Last Straw

Noam Chomsky discusses the meaning of President-Elect Barack Obama’s victory and the possibilities ahead for real democratic change at a speech last week in Boston.
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Kiwi Tom Chapman writes for Public Address about the authoritarian bureaucracy that has been taking root under New Labour’s watch in Britain.
The UK police, who have my DNA, have already sold DNA data to private companies and, according to Jenny Willott MP, this includes “sinister explorations into ethnic profiling.”
I’ve pencilled in the advent of a National ID [...]

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, among others, have been indicted (formally accused) by a Texa Grand Jury for ”organised criminal activity” related to alleged abuse of private prison inmates.
The 3-page long indictment involves Cheney’s USD 85 M investment in the Vanguard Group – an investment management company that reportedly has interests [...]

Keynes is innocent: the toxic spawn of Bretton Woods was no plan of his:
Poor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit that took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed and founded the International Monetary [...]

Just a quick word of thanks to all those National and ACT voters out there in NZ, especially those who were in a “mood for change,” because now you’ve got it. A government of radical right-wingers, many proven untrustworthy in the 80s and 90s, ready to turn New Zealand upside down and shake.
Almost everything I [...]

Think again (think Tony Blair):
Tim Baldwin:
I shut my eyes when I listen to [Obama] and it could be Tony. He is doing the same thing that we did in 1997.
Matthew Parris:
Here we have a handsome, dashing and intelligent man, a man with generous instincts and a silver tongue; but a man with no distinctive plan [...]

This is the first in a new series tracking people who find the whole democracy thing inconvenient1 and would rather those pesky citizens just shut the $%!@ up so they can get on with transferring the world’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of those who are actually entitled to it, [...]

Green politics has come along way in the past ten years.
Barack Obama on revamping America’s energy use:
I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse [...]

Oh New Zealand, what have you done? Roger Douglas on election night fantasising about the mandate he thinks he has:
We have to make some changes and there’s going to be a lot of hurt for a lot of people.
What a cheek, coming from the scoundrel who lied his way into government in the eighties, unleashing an [...]

In a representative democracy it’s not democracy’s purpose to produce good government but to produce representative government. While I don’t expect much in the way of democracy from representative democracy1 enough New Zealanders voted against their interests on Saturday to elect into government a multimillionaire merchant banker Prime Minister and his self-interested fat cat accomplices, including some of those [...]