Category: Life under Capitalism
the Greek revolution will not be televised
June 17th, 2011, No Comments
Paul Mason is in Athens, doing some great reporting on the Greek crisis: And I will repeat the point about hostility to the media: it’s not a problem for me and my colleagues to be hounded off demos as “representatives of big capital”, “Zionists”, “scum and police informers” etc. But to get this reaction from [...]
S&P overreaches itself
April 21st, 2011, No Comments
Over at Crooked Timber, Dsquared put up a post laughing at the pathetic attempt of S&P to grab some publicity by downgrading America’s credit rating. Deep down in the ensuing comment thread he explains again why this is such a dumb move: It needs to be emphasised, by the way, that the USA credit rating [...]
Doin’ the math
April 19th, 2011, No Comments
Or, yes Virginia, America can solve its budget problems soaking the rich [*]: Medicare doesn’t require “tens of trillions,” unless your budget horizon is something like twenty years. This year, Medicare will cost $572 billion. In 2020, according to the CBO, it will cost $949 billion. Over the next ten years, it will cost $7.6 [...]
Criminal bankers hardly prosecuted in the US — quelle surprise
April 15th, 2011, No Comments
The New York Times has a big article up on the lack of prosecutions coming out of the financial crisis “This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity,” said William K. Black, a professor of law at University [...]
History repeating
April 8th, 2011, No Comments
The Congress of Berlin (13 June – 13 July 1878) was a meeting of the European Great Powers’ and the Ottoman Empire’s leading statesmen in Berlin in 1878. In the wake of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, the meeting’s aim was to reorganize the countries of the Balkans. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who led [...]
Most workers would rather bugger off today then tomorrow
April 5th, 2011, No Comments
Found at Pere Le Brun, this offensively stupid quote by Iain Duncan Smith: Most workers want to work on when they reach 65, Iain Duncan Smith claimed yesterday. He insisted that higher life expectancy meant people should – and usually want – to work for longer before taking their pension. The Work and Pensions Secretary [...]
March 26
March 27th, 2011, No Comments
Lenny gets to the heart of things with what conclusion should be drawn from the march: It was something that I haven’t really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It [...]
Flickr used bogus copyright to censor the Egyptian revolution
March 15th, 2011, No Comments
Egyptian blogger 3arabawy has done sterling service in documenting the Egyptian revolution over the past few months, putting up thousands of essential pictures both taken by him and other Egyptian photographers. There’s just one problem: Flickr’s guidelines says you cannot put up photograps you yourself haven’t taken and that’s why they’re disabling his account. Never [...]
That Firm Washington stance against Khadaffi in full
March 10th, 2011, No Comments
Hillary Clinton’s very own Rumsfeld moment:
That LSE – Khadaffi scandal
March 9th, 2011, 2 Comments
Justin puts it in perspective: So, we’re all jolly cross at the London School of Economics for taking Gaddafi’s cash. We’re less cross (if at all) at the arms trade for doing the same. I haven’t heard any calls for the head of BAE Systems to resign, for instance. After all, BAE Systems were only [...]
