Sunday, October 30, 2011

Lying About Scott Olsen

According to the USA Today:

A 24-year-old Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, Scott Olsen, suffered a skull fracture when a projectile struck his head. His family is with him at Highland Hospital where he is recovering, hospital spokesman Curt Olson said.


No, actually he was shot by a cop while peacefully protesting.

This country should be shut down now, beginning with the universities.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Italy and the Euro

Italy could leave the Euro much more easily than a Greece or Portugal. Its debt, while large, is 50% domestically owned and its GDP is in the top 10 worldwide. Devaluation would help its still substantial industrial base.

Friday, October 28, 2011

A Debt that Can't Be Repayed, Won't Be

Greeks have launched a wave of civil disobedience against the embattled government's austerity measures designed to appease international creditors, which provided rescue loans to the country.

The latest example of rebellion is the Athens municipality of Nea Ionia, where authorities are urging people not to pay a much reviled new property tax being charged through electricity bills.

"Our constituents can't pay, they don't have the ability to," Nea Ionia mayor Iraklis Gotsis said. "We consider the new tax to be illegal. But in essence, the truth is our people just can't pay."



1'Civil disobedience in Greece grows over austerity' - AP

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Oakland

If We Touch The Pensions The People Will Kill Us

Class resistance makes the elite uneasy in Italy:

But Angelino Alfano, secretary of Mr Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party, said on Tuesday night that an agreement on reform measures had been reached with the Northern League that would hold the coalition together and assure economic growth. Details were not immediately available.

Talks between the coalition parties continued into the night, indicating no substantial agreement on reforms had been reached.

Mr Bossi said later he was pessimistic and dug in his heels over pension changes. “If we touch pensions the people will kill us,” he told reporters.


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Italian government on brink of collapse - FT

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Getting Something for Nothing

The teachers who took the survey were given a list of 15 things that might help to retain the best teachers. Higher salaries ranked 11th on the list, behind benefits like more time for preparation and opportunities for professional development1.


Apparently Bill Gates does not believe the law of self-interest, as he would define it in every other sphere of economic activity, applies to teachers.

Surely if pay doesn't matter, then he and his boadroom buddies would be happy to take massive pay cuts.

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The fact that music and the arts is argued for inclusion in our schools primarily as a way to raise math scores shows you how useless the whole exercise in education 'reform' is.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

The Diversity Fetish

There is a diversity fetish that vexes people on the 'Left' and occasionally finds expression in public debates, for instance when OWS is denounced as 'too white'. But bringing in some materially comfortable 'people of color' hardly represents a real solution, though certainly in the context of the Left's diversity fetish , it would. If one actually lives in the developing world, white folks are far a few between, and the local exploiters are universally 'people of color'. That they are often on the low rung of the international ruling class is not a question of importance. The world's most powerful steel corporation is owned by an Indian consortium based in Luxembourg, whose children very well may attend elite American universities where they would be 'people of color' - in equivalency with a sharecropper from TJ - in the political context of a common 'Leftist' analysis.

The ruling class as long since incorporated diversity into their worldview, and with the planet's billionaires increasingly 'people of color' one would hope the Left could go back to some common sense class analysis. If it doesn't, it will certainly maintain its irrelevancy.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Enough With the Exclamation Points

If you are bidding for a contract, you do not need to pepper your letter of intro with exclamation points to prove your enthusiasm.

This reliance of emotionalism is very culturally reminiscent of fascism.

The Disgusting Freedom Fighters of Libya

Killing an unarmed man in vengeance is not noble, it is a lynching. What happened today and over the last weeks in Sirte was barbaric and a war crime.

No wonder the liberals are salivating.

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The only redemption - if one can call it that - will be that these neanderthals will completely run Libya into the ground, they will be incapable of ruling except as weak minded servants of some white men in suits.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Those Who Make Peaceful Revolution Impossible

"Sadly I think the time has come for blood to be shed. Every time we protest peacefully more cuts are made and they are always at the expense of workers. As one of our great singers said, it's only with fire and knives that men progress. People will have to die if we are going to stop these dreadful policies."


Make no mistake, the military will be called in.

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1'Greece erupts as police clash with thousands marching on parliament- UK Guardian

Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Hungry American

Gallup surveys in China and the U.S. reveal Chinese are struggling less than Americans to put food on their tables.

Six percent of Chinese in 2011 say there have been times in the past 12 months when they did not have enough money to buy food that they or their family needed, down significantly from 16% in 2008. Over the same period, the percentage of Americans saying they did not have money for food in the previous 12 months more than doubled from 9% in 2008 to 19% in 2011.

But yes, China is posed for a 'hard landing' a 'banking crisis' or any number of troubles that the intellectually bankrupt Western meritocracy and its hangers-on fantasize about.

The Trade Deficit

Dean Baker says :

...the U.S. is currently running a trade deficit that is equal to 4 percent of GDP and would rise to closer to 6 percent of GDP if the economy were at full employment. This is not sustainable unless we think that countries will give us their products for nothing indefinitely.

Since there is nothing to replace the dollar internationally as a supposed store of value, there is no reason to believe that the U.S.trade deficit will reach equilibrium any time soon. This virtually guarantees the continued decline in the financial condition of the U.S. working class, who have since WW2 functioned as the world's buyer of last resort, the absorber of global overproduction. Therefore, the crisis of 2008 was just a beginning. At some point the US government might very well tell the various SWF's of the world that the 0's on their computer screen are worthless. Default. Capitalism has not resolved its contradictions.

Corporate Greed

The 99% meme of OWS is far better than the media-shaping going on around corporate greed. Of course corporations are greedy, that's what it take to survive and make money. And the 'fix' for such a problem is more charity - so Bill Gates therefore is part of the solution.

Billionaires can't save us nor should we want them to.

Kristoff Speaks

It seems to me to be one of the background challenges our economy faces, and it’s an issue of fairness, yet it has received very little attention until recently.


Historic inequality is a 'background issue' ?

Friday, October 14, 2011

The Bill of Rights

It is almost embarrassingly radical viewed in the context of today's political landscape. The right to peacefully assemble 'shall not be infringed upon' ? Instead we have fascist minded gangsters like Bloomberg 'allowing us' rights within a limited time frame that they bless. Sorry fucker, rights are inalienable - they are not granted by governments, priests, or bosses.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Who is this Slavoj Žižek fellow ?

Speaking at Occupy Wall Street:

Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans… ….Starbucks cappuccino. Where 1% goes to the world’s starving children. It is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture. After the marriage agencies are now outsourcing even our love life, daily.


So this 'avowed' Leftist believes people shouldn't be able to marry non-Americans ? Or shouldn't have the freedom to choose who they want as their partner regardless of national boundaries ?

The point being if someone feels free to publicly shame, or critique with the implicit aim of censure, a person's personal decision in affairs of the heart, they are totalitarian in mindset.

What a load of sanctimonious prattle most of the intellectual Left is.

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1'Occupy Wall Street'

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Republicians and Unemployment

I have heard many Republicans recently claiming concern about the plight of the unemployed. This is because a Democrat is in office, nothing more or less. It's OK to admit the economy sucks because the other side is supposedly in power.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

NYPD and OWS

Police forces in the U.S. are unaccountable now and this draws a certain personality type. Trying to divide the blue shirts versus the white shirts isn't going to work in the main. Never trust a cop, ever, in or out of uniform.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Ruling Class Lying Coming Fast and Furious

--A police commander used pepper spray on four women at last weekend's march and a video of the incident went viral on the Internet, angering many protesters who vowed to continue their protests indefinitely.

Police have said pepper spray was a better alternative than night sticks to subdue those blocking traffic.---

Except, you know, the women weren't blocking traffic.

We should just be grateful the president didn't order their assassination.

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1'Wall Street protesters march on police' - AP