Bob Morris @ 23:30 Category: Unfiled;
I knew that my friend Dave Riley, socialist left / green organizer in Australia, was involved in a number of websites, blogs and wikis, but didn’t realize just how many.
He counts 30. Impressive. Some are mentoring projects. Others are his. Good stuff indeed. Check out his many projects. He’s doing podcasts, videoblogs, and more.
Bob Morris @ 19:09 Category: LGBT rights Tags: prop 8;
Join The Impact now lists hundreds, yes hundreds, of protests happening tomorrow, Sat. Nov. 15, across the country in opposition to Prop 8.
I’ll be at the S.F. protest, helping to set up and video. Let’s make these protests be heard around the world.
Bob Morris @ 17:34 Category: Credit crisis;
The European Union is ready to take action at the World Trade Organisation if it judges that US state aid for its struggling auto industry is ‘illegal,’ European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso said on Friday.
‘We are looking at the (US) plan. The plan has not yet been made official but certainly, if it amounts to illegal state aid we will act at the WTO’
WTO rules “prohibit countries from subsidizing domestic industries in ways that hurt foreign competitors” according to CNN. Ok, so why didn’t they complain about US bailouts of financial institutions?
Bob Morris @ 10:15 Category: Socialism;
I was convinced we’d have a revolution in [the] US and I decided to be its leader and prevent it. I’m a rich man too and have run with your kind of people. I decided half a loaf was better than none - a half loaf for me and a half loaf for you and no revolution.” - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Moral of the story: if you really want Obama to be like FDR, threaten him with revolution.
However, the US is nowhere near a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation like it was in the Great Depression. A cousin once told me that when she and her military husband returned from several years in China to the US at the beginning of the Depression, that friends told them to settle in D.C. because they were afraid there would be a revolution on the West Coast.
Much of that revolutionary fervor was spread by militant labor unions who had socialist and communist organizers, and who found a receptive ear. But there simply is little of that mass action and solidarity now in the States. Could there be if economic condition get really bad? Maybe, but it will probably emerge in far different form than back then. I doubt it could come from unions again because they haven’t got the numbers or the clout now.
Obama won’t need coaxing or threatening to do a FDR. And really, what part of the Left has the power to threaten him anyway? The economy needs a massive stimulus, and Obama plans major spending on renewable energy, infrastructure rebuilding, and education. This will create many new jobs, just like FDR did with the public works programs.
All of which riffs on a theme that I’ve mentioned here before. If major change does comes to the US, it almost certainly won’t happen like it has before, with huge masses of protesters in the streets. The Left makes a mistake by looking back to its presumed glory days and trying to use that as a template for tomorrow. The world is decentralized and much faster-moving now. March on a factory in Ohio, and the owners move it to Asia. Start a nationwide boycott and the opposition has websites, listservs, advertisements, and spokespersons refuting you a day or two later.
Capitalism and the Right continually reinvent themselves. Karl Rove was a genius at this for years, figuring how to appeal to voters by prsenting conservative views in new packages. The Left too often doesn’t do this. Instead it tries to make what happened in Lenin’s Russia or the 1930’s labor strikes in the US or the civil rights / antiwar era protests of the 60’s the model for what needs to be done in the future. But the world has changed, new tactics are needed
Bob Morris @ 05:45 Category: Unfiled Tags: CalPERS;
Calpers bought shares in 112 REITs prior to market collapse.
The largest U.S. public pension fund bought shares of 112 real estate investment trusts in the third quarter with a combined value of about $482 million as of Sept. 30, according to a regulatory filing. The holdings are now valued at about $245 million.
It’s difficult to comprehend stupidity and recklessness of this magnitude. CalPERS bought risky real estate investments as that market was clearly tanking, and managed to lose half the money in a matter of weeks. Yes, it’s still a paper loss, but real estate isn’t coming back to where it was for probably years. Why didn’t they just go to cash instead?
They’ve lost a total of 20%, over $50 billion, so far this fiscal year. Management seems content with emanating the sort of blather that GM did for years, bland pronouncements about how long-term prospects are fine, just fine, and that they see no pressing reason to awaken from their slumber.
But GM is a car company. CalPERS is managing retirement money. Yet they have been taking crazy risks with that money. IMO, their entire management needs to be fired and replaced with people with actual competence and concern for pensioner’s retirements.
Bob Morris @ 01:11 Category: Climate change;
The Sierra Club sued and won.
It appears that this decision will essentially stop all new coal plant permitting dead in its tracks for at least a year.
In the meantime, 30 permits for new coal-fired power plants in the seven state directly regulated by the EPA’s permitting process, plus projects on all Indian Reservations will immediately die because of this ruling.
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