California has touch screen voting now, at least in San Mateo County, where Sue and I voted on Saturday.

The machine prints a paper confirmation of your choices which you can compare to your electronic choices before confirming your vote. Sue, a CPA who has done numerous audits, says this auditable paper trail is how all electronic voting should work.

One odd feature. They give you a confirmation number that you enter into the machine so you can vote. Seems to me this number at some point gets linked to you, so is it possible to then determine how someone voted or is this process randomized?

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The challenges facing the next president will be extraordinary. We hesitate to wish it on anyone, but we hope that Mr Obama gets the job.

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From the Telegraph (UK)

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon.

The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that Western European banks hold almost all the exposure to the emerging market bubble, now busting with spectacular effect.

As the economies of emerging nations in Europe and Asia crater, money is galloping back to the dollar (and yen.) This is further destabilizing those countries - and any financial institutions with big investments in them, either directly or via the now-dreaded credit default swaps. It’s European, not US, banks that have huge exposure in emerging markets. How insane did it get?

A few dare-devil homeowners in Hungary and Latvia took out mortgages in Japanese yen. They have just suffered a 40pc rise in their debt since July. Nobody warned them what happens when the Japanese carry trade goes into brutal reverse, as it does when the cycle turns.

The carry trade is the borrowing on money in one currency at a low interest rate and investing it at a higher rate in something denominated in another currency. This can be disastrous, as is happening now, when currencies collapse relative to the yen and dollar.

Yet again, central banks will be forced to intervene, this time in an attempt to prop up sick currencies. Hungary and Russia are among those most at risk.

But anyone can be affected.

The threat to Britain lies in emerging Asia, where banks have lent $329bn, almost as much as the Americans and Japanese combined. Whether you realise it or not, your pension fund is sunk in Vietnamese bonds and loans to Indian steel magnates. Didn’t they tell you?

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Lenin’s Mausoleum

George Galloway speaking at a Respect conference in London

Looking at the economic situation he remarked that the capitalist system as we know it has failed and that some of the businesses which are now receiving big dollops of public money should be taken into state control

Are most working class people interested in arguments about the differences between dead Russians? “No” was George’s answer. It’s a source of deep regret to me but he is probably right. In our public activity and press we have to use language that makes sense in working class communities. It’s a radical idea but it might be worth giving it a spin.

Absolutely. The Left, especially Marxists, too often believe they must justify political stances and ideas by consulting the sacred texts to determine what Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, or some other communist luminary said. Then, since disagreement can always be found in the sacred texts, they can spend days, weeks, months, years, arguing about it, maybe even going so far as to form (yet another) splinter group. Yeah, that’ll really have capitalism quaking in its boots, won’t it?

Galloway is right. The language Marxists use is bewildering and confusing to outsiders. New words and concepts are needed. My suggestion. Toss “bourgeoise” and “working class” out the window. Even socialists use them in contradictory ways. Here in the States, the general public has no idea what they mean. Plus, while the concept of class might have been easy to define in Marx’s day, it is much more malleable now, especially in the US. It needs redefinition.

And what is it with the Marxist insistence that revolutions must be led by the working class? Look at history. Virtually every revolution has been led by the upper middle class, if not the upper class itself. Castro and Che both came from well-off families and not from the most oppressed.

There are so many good ideas in Marxism that it’s a shame that they get buried by impenetrable jargon and a determined resolve to never re-examine core concepts in the light of current history. Capitalism constantly re-invents itself (like it is doing right now!) yet Marxism has never really done so. It needs to. Then it would almost certainly find a wider audience.

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