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Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action. |
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has proposed amending the Constitution to prevent the European Union from settling migrants in Hungary without the approval of Parliament.
In a speech on October 4, Orbán said the amendment would be presented to Parliament on October 10, and, if approved, it would come into effect on November 8.
Hungarian voters overwhelmingly rejected the European Union's mandatory migrant relocation plan in a referendum on October 2, but failed to turn out in sufficient numbers to make the referendum legally binding.
More than 97% of those who voted in the referendum answered 'no' to the question: "Do you want the European Union to be entitled to prescribe the mandatory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly?"
In an address to Parliament on October 3, Orbán hailed the vote as a "great victory" and reiterated his plan to amend the Hungarian Constitution to ensure that the EU cannot settle migrants in Hungary. He said:
"No party or party alliance in the history of Hungarian democracy has ever received such a large mandate. I'm telling you with sufficient gentleness, we will not let the opinion of the 3.3 million people who voted 'no' to be ignored.
"... with sufficient modesty and restraint I must say that Hungarians made history yesterday. If it is true that history is written by the victors then with a resounding victory of the 'no' votes Hungary won yesterday"
http://www.kormany.hu/hu/a-miniszterelnok/hirek/egy-uj-egyseg-jott-letre
(need to use translation service)
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On October 10 2016 14:36 WhiteDog wrote:
Nyxisto the globalization is not an economic phenomena only but a set of regulation that change the sovereignty in the world. If you accept it, you are bound to pursue a certain set of policies, in finance for exemple, and any kind of socialist policies is impossible.
That and capitalist does not work like you seem to believe. Look at the world - redistribution leads to fiscal evasion and increasing debts.
I'm simply against establishing the nation state as a kind of absolute frame of reference that everything needs to be judged against. I think the state is one of many institutions that is good at solving certain sets of problems, but I don't think it is great to solve all problems that occur in our economy. Redistribution and fiscal evasion are two such things. Both can not be solved on the national level without significantly hamstringing your economy. If we want to make the European economy work we also need redistribution on the European level, not just nationally.
It's the dogmatic retreat to the nation state that I find troublesome that is occurring on all sides of the political spectrum, even if can't offer an solution. Accepting the international framework doesn't invalidate all socialist policies, just some.
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Any left party would be utterly stupid to take your position, Nyxisto.
The "I only feel like a European" crowd is already a tiny minority in polls. And these are just verbal commitments. When it comes to actually transferring money or jobs to foreign countries for "the greater good of Europe" approval goes down even further.
In the current environment a party with that position is 'unelectable', period.
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The 'pro European' crowd as in people who support the EU institutions in their current existence make up the large majority of the voterbase in almost any European country. Don't forget that 15% of people voting for the AfD means that 85% don't, they just don't happen to vote for left-wing parties anymore.
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There's a difference between feeling European and feeling that the EU is beneficial.
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On October 10 2016 16:58 maartendq wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2016 07:15 TheDwf wrote:On October 10 2016 05:17 Nyxisto wrote:
Of course not losing your base is an important issue and one that most Left-Wing parties neglected (the SPD after Schröder lost hundreds of thousands of members), but you also need to have an eye on how broad your appeal among the general population is. You can't just try to energise a small base of dedicated supporters because there's simply a ceiling to how much people you can theoretically reach. I know that anti-NATO and more radical left positions are more popular in France than in other countries, but the goal needs to be at some point to be popular and unified enough to win.
And of course you can say that socialists/SD's across Europe lost appeal after the shift to Third Way politics in the 90's but they made that shift in the first place because they couldn't win with socialist policies in the twenty years before. So this alone doesn't really point in any direction. So maybe the better way to go about things is to again look for a third way to the current conflict rather than going into radical opposition. A new Third Way between what and what? Either you maintain the neoliberal order, or you terminate it. What's the possible middle ground here? What is this so-called "Neoliberal Order" you keep referring to? Considering the fact that government spending and regulation keeps increasing across the EU (which is the opposite of what liberals would advocate), you can hardly say that we are in some kind of era of renewed 19th century industrial liberalism. What is happening, however, is three things. One, technology and automisation making it possible for owners of capital to make money without having to hire small armies of low-educated workers. A single programmer can come up with an app that can earn him hundreds of thousands. Second, the rise of East Asia as an economic powerhouse, specifically China as the "production plant of the world". Again, this is mainly a problem for low-educated workers because all production that can be moved there, eventually will. After all, people like cheap stuff (a year ago I saw some trade unionists in Brussels who, while taking a break between protesting social injustice, went shopping at Primark). Back in the "Trentes Glorieuses" Europe and the US did not really have any competition when it came to industrial production capacity, and the owners of the production plants ("capitalists") pretty much had nowhere to go so they were forced into social negotiations. Finally, a rapidly aging population, whose healthcare and retirment costs are skyrocketing year on year, while the tax base (the people who pay taxes to be able to fund all this), is getting smaller year on year. By 2050, Belgium will have only 2 working people for every retired one, while the ideal ratio is about 6 to 1. Then there are also the issues of corrupt and clientelistic government and inefficient, politicised public services, both which are very, very costly to the tax payer. It would be a lot more constructive if the European left would focus on these issues rather than blaming all of society's woes on an imaginary global conspiracy. Then again, these issues are a bit harder to put into oneliners, making them a lot less appealing to voters.
The idea of neoliberalism is not synonyme to liberalism. If you read theory on neoliberalism, like Dardot & Laval for exemple, the development of neoliberal policies does not necessarily needs a smaller state. It's more about developing a state that respect the same principles : economic efficiency, social control, etc. The state is thought as a patch made to compensate for everything the market and the law cannot do (mostly solidarity and social control, which goes hand in hand anyway).
Plus, liberalism actually never lead to a smaller state. Bureaucracy in the US and in the USSR were comparable in importance, altho different in form - the problem is that most people nowadays link the term bureaucracy with the public administration, in total contradiction with what the first thinkers of bureaucracy thought (Weber for exemple, who was talking about both the bureaucracy in firms and of the state at the same time).
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On October 11 2016 03:49 Nyxisto wrote:
The 'pro European' crowd as in people who support the EU institutions in their current existence make up the large majority of the voterbase in almost any European country. Don't forget that 15% of people voting for the AfD means that 85% don't, they just don't happen to vote for left-wing parties anymore.
Ugh.. Are you delusional or something?
85% probably like the "idead" of the european union, but thats something WAY diffrent than being happy with the status quo.
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On October 11 2016 07:03 Velr wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2016 03:49 Nyxisto wrote:
The 'pro European' crowd as in people who support the EU institutions in their current existence make up the large majority of the voterbase in almost any European country. Don't forget that 15% of people voting for the AfD means that 85% don't, they just don't happen to vote for left-wing parties anymore. Ugh.. Are you delusional or something? 85% probably like the "idead" of the european union, but thats something WAY diffrent than being happy with the status quo.
Nobody talked about "being happy with the status quo" the discussion was about the left/liberal split concerning the EU institutions, and a stable majority of people supports the European Union in its current form. Everybody always wants to improve something and dislikes the 'status quo', that's a simple truism.
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On October 09 2016 00:13 SoSexy wrote:
German police is looking for a syrian terrorist who was planning an attack in Chemnitz. They found explosives at his house.
Germany bomb threat: Jaber al-Bakr 'caught by three Syrians'Three Syrian refugees in Germany overpowered a bomb suspect who gave elite commandos the slip and sparked a two-day manhunt, police have revealed. Police believe Jaber al-Bakr, also a Syrian, was planning a bomb attack and had links to so-called Islamic State. They failed to arrest him on Saturday and found 1.5kg of explosives in his flat in the eastern city of Chemnitz. He made his way south to Leipzig and sought help from fellow Syrians, who then handed him to police. Details of the role of the three Syrians emerged slowly as police feared they could be at risk of reprisal. The suspect approached one of the Syrian refugees at Leipzig's main railway station and asked him if he could sleep at his apartment, German media report. Although aware of who he was, the man took the suspect back to his flat in the Paunsdorf area of north-eastern Leipzig where he and his flatmates overpowered him. Saxony police chief Joerg Michaelis said they had heard about the manhunt and tied him up while one of them knelt on him. (...) Intelligence officials had apparently been watching Jaber al-Bakr for several months. He arrived in Germany illegally in February 2015 and was given refugee status. According to his Syrian passport, he was born in a Damascus suburb in January 1994. German intelligence apparently had reports last week that he might be planning such an attack, and they alerted police in the eastern state of Saxony. They found out on Thursday that he had used the internet to get bomb-making instructions and had obtained explosives. On Friday, anti-terror police began watching a flat in a run-down residential area of Chemnitz called Fritz Heckert. They were preparing to storm it when Mr Bakr managed to slip away at 07:04 on Saturday. Defending their actions, police chief Mr Michaelis said they "were not certain if that person was Bakr. "He was told to stop, but he then ran off, police fired a warning shot, but they could not shoot at him because there were other people around. (...) Saxony Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich praised the three Syrians who overpowered the suspect as "courageous and responsible". The trio have been described as witnesses and local police are still trying to check whether they already knew the man.
Wow, Saxony's Prime Minister is Sorbian. I forgot those people still exist.
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On October 10 2016 16:58 maartendq wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2016 07:15 TheDwf wrote:On October 10 2016 05:17 Nyxisto wrote:
Of course not losing your base is an important issue and one that most Left-Wing parties neglected (the SPD after Schröder lost hundreds of thousands of members), but you also need to have an eye on how broad your appeal among the general population is. You can't just try to energise a small base of dedicated supporters because there's simply a ceiling to how much people you can theoretically reach. I know that anti-NATO and more radical left positions are more popular in France than in other countries, but the goal needs to be at some point to be popular and unified enough to win.
And of course you can say that socialists/SD's across Europe lost appeal after the shift to Third Way politics in the 90's but they made that shift in the first place because they couldn't win with socialist policies in the twenty years before. So this alone doesn't really point in any direction. So maybe the better way to go about things is to again look for a third way to the current conflict rather than going into radical opposition. A new Third Way between what and what? Either you maintain the neoliberal order, or you terminate it. What's the possible middle ground here? What is this so-called "Neoliberal Order" you keep referring to? Considering the fact that government spending and regulation keeps increasing across the EU (which is the opposite of what liberals would advocate), you can hardly say that we are in some kind of era of renewed 19th century industrial liberalism.
That's why there's a prefix, neoliberalism isn't the mere reproduction of XIXth century liberalism. It's a set of policies whose aim is to undo the post-WWII social compromise, slowly dismantling the Welfare State and public services. Neoliberal policies run the State like a private company, and use it to promote the market and create the conditions for more competition. Privatization, deregulation (particularly the labour market), free trade treaties and reducing public spending (austerity) are some of the applications. The resulting order is the political hegemony of the capital.
What is happening, however, is three things. One, technology and automisation making it possible for owners of capital to make money without having to hire small armies of low-educated workers. A single programmer can come up with an app that can earn him hundreds of thousands. Second, the rise of East Asia as an economic powerhouse, specifically China as the "production plant of the world". Again, this is mainly a problem for low-educated workers because all production that can be moved there, eventually will. After all, people like cheap stuff (a year ago I saw some trade unionists in Brussels who, while taking a break between protesting social injustice, went shopping at Primark).
Yeah, when you freeze or compress salaries while costs rise, people are forced to switch to cheaper products. That's the perversity of the system, creating poor(er) workers who are forced to buy cheap(er) products, which can only be cheap(er) because of harsher exploitation. The (poor) consumer contributes to the woes of the producer.
Back in the "Trentes Glorieuses" Europe and the US did not really have any competition when it came to industrial production capacity, and the owners of the production plants ("capitalists") pretty much had nowhere to go so they were forced into social negotiations. Finally, a rapidly aging population, whose healthcare and retirment costs are skyrocketing year on year, while the tax base (the people who pay taxes to be able to fund all this), is getting smaller year on year. By 2050, Belgium will have only 2 working people for every retired one, while the ideal ratio is about 6 to 1.
The active:inactive ratio is less relevant than the productivity of active workers.
Then there are also the issues of corrupt and clientelistic government and inefficient, politicised public services, both which are very, very costly to the tax payer.
Indeed. Buying useless weapons to fatten merchants of death, socializing the losses of banks without any counterparty, selling public stuff way under its value, corporate lobbying, …
It would be a lot more constructive if the European left would focus on these issues rather than blaming all of society's woes on an imaginary global conspiracy. Then again, these issues are a bit harder to put into oneliners, making them a lot less appealing to voters.
Critics of neoliberal capitalism have absolutely NOTHING to do with “blaming all of society's woes on an imaginary global conspiracy”. Quite on the contrary, those critics stem from the most down-to-earth analysis and explain things by the mechanisms of a system (e. g. in a competitive and profit-driven system, people seek profit through every mean), and certainly not by the hidden and sly will of hidden, malevolent groups. Either you're trying to disqualify opposing voices in a cheap way, or you don't properly understand the reasoning behind those critics, which leads you to caricature them.
And “hurr durr we have to reduce public spending” is also the kind of simplistic oneliner mantra that the right spouts all the time, so…
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The problem with the critic of neoliberalism with people like dardot and laval is that they refuse to acknowledge that they try to save the liberal doctrine by adding the prefixe "neo", and use weird ass foucauldian arguments to evade any kind of discussion on the continuity between the neoliberalism and the liberalism.
In reality, the worm is in the fruit.
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After a nationwide manhunt, authorities in Germany have arrested a Syrian refugee who was allegedly planning a bomb attack.
The man, identified as Jaber al-Bakr, is likely linked to ISIS, authorities say.
He was caught after fellow Syrian refugees recognized him, held him at an apartment in Leipzig and notified police, NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports.
Some media reports suggest that al-Bakr approached fellow Syrian refugees in Leipzig and asked if he could spend the night with them. The other Syrians, recognizing him, told him he could stay and then tied him up and alerted police.
German authorities would not confirm all the details about how al-Bakr was located. But officials did say that three Syrian men found him and recognized him from police wanted posters, The Associated Press reports.
One of the men then went to a police station with a photo of the suspect and urged police to come arrest him, the AP says. Police came to raid the apartment after midnight on Monday morning.
"The suspect was handed over to us bound," Saxony criminal police chief Joerg Michaelis said Monday, according to the AP.
Al-Bakr had been on the run since Saturday, when federal intelligence agents gave police a tip and they raided an apartment in Chemnitz, Germany.
Source
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"You moron! The Imam said to outbreed them and live off their welfare, not blow them up!"
Jk, hooray for the rare good story.
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...
The incident, in which around 15 people attacked a patrol car in broad daylight on Saturday, played into a national debate on security in the run-up to next year's presidential election. It prompted calls from political adversaries for the resignation of Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
"We're very angry. It is surreal that colleagues be injured on such a mission," said Nicolas Comte, a spokesman for France's second-biggest police union, Unité SGP Police.
Unions urged staff to take part in silent protests in front of police stations throughout France on Tuesday, and called for a go-slow in the area where the attack was carried out to press the government to give police more resources.
"Despite all the reassurances, there are still no-go zones in France ruled by a handful of gangs of criminals who get more and more radical as the years go by," the SCSI-CFDT union said.
...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-security-police-idUSKCN12A1WS
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Vladimir Putin has cancelled a visit to Paris after the Kremlin accused France of seeking to humiliate the Russian leader.
Moscow announced on Tuesday morning that the planned trip was off, hours after the French president, François Hollande, said Russia could face war crimes charges over its bombardment of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city.
France is furious at Moscow’s veto of a French resolution at the UN calling for an immediate halt to Russian bombing of Aleppo.
Hollande had suggested he might refuse to meet Putin, who was due to fly to France next week, and planned to downgrade the trip to a “working visit based on Syria”.
It is thought the Kremlin decided this was humiliating for the Russian leader, who was to have inaugurated a new cultural centre in the French capital.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the decision to call off the trip was due to the cancellation of cultural events rather than Hollande’s demand to discuss the Syrian conflict.
“Certain events were planned connected with the opening of a Russian cultural-spiritual centre and the holding of an exhibit. Unfortunately, these events dropped out of the programme, and for this reason the president to cancel the visit to France for now,” Peskov said on state television.
Peskov had earlier said Putin would appear at the cultural centre, which stands next to a Russian Orthodox cathedral being built on the bank of the Seine near the Pont de l’Alma.
Asked why the events had dropped out of the programme, Peskov said this was a question for the French side. He said Putin “doesn’t have any problems” with the cancellation, and said the president remained “ready to visit Paris whenever it is comfortable for President Hollande”.
Peskov denied the developments showed Putin was isolated internationally. “We saw, for instance, last week there were reports in several French newspapers that the president was insisting on this visit to escape isolation. This is absolutely absurd,” he said.
Source
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On October 11 2016 07:35 TheDwf wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2016 16:58 maartendq wrote:On October 10 2016 07:15 TheDwf wrote:On October 10 2016 05:17 Nyxisto wrote:
Of course not losing your base is an important issue and one that most Left-Wing parties neglected (the SPD after Schröder lost hundreds of thousands of members), but you also need to have an eye on how broad your appeal among the general population is. You can't just try to energise a small base of dedicated supporters because there's simply a ceiling to how much people you can theoretically reach. I know that anti-NATO and more radical left positions are more popular in France than in other countries, but the goal needs to be at some point to be popular and unified enough to win.
And of course you can say that socialists/SD's across Europe lost appeal after the shift to Third Way politics in the 90's but they made that shift in the first place because they couldn't win with socialist policies in the twenty years before. So this alone doesn't really point in any direction. So maybe the better way to go about things is to again look for a third way to the current conflict rather than going into radical opposition. A new Third Way between what and what? Either you maintain the neoliberal order, or you terminate it. What's the possible middle ground here? What is this so-called "Neoliberal Order" you keep referring to? Considering the fact that government spending and regulation keeps increasing across the EU (which is the opposite of what liberals would advocate), you can hardly say that we are in some kind of era of renewed 19th century industrial liberalism. That's why there's a prefix, neoliberalism isn't the mere reproduction of XIXth century liberalism. It's a set of policies whose aim is to undo the post-WWII social compromise, slowly dismantling the Welfare State and public services. Neoliberal policies run the State like a private company, and use it to promote the market and create the conditions for more competition. Privatization, deregulation (particularly the labour market), free trade treaties and reducing public spending (austerity) are some of the applications. The resulting order is the political hegemony of the capital. Show nested quote +What is happening, however, is three things. One, technology and automisation making it possible for owners of capital to make money without having to hire small armies of low-educated workers. A single programmer can come up with an app that can earn him hundreds of thousands. Second, the rise of East Asia as an economic powerhouse, specifically China as the "production plant of the world". Again, this is mainly a problem for low-educated workers because all production that can be moved there, eventually will. After all, people like cheap stuff (a year ago I saw some trade unionists in Brussels who, while taking a break between protesting social injustice, went shopping at Primark). Yeah, when you freeze or compress salaries while costs rise, people are forced to switch to cheaper products. That's the perversity of the system, creating poor(er) workers who are forced to buy cheap(er) products, which can only be cheap(er) because of harsher exploitation. The (poor) consumer contributes to the woes of the producer. Show nested quote +Back in the "Trentes Glorieuses" Europe and the US did not really have any competition when it came to industrial production capacity, and the owners of the production plants ("capitalists") pretty much had nowhere to go so they were forced into social negotiations. Finally, a rapidly aging population, whose healthcare and retirment costs are skyrocketing year on year, while the tax base (the people who pay taxes to be able to fund all this), is getting smaller year on year. By 2050, Belgium will have only 2 working people for every retired one, while the ideal ratio is about 6 to 1. The active:inactive ratio is less relevant than the productivity of active workers. Show nested quote +Then there are also the issues of corrupt and clientelistic government and inefficient, politicised public services, both which are very, very costly to the tax payer. Indeed. Buying useless weapons to fatten merchants of death, socializing the losses of banks without any counterparty, selling public stuff way under its value, corporate lobbying, … Show nested quote +It would be a lot more constructive if the European left would focus on these issues rather than blaming all of society's woes on an imaginary global conspiracy. Then again, these issues are a bit harder to put into oneliners, making them a lot less appealing to voters. Critics of neoliberal capitalism have absolutely NOTHING to do with “blaming all of society's woes on an imaginary global conspiracy”. Quite on the contrary, those critics stem from the most down-to-earth analysis and explain things by the mechanisms of a system (e. g. in a competitive and profit-driven system, people seek profit through every mean), and certainly not by the hidden and sly will of hidden, malevolent groups. Either you're trying to disqualify opposing voices in a cheap way, or you don't properly understand the reasoning behind those critics, which leads you to caricature them. And “hurr durr we have to reduce public spending” is also the kind of simplistic oneliner mantra that the right spouts all the time, so…
I see fairly few countries, except the UK and the US, running the state as a private enterprise. In most Western European countries state spending is still close to or exceeds 50% of GDP, and is in many cases increasing. If private companies are asked to provide services in tandem with public services, it is usually because of ideological reasons ("this is not something the state should run") or because of budgetary reasons.
The active to inactive ratio matters because the welfare state is largely funded by taxes levied on income. If the number of people paying taxes rapidly decreases and the number of people living from social benefits funded by taxes rapidly increases (which is happening all over Europe due to the disappearance of low-skill, non-labour intensive, labour and the babyboom generation retiring and crises in Spain, Portugal and Greece) you've got a problem. Sure with the current low-interest climate countries can borrow to their hearts' content, but when interest rates do eventually go up again (which they will), governments that did not clean house will suddenly be faced with a huge budgetary problem.
So far, the typical European welfare state is funded on the backs of generations that are often not even born yet. If I recall correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong), Wolfgang Streeck wrote in his book Borrowed Time that governments were more or less forced to deregulate the financial market so they'd be able to borrow money to keep funding their voters' demands for social amenities. The European welfare state cannot be funded by tax income alone, not even if we did somehow found a way to tax the elusive 1%. The Belgian communist party PTB/PVDA wants a progressive tax for rich people who have "more than 1 million euros", making it sound as if they have a bank account somewhere that has 1 million euros on it, and that the state can just come in and take away 1% of that amount. Sells votes by the bucketload, but kind of conveniently forgets that people who have that kind of money are both smart and connected enough to make sure that the largest part of that sum is safe from the tax man. Is that fair? Not really, but most people would probably do the same if they just knew how. It's called taxes (or impôts in French, which means that it is something that is imposed, that one does not have a choice in) and not "voluntary contributions to the welfare state" for a reason. I'm actually quite sure that people don't mind paying a certain amount of taxes, but the thing is that the amount keeps increasing while state inefficiencies in spending do not go down, on the contary.
And believe me, people don't shop at primark because the cost of living has become so high that they can no longer afford to shop at the higher-quality Tommy Hilfiger shops they used to frequent before 2008. They shop at primark because it's dirt cheap and allows them to buy clothes they can throw away as soon as they are out of fashion (i.e. a couple of months later) without feeling as if they just threw away an investment. Primark is everything what's wrong with the contemporary hunger for consumption of throwaway goods.
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Yes, the demographic issue is a big problem. What countries like Italy and Greece could do right now to take some pressure off the younger generation is drastically increase the early retirement age. If I'm not mistaken it's 58 and 57 in Greece and Italy respectively, which makes no sense given that people spend more time in education, work under better conditions and live longer than before.
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What's wrong with Primark? I have Primark T-shirts that have lasted me 8 years.
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Zurich15365 Posts
So earlier this week German police raided the apartment of a suspected terrorist. The guy, who was supposed to be under constant surveillance, managed to escape the raid.
After a three day man hunt, he was actually brought to the police by three Syrian asylumn seekers, who he had sought to hide at. He had contacted them over social media and stayed at their place. However the three recognized him as as the terror suspect, overwhelmed and bound him, and delivered him to the police.
Now, two days later, he was found dead in his cell. Apparently hanged himself. Again, because of high risk of suicide he was supposed to be under constant surveillance.
What the fuck has our police been doing this week? First letting the guy escape, then letting him kill himself in custody? Major, major, major fuckup.
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How do you know there was a high risk of suicide?
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EPT
