The Current State
From BullingdonMorons
TUC counts cost of austerity on public sector pay
Trades Union Congress says government policies have had a big impact on the spending power of almost six million UK households
Angela Monaghan - Guardian 09/07/2014
Your Freedom??
Your Freedom???
Nick Clegg enlists public to help battle red tape and invasions of privacy
Deputy PM launches project to fight 'pointless regulation' and let government know whenever Britons feel their rights are violated
Reduced to a hot cones moment.
The Playing Fields of Eton
Apparently
Arthur Wellesley
The Duke of Wellington possibly uttered the words
‘The Battle of Waterloo was won
on the playing fields of Eton’
But was it Wellington or Bluecher?
WHO WON BATTLE OF WATERLOO?
Controversy Still Rages as to
Whether Wellington or Bluecher Was Responsible for the Victory
The New York Times - 22/12/2009
George Orwell extended
the quote
apparently.
‘Probably the battle of Waterloo was won
on the playing-fields of Eton,
but the opening battles of subsequent
wars have been lost there.’
1941
A crumped
acid
Labour MP
had a go
to.
"While it is said the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,
it can be answered now that the Battle of Britain
was won on the playing fields of the [State] schools of England."
Education: Playing Fields of Eton
Aneuran Bevan
was
more
tart.
"There is a great body of opinion, which isn't sufficiently articulate,
that public schools
should be allowed to die a natural death.
Some would like them to die a little more violently."
And those hallowed fields have reared their heads
again in a recent condemnation
of David Cameron’s position on tax policies
by the Prime Minister.
PMQs: Brown mocks 'Eton smoothie' Cameron
Phil Webster - Political Editor - Times 02/12/2009
‘(Gordon Brown produced his most combative Commons performance for many months today as
he mocked David Cameron as a smooth-talking PR man who dreamt up his tax policies "on the playing fields of Eton”)’
How different life
might be
without
‘The Playing Fields of Eton’
Time
for
articulation
&
action.
Neither Socialism nor Capitalism!
‘Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.’
Eric Hobsbawm
Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?
Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp
The Guardian 10/04/2009
‘But it was not refitted. Under the impact of what it saw as the Thatcherite economic revival, New Labour since 1997 swallowed the ideology, or rather the theology, of global free-market fundamentalism whole. Britain deregulated its markets, sold its industries to the highest bidder, stopped making things to export (unlike Germany, France and Switzerland) and put its money on becoming the global centre of financial services and therefore a paradise for zillionaire money-launderers. That is why the impact of the world crisis on the pound and the British economy today is likely to be more catastrophic than on any other major western economy - and full recovery may well be harder.’
This will no doubt become that elusive, but non too successful third way that’s kind of been mentioned before.
Forget me not
Forget - me - not
Beautiful blue just bursting.
Almost balmy.
A coal tit overhead.
Something I read this morning.
John Gray says it was about oil.
Alan Greenspan has already claimed.
Shaken the Whitehouse apparently?
Do you remember someone being howled out of the chamber?
For saying just this.
Vague memories of George Galloway.
Can't talk about this now.
Maybe a few years.
I wonder if India and China will do it to us?
As we did it to them?
To invoke Vietnam was a blunder to far.
Interestingly there's a whole website devoted to keeping a watch on Mr Hitchens.
The 'blunder' is to be found in a speech given by George W Bush to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the USA. It was the comment about 'the price of American withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people, 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'
There was a jumble of thoughts in no particular order that came from this invocation. Agent orange, carpet bombing of Cambodia that actually led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which killed many thousands of people. Agent orange particularly, which still has a devastating affect on people. Coming forward to Iraq, we deliberately starved a country for ten years, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Since the invasion, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and another unkown thousands have been killed. It's the thousands of ordinary people killed and the millions displaced by their actions.
This was put much better than me in an article Marjorie Cohn, 'Turning Iraq into Vietnam'