jerseyhoya wrote:Margaret Thatcher: The lady who changed the world

In her autobiography Thatcher reportedly wrote: I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud...It delivered a high quality of care — especially when it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems.

jerseyhoya wrote:Margaret Thatcher: The lady who changed the world

And with the rise of China, state control, not economic liberalism, is being hailed as a model for emerging countries.

td11 wrote:

And with the rise of China, state control, not economic liberalism, is being hailed as a model for emerging countries.

what

td11 wrote:from the Thatcher obit jerz posted.

and idk, i feel like i've read recent articles talking about china's economy doing well due to their conscious decision to become less state controlled and more capitalist

TenuredVulture wrote:I'm becoming irritated by the onslaught of Thatcher hagiography.

td11 wrote:i wonder how wiz feels

She was the first woman Prime Minister but had little sympathy for the suffragettes (and the women’s movement in general) that broke the barriers to women’s progress, thus allowing her to rise up. She wanted to liberate Britons from the state but ended up granting Whitehall (Britain’s London-based functionaries) hitherto unheard of authoritarian powers. She sought to impose libertarian values, only to discover that she needed an autocratic state in order to do so (which explains nicely her fondness for, and defence of, General Pinochet). She preached judiciousness, on matters economic, and thrift, yet her government built the ‘British Miracle’ on the twin bubbles of real estate and the City created by spivs who worshipped her. She was keen to see the end of the old Etonian ruling circle but, unwittingly, created the conditions for the resurgence of that aristocratic clique (just take a look at the present cabinet). She championed a ‘share owners’ democracy’ but delivered a Britain in which ownership of businesses (and wealth) is more concentrated in the hands of a minority than at the time she became Prime Minister. She campaigned against totalitarianism in Moscow while insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist who deserved to languish in gaol. Above all other contradictions, she argued passionately about a return to the Victorian moral life but gave rise to a regime in which it was impossible to imagine anything good being done for its own sake (as opposed to for profit).

Narrowly judged, the Thatcher economic revolution was a success. Britain's relative decline came to an end, although that was more due to slowdowns in countries such as France and Germany than an acceleration in UK productivity growth. The number of days lost through strikes tumbled. Nissan's arrival in the north-east showed that Britain was no longer the west's industrial pariah.

On the other hand, growth has been depressed because weak trade unions can no longer ensure wage increases keep pace with inflation. The government's welfare bill has been swollen by tax credits and housing benefit caused by the labour market reforms and council house sales of the 1980s. Britain's record on innovation and investment have been extremely poor, while the hollowing out of manufacturing left the economy over-dependent on the de-regulated City. Oil helped Thatcher paper over the cracks, but Britain's age-old problem – finding a way to pay its way in the world – remains. The last time the UK ran a trade surplus was the year of the Falklands war.

WikiLeaks has published more than 1.7m US records covering diplomatic or intelligence reports on every country in the world.

The data, which has not been leaked, comprises diplomatic records from the beginning of 1973 to the end of 1976, covering a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence.

Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state and national security adviser during the period covered by the collection, and many of the reports were written by him or were sent to him. Thousands of the documents are marked NODIS (no distribution) or Eyes Only, as well as cables originally classed as secret or confidential.

Assange said WikiLeaks had undertaken a detailed analysis of the communications, adding that the information eclipsed Cablegate, a set of more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks from November 2010 and over the following year. He said WikiLeaks had developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with complex and voluminous data.

Top secret documents were not available, while some others were lost or irreversibly corrupted for periods including December 1975 and March and June 1976, said Assange.

td11 wrote:sincere thank you wiz