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Time of India
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
‘DMK govt's aim is equitable society'
Chennai: Chief minister M K Stalin on Thursday said his govt settled disputes between employers and employees through discussions. Relationships between employer, employees are balanced through mediation, he said, after laying a wreath at the May Day Park to mark International Workers' Day . Stalin said, "You know that Tamil Nadu is witnessing massive industrial growth, and as a result, workers are also growing. Industrial development in Tamil Nadu is on the rise. Just like targets are fixed for industrial growth, govt has fixed targets for the growth of workers too. Whenever a new project comes up and we sign an MoU, the first question I raise is the total number of jobs generated from the project." You Can Also Check: Chennai AQI | Weather in Chennai | Bank Holidays in Chennai | Public Holidays in Chennai Indirectly referring to the recently held tripartite talks between the state govt, Samsung India, and its labourers, Stalin said, "The relationship between the employer and the employees is balanced through mediation. Our govt ends the dispute through talks." Quoting Periyar, Stalin said, "Dravidian means worker". He added, "Periyar was the first to translate the Communist Manifesto into Tamil in 1932." Recalling the announcement to construct a statue for Karl Marx, Stalin said, "The aim and objective of DMK govt is to establish an equitable society, and schemes are framed based on this." Earlier, Stalin, while extending wishes for May Day on X, said, "Happy World Labour Day to all the workers, comrades who are responsible for the functioning of this world through their hard work. The govt was created by the common man for the common man. We will always be with you."
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The fascist moment is here: Have mainstream liberals heard the alarm go off?
This is pretty much it, I would say: This is the moment we have long feared — or, from another point of view, the moment we've all been waiting for. If you think you know what I mean by 'this' being 'it,' you're probably right. This is the moment to bust out clichés and make them sound authentic, the moment for 'Which side are you on?' or 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' to stop sounding like antique rhetoric out of earnest postwar melodrama. Of course the moment has been more of a long, drawn-out process, and the premise that 'it' can't happen here has been slowly and gradually degraded and negated, somewhat the way Hannibal Lecter ('the late, great Hannibal Lecter,' as President Trump likes to say) keeps you alive and doped up on happy pills while he eats your brain. Still, though: Wasn't there something like a moment for you? There certainly was for me. The question of who understands the nature of the moment, and who does not, has been thrown into dramatic relief over the course of the last week or so — and boy howdy, have there been some surprises. This is too much of a generalization, but it's an irresistible one: We are seeing a truly extraordinary transformation, something like the awakening of the mainstream conservatives alongside the continuing surrender of the mainstream liberals. Yeah, I'm talking, for instance, about New York Times columnist David Brooks calling for mass action against the Trump regime and quoting the 'Communist Manifesto,' pretty much non-ironically. I don't think anyone had that on their mainstream-media bingo card. I'm also talking about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer literally hiding her face from photographers in the Oval Office, and about California Gov. Gavin Newsom's dramatic heel turn, which this week included describing the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, as the 'distraction of the day' compared to truly important things like whether Trump's tariff policy is 'accountable to the markets.' But before you 'well, actually' me about any of that stuff, let's get back to the singular moment that hit me hardest — and affected a lot of other people the same way — because I think it illustrates a much larger problem. It was that video, the one shot from somebody's window in suburban Boston that shows a group of masked people in plain clothes seizing a young woman off the street and driving her away in an unmarked van. To be more specific, it was the video itself and also what happened — and did not happen — after the world saw it. That woman's name is Rümeysa Öztürk. She is a 30-year-old Turkish citizen who has lived in the U.S. for at least the last several years on a student visa. According to her LinkedIn profile (now deleted), she is a former Fulbright scholar who holds a master's degree from Columbia University's Teachers College. She is, or was, a PhD candidate in Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University. She has not been accused of any crime. The government says it revoked her student visa because she supports Hamas, but has produced no evidence beyond an op-ed she co-authored (with three other students) in the Tufts student newspaper last year. Since her arrest, although that word seems like a euphemism, she has reportedly been held in ICE detention centers in four different states. On Friday, a federal judge ordered Öztürk returned from Louisiana to Vermont, where she was being held when her lawyers filed a habeas corpus petition demanding her release. Her arrest and detention 'raised significant constitutional concerns,' wrote Judge William K. Sessions III. (Yeah, no s**t, Sherlock.) That ruling represents a procedural victory, and begins to establish some semblance of due process in this case — but you can feel the energy drain out of the conversation when we start to talk about this as a legal case, right? That's how it works. A woman was literally disappeared off a public street by government agents with no uniforms, no official vehicle and no visible identification because of her political opinions. No one is even pretending there is any other reason. But that fact has itself almost disappeared into a bottomless swamp of procedural questions and jurisdictional disputes and supposed contextual ambiguity, while the human being in question remains in ICE custody into the indefinite future. People generally use 'Kafkaesque' as an exaggerated metaphor, perhaps to describe the runaround you get from an insurance company or an especially aggravating trip to the DMV. But no longer: What happened, and is still happening, to Öztürk and Abrego Garcia and however many other people have been swept up into the ICE gulags, is almost exactly the situation described in Franz Kafka's 'The Trial,' in which carelessness, bureaucratic incompetence and impenetrable legalism are just as damaging as outright cruelty. The Trump administration is making Kafka great again. Judge Sessions' ruling will of course be appealed to a higher court by some factotum of the Trump regime, and then that court's decision on that appeal will be appealed as well. Öztürk has a bail hearing scheduled for May 9, and a hearing on her habeas corpus petition scheduled for May 22, more than a month from now. It's conceivable that one or another of those proceedings will lead to her release, but it's far more likely that they will drag out for months, or possibly years, with no clear resolution. That's a feature of our new fascist regime, and most certainly not a bug. What has not happened since we saw the Öztürk video is anything approaching an admission that the policy that led to her abduction, or the way it was conducted, was a legal, moral or political mistake. Quite the opposite: Of course this individual's fate should matter to all of us, but what ultimately happens to Rümeysa Öztürk is, in a certain sense, beside the point. The point, indeed, has been made: Donald Trump's agents are entirely free to remove people from society on any pretext they like, or none at all. Whether they can do this to U.S. citizens as well as non-citizens remains an unanswered question. No one has made any serious effort to stop them, and they have faced no consequences beyond finger-wagging from judges and lectures from (ahem) the media. To be entirely fair, I don't believe that the range of responses to what is now happening in America has much to do with ideology, in the normal sense. It's more about whether you actually believe in something — and boy, oh boy, has the wheat been separated from the chaff in that respect. It was certainly instructive to encounter David Brooks' call to arms in the same week as another Times contributor, Bret Stephens — a staunch dispenser of anti-woke, pro-Israel right-wing conventional wisdom — described the Trump administration as 'drowning' in policies he called 'reckless, stupid, awful, un-American, hateful and bad.' It was also the week that Bill Kristol, onetime leading 'New Right' intellectual, called for the abolition of ICE. Those three guys are not identical or interchangeable, but they are all non-MAGA or anti-MAGA conservatives who would tell you they believe in 'liberal democracy,' more or less meaning an orderly society based in private property rights and political coalition-building. I might conclude that their views on democracy are somewhere between naive and noxious, but let's give them credit: They have spoken out forcefully against a regime that imperils what they cherish, including the so-called principles of conservatism. When we see Democrats like Newsom and Whitmer — and Amy Klobuchar and John Fetterman and Chuck Schumer, the list goes on — triangulating themselves into oblivion and semi-genuflecting before the Trump throne at exactly the moment when the fascist regime has made its intentions clear and the American people and the world are beginning to push back, we see people who have sucked on the crack-pipe of realpolitik for so long that, like all addicts, they have lost touch with everyday morality. They believe in nothing except political survival, and that, they believe, depends on the discount-store, focus-group version of voter psychology sold to them by expensive consultants. Any principles beyond those have atrophied into and Whitmer both hope to become president in 2029, and have placed their bets on a particular understanding of reality, beginning with the premise that there is no fascist moment. The second Trump presidency, in this view, will be an especially ugly form of normal politics, and then the pendulum will swing back in customary fashion. To win the next election, they need to define a 'moderate' space halfway between MAGA-world and the progressive wokeness they believe destroyed the Democrats last year. In similar fashion, Democratic pollster Natalie Jackson protested that Abrego Garcia made a 'bad poster child' for the anti-Trump cause because Republicans had dug up some fragmentary and unconvincing dirt on him, and journalist Matt Yglesias responded that 'clinging to the due process rights of people making asylum claims' had become a political problem. Again, no discernible principles are at work, only mock-jesuitical debates about what they think the collective mind of the public will think, based on last week's poll numbers. Jackson eventually deleted her X post about Abrego Garcia, partway through Sen. Chris Van Hollen's trip to El Salvador to visit him. The lesson here is not complicated: Van Hollen is about as much of a normie liberal white-guy Democrat as anyone could possibly be. But he believes in something — in mildly cringe ideas about democracy, no doubt — and he understands what time it is.
Russia Today
10-04-2025
- Business
- Russia Today
Lessons Trump could learn from the last Soviet leader
The Great Trump Toddler Tariff Tantrum that we have all been living through is so very Trump – blunt like a baseball bat, burn-it-down-first-figure-out-the-consequences-later reckless, and attention-grabbing like Kim Kardashian – that it is easy to forget that Donald Trump is merely human, too. The now 47th US president has an extraordinary gift for occupying center stage. Yet, as Karl Marx wrote almost two hundred years ago with reference to France's Napoleon III, another bigger-than-life ' global disrupter ' leading his country into a fiasco, 'men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please […] but under circumstances existing already.' And if the co-founder of 'scientific Communism' isn't your thing, take it from the other side: Arch billionaire capitalist and creator of the world's largest hedge fund Ray Dalio is warning us that the current tariff brouhaha, fundamentally driven by Trump's crude ideas about how to re-industrialize the US , is obscuring what is really at stake: namely, a 'once-in-a-lifetime event' : a 'classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders.' Yet collapse is only half the picture. We are also witnessing historic transformation on a global scale: yes, the old world order of so-called 'liberal hegemony' – that is, really, US 'primacy' – is tottering and crumbling. But it is also already being replaced by emerging multipolarity. With American politics simultaneously, according to Dalio again, 'fraying' at home, conditions are 'ripe for radical policy changes and unpredictable disruption.' And hasn't Trump made good on that? Before his subsequent U-turn and suspension (not yet canceling) of his ' Liberation Day ' tariff blitz, accumulated 2025 US import tariffs were scheduled to grow higher than ever since 1909 . Rapid subsequent US stock market cratering alone wiped out well over $5 trillion – as if, to quote the Communist Manifesto, melting into the air. A post-U-turn rally then recovered some of the losses . Yet, whichever way you look at it: 'Radical policy changes' and 'unpredictable disruption' indeed. Now – after what the Trump team tries to sell as the president's brilliant pressure tactics and an analyst has called Trump's ' capitulation to the markets ' (except regarding China) – even if Trump may end up negotiating away some or many of his tariff hikes, great damage has been done to Washington's already shoddy standing and credibility: Because it has once more displayed the staggering irresponsibility, stunning shortsightedness, and sheer incompetence that make living on the same planet with the self-appointed 'indispensable nation' so painful for the rest of us, and this lesson will not be forgotten. Read more EU puts US counter-tariffs on hold Yet the bigger point is that – with his giant ego, lovingly cultivated idiosyncrasies, and Freudian-sized Sharpie signatures – Trump remains locked into his time and place even more firmly than he can cage migrants in El Salvador. And his time is one of America never going to be great again. Like a late-Roman emperor, Trump is trying to stop and reverse history itself. Little wonder that some specialists on Roman history see parallels between his tariff storm and that ancient empire of relentless aggression, ruthless exploitation, and, finally, decadent perversion, decline, and fall. But, like those stubborn Roman emperors, Trump cannot succeed. It does not matter whether he himself politically survives the brutal toll his tariff offensive will impose on the American home front: Before Trump's U-turn/capitulation, the Budget Lab, a research center at Yale University, had estimated that toll at, on average, 3,800 dollars per household annually. It may or may not turn out less catastrophic in the end, but there is no reason to assume it will be negligible. This may cost Trump's Republican Party the midterms in 18 months. It may also cost Trump his whole political career, his unconstitutional dreams of a third term included. For even if he were able to re-industrialize America with his simplistic and misguided methods, it would, of course, take years, if not decades. And it would not, as he suggests, produce an abundance of jobs – and certainly not well-paying ones – because job losses have been due more to automation than to off-shoring. Meanwhile, the self-hobbling US is also supposed to do all of the following, at least: First, fight an escalating economic – and not necessarily only – war against a cohesive, patriotic, and internationally well-connected China that is not ceding ground but retaliating in kind and also has the difficult but devastating option of dumping its humungous holdings of American government debt. Second, wage the usual catastrophic wars in the Middle East to please Israel and American Zionists, with Iran currently in Washington's sight. Third, cajole or conquer its neighborhood, including Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, as a minimum. And, fourth, in general keep spending as if there's no tomorrow on its already insanely expensive, bloated overkill forces – yes, that would be the same ones that cannot defeat Yemen (at a price tag of, at least, a cool billion , and counting) and are just losing their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Just now, Trump has announced a new annual military budget 'in the vicinity' of one trillion dollars , or, in the original Trumpese 'the biggest one we've ever done for the military.' Read more EU would 'cut its own throat' by pivoting to China – US Treasury secretary But, in reality, Trump's attempt to recreate a mid-twentieth-century industrial-manufacturing base in the 21st-century US is quixotic anyhow. And vaguely reminiscent not of ancient Rome but of a large, powerful state much more recently deceased and also often called an empire. It was the late Soviet Union about which Cold War Westerners liked to joke that it had the most impressive early-twentieth-century industry on the planet. That was, of course, an absurd and mean exaggeration – no one built satellites and intercontinental missiles in the first half of the twentieth century, for one thing. But it is true that one weakness that brought down the Soviet Union was clinging to an outdated and always insufficiently modernized economic structure skewed toward heavy industry. Curiously enough, there are other aspects of Trump's second presidency that bring the Soviets to mind, in particular the one-and-a-half decade between, roughly 1985 and 2000, that is the period of the Soviet collapse and its long, extremely painful reverberations. For one thing, there is Trump's perverse sense of imperial grievance. In reality, for decades the US has profited massively, economically and politically, from its position at the center of its own empire, including what a French finance minister once called the ' exorbitant privilege ' of the dollar, that is, a unique ability to live on virtually unlimited credit. And yet here is an American president who cannot stop whining about how everyone else is ' ripping off ' of his poor, downtrodden country. And to top off the absurdity, that president also happens to be a billionaire business clan leader raking in money around the globe. Meanwhile, Trump's bad habit of believing his own demagoguery makes him mistake any trade deficit for evidence of a raw deal ; and his oddly pinpoint forgetfulness makes him simply overlook American trade surpluses in services . A disruptive, charismatic, rabble-rousing politician presenting the dominant core of an empire as the victim of exploitation by its peripheries? A natural-born populist – with an occasional dancing habit – resorting to a nationalist appeal fusing crude economic quarter-truths with widespread resentment at declining living standards and life chances? Read more US looks like 'problematic emerging market' – former Treasury chief That description would also fit Boris Yeltsin, of course, the man who first exploited late-Soviet Russian frustrations to deliver the death blow to the Soviet Union and then misruled what was left through the dark and dismal 1990s. Or consider the curious fact that, among other things, Trump triggered a massive wipe-out specifically of wealth held in stocks. But that kind of wealth is anything but evenly distributed among Americans. Bloomberg even goes so far to speak of an ' American investor class — that top 10% that owns almost all of the stocks. ' Make no mistake: Trump's tariff shock is already hitting all other Americans as well – through rising prices, declining retirement funds, reduced labor income and, soon, lost jobs. Indeed, as an American, the harder you already have it, the worse the Trump's brutalist economics will harm you. That's because, tariffs are, in effect, a kind of tax on the domestic population, too, ' burden[ing] households at the bottom of the income ladder more than those at the top as a share of income .' In other words, if you are already poor, these tariffs – to one extent or the other – will make you even poorer; if you are teetering on the brink of poverty, they are likely to push you over into full destitution. And that means large numbers of Americans will be hit severely: According to a Congressional Research Service paper, as of 2023 between 11.1 and 12.9 percent (almost 37 to nearly 42 million) were already in full-blown poverty (depending on which of two US Census Bureau definitions is applied). 15 million of them were enduring an inner circle of hell by the name of 'deep poverty.' And yet another 15 percent of Americans (or almost 50 million) are still just above the poverty line but precariously close to it. All in all, more than a quarter of the American population is either poor or almost poor. And they are all going to suffer especially badly from Trump's wrecking ball policies. Sorry, ordinary Americans: With all his populist braggadocio, this president is not your friend. And he'll cost you. A lot. And yet, it was also striking to see how Trump's 'Liberation Day' impacted Bloomberg's 'investor class' and in particular the even narrower circle of the rich and super-rich. After the tariff blitz, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg taken together, for instance, lost an estimated $42.6 billion – in one day. Read more US has secret weapons – Trump That does not really hurt them, and they may generate more wealth soon, through no discernible effort of action of their own, as so often. But even if they do, here as well there is a lesson that will remain: namely that America's oligarchs, with all their ostentatious finance power which allows them to corrupt and bend politics, are not invulnerable but, when push comes to shove, also depend on one man at the top. Of course, the above cannot be compared to the taming of the Russian oligarchs gone feral in the 1990s, which was a necessary, healthy stage in Russia's recovery from the Soviet collapse. And yet, fragile as the analogy may be, there it is: around the end of empire no one is entirely safe, not even the richest. And then, there is the final and greatest irony of empire's end: It may be hard to see at first glance, but there is a fatal similarity between the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev and Donald Trump as 47th president of the US. They were different in ideology, personal ethics, temperament, and style. Gorbachev was, for one thing, what Trump only claims to be – a peacemaker. The last Soviet leader was so smugly naïve toward the West that he greatly damaged his own country in the process, but he did play the single most important role in ending the first Cold War, which, otherwise, could well have ended with World War III. Trump, by contrast, is failing to end the Western proxy war in Ukraine while co-perpetrating the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians as criminally as his predecessor Joe Biden. Moreover, one reason for his abrupt change of course on tariffs may well be that Netanyahu and friends have ordered him to get the US shipshape for attacking Iran on Israel's behalf. And yet, Gorbachev and Trump do have one fundamental trait in common: trying to save and make great again a proud superpower in deep crisis. Trump may not end up having to preside over the full, official demise of his country, as Gorbachev tragically did. Yet, just like Gorbachev in that one respect, history will remember Trump as a would-be 'reformer' whose policies of change only hastened the decline he tried to fend off.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
NYC's ‘Open Streets' revising rules to use public space for profit: ‘Fresh kind of hell'
The city is selling its streets. The Department of Transportation recently unveiled a shocking rule change that would privatize its already-controversial 'Open Streets' program by allowing restaurants and other businesses to operate on roadways and public spaces at roughly 200 locations. The rule would also apply to 74 city-designated 'public plazas' — including a 12-block-long stretch of Broadway in Times Square and Willoughby Plaza in Downtown Brooklyn. The rule would allow concession agreements with the businesses, and the city would use politically-connected nonprofits, civic groups and quasi-government agencies as 'partners' overseeing these sites. These partners — which include the North Brooklyn Open Streets Community Coalition and Hudson Yards Hell's Kitchen Alliance — would choose the concessionaires, who'd be handed control of as much as half the space of each car-free area. The DOT has yet to iron out how much outdoor seating restaurants and other concessionaires will be able to offer. 'Let me get this straight: the Bicycle Bolsheviks at DOT reclaimed the streets for The People, in order to turn them over to…Capitalists?!' said NYC Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola (R-Queens), upon learning of the rule change. 'I don't recall reading that in the Communist Manifesto. I guess [the] Open Streets [program is] just open for business. What a bunch of car-hating hypocrites.' Most Open Street sites are usually a single block barricaded from traffic except emergency vehicles, but some are much larger, including a 26-block strip of 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, the city renamed 'Paseo Park.' Many are near or smack in the middle of residential neighborhoods like Jackson Heights that lack parkland, supporters say. But many drivers hate the programs, saying it creates more traffic. Street closures also make it difficult for first responders to deal with emergency calls and are a huge problem for elderly pedestrians and the disabled to navigate, critics have said. Shannon Phipps, a Brooklyn activist and founder of the Berry Street Alliance, blasted the rule change as a brazen attempt at 'monetizing and profiting for the network of private entities tied to the lobbyists and politicians' pushing an anti-car agenda on New Yorkers. 'It is disingenuous; it's classic bait-and-switch,' said Phipps, a staunch critic of a massive 'Open Streets' site stretching 1.3 miles along Berry Street in Williamsburg. 'Our biggest concern is the conversion of Open Streets into entertainment and commercial spaces, and the negative impacts of living within close proximity of these sites. This rule clearly shifts the primary purpose of Open Streets to profit over people, [and] entertainment and drawing crowds. A fresh kind of hell, especially on weekends.' The city is currently fending off a pending federal lawsuit alleging the program discriminates against people with disabilities who rely on vehicles to travel. Jackson Heights activist Kathy Farren, 71, said she's considering moving because the street closures along 34th Avenue have made it difficult for her husband, who suffers from Parkinson's Disease, to get around. Farren predicted 'the rule change is only going to make' the neighborhood's overall quality of life worse. 'The language in the new rules is vague, so there's probably going to be no control over what goes on based off what I've seen in the past, so I should probably put my [co-op] up for sale now,' she said. The Open Streets program was created in April 2020 by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio as a temporary measure to help New Yorkers gather safely outdoors during the pandemic. The City Council made it permanent in 2021, and Mayor Eric Adams has since expanded it to roughly 200 sites as part of an agenda aimed at limiting car use. The DOT's pedestrian plaza program was launched in 2008 under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. DOT spokesman Vincent Barone called the agency's plan 'a small rule adjustment' that 'will help bring in resources to keep DOT's Open Street and Plazas clean, well-managed, and welcoming to all.' 'These public spaces can better support local small businesses while also providing clear paths for pedestrians, ample space for public use, and programming,' he said. He claimed there's 'no evidence to suggest the program has slowed any response times.'
The Guardian
28-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Norwegian community spirit and UK inequality
Emma Beddington's column on dugnadsånd invites readers to embrace the Norwegian tradition of community spirit because of the 'feelgood' effect one gets from volunteering, and as an antidote to the isolation many people experience as things around us become increasingly fragile (It's time to embrace Dugnadsånd – the Norwegian concept we all need right now, 23 March). She rightly points out that dugnadsånd is not to be equated with the 'outsourcing of the state's obligations' to charitable and voluntary entities, which is so common in the UK. However, she fails to recognise that in the UK, unlike in Norway, there are huge disparities across communities that will impact people's ability and willingness to do the kinds of activities dugnadsånd involves (as well as the scale of community intervention needed). Asking people who are already well off, and live in more privileged areas, to 'come together in the context of community projects' is one thing. Asking this of people who are facing the kinds of pressures that many are facing in the UK, is quite another. Dugnadsånd, moreover, is ad hoc and sporadic. There is little litter to pick in Norway's parks, no neighbours forgotten by state agencies in urgent need of help – this allows people to engage in these activities because 'it is a nice thing to do', but not because if they did not, no one else would. Dugnadsånd is about remembering that some of the work that is involved in sustaining communities (such as litter-picking or mowing large communal lawns) is hard; this helps build appreciation for those who do these activities on a daily basis, fostering the Norwegian ideal whereby 'everyone is equally important'. Notably, dugnadsånd is not about the pursuit of an individually felt 'good feeling'; it is about doing something for the common good, about having a sense of common duty and shared Vaghi and Julia HvitlockBergen, Norway Emma Beddington invokes the spirit of dugnadsånd, and cites recent examples of community activity. Though there is no exact equivalent of dugnadsånd in English, the idea is embodied in the idea of 'commoning' – a part of the 1217 Charter of the Forest, which Guy Standing, in The Politics of Time (2023), calls more radical in its implications than either the Communist Manifesto of 1848 or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The 'forest' in question was common land taken by the crown for use as royal hunting grounds. The charter reasserted the freedom of people to draw on the resources of the common good for the benefit of the community – a word he traces to the Greek koinoneo ('to share'). Any such work of sharing, from food banks to dementia support groups to U3A classes is 'commoning'. David Cameron may have coined the phrase 'big society' but it was a Tory government that repealed the centuries-old charter in 1971. Beddington is quite right that it is high time for us to flex our common collective muscles. Austen LynchGarstang, Lancashire Emma Beddington says 'over to you, Norway' when discussing dugnadsånd and its definition as a 'collective willingness of people to come together in the context of community projects – emphasising cooperation and selflessness'. We already have that here in practical terms in the shape of the co-operative movement and politically the Co-operative party. Maybe their time has truly come?Andrew KyleEaling, London It's a funny old thing when you offer to listen to children read at the local primary school, to be told after a month that nothing has been actioned and it will probably be after Easter, even though I have been told there is a definite need now. Then 30 minutes later I read Emma Beddington suggesting dugnadsånd. As hard to do as it is to say. Name and address supplied
