Sunday, September 21, 2008
MORE RELIGIOUS NONSENSE
'recession crime wave'
According to crime figures, around 95 percent of all statutory crime is property-related. This breaks down very roughly as follows: 25 percent theft from or of motor vehicles, 25 percent burglary, 30 percent other forms of theft – fraud, forgery, shoplifting etc., and 15 percent criminal damage to property. The remaining five percent comprises four percent violence against the person and one percent sexual offences . The great bulk of the residual five percent (violence against the person and sexual offences), can be attributed to the everyday stresses and alienations that are part and parcel of our existence in capitalist society. We are conditioned into seeing our fellow workers, with whom, economically, we have everything in common, as rivals; as competitors for jobs and houses.
The system is almost entirely responsible for statutory crime. In socialist society, common ownership and production solely for use would prevail. Almost all statutory crime would fade away. Theft would not exist. What would there be to steal? Your own property? If you really want to be “Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime”, the solution is very simple – abolish capitalism and establish socialism.
Predictions by the government that deteriorating economic conditions will send crime rates spiralling are borne out by an Observer analysis of official police figures which reveals a significant increase in burglaries across England and Wales. In many cases, the percentage rise was in double digits and in most it was more than 5 per cent. The figures suggest that years of falling crime may be coming to an end. For more than a decade the number of recorded thefts from homes has been on the way down, partly because the plunging value of household goods such as DVD players and stereos has made burglary less lucrative.
Jacqui Smith, warned last month that crime levels will increase amid the economic downturn. A leaked draft of a letter to Downing Street from Smith suggested there will be 'significant upward pressure on acquisitive crime [theft, burglary, robbery] during a downturn'.
It said that if the economic slowdown was on a similar scale to the last recession, property crime would be likely to rise by 7 per cent this year and a further 2 per cent in 2009. Smith's letter warned that the economic climate could boost support for 'far-right extremism and racism'. It also suggested there would be an increase in public hostility to migrants as the job market tightens.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
AN EMPTY SOCIETY
WORKING-CLASS HEROINE: Price at a book signing in London this year for
“Angel Undercovered.” Like her other novels, “Angels Uncovered” is ghost-written
in a distinctly Katie Price voice: cheeky, unpretentious and hypersexual."I regret to inform you that Katie Price plans to put her removed breast implants up for auction on eBay with a minimum bid of one million pounds; that her reality show is a continuing success on British television; that her three autobiographies, all written before she was 30, have been No. 1 best sellers; that her endorsed product lines of lingerie, jewellery and perfume are about to be joined by house wares and baby clothes — and that her original renown springs not from any distinction as an actress, dancer, singer or ... anything, but from a career as a topless model."
(New York Times, 12 September) RD
TURN THE OTHER CHEEK?
Lebanese troops have intervened a number of times to quell violence
"A gunfight between rival Christian political groups in northern Lebanon has left two people dead and three wounded, security officials say. The clash between the anti-Syrian Lebanese Forces group and the pro-Syrian Marada group was triggered by a disagreement over hanging banners. On Tuesday, leaders of 14 of Lebanon's rival factions started talks aimed at solving deep divisions in the country. The army has now set up checkpoints around Bsarma where the clash occurred. Violent incidents across Lebanon in recent days have raised fears of a return to sectarian violence that left at least 65 people dead in May, correspondents say."
(BBC News, 17 September) RD
THE PROFIT QUEST
WORLD HUNGER WORSENS
Thursday, September 18, 2008
A MURDEROUS BUSINESS (2)
UPMARKET DOWN-AND-OUTS
A MURDEROUS BUSINESS
KNOWLEDGE AND PROFITS
Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free
"In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. He says he most likely could have earned a $100,000 advance on the book had he gone the traditional publishing route, and it would have had a list price approaching $200. “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.” While still on the periphery of the academic world, his volume, “Introduction to Economic Analysis,” is being used at some colleges, including Harvard and Claremont-McKenna, a private liberal arts college in Claremont, Calif." (New York Times, 14 September). RD
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER
(CNN.com, 15 September) RD
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
CRISIS MANAGEMENT
PROFITS BEFORE PATIENTS
SUFFER THE CHILDREN
CONSPICIOUS CONSUMPTION
SWEAT SHOP FASHION
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
THE RESTRICTIVE SOCIETY
Reading Notes
During the struggle between the capitalists and the aristocracy, the proletariat was used by the latter to win the fight and then cast aside, pointing the way to a new direction for the workers – class consciousness and political action. Gustav Bang in “Crises in European History” writes,”The proletariat had been betrayed and they knew it. They began to perceive that only through independent action could they make any progress. For obviously any cooperation with the bourgeoisie ran counter to all common sense, since the interests of the two classes were diametrically opposite. The capitalists were given added political power without the slightest gain to the workers – the circumstances attending the latter would be no less oppressive and slave-bound. The capitalists, with the aid of the workers, had acquired new powerful political means that could be used with equal effectiveness against the workers below and the landed aristocracy above. The emancipation of the working class must be its own class-conscious work.” On which rests much of our case for achieving socialism.
John Ayers
DYING FOR CAPITALISM
Monday, September 15, 2008
Food for Thought
- That contrasts wildly with “The High Cost of Low Wages” (Toronto Star,22/08/08) which asked the question, “Why should billion dollar corporations be allowed to pay poverty wages in Canada?” (so the superrich can pay for billion dollar condos, stupid!) More than a million workers in Toronto earn less than $30 000 per year. As the economy shrinks and pinches the workers, big oil and banks report record profits.As we continually point out, don’t expect capitalism to work for the workers.- Capitalism also forces people to act in strange ways –
1.Jazz Airlinesrecently announced that in order to save weight, and therefore fuel, they were removing life jackets from all its planes, including those flying over water. Now you have to hang on to your seats, literally!
2.The high price of gas – a Kentucky woman was arrested for trading sex for the pricey commodity.
3. A German purse thief escaped a would-be captor byexposing her breasts and yelling rape.
4. A man is arrested in San Jose for breaking into a small airport and siphoning airplane fuel into his cargas. tank.
5. Police in Peel Region (near Toronto) arrested two men and confiscated fake high-end labeled goods worth $10 million.
6. In Toronto thieves make off with 14 catch basin (road sinks) covers for scrap value and leave gaping holes in the roadway edges. The rest are being welded on.(mostly taken from “Proof the World is getting Worse”, Toronto Star).-
On the environmental front, Clayton Ruby (Toronto Star 16/08/08)reports that the Alberta Tar Sands Project is the ‘single most destructive fossil fuel development in the world.’ There are 207 countries in the world that track the emissions they emit and the tar sands alone out performs 145 of them. Each day the project uses 300 million cubic feet of natural gas, enough to heat 3 million Canadian homes. Each barrel produced in Alberta produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions of a conventional barrel of oil, yet $50 billion a year is being invested there instead of developing new clean technologies. Is there a better example of how capital slavishly follows the path of greatest profit now, without regard to humans or their environment? Harper’s intensity targets which reduces emissions per unit while letting overall emissions rise freely on greater volume, Dion’s carbon tax that allows trading of carbon credits,and Layton’s ‘make the polluters pay’ (as if!) don’t even begin to address the problem, just as you would expect. Our government did go to Washington to tout the green energy (sic) of the tar sands. Unfortunately for them,while there, a large flock of ducks landed in the ever-growing tar ponds, died en masse, and hit the headlines.- In the 1990s, Big Tobacco was in a life and death struggle to retain market share as cigarette prices soared to $50/200. The answer was to work through Canada’s native reserves and smuggle cigarettes in at cheap prices. They got caught and the resulting civil settlement reported onAugust 1 (Toronto Star) said that Imperial Tobacco and Rothman’s, Benson &Hedges paid out $300 million. On the second of August the same newspaper reported that the federal government paid out compensation to the tobacco farmers, who are being squeezed out of the market by a diminishing customer base, to the tune of …$300 million! John Ayers
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Right now there are hundreds of campaigns globally for fossil fuel divestment as a strategy in the fight against climate change. Many are pr...