alanjjohnstone
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Why pick on Israel? It must be anti-semitism, mustn’t it?
Biden’s foreign policy much the same as Trump’s
From tariffs to “maximum pressure” sanctions to arms sales to reckless clients, the watchword for the last year has been continuity.
Russia is “very likely” to invade Ukraine and might only be deterred by “enormous sanctions”, the chair of the US House intelligence committee said.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/02/russia-invade-ukraine-enormous-sanctions-schiff
Flurona – influenza and coronavirus – First case in Israel
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/china-renames-15-places-india-122116393.html
India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh is ‘South Tibet’ says China
Robbo, I think the problem is that they keep changing the goal-posts on what they mean by UBI. Reforms of the Poor Law is constantly cropping up.
The pandemic payments have shown that contrary to what ALB says capitalism can provide a slice of pie in the sky no matter how sliver it may be when circumstances are imposed.
It isn’t impossible, simply improbable.
Ever since Silicon Valley envisaged an automated, artificial intelligence run, robot operated economy, the tech oligarchs raise the prospect of consumers without the income to buy any products and so suggest a UBI.
The Greens have joined the band-wagon of UBI as they too recognise the difficulty in eliminating fossil-fuel and carbon-emitting jobs yet don’t equate socially wasteful work in the same way as we understand it.
Can society survive solely on service and leisure industry sectors? It is as unlikely as an economy based only on banking and finance.
Perhaps the first step is to produce an educational introduction to UBI for Party members and then build up a pamphlet from that.
I have ready a 2,350-word article on UBI for the WSM website for when the moment seems right to publish.
If you wish to improve on it, I can send it to you.
Not directly UBI but an article on the return of cash social security.
Cash payments were a pillar of the U.S. safety net for much of the 20th century but fell out of favor amid criticism that they discouraged people from working. Democratic President Bill Clinton scaled them back, made them temporary and added a work requirement in 1996. Fewer than one in four poor families now get those benefits.
https://news.trust.org/item/20211221105714-50hro/
Unlike universal unconditional proposals, which would have covered everybody, new city-based programs are small in scale, typically serving several hundred families, and are aimed only at low-income people.
Some cities invite people to apply and then do a random drawing. Others focus on specific populations: St. Paul targets families with newborn children, while Pittsburgh says half of its 200 participants will be Black women. Durham, North Carolina, will provide checks to people getting out of prison. A program in Jackson, Mississippi, focuses on Black mothers in public housing.
The Democratic Party prepare their excuses for 2022 Mid-Term defeats.
Hillary Clinton says the progressives will be the cause.
But interestingly when I searched for a link to put up, only right-wing media sources promoted the story.
Some political jiggery-pokery at work, mezinks
China’s foreign minister said Thursday the United States will “face an unbearable price” over its actions towards the self-ruled island of Taiwan.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/china-warns-us-face-unbearable-105844034.html
Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned that Washington’s interference could lead to a dangerous situation.
“The US violated the promises made when China and the US established diplomatic relations, condoned and encouraged ‘Taiwan independence’ forces, and tried to distort and hollow out the one-China principle,” Wang Yi said.
“This will not only bring Taiwan into an extremely dangerous situation, but also cause the US to face an unbearable price.”
In a call that lasted 50 minutes, Putin told Biden that any sanctions over Ukraine would be a colossal mistake,
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/30/putin-warns-biden-against-sanctions-over-ukraine-kremlin
Vegans are muddying the waters, says Lord Deben, chairman of the Climate Change Committee,
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/vegans-bogus-arguments-climate-change-201114790.html
“What I do not want to see is people muddy the climate change issue for some other agenda. Vegans have got to fight their case on their own grounds.”
“It is just not true that we should have a world in which there are no farm animals,” he said. “They are essential for the mixed farming system, which is the way to return the vitality of the soil.”
“Human beings are omnivores and we have bodies made to have meat as well as plants,” he said. “If everybody were a vegan, then we wouldn’t have the healthy soil that we need.”
He also warned that “extreme” arguments from vegans or other green activists could turn people away from the fight against climate change.
“I’m a great believer that extremism puts everybody off,”
Russia and Belarus will hold joint war games early next year.
Haskins says “Marxist socialists have built their entire system on several deeply flawed assumptions, but perhaps the most critical is in Marx’s socialism it is assumed that it is possible to convince virtually everyone to abandon their natural tendency to embrace competition and ambition.”
https://stoppingsocialism.com/2019/02/why-socialism-will-never-work/
So his best argument against socialism is what we have called the lazy greedy selfish person hypothesis.
Plus I think a misunderstanding of what is meant by capitalist competition and wanting to compete in games and sports.
First things first – a web rebuttal of his critique and our defence of his direct references to the SPGB in his book.
But it has made me curious. How an American right-wing libertarian has come to learn about the SPGB and believes it is deserving of being singled out for his criticism.
Biden has signed into law the $777.7bn US annual military budget
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/27/biden-signs-enormous-us-military-budget-into-law
