Political Discussion

It’s been rampant in the UK for centuries too. I’m sure it’s learned behaviours given from where you’re country has grown. The public school and oxbridge boys club is such a blight.

But yes, Converative ethos is killing the NHS. So much that used to be done in house has been sub-contracted out based solely on the bottom line. It has led to cost savings but it has also led to a spectacular decline in the quality of the support services and you know areas like cleaners and catering are pretty fucking important in a hospital setting. The fact that they’re giving the jobs out to mates and donors is just insult added to that injury.
I haven’t read extensively but I know of some of the issues because the articles I read cite the decline of the NHS due to extensive privatization. The word contractor is becoming a dirty word because it’s synonymous with under qualified, under paid for employees and under no obligation to produce results because they are temporary for the contract company.
 
I haven’t read extensively but I know of some of the issues because the articles I read cite the decline of the NHS due to extensive privatization. The word contractor is becoming a dirty word because it’s synonymous with under qualified, under paid for employees and under no obligation to produce results because they are temporary for the contract company.

It’s a mentality that’s spread across the public sector since the 80s. For example the cleaners at my work are all privately contracted and the place is just not clean. It’s not so important in my work environment and even with Covid I’m perfectly capable of wiping down my desk with a disinfectant spray whenever I’m in. I also don’t blame the cleaners, they’re all underpaid, on zero hour contracts and have no surety of pay or employment. Something in our society was fundamentally broken in the early 80s with Reaganism and Thatcherism and it’s very difficult to see how we right it now with everything so polarised and everyone so damn focused on individualism.
 
it’s very difficult to see how we right it now with everything so polarised and everyone so damn focused on individualism.

The focus on individualism is by design, and not at all a bug. I'm all about the rights of the individual, but when it becomes nothing more than a mechanism to pigeon hole us to sell us shit, that's when individualism got warped (and yes, I think that started to pick up steam in the 70's and was going strong in the 80's). There was a shift in the 80's in economic theory where we switched from thinking about production on a societal level and instead defined the smallest economic engine as the person (or the family unit, either way Regan and Thatcher loved this crap). When we started thinking of people in terms of productivity, and we considered ourselves individual economic engines that work towards our individual goals of economic stability. When we started telling people to think of themselves as businesses and then took that idea one step further and came up with the goal to "optimize" our time. This theory doesn't really work well in the real world because each one of our little economic engines of production has real consequences on other people's engines of production. We wanted to believe that we could operate in an independent sphere so that my economic decisions about what I am going to do with my time would in no way effect your economic decisions about what you are going to do with your time. And none of these tiny economic engine activity adds up to equal a much larger economic system.

But that's not true. When I work, how I work, where I spend my money, it all affects the people around me and everything they do affects me. When we focus on ourselves alone to attempt to optimize our economic opportunities, it becomes a very competitive environment very fast--a dog eat dog world. In these sorts of environments, humans do not thrive. It has been shown that humans work better in cooperative environments than they do in competitive environments. When we focused on full employment policies--anyone who wants a job gets a job that they can make a living off of--we had people, as a society, getting better as a whole, but we realized that full employment didn't optimize business efficiency and business owners could have more money, if they paid less wages. They realized that they could pay less wages if they punt the production over to people half a world away that they can treat like slaves. The slave labor didn't happen at first. We were only trading with democratic nations up until the 1960's--South Korea and Japan--but we realized that we could keep consumer prices down if we switched to China and other nations that weren't as committed to democratic ideals. I think this is ultimately when we sold our soul as a nation. We forgot that products have to be made by people and those people deserve a living wage. Then we became hooked on slave labor cheap goods to the point that it became much easier to justify the production rather than live without next season's jean jacket.

The only way to survive climate change is degrowth. Most politicians don't want to acknowledge that, but the truth is that we all need less stuff and that stuff needs to be less disposable. If we come back to the world with the mindset of full employment along with careful resource allocation that benefits people over businesses, I think we could survive as a species. But if we keep on competing for resources because we are all so over focused on our individual needs, we'll never get out of this.
 
Biden game a speech calling for the elimination of the filibuster and a call of action to pass voter reform yesterday.

Mitch McConnell responded today and of course he had nothing tood to say about it or Biden.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted President Joe Biden's speech pushing for the Senate to change its filibuster rules to pass voting and elections legislation, saying Biden compared "a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors."
"How profoundly — profoundly — unpresidential," McConnell said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "I've known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday."
McConnell said Biden's speech was a "rant," "incoherent," "incorrect," "beneath his office," and "unbecoming of a President of the United States."
 
Biden game a speech calling for the elimination of the filibuster and a call of action to pass voter reform yesterday.

Mitch McConnell responded today and of course he had nothing tood to say about it or Biden.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted President Joe Biden's speech pushing for the Senate to change its filibuster rules to pass voting and elections legislation, saying Biden compared "a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors."
"How profoundly — profoundly — unpresidential," McConnell said Wednesday on Capitol Hill. "I've known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at the podium yesterday."
McConnell said Biden's speech was a "rant," "incoherent," "incorrect," "beneath his office," and "unbecoming of a President of the United States."
Getting rid of the filibuster will be great until the GOP wins back the senate in 2022...
 
This is the stuff that really pisses me off.





Meanwhile, these bastards say it's the Democrats who are attempting the unfair power grab...


In Georgia, I have heard news reports that many of the black people that won local elections have had their office undermined / roles and power reduced by the GOP.
 
Meanwhile, in Ohio, The conservative-led Ohio Supreme Court just declared the GOP-drawn state map unconstitutional. Really hoping the same ruling is forthcoming for the congressional map as well.

 
Meanwhile, these bastards say it's the Democrats who are attempting the unfair power grab...


In Georgia, I have heard news reports that many of the black people that won local elections have had their office undermined / roles and power reduced by the GOP.

All of Nashville has been in one congressional district for 200 years. No republican had represented Nashville since 1875 it is that reliable of a democratic district.
 
What in the world is going on with judges and rulings lately?




Judge shames 72-year-old cancer patient too weak to tend to his lawn
 
What in the world is going on with judges and rulings lately?




Judge shames 72-year-old cancer patient too weak to tend to his lawn
"Adrian parenthetically said adults at the party were to blame for Vaughan’s assault. He said they abandoned their parental duties and suggested that sexual assault is what happens when parents hold “parties for teenagers, and they allow coeds and female people to swim in their underwear in their swimming pool.”

wow

"Vaughan’s dad told the Herald-Whig last week that his daughter “feels like she spoke up for nothing.” “Now she wishes she wouldn’t have even said anything,” he said."

and there's the actual injustice
 

Unfortunately, none of my student loans are through Navient nor was I aware there was a lawsuit.

Maybe I should keep my eyes out in the event any lawsuits are filed against the two student loan lenders my loans are with.
 

Unfortunately, none of my student loans are through Navient nor was I aware there was a lawsuit.

Maybe I should keep my eyes out in the event any lawsuits are filed against the two student loan lenders my loans are with.
I did not read the article but just came here to put $40M in perspective. If we assume a rather modest average $50k debt per person this is only 800 people. Less than a drop in the student loan ocean.
 
I did not read the article but just came here to put $40M in perspective. If we assume a rather modest average $50k debt per person this is only 800 people. Less than a drop in the student loan ocean.
The ultra nerdy approach is to get the average student loan debt figure, like this:

Student loan debt in the United States totals $1.75 trillion and grows 6 times faster than the nation’s economy.*

  • 43.2 million student borrowers are in debt by an average of $39,351 each.

$41M/$39,351 = 1042 people

I added the bit about student loan debt growing 6 times faster than GDP because this isn't how this is supposed to work.
 
The ultra nerdy approach is to get the average student loan debt figure, like this:

Student loan debt in the United States totals $1.75 trillion and grows 6 times faster than the nation’s economy.*

  • 43.2 million student borrowers are in debt by an average of $39,351 each.

$41M/$39,351 = 1042 people

I added the bit about student loan debt growing 6 times faster than GDP because this isn't how this is supposed to work.


The article mentions the settlement is for more than 8,300 people.

So it looks like $5200 per person. But in reality, it's less than that because lawyers get what, like at least half usually? Not really going to put much of a dent in anything.
 
Back
Top