief, and a system for helping organizations and individuals carry out Yes Men-style actions on their own, to get media attention for important issues. But the Yes Lab is more than that: it also aims to help YOU take action on issues of social importance. Today, after a year of testing and nearly a dozen successes, we're proud to announce that the Yes Lab is ready for prime time! It's got a set of cool tools in development, that will soon help YOU get involved in new Yes Lab projects, and even to launch them. And it's got a new home at NYU, with space, lots of eager participants, and an ambitious new structure that will soon be cranking out many new projects. The trouble is that in spite of all that, we still have zero budget for the first round of projects themselves! And that's why you're reading this now. We're asking for $10,000, to make the all-new Yes Lab the lean, mean, change-making machine it can be. Any amount raised over $10,000 will bankroll projects beyond the first round.
thinkahol *

The Blog : How Rich is Too Rich? : Sam Harris - 0 views

  •  
    I've written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of "wealth redistribution" that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles-producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance. Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing. Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft-and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment. Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don't have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don't create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy. Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent's, parent's, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn't an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money. But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion doll
thinkahol *

Culture in Economics and the Culture of Economics: Raquel Fernandez in Conversation wit... - 0 views

  •  
    So, yes, it's true that the average guy on the street doesn't understand economics, and it's also true that we don't understand economics. We just have a more sophisticated lack of understanding than the guy on the street.
Joe La Fleur

Yes, Obama really is suppressing the military vote - 0 views

  •  
    OVER 100,000 MILITARY VOTES WERE SUPRESSED IN 2008 ELECTION. THIS IS SOP FOR DEMOCRATS
Bakari Chavanu

Michael Moore Kills Capitalism with Kool-Aid - Michael W. Covel - Mises Institute - 0 views

  • Oh sure, in theory I would like to see everyone with their own homestead, money in their pocket for regular shopping frenzies, and no health worries despite eating at Burger King 24/7, but arriving at those goals is not exactly doable unless government robs Peter to pay Paul and/or starts up the printing press.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      This analysis totally overlooks where real wealth originates from: not from dollars printed by the government or even the redistribution of taxes. It originates from what working class people produce, and what capialist thugs mainly profit off of.
  • And that view of course puts me in opposition to Moore since he has no problem with government as his and our father figure. That is his utopia. He truly believes that warehouses of federal workers, in Washington, D.C., remotely running our lives is the optimal plan. He is an unapologetic socialist who really doesn't care why the poor are poor or the rich are rich, he just wants it fixed. So not surprisingly — and with some generalization as I proffer this — Democrats like Moore and Republicans don't.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      This is not the point he made in the movie. He makes the argument that workers should control and profite from what they produce.
  • I don't care one way or the other that he has that view and I am not knocking union workers, but Moore sees the world through a class-warfare lens resulting in a certain agenda: force wealth to be spread amongst everyone regardless of effort.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      So you think it's perfectly okay for individuals to have a net worth of millions and billions of dollars while the people who produce the wealth should not profit from their work?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • We listen to heartbreaking stories of foreclosed families across America — but we don't learn why the foreclosures happened. Did these people treat their homes as piggy banks? Was there refinancing on top of refinancing just to keep buying mall trinkets and other goodies with no respect to risk or logic? We don't find out.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      Yes, we do learn the source of foreclosures. It's banks raising interest rates that people can't possibly pay. It's people making huge amounts of money off the misfortunes of others.
  • $1,000 for cleaning out the house that they were just evicted from. Was it sad? Yes. But should we end capitalism due to this one family in Peoria, IL?
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      He presents this as represenetive example.
  • There is a lengthy dissertation on the evils of Goldman Sachs. He rips Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson big time, and I agree with him. In fact, I said to myself, "Moore, you should have done your whole film on Goldman Sachs!"
  • As FDR concluded and the film ended, I was shocked at the reaction. The theater of 400-plus spectators stood and cheered wildly at FDR's 1944 proposal. The questions running through my head were immediate: how does one legislate words like useful, enough, recreation, adequate, decent, and good? Who decides all of this and to what degree?
  • So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
  • Friedman's logic was what I was remembering as a theater full of people cheered wildly for a second Bill of Rights. How did this film crowd actually think FDR's 1944 vision could be executed? Frankly, it was clear to me at that moment that capitalism is on shaky ground. From Bush "abandoning" capitalism to bailouts for everyone, to Obama gifting away the future, we seriously might be past the point of no return toward a socialization of America.
  • This film did not make me angry, but it did punch me in the gut. The people in that theater with me, including Moore, were not bad people. They just seem to all have consumed a lethal dose of Kool-Aid.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      What Kool-aid are you talking about? What other system is really challenging capitalism? Not even the government is the real kool-aid when you've already noted that it works on behalf of the corporate class.
  • Moore sees Reagan entering the scene as a shill for corporate-banking interests.
  •  
    I include my reacations to this review in which I think Covel misleads readers about Moore's movie.
thinkahol *

Reagan insider: GOP destroyed economy Paul B. Farrell - MarketWatch - 0 views

  •  
    "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy. Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, 'Four Deformations of the Apocalypse.'
thinkahol *

t r u t h o u t | Five Ways the Democrats Can Avoid a Catastrophe and Pull Off the Moth... - 0 views

  •  
    The election is one month from tomorrow and, yes, it looks hopeless. November 2nd -- the day the Dems are expected to crash and burn. Sadly, it's a situation the Democrats have brought upon themselves -- even though the majority of them didn't create the mess we're in. But they've had over a year and a half to start getting the job done to fix it. Instead, they've run scared ever since they took power. To many, the shellacking they're about to receive is one they deserve.
thinkahol *

Contrary Brin: Why all the Zombies mean you better vote! - 0 views

  •  
     Howdy Halloween... and how about the symbolism as the dead seem ready to rise up, in the coming election?  And yes, I connect the two events, especially with one network pushing a zombie movie at us, just before we vote, in a blatant political ploy! 
Skeptical Debunker

Les Leopold: Why are We Afraid to Create the Jobs We Need? - 0 views

  • 1. The private sector will create enough jobs, if the government gets out of the way. Possibly, but when? Right now more than 2.7 percent of our entire population has been unemployed for more than 26 weeks -- an all time-record since the government began compiling that data in 1948. No one is predicting that the private sector is about to go on a hiring spree. In fact, many analysts think it'll take more than a decade for the labor market to fully recover. You can't tell the unemployed to wait ten years. Counting on a private sector market miracle is an exercise in faith-based economics. There simply is no evidence that the private sector can create on its own the colossal number of jobs we need. If we wanted to go down to a real unemployment rate of 5% ("full employment"), we'd have to create about 22.4 million jobs. (See Leo Hindery's excellent accounting.) We'd need over 100,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth. It's not fair to the unemployed to pray for private sector jobs that might never come through. 2. We can't afford it. Funding public sector jobs will explode the deficit and the country will go broke: This argument always makes intuitive sense because most of us think of the federal budget as a giant version of our household budget - we've got to balance the books, right? I'd suggest we leave that analogy behind. Governments just don't work the same way as families do. We have to look at the hard realities of unemployment, taxes and deficits. For instance, every unemployed worker is someone who is not paying taxes. If we're not collecting taxes from the unemployed, then we've got to collect more taxes from everyone who is working. Either that, or we have to cut back on services. If we go with option one and raise taxes on middle and low income earners, they'll have less money to spend on goods and services. When demand goes down, businesses contract--meaning layoffs in the private sector. But if we go with option two and cut government services, we'll have to lay off public sector workers. Now we won't be collecting their taxes, and the downward cycle continues. Plus, we don't get the services. Or, we could spend the money to create the jobs and just let the deficit rise a bit more. The very thought makes politicians and the public weak in the knees. But in fact this would start a virtuous cycle that would eventually reduce the deficit: Our newly reemployed people start paying taxes again. And with their increased income, they start buying more goods and services. This new demand leads to more hiring in the private sector. These freshly hired private sector workers start paying taxes too. The federal budget swells with new revenue, and the deficit drops. But let's say you just can't stomach letting the deficit rise right now. You think the government is really out of money--or maybe you hate deficits in principle. There's an easy solution to your problem. Place a windfall profits tax on Wall Street bonuses. Impose a steep tax on people collecting $3 million or more. (Another way to do it is to tax the financial transactions involved in speculative investments by Wall Street and the super-rich.) After all, those fat bonuses are unearned: The entire financial sector is still being bankrolled by the taxpayers, who just doled out $10 trillion (not billion) in loans and guarantees. Besides, taxing the super-rich doesn't put a dent in demand for goods and services the way taxing other people does. The rich can only buy so much. The rest goes into investment, much of it speculative. So a tax on the super rich reduces demand for the very casino type investments that got us into this mess.
  • 3. Private sector jobs are better that public sector jobs. Why is that? There is a widely shared perception that having a public job is like being on the dole, while having a private sector job is righteous. Maybe people sense that in the private sector you are competing to sell your goods and services in the rough and tumble of the marketplace--and so you must be producing items that buyers want and need. Government jobs are shielded from market forces. But think about some of our greatest public employment efforts. Was there anything wrong with the government workers at NASA who landed us on the moon? Or with the public sector workers in the Manhattan project charged with winning World War II? Are teachers at public universities somehow less worthy than those in private universities? Let's be honest: a good job is one that contributes to the well-being of society and that provides a fair wage and benefits. During an employment crisis, those jobs might best come directly from federal employment or indirectly through federal contracts and grants to state governments. This myth also includes the notion that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Sometimes it is, but mostly it isn't. Take health care, which accounts for nearly 17 percent of our entire economy. Medicare is a relative model of efficiency, with much lower administrative costs than private health insurers. The average private insurance company worker is far less productive and efficient than an equivalent federal employee working for Medicare. (See study by Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Wolfe) 4. Big government suffocates our freedom. The smaller the central government, the better -- period, the end. This is the hardest argument to refute because it is about ideology not facts. Simply put, many Americans believe that the federal government is bad by definition. Some don't like any government at all. Others think power should reside mostly with state governments. This idea goes all the way back to the anti-federalists led by Thomas Jefferson, who feared that yeomen farmers would be ruled (and feasted upon) by far-away economic elites who controlled the nation's money and wealth. In modern times this has turned into a fear of a totalitarian state with the power to tell us what to do and even deny us our most basic liberties. A government that creates millions of jobs could be seen as a government that's taking over the economy (like taking over GM). It just gets bigger and more intrusive. And more corrupt and pork-ridden. (There's no denying we've got some federal corruption, but again the private sector is hardly immune to the problem. In fact, it lobbies for the pork each and every day.) It's probably impossible to convince anyone who hates big government to change their minds. But we need to consider what state governments can and cannot do to create jobs. Basically, their hands are tied precisely because they are not permitted by our federal constitution to run up debt. So when tax revenues plunge (as they still are doing) states have to cut back services and/or increase taxes. In effect, the states act as anti-stimulus programs. They are laying off workers and will continue to do so until either the private sector or the federal government creates many more jobs. Unlike the feds, states are in no position to regulate Wall Street. They're not big enough, not strong enough and can easily be played off against each other. While many fear big government, I fear high unemployment even more. That's because the Petri dish for real totalitarianism is high unemployment -- not the relatively benign big government we've experienced in America. When people don't have jobs and see no prospect for finding them, they get desperate -- maybe desperate enough to follow leaders who whip up hatred and trample on people's rights in their quest for power. Violent oppression of minority groups often flows from high unemployment. So does war. No thanks. I'll take a government that puts people to work even if it has to hire 10 million more workers itself. We don't have to sacrifice freedom to put people to work. We just have to muster the will to hire them.
  •  
    Unemployment is the scourge of our nation. It causes death and disease. It eats away at family life. It erodes our sense of confidence and well being. And it's a profound insult to the richest country on Earth. Yet it takes a minor miracle for the Senate just to extend our paltry unemployment benefits and COBRA health insurance premium subsidies for a month. Workers are waiting for real jobs, but our government no longer has the will to create them. How can we allow millions to go without work while Wall Street bankers--the ones who caused people to lose their jobs in the first place-- "earn" record bonuses? Why are we putting up with this? It's not rocket science to create decent and useful jobs, (although it does go beyond the current cranial capacity of the U.S. Senate). It's obvious that we desperately need to repair our infrastructure, increase our energy efficiency, generate more renewable energy, and invest in educating our young. We need millions of new workers to do all this work--right now. Our government has all the money and power (and yes, borrowing capacity) it needs to hire these workers directly or fund contractors and state governments to hire them. Either way, workers would get the jobs, and we would get safer bridges and roads, a greener environment, better schools, and a brighter future all around. So what are we waiting for?
Skeptical Debunker

Opinion: Trudy Rubin: U.S. ignores health care successes in Europe, Japan - San Jose Me... - 0 views

  •  
    One of the most bewildering aspects of the current health care debate is the failure to learn key lessons from health systems abroad. Conservative talk show hosts decry the alleged evils of "socialized medicine" in countries with universal health coverage; they warn grimly of rationed health care. Yet there's nary a peep from Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck - let alone Congress - about countries such as Germany, France, Switzerland or Japan, where coverage is universal, affordable, and top quality, and patients see private doctors with little or no waiting. And, oh yes, their health costs are a fraction of our bloated numbers: The French spend 10 percent of GDP on health care, the Germans 11 percent, and they cover every citizen. We spend a whopping 17 percent and leave tens of millions of Americans uninsured. If you want a very readable short course on how European systems really work, take a look at "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care," by T.R. Reid, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent. You might also watch a fascinating 2008 Frontline series, available online, in which Reid was an adviser: "Sick Around the World: Can the U.S. Learn Anything From the Rest of the World About How to Run a Health Care System?"
  •  
    Article continued (Diigo would not highlight!?) - So far, the answer seems to be "no," not because there aren't valuable lessons, but because politicians won't relinquish their myths about European health Advertisement systems. Reid takes up that task. Myth No. 1, he says, is that foreign systems with universal coverage are all "socialized medicine." In countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, the coverage is universal while doctors and insurers are private. Individuals get their insurance through their workplace, sharing the premium with their employer as we do - and the government picks up the premium if they lose their job. Myth No. 2 - long waits and rationed care - is another whopper. "In many developed countries," Reid writes, "people have quicker access to care and more choice than Americans do." In France, Germany, and Japan, you can pick any provider or hospital in the country. Care is speedy and high quality, and no one is turned down. Myth No. 3 really grabs my attention: the delusion that countries with universal care "are wasteful systems run by bloated bureaucracies." In fact, the opposite is true. America's for-profit health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs of any developed country. Twenty percent or more of every premium dollar goes to nonmedical costs: paperwork, marketing, profits, etc. In developed countries with universal coverage, such as France and Germany, the administrative costs average about 5 percent. That's because every developed country but ours has decided health insurance should be a nonprofit operation. These countries also hold down costs by making coverage mandatory and by using a unified set of rules and payment schedules for all hospitals and doctors. This does not mean a single-payer system or a government-run health system. But it does sharply cut health costs by eliminating the mishmash of records and charges used by our myriad insurance firms, who use all kinds of gimmi
Skeptical Debunker

McCain Bill Making Medicare Untouchable Via Reconciliation Contradicts His Record - Yah... - 0 views

  • In a direct challenge to Democratic leadership, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) introduced an amendment on Thursday night that would prohibit Congress from using reconciliation to make changes to Medicare. Framed as an effort to protect the sanctity of entitlement programs, McCain's measure would deprive Democrats of a stream of revenue for their health care bill. The party has targeted hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts and savings to the Medicare program that it would turn around and use to pay for other reforms. But for McCain to be the Republican face behind this effort is to distract, a bit, from its seriousness. The Senator has a fairly lengthy history of voting for reconciliation bills that do exactly what his current amendment prohibits: change Medicare. As pointed out by a Democratic source on the Hill, the Arizona Republican has voted for nine out of 13 reconciliation bills that have been offered during his time in the Senate. Of those nine, four included cuts to Medicare.
  •  
    Republican politicians in general, John McCain in particular - hypocrites of the highest degree. Yes, most politicians sooner or later, one time or another display hypocritical tendencies. However, Republicans and John have taken it to new heights.
thinkahol *

Yes, There Are Ways to Reduce Unemployment and Revive the Economy | Op-Eds & Columns - 0 views

  •  
    As President Obama begins the second half of his term with a campaign for "jobs and competitiveness," we would do well to consider how he might achieve these worthy goals. It is jobs that matter most to the vast majority of Americans, and unemployment remains at 9.4 percent - about double its pre-recession level. This is a terrible punishment to inflict on millions of Americans who did nothing to deserve it. It will cause long-term and even permanent damage to many of the unemployed and their children.
thinkahol *

Tunisian Opposition Activist: "Is Democracy Possible in the Arab World? Tunisians from ... - 0 views

  •  
    Tunisia has announced an interim national unity government days after a popular revolt ousted the president from power in the first Middle East revolution in a generation. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Friday after a month of unprecedented protests gripped the country. Thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against unemployment, high food prices, corruption and government repression. At least 80 people were killed in a crackdown by government security forces. We go to the capital city Tunis to speak with opposition activist, Fares Mabrouk. [includes rush transcript]
sonamp

Stock Tips For Today - 0 views

  •  
    Stock market is a market where each and every person want to try his/her own luck and want to become rich easily and faster. But this is partially true in stock market, here no one becomes rich easier, but yes they can become rich faster by good Stock Tips. http://beststocktipsindia.blogspot.com/2011/05/stock-tips-for-today.html
thinkahol *

The press nods as absurdity, lies prevail in the budget debate - 0 views

  •  
    Would more accurate news coverage prompt Tea Party and Republican leaders to pay more attention to facts in their assertions about the economy? Maybe yes, maybe no. But, suggests Henry Banta, if the coverage continues at its present dismal level, we'll never find out.
thinkahol *

Republicans Killing Jobs and Making Us Sick - 0 views

  •  
    "In January, Mr. Obama signed a food safety law that provides broad new authority to the Food and Drug Administration," wrote Robert Pear in Friday's Times, in an article about the Congressional appropriations mess. But House Republicans, he added, had voted "to cut the agency's budget." Well, yes, in a nutshell, that is the sad story of the food safety law - the first major change in how the government regulates food safety in over 70 years. But the way the Republicans have dealt with its funding represents more than appropriations problems. It also represents the way they've allowed their unyielding antitax, antispend ideology to get in the way of common sense - and the common good.
thinkahol *

BBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: "The Collapse Is Coming...And Goldman Rules The W... - 0 views

  •  
    BBC News-Sept. 26, 2011- http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/bbc-victim-hoax-no-yes-men-154724196.html Just listen to this guy. Thanks to zerohedge for posting this story.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

John Bolton at CPAC: The Benefits of Nuking Chicago | Mother Jones - 0 views

  •  
    Interesting how the warhead seems to be going off on the campus of Columbia College. I guess the bad guys are going to bring us to out knees by cutting off the supply of fashion illustrators and fiction writers? Those fiends! We would have never seen it coming. If you're read my stuff, you know exactly what I think of the Bush administration and how happy I was to see it leave Washington. I like a good neocon bash maybe even more than the next man. But, while this take on Bolton's remarks has been a popular one, I don't feel it's a reasonable one. As the article itself quotes Mr.Bolton "The fact is on foreign policy I don't think President Obama thinks it's a priority," said Bolton. "He said during the campaign he thought Iran was a tiny threat. Tiny, tiny depending on how many nuclear weapons they are ultimately able to deliver on target. Its, uh, its tiny compared to the Soviet Union, but is the loss of one American city" - here Bolton changes his tone subtly to prepare for the joke - "pick one at random - Chicago - is that a tiny threat?" Yes, there's a joke in that remark, but it's not the one that Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wants it to be. The point of the joke is that if even one city gets hit, that's somebody's home and to that somebody, the difference between a vast nuclear arsenal and a small one isn't going to matter much. By naming the president's hometown in the hypothetical, he invites the president to put himself in the shoes of that person left facing a detonation close at hand. We don't have to guess how Obama would feel about such a prospect; it's the same way anybody would feel about it. To suggest, as the author does, that the audience validated a hope for mass murder by laughing at the joke is a disingenuous attempt to produce a hysterical response for the political gain of an already victorious faction. It's a cheap shot, and the author should have known better. This makes the Bush Administration and neoconservatism look bett
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Binyam Mohamed: The false martyr - The Long War Journal - 0 views

  •  
    This link is not an endorsement; the author is writing propaganda. What you should keep in mind as you read this post is precisely what the author would have you forget - that the victim "confessed" to the acts that supposedly justified his torture, as he was being tortured, on behalf of the US government. That part, so far, doesn't really seem to be in dispute. Only the rightness of torturing confessions out of prisoners - and then playing make believe, and pretending that those are real confessions - seems to be, leaving us to ask "didn't the Middle Ages end a few centuries ago". Don't we all basically know what history shouldn't have had to teach our ancestors - that if you inflict enough pain on somebody, he'll say just about anything to make the pain stop? To attach the word "fascism" to a political ideology that supports this sort of thing is in no way excessive, and that's why I'm linking to this article. Watch the way in which the author, with not a single fact in support of his position, blusters his way past reality, treating a torture extracted confession as a source of unimpeachable truth, and gets you to not notice that he has done so. Learn how this creep works his magic, and when the next creep comes along, you'll be less likely to fall under his spell. Oh, and yes - this is the second penis related story to come out of Africa to be seen on this microblog in a row. Nothing deliberate in this; you're just getting the stories as I find them. Wondering if this one is going to be the start of a trend. Remembering Anthropology 100 back in undergrad, and some of its more graphic descriptions of body modification rituals on the continent, I suppose that's a possibility. One I'd really rather not explore more than absolutely necessary, but when somebody ends up being held prisoner and tortured for seven years because he visited a parody site, I think we need to get past our squeamishness and say something about that.
1 - 20 of 38 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page