alanjjohnstone
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Quote:Attorney Robert Mongeluzzi of the Philadelphia firm of Saltz, Mongeluzzi, Barrett and Bendesky has represented victims of construction negligence for 30 years. "The root cause of injury and death is the lack of construction oversight," he said. "When builders incur debt, the faster they do the construction, the more profit they make. Given the profit motive, shortcuts are sometimes taken."
Some may appreciate this article by Mickey Zhttp://www.countercurrents.org/mickeyz290116.htmWe can all cherry-pick quotations…but more importantly is to put Chomsky's ideas into the context he uses them and he has over the decades been the intellectual promoter of voting the lesser evil electoral tactic. In this coming Presidential election he is voting Green Party but only because his state is not one of those swing states and where he does advocate a Democrat vote to keep out the Republican candidate.
"You don't own me"Came across this song and i thought you could use a clip from it for background soundtrack to the video…old enough to be out of copyright, i think, but even if it isn't, obscure enough to not be noticed even though there are plenty of cover versions. I think it reflects the values of socialists…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDUjeR01wnU
The Weekly Worker take on the approaching economic crisishttp://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1091/the-impending-global-recession/
Our Socialist Banner has recently been casting doubt on the story of Africa Rising and pointing to a growing slump on the continent caused by the fall in commodity prices, particularly oil and the drop in Chinese demand.http://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2016/01/china-sneezes-africa-catches-cold.htmlhttp://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2016/01/ghanas-boom-bursts.htmlYou may also find this Al Jazeera story of interesthttp://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/analysis-global-stock-market-plunge-2016-160127190807213.html(I have to admit the personal failing of taking a little bit of schadenfreude in regards to the knock-on effect of China's fall in demand upon Australia. I met more than one Aussie expat who took great delight in extoling the Australian $ strength and its strong economy and my answer was at the time…"wait til China has a recession and see if you stil bragging then"… )
"one concern is the ownership of passwords and getting accounts back off members once they're allowed on."I'm not sure what you are trying to say here…that some members are not to be trusted, while others are?…"we really need twitter accounts for the campaigns…"Well, sooner volunteers get busy on Twitter, the more skilled they will become and more imaginative they learn to be for other Twitter accounts…practice makes perfect so they tell me.
Usually the editorial committee will explain the rejection and suggest improvements or alternaives.I'm sure they don't simply ignore submissions and don't bother to reply as it seems to be in the case of Vin who is in search of an explanation. It seems no one he has approached has offered any. And now it is taking up the valuable time of the EC.
I think her observation about increasing scepticim about political promises may well be an approach we can apply to our up-coming election campaigns. We usually have a leaflet or two, or a paragraph or two, emphasising that we don't make promises to fix things but what about issuing a more extensive Anti-Manifesto, one devoted to what we aren't going to do.Danny was picked up on this by the BBC and without going back to th video, i think Howard too. It was treated by trained TV commentators as a little bit outlandish for a political party cntesting an election.When we participate in election campaigns we should seek out a coordinated publicity strategy and we should build upon our past Do-It-Yourself politics. Short pithy election statements have been tried so maybe if we issue a longer glossy Anti-Leadership/PartyPromises Manifesto it might be the way to go and since our participation is limited, such a broader campaign can be used effectively in all the places where we are not standing. One Edinburgh member's contributions in the Guardian comments has often been …'Get off your knees'…'Stop being sheep'…"Don't follow leaders"…not so much expressed as an appeal but much more as a demand for action…i suggest that sort of 'aggressive' attitude is the one we should take more…The May Elections, may well offer an opportunity to try it out and we have little to lose. Too often, i think we try to be seen as reasonable and our literature is too nicey-nicey…There are lot of our members well versed in vitriol, sarcasm and satire …let them off the leash…
This may be of interest.All conspiracies are exposed eventually – the maths prove it.The short BBC storyhttp://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35411684 The original research http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905#abstract0 AbstractConspiratorial ideation is the tendency of individuals to believe that events and power relations are secretly manipulated by certain clandestine groups and organisations. Many of these ostensibly explanatory conjectures are non-falsifiable, lacking in evidence or demonstrably false, yet public acceptance remains high. Efforts to convince the general public of the validity of medical and scientific findings can be hampered by such narratives, which can create the impression of doubt or disagreement in areas where the science is well established. Conversely, historical examples of exposed conspiracies do exist and it may be difficult for people to differentiate between reasonable and dubious assertions. In this work, we establish a simple mathematical model for conspiracies involving multiple actors with time, which yields failure probability for any given conspiracy. Parameters for the model are estimated from literature examples of known scandals, and the factors influencing conspiracy success and failure are explored. The model is also used to estimate the likelihood of claims from some commonly-held conspiratorial beliefs; these are namely that the moon-landings were faked, climate-change is a hoax, vaccination is dangerous and that a cure for cancer is being suppressed by vested interests. Simulations of these claims predict that intrinsic failure would be imminent even with the most generous estimates for the secret-keeping ability of active participants—the results of this model suggest that large conspiracies (≥1000 agents) quickly become untenable and prone to failure. The theory presented here might be useful in counteracting the potentially deleterious consequences of bogus and anti-science narratives, and examining the hypothetical conditions under which sustainable conspiracy might be possible.
The SPGB are aware of Samir Amin and reviewed one of his bookshttp://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2011/no-1280-april-2011/book-reviews-hobsbawm-ending-crisis-capitalism-or-eI am reading his China 2013 and wondering about a few of his empirical evidence that i am double checking for accuracy (doubt everything, as Marx said)http://monthlyreview.org/2013/03/01/china-2013
For actually all your reading, Sepehr, you seem not at all interested in any criticism of what has become dogma: that socialists are duty-bound to support struggles for "national liberation” and you have simply trotted out the old anti-imperialism position of supporting the weaker country against imperialist aggression which refuses any real class analysis of war.As indicated by both you and Robbo “imperialism” is a very slippery word, as all states seek to channel as much of world profits their way as they can. It is just that some states are stronger – some, much, much stronger – than others and so are better at doing this. In which case “imperialist” would just be another way of describing the successful states. But this does not mean that currently weaker states are not striving to do the same. As Robbo maintains imperialism is not something separate from capitalism.All capitalist countries, not just those normally labelled “imperialist”, are prepared to use force to further the vital economic interests of their capitalist class. Every up-and-coming capitalist power finds the world already carved up by the established powers. If it is to expand its influence it must clash with these powers, as Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia have found and as China is now finding. All of them, in their time, have beaten the "anti-imperialist" drum, that is, have opposed the domination of the world by Britain and France and later America. Mussolini talked of Italy as a "proletarian nation" in a class war against the "bourgeois nations". Nazi Germany stirred up Arab and Latin American nationalism. Japan advanced the slogan of "Asia for the Asians". Russia and China, like Germany before, vociferously denounce Anglo-French-American imperialism. Anti-imperialism is the doctrine long used by capitalists in relatively weak countries to try and pursue their ends.While no fan of Alex Callinicos of the SWP, he has made some pertinent observations: “Anti-imperialist nationalism is the ideology of an actual or aspirant capitalist class that seeks the way to its own independent state blocked by imperialism and therefore must mobilize the masses to help break down this obstacle….. the logic of such movements is to subordinate the interests of workers and other exploited classes to those of the bourgeois leadership…" and that such movements can tie "…their movement to presently supportive states …that may well be prepared to use it as a bargaining chip in their pursuit of their own geopolitical interests."No argument here from us there. Nor can we disagree when he says that:"…different Islamist tendencies and regimes that may now present themselves as anti-imperialist have a history of collaborating with imperialism …"Or when Callinicos says:"… It is of the essence of bourgeois nationalists that, when imperialism prevents them for building their own independent capitalist state, they may lead struggles against it, but they are striving to carve out a place for themselves within the existing system, not to overthrow it. This means that, sooner or later, they will come to terms with imperialism…"I have to take issue with you about the clean sheet you offer China regards imperialist goals. We presently see territorial disputes with Japan, Philippines and Vietnam but more interestingly, you avoided mention of the Chinese invasion of Vietnam of 1979? Vietnam like Tibet has always been thought of as a tribute state to China for over a thousand years. But many regions of China itself were nominally Chinese but ruled by autonomous war-lords. The conventional view of Chinese history is that of alternating periods of political unity and disunity. And of course they have practised the settler tactic of Han Chinese to impose Beijing rule on its outlying territories. But surely the elephant in the room was to deny that the creation of the East European Bloc – puppet states – by the Soviet Union and their rule maintained on two occasions by tanks, was not an act of imperialism.According to many commentators and of Lenin, himself, who you lectured us upon, is that an important characteristics of an imperialist bourgeoisie is its formation of monopolies that export capital. Such a development has been taking place in China during the last decade. Chinese monopolies have become among the largest global corporations, which has resulted in China’s enormously increased capital export. China’s rapid growth as a capital exporter has taken place on two levels: productive investment and finance capital (bonds, loans, etc.). As a result of its tremendously rapid accumulation of capital from production, Chinese imperialism has also accumulated huge volumes of finance capital. This finds expression in the extraordinarily rapid growth of the country’s foreign exchange reserves. These reserves skyrocketed from $165 billion in 2000 to $3,305 billion in March 2012. As such, China’s foreign exchange reserves equal the combined sum of the next six largest foreign exchange reserves holders! Of course, foreign exchange reserves are not bundles of paper money stuffed in a safe, but money capital which is put in circulation as loans to return to the holder a share of the surplus value created by the borrowing country. Usually, foreign exchange reserves are invested in relatively secure deposits like government bonds, deposits in the Bank for International Settlements, or Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) maintained by the International Monetary Fund. In fact about 83 percent of China’s total assets of $ 3.4 trillion are foreign exchange reserves, and most of these are invested in foreign governmental bonds. China is also an active lender in bilateral loans. According to the Financial Times, Chinese banks have emerged as a major financier over the past few years. It is already lending more money to so-called developing countries than is the World Bank. In 2009 and 2010, the China Export Import Bank and China Development Bank signed loans of at least $110 billion to the governments and companies of developing countries. (By comparison, from mid-2008 to mid-2010 the World Bank made commitments of $100.3 billion.)China’s capital is active not only in the international loan and bond markets, but also in the form of foreign investments in the industrial and raw material sector. As China has only recently emerged as an imperialist power, it is still a weaker player in the global market than those imperialist powers that have dominated international finance for more than a century. Thus the old imperialist powers have an outward stock of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) larger than China’s (as share of global FDI stock: United States: 21.1 percent, Britain: 8.1 percent, Germany: 6.8 percent, France: 6.4 percent, Hong Kong: 4.9 percent, China: 1.7 percent). However, the last is already not far behind imperialist Italy (2.4 percent).Moreover, one must bear in mind that China started its massive foreign investment drive only a few years ago. While China’s share of global FDI stock was only 0.2 percent in 1990 and 0.4 percent in 2000, since then it has more than quadrupled to 1.7 percent. its outward FDI having rapidly grown since 2005. According to official Chinese statistics, the country’s FDI from 2005 to mid-2012 was $344.8 billion. In 2009-2011 China’s annual FDI outward flows already surpassed those of rivals like Canada and Italy, and more recently has already reached the level of countries like Germany.China’s monopolies channel a significant proportion of their foreign investments to semi-colonial countries like Nigeria. One can conservatively estimate that 800,000 foreign employees of Chinese corporations are located in semi-colonial countries. It is true that China still lags substantially behind the old imperialist powers in outward foreign direct investment stocks, its role in the semi-colonial countries is rapidly increasing. In 2010, China became the third-largest investor in Latin America, behind the United States and the Netherlands.The continued existence of a strong, centralised bureaucracy and the brutal suppression of China’s working class – a two-tier work-force – enabled the Chinese capitalist ruling class to subjugate and exploit the majority of the country’s massively growing proletariat, made up of many migrants from the interior. On this basis, capitalists—both Chinese and foreign—were able to extract huge amounts of surplus value destined for capital accumulation. While foreign imperialist monopolies also profited, it was primarily the Chinese bourgeoisie that benefited. As a result, Chinese capital was able to develop monopolies that play an important role not only in the domestic market but also increasingly in the world market. Today China’s monopolies are among the most important exporters of capital.Acts of Chinese charity? Of China’s capitalist generosity? The philanthropy of Beijing? Or the more obvious answer – merely another imperialist nation doing catch-up.I am indebted to this article for the statistics, which indeed will be dated and have changed to even more impressive expression of Chinese global economic and financial influence
Been a while since we discussed Syriza and our pessimistic jaundiced view of its prospects for success has been proved right. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/25/one-year-on-syriza-radicalism-power-euro-alexis-tsipras
Quote:A year on, the Syriza party is faithfully implementing the austerity policies that it once decried. It has been purged of its left wing and Tsipras has jettisoned his radicalism to stay in power at all costs. …Syriza was overcome…Still, it fought the good fight…Syriza is the first example of a government of the left that has not simply failed to deliver on its promises but also adopted the programme of the opposition, wholesale.But i am not sure whether this article is not being disingenious by blaming Syriza's failure on its refusal to leave the Euro, as if outside the Eurozone would have meant no, or at least less, austerity…some would claim it would have resulted in even more.
Sepehr, as you probably well understand from your own political journey, one does not discard their political baggage very easily. I always have required to be persuaded of ideas that are new or contrary to those i hold myself. We are not jack-rabbits jumping from one political idea to another but need to be convinced of its correctness. Perhaps, you can tell me more of the socialist position you, yourself, come from.I noticed that you have recommended a number of individual writers but never organisations. Are you a member of an actual socialist/marxist party?Are you involved in your trade union, which is?Are you active in any campaigning groups, which are?Who will you be voting for in your next round of elections?
John,All the time the medical research lobby tells us things have improved, are improving, will improve, yet stories such as this one keep emerging to demonstrate nothing has improved.http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/01/24/447191/Australia-Frankenstein-primates-monkeys—-/
