JERUSALEM — Israel’s conservative Likud Party initialed a coalition agreement with the center-left Labor Party early Tuesday, taking the prime minister-designate and Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, a significant step closer to forming a broad government and avoiding leading a narrow right-wing coalition.
So, supposedly right-wing Likud is going to form a bloc with supposedly left-wing Labor, while supposedly centrist Kadima will be in opposition.
Zionists and the games they play…
Xinhua Chinese news service informs me that peace activists rally in Washington to mark 6th anniversary of Iraq war. Thousands of them, apparently:
Demonstrators also carried some 170 cardboard coffins covered with flags from various countries where they said innocent people are killed as result of “U.S. hegemony.”
Organizers said the rally is aimed to press the Obama administration to immediately withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and “end injustices around the world.”
Oddly, there is no mentioning of this protest anywhere in the New York Times or Washington Post. Or, as far as I can see, any of the US mainstream Internet media, for that matter.
.
The New York Times has a story about the Chinese soldier murdered in southwest China last week. Significance of this incident is, apparently, that “violence against army soldiers is extremely rare in China.”
While reporting it, the New York Times can’t resist to note: “according to state-controlled media.”
The state-controlled Xinhua, on the other hand, tells me nothing about modus operandi of the US media. Too bad, will have to figure it out myself, I guess.
.
Update:
another Xinhua item not deemed newsworthy by the US media:
Israeli warplanes carried out sonic booms in the skies of Gaza Strip Sunday afternoon, causing wide-spread panic […]
Earlier Sunday, Israeli gunboats opened their fire at Palestinian fishing boat near the coast of Rafah city in southern Gaza Strip, damaging a number of boats.
…Radical financial reforms by Turgot and Malesherbes angered the nobles and were blocked by the parlements who insisted that the King did not have the legal right to levy new taxes. So Turgot was dismissed in 1776 and Malesherbes resigned in 1776 to be replaced by Jacques Necker. Necker supported the American Revolution, and proceeded with a policy of taking out large international loans instead of raising taxes. When this policy failed miserably, Louis dismissed him, and replaced him in 1783 with Charles Alexandre de Calonne, who increased public spending to ‘buy’ the country’s way out of debt. Again this failed, so Louis convoked the Assembly of Notables in 1787 to discuss a revolutionary new fiscal reform proposed by Calonne. When the nobles were told the extent of the debt, they were shocked into rejecting the plan. This negative turn of events signaled to Louis that he had lost the ability to rule as an absolute monarch, and he fell into depression.
As power drifted from him, there were increasingly loud calls for him to convoke the Estates-General, and in May 1789 he did so, summoning it for the first time since 1614 in a last-ditch attempt to get new monetary reforms approved. This convocation was one of the events that transformed the general economic and political malaise of the country into the French Revolution, which began in June 1789…
Paul Krugman is unhappy about the “Geithner plan.”
But what difference does it make what the plan is? Banks were looted, and now they need to be funded again. The looters can’t be held responsible (bar a revolution), because they are the Patriciate, so the money should come from the Commoners. These are the facts of the matter.
The rest is pure politics; just a question of how to best organize and sell it to the public. Every used car salesman has his own favorite trick; it is irrelevant how exactly he manages to convince you to buy that piece of junk.
Liddy said the payouts were necessary to retain top employees with the specialized knowledge to dispose of $2.7 trillion in complex securities that ended up dragging the company to the brink of collapse last year.
It’s all bullshit of course; the “top employees” have no “specialized knowledge” or any knowledge really, other than of golf courses and extremely expensive hookers.
Nevertheless, this is very informative: once you’re a “top employee”, nomenklatura as they used to call it in USSR – you’ve made it. Nothing can happen to you; you can destroy a company and move on to the same post in the next one. Laws do not apply, you have nothing to fear. Unlike a politician, neither live boy nor dead girl will end your career; the FBI will not be looking for hundred dollar bills in your freezer.
This has both positive and negative ramifications.
On one hand, this, of course, reduces adversarial tensions, builds solidarity among the ruling class. All in the same boat, un pour tous, tous pour un. This is good, stability.
On the other hand – the rot. Too much solidarity and stability leads to stagnation and decay, like in Louis XVI’s court or post-Khrushchev’s USSR.
Lenin defines ‘revolutionary situation’ as the one where the ruling classes are unable and the lower classes unwilling to keep going as usual; the first half seems present.
It’s a deep rot, and John Stewart satirizing it doesn’t really change anything. It would require the people working at NBC News to develop a conscience.
Mattew Yglesias, American political blogger and prominent voice in the liberal blogosphere:
Henry Farrell has a good post taking on some odd recent punditocratic assertions that the United States is in danger of imminent Frenchification.
Indeed, a good post, very good post, and timely too: I was very much concerned about the US of A turning into France. And now when Prohvessor Farrell with his arsenal of Political Science gizmos is on the case I feel so much better.
And thank you, Mr. Yglesias, too for helping put me at ease with such fine arguments as:
…the United States has its own currency and its own monetary policy which France doesn’t.
and
There’s no metropolitan area in the United States that plays a role even remotely resembling the centrality of Paris in French life…
the US of A is unlkely to become France!
Developing…
So, Yglesias writes a post about the business elite hating the unions. Fair enough; trivial, but okay – hey, the guy writes a dozen posts every day.
So, Prohvessor Farrell quotes Yglesias and adds Adam Smith’s quote about businessmen constantly conspiring to suppress wages of the workers.
That’s it, two quotes, and no explanation from the esteemed Professor. What does it all mean – we are left to wonder about the mysterious ways of Political Science… Does it mean that the existence of labor unions is justified by owners’ crookedness? Sounds like it. But what if they stop conspiring? What if there is only one employer in town – would it make the labor unions unnecessary?
…when presented with the opinion that the US political system just may be as (or more) corrupt and oppressive (in its own way, of course) as the Chinese one:
You don’t know what you are talking about. You don’t know how the petition system works in China … You admit that you know relatively little about China … You don’t understand how petitioning systems work in autocratic regimes … You prefer arguing with the voices in your head … You accuse people of Orientalism for making the apparently reasonable point …
A warning: your score on ‘stupid’ and ‘irrelevant’ is mounting rapidly…
Uh-oh. Sounds like a mandarin is about to teach the ungrateful peasant a lesson.
Hilariously, one of Farrell’s idiot-groupies replies to the phrase “UK, which has an unelected leader”:
The UK does not have an unelected leader. Its leader is Gordon Brown MP, who was elected in 2005.
Right. Elected by 20,000 people from in the middle of nowhere to the lower house of the parliament – oh yeah, that makes all the difference.
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