2 incidents from Irish people this week to make me very proud of them,
first the amazing Tressa Walsh, to hear this made me so happy, because last year I came under massive societal pressure to go after a young lad in Belfast, who did something which is regular and fairly normal on a Friday night, people tried to get me to work with the RUC / PSNI to go after this young lad, but I refused on the reason that he had no intention to do the damage that ensued, a Tressa's son actually did die afterwards, I'm just lucky to be able to write this. strange that Gearoid was also a serious Celtic supporter.
And then the wonderful Liam Meehan, who had this printed in the Irish Times
Madam, – I’m a little confused that the Archbishop of Tuam, Dr Michael Neary, is discouraging people from gathering at Knock to witness apparitions which he believes “risk misleading God’s people and undermining faith”.
This is the the same “faith” that believes that a cosmic Jew who was his own father by a virgin can enable you to live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh, drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from something invisible called your soul that is present because a woman made from a rib was convinced by a talking snake to eat an apple from a magical tree. – Yours, etc,
LIAM MEEHAN,
La Vista Avenue,
Killester, Dublin 5
Credit where it's due, in this case from Paul Newton's perspective, huge credit to both of them, I'm proud of them both.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
and we wonder why?
Just short note on a strange experience that reinforced big time my idea on why the country is fecked.
I'm in a hospital ward visiting my daughter and there are 3 groups of parents and 3 children in the ward, I'm having difficulty communicating with Joy because the TV is so loud, they are all watching a programme called "around the house" but I say nothing about turning down the telly because it's nearing nine and I'm looking forward to hearing the news.
As soon as the news comes on the sound is turned down to an unhearable volume, I'm watching quietly but still saying nothing, and then prime time comes on, and the telly is turned off.
What's important to most Irish people is obvious, feck the facts, we'd rather watch some gobshite called Duncan give his opinions on a house.
GRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr.
I'm in a hospital ward visiting my daughter and there are 3 groups of parents and 3 children in the ward, I'm having difficulty communicating with Joy because the TV is so loud, they are all watching a programme called "around the house" but I say nothing about turning down the telly because it's nearing nine and I'm looking forward to hearing the news.
As soon as the news comes on the sound is turned down to an unhearable volume, I'm watching quietly but still saying nothing, and then prime time comes on, and the telly is turned off.
What's important to most Irish people is obvious, feck the facts, we'd rather watch some gobshite called Duncan give his opinions on a house.
GRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Still frustrated.......Grrr.
I've created a visual to describe my frustration!
Like children we simply cannot take any pain.
NAMA is a soother for the whingers and moaners in the banking, development, financial services and construction industries.
The public service cannot take any pain... let's protect their interests, imagine of we had to take some of their permanent pensionable sweets off them? Out on the streets lads, let's throw a tantrum.
And now the bloody Taniste is crying that parts of the McCarthy report "make no sense", is she friggin serious, Mary maybe it's time for a little discipline and self sacrifice, you can't manage that?
This country has allowed itself to become spoilt bloody rotten, and now we are behaving like spoilt children, tantrums all over the place and can't take any possible pain.
It's easier to blame blame blame.."it wasn't me"..."Johnny did it"
we live in a blame anybody but me culture.... let's give them all soothers so we can postpose our pain and pass it over to our children and their children's children....
Grrrrrrr.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
A wondering wondering star!
Maybe I was born under a wondering star, but I just can't seem to stop wondering how selfishness has captured society, I mean it always did, there are many simple examples of people fighting selfish self centered groups who controlled society, the french bourgeoise, the british aristocracy, the irish catholic heirarchy, the ulster unionists, the american republican party, I could go on and on, but am starting to wonder "what's the point"?
I enjoyed watching the farmleigh economic forum stuff at the weekend, it was talking about energy, passion, relationships and the drive to move a society forward, but then after reading and researching a lot, I had a look at the new RTE programme "frontline" and was left wondering and wondering and wondering.
Can we as a society really economically crucify our children and our children's children to satisfy the selfish needs of the inhabitants of the tent at the Galway races, yes indeed if this legislation is enacted into law we will indeed appreciate the horse men, and indeed they are horsemen, the politicians, the bankers, the developers and the corrupt media will indeed become the Four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war (the rise and rise of the right wing) famine (socially and impoverishment), pestilence, (our vital health service will be cut cut cut) and death, or more likely DEBT.
The brilliance of Farmleigh last weekend was simple, and Einstein pointed it our 60 years ago.
I was brought up to believe that the four pillars of democracy were
Legislature
Executive
Judiciary
Press
but a 5th pillar has been added to our understanding, and I'm wondering what we need to change that.
I am somewhat left thinking, a reader of Marx, and have largely been a supporter of social capitalism, we are all witnesses to what happened the ideological theory of communism under the stewardship of Stalin, but now I feel we have also reached an over the top position on Capitalism, it's unfair to bring individuals to take over this, but it's obvious that the politics of Thatcherism and Reaganism became stronger in the Galway Races tent.
There are new possibilities, new people to take the role of running the country, but just throwing a new party into the Dail is no step forward, perhaps trawling the Farmleigh invitees would give us a chance.
I enjoyed watching the farmleigh economic forum stuff at the weekend, it was talking about energy, passion, relationships and the drive to move a society forward, but then after reading and researching a lot, I had a look at the new RTE programme "frontline" and was left wondering and wondering and wondering.
Can we as a society really economically crucify our children and our children's children to satisfy the selfish needs of the inhabitants of the tent at the Galway races, yes indeed if this legislation is enacted into law we will indeed appreciate the horse men, and indeed they are horsemen, the politicians, the bankers, the developers and the corrupt media will indeed become the Four horsemen of the Apocalypse, war (the rise and rise of the right wing) famine (socially and impoverishment), pestilence, (our vital health service will be cut cut cut) and death, or more likely DEBT.
The brilliance of Farmleigh last weekend was simple, and Einstein pointed it our 60 years ago.
I was brought up to believe that the four pillars of democracy were
Legislature
Executive
Judiciary
Press
but a 5th pillar has been added to our understanding, and I'm wondering what we need to change that.
I am somewhat left thinking, a reader of Marx, and have largely been a supporter of social capitalism, we are all witnesses to what happened the ideological theory of communism under the stewardship of Stalin, but now I feel we have also reached an over the top position on Capitalism, it's unfair to bring individuals to take over this, but it's obvious that the politics of Thatcherism and Reaganism became stronger in the Galway Races tent.
There are new possibilities, new people to take the role of running the country, but just throwing a new party into the Dail is no step forward, perhaps trawling the Farmleigh invitees would give us a chance.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Slight guilt.
Ok I have not managed to update this in over a month, I've been absorbed in a project that has taken me over, it's been a month or hopes and dreams, fear and doubt, happiness and serious frustration, but they are the times I enjoy most.
Here's a commercial that I like to think sums me up, I have no idea if my stuff becomes a success or not, but i do know that many people see it as mad and me as slightly crazy, but whatever happens I will not give up, so we'll see which route takes me all the way.
Here's a commercial that I like to think sums me up, I have no idea if my stuff becomes a success or not, but i do know that many people see it as mad and me as slightly crazy, but whatever happens I will not give up, so we'll see which route takes me all the way.
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Such a day... Let's hope the delayed verdict goes the right way.
It was fun, but important fun, and the effort put in for the ONE advocacy group was brilliant, so if you want to find out and sign up go to www.one.org
Paul
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Understanding the "recession" from a political perspective.
by NAOMI KLEIN
This article appeared in the February 18, 2008 edition of The Nation.
January 31, 2008
Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.
Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.
It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.
So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.
As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.
Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.
Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy.
Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.
Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.
The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it?
This article appeared in the February 18, 2008 edition of The Nation.
January 31, 2008
Remember the "ownership society," fixture of major George W. Bush addresses for the first four years of his presidency? "We're creating...an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property," Bush said in October 2004. Washington think-tanker Grover Norquist predicted that the ownership society would be Bush's greatest legacy, remembered "long after people can no longer pronounce or spell Fallujah." Yet in Bush's final State of the Union address, the once-ubiquitous phrase was conspicuously absent. And little wonder: rather than its proud father, Bush has turned out to be the ownership society's undertaker.
Well before the ownership society had a neat label, its creation was central to the success of the right-wing economic revolution around the world. The idea was simple: if working-class people owned a small piece of the market--a home mortgage, a stock portfolio, a private pension--they would cease to identify as workers and start to see themselves as owners, with the same interests as their bosses. That meant they could vote for politicians promising to improve stock performance rather than job conditions. Class consciousness would be a relic.
It was always tempting to dismiss the ownership society as an empty slogan--"hokum" as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich put it. But the ownership society was quite real. It was the answer to a roadblock long faced by politicians favoring policies to benefit the wealthy. The problem boiled down to this: people tend to vote their economic interests. Even in the wealthy United States, most people earn less than the average income. That means it is in the interest of the majority to vote for politicians promising to redistribute wealth from the top down.
So what to do? It was Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a solution. The effort centered on Britain's public housing, or council estates, which were filled with die-hard Labour Party supporters. In a bold move, Thatcher offered strong incentives to residents to buy their council estate flats at reduced rates (much as Bush did decades later by promoting subprime mortgages). Those who could afford it became homeowners while those who couldn't faced rents almost twice as high as before, leading to an explosion of homelessness.
As a political strategy, it worked: the renters continued to oppose Thatcher, but polls showed that more than half of the newly minted owners did indeed switch their party affiliation to the Tories. The key was a psychological shift: they now thought like owners, and owners tend to vote Tory. The ownership society as a political project was born.
Across the Atlantic, Reagan ushered in a range of policies that similarly convinced the public that class divisions no longer existed. In 1988 only 26 percent of Americans told pollsters that they lived in a society bifurcated into "haves" and "have-nots"--71 percent rejected the whole idea of class. The real breakthrough, however, came in the 1990s, with the "democratization" of stock ownership, eventually leading to nearly half of American households owning stock. Stock watching became a national pastime, with tickers on TV screens becoming more common than weather forecasts. Main Street, we were told, had stormed the elite enclaves of Wall Street.
Once again, the shift was psychological. Stock ownership made up a relatively minor part of the average American's earnings, but in the era of frenetic downsizing and offshoring, this new class of amateur investor had a distinct shift in consciousness. Whenever a new round of layoffs was announced, sending another stock price soaring, many responded not by identifying with those who had lost their jobs, or by protesting the policies that had led to the layoffs, but by calling their brokers with instructions to buy.
Bush came to office determined to take these trends even further, to deliver Social Security accounts to Wall Street and target minority communities--traditionally out of the Republican Party's reach--for easy homeownership. "Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"--an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.
Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s--their piece of the stock market--to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.
The mass eviction from the ownership society has profound political implications. According to a September Pew Research poll, 48 percent of Americans say they live in a society carved into haves and have-nots--nearly twice the number of 1988. Only 45 percent see themselves as part of the haves. In other words, we are seeing a return of the very class consciousness that the ownership society was supposed to erase. The free-market ideologues have lost an extremely potent psychological tool--and progressives have gained one. Now that John Edwards is out of the presidential race, the question is, will anyone dare to use it?
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