Archive for the ‘Liberals’ Category

Liberals may be pleasantly surprised by the Budget but Tory Party faithfuls could be in for a shock – The Independent

In November 2009, the dying days of Gordon Browns premiership, his Chancellor, Alistair Darling, was named Survivor of the Year at The Spectator magazines parliamentary awards. It was a coy compliment from a right-leaning magazine, highlighting how close Darling had come that year to losing his job to Browns henchman Ed Balls (the pre-Strictly version). Yet it was also a grudging acknowledgement of how difficult it can be to maintain the second most powerful office in the land especially when the premier is used to having things his, or her, way.

Philip Hammond, as he delivers his first Budget on Wednesday, will also have emerged as a great survivor. On his appointment, he seemed to exemplify the aesthetic of the Theresa May regime: a safe pair of hands, an older and greyer head than the yuppie-young confidence tricksters of the Cameron years. Hammond was 61 when he took the job of Chancellor; GeorgeOsborne had been 38.

Yet it soon emerged that Hammond was altogether too grey, too sage, for the more excitable Brexit bunnies. The details of early rows found their way with regularity into Sunday papers. An early skirmish over immigration drew a public rebuke from No 10 when Hammond publicly floated the idea of excluding students from the Governments target. (Most economists would like to see British universities allowed to take as many foreign students as possible; Tory voters, and thus the Prime Minister, fear it as immigration by the back door.)May and Hammond already clashed over the independence of the Bank of England, and the regulation of foreign takeovers. By mid-October, Hammond had to deny that hed threatened to resign; No10 was left issuing anodyne statements about having full confidence in the Chancellor.

And yet he survived. Why? In part, it is because Hammond has firmly established himself as a steady check on the more extreme excesses of the hard Brexiteers. Unlike May, who is driven primarily by the electorates concerns, Hammonds focus has been on retaining Britains attractiveness to foreign investors and talking up economic growth It is clear to me that the British people did not vote on 23Juneto become poorer, he declared at last autumns party conference, before going on to caution against alienating international employers. As indicated by his intervention on student migration, Hammond is fundamentally an economic liberal, who has set himself the mission of salvaging as much of Britains openness to movement of labour as possible.

Perhaps that puts the Chancellor on a collision course with the Prime Minister. But the truth is that the PM has found it quite useful to have a proxy when David Davis dismisses off-hand the promise of an EU transitional deal, or Boris Johnson announces unilaterally that we wont pay for access to the single market. With his dry erudition Hammond is frequently described as intellectual arrogant by his opponents he commands the respect of the City. And he can babysit the Cabinet at the same time.

More fundamentally, Hammond and May know that both their necks are on the line if Brexit negotiations fail. The Conservative Party may have no effective opposition for now. But both have staked their political careers on steering Britain out of the Brexit quagmire and that means, however great their day-to-day differences, they know they have to steer together.

Philip Hammond: Post-Brexit Britain won't 'slink off like a wounded animal'

The advantage for Hammond, of course, is that Brexit is still the only game in town, even on Budget day. Brexit planning is sucking up the energy of the Government in a fashion that is downright dangerous talk to civil servants in the Department of Transport, or even atHealth, and theyll complain that their political masters are too busy with European matters to agree basic policy directives. So Wednesdays Budget will be watched closely to see the assumptions it makes about inflation and post-Brexit growth, but on fiscal detail, few people will be offering quite as much scrutiny as usual. Why bother, when you can go another round of expat versus migrant in the pub?

The Budget, such as it is, looks unlikely to break much with the Osborne tradition. (Hammond is said to have asked his predecessor for advice.) In a rare anti-market sop, Hammond retains Osbornes antipathy to the buy to let market, phasing out tax relief on Buy to Let mortgages although there are inklings he may reverse Osbornes stamp duty increase. Otherwise, its cautious but standard Tory fare: raising the personal allowance before tax is paid on income (although many of the working poor will still pay hefty NI contributions) and heavy cuts on child credit. Much will be made of small gestures gently increasing the budget again for staff in prisons, for example, despite a 30 per cent cut in recent years and 1bn for social care, which may provide a bandage to the current crisis but is unlikely to accompany major policy changes until a mooted review concludes.

So far, so Tory. But what makes Hammonds policy moves interesting is that hes one of the few characteristic conservatives left in senior positions. The Brexiteers are innately radical, enthralled by the concept of creative destruction. Hammond is inherently cautious look at this weekends appearance on Peston on Sunday and at how heavily he warned against getting too optimistic about the latest positive economic growth forecast. Perhaps the forecasts immediately following the Brexit vote were over-pessimistic, he admitted, but if somebody gives you a bit more headroom on your credit card, it doesn't mean you have to rush out and spend it all at once. Expect to hear a lot more of that on Wednesday and plenty of talk about the need for Britain to shore up long-term resilience. This is the rhetoric of a man playing a long game. If Britain emerges as a cautious survivor, so can he.

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Liberals may be pleasantly surprised by the Budget but Tory Party faithfuls could be in for a shock - The Independent

Straight from print: AU liberals are failing – The Eagle

By Antonio lvarez Ramirez | 03/06/17 6:22pm | Updated 03/06/17 6:22pm

This article originally appeared in The Eagle's Feb. 24, 2017 special edition.

On April 27, 1989, students across the Peoples Republic of China took to the streets in an act of defiance against the repressive totalitarian government under which they lived.

Initially, the student-led protest centered its demands on the development of democracy, the destruction of corruption and the opening of social institutions like the press and higher education. Student leaders had organized and mobilized their campus in a massive and powerful demonstration against the state.

Their passion and courage began to inspire wider support. Soon, workers parties joined the student protesters in support of their ideals of anti-corruption and decentralization of power.

This incredible demonstration of popular dissent and courage forced the government into a general state of emergency and immediately began a negotiation process. Although it may seem like a completely abstract and distant reality, universities and institutions of higher education have a long history of political dissent and mobilization. Students have led famous actions that have inspired millions to act, leading to concessions from governments and even the toppling of regimes.

In an era of political tension in our country, the University and especially its progressive liberal student population must embody this spirit of mobilization and stand in opposition to an increasingly racist, xenophobic, sexist, ableist and power hungry regime. The resistance movement is failing.

On Feb. 3, No Lost Generation, an organization dedicated to informing the student body about refugee issues, hosted a demonstration called AU Stands Up: Rally for Refugees and Immigrants. Despite the Facebook event having 296 people going, 648 people interested and 1,200 people invited, the actual attendance never exceeded 30-40 people. This is not a commentary on the organizing skills or effort of No Lost Generation but on the woeful state of mobilization on AUs campus.

Standing out in the cold with a few dozen others listening to students give their personal experiences as refugees and immigrants, I couldnt help but wonder why the hundreds of students walking by us, most of whom I am sure are self-described liberals, progressives or Democrats, wouldnt stop for at least a few minutes and listen.

This lack of action could be a result of disinterest, too much trust in the electoral system or an abundance of privilege. Whatever the reasons, I call on our campus to do better.

For the many of us who exist in a position of extreme privilege compared to those impacted by the incoming regimes proto-fascist policies, we cannot sit by and let these actions stand. Students can be the foot soldiers for important movements that demand change and resist oppression. We can be the organizers that spark the next popular resistance movement.

If you are able to, it is not enough to say you are a liberal, or to say you are against racism, or to share Huffington Post articles whose content amounts to Trump: Sad Face Emoji. If you are able and truly believe in equality and justice, you must mobilize and agitate.

Demonstrative opposition to the Trump regime and to the rise of far right powers across the world is the only thing which will stop us from conceding ground to the rise of global fascism. Groups like the College Democrats, who have not organized any events whatsoever in response to racist and Islamophobic executive orders, are complicit in the administrations ability to act without punishment or response from the populace.

Of course, when I urge folks to come out and mobilize, I am not referring to those who for various reasons cannot do so. Our undocumented, Muslim/Muslim passing, mentally ill, trans, low income and Black siblings and peers are often at special risk in these movements.

I direct my call of action at the majority of AU students that are white. I challenge the men, the able bodied and minded, the wealthy and financially stable and the non-black people of color. All of us should stand in solidarity with those who will be punished more harshly for standing up and fighting for their rights.

I implore you as an AU student, as a self-described liberal, as a leader of a student organization. Organize protests, sit-ins and actions. Educate yourself about student activism. Mobilize your peers and friends to act. Embody the revolutionary spirit of your predecessors and peers throughout history. Most importantly, do better. The future is counting on you.

Antonio lvarez-Ramirez is a sophomore in the School of International Service and College of Arts and Sciences. He is the Economic Development Policy Expert at the AU Roosevelt Institute and a Director on the AUSG Diversity and Inclusion Working Group.

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Straight from print: AU liberals are failing - The Eagle

The liberals and their false angst on intolerance – Times of India (blog)

It is clear that today what passes for news is essentially opinion. The left-leaning media (so called liberal) have shown more intolerance than what is essentially called right-wing by them. They hate to lose. And when they do, the savage attacks on the non-liberals show their intolerance.

Take the case of Shazia Ilmi not being allowed to speak at her Alma MaterJamia Millia Islamia on a seminar on Women empowerment. Though she was invited, the invite was withdrawn at the last minute without explanation. General Bakshi and Tarek Fatah were invited to a prestigious club in Kolkata for a seminar and Mamata Banerjee made the institution cancel the event.

None of the liberals had massive rallies against such acts against Freedom of Speech. In fact, most news channels did not even carry this.

Be it the Indian, American or British media all seem to have a markedly liberal point of view that does not allow any dissent. Talk about freedoms. Only the Left it seems has the freedom to speak and rally.

The word intolerance is used all the time when there is a blowback on whatever the liberals say or do. No matter how innocuous the subject, such as spreading yoga worldwide, the liberal left will have something unpleasant to say about it.

The people have pretty much told the liberal media that they dont rule the dialogue and the social media is, thus, thriving. Whether it is the New York Times or the New Yorker, very few read them and many think they are biased towards the extreme left.

Change in spite of the media has happened in India, Britain and USA and will follow in most European countries. One has stopped watching Indian TV news as once again there is little news but a great deal of debate. What passes for news is the opinion of the anchor or the owners of the channels who have their own agendas.

Yesterday, I watched the news briefly and saw an event, that made me think:Arun Purie congratulating his daughter for India Today TV getting the award for best English and Hindi news. To me an award is a self-perpetuating exercise by an organisation where they form a club of sorts and give each other awards. Whether it is the Oscars, Grammys, etc. They form a small cabal who decide who gets an award. Is this the peoples choice? No! The people are not consulted and mostly unaware of how and who chooses these awards.

Newspapers, magazines and such organisations pump up their reader/viewership to garner more advertising revenue, so their own statistics are always suspect. So, are these awards really relevant? Are the best reporters getting awards? Is there even such a thing as investigative reporting left in India?

I saw a portion of The big fight where the issue being debated was Is free speech being curtailed now. Well, in fact no. When the Congress realised that Modi was a potential threat way back in 2004 a sustained campaign was launched to discredit him this is a long story and much has been written on this. The US media did the same for Trump. The people lost trust and switched to social media. And voted Trump as president, in spite the hundreds of negative articles that appeared on him by CNN, New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post and many others. They switched off.

So, I looked up once again at media viewership and came up with this revealing data on TV news viewership.

Top 5 English news channels viewership (BARC data week Feb 2017):

Times Now 798,000 India Today 498,000 CNN-IBN 404,000 NDTV 376,000 BBC 184,000

Hindi News Channels (Feb 2017)

Simply put two million people watch the top five English channels put together. And 485 million people watch the top five Hindi news channels.

The conclusion is most of what we see in the English news channels is really not relevant in the context of forming public opinion. A viewership of just two million in a country of 1.3 billion is too small to be of any significance. Wake up reporters and anchors. Your air- conditioned environment plus huge salaries and popularity are at stake. Beat the streets and start feeling the pulse of all Indians not just the Liberals and their cronies.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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The liberals and their false angst on intolerance - Times of India (blog)

Liberalism Needs the Alt-Left – New Republic

The first problem with these kinds of arguments is that the alt-left doesnt actually exist, at least not in the way that the lefts opponents would have it. As The New Republics Sarah Jones pointed out, the alt-rights goal, shared by neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer and the White Houses infamous Steves (Bannon and Miller), is to implement a white supremacist state. In contrast, the goals of the alt-left are not too different from that of a New Deal Democrat. Universal health care and a $15 minimum wage are not the lefts version of a Muslim ban, even if the rhetoric of the left is combative, uncompromising, and, yes, sometimes obnoxious.

As Eric Levitz points out at New York, one of the main problems with Wolcotts piece is that he cherry-picks a number of voicesmany of whom barely intersectto speak for a perceived group. Among them are a few writers he apparently dislikes (Michael Tracey, Freddie deBoer, Connor Kilpatrick), Susan Sarandon, Mickey Kaus, and Oliver Stone. While criticisms can be made of many of Wolcotts targets, to lump them together as representative of the alt-left is nonsensical. It conflates being Loud Online with actual politics. And crucially, unlike members of the alt-right, who are being actively wooed by the GOP, these people have almost no power.

Blair is positing a more dangerous idea: that liberalism should essentially reorient itself as a globalized technocracy, in opposition to anti-elite populism.

A graver sin is the adoption of a term that was created by conservatives to smear the left and discredit criticisms of the growing clout of the racist right. Richard Spencer coined the term alt-right for his own movement. In very stark contrast, alt-left is a strawman invention of far-right websites. As The Washington Posts Aaron Blake pointed out in December, The difference between alt-right and alt-left is that one of them was coined by the people who comprise the movement and whose movement is clearly ascendant; the other was coined by its opponents and doesnt actually have any subscribers. When alt-left is deployed by the likes of Sean Hannity on Fox News, it is a form of propaganda used to conflate groups like Black Lives Matter with the Ku Klux Klan. For Wolcott to ascribe to this notion only gives this right-wing smear more credence.

Blair invokes the specter of a dangerous left for different reasons. By equating the populist lefts hostility toward big business and the 1 percent with the populist rights hostility toward migrants and people of color, he is creating a false equivalence that undermines progressivism as a whole. The ultra-wealthy patrons of the Republican Party (and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Party) are, in fact, much to blame for deep inequality we see in the United States. Globalization did gouge the working and middle classes in the West, most notoriously during the Great Recession, even as it lifted millions out of poverty in other parts of the world. Political elites did fail us, from the Iraq War to the financial crisis.

Yet this is how Blair frames the debate over these issues:

Today, a distinction that often matters more than traditional right and left is open vs. closed. The open-minded see globalization as an opportunity but one with challenges that should be mitigated; the closed-minded see the outside world as a threat. This distinction crosses traditional party lines and thus has no organizing base, no natural channel for representation in electoral politics.

The last half of Blairs op-ed argues for achieving radical change by reaching for voters who remain in the big space in the center. Tellingly, he calls for an alliance between Silicon Valleyan industry of socially liberal economic elitesand public policy. In his closing line, Blair states that we must build a new coalition that is popular, not populist.

There are two ironies in Blairs column. The first is that Blair himself was partly responsible for his Labour Party losing a large chunk of its core working-class voters, thanks to the Iraq War and the Great Recession. The second is that huge pillars of Blairs British-style moderate liberalismsuch as universal health careare totally in line with what the American populist left is demanding. The populist left, in other words, is well within the mainstream of Western democratic tradition; it is apparently their anti-elitist rhetoric that really rubs Blair the wrong way. He is, after all, an elite himself.

One big lesson from Hillary Clintons loss to Donald Trump was her campaigns over-reliance on the mythical moderate voter. (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer encapsulated this line of thinking in an infamously bad projection: For every blue-collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two or three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It didnt quite work out that way.) Wolcott and Blair do not address this problem. In different ways, they make a case for the center based on a bad-faith argument that the populist left is the same brand of scourge as the nationalist right.

In American politics at least, the political center is the space between a functional liberal democratic party and one hijacked by white nationalists. This is not a promising ground on which liberals can build out from, as Blair puts it. Whether he likes it or not, the case remains that the Democratic Party will need its left wing to mobilize working-class and young, progressive voters; the left will need institutions like the Democratic Party if it wants to win elections. Over the next few years, there will be time for arguments over strategies and priorities. But there is no time for liberals to try to delegitimize the populist left; it will only cut their own legs out from under them.

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Liberalism Needs the Alt-Left - New Republic

Ontario budget watchdog to examine Liberals’ hydro relief plan – The Globe and Mail

Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne speaks during a press conference in Toronto on Thursday, March 2, 2017. (Frank Gunn/THE CANADIAN PRESS) Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne speaks during a press conference in Toronto on Thursday, March 2, 2017. (Frank Gunn/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Allison Jones

TORONTOThe Canadian Press

Published Monday, Mar. 06, 2017 7:19AM EST

Last updated Monday, Mar. 06, 2017 12:01PM EST

Ontarios budget watchdog is planning a report examining the Liberal governments plan to lower hydro bills.

Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown has written to the financial accountability office, asking them to investigate the plan with a full costing analysis.

A spokeswoman for the office says theyll take Browns letter under consideration, but they had already been planning to examine the hydro plan.

The recently announced 17-per-cent reduction in hydro bills comes this summer thanks to a move the Liberals say is like refinancing a mortgage over a longer period of time.

Premier Kathleen Wynne has acknowledged it will cost ratepayers more in the long run, but she says savings are needed now because people are struggling.

She has said the extra interest costs related to the plan would amount to $25 billion over 30 years, but the Tories say theyre not clear on how the Liberals arrived at that number.

Wynne defends Ontario hydro rate cut (The Canadian Press)

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Ontario budget watchdog to examine Liberals' hydro relief plan - The Globe and Mail