In an attempt to demonstrate their credentials as the takers of “tough decisions”, British Labour leader Ed Miliband (whom I backed as leader) and his shadow Chancellor Ed Balls have been telling the world that a future Labour government can’t guarantee to reverse Tory public expenditure cuts, and favour a public sector pay freeze, and even pay cuts for public sector workers (to save jobs, apparently). Well it is a funny world where a sign of your toughness is your willingness to pander to the right-wing commentariat.
Toughness in political jargon has always been about how much you are willing to screw the defenceless and poor, how much ship you’re willing to heap up on those at the bottom of society. It’s never about taking on multibillionaire newspaper owners, or forcing harsh new taxes on banks that threaten to move out of the City if their directors have to pay so much as a parking fine or anything else that actually takes guts. Instead we get this whole charade in which a supposedly leftwing politician has to regretfully acknowledge that it’s no longer realistic to expect that…, that the current economic climate makes it imperative to rethink…, that the challenges facing the country leave him no choice but… all to appear realistic and tough to an audience that, as Chris dryly notes, is not his friend in the first place.
It’s easy to see what the rightwing wurlitzer gets out of it; the pre-emptive nobbling of a rival to their champion; while for “impartial” journalists it’s at least a man bites dog story even if this particular man has bitten more often than even the most aggresive rottweiler has managed in its lifetime, but why does an Ed Balls or Milliband join in?
Obviously because they’re not as leftist as their supporters would like them to be and this provides good covering for them to move rightwards; it’s not that they want to move, it’s that they’re forced to. Whether or not anyone believes them is unimportant: it’s the appearance that counts, the willingness to participate in this theatre.
Now, I just wanted to say that, by and large, I will be ignoring your shit and not giving you a platform and definitely not a dialog on your ideas. Mainly this is because, at the end of the day, you’ve already lost. However flawed the world is now, you’re never going to achieve whatever open, racist, white supremacist world you so desperately want, and it’s not going to be particularly fun or useful to swear at you racist fucks.
Think of it this way, at some point in the future, when your kids, or your grandkids, or your great-grandkids speak of you, the nicest way they’ll be able to do it is to ignore the central thing that defines you, your racism. That’s at best. Obviously most likely you’ll be the scary, embarrassing, racist piece of trash that the family wishes never existed.
Amanda Marcotte on why cats are better than Ron Paul (or any Republican candidate really):
Cats get delusional ideas all the time, but what’s nice is that their ambitions are small. Instead of trying to destroy the Fed, they climb trees they can’t get out of. Or, instead of having an irrational fear of black people, they have an irrational fear of vacuum cleaners. Given the choice to vote for Paul or for cats, you should take cats every time.
Thin skinned, thick as shit police. From the description of the video:
Here’s the scene:
We were enjoying the nice spring weather from our balcony. A friend was visiting on his bike, and he rode up on the sidewalk from the street to our front door. In NYC this is illegal. You are supposed to stop in the street, get off the bike and walk it on the sidewalk. Although he was merely coming from the street up to our front door, those few second were illegal. NYPD rolls up, and I begin to film as they are issuing him a summons to appear in court.
Meanwhile our neighbor walks by while this scene is unfolding. My neighbor and my friend on the bike exchange some banter. No one is offended. We all laughed. He keeps walking.
From there everything escalates… Seems completely unnecessary to me…
At the end of the day, my neighbor was charged with harassment, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Welcome to an afternoon with the NYPD
There’s the reason why there’s never a cop when you need one. Dude jokes to his friend, didn’t say anything to the police and officer McRacist decides to make a case out of it — in the end three police cars and about a dozen officers are involved. Meanwhile one of the local neighbourhood drug dealers (judging from the commentary from the guys with the video) walks by…
That’s one reason I don’t want to visit the US anytime soon, because I’m not sure I could’ve stayed as calm as this guy did had this happened to me. I’ve been angry and done stupid things before, but nothing that could’ve gotten me tasered and I’m not in a hurry to try that.
Richard Sanderson, 44, an unemployed helicopter pilot of Southfields in London, who stabbed himself twice in the heart in May. He had been informed that his family faced a £30 a week cut in housing benefit and he feared this would leave his family homeless
Paul Willcoxson, 33, of Corby, Northants, was according to the suicide note he left behind, worried about benefit cuts when he hung himself in April.
[...]
Elaine Christian, 57, of Hull, was worried, according to reports of an inquest in July, about a meeting to assess her disability benefits. She was found drowned in a drain with ten self-inflicted cuts to her wrist and she had taken painkillers.
Now imagine you’re on long term disability benefits, unable to work or even find an employer willing to take you on, knowing that the “reforms” will mean you will lose what little money and assistance is getting you by at the moment. Sign the petition against this “reform” that will end up killing more people.
An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.
[...]
Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.
Half a million public sector jobs have already been lost and the ConDem government yesterday confirmed that more cuts were coming, which may mean another 300,000 people losing their jobs as the UK is to cut its way to becoming a growth orientated export driven economy. Those workers who haven’t lost their jobs have to swallow pay freezes (extended by two years of below inflation salary growth yesterday), less pension and having to work longer to get their pension (brought forward yesterday). These are all cuts supposedly driven by the government’s desire to bring down Britain’s debt, yet what was also revealed yesterday was that it’ll have to borrow up to 100 billion in the next few years, or more than 30 billion over what needed to be borrowed in Labour’s plans until 2014 if their policies had been maintained…
Instead these and other ineffectual crisis measures (certain tax cuts, less protection for workers against being fired, undosweiter) are ideologically driven, a wish list of their pals in the City. These measures are not intended to solve the crisis, but to get a bigger share of the country’s wealth to the one percent, while everybody else suffers. It’s simply fat cats stuffing their pockets. The public workers strike is the next major act of resistance against this agenda, after protests earlier this year by other affected groups, including an earleir union led day of protest in March for which half a million people turned up.
There are differences between the two parties. Despite the usual straw man, no one — except college students new to leftism and maybe Alexander Cockburn — ever really says there’s no difference between the parties except as the most shortened of shorthand. In point of fact, there’s as much difference between the parties as there is between clockwise and counterclockwise on a ratchet wrench turning a bolt. Turning rightward tightens the bolt. But you don’t want to break the handle by pushing too hard, so you relax and turn the handle back to the left. The wrench loosens a bit, if ineffectually — the bolt doesn’t move, but the pressure eases up. And then comes the next push to the right, tightening the bolt still further. Each cycle has its new status quo, its period of tightening up and release, and the result in the end? The leftward relaxation has merely made the rightward clampdown possible.
I can’t say it surprised me that people defended the cop. There are always people who will defend the cop. Believe it or not, I was taken aback by just how stupid their arguments were even though such things should not surprise me anymore. Most of all, though, it’s amazing the extent to which these people who believe that government is pure evil will argue that A) the role of the citizen relative to the police is one of absolute, unquestioning obedience, B) the police are to be taken at their word at all times, and C) whatever type and amount of force the police choose to use is inherently right.
It’s the same sort of person who has no problem with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan but who thinks having state obligated health insurance is the thin edge of fascism.
You may have noticed nothing much has happened at this blog in the last year or so. Yhose of you who also read my other blog may have guessed why this is: Sandra’s longterm illness and sadly, her death earlier this month. What you may not know is that Sandra was not just my wife, but also my blogging partner Palau, pretty much the person who kept this blog going for the last four-five years or so, as it evolved away from being a repository of the best of leftwing blogs to something more personal yet still political. Though she was always modest about her talents, when she was on she was incredible, with a nose for interesting but under reported news, a knack for writing naturally and wittily and a keen interest in, well, everything. She loved writing about politics, could incredibly outraged, but was interested in more than just politics. One of her strengths was her lawyer background, she had a respect for the law and the British constitution that is sometimes lacking in socialist bloggers, who do tend to view the law as just another instrument for the rich to oppress the working classes, which is true as far as it goes, but she knew it was more than this and it annoyed the hell out of her to see the cavalier attitude with which New Labour especially treated it.
But it wasn’t all serious with her. She was tickled pink finding that Pimp My Crab kit a few years back for example. And she was into gardening and nature and kittens and squid. Especially squid, but other cephalopods as well. She was incredibly productive posting when she could, but her illness did rob her of a lot of energy and time to post and in the end she had to give it up long before she had to give up on life itself. She had hoped to come back to the blog, but unfortunately she couldn’t.
