Democracy in action
Saturday, 12 November 2011
Friday, 11 November 2011
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Lupe Fiasco - Words I Never Said ft. Skylar Grey
It's so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said
I can't take back the words I never said
I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it make to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
Uhh, and a bunch of other cover ups
Your childs future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts, then, wait here comes the uppercut
The school was garbage in the first place, thats on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the uppercrust
You get it then they move you so you never keeping up enough
If you turn on TV all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks"
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that aint Jersey Shore, homie tha's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glen Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit
That's why I aint vote for him, next one either
I'ma part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful
And I believe in the people.
It's so loud inside my head
With words thay I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said
I can't take back the words I never said
Now you say it aint our fault if we never heard it
But if we know better than we probably deserve it
Jihad is not a holy war, where's that in the worship?
Murdering is not Islam!
And you are not observant
And you are not a muslim
Israel don't take my side cause look how far you've pushed them
Walk with me into the ghetto, this is where all the Kush went
Compain about the liqour store but what you drinking liqour for?
Complain about the gloom but when'd you pick a broom up?
Just listening to Pac aint gone make it stop
A rebel in your thoughts, aint gon make it halt
If you don't become an actor you'll never be a factor
Pills with million side effects
Take em when the pain felt
Wash them down with Diet soda!
Killin off your brain cells
Crooked banks around the World
Would gladly give a loan today
So if you ever miss a payment
They can take your home away!
It's so loud in my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said, never said
I can't take back the words I never said
I think all the silence is worse than all the violence
Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it
We scared of almost eveything, afraid to tell the truth
So scared of what you think of me, I'm scared of even telling you
Sometimes I'm like the only person I feel safe to tell it to
I'm locked inside a cell in me, I know that there's a jail in you
Consider this your bailing out, so take a breath, inhale a few
My screams is finally getting free, my thoughts is finally yelling through
It's so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
Being treated fairly and with dignity
At the heart of human rights is the belief that everybody should be treated equally and with dignity - no matter what their circumstances.
This means that nobody should be tortured or treated in a inhuman or degrading way.
It also means that nobody has the right to 'own another person or force them to work under threat of punishment.
And it means that eveybody should have access to public services and the right to be treated fairly by those services. This applies to all public services, including the criminal justice system. For example, if you are arrested and charged tou should not be treated with prejudice and your trial should be fair.
UK law includes a range of human rights which protect you from poor treatment, and which require you to have equal and fair treatment from publc authorities.
http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/what-are-human-rights/being-treated-fairly-and-with-dignity/
Sadly up and down this country people on incapacity benefit are being forced to take assessments that are not only impersonal, they are mechanistic and lack any kind of empathy. Many people are being injustly treated and left in distress.But this is what happens in a Tory led Britain, stigmatise a group, seek to dissimate and destroy.Basic sensitivities ignored!! The B.B.C themselves have recently been adding to the flames with blinkered sensationalist programmes on benefit cheats straight out of the Daily Mail. John Humprey's recent programme " The future state Of Benefit" was an absolute shocker, a right wing thesis playing loosely with the facts, as if witten by some governmental department.
New tests designed to stigmatise the diadvantaged, the disabled , the mentally ill in order to save money. Taking from many who are already impoverished.
Is this the future for all, look to America and follow their flawed policies and agendas.Human dignity and fairness overiden, justice and human rights denied.
As for the cold, it's bloody freezing!!
Sunday, 6 November 2011
A PAGAN PHILOSOPHER ON THE USE OF IMAGES
Maximus of Trye (ca.A.D 125 -185) was a Sophist and eclectic philosopher who reavelled widely and lectured both at Athens and at Rome.
For the God who is the Father and Creator of all that is, older than the sun, older than the sky, greater than time and eternity and the whole continual flow of nature, is not to be named by any lawgiver is not to be uttered by any voice, is not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to grasp his essence, makes use of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, of mountains peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in the world after his nature. The same thing happens to those who love others, to them the sweetest sight will be the actual figure of their children, but sweet also will be their memory - they will be happy at ( the sight of) a lyre, a little spear, or a chair , perhaps, or a running ground, or anything whatever that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I go any further in examining and passing judgement about images? Let all men know what is divine; let them know, that is all. If Greeks are stirred to the rememberance of God by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptians by paying worship to animals, or others by a river, or others by fire, I will not quarrel with their differences. Only let them know, let them love, let them remember.
Translation by Frederick C. Grant, in his Hellenistic Religions ( New York , 1953)
Friday, 4 November 2011
Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world
Graphic: The 1318 transitional companies that form the core of the economy
Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot pepresents revenue ( Image: PLos One)
by Andy Coghlan and Debora Mackenzie
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protestors' worst fears. An analysis of the relationship between 43,000 transnational cororations has identified a small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysrs contacted by New Scientist say iy is a unique effort to untangle control in the global econony. Pushing the analysis further, they say could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters rlsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex system theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empyeically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics longused to model systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
" Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. " Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownership, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more stable or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships owning them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work to be published in PLoS One , revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 has ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 percent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to colectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent og global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity"
of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the superentity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and the Gold man Sachs Group.
John Driffil of the University of London, a maroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather it's insights into economic stability.
Concentration of poer is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one (company) suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propogates."
" It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are." agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar -Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is nor always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could hep make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading throgh the entire economy. Glattfelder says we need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivitity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Nwecomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECS1: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the waelth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is ehether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially by identifying the achitecure of global economic power..." was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Plc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellingtom Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Mank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Societe Generale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brother Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depositary Trust Company
40. Massachussetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Republication from Newscientisthttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalistnetwork-that-runs-world.html
Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot pepresents revenue ( Image: PLos One)
by Andy Coghlan and Debora Mackenzie
AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protestors' worst fears. An analysis of the relationship between 43,000 transnational cororations has identified a small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysrs contacted by New Scientist say iy is a unique effort to untangle control in the global econony. Pushing the analysis further, they say could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters rlsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex system theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empyeically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics longused to model systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).
" Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. " Our analysis is reality-based."
Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownership, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more stable or less stable, for instance.
The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships owning them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work to be published in PLoS One , revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 has ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 percent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to colectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent og global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity"
of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the superentity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and the Gold man Sachs Group.
John Driffil of the University of London, a maroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather it's insights into economic stability.
Concentration of poer is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one (company) suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propogates."
" It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are." agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.
Yaneer Bar -Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is nor always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.
Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could hep make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading throgh the entire economy. Glattfelder says we need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivitity to discourage this risk.
One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.
Nwecomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECS1: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the waelth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."
So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is ehether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially by identifying the achitecure of global economic power..." was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies
1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Plc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellingtom Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Mank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Societe Generale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brother Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depositary Trust Company
40. Massachussetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company
* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used
Republication from Newscientisthttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalistnetwork-that-runs-world.html
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Occupy Cardiff.
Cardiff plans demonstration in solidarity with the global Occupy Movement.
A demonstration has been called in Cardiff on Friday 11 November 2011 - the date set for a global day of action in solidarity with the international Occupy Movement.
The current Occupy Movement began in the US with Occupy Wall Street and has spread internationally taking inspiration from the US movement as well as similar occupations about social ineqality in Spain and the Arab Spring.
Here in the UK there has been an inspiring occupation at St Paul's Cathedral in London since Saturday 15th October 2011, a location close to the London Stock Exchange, and there have also been occupations and protests up and down the country.
The Cardiff demo will gather at the Aneurin Bevan statue on a time to be confirmed.
Find out mire about the Cardiff event on Facebook below.
https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192221504188896
There seems to be something happening here , there and eveywhere.
What it is aint exactly clear.The rulers cannot simply go on ruling
in the old way, and the important thing is , the people refuse to
go on the old way.....
to be continued.
 |
- Aneurin Bevan.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Riot Granny
After Loukanikas the Riot Dog, Athens, Greece gets a new symbol of hope and global resistance that makes's its way into the limelight, the riot Granny......
Long may she have the power.
Long may she have the power.
Monday, 31 October 2011
Adelaide Crapsey (9/9/1878- 8/10/14) - The Witch
When I was a girl by Nilus stream
I watched the desert stars arise;
My lover, he who dreamed the Sphinx,
Learned all his dreaming from my eyes
I bore in Greece a burning name,
And I have been in Italy
Madonna to a painter-lad,
And mistress to a Medici.
And have you heard ( and I have heard)
Of puzzled men with decorous mien,
Who judged - The wrench knows far too much-
And hanged her on the Salem green?
Adellaide Crapsey , grew up in Rochester, New York. Educated at Vassar College. Spent her life teaching, studying and writing poems. Her poetry A study of English Metrics was published in 1918, after her death in a sanatorium of tuberculosis.
The Witch from 'Verse' by Adelaide Crapsey 1922.
Happy Samhein everyone
May it be good. xx
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)