At Least We Can Take Some Comfort

The Hammock Fallacy

"Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.

And the big new poverty report from the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul Ryan, offers additional reasons for optimism. Mr. Ryan used to rely on “scholarship” from places like the Heritage Foundation. Remember when Heritage declared that the Ryan budget would reduce unemployment to a ludicrous 2.8 percent, then tried to cover its tracks? This time, however, Mr. Ryan is citing a lot of actual social science research."

It's not just here. It's everywhere. Paul Krugman knows the answer and expresses himself very clearly........and is ignored.

Why are we blinded by ideology? If it defies reason then it is ideology. Let's really get rid of it next time. 

Friar Tuck and the Robbing Hoods Part III

Ian Verrender

"It's on again: the great productivity debate."

"It makes for a compelling argument, particularly for an electorate that has grown accustomed to the five second sound bite, repeated ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, like almost everything that passes for political discourse these days, it ignores the evidence, overlooks the logic and ploughs on through to a predictable conclusion that is entirely wrong."

Finally someone who tells it like it is in a similar vein to my verbiage on this blog.

Will it get into the mainstream media where the majority of the electorate have their opinions dictated, since they don't have the time to form their own, because they are enslaved to their mortgage repayments and therefore have to work longer hours than they otherwise would.

This government is running this country into the ground because its policies are blinded by a failed ideology which has created a world existentially threatened by climate change and subject to inevitable economic crises, which have the potential to knock civilization back to the stone age.

The failure of this ideology has been played out before our eyes on the world stage since its original implementation in the 1980's leading directly to the GFC in 2008. Breathtaking human suffering has been caused. Why do we continue to follow it?

The Continuing Saga of Friar Tuck and the Robbing Hood Part II

Stephen Koukoulas - Per Capita

"All of which suggests the hidden agenda of reform to the labour market slowly but surely being unfurled by the Coalition government since the election is not really about macroeconomic management."

Oh Really. What on Earth could it possibly be about then?

This article is way too diplomatic. The above quote is the only reference in this entire article - an article with such an alarming title - to the re-emergence of the work-choices bogey supposedly killed off in the Kevin-07 election.

When will people wake up? The ancient antagonism between the forces of capital and the forces of labour, embodied in the political conflict between the ALP and the LNP, doesn't magically disappear when you abandon the union movement and allow another round of marginally legitimate LNP government.

Progressive forces all over the world need to harden themselves and get down and dirty. They are pitted against neoliberal ideologues who know exactly how free markets work in capitalist economies, and are prepared to use every weapon available - to win. If the powers of progress can not bring themselves to play the free marketeers at their own game, then we are all well and truly doomed.

The Continuing Saga of Friar Tuck and the Robbing Hood Part I

Jonathon Green

"Young people will struggle to imagine that there can ever have been a mainstream expression of hardline leftist thinking, a school of thought represented today by a few tattered remnants; a half a dozen spotty vendors of Green Left Weekly huddled defiantly by a card table in a stream of oblivious commuters."

They'll be strugglin' a'right. Subsistence wages for slaving at the job 12 hours a day.

Fools.

Could've easily been  avoided.

The Great Continuing Saga of Friar Tuck and The Robbing Hood

Jonathan Green

"The conservative commentariat is still railing against a hardline left which is almost exclusively represented in modern times by half a dozen spotty vendors of Green Left Weekly."

Where can we find the next bogey-man-to-beat-up. Those ignorant low-borns won't know what to think. Oh no Joe please don't go. No, no Joe.

"A hankering for a time when ideological divisions were rich, clear and meaningful, when a clear sense of what separated the left and the right gave a certain rhythm to the cut and thrust of mainstream politics."

This is such a LIE. Ideology is vastly important. Good God : an asteroid is coming close to  our annihilation and you say it's unimportant? The salvation of the planet relies on this concept.

Oh Jonathon. What shall we say to this?

"In early 1886, the Texas & Pacific Railroad fired a leader of the district assembly of the Knights of Labor, and this led to a strike which spread throughout the Southwest, tying up traffic as far as St. Louis and Kansas City. Nine young men recruited in New Orleans as marshals, brought to Texas to protect company property, learned about the strike and quit their jobs, saying, “as man to man we could not justifiably go to work and take the bread out of our fellow-workmen’s mouths, no matter how much we needed it ourselves.” They were then arrested for defrauding the company by refusing to work, and sentenced to three months in the Galveston county jail. The strikers engaged in sabotage. A news dispatch from Atchison, Kansas: At 12: 45 this morning the men on guard at the Missouri Pacific roundhouse were surprised by the appearance of 35 or 40 masked men. The guards were corralled in the oil room by a detachment of the visitors who stood guard with pistols . . . while the rest of them thoroughly disabled 12 locomotives which stood in the stalls."

Zinn, Howard (2010-01-14). A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (p. 269). Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Kindle Edition.

Is this ideology? No, these are only facts, things that actually happened. It is because of the lies of Friar Tuck and the Robbing Hood that another myth is created about the disappearance of ideology. It reminds me of that 'budget emergency' we were searching for, high and low, before the election. Was that my ideology? oh no I missed it again.

Why do you procreate the myth by giving it credence on the media?

Which brings us to the crux of the matter.

It is LNP policy to drive wages down to the level of subsistence existing in China (in fact, if you look at their policy on Qantas, they want all our assets to be owned and operated for profit by state owned Chinese enterprises). Part of their strategy for achieving this is to convince the electorate that the ideological battles of the previous two centuries are in the past: 'blowing in the wind', passing wind in the process. This has lead to the abandonment of union membership we see today. They have fooled everyone into believing that we have all grown up now and it can't happen again.

This is all just lulling their opponents into a false sense of security prior to a blood-letting of supreme importance.

People died and blood was spilt to get everyone their job security and wages and working hours.

If we get lucky, a few of us may still have these things by the end of this term of government.

every body fell for it.

        

 

Usually a Better Way

Ivor Roberts

"Yet appeasement has continued to get a bad press and this has infected the political thinking of those born too young to have fought in wars and too ignorant of history to absorb its lessons."

This is a delightful article. It never quite comes out and makes too many points though. Historians tend to be much too diplomatic and water down their content accordingly. How would they ever get published if they didn't?

The phrase 'too ignorant of history' rang some bells for me. To misquote a wise man, something about perhaps 'too ignorant of history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past'.

Howard Zinn , a historian/activist, someone who practiced what they preached, in his seminal and highly readable "Peoples' History of the United States" points out the failings of history, how things can be left out or barely mentioned, or coloured and stressed differently, so 'ignorant of history' will also mean those who know all about 'history', meaning history as approved by the dominant ideology only.

When I went through school Christopher Columbus was a hero, a groundbreaking far-sighted genious who took his heart in his hands and set out into the unknown on the promise of what we would now call rumour, not a ruthless scammer who duped the monarchs of Spain into backing him financially time and again on the promise of dubious loot and pillage and then cruelly conquered vast swathes of the planet killing and stealing as he went.

In Australia you just never heard of massacres of aboriginals. The truth was so well burried that you would have had to go back to original source documents and eye-witness accounts to find it. Even then you wouldn't know who to believe as reputable people contradicted this information at every turn.

As a policy 'appeasement' did not exist to appease, but to buy time to rearm in the face of superior military strength. 'The war to end all wars'; 'The war that ended peace' had ensnared the world's leader in their own lies, causing them to think it was then OK to drop their guard permanently and disarm.

The truth is always in the middle.      

Stalin's Last Hurrah

Goodbye Ukraine and thanks for the fish

Civil war may be the only solution to the Ukrainian dilemma. After colonisation of Ukraine by first Czarist then Stalinist Russia through the better part of two centuries the Russian segment of society is almost as numerous as the Ukrainian.

Unless the two sides can compromise there will need to be two Ukraines.