Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

At the moment, the Board does not expect delinquency on behalf of the Pirate Party. Investigation is not directed against the party or any of its subsidiaries, they are only involved as the server's operators. The results are expected with curiosity. According to our own standards, the Board will report on the incident in all transparency and detail as soon as it has affirmed information.

The Board does not have information that indicate the necessity to take all servers of the Pirate Party off-line. According to the information it has been provided with, only one single public service on a virtual server of the party was affected. The disconnection of all servers is a massive intrusion into the communications infrastructure of the sixth largest party in Germany. Considering the state elections taking place in Bremen in two days, this caused a severe political damage, which the Board condemns decisively.

It will be interesting to see hwo this affects the perfomrance of Piratenpartei in the elections. Anyone having access to polls on the Bremen elections?

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

China 'hit by power crunch' amid drought

Chinese factories are facing curbs on electricity use as coal prices soar and a severe drought hits hydropower plants, state media have said, with possible major shortages ahead this summer.

The situation has highlighted the difficulties faced by China, the world's largest energy consumer, as global fuel prices climb and the country battles soaring inflation.

Businesses in coastal areas and some inland provinces have grappled with power cuts and full blackouts since March due to surging demand and a drop in hydroelectric output, the China Daily said.

The shortage -- the worst since 2004 -- is likely to get worse in the summer when demand peaks, with coastal Jiangsu, an export powerhouse neighbouring Shanghai, the hardest hit, it said.

Power supplies could be as much as 16 percent lower than the province needs, it said.

The drought plaguing central China for months has left more than one million people without proper drinking water and crimped output of hydroelectric power, China's second-biggest energy source, previous media reports said.

Labor Market Policy in the Great Recession: Some Lessons from Denmark and Germany

This paper reviews the recent labor-market performance of 21 rich countries, with a focus on Denmark and Greece. Denmark, which was widely seen as one of the world's most successful labor markets before the downturn, has struggled in recent years. Germany, however, has outperformed the rest of the world's rich countries since 2007, despite earlier labor-market difficulties. Labor-market institutions seem to explain the different developments in the two economies.

Danish institutions - which include extensive opportunities for education, training, and placement of unemployed workers - appear to perform well when the economy is at or near full employment, but have not been effective during the downturn.

German labor-market institutions, which emphasize job security by keeping workers connected to their current employers, may have drawbacks when the economy is operating at or near full employment, but have performed well in the Great Recession. The paper also discusses lessons for U.S. labor-market policy.

Report (pdf)

Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage
The pay gap at the top should change the terms of political trade. But the squeezed middle must first learn to look up

Why aren't we more angry? Why isn't blood running, metaphorically at least, in the streets? Evidence of how the rich prosper while everyone else struggles with inflation, public spending cuts and static wages arrives almost daily. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports that last year incomes among the top 1% grew at the fastest rate in a decade. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the top 1,000 are £60.2bn better off this year than in 2010, bringing their collective wealth close to the record pre-recession levels.

(...)

That is the most important point about what has happened to incomes in Britain and America during the neoliberal era: the very rich are soaring ahead, leaving behind not only manual workers - now a diminishing minority - but also the middle-class masses, including doctors, teachers, academics, solicitors, architects, Whitehall civil servants and, indeed, many CEOs who don't run FTSE 100 companies, to say nothing of the marketing, purchasing, personnel, sales and production executives below them. That is why, over the past decade, some of the most anguished cries about high incomes and inequality have appeared in the Telegraph and Mail.

(...)

One reason why the working classes so often disappointed the left was that, having little daily contact with the rich and little knowledge of how they lived, they simply didn't think about inequality much, or regard the wealthy as direct competitors for resources. As the sociologist Garry Runciman observed: "Envy is a difficult emotion to sustain across a broad social distance." Nearly 50 years ago he found manual workers were less likely than non-manual workers to think other people were "noticeably better off". Even now most Britons underestimate the rewards of bankers and executives. Top pay has reached such levels that, rather like interstellar distances, what the figures mean is hard to grasp.

(...)

They are not, however, imminently likely to join a crusade for equality. This generation of the middle classes has internalised the values of individualist aspiration, as zealously propagated by Tony Blair as by Margaret Thatcher. It does not look to the application of social justice to improve its lot. It expects to rely on its own efforts to get ahead and, crucially, to maintain its position.

As psychologists will tell you, fear of loss is more powerful than the prospect of gain. The struggling middle classes look down more anxiously than they look up, particularly in recession and sluggish recovery. Polls show they dislike high income inequalities but are lukewarm about redistribution. They worry that they are unlikely to benefit and may even lose from it; and worse still, those below them will be pulled up sufficiently to threaten their status. This is exactly the mindset in the US, where individualist values are more deeply embedded. Americans accepted tax cuts for the rich with equanimity. Better to let the rich keep their money, they calculated, than to have it benefit economic and social inferiors.

Yes, the leadership Democrats and the Republicans are both only talking about deficits, but that's no reason the media should just be sitting back and agreeing that deficits are what's important, rather than jobs. The media is perfectly happy to be adversarial about what politicians are talking about when it suits them. Unfortunately, these days, "when it suits them" means "when it suits Republicans to be adversarial about what Democrats are saying".

Because, of course, these people are just a bunch of millionaire celebrity court scribes, and they don't give a toss about what the rest of the country needs or wants. Which is most emphatically not what a free press is supposed to be about. We no longer have labor reports as a routine part of the news - or even on Labor Day! We no longer have reporters who actually go out and talk to normal people and then report back in big newspapers.
[....]
 The thing is, the leadership Democrats and Republicans have nothing but reinforcement for talking about deficits rather than jobs. Since they ignore the rest of us completely, the only thing left is a press corps to hold them to the fire. That's their job.

That's why the 1st Amendment exists - so that there is an adversary out there who can tell the leadership what's important, and tell the people what needs to be done and how to do it. They're not. Because they're not a free press - they are paid shills for the corporatocracy and that has nothing to do with what the American form of government is supposed to be about.

"The focus" did not shift to the deficit - that only happened in one small part of Washington, DC. For the rest of us, it's still jobs and health care and crumbling infrastructure and "legal" mobsters shaking us down for what we've honestly earned.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.