If public-private organisation of health care, government money for injured veterans and stimulus investment is communism, then call me Lenin. It is not and now the "house" has to bend with the wind.
Romney may have been able to persuade some "swingers" but when he was caught on camera " we don't care about that 47%" then that sealed the black vote and probably a lot of the public sector worker vote for Obama.
Tuesday, 6 November 2012
What has the New Left left to Do?
What is there again now for the new left which is left for them to do?
Well the days of trying to tax the rich are pretty much over: in the UK and the USA they have bought enough of congress, senate and the U/L houses to be able to sway governance away from grabbing much if any money from them. Apple and Starbucks have become fully tax efficient- sorry evasive effective.
The left should as I have said before address two areas: family values and infrastructural planning and investment.
Family values, by legistlating for choice and fairness at work centred around quality of life with the family and extended family, and local community as we get our heads out of the ass of economic dreaming and debt slavery. Family values by providing health and education which is adequate if not with frills and certainly not without rationing.
Infrastructural planning meets family in providing housing: 20 Bn a year on housing benefit would be better spent on building housing assocition and local authority social housing rather than subsidising Rachmans.
Also in education, planning once again schools with life times of 30 years which meet the digital age and the age of getting out of the arm chair. Specialist provision for sports, special needs and gifted children in both cities and at school and class room level. Rewarding performance in school with streaming and high acheiver routes internally.
When I went to a large comprehensive, there was not a mediocre performance dragged down to the lowest common denominator. My year and the years around all outperformed the private school average in terms of % university entrance. Mediocrity only came due to the Thatcher and Major cut backs and dissaffection of teachers with the ironically "large government" beaurocracy emposed by them on schools. On the other side, far left socialists wanted to remove streaming and exclusion from intimidating subjects for the less able to focus on the three Rs and PE, seen then as a right wing approach.
Transport is the other big area, where we should both be pragmatic: that is in pandering neither to business and sprawling industrial parks, nor to the environmental lobby completely. Making public transport and electric cars an attractive option.
The thing to avoid is the wrath of the oligarchs, but also the seeping of everything to slavery and delivery of public money to them.
So this is what is left: a line in the sand to stop the errosion of a meritocracy over a bourgiose qausi oligarchy.
Well the days of trying to tax the rich are pretty much over: in the UK and the USA they have bought enough of congress, senate and the U/L houses to be able to sway governance away from grabbing much if any money from them. Apple and Starbucks have become fully tax efficient- sorry evasive effective.
The left should as I have said before address two areas: family values and infrastructural planning and investment.
Family values, by legistlating for choice and fairness at work centred around quality of life with the family and extended family, and local community as we get our heads out of the ass of economic dreaming and debt slavery. Family values by providing health and education which is adequate if not with frills and certainly not without rationing.
Infrastructural planning meets family in providing housing: 20 Bn a year on housing benefit would be better spent on building housing assocition and local authority social housing rather than subsidising Rachmans.
Also in education, planning once again schools with life times of 30 years which meet the digital age and the age of getting out of the arm chair. Specialist provision for sports, special needs and gifted children in both cities and at school and class room level. Rewarding performance in school with streaming and high acheiver routes internally.
When I went to a large comprehensive, there was not a mediocre performance dragged down to the lowest common denominator. My year and the years around all outperformed the private school average in terms of % university entrance. Mediocrity only came due to the Thatcher and Major cut backs and dissaffection of teachers with the ironically "large government" beaurocracy emposed by them on schools. On the other side, far left socialists wanted to remove streaming and exclusion from intimidating subjects for the less able to focus on the three Rs and PE, seen then as a right wing approach.
Transport is the other big area, where we should both be pragmatic: that is in pandering neither to business and sprawling industrial parks, nor to the environmental lobby completely. Making public transport and electric cars an attractive option.
The thing to avoid is the wrath of the oligarchs, but also the seeping of everything to slavery and delivery of public money to them.
So this is what is left: a line in the sand to stop the errosion of a meritocracy over a bourgiose qausi oligarchy.
The New Left's Liberal Economic Strategy!
Well that title seems like a contradiction in terms: how the new left should embrace liberal economics ? Well it already has, it is just that there has to be a further realigment of attitudes to social policy in respect of the economy: who benefits and who pays ?
As I have said before, the new, newer left have to stop punititive taxation. What they should be doing however is firmly moving the taxation burden up the scale while at the same time, winning over more affluent middle class voters.
Currently the Conservative have levelled a high tax burden on the poorest in society by raising VAT. This is a perverted-robin-hood trick Thatcher also played: we seem to have more money in our paypacket, but it is taken back from those who can least afford it. The wealthy and the corporates seem to not only be able to pay ever less a proportion of their income and capital in tax, while actually attracting more back door subsidies in the aftermouth of the "failed sub prime casino" front door bail outs. Now there is talk of growth stimulation, which just a couple of years ago would be medling, nanny state keynsian economics.
Back to Liberalisation;: Firstly, once again aim to reduce burden on employers for social costs and rather than subsidising slavery ( "envelope opening apprentices" this week) with grants, they should reward investment in people and training on a level playing field, such that it becomes the business standard rather than the exception, to take the risk to train people balanced by the attractiveness of tax rewards. Secondly they should infact raise the limit for higher rates of tax: this will attract high wage, middle class employee voters and engage them more with qaulity-of-life politics of the left. Also it injects money at the right level of liberal trickle down: much of this money is actually public, as these are doctors, civil servants, and lawyers (bank rolled often on legal aid) and it will inject it back into local economies. These are the section most likely to invest in home improvements for example.
Why stop there, why not say carry on from a top rate applied at 60K pounds ? ( what I am suggesting to reward many of the top performers in public and private administration and "technical delivery") Why not do what they do in eastern europe, 25% flat? Well the super rich are an international bunch and trickle down is as much trickle out. Effectively they never pay top rate anyway, so there should be other tax efficient mechanisms to recirculate their money in the real, national and local scale economy.
On an important point, really what new labour tried in part, leave business alone - by in large. Pick your battles while otherwise charming them with strict budgets in line with GDP and debt leverage targets. The battles to pick are then with the overly inflationary former utilities, who are reigned in over the majority of europe to being chained tigers rather than the uncaged sharks of the UK. Competition and some level of efficiency and quality of management, tethered to below inflation price rises, more social pricing and directly comparable tariffs.
As I have said before, the new, newer left have to stop punititive taxation. What they should be doing however is firmly moving the taxation burden up the scale while at the same time, winning over more affluent middle class voters.
Currently the Conservative have levelled a high tax burden on the poorest in society by raising VAT. This is a perverted-robin-hood trick Thatcher also played: we seem to have more money in our paypacket, but it is taken back from those who can least afford it. The wealthy and the corporates seem to not only be able to pay ever less a proportion of their income and capital in tax, while actually attracting more back door subsidies in the aftermouth of the "failed sub prime casino" front door bail outs. Now there is talk of growth stimulation, which just a couple of years ago would be medling, nanny state keynsian economics.
Back to Liberalisation;: Firstly, once again aim to reduce burden on employers for social costs and rather than subsidising slavery ( "envelope opening apprentices" this week) with grants, they should reward investment in people and training on a level playing field, such that it becomes the business standard rather than the exception, to take the risk to train people balanced by the attractiveness of tax rewards. Secondly they should infact raise the limit for higher rates of tax: this will attract high wage, middle class employee voters and engage them more with qaulity-of-life politics of the left. Also it injects money at the right level of liberal trickle down: much of this money is actually public, as these are doctors, civil servants, and lawyers (bank rolled often on legal aid) and it will inject it back into local economies. These are the section most likely to invest in home improvements for example.
Why stop there, why not say carry on from a top rate applied at 60K pounds ? ( what I am suggesting to reward many of the top performers in public and private administration and "technical delivery") Why not do what they do in eastern europe, 25% flat? Well the super rich are an international bunch and trickle down is as much trickle out. Effectively they never pay top rate anyway, so there should be other tax efficient mechanisms to recirculate their money in the real, national and local scale economy.
On an important point, really what new labour tried in part, leave business alone - by in large. Pick your battles while otherwise charming them with strict budgets in line with GDP and debt leverage targets. The battles to pick are then with the overly inflationary former utilities, who are reigned in over the majority of europe to being chained tigers rather than the uncaged sharks of the UK. Competition and some level of efficiency and quality of management, tethered to below inflation price rises, more social pricing and directly comparable tariffs.
The Soul of Europe...
The soul of the UK has been under an apparent change, but this is actually a lot of smoke and mirrors: the far right oligarchical conservative movement have temporarily hijacked the agenda of the media. Don't trust the media, and the inevitability of the message that the Uk will drift inevitably to more and more control by big business and the bourgoiese.
The soul of many european countries is that we trust government to deliver and we don't trust privatised services to do any more than rip us off if not restrained by good governance. We trust government with health and education: there are inefficiencies, but when you look at high inflation in many privatised monopolies and services like electricity, rail travel, water, gas then it makes many of us wonder why we went down the private root.
This type of inflation is of course a heavy form of hidden taxation, which burdens below average income families most : they do not qualify for capping while as a proportion of income energy and travel are higher, while their disposable incomes do not increase at the rate if inflation that these privatised utilities present.
There is inherent inefficiency in constructing and maintaining a somewhat artificial market for a commodity which favours the computer literate. There is the cost of marketing and the cost of administrating customers over to new systems. Then there is the cost of interest based on smaller more diffuse loans negotiated on a regional, or at least divided basis and not national basis often. Lastly there is the demands for dividends to the stock markets, which is short sighted of course. Coupled to this there is the inefficiencies of several beaurocracies reporting financially, and the hidden organisational strain of providing dividends in years when money would be better used internally to the company, on training staff for example, or directly upon making infrastructure more efficient in delivering power.
The UK, especially England, stands at a turning point where it may slip from being a social democracy where state once provided a perfectly adequate level of education, transport and health care, into being far more like an american state where the class divide is cemented for ever. Education and health may start to slip into being a second class public provision with entry to tertiary education becoming more exclusive (partly i believe it should be, but based on merit and not coming from an affluent family). This is a status that the bourgoiese and the rich are very happy about: they want to be able to lock society into unfullfilable aspirations ( as in the "american dream" ) by removal of the earlier and as I remember, fully adequate comprehensive provision.
What I have seen in my life time in England in particular, is the rise of the bourgoise as the new middle class, and the decline of the adminstrative middle class to being the new working class. For the first time, a significant section of society will start to live a lower material standard of living than their parents, and this is university graduate level. They will live in smaller, more expensive houses, spend more time at work and have less discretionary income and holiday entitltement. They have less job security, less rights in the work place and lower pay rises than their parents enjoyed.
Basically the rich pay very handsomely for the message to be controlled and dominant that "business rules, government is inately inefficient and largely incapable". BBC world news on the TV went more and more business oriented- the importance of international business, and okay maybe their audience is a lot of business travellers and foriegn business men. This has however crept over into Radio 4 which seems to have far more of its agenda taken up with how important business is to our daily lives. How much we should worship and feed business, even when it does go to the casino and loose and need socialist bail outs.
The soul of many european countries is that we trust government to deliver and we don't trust privatised services to do any more than rip us off if not restrained by good governance. We trust government with health and education: there are inefficiencies, but when you look at high inflation in many privatised monopolies and services like electricity, rail travel, water, gas then it makes many of us wonder why we went down the private root.
This type of inflation is of course a heavy form of hidden taxation, which burdens below average income families most : they do not qualify for capping while as a proportion of income energy and travel are higher, while their disposable incomes do not increase at the rate if inflation that these privatised utilities present.
There is inherent inefficiency in constructing and maintaining a somewhat artificial market for a commodity which favours the computer literate. There is the cost of marketing and the cost of administrating customers over to new systems. Then there is the cost of interest based on smaller more diffuse loans negotiated on a regional, or at least divided basis and not national basis often. Lastly there is the demands for dividends to the stock markets, which is short sighted of course. Coupled to this there is the inefficiencies of several beaurocracies reporting financially, and the hidden organisational strain of providing dividends in years when money would be better used internally to the company, on training staff for example, or directly upon making infrastructure more efficient in delivering power.
The UK, especially England, stands at a turning point where it may slip from being a social democracy where state once provided a perfectly adequate level of education, transport and health care, into being far more like an american state where the class divide is cemented for ever. Education and health may start to slip into being a second class public provision with entry to tertiary education becoming more exclusive (partly i believe it should be, but based on merit and not coming from an affluent family). This is a status that the bourgoiese and the rich are very happy about: they want to be able to lock society into unfullfilable aspirations ( as in the "american dream" ) by removal of the earlier and as I remember, fully adequate comprehensive provision.
What I have seen in my life time in England in particular, is the rise of the bourgoise as the new middle class, and the decline of the adminstrative middle class to being the new working class. For the first time, a significant section of society will start to live a lower material standard of living than their parents, and this is university graduate level. They will live in smaller, more expensive houses, spend more time at work and have less discretionary income and holiday entitltement. They have less job security, less rights in the work place and lower pay rises than their parents enjoyed.
Basically the rich pay very handsomely for the message to be controlled and dominant that "business rules, government is inately inefficient and largely incapable". BBC world news on the TV went more and more business oriented- the importance of international business, and okay maybe their audience is a lot of business travellers and foriegn business men. This has however crept over into Radio 4 which seems to have far more of its agenda taken up with how important business is to our daily lives. How much we should worship and feed business, even when it does go to the casino and loose and need socialist bail outs.
Fighting for the Soul of America ?
What is the nature of America? Is this presidential election really a fight between vastly opposing values?
The presidential candidates seem to represent the two side: the college scholarship, self made, lean tall man of mixed race and a broken home. On the other side , born super priviledged while it must be said, successful in his own right, from a family whose history represents flight from governance, the shiney smiling hamptons socialite and city slicker.
Barack Obama represents a move towards the USA becoming a social democracy, but just ever so slighty. His health insurance plans, once endorsed by many republicans before they picked up the hate-of-ObamaCare as a drum, keep provision largely private while perhaps introducing a deal of rationing. In effect what happens in the charity sector. And also spreads the payments: private health care in the US is economically floated by state employee contributions. In effect, like car insurance, it gives more people access to less health care per head, while also injecting a huge amount of money into that sector. From us in the "other" west, Canada, Europe, Australia, with our national insurance ( and in the picture part private plans the wealthier can afford, and the private supply to our public side), the fact that less than 20% of the USA's population have access to the type of services we take for granted and pay maybe 5% tax for, seems alien and unfair.
On education too, we still enjoy a high degree of social mobility, although this is very much under threat from the far right control in many lands now. I couldnt think of anything worse than my children having to go through the american system watching the over-priviledged swan around while they worked fast food and late night customer service to pay their way through an education compromised by lack of time to study.
But is the USA too inextricably linked to it's history and the type of chance taking, hard working optimists who took the boat there in the 19th C and before? Well as Tom Wolfe puts it as a republican voter, you are as well to vote Romney to try and at least slow the train of inevitable governance and federalisation.
With rights to vote and a somewhat partisan race card being played, it is somewhat inevitable that capitalist countries which are democracies, drift towards social democracy because the ordinary, average person and the dispossessed can vote and capitalism inevitably makes their lives poorer by moving value up into capital. The borgiouse do well on republicans, and the super rich do well. Everyone else has the dream but for many their dream is to work in public service and qualify for private health care.
The presidential candidates seem to represent the two side: the college scholarship, self made, lean tall man of mixed race and a broken home. On the other side , born super priviledged while it must be said, successful in his own right, from a family whose history represents flight from governance, the shiney smiling hamptons socialite and city slicker.
Barack Obama represents a move towards the USA becoming a social democracy, but just ever so slighty. His health insurance plans, once endorsed by many republicans before they picked up the hate-of-ObamaCare as a drum, keep provision largely private while perhaps introducing a deal of rationing. In effect what happens in the charity sector. And also spreads the payments: private health care in the US is economically floated by state employee contributions. In effect, like car insurance, it gives more people access to less health care per head, while also injecting a huge amount of money into that sector. From us in the "other" west, Canada, Europe, Australia, with our national insurance ( and in the picture part private plans the wealthier can afford, and the private supply to our public side), the fact that less than 20% of the USA's population have access to the type of services we take for granted and pay maybe 5% tax for, seems alien and unfair.
On education too, we still enjoy a high degree of social mobility, although this is very much under threat from the far right control in many lands now. I couldnt think of anything worse than my children having to go through the american system watching the over-priviledged swan around while they worked fast food and late night customer service to pay their way through an education compromised by lack of time to study.
But is the USA too inextricably linked to it's history and the type of chance taking, hard working optimists who took the boat there in the 19th C and before? Well as Tom Wolfe puts it as a republican voter, you are as well to vote Romney to try and at least slow the train of inevitable governance and federalisation.
With rights to vote and a somewhat partisan race card being played, it is somewhat inevitable that capitalist countries which are democracies, drift towards social democracy because the ordinary, average person and the dispossessed can vote and capitalism inevitably makes their lives poorer by moving value up into capital. The borgiouse do well on republicans, and the super rich do well. Everyone else has the dream but for many their dream is to work in public service and qualify for private health care.
What the UK Tax Payers Alliance Should really focus on
The UK tax payers alliance, a "non partisan" body with links to the daily mail and other right wing establishment bodies, have sighted the investment the UK makes in industrial relations as being money wasted which should be funded purely by trade union subscriptions. The tax payer must bend over backwards to fork out £113 M per annum, which is actually less than the budget for the administration of the tender process for rail franchises over the last three years. Of course under the Tories, workers rights are worthless in the face of the god of "wealth creation at all costs".
However the UK Tax payers alliance like to only mention the £17-19 Bn Housing Benefit bill in terms of "beenfit cheats" and not actually the real cheats who are the private property owners receiving an index linked income. Basically skewing the entire property market and writing a blank cheque of subsidy to do so.
A common thread through out their web site is that they AVOID anything which is to do with public money being missused in the Private sector, and they have deleted many entries with "trident" which is proposed not for early withdrawal as a strategic white elephant, but in fact for like-for-like replacement at a cost over 100 billion. It deters North Korea and keeps the UKs (not very) independent ICBM flag waving for old duffers from a past-sell-by-date "great" Britain.
I think they should spend more time on housing benefit and the possibility of LIMITING what is payed (far from Russian Roulette) to private and public landlords, the waste of money Trident is and a new ICBM system will be, poor value for money in the "apprenticeships" schemes( fast becoming the YOPpers scheme for cheap subsidised low quality labour) and the PFI value for money
We should pay high interest rates to private industry for "efficiencies" over direct public funding and capital ownership, while this on their very partisan web site is glossed over in favour for comparing the GDP / Interest payments of the UK, a tertiary economy, with the two primary resource fuelled economies of Austrailia and Canada.
Monday, 5 November 2012
Growth? But Not-In-My-Back-Yard in dear England ??
Now the Uk government has come up with a rather good little wheeze for stimulating or rather you could say untapping a latent source of growth: big government takes over from stodgey local interests in planning persmission.
This is aimed largely at greenfield sites, while mysteriously at industry and social housing, which would seem to be what would really get the Shires of Tory voting NIMBY's up in arms. However, with a bung here and a PR campaign there, luxury estates for the decanted semi wealthy will start to pop up amongst the cowslips and daffodils, along with health spas and holiday activity centres no doubt.
Brown field sites are abundant, but can be more expensive to redevelope and are often in industrial lepper colonies, cut off from modern infrastructure or rather many are encircled by it. Basically, they dont have village pubs and they dont move more tory voters into the shire, they move more labour votes into the city constituencies they are often on the periphery of.
This is aimed largely at greenfield sites, while mysteriously at industry and social housing, which would seem to be what would really get the Shires of Tory voting NIMBY's up in arms. However, with a bung here and a PR campaign there, luxury estates for the decanted semi wealthy will start to pop up amongst the cowslips and daffodils, along with health spas and holiday activity centres no doubt.
Brown field sites are abundant, but can be more expensive to redevelope and are often in industrial lepper colonies, cut off from modern infrastructure or rather many are encircled by it. Basically, they dont have village pubs and they dont move more tory voters into the shire, they move more labour votes into the city constituencies they are often on the periphery of.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)