alanjjohnstone
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Perhaps a dedicated thread would be useful because it appears that Carillion will be producing many worms as it is investigated .
Quote:Frank Field, chair of the work and pensions committee, said: “It’s clear that Carillion has been trying to wriggle out of its obligations to its pensioners for the last 10 years. The purported cashflow problems did of course not prevent them shelling out dividends and handsome pay packets for those at the top.The work and pensions committee said Carillion had been “falling short” of what the trustee expected it to contribute to pension schemes since 2008. The company pointed to cashflow problems in 2011 and 2013 – but paid more than £70m in dividends in both those years.
This is the debate on identity politics, isn't it Meel? For sure we all have our own special oppression…gender, sexuality, colour, nationality, but what is the exploitation we all share…economic oppression by being working class. Debs said it once
Quote:my heart goes to the Negro and I make no apology to any white man for it. In fact, when I see the poor, brutalized, outraged black victim, I feel a burning sense of guilt for his intellectual poverty and moral debasement that makes me blush for the unspeakable crimes committed by my own race. In closing, permit me to express the hope that the next convention may repeal the resolutions on the Negro question. The Negro does not need them and they serve to increase rather than diminish the necessity for explanation. We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.Quote:The Socialist Party is the congealed, tangible expression of the Socialist movement, and the Socialist movement is based upon the modern class struggle in which all workers of all countries, regardless of race, nationality, creed or sex, are called upon to unite against the capitalist class, their common exploiter and oppressor.Ike, i don't think J Surman challenging you on what appears to be climate change denial is a personal attack. She made a valid point that you were unable to defend your opinion with any references.I'm not a climate scientist either, nor an astronomer or physicist or medical doctor or any other kind of specialist. It means i am required to make a value judgement on the expertise and accuracy of those who are. (Bakunin explains the authority of the expert here – https://www.panarchy.org/bakunin/authority.1871.html )When we have 97% of those experts agree on the reality of climate change and who have produced research that has been studied by others in the field to verify the accuracy, then i feel i can accept that prevailing view as a true reflection of reality rather than subscribe to the views of a few that has also been appraised but then rejected. And members of the SPGB are well aware of the skewed nature of scientific enquiry and take into account the influence of vested interests when we reach our conclusions.
Quote:It's not as if I've just come back from an expedition to AntarcticaQuote:Actually, Ike, we do possess someone with this insider's first-hand knowledge, not of Antarctica, but the Arctic. He was an invited non-member speaker in a debate who then joined the Party, afterward.You can view the original debate on video https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/video/poles-apart-capitalism-or-socialism-planet-heatsA later talk on capitalism and the environment can be seen herehttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/video/business-growth-conflict-environmentMightyY, i think my original post #65 made it very clear that the "other" was an addition and that there was no intention to mislead or misattribute.
Quote:I will say human nature is broader than that and casts a vestigial shadow over much of what we manifestly call human behaviour.It always surprises me that when "human nature" is cited, it is invariably in a negative context.Supposing there is a "human nature", wouldn't many of its characteristics be positive ones? Certainly, things are "natural" to human beings, but what and to what degree?Yup, since i was born, i always put myself first…took quite a few years before i realised i may be the centre of my world but definitely not the centre of the world.And just how detrimental is this "human nature" to the establishment of socialismI am always minded of the Situationist- influenced pamphlet – "The Right to be Greedy" and its opening sentences
Quote:Greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of communist society. The present forms of greed lose out, in the end, because they turn out to be not greedy enough.Just to re-phrase the assertion to reflect the actual point of dissension" Far too many fucking other people…"
Came across this bunch on my cyber travelshttps://www.tradworker.org/points/Faith, Family, and FolkI know Ike stands against the state so he will disagree with many of their points such as nationalisation and the establishment of an anti-capitalist white-ethno national socialist state.Very much an echo of Strasserism updated for American consumptionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditionalist_Worker_Party#Organization_and_activitieshttps://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/traditionalist-worker-party
The CASHIERLESS storeA more critical review of it here https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/21/inside-amazons-surveillance-powered-no-checkout-convenience-store/There may not be cashiers, but there are staff. Shelf stockers who replenish inventory; an ID checker in the wine and beer section, and chefs in the back throwing together fresh sandwiches and meal kits. Someone also hovers in the entrance area to help people with the app, answer questions, and take returns. Amazon has said it employs the same number of people at Amazon Go as you'd find at a comparably sized convenience store, though declined to provide specific numbers. Instead of cashiers, Amazon has more people restocking shelves and preparing meals
Another related article for you to readhttps://www.alternet.org/local-peace-economy/what-new-economy-and-can-it-help-save-planetWell-Being Economy Alliance (WE All)
Another article on MMT
Quote:"Taxes do not fund government spending"MMT’s first premise—that the federal government, and only the federal government, creates money…the federal government can create as many dollars as it wants, as numbers in electronic account ledgers, without “collecting” any dollars in advance. Whatever economic reason there is to limit the amount of dollars the government creates (we’ll discuss that below), it is not because the government hasn’t previously “collected” enough of them in taxes (or fees, loans, etc.)…As a matter of economic logic, taxes do not precede and provide the money for, government spending; government spending precedes and provides the money that is later collected in taxes. It’s not “tax and spend”; it’s “spend and (then) tax.” That’s the sequence. Every dollar paid in taxes is a dollar that was created by government authority. There is no place else it could have come from…Limiting inequality, not revenue collection, is precisely what taxation is for, the core progressive purpose of taxes—including a graduated income tax and the crucial estate tax—in a capitalist society. (And we are here talking about a capitalist society.)Quote:left socialists rooted in the Marxist analysis of capitalism (myself included) are generally content with their Capital, Volume One understanding of how wealth and surplus-value is produced via the exploitation of labor-power, and they’re eager to figure out how to achieve the democratic control of the means of production. They’re not so interested in thinking about money, which they consider a secondary element of the “real” economy, something that will have a much-diminished role in a socialist society, and, anyway, is too damn complicated. Their version of true and evasive enough. As Peter Cooper, puts it: “it seems fairly common on the left to view the topic as superficial compared with study of ‘real’ stuff. I think downplaying the significance of money is a mistake.” I tend to agree with British Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, that MMT is a more radical Keynesianism, whose thinking about money is consistent with Marxism,I found the interview interesting until the wordsmith went too far with his vocabulary
Quote:then we have to mediate that fight for quotidian amelioration with a strategy of tension, an unflinching antinomianism.Luke Schaffer and Kathryn Edin’s "$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing In America" found that “1.65 million households with about 3.55 million children were surviving on $2 or less in cash income per person per day in a given month” in 2011. Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff showed that across the country food stamps are the only income of many poor families.It is all summed up by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Professor Philip Alstonhttp://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533&LangID=E
Quote:I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks. I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by prescription and other drug addiction, and I met with people in the South of Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them bringing illness, disability and death…Who then are the poor? Racist stereotypes are usually not far beneath the surface. The poor are overwhelmingly assumed to be people of color, whether African Americans or Hispanic ‘immigrants’. The reality is that there are 8 million more poor Whites than there are Blacks. Similarly, large numbers of welfare recipients are assumed to be living high on the hog. Some politicians and political appointees with whom I spoke were completely sold on the narrative of such scammers sitting on comfortable sofas, watching color TVs, while surfing on their smart phones, all paid for by welfare. I wonder how many of these politicians have ever visited poor areas, let alone spoken to those who dwell there. There are anecdotes aplenty, but evidence is nowhere to be seen. In every society, there are those who abuse the system, as much in the upper income levels, as in the lower. But the poor people I met from among the 40 million living in poverty were overwhelmingly either persons who had been born into poverty, or those who had been thrust there by circumstances largely beyond their control such as physical or mental disabilities, divorce, family breakdown, illness, old age, unlivable wages, or discrimination in the job market.Putin plays the religion card in re-election campaignhttp://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42707957
Quote:He [Putin] then argues that communism and Christianity are essentially the same idea, and compares the mausoleum of Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin to the Christian tradition of church relicsAnother dubious contributor to the topic is Brandon Turbeville whose various conspiracy theories can be read at his website.http://www.brandonturbeville.com/Rick Stirling is an activist in support of the Syrian Assad government with a pre-determined agendaNevertheless, there others more respected observers who share their view on the White HelmetsScott Ritter, former Iraq WMD investigatorhttps://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-white-helmets-and-the-inherent-contradiction-of-americas-syria-policy/Then there is Max Blumenthalhttp://maxblumenthal.com/Who to believe in a vicious war, is always a difficult issue. A war article in the Standard cautioned readers that the stories of Nazi atrocities against the Jews may be propaganda.http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2018/01/50-years-ago-1943the-war-and-workers.htmlOur view on all war is on safer ground. A plague on both houses. I followed the Syrian Civil War from the days it was part of the Arab Spring and am aware of all the disinformation and misinformation. http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2012/04/syrian-struggle-for-democracy-is-on-two.htmlhttp://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/08/revolution-without-leaders.html
Quote:"Our revolution has been stolen from us…We are fighting two regimes and two armies now."Where were the millions that went into the logistics of the White Helmets for those people? Perhaps it is as you and others say, that the White Helmets are truly a humanitarian organisation, JDW, but their success was only fostered because they served the interests of only one side of the conflict. Those sponsors of the White Helmets have no intention of repeating the process in Yemen, for instance. It doesn't suit them.
