Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, October 30, 2011

OWS -- Jeffrey Sachs Speaks, October 7

By John Ballard


Thanks to Fareed Zakaria for the transcript. The people's microphone has a somewhat liturgical quality about it, but it becomes tedious pretty quick.  Go to the link for a video and full falvor of the original. If you need more, YouTube has Part Two.
In future years this will be an original source document when the history of Occupy is recorded.
Jeffrey Sachs is already well-known.
Here is part of what he says.



In 1981 a very strange thing happened. A man was elected. He came the first day of office and he said "Government is not the solution. It is the problem." Now a man who believes that should not be our President. He should have stayed on TV and left us alone. We need presidents who believe that government is the solution for all of us. But what Ronald Reagan did was he cut the taxes at the top and cut the benefits below and put our country on the path of inequality.


Now here's the sad news. It is not news to you because you figured it out before everybody else. It wasn't just Ronald Reagan. It wasn't just the Republicans. It was both the Republicans and the Democratic Party. They figured if they cut taxes for the rich, the rich would give them campaign contributions, and they could all live happily ever after. They could all live happily ever after. Not us. They are the 1%. We're the 99%.


This has gone on for 30 years now. The corporate lobbies have owned our government - even Barack Obama, who I supported and I voted for and I want to succeed. He's having dinner with rich people all the time, but he's not having dinner with the 99%. If you have to pay $35,800 a plate, the 99% are going to go hungry. Every week, President Obama is having a campaign dinner. $35,800 per plate. Who do you think he's meeting? Who do you think he's listening to? The 1%. We need to elect a government for the 99%.




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1 comment:

  1. geoffOctober 30, 2011 at 5:40 AM

    Sach I take with a massive chunk of salt. At heart I think of him as an imperialist. His new concern is really the decline he perceives in USAs influence on the world stage which I take as really meaning, though he likes to put a faux we only mean good gloss on it, a depreciated ability to dictate outcomes and act as a true hegemonic state. This he sees as stemming from the nonsense, started by the Hollywood actor POTUS, of cutting discretionary federal gov't spending which has and will continue to result in the decay of the USAs domestic ability to actually act as a real nation state. When you can't drive on the roads or drink the water or cross a bridge and your population can barely read it's difficult to twist the arms of other nations even with unmanned bombs. He had a good chit chat with Chris Lydon on OpenSource radio last week where he expressed his concerns about the domestic US problems:
    http://t.co/dD2OxPg4
    Me, I've never really gotten over his part in let's screw Russia and have wondered for sometime now if he hasn't recently, speaking to OWS maybe part of this, been doing penance for the Harvard boy stuff:
    http://t.co/zBHOeCDw

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