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Yee Sian Ng

Empathy in short supply: Greece: not a simple fable about ants and crickets | The Econo... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...empathy_short_supply

European Union Germany Greece

shared by Yee Sian Ng on 09 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Yee Sian Ng on 09 Mar 10
     
    "Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece's fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory."
thinkahol *

Robert Reich (The Shameful Attack on Public Employees) - 0 views

robertreich.org/2615647030

Robert Reich (The Shameful Attack on Public Employees)

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Jan 11
     
    Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
thinkahol *

Bill Scher: Top 5: Why Wisconsin Matters to You - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-wisconsin-matte_b_826897.html

Bill Scher: Top 5: Why Wisconsin Matters to You

shared by thinkahol * on 23 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 23 Feb 11
     
    Thousands are rallying in Wisconsin and across the nation to oppose conservative governors who are attacking the collective bargaining rights of our civil servants. And the people in the streets are not just public sector union members. Why? Why are so many who are not part of a union so committed to protecting the role of organized workers in our government and our economy?
thinkahol *

How the U.S. government uses its media servants to attack real journalism - Glenn Green... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

How the U.S. government uses its media servants to attack real journalism - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Jul 11
     
    A vital investigative report by Jeremy Scahill is first ignored, and then maligned, by subservient media outlets
Levy Rivers

NPR: Brazile: #blck Jackson Jr. Claim Doesn't Meet The 'Smell Test' - 0 views

www.npr.org/...le_jackson_jr_claim_doesn.html

brazile

shared by Levy Rivers on 18 Dec 08 - Cached
  • Now with this new revelation that he may or may not have served as a government informant, and then another press release indicating that he did nothing wrong -- all he was doing as a public servant was informing federal officials something that was going on -- that didn't meet the smell test.
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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 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.
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