Obama's media and internet savvy presidential campaign seems to have invented a powerful new tactic for the remaining weeks of the race to the White House. So far his success in this presidential campaign has rested mainly on his huge army of supporters, managed with the most advanced digital network expertise.
The list of his supporters, running into the millions, enabled him to collect huge amounts of campaign dollars and to mobilize a national volunteer network as well. However, he seems to be now mobilizing this army of supporters in order to bully adversary media outlets with his website: The Action Wire.
The technique increasingly used is known as Denial of Service Attacks, DSA, forbidden in the UK but not in the US. The effect is that normal customers are prevented from using a particular service such as media properly. And it works like this: media messages are monitored 24/7 and if anything is regarded as wrong or simply not welcome, the Obama campaign uses its awesome army of supporters, many of them left wing radicals, to hit back on the responsible media outlet. Hundreds or thousands of them will keep flooding radio and television stations with e-mails or phone calls as soon as opponents are on air or anti-Obama ads are being published. According to the Weekly Standard:
It did so as recently as Monday night, when it orchestrated a massive stream of complaints on the phone lines of Tribune Co-owned WGN-AM in Chicago when the radio station hosted author David Freddoso, who has written a controversial book about the Illinois Democrat.
So much for Obama's claims to leave behind embattled partisanship and engage in a bipartisan style of political debate.
Yes, yet even more about markets. Why is that people don't understand that much of the derivatives world is built upon the restrictions of previous rounds of regulation?
Guido answers your questions. Well, since you did ask, didn't you?
Looking a little longer term than most have been doing this past week: Julain Simon on the Ultimate Resource.
Human Rights Watch would not be described (not by anyone sober or sane at least) as a right wing, or neo-con organisation so their report on Venezuela is a bit of an eye opener for certain types.
On the subject of rescues: not everyone wants to be rescued and certainly not in certain manners.
Cognitive dissonance is of course not unknown but you would prefer that an elected politician didn't have quite such a bad case of it.
As a purely personal opinion reform of the Common Agricultural Policy should be achieved by burnging the entire structure to the ground and ploughing the intellectual landscape that produced it with salt: the selling of the administering population into bondage would perhaps be a step too far in this age.
In the absence of a Cato to lead the mob with burning brands and pitchforks aloft I am left to consider less radical alternatives. Like this one from the European Centre for International Politial Economy. They open with two quite mindboggling points:
Alasdair Darling, the British Finance Minister, recently proposed to abolish tariffs and all other measures that keep EU agricultural prices above world market levels, as well as to end the direct payments that farmers receive irrespective of their output.
Good grief, almost makes me warm to the man, such an entirely sensible proposition. This is less sensible:
Michel Barnier, his French counterpart, even deems the CAP so effective that the policy should be exported to developing countries.
Just what the developing world needs, high food prices, a tax burden supportable only by the already rich and limits on what farmers may produce and how.
The basic outline of their proposal is that:
First, that all measures that distort market prices and production should be abolished. This includes production quotas, land set-asides, storage aids, export refunds, output payments, and area payments. Second, the Single Farm Payment (SFP), which provides income support to farmers independently of their current production decisions, should be phased out because it does not serve any societal need. Third, targeted subsidies that reward farmers for providing socially valued services that are not remunerated on the market, such as maintaining scenic landscapes, should be adapted. Many of these subsidies should be provided at the national or local level without or with little EU co-financing.
In a nutshell, that the Common Agricultural Policy should, as a policy, have almost nothing to do with agriculture and should not be common. Yes, I'd happily sign up to that, even in the absence of an oratorial firebrand whipping the mob along with cries of CAP delenda est for the end result would indeed be that delenda* to all our benefit.
* Yes, yes, I know, pig Latin of the most appalling kind
As a purely personal opinion reform of the Common Agricultural Policy should be achieved by burning the entire structure to the ground and ploughing the intellectual landscape that produced it with salt: the selling of the administering population into bondage would perhaps be a step too far in this age.
In the absence of a Cato to lead the mob with burning brands and pitchforks aloft I am left to consider less radical alternatives. Like this one from the European Centre for International Politial Economy. They open with two quite mindboggling points:
Alasdair Darling, the British Finance Minister, recently proposed to abolish tariffs and all other measures that keep EU agricultural prices above world market levels, as well as to end the direct payments that farmers receive irrespective of their output.
Good grief, almost makes me warm to the man, such an entirely sensible proposition. This is less sensible:
Michel Barnier, his French counterpart, even deems the CAP so effective that the policy should be exported to developing countries.
Just what the developing world needs, high food prices, a tax burden supportable only by the already rich and limits on what farmers may produce and how.
The basic outline of their proposal is that:
First, that all measures that distort market prices and production should be abolished. This includes production quotas, land set-asides, storage aids, export refunds, output payments, and area payments. Second, the Single Farm Payment (SFP), which provides income support to farmers independently of their current production decisions, should be phased out because it does not serve any societal need. Third, targeted subsidies that reward farmers for providing socially valued services that are not remunerated on the market, such as maintaining scenic landscapes, should be adapted. Many of these subsidies should be provided at the national or local level without or with little EU co-financing.
In a nutshell, that the Common Agricultural Policy should, as a policy, have almost nothing to do with agriculture and should not be common. Yes, I'd happily sign up to that, even in the absence of an oratorial firebrand whipping the mob along with cries of CAP delenda est for the end result would indeed be that delenda* to all our benefit.
* Yes, yes, I know, pig Latin of the most appalling kind
Social Democrats across Europe still espouse the wonders of the Swedish welfare state, claiming it to be the model that should be translated into their countries. It appears nobody has told them that the Swedish model is no more. For a while now, Swedish politicians have been busy reforming the state in an attempt to meet public expectations. Opposition parties in this country should take note.
Swedish school reform – the inspiration for Conservative education policy – gets a lot press, yet as this article in the Financial Times shows, reforms have been radical across the board. Arguably, the biggest concern in this country surrounds the disastrous state of public finances. Compare this to Sweden, where “Anders Borg, the finance minister who will present his budget this month, says Sweden can now afford the biggest fiscal boost in Europe – equivalent to 1 per cent of GDP – to counteract the global economic slowdown". Despite the fact that Swedish politicians still work within the language of the welfare state, they have been busy breaking down state monopolies, opening up competition and cutting welfare to incentivize work.
It is not the just the current centre-right government that has led these reforms. The previous Swedish Social Democratic Party, led by Göran Persson was equally keen. As Waldemar Ingdahl, President of the Eudoxa Think-Tank states in a letter to the Financial Times: “the former Social Democratic government instituted far more radical changes than Mr Reinfeldt".
Fear not Guardian readers, there is one area of change that the right-wing Swedish government should back away from. In June, the Swedish government approved a new law permitting surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that cross the country's borders. And government officials filed a complaint against a blogger who published documents revealing that Swedish authorities have long engaged in domestic surveillance. This video documentary explains the situation well. What they give with one hand, they take away with the other.
Someone had to do it: compile the quotes about how we were now free of "boom and bust". One can taste the hubris, the claim that we'd abolished the business cycle.
So just whose money is it? Alternatively, the remarkable sight of Joe Biden having a good idea.
This Adam Smith fella....ever read him? Heard of him? His ideas, 232 years old, explain the response of certain businesses to the climate change thing perfectly.
Take advice from the lawyers: never, never, ask a question unless you already know the answer you're going to be given.
This ban on shorting stocks: just closed another market right down as well. The collateral damage from regulation can often be worse than the original problem being addressed.
More things you can't do now that short selling is banned.
Or different regulation? Or fewer regulations altogether?
Just what is the correct response to the current financial market travails? After we've cleaned up the current spills, of course, we'd rather like to know what the system of financial market regulation should be in the future.
There are of course those who argue that there should be no such regulation at all: they might be right but they're not going to get a hearing at the moment (no matter how close some of them might be to this blog). I would certainly argue for a mix between fewer and different regulations than the ones we've had that got us to this point. I'm not sure that this view will get much of a hearing either.
The view I would like to address though is the one that we need to have more regulations. What is the fiirst one that has actually been put in place on both sides of the Atlantic? The ban on short selling of financial stocks. What's the justification for that? Truth to be told, not a lot actually. The FSA has agreed that there was no coordination of rumours and short selling during the HBOS rights issue earlier this year. This last week the percentage of HBOS stock that was lent out to short sellers had fallen from some 17% during that rights issue to under 3%. Even Dean Baker (who would rarely agree with us but is an economist) wonders why on earth anyone is trying to ban short sales. There are many others out there, those who actually understand markets, who are similarly scratching (or banging upon their desks) their heads. Why on earth was this done?
Does the FSA know what it’s doing? The consensus among the financial community - excepting, perhaps, asinine bank boards and their ineffectual directors - seems to be that no, the FSA does not know what it’s doing.
I'm still willing to listen to arguments that we should have more, different, less or no regulation of the financial markets. But, Dear Lord, could we please try to make sure that whoever takes that decision actually does know what they're doing?
Pause in the street for a cigarette today and you could find yourself approached by one of a team of stop smoking officers employed to roam the capital. Under plans for a ‘hard hitting’ approach smokers will be approached at bus stops, betting shops and shopping centres and offered a carbon monoxide test to ‘shock’ them into signing up for a stopping smoking service. The plans come on the back of a similar scheme for fat-busting nurses to patrol the streets of Scotland armed with measuring tapes and equipment to test blood pressure.
We all know that smoking is a filthy, expensive and deadly habit - we are told as much by the health warnings emblazoned across our cigarette packets. And we are quite aware that eating fatty foods and drinking too much is not the best way to ensure that you are around to see your great grandchildren. Smoking, drinking and eating too much are choices – choices that we should be free to make.
The approach increasingly adopted by the state - harassing, shaming and persecuting those who do not conform to the puritanical lifestyle that they espouse is designed explicitly with stigmatisation in mind. Government sponsored campaigns increasingly portray smokers and drinkers as unattractive or morally corrupt. But, shaming us into believing that certain choices we make are dirty or abnormal is nothing less than state-sanctioned bullying. And there is nothing attractive or moral about bullies.
Dr Eamonn Butler, Director of The Adam Smith Institute, has been in great demand of late. Yesterday he was on BBC Radio 5, BBC World TV, the World Service twice, Hungarian Klubradio and PM on Radio 4. Mostly up for discussion was the state of the global economy, with Dr Butler rightly arguing that global capitalism is not dead and that governments are mostly to blame for the current crisis. If you happened to have missed him, you can listen to him 2h 2m in on the Radio 5 Breakfast Show here (worth it just to hear the lunacy coming out of Ken Loach's mouth); or you can read recent blogs on the same topics here and here.
Social Democrats across Europe still espouse the wonders of the Swedish welfare state, claiming it to be the model that should be translated into their countries. It appears nobody has told them that the Swedish model is no more. For a while now, Swedish politicians have been busy reforming the state in an attempt to meet public expectations. Opposition parties in this country should take note.
Pause in the street for a cigarette today and you could find yourself approached by one of a team of stop smoking officers employed to roam the capital. Under plans for a ‘hard hitting’ approach smokers will be approached at bus stops, betting shops and shopping centres and offered a carbon monoxide test to ‘shock’ them into signing up for a stopping smoking service. The plans come on the back of a similar scheme for fat-busting nurses to patrol the streets of Scotland armed with measuring tapes and equipment to test blood pressure. .jpg)
Dr Eamonn Butler, Director of The Adam Smith Institute, has been in great demand of late. Yesterday he was on BBC Radio 5, BBC World TV, the World Service twice, Hungarian Klubradio and PM on Radio 4. Mostly up for discussion was the state of the global economy, with Dr Butler rightly arguing that global capitalism is not dead and that governments are mostly to blame for the current crisis. If you happened to have missed him, you can listen to him 2h 2m in on the Radio 5 Breakfast Show