Obama: Debt, Default and Betrayal
Last week Sunny told us that he was frustrated with people like Glenn Greenwald who think Obama is giving away too much in the current negotiations over the US debt ceiling. He thinks that Republicans are in a bind “if they agree to increase taxes, they break their own pledges and annoy the hell out [...]
Scottish Greens 2011: Election Review
It would be a mistake to think that the Scottish Green Party’s performance in the 2011 election was anything other than a profound failure. As Green blogger Jeff Breslin said the day after the election “the Greens are stuck in the mud. I’m aghast that the Greens have fared so badly, not even moving on [...]
Breivik, Blogging and How Not to Study Terrorism
Claims in early editions of newspapers following the appalling attacks in Norway last Friday that an Islamic group had claimed responsibility have led onto a flurry of accusations regarding the Islamophobia of the media and the experts on which it depends. I have to admit to a measure of sympathy in this case for the [...]
Hey Jude: culture and class from inside a kettle
We had been kettled for 8 hours. In December. It was below freezing and the air was cut with the acrid smoke of burnt bus stop. “We need to make a bigger stink than them” the pyrotechnic had said, gesturing at Parliament. “Yeah, but we’re stuck here, we have to breathe.” He wasn’t popular. To [...]
What’s happening in Somalia is no natural disaster.
Last month I asked a Kenyan farmer what the impact of food speculation was on her community. “Food is getting more and more expensive” she told me. She talked too about how climate change was already hitting her community, how it was getting harder and harder to grow crops. It is all too easy to [...]
Green-led council announces first steps towards living wage
Press release from the Brighton Green Party: Green council leader Bill Randall (21 July) announced radical plans to introduce a Living Wage in the city of Brighton & Hove. At a meeting of the whole council, he confirmed that the council will be taking a number of steps to reduce inequality in the city through [...]
Internationale in Norwegian – with love and solidarity
Some Utopian Thinking on Health (Part II)
In the first post I talked about the need for a more idealistic health policy than one which relies so heavily upon the pharmaceutical industry, leading to the question of how we arrived at our current situation. I will address that question now, and part III I’ll have a go at suggesting some practical steps that might be taken to [...]
Murdoch and the European collapse: the chance for the left?
Is the Italian economy about to collapse? Is the Eurozone going to fall apart? I don’t know. But it is certainly creaking wildly. If it does, it will surely make the tumbling of Lehman Brothers look like relatively small fry. After cutting the bottom out of their economies, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland too are [...]
The fungibility of Rebekah Brooks
Economists have a word for it: fungibility. It describes how replaceable a type of commodity is. Art isn’t at all fungible – every piece is unique. Money is highly fungible. So is Rebakah Wade. So is Paul Stephenson. So is David Cameron. Unlike Salvador Dali, Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart or Jane Espenson, these people are easily [...]
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