Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Categories
In this Discussion
Top Posters
- Arkady 5356
- miss annie 5139
- andy 4506
- Ali 3397
- krappyrubsnif 3205
- tosscat 2291
- David 2179
- ADGS 1875
- kreuzkav 1732
- Mirandola 1618
Comments
Korean Information Infrastructure project (KII) launched in 1995 which was a government regulatory body not a nationalised company. It set targets and a regulatory regime.
There was public seed money and aggressive use of subsidies. But the work itself was done by private investment and private companies, not the state and not a nationalised company.
@LukeG ...
"Big business should obviously pay tax... not at all the same as literally taking 10% of their capital to give it to workers that's actually theft. Tax business how you want and stop tax evasion, that's different to state appropriation, you've got to see that?"
Let me get my glasses.
Nuance returns. Theft is bad, agree. Tax avoidance yep, bad. State Appropriation... tricky.
It's great that 'big' businesses make money, we need it and well done them but... the roads their workers use to get to the office, the hospitals they use to make them better to go back to work. The police that protect their businesses, or the fire services that would come if their office set alight. They're important too.
In fact, the bigger the business, the more they rely on workers, on their health, on the taxes they pay, on their social contribution both financially and morally; because if they stopped coming, the business would cease to exist.
It's not as cut and dry as "its theft!" Workers are the engine of any company, it's how they make cash and the social systems we have in place look after those workers. In some people's eyes, those workers should not only be protected but have a say in how the company they fuel, should be run.
I'll leave it there, looks like rain and my red flag will get wet.
Are the 10% worker-owned proposals not separate from the proposals to ensure that Facebook at al pay their fair share of tax by calculating local revenue?
I'm not defending the Tories, I'm pointing out how shoddy nationalising the internet is as an idea - an idea that has categorically not happened in S. Korea.
However it's pretty sickening to think that it's in any way okay to just take a chunk of a business and just give it to someone else just because they are the 'workers' or the less 'fortunate'... I don't know if I need to give you a history lesson about how that's gone in the past. Remember the majority of shares in listed companies in the UK are owned by Pension funds (including public pensions) and individuals, not just some dark forces off-shored somewhere.
As this labour shadow cabinet has already hinted, they care little about private ownership of assets and land - remember that proposal to 'seize' unused properties because there's a housing crisis (which there is undeniably)? I'm all for fair taxation and giving back to the working people via fair, regulated wages and strongly regulated labour markets, but giving the state the actual power to seize assets is literally opening the door to future extremism- not just on the left, but on the right too. Okay - one day take the empty properties off the 'international investors', next day it's the 'internationalist bankers'. It would be no hyperbole to ask the day after that, who are the next in line to get their assets taken off them because they are richer than the rest of the population?
I hoped that when the Labour party turned further to the left, it would be a party of aspiration, a party of growth and investment in education, police and communities. Bring up the level of everyone in order to create a fairer society, rather than pull down!
Instead it's increasingly looking like a party of envy and equality through expropriation.
It has an open goal with May and BoJo. Comon we can do better!!!
We will know the facts on the Labour Manifesto late r this week from which point the discussion can be fact based
Did anyone watch the debate last night (disclaimer I only peeked in a few times).
As I unfortunately learnt to my cost in 2010, voting for the Lib Dems is a vote for a Tory government. The LDs had great manifesto pledges then too - abolishing tuition fees etc etc - and broke every one of them propping up the Tory austerity policies instead.
Jo Swinson was herself a minister in that government, and has been much more negative about Corbyn than Johnson. I don’t think there’s any room to reasonably doubt that voting Lib Dem in December would directly lead to 5 years of Boris Johnson as PM.
And while I’m no fan of the run-of-the-mill nasty party Tories, it’s vital that we acknowledge that Boris Johnson is not one of them. I don't believe is's an overstatement to say he is an unprecedented threat to society as we know it.
Let’s recall a few highlights of this short stint as PM thus far:
- Illegal and anti-democratic prorogation of Parliament - followed by zero expression of remorse when forced by the Courts to reverse it.
- Installing Dominic Cummings as Chief of Staff - this guy is currently in contempt of Parliament for refusing to attend hearings into Vote Leave electoral fraud. Literally endorsing a criminal who has zero respect for our democracy.
- Repeatedly lying in public statements and refusing to acknowledge or apologise when called out for his lies. More here: https://bit.ly/2qlOOFn
- Under investigation for committing fraud when Mayor by directly ordering 6-figure public funding for his mistress Jennifer Arcuri’s company, when the money was for UK entrepreneurs and both she and her company are US-based - many thousands of people currently doing time in jails for smaller crimes.
- Now seems to have used his position as PM to block that investigation from announcing findings until after the election despite the fact that the investigation body, Independent Office for Police Conduct, is not meant to be subject to such purdah delays.
The fact that John Major was one of the litigants against him in the prorogation lawsuit shows how radically he's breaking with precedent - moving towards a special brand of don't-give-a-toss destruction of social and political norms.
The pathological lying shows that there's nothing he says - on Brexit, on the NHS, on our human rights post ECHR - that we can trust.
If Johnson becomes PM in December and Trump wins in 2020, the two of them will be a truly unholy axis of narcissistic, amoral, anti-society, racist, climate-denying terror. I wouldn't put it past them to whip each other into starting World War 3 if it seemed personally expedient to them. Let alone the day-to-day environmental and social tragedies they would unleash.
In my time, I've felt politics in the UK was dispiriting, disappointing, even disenfranchising.
I've never felt that we were staring into the abyss of an Orwellian dystopia until now.
Voting for the Tories, naturally, is to explicitly endorse all of the above.
Voting Lib Dem will implicitly do the same.
Anyone who cares about the things that make the UK a safe, stable, moderately just society - let alone cares about our NHS - and wants to safeguard them - for god's sake stop quibbling and vote Labour.
I think we are all in general agreement and push comes to shove we'll vote lab in our general geographic area, and I guess pro-leavers don't have a choice and kind of have to vote Tories right now.
I'd beseech you not to use hyperbole though - no swing voter is going to be convinced by exaggeration, especially on the racist, war mongering angle. I've met a lot of young voters my age who are put off by this kind of exaggerated language when it's just not true - it diminishes the real points of Boris being corrupt, unfit for rule and a general lair; it's the same when the right-wing call Corbyn an actual communist - how silly does that sound?
Similarly I have people in my family who vote conservative, they're not white, I don't think they appreciate being called racists.
Again my points are about labour shooting themselves royally in the foot. This is an open goal, Boris is one of the easiest targets in British history, just like May was, and yet the left is failing to capitalise by being largely incompetent and coming out with silly policies!
I'm interested that you think this is hyperbole. I'm literally losing sleep and weight because I truly believe everything I said above, and it's making me sick. Interested to know what precisely you disagree with, in case it helps me feel better.
Voting Lib Dem will implicitly do the same.' Thus voting for Tories = explicitly endorse racism... thus Tory voters are racists, and all the other words you used.
As to the charge of BoJo being a racist, it's a bit infantile (and I say again, it's not winning us on the left any friends) if we go around labelling people racists just because we don't agree with them. I'm guessing you're referring to the fucking daft comment about burqas (lest I remind you that Islam isn't a race, so it's actually Islamophobic if you want to call it something, and not I'm not defending him). He's got the highest number of BAME representatives in the cabinet office ever in the history of the UK (that's four, to labour two in the shadow cabinet).
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Funding-Real-Change.pdf
That leaves the question of whether it is racist, sexist, homophobic and Islamophobic to knowingly vote for a racist, sexist, homophobic Islamophobe. At the very least one is tacitly endorsing those views and attitudes. Is is a stretch to call someone who votes for a racist a racist themselves? Maybe a bit, but it's not a very big one. There was little in jacula's post that I thought was hyperbolic.
https://www.indy100.com/article/boris-johnson-tory-leadership-theresa-may-racist-sexist-comments-8917876
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjNkbCmsvvlAhUjt3EKHW8fCWIQFjAAegQIAhAB&url=https://www.businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-record-sexist-homophobic-and-racist-comments-bumboys-piccaninnies-2019-6&usg=AOvVaw0sw903Cwdg1RXOGgnY5noc
"Basically going back to my original point, which I think people can agree on. Labour have an open goal with BoJo, and yet, time after time it's fucking up with unrealistic policies that the majority of Britons just won't vote for in the numbers needed for Labour to win. "
I do agree with this too!
I seem to have fallen into a trap of seemingly defending BoJo, where the intention was actually to criticise Labour - in particular on their Brexit policy.
The whole lot is here https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/
But I see zero evidence of this. What I see is a party banging the class warfare drum and going after the low hanging fruit of high earners on PAYE, small investors, families made paper wealthy by house price inflation, and the stock market-listed UK firms that do tend to pay tax, plus the bulk of those dividends from the 10% of shares taken will go to the state not the workers.
And as for the Tories... they seem to think an election strategy can be to say you'll spend more money where it is needed, but expect people to believe you while you continue to be obnoxious.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems' decide to make a cornerstone policy of overturning a democratic vote.
I despair.