Partial Readings: Austerity for Whom?
Partial Readings: Austerity for Whom?
Partial Readings: Austerity for Whom?
Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced yesterday that there are massive budget cuts in store for the UK. Osborne justified spending cuts as a ?hard road to a better future?; at the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan tells us who won?t be traveling that road: British MPs. ?Not since the days of Harold Macmillan in the late 1950s has Britain been governed by politicians representing such a narrow social base. And Supermac and his millionaire colleagues at least believed in the universal welfare state. Cameron and his rich chums, in contrast, are engaged in a war on welfare?.I suspect voters will not stomach a diet of cuts, cuts, cuts imposed by millionaire ministers and backed by corporate barons and bonus-rich bankers.?
In the Romanian weekly Dilema Veche, ?a happy connoisseur and a doubting neophyte? debate internet privacy. After the connoisseur suggests ways that the neophyte can protect himself online, the neophyte fights back:
What I’m afraid of is not so much the state as those individuals who are better at violating someone?s privacy, and all you say is, ?Use proxies and Linux distributions or don’t use the Internet at all.? I haven’t a clue what a proxy is and Linux could be a cat for all I know. What’s more, I claim my right not to know, to treat the Internet the way I do a car engine: I don’t need to know how the car is made so I can drive it, and I don’t need to know about Linux so I can use the Internet. I want laws, tough laws that can defend me. I want to see those kids who break into email accounts for fun go to jail. I want to see the police slap spam-mailers with a fine, and so on. I want the Internet just as regulated as real life.
In the American Prospect , Timothy A. Canova mines the historical record to argue that a different Federal Reserve is possible.
[T]he 1942-1951 Federal Reserve?provides a model of what a democratically accountable central bank would look like when working with elected branches to achieve the three primary objectives of Keynesian economics: maintaining genuine full employment; reducing the tremendous inequalities in wealth and income that undermine any sustainable recovery; and putting an end to the monopolistic structures and financial practices that harm taxpayers and consumers alike.
As for such the chances of such a Fed today, Canova proffers little hope:
Few economists ever learn this period in Federal Reserve history, which has been airbrushed from most mainstream texts, including Bernanke’s own economics textbook….Today’s new normal is a central bank captured by private financial interests that is pursuing an elite agenda of deregulation, fiscal austerity, and bailouts and bonuses for bankers.
When Robert Jordan, one of the most prominent genre writers of recent times, learned he was dying, his greatest fear was that he would not finish his life?s work: The Wheel of Time, a paperback fantasy epic spanning more than ten volumes and 10,000 pages. Writes Zach Baron,
Jordan, who once spoke so cavalierly about dying with a pen in his hand, had come to realize, at the end of his life, that his series needed a resolution, whether or not he was around to write it. His treatment left him strong enough to work two hours a day, and Jordan skipped ahead, wrote the series?s final paragraph, then began working backward. In his last weeks, when his strength failed him entirely, Jordan summoned his family to his deathbed and narrated aloud the fate of a world he knew he wouldn?t live long enough to realize. They made tapes for posterity.
Jordan?s wife picked a young successor, Brandon Sanderson, to bring the epic to conclusion. Jordan?s fans likely deserve a resolution ?after two decades of waiting. At the same time, it was hard not to wish we were headed there with the people with whom we started the journey?and not their sometimes indifferently written, fast-talking facsimiles.?
