Young Master Smeet
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The Sinn Fein angle is significant, their success has made a Tory majority easier, but, they are now two seats short of being the largest party in the 6 counties: Belfast North is in sight, and the fall of Belfast South to the DUP may mean SDLP voters will back the Shinners next time. (Although there is an Independent Unionist out there).DUP support for the Tories may well come back to hurt them in the way that happened to the Lib-Dems, and re-unification is the easy business solution to the Hard border problem.
In his current book, Yanis Varoufakis outlines some very intersting goings on with Greek finances.
Varoufakis wrote:Here's how our two bankers – lets call them Aris and Zorba – did it.Aris' family founded offshore companies, to which Zorba agreed secretly to lend without guarantees the millions that Aris' bank needed. Why such generosity towards a competitor? Because Aris and Zorba were sitting under the same proverbial oak. Desperate to raise money for his own bank, Zorba agreed the loan on condition that Aris' bank lent a similar amount to Zorba's family's offshore outfits. Aris' and Zorba's families then used money from their offshore accounts to buy new shares in their own banks, thus fulfilling the regulator's requirements that new capital be raised and thereby qualifying for the real money that the poor taxpayer was borrowing from the troika….they ended up owing nothing to anyone. Both sets of loans … were written off soon after being granted and transferred to the banks's long list of non-performing loans.He adds in a footnote:
Varoufakis wrote:An even more outrageous trick was employed: in addition to millions from Zorba's bank, the Aris family's offshore companies also borrowed millions from Aris' own bank. These loans were also written off as unserviceable or non-performing, or were used to buy office space that was resold to other parties only to be leased back by the bank or sold to it at inflated prices. The newly conjured up funds, or 'profits' would be used to buy new shares in the bank, keeping up the pretence that investors were injecting private capital into them.That's the banks, creating money through real fraud. Next, let's look at what the European Central Bank got up to.
Varoufakis wrote:The ECB granted Greece's bankrupt banks the right to issue new IOUs with a face value of €5.2 billion – worthless peices of paper, given the banks' coffers were empty.As no sane person would pay money to buy these IOUs, the bankers took them to the finance minister..who stamped on them the bankrupt state's copper cbottomed guarantee – a really useless gesture, since no bankrupt entity (the state) van meaningfully guarantee the IOUS of another bankrupt entity (the banks).The bankers took the worthless IOUS to the central bank of Greece, which is, of course, a branch of the ECB, posting them as collateral for new loans.The Eurogroup gave the green light to the ECB to allow its Greek branch to accept these IOUs as collateral and, in exchange, give the banks real cash equivalant to 70% of the IOUs face value (a little more than €3.5 billion).Meanwhile, the ECB and Eurogroups gave [Greece's] finance ministry the green light to issue new treasury bills with a face value of €3.5 billion – IOUs issued by the state, which, of course, no investor in their right mind would touch given the emptiness of the state's coffers.The bankers then spent the €3.5 billion they had received from the central bank of Greece – in fact from the ECB itself – when they pawned their worthless IOUs in order to buy the state's worthless IOUs.Lastly, the Greek government took this €3.5 billion and used it to pay off ….the ECB!You neeed to read that a few times, it's a method to allow Greece to not default on a debt it owed to the ECB.
I remember some on the Labour right arguing thus after the last election, labour got 9 million votes, the Tories 11 million, to overhaul that, Labour needed to tack right, because Tories plus UKIP formed a natural right majority. They noted that Corbyn's alternative was to find three million voters from somewhere. He did that, the Tories found an extra two million. I suspect many came from the same source: they hoovered up the UKIP vote between them, but the Tories squeezed the Liberals harder.The interesting things is the six counties now only have two parties.I think the outcome is May stays, the question is, will Labour use their veto to prevent another election, and watch the Tories tear themselves apart.
LBird wrote:I thought that you'd avoid political discussion, and return to insults, YMS.You're politically predictable, just like all individualists.It's not an insult, it's a point, that you behave like Humpty Dumpty, words mean whatever you want them to mean. So, if you've finished avoiding the question: how is "community" individualist? Surely, you are a commun(ityi)st?
LBird wrote:If they are now class conscious members of the revolutionary proletariat, then yes, they will. If not, no, they won't.But they won't be members of the proletariat, will they, because they won't be free labourers selling their ability to work, and will instead by co-owners of the means of production.
LBird wrote:My comments above about 'people' also apply to 'community', 'community as a whole', and 'humanising', for the same political reasons – you're trying to hide the 'social' nature of 'production', because you're an individualist.How is community individualist, Humpty?
Won't the ex capitalists be building socialism?My preferred term is 'the community' rather han people, the community as a whole,will that suffice? I prefer terms that humanise, rather than metonyms.
Vin wrote:This is a lot worse. I don't have to spell out where this leaves our candidate standing against Corbyn in Islington. Many 'left wing' groups (all?) have thrown in their lot with Corbyn – 'without illusions' as Robbo says elswhere. I would call that bad judgement but it is honest bad judgement. These members have not only brought the party into disrepute but they reveal us as dishonest and hypocritical. They have declared their preference for reformism. The Left will have a great time with that one and we will never recover from it.This is more than a little bit hysterical: we have party democracy so we can disown the actions of a few individuals, the party's position remains unchanged. Members ar entitled to express opinions (as Gnome pointed out, correctly, even saying you will vote Labour is not quite actionable, unless you actually do and are daft enough to openly admit it). I've heard tell of members in the past who used to vote communist on the sly.
Just to be clear then, if there are no classes in socialism, what is the point of using any designation like 'social producers' or 'workers'? People suffices, as you can see, the persistence in using these terms has lead to confusion, since, naturally, interlocutors inferred that there was some significance in this designation and hat there would be non-workers.So, for further clarification, "social-producers" and "people" are exact synonyms?
Vin,this is strictly a personal opinion: Paula's comment, if true, is actionable: John's is more debatable, he's simlpy said he can envisage a circumstance in which he could vote Labour, he hasn't committed to doing so. A case could be made either way on that one, in my opinion.(BTW, I'm not on the party Facebook group hence why I've not commented previously).
Vin wrote:Why is it that party members are free to support Labour but a member will be expelled for opposing Labour?BTW, I notice that the councillor has failed to declare his membership of the Socialist Party: https://democracy.durham.gov.uk/ecSDDisplay.aspx?NAME=SD2385&ID=2385&RPID=6040762.
LBird wrote:There will be 'social producers', because 'social producers' exist in every society. In terms of process, today's social producers (workers, proletariat) will transform themselves into socialism's social producers. It's easier just to use the term 'workers', but Vin has a bee in his bonnet about this, and now you and others seem to have jumped on the bandwagon, because I've stopped replying and explaining to Vin.So, just to be clear, in your future Catholic society, will the old, the sick, the infirm and children not have a vote?
LBird wrote:Why not just openly say what your ideology is, YMS, rather than pretend that you don't know (and that I don't know) and that it will simply 'emerge' during, presumably, 'objective' debate.Since when have the gods Debate, Consistency, Coherence and Validation determined 'rationality', etc.?Since communication has been a social process, and debate has been about how to produce meaning.As I have said many times, I am a Marxist and a democratic socialist, I seek to hide nothing,I believe in common ownership of the means of production, the free association of producers, and creating a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all: where every human being is treated as an end in themself, and human society's goal is to develop human potential.Now, as a ctholic, you believe in one god, father the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, orf all that is seen and unseen. You believe in the Lord Jesus Chirst, god from god, light from light, true god from true god, begotten not made, of one being with the father. you believe in the holy spirit, the lord the giver of life…So you keep telling us, ad nauseam, why do you keep banging on about being a catholic?
LBird wrote:Whose 'rational, whose 'reasonable', whose 'argument' and whose 'evidence', YMS?Debate's, and consistency's. Can the argument coherently endure, and explain what it is trying to explain: can it's moves be validated, and is the validation itself inconsistent. Again, you attribute positions to me I don't hold. You don't seek to try and find out. Mere denonotative locutions cannot announce an ideology, it is an emergent property of debate.
LBird wrote:I knew that you've give up, YMS.You won't have workers' democracy, and you're even reluctant to discuss it, and want to talk about yourself and individualism. Why not openly reveal your ideology, rather than pretend to be wanting to 'objectively' read Marx.Nothing objective about it, but rational, reaonable, based on argumnt and evidence : if you can change the meaning of a text, arbitrarily, there is no scope for dialectic. There are no invalid moves in your language game.
LBird wrote:They'll mean what the ideology trying to understand Marx's words, says that they mean.Since I'm a Democratic Communist, concerned to build up the confidence and abilities of the class concious proletariat for their aim of building socialism, Marx's words are about 'social production', workers, and democracy.And cut. There is no possibility for debate in Humpty Dumpty world, eitehr words have historical, logical meanings that can be examined by their usage and assemblage in a text, or they don't.What this means is there is no point discussing Marx, and exploring his meanings with you, all we can do is judge your ideas as tand alone, based on your words (though your words, too are meaningless, if I accept what you say above).Clearly, this is how you debate, you decide what someone's position is, and then proceed to argue against that. When asked to define terms, you fail, dismally, and resort to repeating them slowly and loudly.You might want to consider how succesful such a discoursive approach may be. Because, although you say you are a democratic communist, I've decided in my ideology that you are an Orthodox Catholic, so how dare you support the transubstantiation of the eucharist, who are you to question the decisions of the magisterium, how can you reconcile the indivisibility of catholicism with your rejection of Vatican II?
