Waters Squeezes in Perfectly Legal Message

Last night in Curitiba, Brazil. See, it was unlawful to campaign after 22h00 so at 21h58 a multi-part message appears on the concert screen to remind fans of this fact and to urge them to prevent fascism from taking over their country in the general election today. Also included in the message was the slogan used to motivate the movement against seeing Bolsonaro occupying the Planalto in the coming days: Ele Não! (Not Him!). Not too sure that this attempt of the 75-year old rockstar will be enough though as the right-wing candidate still has a double-digit lead over his rival, Mr. Haddad. Indeed the fact that Brazil has just been in one of its worst recession ever and the law and order situation seemed to have got out hand – 17 of the 50 cities with the worst crime rates are in the huge South-American nation – doesn't favour the election of candidate of Lula's party.

Marine Le Pen must be watching all of this and thinking she'll be calling the shots in about three and half years. And blessing failed policies.

What do you think the flat tax is eventually going to make happen in Mauritius?

Les Shelina Montre U Kuma Fer Zasar Lisu

Monn seye ena inpe letan. Pa ti mal ditu. U kav aste zepis zasar fini prepare si u pale kraz lor ros kari u dan graynder. Mo prefer long pima ver ek mo met li an dernye pu li res ferm ek li fer mwa kone li la ler mo manz mo dipin zasar. Enn lot ti zafer ki u kav fer se azut enn ti kuyer delwil mutard pu aranz so gu ankor plis.

Getting a Handle On Electoral Reform Has Never Been Easier

Understanding the issues of electoral reform is very important because it sets the rules of the political game. But just like with anything else there is a minimum investment of energy and time required to figure them out. That can be more difficult than it should have been when you have a biased media putting intellectually dishonest politicians with a giant skills-mismatch like Sithanen on a pedestal. It doesn't help either that the Labour Party is currently in the darkest phase of its history.

So the above table will be quite handy to bring a maximum of voters up to speed with the three principal options. Both the Sithanen (RS/NR/PB) and the Pravind Jugnauth proposals would have increased the number of additional MPs we had over the last eleven general elections by over one hundred – the actual numbers would be between 124 and 168. They would also have made government formation a lot more difficult and led to unstable governments and to more governments with much shorter durations – you can bet we would have ended up with a lot more than 11 of them. These proposals would basically turn the plutocracy we're in into an autocracy afflicted with a perpetual political crisis. 

The last proposal is one which I've worked on for the past eight years with most of the interesting work done in the past four. It starts with our current system and makes use of the important insight that the problem of large imbalances between vote share and number of MPs in the FPTP system can be recast as one of an opposition that's below a minimum size. Which is why unlike PR-based systems it allocates additional seats only to candidates that are not in the winning alliance and only when there's not enough MPs in the opposition. It also recommends three tools to deepen our democracy. Find out more about these and its other features.

Karl At 200

So he got the boom and bust cycles and inequality right but missed the ability of capitalism to reform itself and the establishment of welfare states which boosted upward social mobility and improved lives. He didn't foresee Marxist regimes killing people on a horrendous scale either. After ideology had become an opium or tool of deception for too many of his followers. But the most interesting thing about Marx was the healthy dose of scepticism he kept about ideas including his own (read with a free subscription). He was relatively unknown during his life with between nine and eleven people attending his funeral.

The MMM started out as a Marxist-Leninist party. Would you believe this? While a recent breakaway faction with interesting initials wants to privatise water.

Trudeau Rejects Proportional Representation

Just like voters here did in December 2014. And several decades before that. The Canadian PM says he understands that PR would harm his country. Basically what the Labour Party before 1982 understood.