ALB
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Informative article here by Robert Peston as to why the German Vice-Chancellor can say, as he did yesterday, that Germany will be able to take 500,000 refugees a year over the next few years. Basically, it's because there's going to be a labour shortage there (and, we can add, where would capital be without labour?), i.e even the refugees are really economic (im)migrants. There are indeed our fellow workers.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34172729Note the criticism, from an economic point of view, at the end of the article, of Cameron's plan to take children and vulnerable people from refugee camps instead of the more enterprising and educated refugees who have made their way to Europe under their own steam: it's going to cost more to educate and maintain them. But it does provide a pretext for keeping out the others.
That's the opinion of the Independent (! ?) journalist and a flagrant example of the fallacy of "post hoc, propter hoc" (see DJP's talk at Summer School) of concluding that because one thing happens after another one the first one is the cause of the second. It wasn't a reason Brand gave. In fact, he didn't actually say vote for Corbyn, only commented ironically about why was what he said (on austerity, war, etc) considered so outrageous. But then, the Independent is backing one of the pro-business, anti-welfare candidates for Labour Leader (the one called Cooper, I think).
That's the solution to Robbo's problem. Get people whose only difference with us is over religion to declare that they support our aims and values, pay £3 and get to vote to choose our election candidates ….
We all seem to have missed this: Brand has retired from the social media as he doesn't want to be the centre of attention anymore as it distracts from the struggles he supports. So perhaps he really didn't want to be a leader after all.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/russell-brand-quits-social-media-and-the-trews-10464057.html
Greece has dropped out of the news recently but there's another general election there this month, on the 20th. According to this report (don't know how reliable it is) Syriza is set to lose:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11844657/Alexis-Tsipras-faces-shock-election-defeat-as-voters-on-course-to-punish-Syriza-at-the-ballot-box.htmlIf this does happen, it will be a repeat of the familiar pattern. Leftist party wins election, tries to make capitalism work for the workers, makes things worse, and is booted out at the next election.
A more measured analysis of the Syrian refugee question and where and what people are fleeing from by Patrick Coburn in The Independent on Sunday:
Quote:The four million Syrians who are already refugees mostly came from opposition or contested areas that have been systematically bombarded by government aircraft and artillery, making them uninhabitable. But the majority of the 17 million Syrians still in the country live in government-controlled areas now threatened by Isis. These people are terrified of Isis occupying their cities, towns and villages because of its reputation for mass executions, ritual mutilation and rape against those not obedient to its extreme variant of Sunni Islam.Half the Syrian population has already been displaced inside or outside the country, so accurate figures are hard to estimate, but among those particularly at risk are the Alawites (2.6 million), the Shia heterodox sect that has provided the ruling elite of Syria since the 1960s, the Christians (two million), the Syrian Kurds (2.2 million), and Druze (650,000) in addition to millions of Sunni Arabs associated with the Syrian government and its army. The forced flight of these communities could swiftly double the total number of refugees to eight million.Which makes nonsense of George Osborne's claim that the refugee crisis would not have happened had parliament voted two years ago to bomb the "Assad regime" to bring about "regime change" there as in Iraq and Libya (which would have opened the way for an Islamist takeover of Syria):
Quote:A move by the coalition government to bomb President Assad’s regime in Syria in 2013 was defeated by MPs after Labour opposed the move, a decision that Mr Osborne described as “one of the worst decisions the House of Commons has ever made”.On the contrary,as a decision not to go to war, it was one of the best decisions the Commons has ever made.
I see the man bringing this up is "Blue Labour", i.e anti-immigrant, British Nationalist, MP John Mann, a really nasty piece of work:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3093140/Slash-welfare-stop-mass-migration-win-power-Labour-MP-releases-Blue-manifesto-leader.html
According to a trailer it's going to accuse him of supporting the killing of British soldiers in Iraq:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34179201i.e is part of a sustained media campaign against him (probably because of his anti-NATO stance). Here's another part:http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4545949.eceWe knew of course that his opponents would play dirty.
I remember going to a Green Party Conference in the mid or late 1980s (I think). At that time they had no Leader, any six members could propose a motion for their conference, and any member could attend the conference and vote on motions. I remember thinking at the time that, given our respective sizes, they had a constitution more appropriate to us and vice versa. In the meantime their constitution has changed to something more like ours, with their conference too being a conference of branch delegates. Not sure though that they then put conference motions to a referendum of the whole membership, but I don't think so.
There are other, better examples of Syrian immigrants to the US. Those who participated in the famous strike in 1912 the textile mills in Lawrence, Mass, organised by the IWW:This from Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 by Donald Cole.
Quote:The three Syrians on the strike committee were particularly important: Farris Marad, dyer, tailor, special policeman, and court interpreter; James Brox, grocer; and Doctor Hajjar. When interviewed years, Marad denied that he was influential in the strike and said he had done little more than lead one of the parades. Brox joined the I.W.W. in 1911 and during the strike invited Ettor to speak at one of the Syrian churches."Syria" was then the name of a province of the Ottoman Empire and included present-day Lenanon. From wikipedia
Quote:The first Syrian immigrants arrived in the United States from Ottoman Syria. Most of them came from Christian villages around Mount Lebanon (before the creation of Republic of Lebanon), while around 5-10% were Muslims of different sects. A small number were also Palestinians. According to historian Philip Hitti, approximately 90,000 "Syrians" arrived in the United States between 1899 and 1919. An estimated 1,000 official entries per year came from the governorates of Damascus and Aleppo, which are governorates in modern-day Syria, in the period between 1900 and 1916. Early immigrants settled mainly in Eastern United States, in the cities of New York, Boston and Detroit and the Paterson, New Jersey area. In the 1920s, the majority of immigrants from Mount Lebanon began to refer to themselves as "Lebanese" instead of "Syrians".Here's some of the details of how the online, open primary organised by the Tories to choose their candidate for mayor of London next year:https://registration.conservatives.com/ps/event/LondonMayorConservativeElection2015Don't know how it will work in practice.
alanjjohnstone wrote:Let us not overlook what our election candidate for Brighton said on the Andrew Neil programme…i'm paraphrasing but the jist was….we welcome the presence of those other parties that call themselves socialist because it brings the topic of what socialism is into the debate…That's not what he said, otherwise he'd have more criticism from some quarters than he got!And he certainly did not say (that was former member William Dunn in his letter in this month's Socialist Standard):
Quote:and by implication that means we very much welcome Corbyn's bid for the leadership of the Labour Party and it has already been pointed out, it has instigated political discussions once again on what is socialism.What he actually said textually was:
Quote:( …) to be honest, actually, I welcome the presence of a lot of these other parties . . . (…) This is because what they’re doing is that they may well be raising the right questions. And I think what’s very important for us to put on the agenda this time is that in actual fact there is an alternative to the way things are being run at the moment. And I think anybody who’s bringing that to people’s consciousness is doing a good job. I mean, we disagree with them as to how things should shape up in the longer term. We disagree with them as to whether a party should be leaderless and that people should be leading themselves.So, he was merely saying, rather, that the other parties were raising the right questions, about what was wrong with present-day society and needed dealing with, but not providing the right answer.He took the same approach in his review of Naomi Klein's book This Changes Everything: Capitalism v the Climate in the February Socialist Standard which ended:
Quote:In the current climate anyone who starts asking the right questions has to be congratulated.He is a member of Kent & Sussex branch, so I imagine their branch meetings have as lively discussions as we're having here.
alanjjohnstone wrote:The Green Party attitude to Corbyn…another mixed message…You mean another mixed message from the Green Party or that they like us are sending out a mixed message?Actually, part of it is one of our messages:
Green Party member wrote:He’s a decent, authentic bloke; but in the end he’s unlikely to actually succeed in doing very much more than pasting a new temporary label over the ‘New Labour’ tin.The only difference is that we substitute "Marmite pot" for "tin".
alanjjohnston wrote:i have already raised this option that we ignore Corbyn completely ….I'm sure nobody in the jungles of Thailand has heard of or cares about Corbyn but it's not an option here in Britain and shouldn't be. In fact, can't be. Even usually non-political people here are talking about him.
