Friday, April 30, 2010

Cusco

Here I am in Cusco again. And it´s been raining today. I´m assured it´s a one off and tomorrow will be all sunshine.

I´m already feeling the altitude effects, but takes a few days for the body to adjust, and probably more as we get older. It´s exhausting I can tell you. Need an early night tonight, so no night clubbing for me. Cusco has many discos and night clubs as one would expect for such a touristy place.

Flat is excellent though not quite the same standard as my Lima flat, which is to be expected given the price difference.

I´m rambling. Need to go eat more soon.

1 comment:

Coinneach said...

Glad to hear that things are going well for you in Peru. We are all well and have a Monday holiday. Yippee!!!
I have watched and listened to some of the election debates to my eternal shame. It’s tweedledum Gogs, tweedledee Nick and tweedletwatt Dave. I know the vicious tory bastards are are itching to get their greedy paws on the levers of capital again and are the worst option but the others are not going to create a better world for the majority of people at home or abroad. I hope sometimes that the labour party falls apart and a new invigorated and radical trade union movement starts a new party. Pie in the sky but I don’t see any real change for the better from the present lot. Here are a few thoughts from my pal Chomsky.

“Capitalism means, we don't take the risks, the public takes the risks, we take the profits. It's the basic principle.
The general policy is exactly the way that Adam Smith described it: it's designed for the benefit of its principal architects, the powerful. It serves "the vile maxim of the masters: all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else".
Those are the basic rules of the world.

James Madison -- who was the main framer, and one of the founding fathers who was most libertarian -- makes it very clear that the new constitutional system must be designed so as to insure that the government will, in his words "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority"

Dewey said, Politics is the shadow that big business casts over society. He said attenuating the shadow doesn't do much. Reforms are still going to leave it tyrannical. His main point was that you can't even talk about democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking, everything. That means control by the people who work in the institutions, and the communities.”
- Noam Chomsky

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest
of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
John Maynard Keynes

I know that writing to an old established anti-capitalist like yourself on these issues is a teaching a granny to suck eggs exercise but we sometimes need a wee reminder.
All the best
P.S. I shall be voting green this time round.