Prog Gold – Page 8 – …bestriding the US, UK, Holland and Europe like a bad-tempered giant hedgehog

A rising tide lifts all boats — not!

Published on July 28, 2014Leave a comment

John Emerson on why Thomas Piketty “strikes at the heart of liberal Democrats’ first principle of political economy”:

Piketty’s “r>g” formula denies specifically this point. And not only did he disprove the liberal economists’ fundamental principle, he did it using the tools of liberal economics. For forty years or so American workers’ incomes have been stagnant or declining, and as the years have gone by this tendency has intensified. But there has been no theoretical explanation for these very evident facts, and without a theoretical explanation liberal economists felt that their hands were tied; these were things that everybody knew, but no one knew it in a proper scientific way.

IDF looting

Published on July 28, 2014Leave a comment

So when the IDF went searching the West Bank for the three Israeli teenages it already knew were dead, it managed to steal at least $3 million from the homes and businesses it searched:

Ramallah- During the course of Israel’s three-week campaign of mass arrests in the West Bank, ostensibly to search for the killers of three settlers, the Israeli military and police conducted an average of 18 raids per day into Palestinian homes, charities and businesses, stealing cash and property worth an estimated $3 million, documents a new report from the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights.

The full report (PDF).

“Why the world hate Israel?” the soldier whispered.

Published on July 27, 2014Leave a comment

An Israeli soldier asks Paul Mason why the world hates Israel.

It was the second conversation of the day along the same lines: the guy who issued my press pass made the same points to me as the soldier: that “we don’t target civilians” and that Hamas’ infrastructure hides within civilian homes, hospitals etc.

To anybody who’s been anywhere near a military staff college, or an international law course, there is an obvious missing point in these justifications: soldiers, and their commanders, also have a duty to take precautions against killing civilians.

Not taking those precautions can be just as criminal as getting a rocket and firing it indiscriminately towards civilian areas as Hamas is doing.

In previous conflicts, even during Operation Cast Lead only six years ago, Israel was largely able to control the media picture of their warwaging, with arguments like those cited above. Even with bloggers and other new media channels hostile to their intepretation, the public still had to seek out those. Now though, with Twitter and less so, Facebook, the real facts of the war get shoved in your face and Israeli propaganda can’t compete with pictures of children killed by IDF strikes and can no longer control what’s being told about the war:

Reporting goes through an editing process; things that don’t conform to editorial policy can be weeded out; facts have to be cross-checked with other facts and claims. The reporting team itself – producer, reporter, camera crew, translator for TV – form an initial filter. But in Gaza, there is no filter; plus you are now getting camera crews and off-screen TV journalists tweeting. On newspapers, several different reporters will be tweeting, rather than it all going into the editorial machine and coming out as one thing.

But what I wonder how much it does matter that so many more ordinary people get to know something of the truth of Israel’s warcrimes when our own elites and the media are still reflexivily pro-Israel. We’ve seen what happened with the War on Iraq, where the public was opposed but they were in favour of the war.

Sweden’s School Choice Disaster

Published on July 27, 2014Leave a comment

So it turns out that the good results of the Swedish school voucher system of “free” school choice, long the benchmark for all sorts of rightwing busybodies wanting to disrupt public schooling were created by, well, cheating:

It’s the darker side of competition that Milton Friedman and his free-market disciples tend to downplay: If parents value high test scores, you can compete for voucher dollars by hiring better teachers and providing a better education—or by going easy in grading national tests. Competition was also meant to discipline government schools by forcing them to up their game to maintain their enrollments, but it may have instead led to a race to the bottom as they too started grading generously to keep their students.

Hands up anybody who didn’t see this coming? Thought so.

Absolutely disgusting

Published on June 16, 2014Leave a comment

Not content with destroying the economy and the social safety nets, the ConDem coalition is also threatening those who are exposing the effects of their policies:

The chair of the Trussell Trust has said that the charity made a decision to tone down its criticisms of the benefit system after someone in power warned them that they could get shut down.

Chris Mould, chair of the Trussell Trust, was giving evidence to the Panel on the Independence of the Voluntary Sector yesterday when he said that the charity, which aims to tackle poverty, had been criticised by the government for raising awareness of the need for food banks.

He said that he had seen several examples of how “people in power do pretty inappropriate things at times to try and curb and curtail independence of a voluntary organisation when it proves to be inconvenient to them”.

Mould, who made it clear that the charity was not a campaigning organisation, told the panel that most of these examples had arisen in private conversations with those in power.

“Nice charity you have there. Shame if something happened to it.”