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David Corking

Crossbow magazine - February 2009 "Full marks, Marx?" - 0 views

www.bowgroup.org/...Xbow%20Feb%2009.pdf

Culture Finance

shared by David Corking on 09 Apr 09 - No Cached
  • David Corking on 09 Apr 09
     
    "This edition asks, is capitalism dead?" Not everyone writing here is a Tory Wet, but most are. Interesting selection of articles: a mixture of analysis and polemic.
thinkahol *

Reports: Obama pushing for cuts to Social Security, Medicare - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

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

Reports: Obama pushing for cuts to Social Security Medicare - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Jul 11
     
    When I first began writing about politics in late 2005, the standard liberal blogosphere critique -- one I naively believed back then -- was that Democrats were capitulating so continuously to the Bush agenda because they "lacked spine" and were inept political strategists: i.e., they found those policies so very offensive but were simply unwilling or unable to resist them.  It became apparent to me that this was little more than a self-soothing conceit: Democrats continuously voted for Bush policies because they were either indifferent to their enactment or actively supported them, and were owned and controlled by the same factions as the GOP. 
thinkahol *

Robert Scheer: Bill Clinton's Legacy of Denial - Robert Scheer's Columns - Truthdig - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...linton_in_deep_denial_20110621

Robert Scheer: Bill Clinton's Legacy of Denial - Scheer's Columns Truthdig

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Jun 11
     
    Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that's the case, or he wouldn't have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president. 
thinkahol *

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11
     
    I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:
Bakari Chavanu

Amazon.com: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free eBook: Charles P. Pierce: The Kindle Store - 0 views

www.amazon.com/...ref=pd_sim_kinc_6

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise.
  • Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect? Charles P. Pierce: I don't know if there's one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion—often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense—has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.”
  • Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America? Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don't notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • To this day, we have a political party—the Republicans—who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
  • Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
  • "Idiot America" is great, informative book about concepts we see everyday. Also, many of the 1-star reviews are likely biased because of some of the political and religious topics noted. I think this book is definitely a full, 5-star book.
  • The author notes "The 3 Great Premises: and applies them to many instances in this book: 1. Any theory is valid if it moves units (rating, and making money). 2. Anything can be true if it is said loudly enough. 3. Fact is what enough people believe (the Truth is what you believe).
  • POLITICAL TALK RADIO: One set of rules noted by a professor studying radio discourse: *Never Be Dull *Embrace willfully ignorant simplicity *The American public is stupid; treat them that way *Always ignore the fact and the public record when it's convenient
  • TELEVISION: "Television is an emotional medium. It's entertainment, not analysis or reasoned discourse."
  • But to someone willing to take the time to read it, this book tells people what practically everyone should know about American politics -- that the American people are being sold a sob story about how experts are an elite that is keeping them from being The Best Damn Nation In The World. (In that regard, one should definitely read "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" by Richard Hofstadter -- it's over four decades old, but saw from the very beginning what has come into full bloom now with the barking lunacy of the American Right.)
  • The main problem with this book is this: the people who are likely to read it already know most of the story, and are mostly getting background information, and the people who won't read it are like the six reviewers I mentioned in my intro -- determined to ignore its stories and insights as "bias" because their politics and faith won't let them look outside the cloister.
  • He lays the blame at the feet of various ideology-driven entities, with special attention given to the same corporate-media war cheerleaders who happily passed on Bush's lies about Iraqi weaponry to a somnolent public, and who, in the name of putting "balance" over reality, treat specious creationist nonsense and hard scientific fact as if both had equal validity. Highly recommended!
Matthew Davis

ColdType - Writing Worth Reading From Around The World - 0 views

www.coldtype.net

alternative media anti-war globalisation social criticism

shared by Matthew Davis on 25 Apr 08 - Cached
  • Matthew Davis on 25 Apr 08
     
    Many writers on globalisation and anti-war critiques, all in one handy reader! Now Coldtype has a master index. The files come as PDF, very neat.
Levy Rivers

Tom Watson MP » Blog Archive » Power of Information: New taskforce and speech - 0 views

tom-watson.co.uk/index.php

data leadership phones coverage prime minister taskforce

shared by Levy Rivers on 02 Apr 08 - Cached
  • We commissioned Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg to write the Power of Information report because we knew that information, presented in the right way, was a potent driver for improving public services and government.
  • Today I am going to offer two arguments that I think compliment the Prime Minister’s recent announcement on public service reform
  • Firstly, that freeing up data will allow us to unlock the talent British entrepreneurs. And secondly, engaging people - using the simple tools that bring them together - will allow the talents of all our people to be applied to the provision of public services.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • The difference of course is that today we contend with what Richard Saul Wurman describes as a ‘tsunami of data’
  • My job is to make sure that government can benefit from this new thinking too. When we were first elected in 1997 people had a recipient relationship with data, they got what they were given when they were given it. It was static.
  • In scale, the spread of social media is comparable to the spread of telephones in the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Yet it’s happened in two years not 20.
  • As Clay Shirky would say, we’ve reached a point where technology is simple and boring enough to be socially useful and interesting.
  • Over 7 million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website. 1 in 10 citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government webspace.
  • Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least
  • Richard is here tonight and I hope that after the formal proceedings you might like to share some of your own ideas with him. Richard is also joined by a number of other taskforce members. They’re all people with remarkable track records in this field. We’re lucky. The UK has some of the world’s leading talent.
  • And today the PM announced an initiative that would allow you to find your community Bobbies using your postcode.
  • The taskforce will bring its expertise to bare on existing initiatives to see if we can what we already do better
  • I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.
  • By bringing people onto the taskforce with the skills and experiences of people like Sally Russell we can move further and faster in this area.
  • Two weeks ago the Prime Minister signalled that we were moving public services to the next stage of reform. He said that we were not only going to, further enhance choice but also empower both the users of services and all the professionals who deliver them - to drive up standards for all.
  • Transformational government is about wrapping services around the citizen, not citizens around the services.
  • Last month DirectGov had over 7 million visitors. Peter is seeing the aggregate desires of millions of UK public service using citizens. I had half an hour with him a fortnight ago and came away with a dozen ideas as to how we can improve our public services.
  • I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.
  • And much of that information has the potential to be reused in data mashups. Some of it already is, like Hansard on theyworkforyou, or Google Maps using Ordnance Survey data.
  • The Power of Information Report recognised that, and made recommendations to the Treasury. The Treasury, with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, published an independent economic study in the Budget and announced its intention to look at these issues during this spending review cycle.
  • It was this early open source approach that arguably fostered 500 years of Islamic scholarship in important fields like medicine, astronomy, lexicography, literature and science. In contrast, European data was stored in monasteries and did not foster easy knowledge transfer. As Gibbon wrote in the ‘Decline and fall of the Roman empire’ the ‘age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years’ and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals?
  • I believe in the power of mass collaboration. I believe that as James Surowiecki says the many are smarter than the few. I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever. I said that I don’t believe the post-bureaucratic age argument. It’s just old thinking, laissez faire ideas with a new badge. The future of government is to provide tools for empowerment, not to sit back and hope that laissez-faire adhocracy will suffice.
  • The irony that laying claim to the ownership of a policy on open source was lost to the poor researcher who had spent a day dissecting the speech. He’d been able to do so easily because it was freely available on my blog, a simple tool used for communicating information quickly and at nearly zero cost without the requirement to charge for access. The point is, who cares? It doesn’t matter who has the ideas. It’s what you do with them and how you improve on them that counts.
Skeptical Debunker

Radical Anti-tax Groups Growing Threat, Say Law Enforcement - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News - FOXNews.com - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...0,2933,586904,00.html

Joseph Stack manifesto anti-tax IRS

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Stack's manifesto offers insight into his personal journey as a tax protester - and into the large and growing movement that attracted him. Passages of Stack's manifesto suggest that he was involved in a notorious home church scheme that was popular in the part of California where he lived before he moved to Texas, MacNab said. Stack wrote that he was part of a group who held tax code readings and "zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful 'exemptions' that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy." He said they had "the best high-paid experienced tax lawyers in the business." MacNab said Stack likely was referring to a notorious scheme run by lawyers William Drexler and Jerome Daly. It was based on the idea that citizens could establish themselves as a church and gain the same tax exemptions afforded to religious institutions. The scheme didn't work, and Drexler and Daly were disbarred and imprisoned. If this was the operation Stack was referring to, it may have been a turning point in his life. He wrote: "That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie." This inspired him to take action, write to politicians and meet with likeminded anti-tax protesters. He wrote: "I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity." His anti-tax and anti-government beliefs may also have been fueled by Section 1706, an obscure and relatively unknown change in the tax code that focused on his industry and went into effect in 1986. Section 1706 essentially removed technical workers like software engineers from a safe haven classification of "self-employed consultant," making it easier for the IRS to challenge how Information Technology companies classified their employers. An association of IT companies and industry professionals, now called TechServe Alliance, was created to protest the changes in tax law that it says singled out the industry. "It made the whole business riskier for people using independent contractors because it favored the so-called employment business model," Mark Roberts, TechServe CEO, told FoxNews.com. "It created havoc on a number of folks." Roberts was quick to condemned Stack's behavior as "an act of a very, very sick individual." "I don't see a long-term lasting effect, just a troubled wayward person acting in response to a legitimate issue. But I don't think that actually impacts the issue," Roberts said. Noting that Section 1706 was passed years ago, he added: "We still resent the fact that it singles out the industry, but folks have basically learned to adapt. It's kind of been awhile since this was a burning issue in the industry."
  • Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10
     
    Joseph Stack, the 53-year-old software engineer who crashed his small plane into a seven-story office building in Austin, Texas, was part of a growing, violent anti-tax and anti-government movement that has become increasingly alarming to law enforcement agencies.\n\nStack, who torched his home Thursday morning before setting out on his suicide flight, was fueled by his hatred of the Internal Revenue Service, which had offices and employed nearly 200 workers in the building.
Skeptical Debunker

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

www.mercurynews.com/...ci_14498573

healthcare conservative lies socialism myths

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10
     
    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?"
  • Skeptical Debunker on 05 Mar 10
     
    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
Ali Haider

Who gets to define terrorism? | Blog | DAWN.COM - 0 views

www.dawn.com/...-gets-to-define-terrorism.html

Politics terrorism interim statement

shared by Ali Haider on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Ali Haider on 03 Aug 11
     
    My column last week on drone attacks so clearly struck a nerve that I intended to write a follow-up this week, addressing some of the many comments and responses. I did publish an interim statement on my own website, where I invite you to continue that conversation.
Michael Haltman

The Hallmark Abstract Sentinel: What happens if your title insurance underwriter stops writing policies? - 2 views

hallmarkabstractllc.blogspot.com/...s-if-your-title-insurance.html

title insurance house crisis real estate market financial crisis underwriter

shared by Michael Haltman on 11 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Michael Haltman on 11 Aug 11
     
    New Jersey Title, an underwriter of title insurance policies in the northeast, has become a casualty of a financial and real estate crisis that has taken many victims. Some of these casualties might never have occurred if the events of the past few years had not taken place, but because they did there are firms and individuals who now face the need to find alternatives at a time when those alternatives may be difficult to come by.
David Corking

Leading article: Bad judgement - Leading Articles, Opinion - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...cle-bad-judgement-1669307.html

Writing Culture

shared by David Corking on 16 Apr 09 - Cached
  • When a good journalist needs to be robustly defended, it must not be afraid to do so.
  • David Corking on 16 Apr 09
     
    Reaction to Jeremy Bowen's censure
David Corking

Bowen 'breached rules on impartiality' - April 16, 2009 - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...s-on-impartiality-1669278.html

Writing Culture

shared by David Corking on 16 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The BBC said it had no intention of taking any disciplinary action against Bowen. Nonetheless, the findings were made by the BBC Trust's editorial standards committee – which includes such figures as Richard Tait, the former editor-in-chief of ITN, and David Liddiment, the former director of television at ITV – and will cause great concern within the BBC newsroom.
  • "It was not necessary for equal space to be given to the other arguments, but ... the existence of alternative theses should have been more clearly signposted."
  • David Corking on 16 Apr 09
     
    some detail and context
David Corking

People: Jeremy Bowen under fire over Israel reports | News | The First Pos | Apr 16 2009t - 0 views

www.thefirstpost.co.uk/fire-over-israel-reports,82260

Writing Culture

shared by David Corking on 16 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Greg Dyke, the BBC's former director general, who said it was wrong for the trust to spend months investigating individual reports by journalists that had been compiled under pressure and tight deadlines."The problem is that journalism is not an exact science,"
  • David Corking on 16 Apr 09
     
    Pressure of deadlines is not an excuse, but it does increase the burden of proof for intent. In addition, in a complex story like this, balance arises from the totality of coverage, and an individual report can only be approximately neutral. Should we not expect an experienced reporter like Bowen to provide some original interpretation of motives?
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