Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 365 Editor's Choice: 5
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such irrelevance
[Read the article: Hillary's team crosses the line]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How can you be so blind? None of this matters. What matters is
POLICY! What are Obama's policies? If you looked at them and analysed them you'd find they differ hardly at all from Senator Clinton's. So commentators say- and I suppose onlookers just have to take their word for it because Obama isn't big on policy he's more into hope and inspiration and the charismatic preacher thing. It seems obvious to me that the right in America have done the math, crunched the numbers, and they know Obama can't win the Presidency. They believe Hillary Clinton can. You can see this very clearly. When you have right wing figures like David Brooks singing Obama's praises and mainstream media figures falling all over themselves to call him 'sexy' well, call me cynical but I smell a rat. If they really thought he could win and become President they would be attacking him day and night the way they do Hillary Clinton.At the moment he is just something to wedge the Clinton camp. Divide and conquer. Some of this stuff is just damn silly. Michael Moore is desperately trying to link Clinton to McCain on his website. He has pictures all the time of Clinton and McCain together: some authentic, some photoshopped. What makes this amusing is that there is no link between Clinton and McCain politically but you could draw a line with a ruler from Obama via Joe Lieberman straight to McCain. All of the right's energy is focused on preventing Hillary Clinton from getting the Democratic nomination: she is a major threat in their eyes. She has the experience,she was in the White House for eight years and she has a lot of support from women and the white working class - the two biggest groups in the electorate, far outnumbering African Americans as a group. Don't you think the pointy heads in the rightwing think tanks are at their laptops right now, analysing percentages? And who is their candidate of choice? Obama of course. Shouldn't someone be asking why instead of running with the lemmings for the cliff? The right has more at stake then just losing the White House: there are legal matters to be considered and some people could end up doing major time. Their cunning is the cunning of desperation. Only Obama and Methuselah McCain can save them. Looking down on all this like an alien from outerspace I see the blind leading the blind.
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don't re-write history
[Read the article: The resurrection of John Maynard Keynes ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I write more in sorrow than anger romath. Did laissez-faire capitalism ever exist? How old are you? There's a book you might like to get hold of called 'Dickens and the London Underground' which contains horror stories that put Stephen King in the shade. That someone like you who lives in the midst of the social dysfunction laissez-faire capitalism always creates can ask this question is truly disturbing on a number of levels. It was in the 'Dickens' book that I found the story of the rooms with ropes in them. For a penny homeless people could come in for a couple of hours and drape themselves over the ropes and sleep. Then they were moved on and someone came and took their place. It was this book that also had the story of the shoemaker who had to put his family in the workhouse because he couldn't feed them. He was determined to get his family out of the workhouse so he set to work mending shoes. He worked for days with no sleep and very little food and he put the money he made in a tin. After three days he died. When the doctor came he said the man had died of exhaustion and malnutrition. The money in the tin still wasn't enough to get his family out of the workhouse. So, yes, I know laissez-faire capitalism existed and exists and its pernicious effects linger all over the world. Even the Iraq war is part of laissez-faire capitalism and the never ending pursuit of market share. John Maynard Keynes was opposed to globalisation because, even though he could see the benefits to business, he could also see the devastating effects of a global market on workers and their pay and conditions. Globalisation is just a form of super capitalism with morals borrowed from the Medicis, who I believe set up the first bank and also created the blueprint for the structure and activities of the mafia in the way they did business. American capitalism learned everything the Medicis and the mafia had to teach them and improved on their ruthlessness and inhumanity in ways the medici and the mafia could only dream of. Laissez-faire capitalism: you're standing in it. And don't dream it's over.
In 2007, shortly before John Howard and his Calvinist apostles were finally thrown out of government in Australia it came out that people who had had brain surgery for tumours or because of car accidents were sometimes collapsing to the floor and having seizures while waiting in the queue to put their form in for disability payments from social security. These people were then 'breached' and had their payment cut off because they hadn't completed the form. Makes you proud to be a human being doesn't it? The wonder of LFC is that it can bring the Victorian era back just like that! As if nothing has been learned in the meantime. People like you are probably the reason.