Blah blah Obama won blah - I DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
Barack Obama is a corporate puppet and suspected war criminal. FUCK HIM.
He’s not a women’s liberation activist. He’s not a civil rights activist. He’s not an LGBT activist. He’s a Wall Street stooge who’s reasonably OK at observing what should be a bare minimum of sanity on these issues in the face of the GOP presenting fucking lunatics.
The silence from left-wing public figures on drone strikes, inequality, the Obamacare sellout, has been deafening. They think they’re helping keep the crazies out of politics by ignoring the continuity from Bush to Obama. The opposite is true.
The less pressure there is on Democrats to distance themselves from Wall Street, the closer they get. The Republicans present such insane misogynists precisely because they’re sharing very narrow economic space with the Democrats, and in the absence or economic differences they’re making a massive show of disagreeing about vaginas, the Republicans in particular talking themselves into spectacularly fucking stupid corners.
Tonight, the Dems and cheering and the Reps are crying. But Wall Street are cheering harder, and Pakistani villagers are crying harder.
It wasn’t always like this. The Republicans used to be pretty sane and sensible, for conservatives. Go and read some of Eisenhower’s quotes; he sounds like a pinko by modern Republican standards. I’ll go you one farther; those abortion rights that will be lost the moment a Wall Street candidates with a Donkey pin loses? They were ruled constitutional in Roe vs Wade by SCOTUS Justices appointed by Republicans Eisenhower and Nixon. (And there’s already a Republican majority in SCOTUS this minute. Pro-lifers wouldn’t need an extra appointment to rule the roost.) It wasn’t voting for Wall Street Lite that won abortion rights. It was a fear of the people, by the government, of Wall Street, that squeezed this concession out of capitalist patriarchy.
But I’ll tell you this: the establishment are shitting themselves tonight.
Not because America did as she was told and voted for Obama. Don’t you think Wall Street were delighted when their pet madman started foaming so much their critics started telling people to vote for their other pet?
No. What’s put the fear into them is the fact that Kshama Sawant, running for election to the Washington House of Representatives, as a member of the openly Marxist Socialist Alternative Party, against an incumbent who is no less than the Speaker of the House, on a manifesto that amongst other things demanded ‘a woman’s right to choose when and whether to have children. Defend abortion rights. Free birth control, paid maternity and paternity leave, and high-quality, fully subsidized child care’, having had to fight in court to be allowed her party’s name to be put on the ballots, having gotten into the final two horse race because more people wrote her name on the ballot than ticked the name of any other challenger to the incumbent, got 27% of votes. (Why did they have to write her name in? Because she wasn’t even a registered candidate in that district. She was officially running in another district, but got such an amazing result in this one she went ahead and took the fight right to the Speaker’s turf.)
That’s an actual communist kicking the door in and being supported by over a quarter of voters over an identikit Democon/Republicrat. In America.
Any time you wanna mention her, Michael Moore, feel free. Election’s over, now; you can start pretending to be as good as you were in the ’90s.
PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS.
When someone stands in a Parliamentary Election, they pay the state a £500 deposit. When a party isn’t bankrolled by big business, that’s quite an upfront commitment. If they get less than 5%, the state keeps it.
If there’s a candidate you agree with who won’t get elected and you don’t take the effort to go and vote for them anyway, and they fall exactly one vote short of 5%, you’ve effectively let the state fine them £500 for agreeing with you.
If there’s absolutely no-one worth voting for and you don’t take the effort to go and at least spoil a ballot, and the BNP get exactly 5% of the vote, you’ve effectively stood by and let the the state give £500 back to racists.
If you vote BNP for shit and giggles, and they get exactly 5% of the vote, you’ve effectively told the state to give £500 back to racists.
Do you want £500 to be given to the Civil Service, to a racist, or to someone who agrees with you?
“After having dragged her outside naked from the waist up, the police pepper sprayed her, beat her severely, and handcuffed her in front of early age children who were visibly distraught. As she had recently undergone a serious stomach surgery, the scar opened and started bleeding while she was being beaten. Adekemi was then hospitalised, but after a short time she was brought back to the hostel, and together with her three children she was taken to the airport by the GNIB for deportation.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is fighting for students at Hardin County High School in Tennessee who were banned from displaying support for LGBT rights in any way.
Isabella Nuzzo and other students were told by an assistant principal that they could not wear rainbows or any other symbols of gay rights because those symbols “advertise or promote sex.” Wait, what?
The group also said the assistant principal terminated a student organized “Week of Pride” event to show support for gay rights and threatened students with suspension, class failure and disqualification from graduations.
“I and many other students were really upset with the school for shutting down free speech about a topic I feel strongly about,” Nuzzo said in the release. “I love my gay friends and life is hard enough without being judged for who you are or for believing in equality.”
I hope SPLC takes this up with a lawsuit, because this is absurd. A rainbow signifies sex? Really? Not only does this perpetuate the flawed but repeated idea that sex is bad bad bad and should never be talked about at school, it likens LGBT rights to purely sexual matters. This deserves attention, and this school deserves a national reality check.
For fuck’s fucking sake.
(Source: gaywrites, via girlgoesgrrr)
I think there’s three factors that put Boris in for a second term.
Firstly, there’s Ken’s foolish decision to go back to the New Labour fold. It seems strange that he took such a lead in walking out of the Blairite trainwreck, only to rejoin it and get cosier and cosier.
Secondly, there’s the Evening Standard - owned by the racist Daily Mail and a couple of Russian oligarchs (one of them ex-KGB, and father of the other) - giving Boris blanket publicity.
Thirdly, there’s the cultural demographic I felt plagued by at Uni whom I came to class as ‘spiky haired twats’. It seemed that the overlap of ‘has spikey hair’ and ‘is a twat’ magnified the twattishness exponentially. You know the ones; at union meetings they’d only be interested in the beer budget, in union admin they’d be organising the sexist beauty contests, and at NUS conferences they’d be falling asleep and voting for the angriest soundbite puker in between the evening bar crawls.
I’m going to be highly presumptuous and assume that this was a significant swing demographic that voted for a “legend” who they enjoyed laughing at on the telly.
Yep.
Political economy made simple.
Number crunching (the bastards are lying to us).
The Office for Budget Responsibility is an institution that George Osborne founded. Its purpose is to publish reports claiming that everyone would be better off if the rich were richer, and pretend to be independent from politics (which it isn’t). It produced loads of graphs that claimed that the tax revenue ‘sweet spot’ was 48%.
More than that, and it’s worth their while for rich people to hire accountants to hide their money, meaning falling revenues. Less than that, and rich people don’t bother so much with tax dodging - but pay less actual tax.
The actual tax rate we got in the 2012 budget? 45%.
Never mind the point that there’s a big question over the legitimacy of the vast amount of wealth hoarded by a tiny minority in a country where disabled people are committing suicide to escape poverty before we ask how much tax they should pay on that hoard. Here we have proof, if proof were needed, that the coalition does not give a flying fuck about austerity. They want to make the rich richer. Simple as that.
