Not sure if this fits here; this is about current major events going on in the Netherlands. If you're buying into the "wow such a cool and progressive country": congrats, you're not immune to...
Not sure if this fits here; this is about current major events going on in the Netherlands.
If you're buying into the "wow such a cool and progressive country": congrats, you're not immune to propaganda & l'd highly urge you to read this article.
I mean....that sucks, but it's still well under the 50%+ of the representatives in the USA, where the bigot party has an uneven advantage due to horrendously disproportionate representation. The...
let’s not forget that the extreme Right – representing antisemites, career Islamophobes and biological racists, homophobes and misogynists, climate deniers and Covid deniers – now occupy 20% of seats in the lower house.
I mean....that sucks, but it's still well under the 50%+ of the representatives in the USA, where the bigot party has an uneven advantage due to horrendously disproportionate representation. The US progressives look to the Netherlands as a relatively good example because it is a demonstratable improvement of our status quo.
Most of the problems described in the article seem to stem from privatization of the energy sector and the subsequent power that money buys when that happens. We are no strangers to that problem.
And for good measure, it looks like their courts are also making relatively good decisions. As opposed to the US courts which have a spotty track record at best in the ladt 25ish years.
"It doesn't suck for you because for us it sucks more". Thanks. The entire political system is fucking useless. 20% is racists, 70% is neoliberals that are technically of different...
"It doesn't suck for you because for us it sucks more". Thanks.
The entire political system is fucking useless. 20% is racists, 70% is neoliberals that are technically of different right/leftwinged parties but practically are all the same. There's only one party that even tries to does anything for human right and it's shoved aside as irrelevant most of the time.
And it's not just the energy sector, it's everything. But l guess the problems aren't relevant as the US is already having them which invalidates us having them as well.
I'm not saying it invalidates those concerns. Just providing the reason that US progressives look to the Netherlands and say 'Hey that looks pretty good.' All of your problems are valid, and...
I'm not saying it invalidates those concerns. Just providing the reason that US progressives look to the Netherlands and say 'Hey that looks pretty good.'
All of your problems are valid, and honestly are great things to attempt to be addresssd before they hit USA levels.
The world is being crippled by neoliberalism, and the USA is the epicenter.
While neoliberal think tanks rile up the base with debt clocks and boogeyman statistics of ratios of government expenditure to GDP, neoliberal politicians organize a host of new state activities to fortify their markets. They extravagantly increase incarceration and policing of those whom they deem unfit for the marketplace. They expand both state and corporate power to exercise surveillance and manipulation of subject populations while dismantling judicial recourse to resist such encroachments. Neoliberals introduce new property rights (like intellectual property) to cement into place their extensions of market valuations to situations where they were absent. They strengthen international sanctions such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and investor-state dispute settlement schemes to circumvent and neutralize national social legislation they dislike. They bail out and subsidize private banking systems at the cost of many multiples of existing national income. And they define corporations as legal persons in order to facilitate the buying of elections.
I don’t believe this gets at the real problem, or at least not in the US. There have been some expensive failures when people try to win elections by spending a lot of money. (Consider Bloomberg’s...
I don’t believe this gets at the real problem, or at least not in the US. There have been some expensive failures when people try to win elections by spending a lot of money. (Consider Bloomberg’s campaign.) And it seems like the Tea Party candidates that win over more moderate Republicans aren’t doing it by outspending their opponents? They are (unfortunately) tapping into some genuine enthusiasm with their base.
Money does matter in elections, but I think it’s more that some candidates without a lot of support also don’t have enough money to get the word out.
This was initially done many years ago so that corporations could be sued. It’s just that in the time since, corporations’ leaders have figured out how to turn this to their advantage.
define corporations as legal persons
This was initially done many years ago so that corporations could be sued. It’s just that in the time since, corporations’ leaders have figured out how to turn this to their advantage.
There is a study cited about unequal representation and it links to a web page in Dutch, but that links to the study which is in English. Skipping down to 3. Data: There is a scatter plot (Figure...
There is a study cited about unequal representation and it links to a web page in Dutch, but that links to the study which is in English. Skipping down to 3. Data:
The basic idea is to gather a large number of questions from pre-existing surveys that ask respondents for their opinions on specific policy changes. These questions can cover all kinds of topics, the only common denominators between them being that they should fall under the authority of the national government and they can be linked to subsequent policy changes. For each question, coders could then track down whether the policy change was passed in the years following the survey.
There is a scatter plot (Figure 1) which, just eyeballing it, seems to indicate that people in the 10th percentile and 90th percentile of income have similar preferences and more popular policies are more likely to pass.
Figure 2 shows that there is some increased responsiveness to the 90%, but apparently not that bad?
Although these results suggest some inequality in responsiveness, they also suggest that policy is responsive to all income groups. However, given the strong correlations between the views of these groups, it may not be the case that they all independently influence policy.
In Table 3 they look at just the policies where the 10% and 90% disagree:
Strikingly, the preferences of the 90th income percentile continue to have a strong effect when they diverge from the 10th and 50th percentiles, while the effect of the latter’s preferences is indistinguishable from zero.
This is 52 policies out of 291. It might be interesting to see which policies those are? Maybe someone familiar with Dutch politics could put them in context. I’m going to stop here, though.
Not sure if this fits here; this is about current major events going on in the Netherlands.
If you're buying into the "wow such a cool and progressive country": congrats, you're not immune to propaganda & l'd highly urge you to read this article.
I mean....that sucks, but it's still well under the 50%+ of the representatives in the USA, where the bigot party has an uneven advantage due to horrendously disproportionate representation. The US progressives look to the Netherlands as a relatively good example because it is a demonstratable improvement of our status quo.
Most of the problems described in the article seem to stem from privatization of the energy sector and the subsequent power that money buys when that happens. We are no strangers to that problem.
And for good measure, it looks like their courts are also making relatively good decisions. As opposed to the US courts which have a spotty track record at best in the ladt 25ish years.
"It doesn't suck for you because for us it sucks more". Thanks.
The entire political system is fucking useless. 20% is racists, 70% is neoliberals that are technically of different right/leftwinged parties but practically are all the same. There's only one party that even tries to does anything for human right and it's shoved aside as irrelevant most of the time.
And it's not just the energy sector, it's everything. But l guess the problems aren't relevant as the US is already having them which invalidates us having them as well.
I'm not saying it invalidates those concerns. Just providing the reason that US progressives look to the Netherlands and say 'Hey that looks pretty good.'
All of your problems are valid, and honestly are great things to attempt to be addresssd before they hit USA levels.
The world is being crippled by neoliberalism, and the USA is the epicenter.
I think this excerpt, from the excellent Neoliberalism: The Movement That Dare Not Speak Its Name sums up how I see neoliberalism.
I don’t believe this gets at the real problem, or at least not in the US. There have been some expensive failures when people try to win elections by spending a lot of money. (Consider Bloomberg’s campaign.) And it seems like the Tea Party candidates that win over more moderate Republicans aren’t doing it by outspending their opponents? They are (unfortunately) tapping into some genuine enthusiasm with their base.
Money does matter in elections, but I think it’s more that some candidates without a lot of support also don’t have enough money to get the word out.
I can't help suspecting Bloomberg wasn't really bothered about winning, but more interested in undermining candidates on the left.
See: Citizens United
This was initially done many years ago so that corporations could be sued. It’s just that in the time since, corporations’ leaders have figured out how to turn this to their advantage.
There is a study cited about unequal representation and it links to a web page in Dutch, but that links to the study which is in English. Skipping down to 3. Data:
There is a scatter plot (Figure 1) which, just eyeballing it, seems to indicate that people in the 10th percentile and 90th percentile of income have similar preferences and more popular policies are more likely to pass.
Figure 2 shows that there is some increased responsiveness to the 90%, but apparently not that bad?
In Table 3 they look at just the policies where the 10% and 90% disagree:
This is 52 policies out of 291. It might be interesting to see which policies those are? Maybe someone familiar with Dutch politics could put them in context. I’m going to stop here, though.