Michael Collins on Scoop:
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
Espiner agrees that the election is now all about trust, but he characterises it as trust in economic management. I’d characterise it differently. Recessions aren’t about poor macroeconomic statistics, but about people - people who are going to lose their jobs, and need to fall back on the state in their time of need. The question then is who do we trust to care for the victims (remembering that any of us could end up as one of them), minimise the damage, and ensure they can get on with their lives when the economy picks up again? The people who slashed welfare benefits? Or the people who have maintained them? The people who slashed health spending? Or the people who have expanded it? The people who don’t care about the poor? Or the people who do?
How many anti-capitalist climate change deniers do you know? Do they even exist? I presume there are at least some out there but the only deniers I personally know are also ardent advocates of market economics. Go through a list of prominent sceptics and you also invariably find within it a little club of market economy advocates.
Maybe they subconsciously realise what many don’t want to talk about; that climate change has happened under the market economy’s watch.
Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzalez:
The Obama and McCain campaigns jointly negotiated a detailed contract dictating the terms of all the 2008 debates. This includes who gets to participate as well as the topics raised during the debates. But the contract remains secret and the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private corporation created by the two major parties, has refused to release the contract to the public.
Another feather in the cap of U.S. “democracy.”
The free market preachers have long practised state welfare for the rich.
Bailing out banks seems unprecedented, but the US government’s form in subsidising big business is well established.
What an emergency economic plan might look like if the U.S. was a real democracy.
Will Wall Street’s Meltdown Turn America Into a Police State?
I‘m not much of an Army Times reader, but after reading that a brigade was shipping from Iraq in October to serve as “an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks” in the homeland right before the election, my antennae perked up.
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