Prog Gold

America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere

August 9th, 2010

Says Paul Krugman, as all our seventies doom science fiction dreams and fears seem to come alive in the New Great Depression:

The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

Meanwhile, a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.

[...]

But Washington is providing only a trickle of help, and even that grudgingly. We must place priority on reducing the deficit, say Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. And then, virtually in the next breath, they declare that we must preserve tax cuts for the very affluent, at a budget cost of $700 billion over the next decade.

In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.

Bad enough, but much worse is the fact that almost every European government seems bound to walk the same road. We’ve got Greece that on the one hand can’t be bothered to collect the taxes of the people who own all those nice villas just outside Athens, can pay off the banks to not collapse, but now has to pay for it by squeezing ordinary workers hard. Germany meanwhile is putting its nose in the air at Greece’s profligacy but is still planning to put the screws on its workers too. We all know already what the ConDem(med) coalition wants to do to the UK even if Cameron is still vain enough not to want to be milk snatcher 2.0, while the most likely coalition in the Netherlands is not so much divided on whether or not eighteen billion euros in spending cuts are needed now, but on where to cut…

A spirit is haunting Europe and it’s the spirit of undead neoliberalism, the last gasp of the freemarket fuckers, using this crisis to once again help themselves and their banker friends to our money.

Categories: Life under Capitalism

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Dude, I’m so high right now

August 3rd, 2010

Do big cats like catnip? Signs points to yes.

Categories: Funny, Kittens!, Natural World, Video

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QotD: The fringe was right on Afghanistan

July 30th, 2010

On the second to last day of the Dutch “mission” in Afghanistan, there is no more appropriate quote than this gem by Nick Mamatas:

Now, six, seven, eight years later, all one can do is take this as an admission that indeed, the far left was right in categorically opposing the invasion of Afghanistan, was right in categorically opposing the invasion of Iraq, was right about WMDs, “catching Osama”, the possibility of creating a stable Middle East or Central Asia powerbase, was right about virtually everything we claimed was going to happen in the wake of 9/11, and that all the Democrats who voted for war were wrong, all the people who voted for Kerry under his “you break it, you bought it” conception of imperial politics were wrong, and everyone who voted for Obama because he was against the “bad war” (Iraq) and in favor of the “good war” (Afghanistan) were wrong. Those kooky fringe people who waved the wrong kind of signs and booed Howard Dean and didn’t even argue “sanctions, not war” (i.e., slow starvation, not fast bombs) were absolutely right.

In Holland those “kooky fringe people”, even in 2001 numbered in the tens of thousands during the first demonstrations against the war as millions more people, ordinary people saw through the lies and excuses from the start. In the end, it did not matter much how we thought about it, or how much we opposed this war and the war on Iraq: our leaders had decided that those wars should be fought and our permission was not needed nor much wanted.

Categories: War on Afghanistan

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Context dammit!

July 25th, 2010

It’s nice that the Nation gets outraged about Obama approving cooperation between the US military and one of the more infamous Indonesian murder squads:

Yesterday’s announcement by the Obama administration that it is resuming military ties with the mass-murdering war criminals of Indonesia’s special forces ought to give us pause. Because the new relationship with Kopassus, the Indonesian thugs, has little or nothing to do with concrete U.S. interests in Indonesia – do we have any, anyway? – and everything to do with building a Great Wall around China.

But it would be nice had the article also acknowledged America’s important role in enablihing the Kopassus to commit their crimes. It was in an earlier struggle against supposed communism that several million people got murdered for being communist, or socialist, or just leftist or in the way. It’s was the US who armed the killers and led the killing and who supported the Indonesian military as they committed one warcrime after another, from the invasion of East Timor to the counterinsurgency in Papua New Guinea. In short, while this article does criticise current policy, by its silence on the history of American support for Indonesia, it helps whitewash this history, making the US seem more innocent in this than it really is. All that remains for a reader not familiar with this history is a vague awareness that this Indonesian unit is bad and Obama in the wrong for wanting to support it, but unaware that the very crimes for which Kopassus was responsible were instigated on behalf of America and that America has supported it throughout these crimes.

Categories: Media, US Foreign Policy

Tags: Indonesia, Kopassus No Comments

How to torture children the ministry of justice approved way

July 18th, 2010

More news to make you forget any nostalgia for New Labour you may have had. It turns out the Ministry of Justice has written a torture manual on how to restrain children in private prisons, according to the Observer:

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to:

■ “Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee’s sternum and drive inward and upward.”

■ “Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person’s ribs until a release is achieved.”

■ “Drive straight fingers into the young person’s face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person’s groin area.”

[...]

Published by the HM Prison Service in 2005 and classified as a restricted government document, the manual guides staff on what restraint and self-defence techniques are authorised for use on children as young as 12 in secure training centres. The centres are purpose-built facilities for young offenders up to the age of 17 and run by private firms under government contracts.

Locking up children as young as twelve is not enough for these sadists, they have to be handed over to for profit jails to be tortured there because obviously keeping order normally is too difficult or too expensive for these fuckers. And it wouldn’t have come to light if some of the poor kids tortured like this hadn’t killed themselves in desperation, leaving their parents devastated and looking for answers. One more piece of the sordid lawandorder legacy New Labour has left behind.

Categories: Policing, Torture, UK politics

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