Red
Snapper
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Sound bites
and
unsound nibbles
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"A
moustachioed
demagogue. "
Labour MP Oona King's
election team on George Galloway. Guardian, April12th.
"
The tension, the
atmosphere [in Israel]
looks like the eve of the civil
war. "
Ariel Sharon on the current
situation in Israel. Independent,
12th April
"
All my life I was
defending Jews, now for
the first time I'm taking steps to protect me from Jews.
"
Ariel Sharon again, Independent, April 12th
" I love a fight...I
love
coming out to Tories'
seats and roughing them up a
bit. That is what elections are all about. "
John Prescott, Guardian,
March 19th
"
You can walk down the
street and see who's
working class and who's middle
class. It's in the way we drive,
the way we are, the way we
dress. I am not getting back into
whether I am middle class -
clearly I am! "
John Prescott
again, Guardian, March 19th
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Cooking
the
Books (1)
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Islamic
Bankers
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One of the measures announced in Gordon Brown's preelection budget was
a concession to Islamic banks.
"Under Islamic law", explained the Times (17 March), "the receipt and
payment of interest is forbidden,
so Sharia products are structured differently. Islamic deposit accounts
are operated on a profit-sharing
arrangement, under which the bank invests customers' money in
Shariacompliant investments and then
shares profits with customers".
This meant that the money received by depositors was taxed as a
dividend. Gordon Brown's concession
consists in treating it from now on, for tax purposes, as interest.
The Christian Church, too, once used to condemn interest. Or rather, it
condemned usury since the
word "interest" derives from the Mediaeval Latin word "interesse" which
was one of the ways round the
ban: "interesse" was the compensaton that could be charged if the money
lent was not repaid on time.
R. H. Tawney, in his book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,
explained that what was condemned
was "that which appears in modern economic text-books as 'pure
interest' - interest as a fixed payment
stipulated in advance for a loan of money or wares without risk to the
lender . . . The essence of usury
was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower gained or lost,
the usurer took his pound of flesh".
This is exactly the position preached by backward Islamic clerics
today, as is one of the get-out clauses: No
man in mediaeval times, wrote Tawney, "may charge money for a loan. He
may of course take the
profits of partnership, provided that he takes the partner's risks".
It is on this basis that Islamic banks operate. They pay depositors a
share in the profits made from
investing the money deposited. But, economically speaking, that is what
the interest paid by non-Islamic
banks to their depositors largely is anyway. Under capitalist
conditions, "interest is simply a
part of profit", as Marx showed in Volume III of Capital (the beginning
of chapter 22). What
else could be the source of the money to pay interest on investments
than the surplus value
produced in the profit-seeking section of the economy?
Islamic law is quite compatible with capitalism as it does not condemn
making profits, only sharing them in the form of fixed payments. It
only objects to bondholders not shareholders.
Peace be upon the profit.(image)>>>..
Pathfinders
Extra
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Who
would do the
dirty work in
socialism?
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While conventional socialist views on cooperation and division of
voluntary labour deal quite well with this question, there is no need
for people to do the unpleasant work if a machine could do in
instead, and a new development presents an intriguing possibility.
Step forward - at 10 cms per hour - the insect-munching Ecobot.
Ecobot in ‘action’(image)>>>
While there is nothing very new about robot technology, their
dependence
on a power supply means there always has to be a human somewhere in the
system to feed it. But now a newgeneration of release and forget robots
may be possible, powered by the common housefly, whose exoskeleton can
be broken down into sugars used to produce electricity.
Although Ecobot is at present astonishingly slow, and its method of
trapping the flies (using large amounts of human dung as bait)
decidedly unattractive, it can last an impressive five days on just
eight large flies.
Uses would include any type of routine maintenance, perhaps most
appropriately in the sphere of
agriculture, potentially releasing humans from many of the most tedious
tasks.
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