ALB
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Abeniezer, why when you pass on a link don’t you comment on it? Are we to take it that you are endorsing what is said? Otherwise what’s the point?
Grim speculation by the head an assets management company seeking publicity and more clients !
It is true that stock markets are overvalued as prices there have been inflated by QE and that they will deflate when QE is wound down. The hope of the monetary authorities is that they will be able to manage this in an orderly way. Nobody knows whether or not they will be able to. So asset managers like Dent can exploit the anxieties of small investors.
In any event, a stock exchange crash is not the same as a slump in production. This could occur but the immediate cause is more likely to be the effect of the sanctions imposed by the West on Russia and the measures taken by Russia to counter them. Western politicians are taking a bit risk here which Western oligarchs might not thank them for.
Incidentally, the Daily Excess is even less to be trusted as a source of reliable and unbiased information than the Daily Wail. To be honest, the extent of the latter’s coverage is quite good but you need to check what they cover with other sources, not just pass them on without comment.
Five members of the branch were out yesterday to leaflet the Clapham East ward. We distributed some 1500 in a polling district with 37% of the electorate.
We ordered (and will only have to pay for) 4000, but the printer said he had sent more because of how they had to be printed. In fact he sent 5000, which is way too much for a ward with 7500 electors and under half that number of letter boxes. So we will have to distribute some outside the ward. That won’t be a problem to do and the QR code can still be used.
Of course we don’t care which state she pays or doesn’t pay taxes to. What’s more important is the source of her income. It’s dividends on the shares she owns.
“She owns £700m in shares of the Indian IT giant Infosys, founded by her father, from which she received £11.6m in dividend income last year.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61045825
That’s £11.6 million for which she has to do absolutely nothing. It is what the UK tax authorities used to call (until they realised the implications of the term) “unearned income”. She doesn’t earn it but gets it simply because she owns part of a capitalist business. It’s a pure property income and as “ill-gotten” as the income of the Russian oligarchs since the only place it can come from is the work of other people — of the appropriately called working class — for which they are not paid in full.
She is a classic capitalist, a reminder that the idle rich still exist.
You are right that if the message in Russian meant that the bomb was intended to kill children then that would be the work of a very, very sick mind. There is a suggestion that it translates as “for our children” — which suggests that it might have come from the Russian separatists in revenge for Ukrainian bombs killing their children.
Found this since posting the original message:
“Debris from one of the rockets could be seen lying on the grass near the station. The message in Russian “Za detei”, meaning for or on behalf of the children, had been daubed on the missile in white.”
“Tracey German, a professor in conflict and security at King’s College London, said: “За Детей in Russian means ‘for children/for the children’ – exactly what is meant by this is unclear, but it does not mean ‘intended for the children’, rather ‘on behalf of/to avenge children’, I think.”
Is there a Russian-speaker in the house?
More than 4000 election addresses for the elections in Lambeth were delivered to Head Office yesterday. Door-to-door distribution in Clapham East ward will begin tomorrow.
The leaflets carry a QR code which will take those using it directly to a page on our website. As this page can only be reached directly via the code this means that we can see how many used it from the leaflet.
Up to now we have only be able to judge the effectiveness of our election leafletting in terms of votes (not all that helpful) and replies by post, phone or email to Head Office (very few in recent years). We will now have a additional measure. In this sense, this election campaign is an experiment.
Imposs1904 has just put up in his blog this appropriate article from April 1963:
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-inhumanity-of-war-1963.html?m=1
According to this report in an Indian news outlet, in one such incident the soldiers killing captured Russians call them “Bolsheviks”. Somebody seems to think they are still fighting the Russian Civil War of 1918-21.
This is going to be a test of the sincerity or hypocrisy of Western politicians. Are they going to equally condemn atrocities by those fighting on their side?
It looks as if the Green Party election agent didn’t understand that in a two or three member ward electors can sign the nomination papers of up to two or three candidates, as the Labourites and Tories did. That would have been much easier than collecting another ten.
In one sense it is lucky they didn’t as their proposer is one of those who assented to our nomination. If he had also proposed the second Green candidate that would have meant that he had proposed three candidates. Which he couldn’t validly do. As it happened, we handed in our papers first and so it would have been the third nomination that would have been invalid.
Here’s the Daily Mail quoting the New York Times on that:
It’s war itself that is the atrocity.
And perhaps the LibDems as well, as they have only one candidate. Another possibility is that there is a deal between the two parties as in some other places.
In the rest of the Borough apart from 3 other Tuscites, the only other minor capitalist parties contesting are the Womens Equality Party and the Reform party (ex-Brexit party) with one each somewhere.
Here are the candidates in Clapham East ward, which is a new 2-member ward. As you can see, our opponents are: 2 Labourites, 2 Tories, 2 Greens, 1 LibDem and 1 TUSC:
We now know who our opponents are in Tunbridge Wells. It’s the usual gang of four capitalist parties — Tory, Labour, LibDem and Geem, including the outgoing Liberal Democrat counillor.
According to the terms of the Geneva Convention and its interpretation, it is a “war crime” to deliberately kill non-combatant civilians but it is ok to kill armed people in civilian clothes fighting against you; and it is just too bad if civilians get killed in shelling from either side, their killing does not count as a war crime. Captured armed civilians are supposed to be treated as POWs and so to shoot them is a breach of the Convention.
There are calls to charge and convict Putin as a “war criminal” but to blame the head of the government for war crimes committed by their troops would create a precedent which Western politicians might not like. It would mean that they could be held responsible for any war crimes committed by their armed forces — and to Bush, Clinton, Obama, Blair, Cameron, and various successive Australian prime ministers being hauled before the international court at The Hague for the war crimes committed by their troops in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Putin is clearly a warmonger but so are they.
From a socialist point of view, the killings permitted by the Geneva Convention — workers killing other workers for the benefit of their respective rulers — are also to be condemned as is civilians being killed in the crossfire. War itself is the crime, of which workers are the victims.
The first three paragraphs are ok:
“This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It is a war between the USA and Russia, in which both sides are cynically using Ukraine as a battering ram.
The people of Ukraine will gain nothing and lose much from being treated in this way. They fight and die or lose their homes and flee. We pour in more weapons and shout encouragement from a safe distance. Russia wrecks the joint.
What Ukraine actually needs is action to cure its festering, universal corruption. It would also benefit from the pushing to the margins of the ultra-nationalist fanatics who have far too much influence in its government and armed forces. The war will make these problems worse, not better.”As to the rest, it won’t be official US policy to want to reduce Russia to the Stone Age. That may well be the opinion of some government adviser, but no more official policy than the mad plan for “denazifying” Ukraine that YMS has drawn our attention to will be official Russian policy.
What both the US and Russia want is to expand their sphere of influence to include Ukraine, an issue that is being settled on the battlefield at the expense of the people living there.
