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Leigh Ann Smith

Amazing House and Land Packages in Perth for First-time Buyers - 1 views

As a first-time homebuyer, I looked for house and land packages in Perth that would fit my idea of a dream house. Natures Walk offers stunning home designs; many homebuyers like me were lucky to ha...

Mandurah houses

started by Leigh Ann Smith on 14 Sep 11 no follow-up yet
David Corking

London G20 Police outnumbered and attacked « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG - 0 views

  • Inappropriate use of force brings with it trouble for the officer who transgresses, as it always did except for the fact that such things were rarely captured on cctv or mini videos - but if they ever show the footage of the anti-Vietnam war Grosvenor Square riot in 1968 you’ll see some stick happy police officer who, ultimately, got the sack
  • Hardly something that should result in the local bobby from an English village being pilloried along with every other officer in the land.
  • I’m-a-citizen-not-a-criminal says that those police who “just stood and watched their colleagues break the law are equally to blame”. The same goes for protesters.
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  • A whack with the baton on a fleshy part of the body (as taught) ie thigh, calf, upper arm will hurt and sting and maybe bruise. it is a means of control and saying ‘Im in charge’. If the police didnt have these actions in their armoury, what do you think would happen?
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    Nasty video of protester brutality
David Corking

Pelosi Now Remembers Harman Wiretap - The Caucus Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • when you are briefed on something, it isn’t your information to share with anybody else, whether they are briefing you on legal opinions or whether they are briefing you on actions they are taking, you have no ability to share that information with anyone else, so even if I wanted to share it with her I would not have had the liberty to share it,” Ms. Pelosi said.
    • David Corking
       
      What is the point of a briefing if you are not allowed to use the information? Sounds like a "Yes, Minister" script.
David Corking

CUES Skybox: A Model for Credit Union Board Renewal |Ginny Brady |April 2009 - 0 views

  • It usually takes some kind of crisis to get people to participate - CU Conservatorships, Mergers, Scandals? Believe it or not we have not had one comment from any of our members on the corporate controversies. We want a board and management that make the members secure and not have to think about their CUs viability and strength and yet we want involvement. How to get both is the challenge.
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    A challenge - if a healthy democracy means healthy governance, how do we make the democracy healthy?
David Corking

You are being lied to about Pirates | w w w . P e t e r S a n t i l l i . c o m - 0 views

  • The pirates showed “quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
  • Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the U.N. envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories
  • European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood
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  • They call themselves the Volunteer Coast Guard of Somalia - and it’s not hard to see why.
  • this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters
  • 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country’s territorial waters.”
  • George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coast guard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
  •  
    a column from the Independent - a fascinating alternative view of the Somali Pirates
Asif Sheeraz

Watch NawazKush Compaign Fauji Choorun ore Gernali Hakeem Khrian Khrian 28/08/09 by Rashid Murad - 0 views

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    Army Establishment is busy in NawazKush Compain with the help of Altaf Hussain and his health care workers...
Bakari Chavanu

bonuses-put-goldman-in-public-relations-bind: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance - 0 views

  • But these days that old dictum is being truncated to just “greedy” by some Goldman critics. While many ordinary Americans are still waiting for an economic recovery, Goldman and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank’s 140-year history.
  • For Goldman employees, it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened. Only months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars, Goldman Sachs is on pace to pay annual bonuses that will rival the record payouts that it made in 2007, at the height of the bubble. In the last nine months, the bank set aside about $16.7 billion for compensation — on track to pay each of its 31,700 employees close to $700,000 this year. Top producers are expecting multimillion-dollar paydays.
  • But its strong financial showing — a profit of $3.19 billion in the third quarter — was overshadowed by Goldman’s swelling bonus pool. Goldman set aside nearly half of its revenue to reward its employees, a common practice on Wall Street, even in this post-bailout era.
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  • Even in 2008, the most tumultuous year in modern Wall Street history, Goldman employees reaped rewards that most people can only dream about. Goldman paid out $4.82 billion in bonuses last year, awarding 953 employees at least $1 million each and 78 executives $5 million or more. The rewards for 2009 will be far greater.
  • “We are very focused on what is going on in the world,” Mr. Viniar replied to a barrage of questions about whether the bank should pay outsize bonuses in these hard economic times. “We are focused on the economic climate. We are focused on what is going on with other people.”
Bakari Chavanu

Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views

  •  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

  • 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.
David Corking

Royal Mail - Service Summary for all customers - Saturday 24th October Communication Workers Union national industrial action - 1 views

  • We are really sorry for the significant disruption and inconvenience national industrial action being taken by the CWU is having on customers and for the uncertainty further announcements of industrial action will cause.
    • David Corking
       
      If they are really sorry, or in any way regret the disruption to customers, then they would enter into unconditional mediation. Perhaps Royal Mail managers think it will be better for their careers to win a fight rather than save the postal service.
Keith Sweat

How Mandurah Real Estate Changed My Life - 1 views

Ever since I decided to take my residence in Mandurah Real Estate, I have enjoyed the benefits that living inside a safe and beautiful neighborhood brings. I now have a very stunning and comfortabl...

Mandurah Real Estate

started by Keith Sweat on 08 Jul 11 no follow-up yet
Sonny Cher

Getting High Legally! - 1 views

After getting out of rehab, I still cannot shake off my need to get high. However, I vowed not to resort to illegal drugs again. After consulting a friend about it, he introduced legal drugs and ma...

marijuana

started by Sonny Cher on 23 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
4Land.com.au AU

Benchmark House Designs from Display Homes in Perth - 1 views

If you want a beautiful home but just cannot decide about how you should go about it, you can look at display homes in Perth. You will actually see the specific panels, floor options, laminate colo...

Display Homes Perth

started by 4Land.com.au AU on 17 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
Natureswalk Au

House and Land Packages with Contemporary Designs - 1 views

When I visited Natures Walk's house and land packages, I have seen the stunning home designs. Homebuyers like me have decided to live in this very nice neighbourhood that has contemporary-designed ...

Mandurah houses

started by Natureswalk Au on 16 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
funeral adelaide

Top Funeral Service in Adelaide - 1 views

Sensible Funerals handled the funeral of my late grandmother. It was really difficult for me and my family to say goodbye. That is why we wanted to give her the best funeral service though our fam...

Funeral Adelaide

started by funeral adelaide on 18 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
Syntacticsinc SEO

IT Solutions That Really Work - 1 views

I am planning to build up and improve my website for my business and I was thinking of choosing the best IT company that can meet my requirements for my website and optimize it to make it easier fo...

web designing

started by Syntacticsinc SEO on 19 Oct 11 no follow-up yet
Bakari Chavanu

The root cause of war is oligarchic capitalism | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • After World War Two, Britain and the USA pressured the United Nations into confiscating Arab land to form the state of Israel, making the Arabs pay for the crimes of the Germans. In addition to providing a nation for the Jews, Israel would be a forward base for Western economic and military power in the Middle East. To the Arabs it was another European invasion of their territory.
  • In the early 1950s, the USA and Britain overthrew the government of Iran because it tried to nationalise its oil industry, which was under Western control.
  • In the mid-1950s, Egypt decided to nationalise the Suez Canal and use the income from it to help their people out of poverty. They were willing to pay its British and French owners the full market value for their shares, but Western governments and Israel responded violently, invading and bombing Egypt into submission.
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  • The USA and Britain committed similar atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Indonesia and Afghanistan. We overthrew their governments, installed dictators, undermined their economies - all to strengthen our business interests. In every nation where we now have terrorism, we had first assaulted them.
  • Capitalism is always at war. The violence, though, is often abstract: forcing us either to accept low-paying, exhausting jobs or starve; denying us adequate healthcare, education and economic security; convincing us that human beings are basically isolated, autonomous units seeking self gratification. But when this doesn't suffice to keep their profits growing, the violence becomes physical, the cannons roar, and the elite rallies us to war to defend "our" country and destroy the fiendish enemy.
  • Since 9/11 the USA has killed over 300,000 - a hundred times more than died in the World Trade Center. The overwhelming majority have been civilians.
  • As Martin Luther King stated with simple eloquence: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government."
  • Since they don't have our military power, they resort to guerrilla warfare. As Mike Davis wrote, "The car bomb is the poor man's air force."
  • www.amazon.com/dp/1897455844
S D

How To Win A Local Election When You Have No Money - 1 views

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    The fact is, if you raise and spend less money than your opponent, you are much more likely to lose your election.
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