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All Out Class Warfare, No Compromise

by Oui Fri Jan 19th, 2018 at 08:51:47 AM EST

There are many parallels between the UK vote for Brexit and the rise and win of Trump in America. The wrong answer is to simply blame Russia's Putin or the "global" right-wing extremists [alt-right] gaining a voice through populist leaders in rising parties. In the UK the vote split along geographic lines of inequality due to decades of austerity for the underclass in British society. A breeding ground for the British people to be gullible for political propaganda of UKIP and its leader Farage: blame the immigrant policy of the EU and especially the Polish migrants.

The scientific input by Robert Mercer's Cambridge Analytica performed in both the UK referendum and US presidential election is mostly disregarded.

As the Democats and its pundits in America still put the blame on Russia and its intrigues for HRC's loss, a lot of attention is diverted from a full year of politics ...

World: Confidence In America Drops Off A Cliff

I just read two articles about Carillion with quite opposing views, word choice and analysis ...


This is not a Corbynite coup, it's a mandate for his radical agenda | The Guardian Opinion - Gary Younge |

That this should have happened in the week of Carillion's collapse has a certain symmetry. Carillion took billions in public funds for public projects, paid its executives and shareholders handsomely, and has now left taxpayers to pick up the pieces in a system of private finance initiatives introduced by Conservatives but championed and vastly expanded by New Labour.

It was anger at this kind of rank unfairness, the inequalities it both illustrated and imposed after the economic crash, that explains not just Corbyn's victory but the rise of the hard left across Europe and in the US.  

I was an outsourced Carillion hospital worker. Here''s what I learned | The Guardian Opinion - Polly Toynbee |

It's low-paid workers who pay the price of shifting state debt off the Treasury's books. I know: I've seen the process at work.

while ago I worked for Carillion as a hospital porter. Or at least I worked for an agency that provided labour for Carillion - as these outsourcers always themselves outsource, to cut costs further. I was researching my book Hard Work, but try as I might, in every single public sector job I failed to work for the public sector.

Every minimum-wage-level job was outsourced in the two NHS hospitals where I worked, in a primary school kitchen and in a government nursery. Austerity causes the number of public employees to keep falling. But try to find out how many apparently public employees work for these companies, and no one knows.

Blame for outsourcing starts with Margaret Thatcher's compulsory competitive tendering, which was forced on councils and others. Public managers still doing it often do so reluctantly, under the cost-cutting extremes of Treasury austerity, as lowest-paid employees take the hardest hit.

Carillion had taken over this large London teaching hospital's portering, cleaning and other services ... Agency workers were paid less than the old staff Carillion had taken over.

By chance, I was working back on the same hospital site where I had worked as a ward orderly 30 years before on the same grade. Before, I had belonged to the NHS; now, at one remove, I belonged to Carillion. When I took my payslips to the Institute for Fiscal Studies to compare the value of my wages with 30 years earlier, they found Carillion was paying me, in real terms, nearly a third less. That was concrete proof of how wages at the bottom had been held down since the 1980s while wages at the top skyrocketed, causing an explosion in inequality.

Austerity measures introducing middle men (outsourcing) to cut off worker's rights and lower wages ...

Gender equality and the impact of recession and austerity in the UK | Cairn Info |
The Impact on Women of Recession and Austerity | TUC Paper |
Low wages are 'return to pre-industrial Britain', says Bank of England economist
Why don't we agonise about welfare cuts as much as public sector pay caps?

I'm confident a win for Independent Bernie Sanders would have reshaped America and kept it on a path provided by eight years of President Obama ... a more equal world within the United States of America.

Political Effects of the Great Recession | Vanderbilt Working Paper |

In the wake of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, pundits from across the ideological spectrum seemed to be in considerable agreement regarding the likely political ramifications of the economic crisis. On the right, a Wall Street Journal (2008) editorial just a month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers worried that "the current financial panic" mightprovide a "pretext" for"a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy" comparable to past "heydays of welfare-state liberalism." On the left, Robert Kuttner had already published a book premised on the notion that the economic crisis offered Barack Obama an opportunity to be "a transformative progressive president" (Kuttner 2008, 1). Obama's subsequent election impelled John Judis to posit that "liberal views have re-emerged ... with a vengeance, and can be expected to shift further leftward -- especially on economic questions -- in the face of coming recession" (Judis 2008). Of course, nothing of the sort actually happened. Public opinion moved -- insofar as it moved at all -- to the right, not to the left.

The primary manifestation of mass mobilization in response to the recession, the Tea Party movement, harnessed right-wing populism in opposition to big government, bailouts, high taxes, and public debt. Obama's Democratic base in Congress was decimated in the 2010 midterm election, a result the president himself referred to as a "shellacking."

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the same liberal commentators who had badly misread the political implications of the economic crisis and the 2008 election were prominent among those expressing surprise and disappointment at the political trajectory of Obama's first term. Kuttner (2011), who had expected "a transformative progressive president," now argued that Obama's presidency was "shaping up as one of American history's epic missed moments." Judis (2010) published a much -talked- about analysis of Obama's "Unnecessary Fall."

Unfortunately, the Clintonites grip on the DNC and elite power prevented a fair chance for Bernie Sanders during the primaries. His participation did lay bare the weakness in the party platform of the Democratic Party in America. In 2018, the internal crisis is still full fledged and a further decline is a great risk.

The anti-capitalist, secular Jew from Brooklyn
IMF Pleads for a Social, Progressive Face to Battle Poverty
Fifty-Six Years and Heads Exploding

How the right played America's democracy to get rid of liberal policy from the 1960s ... the long term vision to might for AngloSaxon revival.

Stunning!!! - James McGill Buchanan by TarheelDem @BooMan
The Burning Bush - In Search of a Leader by Oui @BooMan

 
[Update-1] Quite interesting article, I’ve much more to comment on this wrong-headed analysis by European Atlantic conservative think-tanks …

Trans-Atlantic ties: Angela Merkel needs a Donald Trump strategy

Donald Trump's election as US president has been called "a nail in the coffin of the liberal world order." What can German Chancellor Angela Merkel do to make sure that coffin isn't buried?

In the past, US-German relations were consistently close; now, one is just hoping that better days will return. Political scientist Josef Braml of the German Council on Foreign Relations says those hopes are in vain. "Trump doesn't think the liberal world order serves America's interests, rather, it simply helps 'copycats' like Germany and China," he said. Therefore, the US president has one simple aim: "to destroy that order."

That, of course, has negative consequences for trans-Atlantic relations. "Everything is a zero-sum game with Trump," said Braml. "The US has to win, and everyone else has to lose."

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Living on the plains of Utah. In essence the Mormon community represents the core values of the American way of life as the Republican party advocates in the 21st century. It's a political philosophy of cohesion whereas the liberal, progressive Democrats is a party of diversity. The Mormons are pro-life, anti-gay and practice a religion of wealth by the grace of God.

The electorate had to make a choice of a mad man representing the GOP or a DINO who had thought it wise to move towards the right as a Republican lite on issues of national security, foreign policy and the privacy of citizens. It reminds me of Rockefeller Republicans which had moved closer to the principles of the Democratic party, he failed too.

Trump's America: One Year On
Trump Orders Largest National Monument Reduction In U.S. History

The Mormons: From Poverty and Persecution to Prosperity and Power | American Heritage |

But what in fact is the status of the Mormons today, more than 130 years after their trek to the land of Zion in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah? They are one of the fastest-growing and most prosperous denominations in the country. They claim nearly 2,500,000 adherents within the United States and another million overseas, and thanks to energetic proselytizing at home and abroad, their numbers increase almost daily. So does their influence. The Mormons, who were unsophisticated, poorly educated rural folk in 1846, have joined the general American trend by turning away from the countryside to dwell in suburbs and cities, and away from farming and simple crafts to the professions, commerce, finance, and industry.

The State of Utah voted for the Democratic presidential candidate seven times since 1900: 1916 ; 1932 through 1948 ; and in 1964. In 2016 HRC got 27.5% of the vote in Utah.

More in my diary posted @BooMan today ...

'Sapere aude'

by Oui (Oui) on Fri Jan 19th, 2018 at 03:25:10 PM EST


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