Get your mind out of the gutter, Oxford Dictionaries, I’m writing about sovereign wealth funds.
Irish President Michael D Higgins on Europe's past, present, and future
8:37 Apr 19th, 2013 | 2 notesWatch this speech, for I believe (or at least hope) it will be recalled many years from now as a defining text of this period of the Union’s history.
Here is an excerpt of the speech:
Instead of any discourse that might define the European Union as simply an economic space of contestation between the strong and the weak, our citizens yearn for the language of solidarity, the commitment to cohesion, for a generous inclusive rhetoric that is appropriate to an evolving political union that is anxious to reach a future of peace, prosperity, inclusion, and in a sustainable way.
This is a serious challenge, not least because if we were to fail we run the risk of an economic crisis leading to a crisis of legitimacy for the Union. A Union that in its founding treaties is fundamentally founded on values – respect for personal dignity; freedom; democracy; equality; the rule of law and respect for human rights.
The Union draws its legitimacy from the support of its citizens. That connection with the citizens – their belief that the European Union is of them and for them – is fundamental. Without it, we are adrift. Citizens need an appeal to their heart as well as their reason. They need reassurance now that the Union will keep faith with its founding treaties.
It is many years since Jacques Delors declared “Europe needs a soul”, but it remains just as true. We should never forget that we are the inheritors of a profoundly important set of European values – Greek democracy, Roman law, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the reformation, the enlightenment, the great democratic revolution that began in France. Europe is therefore more than an economic space of contestation in which our citizens are invited or required to deliver up their lives in the service of an abstract model of economy and society whose core assumptions they are assumed not to question or put to the democratic test in elections.
As we face into the future, we need to draw strength from the founding values of the Union and these include cohesion and solidarity – among Member States, among the citizens of our Union, and between the European Union and the rest of the world. We need to work together to apply ourselves to building a better future together – as Jacques Delors also said of this present crisis “Europe does not just need fire-fighters, it needs architects too”.
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I believe that a European Union that has the courage to face all of its past, including its darker periods of empire, with honesty, and its future with a commitment to values that are inclusive of all humanity, with a discourse that respects diversity, has a profound contribution to make – not only to its own citizens in Europe but to the global community. It can give a lead in creating a form of ethical globalization that recognizes intergenerational responsibilities.
Such an integrated discourse as might allow for this to happen is, I believe, missing just now. The prevailing narrative seems to be trapped intellectually in a structure of thought which it appears unable to challenge, from which it seems unable, or at times even unwilling, to escape or exit.
In the absence of considering other possible models or approaches, we are in danger of drifting into, and sustaining, a kind of moral and intellectual impotence. Yet we have available to us, I repeat again, a rich legacy of intellectual, radical work upon which we can draw.
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From the flux of diverse histories, from our current problems, from our fears and our aspirations I hope will emerge a response that constitutes a tapestry of many colours, of different strengths in its threads; and, in its design, evocative of what memory has made endure, and the human spirit has invested with hope. Whether it is made out of wondrous reason or woven with a prayer will not matter. What matters is that it be work of us all, working together, in co-operation, cosmopolitan and open to the world, caring for it, in an inter-generationally responsible way, and embracing all our people as equal citizens.
So let us the citizens of the European Union who want to make a real Union together, move out of the dark into the light and achieve something indeed worthy of Friedrich Schiller’s poem originally called “Ode to Freedom”.
Go raibh maith agat [May good things be bestowed upon you].
Full text available here
Over the Love - Florence + The Machine
From the soundtrack of The Great Gatsby
Students in Australian have to pay triple what their American counterparts do for a digital subscription to The Economist.
Seriously, that’s insane.
A timely excerpt from the article, “Europe’s Adventure Begins” - The Economist, January 2, 1999
The danger that this raises is that in the event of a sharp recession in one or more countries, there will then be a political reaction against the EU itself. The Union as a whole, and other euro members, will be blamed for the victim’s inability to moderate its recession. Given that public support for the euro has been thin, to say the least, in most of the member countries (and is unlikely to grow much during the absurdly long, three-year period before people actually get hold of euro notes and coin), this is one helluva hostage to fortune.
Such an outcome, if it happens, could cause a political bustup; or it could lead to more power being transferred to the EU in the worst possible circumstances, namely when the Union is deeply unpopular. But there is also a happier way to think about things. Perhaps this nasty outcome will not occur, either because no such “asymmetric” recession takes place or because governments, meanwhile, have dismantled the stability pact. In that event, the euro will have proved a success: its members will have achieved low inflation, and the currency will have ridden out the ups and downs of the economic cycle without itself becoming politically unpopular. That is the outcome for which everyone should be hoping during the next decade.
NTEU and CPSU: Time to stand down
12:00 Mar 26th, 2013 | 8 notes
The strike action currently taking place at Sydney University is futile, selfish, and irreparably damaging the image of the labour movement as a whole. In a year where the federal Labor Party is sure to be wiped out at the September General Election, scenes of police arrests and raging socialists are doing nothing but further degrading the image of its union base, who are already facing dwindling membership and claims from all sides that they lack relevance in our modern economy.
It is only 10:30am, yet already today students have been arrested inside lecture theaters and on the busy thoroughfares of the University. Chants of “Cops off campus” and the waving of red socialist flags have done little to improve the scene in the minds of the hundreds of onlookers walking past the chaos. The strike does not end until tomorrow afternoon.
As a card carrying member of the Labor Party and coming from a union family, I am appalled by this strike action not only for its spectacle but for its purpose. Reading through the list of demands from the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), it is hard to conclude that this strike amounts to anything but overreach and self-indulgence. By all measures, Sydney University staff already get a sweet deal: fifty days paid sick leave a year, seventeen-percent superannuation (way above the current mandatory nine-percent), four weeks of paid annual leave, and a 37.5 hour working week. Additionally, the NTEU’s reach into University administration and bureaucracy is mind-boggling. By their own account, the NTEU already has office space within the University (paid for by the University), access to internal University systems, and the right to challenge some University management decisions. The University must also consult the NTEU on all University policy coming out of the Management and Staff Consultative Committee, and several “review committees” exist at the behest of the NTEU.
These are benefits that other public sector workers can only dream of, yet on top of this pile of decadence, the NTEU and CPSU are demanding a seven-percent pay rise every year for the next four years. Let’s make one thing clear: this is more than double the average wage increase in Australia last year.
The University staff may feel like they are the inheritors of the spoils “won by generations of staff who have worked hard to make this university what it is,” but those generations were from a different age. Times have changed, for better or for worse. It is concerning that as unionism declines across the country, those remaining are intent on further smashing away at the collapsing foundations of their own movement. As I look on at this industrial action with nothing but frustration and despair, I dread to think what my 50,000 peers must think.
To the NTEU, CSPU, and University staff: change, evolve, and adapt. It is time to accept that the workplace you demand belongs to a bygone era. Many of your students will be entering the world of casual and contract employment you fear, myself included. If other professional services can survive the transition, so can you. Regrettably, You have also so far failed to win the hearts and minds of your students. Doing so should be your first priority, as without them your cause is lost.
To the socialist students who have joined the protest: your movement is useless and your ideology, a failure. You are irrelevant. The best thing you can do to further the plight of those you support is to get out of the way.
To the students of Sydney University: I am sorry it had to be like this. It is moments like this that one must remember that the story of the union movement is, at its heart, the story of the Australian middle class—it is the constant endeavor for a freer and fairer society.
And as society changes, so must the goals of the union movement. I pray that the NTEU and CSPU come to acknowledge this fact, for their sake, and ours.
The Daily Telegraph, whom yesterday ran a front page story comparing the Federal Communications Minister to a slew dictators, today printed an apology to Joseph Stalin, who the paper argues at least “was upfront in his efforts to control the media instead of pretending he supported free speech…”
The apology goes on to say, “We also note that despite his well-documented crimes against humanity, Stalin at least managed to hold a government together for more than three years.”
How pathetic.
To anyone with any sense of decency, this piece of writing fails to be funny or provocative. It is distasteful pure and simple. Forgive me if I “can’t take a joke”, but in this case I am happy to be called a wet blanket when that “joke” is carried on the shoulders of a man responsible for the death of 15 million people (Conquest, 2007, xvi).
(Source: twitter.com)
Milestone!
I’m also quite proud of the fact that only about a handful of those are reblogs :)
The Daily Telegraph, a conservative Australian tabloid, has compared the Federal Communications Minister to Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim, Mugabe, and Ahmadinejad, in response to newly proposed media market reforms.
