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by Frank Schnittger Wed Nov 27th, 2019 at 11:33:18 AM EST
Accepting the fact that most Brits aren't listening and couldn't care less what we think, what are our collective thoughts on Brexit at this stage?
Poll below the fold:
#Generalelection2019: Why you should think climate change not Brexit [_link] pic.twitter.com/HLlhBr2QCg— New Scientist (@newscientist) November 27, 2019
#Generalelection2019: Why you should think climate change not Brexit [_link] pic.twitter.com/HLlhBr2QCg
3 is self-evidently true. The UK has always been the US' trojan horse to undermine the EU from within. Although I think that the BundesBank has been far more effective at that particular mission.
4 is probably a net benefit, but if you thought the Irish border situation was fraught, then the Scottish one is a nightmare. A completely new financial system would be great, but simply re-locating the City to Frankfurt doesn't help in any way whatsoever.
5 is true. The constant re-election conservative governments i destroying us.
6 is N/A. Even Hungary knows it's better off inside. But the dominance of the Bundesbank will destroy it eventually
7 is untrue. The people of the UK will suffer terribly. keep to the Fen Causeway
Given the importance of the Irish border in the Brexit negotiations, why has it disappeared from this election campaign?— Dr Eric Farmer (@Himself132) November 26, 2019
Given the importance of the Irish border in the Brexit negotiations, why has it disappeared from this election campaign?
Politics, showbiz for ugly people ~ F. Zappa
Meanwhile Grenfell... grotesque, hideous!
Brexit will be worth it only if it buries the myth that Etonians deserve to rule by divine grace, and the Tory party ends up 6 feet under, for once and for all.
Go Jezza ;) 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
But Farage committed hara-kiri - or at least did the bidding of his financial masters - and it is the Remain vote which is split and Boris set fair to ride triumphant into the sunlit uplands of Brexit.
For all the criticism he has gotten, I still think Corbyn did all he could to keep both Remainers and Leavers within the Labour party tent and his offer to hold a second referendum while remaining personally neutral is statesmanlike and a viable way out of the crisis with no one losing face.
But for whatever reason the British people seem to be buying all the anti-Corbyn bile as if the personality and charisma of the PM mattered all that much in the context of the gravity of the crisis the UK will be facing when Boris crashes out without a comprehensive FTA.
The reduction of politics to a televisual beauty contest and the sheer stupidity of people who are bearing the brunt of Conservative led austerity and privatisation voting for Boris beggars belief.
It will be very hard for me to muster sympathy for the British people if they vote for Boris and when it then all comes crashing down. It's not as if they weren't warned and didn't know that Boris is a lying, cheating bastard whom no one of any integrity would have dealings with.
And still it seems we are in for another few years of pommy moaning about the EU not being fair to them when they discover that nothing outside the EU comes for free.
The only benefit for most of the EU will be that they won't have to listen any more (but also won't have any excuses for not putting their own houses in order).
In Ireland the EU/UK dynamic will have another few years to play out - re-cast as a nationalist/unionist divide - and with an increasingly beleaguered and desperate DUP thrashing about for victims to blame.
But the die has been cast. Unionism's days in Ireland are numbered. It is just a matter of how gracefully the process is managed. Brexit was the last act of "those whom the Gods seek to destroy, they first make mad". Index of Frank's Diaries
"It's not about me Boris. My personal opinion is my own and I have every right to cross that brdge if/when I come to it after further thought, study, debate and counsel. I am not Prime Minister and am not running a Brexit campaign, as you are reduced to doing since no-one believes a jot of what you say with your promises about the NHS after what you plastered on the side of buses before the referendum and every other blathering word out of your lying, disingenuous mouth is Brexit. I respect the people's vote but they were un- and misinformed as to the consequences and if they vote again in a second referendum to leave, then it'd be my duty as PM to renegotiate a better Brexit deal, and have it supported by Parliament after due, unhurried debate, a negotiation with a new, improved EU at which I wll have a decided advantage over your prior position because I have excluded my own feelngs and maintained, professional, gentlemanly discretion about them while concentrating on the greater good of the many rather than my own bias and possibly stll incomplete understanding of this Tory-spawned nightmare into which your idiot ilk have recklessly, callously plunged us and future generations. Those generations who will bear the greatest burden for your folly and many more of whom are eligible to vote now on something of such importance to them. You on the hand have zero credibility or ideas, and your whole political existence rests on one crumbling pillar, that of hard-crashing out of the EU while your chortling chums cash out on the sterling dive and buy up businesses on the cheap wth their ill-gotten gains."
Off-mike: "Wanker" 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
sometimes countries go crazy. It happens. We have more than enough experience of that over here. Sometimes countries go down. Ditto. Just as your union is wobbling, we know that our European Union is not eternal, either. It's sad but that's life.
Drink a pint, have a laugh!
I believe 5 is correct but of course it's gonna drag the EU down too. Schengen is toast!
Apart from overstated UK budget rebates, contribution to EU trade balance with either EU or ROW, and overstated economic impact within UK attributable only to BREXIT jingoism, I wonder. I wonder, because GINI is one of those topics that have left the room for the election against HRM BoJo or the elusive 2nd referendum.
Love or detest GINI: GB is not the "engine" of EU prosperity, however you care to measure that. You are familiar with GINI figures, and Eurostat figures by nation-state have been nearly level for some decades. Which might or might not be and endorsement of endemic poverty across Europe, induced by "neoliberal" or "neocon" national parliaments' policies. It is however an indictment of grossly disproportionate income inequality--matching the most grossly overvalued currency on the planet--hoarded in Britain for generations. That is, UK will secede with "wealth" to be squandered by its gov, not EU gov and EU27. The Scale of Economic Inequality in the UK
The UK has a wealth GINI coefficient of 73.2%.
The incorrect answer is RE. RE is a store of value, money. Wealth is credit. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
They plan to renegotiate the coalition agreement with an eye towards exiting the government. It's not fully Corbynesque but a similar direction of travel. Schengen is toast!
And what are the implications for German foreign, European, and Brexit policies? Index of Frank's Diaries
Foreign policy: new CDU chief wants to be more 'active' - no tools to back it up.
European policy: the fuck anybody knows. Merkel would have to be gone for a long time and people would have wake up and start to learn to think for themselves again.
Brexit policy: no change. Schengen is toast!
Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
We also need to understand that the young person taking passionately about Corbyn and embracing his brand of social justice does not represent an entire generation. At a shopping parade in the Wolverhampton neighbourhood of Penn I met two sparky, loquacious twentysomethings whose jobs pay less than £9 an hour: he a duty manager at a town-centre hotel, she a care assistant. When I asked them whether they had thought of joining a trade union, they bluntly told me they did not know what that term meant. Neither did they have any sense of what the Labour party stands for. After talking to them, I sat in the car and listened to Len McCluskey imploring the party's lost voters to "come home". What does that even mean any more?
The Tories may appal us, but Labour has been losing the plot for a long, long time. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore L. Cohen
Junior hotel managers may be badly paid, but they think of themselves as having a posh job with prospects. Care assistants may be at the bottom of the status hierarchy, but they tend to regard themselves as caring people, working for individual clients, often in their homes, and don't really identify themselves as part of a cohesive occupational grouping.
Union membership in these and similar service orientated occupational groups has always been low, but their numbers have grown hugely, with the result that union membership as a proportion of the working population has declined precipitously.
Unions work best where there are large groups of people performing similar work in the same location or company. This sort of factory production environment has been decimated by out-sourcing, automation and de-industrialisation.
In Ireland, and I suspect in the UK, union membership is now largely confined to the public service, and to a few larger companies employing larger numbers. US companies often pay better but do not recognise unions at all.
This has led to a perception that Unions now largely work for better paid workers in more secure employments who have better benefits to begin with - and don't represent the unemployed or more precariously employed majority.
Although the working class rhetoric and accents often remain, the reality is that it is the middle class professions which are often the most militant and well organised and unions are seen by many outside these groups as entrenching the privileges of the few in sheltered employments.
Rapidly changing work environments do not lend themselves to the staples of union organisation:- stable job descriptions, comparative job grading schemes, structured pay and benefit scales, and rigid negotiating categories. Everything is being individualised to prevent worker solidarity creating a threat to management bargaining power.
Individual workers are bought off by management if they are seen as having better than average ability and work ethic. Companies deliberately automate or outsource work which has been a focus of union activity. Militants are ostracised and marginalised.
It's every man for themselves now, and even the women are betraying their sisters... Politics in this environment, becomes less about class solidarity and more about looking after yourself: Precisely the sort of individual "meritocracy" that conservative parties say they promote. Merit being defined as playing the game within the rules set by others and not any objective measure of contribution or effort. Index of Frank's Diaries
In fairness, "Labour losing the plot" is as much a consequence of a transformation in the economy in the post Thatcher years as it is a result of political incompetence.
Political competence would have been understanding the transformation in the economy and its social consequences, which you rightly describe, and finding non-Blairite language and policies to address them.
The base problem is the destruction of the organized industrial working class, partly by bare-fanged Thatcherian class hatred, but mostly by the fact that global capital found itself a new, cheaper unorganized body of industrial workers in Asia, and threw the Western lot on the tip. With the resulting poverty, social dislocation, atomisation, uberisation, that we can observe.
Labour, like other parties on the left (Dems, French PS, for example) have spent decades split between pro-capitalist lite "centrists" (Clinton Schroeder Blair) and a dug-in left wing that still seems to be dreaming of half-a-century ago. These "parties of government" currently have no clearly discernible line that addresses problems and speaks to voters. Which is what I mean by "losing the plot".
All the more in that the billionaire's lackeys on the other side have an extremely efficient plot taken from Bannon's playbook. Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore L. Cohen
Corbyn's not a very good story teller. Then again, he has neither an particularly attentive audience nor fresh material. HRM BoJo is not a good story teller. Neither is any other "leader" pro temp selected by "elites" of "nations", formerly known as the one's with the nu-klear capability, formerly known as the one's with the guns, formerly known as "gods".
See how I reveal recurring "narratives" of death delivered from on high? Compelling, no? by comparison to the manifest reality of union: Nadie es libre. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
There are only three plots for all the stories ever created by people: death, birth, union
No wonder that progressive politicians, activists do not get it. They are nicely quick to offer solutions to apparent problems, but... the masses want really something else. They would not like to tell exactly what.
The kumbaya mythology of some social-economic perpetum mobile is not deeply believable in this limited world. Too bad if only terrible reactionary populists perform for relatable monomyths. Beliefs in transformative heroes, transcendent trials, magic helpers, ultimate boons may be not rational, but they are perhaps archetypally wise.
A fun series of events in Finland:1. Postal service cuts pay of 700 sorters. 2. Strike called. 60k workers join in solidarity, shutting down docks, rail, buses, airlines.3. Postal service cancels pay cut.4. Minister of state ownership resigns.5. Prime minister resigns.— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) December 3, 2019
A fun series of events in Finland:1. Postal service cuts pay of 700 sorters. 2. Strike called. 60k workers join in solidarity, shutting down docks, rail, buses, airlines.3. Postal service cancels pay cut.4. Minister of state ownership resigns.5. Prime minister resigns.
Read how confused Anglo-mericans are. I can easily spot the US Americans. The first clue is ascribing ethnic homogeneity to industrial solidarity. The second is they've no idea what Finland produces except Nokia phones, maybe. For them a brand "boycott" and a 24-hr "general strike" are identical acts of, oh, inconveniences--they wouldn't know Taft-Hartley if you beat a Google "engineer" about the head with a rolled up copy, and the last, most devastating demo was (1872) past out of mind generations ago. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
"I had no idea about the strike happening, and I was waiting for two hours in the airport for the train to arrive, and it didn't arrive," said vacationer Ian Crossen, from New York. "I feel a little bit frustrated. And I've spent a lot of money. I've spent money I didn't need to, apparently."
British people guess how much health care costs in the US -- and they are shocked. pic.twitter.com/dkRzFRYoJD— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) December 3, 2019
British people guess how much health care costs in the US -- and they are shocked. pic.twitter.com/dkRzFRYoJD
Assume barrel, because measurement. Assume measurement, because objectivity. Assume objectivity, because x.
archived DeRp
Our country needs us to be more ambitious right now, and we are rising to that challenge. This choice is about the future of our country for GENERATIONS to come. It is not about the red team or the blue team, because on this issue they merge into one.
Too bad for the English, but they voted for it. Sort of.
Nick Cohen believes Corbyn is too radically left-wing: https:/t.co/zw3MJVzr5tBut conversely, Nick Cohen also believes Corbyn isn't radically left-wing enough: https:/t.co/tLG9Az7Pbj— Colin Millar (@Millar_Colin) December 2, 2019
Nick Cohen believes Corbyn is too radically left-wing: https:/t.co/zw3MJVzr5tBut conversely, Nick Cohen also believes Corbyn isn't radically left-wing enough: https:/t.co/tLG9Az7Pbj
There is a possibility Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister of the UK by the end of next week. There is no better time to highlight how, no matter what Corbyn does or whatever position he takes, his critics will attack him - even if they totally contradict themselves (thread).— Colin Millar (@Millar_Colin) December 2, 2019
There is a possibility Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister of the UK by the end of next week. There is no better time to highlight how, no matter what Corbyn does or whatever position he takes, his critics will attack him - even if they totally contradict themselves (thread).
Daily Mail headline bingo. Not as good as my all time favourite pic.twitter.com/zxSTxB6FVQ— James Morris (@jcdmor) 2. Dezember 2019
Daily Mail headline bingo. Not as good as my all time favourite pic.twitter.com/zxSTxB6FVQ
Jeremy Corbyn pledges to compel schools to teach colonialism and the British empire https://t.co/WC3J5pueH3— The Independent (@Independent) November 26, 2019
Jeremy Corbyn pledges to compel schools to teach colonialism and the British empire https://t.co/WC3J5pueH3
Sixteen years ago, I warned the invasion and occupation of Iraq would set off a spiral of conflict and hate that would fuel the wars, terrorism and misery of future generations. pic.twitter.com/7FS56kOH74— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 1, 2019
Sixteen years ago, I warned the invasion and occupation of Iraq would set off a spiral of conflict and hate that would fuel the wars, terrorism and misery of future generations. pic.twitter.com/7FS56kOH74
Yes, I'd be astonished that any Brit gives a shit about Brisith colonial history unless the prices of spices, teas, coffee, banana republics, and citrus fruits SURGES. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Yet another photo emerges of Corbyn with a well-known terrorist. "Robin Hood" preached the politics of envy and hated the wealth creators of this fine land, waging a violent guerilla war against the wealthy. https://t.co/6ytUxHWdYZ— Emilia Mansfield 💙 (@krankyvalli) December 5, 2019
Yet another photo emerges of Corbyn with a well-known terrorist. "Robin Hood" preached the politics of envy and hated the wealth creators of this fine land, waging a violent guerilla war against the wealthy. https://t.co/6ytUxHWdYZ
Robin Hood is well known as a defender of oppressed populations. But one aspect of his story that has mostly been lost to time, however, is his role as protector of Jews, who figured prominently in ballads and dramatic texts that began appearing in 15th- and 16th-century England. Aside from his fundamental mission of tikkun olam -- repairing the world via a forced redistribution of wealth, aka stealing from the rich and giving to the poor -- Robin Hood was originally portrayed as a champion of all the oppressed, whether they be peasants, Muslims, disinherited kings, scorned Crusaders, anti-clerics or Jews.
Does Batman really need a Bat-Yacht? 🦇#Joker #Batman #JokerMovie pic.twitter.com/Vu3wEBiHGo— Momentum (@PeoplesMomentum) November 12, 2019
Does Batman really need a Bat-Yacht? 🦇#Joker #Batman #JokerMovie pic.twitter.com/Vu3wEBiHGo
It was often when I was abroad that I felt more Irish, though, strangely, the further I went, the more the concepts of Britishness and Irishness blended into each other. In India, it is simpler sometimes to agree that you are English than take the trouble to explain.
He's one of those disgusting centrists who think there is a meaningful difference between "Muscular Liberalism" and Neu-Colonialism/Neo-Conervatism. Anybody who critiques his idiocies is branded a marxist/leninist/trotskyist. keep to the Fen Causeway
Both Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid refuse to rule out possibility of no-deal Brexit ...
Boris Johnson likens US-NHS talks to "Photos of UFOs" as Tories tax cuts dismissed as "pure fantasy"
NEW: ITV News has just told me Boris Johnson will NOT be taking part in an interview with Julie EtchinghamITV said: "Every other leader of Great Britain's main political parties that has been approached has done an interview for Tonight" @julieetchitv— Anna Mikhailova (@AVMikhailova) December 5, 2019
NEW: ITV News has just told me Boris Johnson will NOT be taking part in an interview with Julie EtchinghamITV said: "Every other leader of Great Britain's main political parties that has been approached has done an interview for Tonight" @julieetchitv
Eddie Stobart transport firm teeters on brink of collapse
The vote will pit William Stobart, the third son of the company's founder, against his childhood friend and former brother-in-law, Andrew Tinkler.
It is also struggling with £200m worth of debt. However, ["]accounting problems["] revealed in August mean the financial situation could be much worse.
All the rest of the noise is how to divvy up the crumbs from their table. keep to the Fen Causeway
This leaked government document shows Boris Johnson hasn't been telling the truth to the people of our country about his damaging Brexit deal. His deal will cause huge price rises, economic damage to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and place a border down the Irish Sea pic.twitter.com/sSurc1vZyw— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 6, 2019
This leaked government document shows Boris Johnson hasn't been telling the truth to the people of our country about his damaging Brexit deal. His deal will cause huge price rises, economic damage to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and place a border down the Irish Sea pic.twitter.com/sSurc1vZyw
Leaked communiqué signals caution over PM's 11-month timeframe for negotiations
Key words: Election News - Tory lies Global Warming - distance between America and Europe is steadily increasing.
## Mental disorder is a communicable disease. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Her comments come as healthcare workers across Northern Ireland take industrial action in a dispute over pay and staffing levels, demanding to be paid the same as their colleagues in the rest of the UK. Trade union Unison accused politicians of not being willing to share power, but being willing to share blame. [...] For years healthcare workers across the UK were paid equally. In late 2014, however, this was ended by the then Health Minister, Jim Wells of the DUP, who stated he had to "exercise a degree of restraint" over pay. [...] In January 2016, DUP Health Minister Simon Hamilton was involved in a dispute with nurses after he offered them a one-off pay increase of 1%. Nurses argued the increase should be added to salaries, as was the case in the rest of the UK.
[INCONTINENCE ALERT] Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
Top British diplomat in Washington DC quits in a tirade ...
British diplomat in US resigns, saying she can't 'peddle half-truths' on Brexit Global Warming - distance between America and Europe is steadily increasing.
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