Sunday, May 19, 2013
Sunday Sermon - Non-belief
Labels:
atheism,
materialism,
Religion
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Saturday, May 18, 2013
Levellers Day
Labels:
Levellers
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“There was no other way to deal with these men, but to break them to pieces ... if you do not break them, they will break you.” - Oliver Cromwell
On 17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.
The name “Levellers,” like most party names (e.g., “Lollards,” “Anabaptists,” “Quakers,” “Whigs” and “Tories”) was originally a nickname applied in scorn and derision. The Levellers were those who demanded, so early as 1647, that the “whole body of the People” should make the people’s laws. During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.
The Levellers were the most energetic and uncompromising faction in the English Revolution, with a short life taking shape in 1646 to be crushed by Cromwell’s dictatorship in 1649. The English Revolution was the revolution of the rising capitalist class against the monopolies and other restraints on free competition of the feudal-monarchic state in which many sections of the country gentry were capitalist, rearing sheep on land from which the peasants had been driven. Thus in 1640 they were able to combine with the merchants and lead the yeoman farmers and the artisans and apprentices of the town.
The Levellers started as a propaganda group and transformed themselves into a party as their influence extended and the revolutionary movement mounted. The Levellers linked themselves with the rank-and-file of Cromwell’s New Model Army. They supported elections of soldier’s delegates and the agitation of the soldier’s committees which took up their grievances and favored a popular militia, democratically controlled. Most of the Agitators in the revolutionary army either belonged to the Levellers or were inspired by their ideas. Both the Cromwellians and the Levellers moved forward to a Republic. The Cromwellians wanted a regime in which sovereignty was concentrated in the hands of the large property owners. The Levellers demanded a democratic republic based upon the power of the people and responsive to their demands.
Their religious, political and economic ideas expressed the interests and outlook of the artisans, apprentices, shopkeepers and similar lower middle-class and working-class elements in the cities and the yeomen in the country districts. The"far left” was occupied by the dispossessed peasants who formed the agrarian communist sect of the Diggers who recognised that political democracy was impossible without economic democracy. However, the Diggers’ condemnation of private property in land ran counter to the aspirations of the peasant majority. By contrast, the Levellers were opposed to “making all things common,” defended the rights of private property, and called for free trade. The Levellers called for sweeping democratization of both Church and State. Among the religious reforms were full freedom of religious belief, separation of Church and State, the suppression of tithes; among the political reforms were a constitutional republic, annual election of a Parliament responsible to the people alone, general manhood suffrage; among the legal reforms, the right to a trial by jury, no star-chamber hearings, no capital punishment or imprisonment for debt; among the civil rights, freedom of the press and no license on printing. In their day such doctrines were audacious and revolutionary.
The mass petition was the principal means they used to inform and arouse the people. These petitions containing the demands of the people were widely circulated for signatures, submitted to Parliament, and backed up by meetings and demonstrations. In March 1647 a great petition was presented to the Commons. It called for the abolition of tithes, for the abolition of the Merchants Adventurers Co., for relief to imprisoned debtors and assistance to the poor, for limitations on fees of all judges, magistrates, lawyers and government officials. It demanded the abolition of the veto power of the King and the House of Lords. The Commons ordered the petition to be burnt. Lilburne who had hitherto been a fervent admirer and supporter of Cromwell broke with him for his subservience to Parliament, denounced the Parliament as a tyrant and oppressor and called for a new constitution and new elections. Lilburne, himself at one time a soldier, now turned to the army’s the rank and file. A popularly elected soldier’s Council argued about the Army’s political programme on level terms with the Generals.
Both the Cromwellians and the Levellers supported a republic but the Cromwellians wanted a regime in which power was concentrated in the hands of the large property owners. The Levellers demanded a democratic republic based upon the power of the people and responsive to their demands.
The Levellers were the first to encourage women to participate in political activity. In one of the petitions offered in their name the women asserted that they had “an equal interest with the men of the nation in its liberties and securities.” They did not go so far, however, as to demand female suffrage.
Although only active for only a few years on the stage of history, the Levellers left a durable imprint on the development of democratic thought demonstrating how a revolutionary group which itself never attains the heights of power can nevertheless profoundly affect the course of a great revolution and fertilize progressive tendencies for centuries thereafter.
Marx and Engels knew that the Levelers were before their time and said so often, but they wrote also:
“We find the first appearance of a really functioning Communist party in the bourgeois revolution at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is removed. The most consistent republicans, in England the Levelers, in France, Babeuf, Buonarroti, etc. are the first who proclaimed these ‘social questions.’” - The Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality.
On 17 May 1649, three soldiers were executed on Oliver Cromwell’s orders in Burford churchyard, Oxfordshire. They belonged to a movement popularly known as the Levellers, with beliefs in civil rights and religious tolerance.
The name “Levellers,” like most party names (e.g., “Lollards,” “Anabaptists,” “Quakers,” “Whigs” and “Tories”) was originally a nickname applied in scorn and derision. The Levellers were those who demanded, so early as 1647, that the “whole body of the People” should make the people’s laws. During the Civil War, the Levellers fought on Parliament’s side, they had at first seen Cromwell as a liberator, but now saw him as a dictator. They were prepared to fight against him for their ideals and he was determined to crush them. Over 300 of them were captured by Cromwell’s troops and locked up in Burford church. Three were led out into the churchyard to be shot as ringleaders.
The Levellers were the most energetic and uncompromising faction in the English Revolution, with a short life taking shape in 1646 to be crushed by Cromwell’s dictatorship in 1649. The English Revolution was the revolution of the rising capitalist class against the monopolies and other restraints on free competition of the feudal-monarchic state in which many sections of the country gentry were capitalist, rearing sheep on land from which the peasants had been driven. Thus in 1640 they were able to combine with the merchants and lead the yeoman farmers and the artisans and apprentices of the town.
The Levellers started as a propaganda group and transformed themselves into a party as their influence extended and the revolutionary movement mounted. The Levellers linked themselves with the rank-and-file of Cromwell’s New Model Army. They supported elections of soldier’s delegates and the agitation of the soldier’s committees which took up their grievances and favored a popular militia, democratically controlled. Most of the Agitators in the revolutionary army either belonged to the Levellers or were inspired by their ideas. Both the Cromwellians and the Levellers moved forward to a Republic. The Cromwellians wanted a regime in which sovereignty was concentrated in the hands of the large property owners. The Levellers demanded a democratic republic based upon the power of the people and responsive to their demands.
Their religious, political and economic ideas expressed the interests and outlook of the artisans, apprentices, shopkeepers and similar lower middle-class and working-class elements in the cities and the yeomen in the country districts. The"far left” was occupied by the dispossessed peasants who formed the agrarian communist sect of the Diggers who recognised that political democracy was impossible without economic democracy. However, the Diggers’ condemnation of private property in land ran counter to the aspirations of the peasant majority. By contrast, the Levellers were opposed to “making all things common,” defended the rights of private property, and called for free trade. The Levellers called for sweeping democratization of both Church and State. Among the religious reforms were full freedom of religious belief, separation of Church and State, the suppression of tithes; among the political reforms were a constitutional republic, annual election of a Parliament responsible to the people alone, general manhood suffrage; among the legal reforms, the right to a trial by jury, no star-chamber hearings, no capital punishment or imprisonment for debt; among the civil rights, freedom of the press and no license on printing. In their day such doctrines were audacious and revolutionary.
The mass petition was the principal means they used to inform and arouse the people. These petitions containing the demands of the people were widely circulated for signatures, submitted to Parliament, and backed up by meetings and demonstrations. In March 1647 a great petition was presented to the Commons. It called for the abolition of tithes, for the abolition of the Merchants Adventurers Co., for relief to imprisoned debtors and assistance to the poor, for limitations on fees of all judges, magistrates, lawyers and government officials. It demanded the abolition of the veto power of the King and the House of Lords. The Commons ordered the petition to be burnt. Lilburne who had hitherto been a fervent admirer and supporter of Cromwell broke with him for his subservience to Parliament, denounced the Parliament as a tyrant and oppressor and called for a new constitution and new elections. Lilburne, himself at one time a soldier, now turned to the army’s the rank and file. A popularly elected soldier’s Council argued about the Army’s political programme on level terms with the Generals.
Both the Cromwellians and the Levellers supported a republic but the Cromwellians wanted a regime in which power was concentrated in the hands of the large property owners. The Levellers demanded a democratic republic based upon the power of the people and responsive to their demands.
The Levellers were the first to encourage women to participate in political activity. In one of the petitions offered in their name the women asserted that they had “an equal interest with the men of the nation in its liberties and securities.” They did not go so far, however, as to demand female suffrage.
Although only active for only a few years on the stage of history, the Levellers left a durable imprint on the development of democratic thought demonstrating how a revolutionary group which itself never attains the heights of power can nevertheless profoundly affect the course of a great revolution and fertilize progressive tendencies for centuries thereafter.
Marx and Engels knew that the Levelers were before their time and said so often, but they wrote also:
“We find the first appearance of a really functioning Communist party in the bourgeois revolution at the moment when the constitutional monarchy is removed. The most consistent republicans, in England the Levelers, in France, Babeuf, Buonarroti, etc. are the first who proclaimed these ‘social questions.’” - The Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality.
Ryanair Exploitation
Ryanair pilots have been warned by them not to sign a letter to airline regulators expressing concern that the airline’s employment practices could jeopardise passenger safety. In a memo staff were told they would be guilty of “gross misconduct” and “liable for dismissal” if they signed the letter to the Irish Aviation Authority that regulates Ryanair. The letter was drawn up by the Ryanair Pilot Group (RPG), which represents captains and co-pilots working for the airline but is not recognised by the company.
Pilots are paid for the actual flying work they do but have to pay for all their own expenses, including uniforms, identity cards, transport and hotel accommodation. The contracted pilots have no pension scheme or medical insurance unless they set it up themselves.
One Ryanair pilot said that the company was protected themselves because they could claim that pilots had a legal and moral obligation not to fly if they do not think they are capable. But they added: “People are human and if you’re not going to be paid [if you don’t fly] you might think ‘I can do this, I’m fine. I’ll just get on with it’. You should not have a safety culture based on fear.”
David Learmount, operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine and an expert on aviation, said: “Ryanair are pushing their luck on human factors when they employ pilots like a warlord employs mercenaries. There is the worry that if they are self-employed that might place additional pressures on them to work even if, for any number of reasons, they might not feel entirely fit to do so.”
Flight attendants are employed by Crewlink, a contractor for Ryanair. Cabin crew are obliged to take compulsory unpaid leave in the quieter months – during which they are forbidden to take another job but receive no money. Pay £360 for a Ryanair uniform plus another £1,800 towards a mandatory safety course. Wages are for the hours actually "in the air"and are not paid for pre-flight briefings, turnaround time between flights, sales meetings and time on the ground due to delays and flight cancellations. The hourly flying rate was just £13.07 an hour with no contractual review for three years. Pay is for only four days work a week. The fifth day is on-call, to turn up for work with an hour's notice. Stand-by days were not paid unless called to work. If an employee should leave within the first 15 months of employment, they would be liable for a 200 Euro administration fee.
From the Independent
Pilots are paid for the actual flying work they do but have to pay for all their own expenses, including uniforms, identity cards, transport and hotel accommodation. The contracted pilots have no pension scheme or medical insurance unless they set it up themselves.
One Ryanair pilot said that the company was protected themselves because they could claim that pilots had a legal and moral obligation not to fly if they do not think they are capable. But they added: “People are human and if you’re not going to be paid [if you don’t fly] you might think ‘I can do this, I’m fine. I’ll just get on with it’. You should not have a safety culture based on fear.”
David Learmount, operations and safety editor of Flight International magazine and an expert on aviation, said: “Ryanair are pushing their luck on human factors when they employ pilots like a warlord employs mercenaries. There is the worry that if they are self-employed that might place additional pressures on them to work even if, for any number of reasons, they might not feel entirely fit to do so.”
Flight attendants are employed by Crewlink, a contractor for Ryanair. Cabin crew are obliged to take compulsory unpaid leave in the quieter months – during which they are forbidden to take another job but receive no money. Pay £360 for a Ryanair uniform plus another £1,800 towards a mandatory safety course. Wages are for the hours actually "in the air"and are not paid for pre-flight briefings, turnaround time between flights, sales meetings and time on the ground due to delays and flight cancellations. The hourly flying rate was just £13.07 an hour with no contractual review for three years. Pay is for only four days work a week. The fifth day is on-call, to turn up for work with an hour's notice. Stand-by days were not paid unless called to work. If an employee should leave within the first 15 months of employment, they would be liable for a 200 Euro administration fee.
From the Independent
Nationalist Hypocrisy
Labels:
Democracy,
Free Speech,
Nationalism,
ukip
2
comments
On 16 May Ukip leader Nigel Farage was confronted by protesters in Edinburgh. The demonstration had been partly organised by supporters of the Radical Independence Campaign (a group supporting Scottish independence). The BBC reported a spokesman for the Radical Independence Campaign, "it is UKIP who are stoking division. … Everyone who opposes the politics of fear and division should unite against UKIP - whether you live in Scotland or England."
This is hypocrisy, just as nationalism always is. The Radical Independence Campaign are arguing in favour of dividing workers in Scotland from workers in England. Ukip are arguing in favour of dividing workers in the United Kingdom from workers in the European Union. What is the difference?
Farage commented “I have heard before that there are some parts of Scottish nationalism that are akin to fascism but yesterday I saw that face-to-face.”
The SNP and its First Minister Alex Salmond evasively failed to condemn the protest and described Farage's comment as an over-reaction and that he has "lost the plot".
Once again the Socialist Party affirms its commitment to free speech. Free speech means exactly what it says: any and every view should be allowed expression regardless of whether it is right-wing, left wing, separatist or racist. The Socialist Party unhesitatingly opposes the UKIP’s policies of British nationalism and its calls for immigration curbs but it does not serve democracy by denying UKIP’s right to declare those beliefs and reinforce its sense of “victimhood”. Rather than giving publicity to capitalism's defenders by shouting them down and letting them appear as martyrs, rather than shouting down those advancing unacceptable ideas, socialists must defeat their arguments with rational discussion and reasoned persuasion. Many on the Left advocate leaving the EU just as UKIP do. All mainstream political parties, including the SNP and Labour, are committed to some form of immigration controls just the same as UKIP.
The Socialist Party has never supported the disruption of our opponents' meetings and their right to speak. Workers have fought long and hard for the opportunity to speak openly, and genuine socialists understand that nothing is to be gained for our class by stifling ideas.
This is hypocrisy, just as nationalism always is. The Radical Independence Campaign are arguing in favour of dividing workers in Scotland from workers in England. Ukip are arguing in favour of dividing workers in the United Kingdom from workers in the European Union. What is the difference?
Farage commented “I have heard before that there are some parts of Scottish nationalism that are akin to fascism but yesterday I saw that face-to-face.”
The SNP and its First Minister Alex Salmond evasively failed to condemn the protest and described Farage's comment as an over-reaction and that he has "lost the plot".
Once again the Socialist Party affirms its commitment to free speech. Free speech means exactly what it says: any and every view should be allowed expression regardless of whether it is right-wing, left wing, separatist or racist. The Socialist Party unhesitatingly opposes the UKIP’s policies of British nationalism and its calls for immigration curbs but it does not serve democracy by denying UKIP’s right to declare those beliefs and reinforce its sense of “victimhood”. Rather than giving publicity to capitalism's defenders by shouting them down and letting them appear as martyrs, rather than shouting down those advancing unacceptable ideas, socialists must defeat their arguments with rational discussion and reasoned persuasion. Many on the Left advocate leaving the EU just as UKIP do. All mainstream political parties, including the SNP and Labour, are committed to some form of immigration controls just the same as UKIP.
The Socialist Party has never supported the disruption of our opponents' meetings and their right to speak. Workers have fought long and hard for the opportunity to speak openly, and genuine socialists understand that nothing is to be gained for our class by stifling ideas.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
The world is rich - the rich are the problem
Labels:
inequality,
poverty
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comments
There’s no shortage of food, no shortage of wealth to solve social crises. The problem is a system that enriches a few and starves the many. We hear day in day out about the massive poverty and hunger that exists in the world. NGO’s and various non-profits have been around for decades appealing for assistance in feeding the world’s poor. Some experts think it is simply an overpopulation problem and it is the poor that are to blame; if only they’d have fewer children, they advise. It is not too many people that are the problem. It is not the lack of medical knowledge or technical expertise that leads to staggering infant and adult death rates in some parts of the world. It is the lack of social infrastructure and the political will needed to provide it.
The world produces enough food to feed everyone according to Hunger Notes —17% more calories today than it did 30 years ago. But food is a commodity and its production does not take place if the end product cannot be bought and the value added during the production process realized. The capitalist class would call this lack of demand. But in the world of the market, if you can’t pay you can’t play. No money for food, then you starve.
Unicef estimates that between 2000 and 2010 92 million children died form hunger and diseases, “…many of the illnesses and conditions that children suffer are easily preventable, technically.” says Global Issues, in other words, they are really what we might refer to as “man made” deaths. They are in actuality, market induced deaths.
Almost 2 million children a year die form diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water, another market induced crisis with which even the UN seems to agree:
“We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.” (UN Human Development Report)
This situation is not something that cannot change. It is not an insoluble dilemma. It is not the fault of the victims, of “human greed” in the abstract or of “natural disasters” or the by-product of supernatural squabbling between a benign god and his disgruntled fallen angel. It is a very simple. We solve the problem by transferring collective wealth, and more importantly, the means by which it is created, the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from private individuals to the collective. Through this process, we can emerge from the depths of depravity to the apex of civilization. True freedom.
Taken from here
Hat tip to JanetS
The world produces enough food to feed everyone according to Hunger Notes —17% more calories today than it did 30 years ago. But food is a commodity and its production does not take place if the end product cannot be bought and the value added during the production process realized. The capitalist class would call this lack of demand. But in the world of the market, if you can’t pay you can’t play. No money for food, then you starve.
Unicef estimates that between 2000 and 2010 92 million children died form hunger and diseases, “…many of the illnesses and conditions that children suffer are easily preventable, technically.” says Global Issues, in other words, they are really what we might refer to as “man made” deaths. They are in actuality, market induced deaths.
Almost 2 million children a year die form diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water, another market induced crisis with which even the UN seems to agree:
“We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.” (UN Human Development Report)
This situation is not something that cannot change. It is not an insoluble dilemma. It is not the fault of the victims, of “human greed” in the abstract or of “natural disasters” or the by-product of supernatural squabbling between a benign god and his disgruntled fallen angel. It is a very simple. We solve the problem by transferring collective wealth, and more importantly, the means by which it is created, the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from private individuals to the collective. Through this process, we can emerge from the depths of depravity to the apex of civilization. True freedom.
Taken from here
Hat tip to JanetS
Buying politicians
Labels:
Corruption,
elections,
political parties
0
comments
Politics is simply the expression of the economic interests of certain groups or classes. The “captains of industry” as they like to call themselves wish to steer the ship of government. They finance chosen and favoured politicians with generous party campaign funds with which the political process becomes corrupted. The exploiters realise they are in politics, not in non-partisan politics, but in politics. The capitalist tries to obscure it in every way possible by pretending to be responsible concerned citizens. The capitalist doesn’t vote for a workers’ party , yet money is spent to ensure that the working class will vote for the capitalist one. This is why the capitalists are in power and the workers are in subjugation.
In the American presidential elections an estimated $3 billion went to political advisors. $6 billion in 2012 went towards the advertising costs on TV, radio and press.
Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson (fortune worth $26.5 billion) . He and his wife, Miriam, first gave $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservatives . All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.
Super PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money from pretty much anyone and there is no limit on how much they can spend. Every so often, they must reveal their donors and show how they spent their money. And they can't directly coordinate with candidates or their campaigns. For instance, Restore Our Future, the super PAC that spent $142 million to elect Mitt Romney, couldn't tell his campaign when or where it was running TV ads, couldn't share scripts, couldn't trade messaging ideas. The savviest political operatives quickly realized how potentially powerful such outfits could be when it came to setting agendas and influencing the political system. Karl Rove, George W. Bush's political guru, launched American Crossroads, a super PAC. As consultants like Rove and the wealthy donors they courted saw the advantages of having their own super PACs -- no legal headaches, no giving or spending limits -- the groups grew in popularity. Having decried super PACs as "a threat to democracy," Obama and his advisers flip-flopped and blessed the creation of one devoted specifically to reelecting the president.
The American Action Network raised $27.5 million from July 2010 to June 2011; of that haul, 90% of the money came from eight donors, with one giving $7 million. The story is the same with Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS. It raised $77 million from June 2010 to December 2011, and nearly 90% of that came from donors giving at least $1 million. And while Priorities USA, the pro-Obama nonprofit, raised a comparatively tiny $2.3 million in 2011, 80% of it came from a single, anonymous donor.
The liberal think tank Demos found that out of every $10 raised by super PACs in 2012, $9 came from just 3,318 people giving $10,000 or more. That small club of donors is equivalent to 0.0011% of the U.S. population.
In late April, roughly 100 donors gathered at a resort in Laguna Beach, California. They were all members of the Democracy Alliance, a private group of wealthy liberals that includes George Soros and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Over five days, they swapped ideas on how best to promote a “progressive” agenda and took in pitches from leaders of the most powerful liberal-leaning groups in America, including Organizing for Action, the rebooted version of Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. Since the Democracy Alliance's founding in 2005, its members have given $500 million to various causes and organizations. At the Laguna Beach event alone, its members pledged a reported $50 million.
At the same time, a similar scene was playing out at the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort and Spa in Palm Springs . A few hundred conservative and libertarian donors were there for the latest donor conference convened by billionaire Charles Koch . Over two days, donors mingled with politicians, heard presentations by leading activists, and pledged serious money to bankroll groups promoting the free-market agenda in Washington and around the country.
The money raised by the Democracy Alliance and the Kochs' political network is secret. The public will never know its true source. Call it “dark money.” what is dark money? Say you're a billionaire and you want to give $1 million to anonymously influence an election. You give that money, as many donors have, to a nonprofit organized under the (c)(4) section of the tax code. That nonprofit, in turn, can spend your money on election-related TV ads or mailers or online videos. But there's a catch: unlike super PACs, the majority of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit's work can't be political. Where the IRS draws the line on how much politicking is too much, and even what the taxman defines as political, is very murky. Wealthy donors have seized on this as a new way to direct secret money into campaigns. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status spiked from 1,500 to 3,400, according to IRS official Lois Lerner. During the 2010 campaign, politically active nonprofits outspent super PACs by a three to two margin, according to the Center for Public Integrity. The Commission on Hope, Growth, and Opportunity (CHGO) was created in 2010, it informed the IRS that it wouldn't spend a penny on politics. During the 2010 elections, however, it put $2.3 million into ads attacking 11 Democratic congressional candidates. Then, in 2011, CHGO simply closed up shop and disappeared -- a classic case of political hit-and-run. And it wouldn't have happened without a secretive wealthy bankroller: of the $4.8 million raised by CHGO, tax records show that $4 million came from a single donor (though we don’t know his or her name).
Millionaires and billionaires handpick the candidates and the issues. "It'll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party," a Democratic strategist recently said. "We're in a whole new world."
A serious Senate or White House bid is dependent not on climbing the party ranks, but on winning the support of a few wealthy bankrollers. Although the political parties may still claim to officially pick the candidates for office, the power increasingly lies with the elites of the political donor class. After the 2012 elections, Republican politicians including Governor John Kasich of Ohio and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana met privately with Sheldon Adelson. They were officially in Las Vegas for a gathering of the Republican Governors Association, but it was never too early to court the man who, with a stroke of his pen, could underwrite a presidential hopeful's bid for his or her party's nomination.
Democratic candidates are no different. House and Senate hopefuls are flocking to Hollywood studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of their party's biggest donors and fundraisers. And why wouldn't they? Barack Obama might not be where he is today without Katzenberg. Days after Obama launched his presidential campaign in 2007, the DreamWorks Animation mogul gave the junior senator his imprimatur and prodded Hollywood into raising $1.3 million for him. Years later, Katzenberg provided $2 million in seed money for the pro-Obama super PAC that played a pivotal role in his reelection.
Increasingly, it looks like before the rest of us even have our say, before we enter the voting booth, issues, politics, and the candidates will have been vetted, and predetermined by the wealthiest Americans.
Unfortunately, it is not a whole new world but the continuance of what has always been. Just the manner has changed.
ADAPTED from here
Hat-tip to JanetS
In the American presidential elections an estimated $3 billion went to political advisors. $6 billion in 2012 went towards the advertising costs on TV, radio and press.
Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson (fortune worth $26.5 billion) . He and his wife, Miriam, first gave $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservatives . All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.
Super PACs can raise unlimited amounts of money from pretty much anyone and there is no limit on how much they can spend. Every so often, they must reveal their donors and show how they spent their money. And they can't directly coordinate with candidates or their campaigns. For instance, Restore Our Future, the super PAC that spent $142 million to elect Mitt Romney, couldn't tell his campaign when or where it was running TV ads, couldn't share scripts, couldn't trade messaging ideas. The savviest political operatives quickly realized how potentially powerful such outfits could be when it came to setting agendas and influencing the political system. Karl Rove, George W. Bush's political guru, launched American Crossroads, a super PAC. As consultants like Rove and the wealthy donors they courted saw the advantages of having their own super PACs -- no legal headaches, no giving or spending limits -- the groups grew in popularity. Having decried super PACs as "a threat to democracy," Obama and his advisers flip-flopped and blessed the creation of one devoted specifically to reelecting the president.
The American Action Network raised $27.5 million from July 2010 to June 2011; of that haul, 90% of the money came from eight donors, with one giving $7 million. The story is the same with Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS. It raised $77 million from June 2010 to December 2011, and nearly 90% of that came from donors giving at least $1 million. And while Priorities USA, the pro-Obama nonprofit, raised a comparatively tiny $2.3 million in 2011, 80% of it came from a single, anonymous donor.
The liberal think tank Demos found that out of every $10 raised by super PACs in 2012, $9 came from just 3,318 people giving $10,000 or more. That small club of donors is equivalent to 0.0011% of the U.S. population.
In late April, roughly 100 donors gathered at a resort in Laguna Beach, California. They were all members of the Democracy Alliance, a private group of wealthy liberals that includes George Soros and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. Over five days, they swapped ideas on how best to promote a “progressive” agenda and took in pitches from leaders of the most powerful liberal-leaning groups in America, including Organizing for Action, the rebooted version of Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. Since the Democracy Alliance's founding in 2005, its members have given $500 million to various causes and organizations. At the Laguna Beach event alone, its members pledged a reported $50 million.
At the same time, a similar scene was playing out at the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort and Spa in Palm Springs . A few hundred conservative and libertarian donors were there for the latest donor conference convened by billionaire Charles Koch . Over two days, donors mingled with politicians, heard presentations by leading activists, and pledged serious money to bankroll groups promoting the free-market agenda in Washington and around the country.
The money raised by the Democracy Alliance and the Kochs' political network is secret. The public will never know its true source. Call it “dark money.” what is dark money? Say you're a billionaire and you want to give $1 million to anonymously influence an election. You give that money, as many donors have, to a nonprofit organized under the (c)(4) section of the tax code. That nonprofit, in turn, can spend your money on election-related TV ads or mailers or online videos. But there's a catch: unlike super PACs, the majority of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit's work can't be political. Where the IRS draws the line on how much politicking is too much, and even what the taxman defines as political, is very murky. Wealthy donors have seized on this as a new way to direct secret money into campaigns. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of applications for 501(c)(4) status spiked from 1,500 to 3,400, according to IRS official Lois Lerner. During the 2010 campaign, politically active nonprofits outspent super PACs by a three to two margin, according to the Center for Public Integrity. The Commission on Hope, Growth, and Opportunity (CHGO) was created in 2010, it informed the IRS that it wouldn't spend a penny on politics. During the 2010 elections, however, it put $2.3 million into ads attacking 11 Democratic congressional candidates. Then, in 2011, CHGO simply closed up shop and disappeared -- a classic case of political hit-and-run. And it wouldn't have happened without a secretive wealthy bankroller: of the $4.8 million raised by CHGO, tax records show that $4 million came from a single donor (though we don’t know his or her name).
Millionaires and billionaires handpick the candidates and the issues. "It'll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party," a Democratic strategist recently said. "We're in a whole new world."
A serious Senate or White House bid is dependent not on climbing the party ranks, but on winning the support of a few wealthy bankrollers. Although the political parties may still claim to officially pick the candidates for office, the power increasingly lies with the elites of the political donor class. After the 2012 elections, Republican politicians including Governor John Kasich of Ohio and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana met privately with Sheldon Adelson. They were officially in Las Vegas for a gathering of the Republican Governors Association, but it was never too early to court the man who, with a stroke of his pen, could underwrite a presidential hopeful's bid for his or her party's nomination.
Democratic candidates are no different. House and Senate hopefuls are flocking to Hollywood studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of their party's biggest donors and fundraisers. And why wouldn't they? Barack Obama might not be where he is today without Katzenberg. Days after Obama launched his presidential campaign in 2007, the DreamWorks Animation mogul gave the junior senator his imprimatur and prodded Hollywood into raising $1.3 million for him. Years later, Katzenberg provided $2 million in seed money for the pro-Obama super PAC that played a pivotal role in his reelection.
Increasingly, it looks like before the rest of us even have our say, before we enter the voting booth, issues, politics, and the candidates will have been vetted, and predetermined by the wealthiest Americans.
Unfortunately, it is not a whole new world but the continuance of what has always been. Just the manner has changed.
ADAPTED from here
Hat-tip to JanetS
Fact of the Day
Labels:
inequality
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comments
The wealth of the average person by 2010 was at its lowest level since 1969. The American at the midpoint in the wealth distribution had a net worth of $107,800 in 2007, falling to $57,900 in 2010 (in constant 2007 dollars) – actually less than the value in 1969 ($63,600).
The steep drop in asset prices during the recession, particularly housing, hit the “middle class” harder than more affluent Americans. Blacks and Hispanics and young adults also increased their net worth earlier in the decade, because so much of their assets were tied up in home ownership. These gains were wiped out during the recession. home values, which still make up two-thirds of their total wealth, and their high levels of mortgage debt have been the main cause of increasing wealth inequality since 2007.
The steep drop in asset prices during the recession, particularly housing, hit the “middle class” harder than more affluent Americans. Blacks and Hispanics and young adults also increased their net worth earlier in the decade, because so much of their assets were tied up in home ownership. These gains were wiped out during the recession. home values, which still make up two-thirds of their total wealth, and their high levels of mortgage debt have been the main cause of increasing wealth inequality since 2007.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Crazy Capitalism
Abercrombie and Fitch would rather burn clothes than donate to those in need
An interview with an Abercrombie and Fitch District Manager, who has requested to remain nameless, revealed an interesting procedure the company follows regarding its damaged clothing. "Any clothing that has any type of blemish, including things such as a stitch missing or a frayed fabric, gets sent back to the company for immediate disposal." He continued to share that a large amount of clothing gets sent back to corporate for issue such as the ones listed.
Abercrombie and Fitch has had many requests by non-profit organizations to have the clothing donated to areas of need but the company refuses.
"Abercrombie and Fitch doesn't want to create the image that just anybody, poor people, can wear their clothing. Only people of a certain stature are able to purchase and wear the company name."
Think of all the clothing they could have donated to Katrina victims or for the Haiti relief.
Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries got $48.1 million, according to the New Albany, Ohio-based company’s 2012 proxy. That’s 1,640 times the average clothing-store worker’s $29,310 in pay and benefits.
An interview with an Abercrombie and Fitch District Manager, who has requested to remain nameless, revealed an interesting procedure the company follows regarding its damaged clothing. "Any clothing that has any type of blemish, including things such as a stitch missing or a frayed fabric, gets sent back to the company for immediate disposal." He continued to share that a large amount of clothing gets sent back to corporate for issue such as the ones listed.
Abercrombie and Fitch has had many requests by non-profit organizations to have the clothing donated to areas of need but the company refuses.
"Abercrombie and Fitch doesn't want to create the image that just anybody, poor people, can wear their clothing. Only people of a certain stature are able to purchase and wear the company name."
Think of all the clothing they could have donated to Katrina victims or for the Haiti relief.
Abercrombie CEO Michael Jeffries got $48.1 million, according to the New Albany, Ohio-based company’s 2012 proxy. That’s 1,640 times the average clothing-store worker’s $29,310 in pay and benefits.
The 1969 Occupy Movement
Labels:
california,
History,
occupy
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In what was called Battle for People's Park or “Bloody Thursday”, on the 15th May, 1969, students and members of the “counter-culture" fought against the police in Berkeley, California, who had fenced the park off in the middle of the night.
Frank Bardacke, a participant in the park's development, stated "A group of people took some corporate land, owned by the University of California, that was a parking lot and turned it into a park and then said, 'We're using the land better than you used it; it's ours'".
Michael Delacour stated, "We wanted a free speech area that wasn't really controlled like Sproul Plaza was. It was another place to organize, another place to have a rally. The park was secondary."
The university's Free Speech microphone was available to all students, with few if any restrictions on speech. The construction of the park involved many of the same people and politics as the 1964 Free Speech Movement.
Local landscape architect Jon Read and many others contributed trees, flowers, and shrubs. Free food was provided and community development of the park proceeded. Eventually, about 1,000 people became directly involved, with many more donating money and materials. The park was essentially complete by mid-May
Police killed a bystander, James Rector, & wounds 60 others, including Alan Blanchard, blinded for life. Seventeen days of street fighting ensued, capped by a march of 30,000, where another 150 demonstrators are shot & wounded.
Ronald Reagan then the governor of California considered the creation of the park a direct leftist challenge to the property rights of the university and says “If there has to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with. No more appeasement”.
1..2..3..4...What was it they were dying for?
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Vietnam
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Vietnamese rubber tycoon, Doan Nguyen Duc, the chairman of Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) Group, has been accused by Global Witness, a group that campaigns on resource issues, of land grabbing in Southeast Asia. In its report titled “Rubber Barons” Global Witness accused international investors including Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – the private lending arm of the World Bank – of financing two of Vietnam’s biggest rubber companies, the privately-owned HAGL and the state-owned Vietnam Rubber Group (VRG), to acquire vast amounts of land for rubber plantations in Cambodia and Laos. According to the report, the two firms have caused widespread evictions, illegal logging and food insecurity in the countries.
Global Witness concluded the Vietnamese firms gained rights to more than 200,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) of concession land through secretive deals with the Lao and Cambodian governments. Land was often sold without villagers' consent or knowledge and without compensation, the report alleges. Families were forced off their land or expected to work for the rubber plantation, although jobs were few and far between.
"When they resist, communities face violence, arrest and detention, often at the hands of armed Cambodian security forces who are on the investors' payroll," the report claims.
It alleges the IFC invested US$14.95 million in a Vietnamese fund that holds 5 percent equity in HAGL, while Deutsche Bank owns some $4.5-million-worth of HAGL shares. Deutsche Bank is also said to have 1.2-million shares in a subsidiary company of VRG amounting to more than $3 million
Global Witness concluded the Vietnamese firms gained rights to more than 200,000 hectares (nearly 500,000 acres) of concession land through secretive deals with the Lao and Cambodian governments. Land was often sold without villagers' consent or knowledge and without compensation, the report alleges. Families were forced off their land or expected to work for the rubber plantation, although jobs were few and far between.
"When they resist, communities face violence, arrest and detention, often at the hands of armed Cambodian security forces who are on the investors' payroll," the report claims.
It alleges the IFC invested US$14.95 million in a Vietnamese fund that holds 5 percent equity in HAGL, while Deutsche Bank owns some $4.5-million-worth of HAGL shares. Deutsche Bank is also said to have 1.2-million shares in a subsidiary company of VRG amounting to more than $3 million
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Less wages, more profits
Labels:
low wages,
Wages
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The quarterly reports of S&P 500 corporations for the first three months of 2013 show profits rising by more than 5 percent even while revenues have risen by less than 1 percent.
Corporations are getting by with fewer workers than they employed before the crash of 2008, and they’re paying those workers less. Wages and compensation (that is, wages plus benefits) now make up the smallest shares of GDP that they have in 50 years, and their decline has proceeded without interruption since 2001.
According to a report from JP Morgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office, two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits between the end of the dot-com bust and the collapse of 2008 is directly attributable to the decline in the wages they paid their employees. The share of wages from the surplus value to put it in Marxist terms has kept on decreasing to permit maximising profits.
Companies have been replacing workers with machines wherever possible. They have been replacing their own employees with temps—workers hired from employment agencies to whom they pay no benefits and whose wages can be lower than those of regular employees. And those temps are now are working longer hours than regular employees. Historically, an employer’s own workers have worked longer hours than those brought in on a temporary basis from employment agencies. But in 2009, the average workweek of temps began to exceed the average workweek of all employees. The average number of hours that Americans work still hovered at 34.4 in March, the latest month for which we have figures. Temps, however, worked an average of 35.2 hours – more than they did not only during the recession but during the years preceding the recession as well.
American workers have lost much of the capacity to defend their interests, and their employers are exploiting their weakness to extract higher profits they could not otherwise attain.
Adpted from here
Corporations are getting by with fewer workers than they employed before the crash of 2008, and they’re paying those workers less. Wages and compensation (that is, wages plus benefits) now make up the smallest shares of GDP that they have in 50 years, and their decline has proceeded without interruption since 2001.
According to a report from JP Morgan Chase’s Chief Investment Office, two-thirds of the increase in corporate profits between the end of the dot-com bust and the collapse of 2008 is directly attributable to the decline in the wages they paid their employees. The share of wages from the surplus value to put it in Marxist terms has kept on decreasing to permit maximising profits.
Companies have been replacing workers with machines wherever possible. They have been replacing their own employees with temps—workers hired from employment agencies to whom they pay no benefits and whose wages can be lower than those of regular employees. And those temps are now are working longer hours than regular employees. Historically, an employer’s own workers have worked longer hours than those brought in on a temporary basis from employment agencies. But in 2009, the average workweek of temps began to exceed the average workweek of all employees. The average number of hours that Americans work still hovered at 34.4 in March, the latest month for which we have figures. Temps, however, worked an average of 35.2 hours – more than they did not only during the recession but during the years preceding the recession as well.
American workers have lost much of the capacity to defend their interests, and their employers are exploiting their weakness to extract higher profits they could not otherwise attain.
Adpted from here
MARXISM and LITERATURE: 1
" In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch." MARX.
Historical materialism abhors a vacuum: that is, it does not accept that any aspect of man's development exists and can be studied except in relation to the mode of production — society's "real foundation." The institutions and ideas, the moralities, laws, concepts and knowledge held in any society are results of, basically, the way labour is organized and its products distributed. Thus the primitive measurement of land gave birth to geometry; the making of pots and baskets to the idea of capacity; the division of fields to the concept of justice, which is nomas in Greek that originally meant pasture.
Literature is one of man's oldest activities. From earliest times, man has recorded the impressions and ideals given him by social life, in plays, poetry and prose. The intention of these notes is to show the evolution of literature as something closely interwoven with the evolution of society. Beowulf and Bunyan, Juvenal and Joyce, Shakespeare and Damon Runyon show it; it is in the troubadors' songs, purveying the middle ages' new concept of romantic love, and in the epics of Homer, where kings' divine rights are backed by the gods' divine retribution.
"Literature" had better be defined, as far as that is possible. In one sense, it means just printed matter: furniture shops and political parties distribute literature, but nobody places it with Shelley's poems. On the other hand, political speeches and factual writings can and have become literature in the other sense: Cicero's orations, or Herodotus' histories, or White's Natural History of Selborne. When reading matter has given pleasure and satisfaction to many people for a long time, it must be called literature. That does not mean all books of long-standing fame must be good; many hold their places in the histories because they mark new trends and phases. In this writer's view, there could be no other justification for those monuments to hack writing, Scott's works.
Prose literature is a comparatively recent development. The earliest literature was in verse and unwritten; our knowledge of it comes from present-day primitive peoples. In their societies, the poet is not separated from his hearers by the barrier of literacy; poetry is generated spontaneously by everyday life and passed from mouth to mouth. The origins of speech itself are believed — see Malinowski, Ogden and Richards, and others — to lie in rhythmic sound-making as an aid to work. " The group worked together, like children in a kindergarten orchestra, and each movement of hand or foot, each stroke on stick or stone, was timed by a more or less inarticulate recitative uttered by all in unison. Without this vocal accompaniment the work could not be done." (Geo. Thomson, Marxism and Poetry).
When speech and skill were better developed, that accompaniment became unnecessary. It went on, however, as a rehearsal of work before the work was done — in other words, as a piece of magic. It still happens: Frazer in The Golden Bough and Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual give numerous examples. In these rituals music, dancing and poetry had a common origin. Plenty of labour songs are still known, in places where they have not been drowned by machinery: spinning songs, rowing songs, sea shanties and so on.
The incorporation of poetry in ritual meant its separation from ordinary speech and its association with magic. Thus, for barbarian peoples the poet is a prophet inspired by the gods (the status of the Old Testament psalm-singers). Said Plato: "All good poets are enabled to compose not by art but because they are divinely inspired or possessed. When they compose, they are no more sane than the Korybantes when they dance." The conception of poetry as magical, inspired and different from other speech has remained: that is why Shakespeare used verse for lofty sentiments and prose for commonplace talk, and why poets are still regarded as "weirdies" to-day.
The oldest written literature which is known is that of the Egyptians. From Memphis of more than four thousand years ago there are incised tablets with the folk songs of peasants and fishermen, the precepts of rulers, the bitter testament of a king who had escaped from assassination. The great age of Egyptian literature was roughly between 2000 and 1800 B.C., when the nobles had broken the power of the Pyramid Age Pharaohs. There were temple libraries, extensive private libraries, and a goddess of books named Safekh. The papyrus rolls include religious plays and pageants; there is "The Voyage of Sinuhe" — the original Sinbad — with stories of travel, exploration and military adventure, the earliest scientific writings and the earliest prophecies of a Messiah.
The growth of literature in this age — abruptly ended by the Hyksos' invasion of Egypt — is comparable with what happened in Britain in the Elizabethan era. A language had been perfected for writing. The boundaries of Egypt were extended, and Egyptian ships were going to every part of the known world. Navigation, irrigation to increase the agricultural yield, the building of huge cylindrical granaries — in a word, commerce — gave tremendous stimulus to the gaining of knowledge and to the imagination. There was another factor, too. As Ford Madox Ford puts it in The March of Literature: " You have to consider that all across Asia there was a continual, an unending, going and coming of merchants, of conquerors, of missionaries, of nomads, and that one body of men cannot come into contact with another body of men without maxims, practices, or merely material habits and knowledges getting transferred from one to the other."
The Babylonians, too, had their literature, and the immense flow of Chinese poetry began more than a thousand years B.C., long before the Emperor Shi Hwang Ti ordered the burning of books. The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt at that time, assimilating the legends of the Creation and the Flood that had been carried from Babylonia and went with a dozen more Egyptian myths into the compendium of propaganda and folklore that is the Old Testament. And, in the same period still, the man or men Homer gathered the folk-legends and hero-myths of barbarian Greece into the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Greek epics were tales of past glories, composed when the first warlords had been driven out of Mycenae and Sparta by others like themselves. They began as extempore sung lays; for two centuries they existed in a dozen different forms, until an Athenian tyrant commissioned what would to-day be called a definitive edition; they were gone over again about 150 B.C. by Aristarchus of the library of Alexandria. Even the ancient world doubted that Homer had much to do with them, and even- the ancient world doubted the stories: Herodotus,for example, thought it moonshire that a world should fight for a woman when virgins were cheap in the market place. The real fact is that the Greek epics were a popular heritage, passed on by countless bards, of mythology and tradition.
Yet they were great and skilful works. The historical conditions of early Greece made them so. Thus, they were not written for generations; when writing was widely practised in Greece, they were heard and not read — they thrived in and were moulded by the declamatory traditions of the Greek festival and the agora. When finally they were written down there were skilled hands to do it. Then there is the question — too wide to go into here — of the Greek conception of beauty in simplicity; it went into their epics as it did into their architecture and sculpture, and it derived mainly from the physical environment. Greek epics were inspired by war. Drama was the product of agriculture. Beginning with magic ritual, it evolved as religious drama with the poet speaking as a god. In the growth of Greek democracy in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., tragedy became part of the great religious festivals." It was employed from above," says Ford, "by the governing class to instil into more or less turbulent proletariats the lessons of discipline and of obedience to rulers who had behind them the divine beings of Olympus."
That is near enough to the truth. The ideas of retributive justice and retributive law are the core of Greek tragedy, as they are of the Homer epics. Of the latter, Kelsen says in Society and Nature: "Retribution is regarded — always and everywhere — as a kind of trade in which good is exchanged for good and bad for bad. Thus it is said at the beginning of the Iliad, "Whoso obeys the gods, to him do they gladly give ear." The whole character of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles is the demand for obedience to the gods, who represent but an idealized human authority. Divine law is personified in Dike, the goddess of righteousness and punishment. In Euripides, third of the great tragic dramatists, the religious theme gives way to a national one, but authority suffers no loss.
Euripides' nationalism was a sign of the times: the rivalry between Athens and Sparta was approaching its climax. When the walls of Athens were torn down and the Spartan hegemony established in 405 B.C., the curtain fell on Greek tragedy. The other celebrated dramatist, Aristophanes, was a political propagandist; an aristocrat, anti-democrat, pro-Spartan. His comedies aimed at sitting targets — the Athenian democracy, the philosophers and artists who got few chalks under the Spartans' Thirty Tyrants. Lysistrata, enjoyed nowadays for its bawdiness, was a plea for Athens to make peace with Sparta; The Birds and Peace clamoured for alliance with the Lacedaemonians.
The conflicts between the states and the victories of Alexander reduced Greece's population and sent commercial and cultural leadership eastwards. The museum and library at Alexandria became a storehouse and a refuge, the home of second-rate poets and philosophers and finally the cradle of theology. A small colony of Greeks—Theocritus, Bion, Moschus — lived in pretty, sheltered Sicily and produced pretty, sheltered pastoral poems for a few years until Alexandria called them too. Ptolemy was generous.
When Greek epics and tragedies were flourishing, the Romans were a barbarian tribe. By the beginning of the Christian era the importation of arts and artists from Rome's province Greece, commissioned by millionaire connoisseurs, was enormous. Cicero decried the Greek arts, but the others borrowed from them. Virgil, Ovid and Lucan were official poets of the court while Rome became a great, busy, money-mad city, reflecting the manners and upper-class ideals but little of the real life of that time. Petronius and Apuleius saw to the last matter; the former, with his shrewd uproarious pictures of parvenu and low-life alike, one of the greatest realists ever.
The separation of everyday life from what is called literature must be evident, through all this. The sweated populace of Rome knew and cared nothing of bucolics or hexameters. All the same, they had something in the nature of a last word. Their language — Latin, but only coincidentally resembling the classic tongue of Seneca or Livy — spread over Europe. It became the language of the Romance period — that is, of Chaucer, Ronsard, and the others who stand at the beginning of modern European literature.
R. COSTER.
NOTE.—In addition to many other opinions, the writer thinks the provision of book lists with articles rather unctuous. However, for those who are interested, he recommends the works cited. Erman's The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians is the standard work on its subject,and Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens is worth anybody's time. There is also Lafargue's very good essay, " The Origin of Abstract Ideas," in Social and Philosophical Studies.
FORUM (internal Socialist Party discussion journal for better understanding), May 1955
Historical materialism abhors a vacuum: that is, it does not accept that any aspect of man's development exists and can be studied except in relation to the mode of production — society's "real foundation." The institutions and ideas, the moralities, laws, concepts and knowledge held in any society are results of, basically, the way labour is organized and its products distributed. Thus the primitive measurement of land gave birth to geometry; the making of pots and baskets to the idea of capacity; the division of fields to the concept of justice, which is nomas in Greek that originally meant pasture.
Literature is one of man's oldest activities. From earliest times, man has recorded the impressions and ideals given him by social life, in plays, poetry and prose. The intention of these notes is to show the evolution of literature as something closely interwoven with the evolution of society. Beowulf and Bunyan, Juvenal and Joyce, Shakespeare and Damon Runyon show it; it is in the troubadors' songs, purveying the middle ages' new concept of romantic love, and in the epics of Homer, where kings' divine rights are backed by the gods' divine retribution.
"Literature" had better be defined, as far as that is possible. In one sense, it means just printed matter: furniture shops and political parties distribute literature, but nobody places it with Shelley's poems. On the other hand, political speeches and factual writings can and have become literature in the other sense: Cicero's orations, or Herodotus' histories, or White's Natural History of Selborne. When reading matter has given pleasure and satisfaction to many people for a long time, it must be called literature. That does not mean all books of long-standing fame must be good; many hold their places in the histories because they mark new trends and phases. In this writer's view, there could be no other justification for those monuments to hack writing, Scott's works.
Prose literature is a comparatively recent development. The earliest literature was in verse and unwritten; our knowledge of it comes from present-day primitive peoples. In their societies, the poet is not separated from his hearers by the barrier of literacy; poetry is generated spontaneously by everyday life and passed from mouth to mouth. The origins of speech itself are believed — see Malinowski, Ogden and Richards, and others — to lie in rhythmic sound-making as an aid to work. " The group worked together, like children in a kindergarten orchestra, and each movement of hand or foot, each stroke on stick or stone, was timed by a more or less inarticulate recitative uttered by all in unison. Without this vocal accompaniment the work could not be done." (Geo. Thomson, Marxism and Poetry).
When speech and skill were better developed, that accompaniment became unnecessary. It went on, however, as a rehearsal of work before the work was done — in other words, as a piece of magic. It still happens: Frazer in The Golden Bough and Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual give numerous examples. In these rituals music, dancing and poetry had a common origin. Plenty of labour songs are still known, in places where they have not been drowned by machinery: spinning songs, rowing songs, sea shanties and so on.
The incorporation of poetry in ritual meant its separation from ordinary speech and its association with magic. Thus, for barbarian peoples the poet is a prophet inspired by the gods (the status of the Old Testament psalm-singers). Said Plato: "All good poets are enabled to compose not by art but because they are divinely inspired or possessed. When they compose, they are no more sane than the Korybantes when they dance." The conception of poetry as magical, inspired and different from other speech has remained: that is why Shakespeare used verse for lofty sentiments and prose for commonplace talk, and why poets are still regarded as "weirdies" to-day.
The oldest written literature which is known is that of the Egyptians. From Memphis of more than four thousand years ago there are incised tablets with the folk songs of peasants and fishermen, the precepts of rulers, the bitter testament of a king who had escaped from assassination. The great age of Egyptian literature was roughly between 2000 and 1800 B.C., when the nobles had broken the power of the Pyramid Age Pharaohs. There were temple libraries, extensive private libraries, and a goddess of books named Safekh. The papyrus rolls include religious plays and pageants; there is "The Voyage of Sinuhe" — the original Sinbad — with stories of travel, exploration and military adventure, the earliest scientific writings and the earliest prophecies of a Messiah.
The growth of literature in this age — abruptly ended by the Hyksos' invasion of Egypt — is comparable with what happened in Britain in the Elizabethan era. A language had been perfected for writing. The boundaries of Egypt were extended, and Egyptian ships were going to every part of the known world. Navigation, irrigation to increase the agricultural yield, the building of huge cylindrical granaries — in a word, commerce — gave tremendous stimulus to the gaining of knowledge and to the imagination. There was another factor, too. As Ford Madox Ford puts it in The March of Literature: " You have to consider that all across Asia there was a continual, an unending, going and coming of merchants, of conquerors, of missionaries, of nomads, and that one body of men cannot come into contact with another body of men without maxims, practices, or merely material habits and knowledges getting transferred from one to the other."
The Babylonians, too, had their literature, and the immense flow of Chinese poetry began more than a thousand years B.C., long before the Emperor Shi Hwang Ti ordered the burning of books. The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt at that time, assimilating the legends of the Creation and the Flood that had been carried from Babylonia and went with a dozen more Egyptian myths into the compendium of propaganda and folklore that is the Old Testament. And, in the same period still, the man or men Homer gathered the folk-legends and hero-myths of barbarian Greece into the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Greek epics were tales of past glories, composed when the first warlords had been driven out of Mycenae and Sparta by others like themselves. They began as extempore sung lays; for two centuries they existed in a dozen different forms, until an Athenian tyrant commissioned what would to-day be called a definitive edition; they were gone over again about 150 B.C. by Aristarchus of the library of Alexandria. Even the ancient world doubted that Homer had much to do with them, and even- the ancient world doubted the stories: Herodotus,for example, thought it moonshire that a world should fight for a woman when virgins were cheap in the market place. The real fact is that the Greek epics were a popular heritage, passed on by countless bards, of mythology and tradition.
Yet they were great and skilful works. The historical conditions of early Greece made them so. Thus, they were not written for generations; when writing was widely practised in Greece, they were heard and not read — they thrived in and were moulded by the declamatory traditions of the Greek festival and the agora. When finally they were written down there were skilled hands to do it. Then there is the question — too wide to go into here — of the Greek conception of beauty in simplicity; it went into their epics as it did into their architecture and sculpture, and it derived mainly from the physical environment. Greek epics were inspired by war. Drama was the product of agriculture. Beginning with magic ritual, it evolved as religious drama with the poet speaking as a god. In the growth of Greek democracy in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., tragedy became part of the great religious festivals." It was employed from above," says Ford, "by the governing class to instil into more or less turbulent proletariats the lessons of discipline and of obedience to rulers who had behind them the divine beings of Olympus."
That is near enough to the truth. The ideas of retributive justice and retributive law are the core of Greek tragedy, as they are of the Homer epics. Of the latter, Kelsen says in Society and Nature: "Retribution is regarded — always and everywhere — as a kind of trade in which good is exchanged for good and bad for bad. Thus it is said at the beginning of the Iliad, "Whoso obeys the gods, to him do they gladly give ear." The whole character of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles is the demand for obedience to the gods, who represent but an idealized human authority. Divine law is personified in Dike, the goddess of righteousness and punishment. In Euripides, third of the great tragic dramatists, the religious theme gives way to a national one, but authority suffers no loss.
Euripides' nationalism was a sign of the times: the rivalry between Athens and Sparta was approaching its climax. When the walls of Athens were torn down and the Spartan hegemony established in 405 B.C., the curtain fell on Greek tragedy. The other celebrated dramatist, Aristophanes, was a political propagandist; an aristocrat, anti-democrat, pro-Spartan. His comedies aimed at sitting targets — the Athenian democracy, the philosophers and artists who got few chalks under the Spartans' Thirty Tyrants. Lysistrata, enjoyed nowadays for its bawdiness, was a plea for Athens to make peace with Sparta; The Birds and Peace clamoured for alliance with the Lacedaemonians.
The conflicts between the states and the victories of Alexander reduced Greece's population and sent commercial and cultural leadership eastwards. The museum and library at Alexandria became a storehouse and a refuge, the home of second-rate poets and philosophers and finally the cradle of theology. A small colony of Greeks—Theocritus, Bion, Moschus — lived in pretty, sheltered Sicily and produced pretty, sheltered pastoral poems for a few years until Alexandria called them too. Ptolemy was generous.
When Greek epics and tragedies were flourishing, the Romans were a barbarian tribe. By the beginning of the Christian era the importation of arts and artists from Rome's province Greece, commissioned by millionaire connoisseurs, was enormous. Cicero decried the Greek arts, but the others borrowed from them. Virgil, Ovid and Lucan were official poets of the court while Rome became a great, busy, money-mad city, reflecting the manners and upper-class ideals but little of the real life of that time. Petronius and Apuleius saw to the last matter; the former, with his shrewd uproarious pictures of parvenu and low-life alike, one of the greatest realists ever.
The separation of everyday life from what is called literature must be evident, through all this. The sweated populace of Rome knew and cared nothing of bucolics or hexameters. All the same, they had something in the nature of a last word. Their language — Latin, but only coincidentally resembling the classic tongue of Seneca or Livy — spread over Europe. It became the language of the Romance period — that is, of Chaucer, Ronsard, and the others who stand at the beginning of modern European literature.
R. COSTER.
NOTE.—In addition to many other opinions, the writer thinks the provision of book lists with articles rather unctuous. However, for those who are interested, he recommends the works cited. Erman's The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians is the standard work on its subject,and Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens is worth anybody's time. There is also Lafargue's very good essay, " The Origin of Abstract Ideas," in Social and Philosophical Studies.
FORUM (internal Socialist Party discussion journal for better understanding), May 1955
Monday, May 13, 2013
Same old story
Despite the rhetoric, corporations are still receiving increasingly friendly treatment from governments.
In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.
The president Obama’s new choices for Commerce secretary is an indication of who the government is for. Penny Pritzker has a personal fortune estimated at $1.85 billion, and is listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 wealthiest Americans.
She pioneered sub-prime operations, out of Superior Bank in Chicago, specifically targeting the poor and working class people of color across the country and ended up crashing Superior for a billion-dollar cost to the government , and creating a personal tragedy for the 1,400 people who lost their savings when the bank failed. Pritzker, whose family controls Hyatt Regency Hotels, has a vile anti-union record.
Tom Wheeler is Obama’s nomination to chair the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler’s background is as a trade association representative for companies appearing before the Commission, a lobbyist in Congress for other FCC customers, and a venture capitalist investing in and profiting from others whose requests he’ll have to pass on. He has no record of challenging corporate abuse of power on behalf of consumers and the poor. Wheeler’s membership of the Intelligence Advisory Board does not bode well for those who believe in the Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
Obama’s recent appointment of Wall Street insider Mary Jo White as SEC chair is playing out in predictable fashion. In an editorial, the New York Times faulted her role in an SEC decision on regulating the huge derivatives market: “Last week, in her first commission vote, Ms. White led the commissioners in approving a proposal that, if finalized, could leave investors and taxpayers exposed to the ravages of reckless bank trading.”
The two wings of the American Business Party try to separate themselves through their rhetoric. but when it comes to the important issues they both make the exact same decisions. Recognizing that there is no significant difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties is the first step towards class consciousness.
Adapted from here
In the past twenty years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.
The president Obama’s new choices for Commerce secretary is an indication of who the government is for. Penny Pritzker has a personal fortune estimated at $1.85 billion, and is listed by Forbes magazine among the 300 wealthiest Americans.
She pioneered sub-prime operations, out of Superior Bank in Chicago, specifically targeting the poor and working class people of color across the country and ended up crashing Superior for a billion-dollar cost to the government , and creating a personal tragedy for the 1,400 people who lost their savings when the bank failed. Pritzker, whose family controls Hyatt Regency Hotels, has a vile anti-union record.
Tom Wheeler is Obama’s nomination to chair the Federal Communications Commission. Wheeler’s background is as a trade association representative for companies appearing before the Commission, a lobbyist in Congress for other FCC customers, and a venture capitalist investing in and profiting from others whose requests he’ll have to pass on. He has no record of challenging corporate abuse of power on behalf of consumers and the poor. Wheeler’s membership of the Intelligence Advisory Board does not bode well for those who believe in the Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
Obama’s recent appointment of Wall Street insider Mary Jo White as SEC chair is playing out in predictable fashion. In an editorial, the New York Times faulted her role in an SEC decision on regulating the huge derivatives market: “Last week, in her first commission vote, Ms. White led the commissioners in approving a proposal that, if finalized, could leave investors and taxpayers exposed to the ravages of reckless bank trading.”
The two wings of the American Business Party try to separate themselves through their rhetoric. but when it comes to the important issues they both make the exact same decisions. Recognizing that there is no significant difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties is the first step towards class consciousness.
Adapted from here
Forced Migrations
A new report released today by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) reveals that 32.4 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2012 by disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes. While Asia and west and central Africa bore the brunt, 1.3 million were displaced in rich countries, with the USA particularly affected where over 900,000 people being forced to flee their homes in 2012.
98% of all displacement in 2012 was related to climate- and weather-related events, with flood disasters in India and Nigeria accounting for 41% of global displacement in 2012. In India, monsoon floods displaced 6.9 million, and in Nigeria 6.1 million people were newly displaced. While over the past five years 81% of global displacement has occurred in Asia, in 2012 Africa had a record high for the region of 8.2 million people newly displaced, over four times more than in any of the previous four years.
There is also increasing scientific evidence that climate change will become a factor. A 2012 Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that there is some evidence to support the claim that “disasters associated with climate extremes influence population mobility and relocation, affecting host and origin communities.”
“In the US following Hurricane Sandy, most of those displaced were able to find refuge in adequate temporary shelter while displaced from their own homes” says Clare Spurrell, Chief Spokesperson for IDMC. “Compare this to communities in Haiti, where hundreds of thousands are still living in makeshift tents over three years after the 2010 earthquake mega-disaster, and you see a very different picture″.
98% of all displacement in 2012 was related to climate- and weather-related events, with flood disasters in India and Nigeria accounting for 41% of global displacement in 2012. In India, monsoon floods displaced 6.9 million, and in Nigeria 6.1 million people were newly displaced. While over the past five years 81% of global displacement has occurred in Asia, in 2012 Africa had a record high for the region of 8.2 million people newly displaced, over four times more than in any of the previous four years.
There is also increasing scientific evidence that climate change will become a factor. A 2012 Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that there is some evidence to support the claim that “disasters associated with climate extremes influence population mobility and relocation, affecting host and origin communities.”
“In the US following Hurricane Sandy, most of those displaced were able to find refuge in adequate temporary shelter while displaced from their own homes” says Clare Spurrell, Chief Spokesperson for IDMC. “Compare this to communities in Haiti, where hundreds of thousands are still living in makeshift tents over three years after the 2010 earthquake mega-disaster, and you see a very different picture″.
Something to think about
Labels:
poverty
0
comments
80% of the world’s population live on less than $10 a day.
Over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day.
Rural areas account for 75% of people living on less than $1 dollar a day.
More than 80% live in countries where income inequality is increasing.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 impoverished children die daily. In 2003, 10.6 million children died before age five. They “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
28% of children in developing countries are underweight, malnourished and/or stunted.
Tens of millions of impoverished children aren’t in school. At the start of the new millennium, nearly a billion people were illiterate. Less than 1% of what’s spent on weapons globally can provide universal primary education.
Preventable infectious diseases claim millions of lives annually. Unsanitary water and lack of basic sanitation affect half the world’s population. Nearly half the population in developing countries, at any given time, experience water and/or sanitation related health problems.Diarrhea and other water-related illnesses claim at least 1.8 million child deaths annually.
One-third of children in developing countries have inadequate shelter. About half the world’s population live in urban communities. In 2005, about one-third lived in slum conditions. 1.6 billion people have no electricity. Billions lack basic necessities overall. It’s reflected in lower than average life expectancy, as well as high infant and child mortality rates.
One in seven have no access to health care.
Around 100 million working age Americans are jobless. Many more others are underemployed. Millions struggle to pay rent, service mortgages, cover medical bills, heat homes, and manage other daily expenses.
America’s top 1% owns over half the nation’s wealth. 1% has more wealth than the bottom 95%.
Income inequality is greater than in all other developed countries. Over three-fourths of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.
By 2020 one in four British children will be living in relative poverty. In Great Britain, a family find themselves homeless every 15 minutes.
Experiments with monkeys show clearly that animals take into account both their own and others’ rewards or actions in comparison to their own. The experiment shows the emotional responses that one monkey made when it clearly thought unfair treatment was taking place. The monkey throws a tantrum when it realises it was receiving cucumbers for its efforts over the preferred fruit - grapes.
Over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day.
Rural areas account for 75% of people living on less than $1 dollar a day.
More than 80% live in countries where income inequality is increasing.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 impoverished children die daily. In 2003, 10.6 million children died before age five. They “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”
28% of children in developing countries are underweight, malnourished and/or stunted.
Tens of millions of impoverished children aren’t in school. At the start of the new millennium, nearly a billion people were illiterate. Less than 1% of what’s spent on weapons globally can provide universal primary education.
Preventable infectious diseases claim millions of lives annually. Unsanitary water and lack of basic sanitation affect half the world’s population. Nearly half the population in developing countries, at any given time, experience water and/or sanitation related health problems.Diarrhea and other water-related illnesses claim at least 1.8 million child deaths annually.
One-third of children in developing countries have inadequate shelter. About half the world’s population live in urban communities. In 2005, about one-third lived in slum conditions. 1.6 billion people have no electricity. Billions lack basic necessities overall. It’s reflected in lower than average life expectancy, as well as high infant and child mortality rates.
One in seven have no access to health care.
Around 100 million working age Americans are jobless. Many more others are underemployed. Millions struggle to pay rent, service mortgages, cover medical bills, heat homes, and manage other daily expenses.
America’s top 1% owns over half the nation’s wealth. 1% has more wealth than the bottom 95%.
Income inequality is greater than in all other developed countries. Over three-fourths of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck.
By 2020 one in four British children will be living in relative poverty. In Great Britain, a family find themselves homeless every 15 minutes.
Experiments with monkeys show clearly that animals take into account both their own and others’ rewards or actions in comparison to their own. The experiment shows the emotional responses that one monkey made when it clearly thought unfair treatment was taking place. The monkey throws a tantrum when it realises it was receiving cucumbers for its efforts over the preferred fruit - grapes.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
The Drug Experimenters
Labels:
Germany,
pharmaceutical industry
0
comments
Leading pharmaceutical companies paid millions of pounds to former East Germany to use more that 50,000 patients in state-run hospitals as unwitting guinea pigs for drug tests in which several people died, it was revealed today.
An investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel said international conglomerates such as Bayer, Hoechst, Roche, Schering and Sandoz carried out more than 600 tests on patients, mostly without their knowledge, at hospitals and clinics in the former state.
The companies were said to have paid the regime the equivalent of €400,000 (£338,000) per test. Schering, a concern which now belongs to Bayer, was said to have offered East Germany the equivalent of €3m to carry out a series of tests at an East Berlin hospital.
Pharmaceutical companies are known to have turned to cash-strapped Eastern Bloc countries in their search for human guinea pigs after the 1960s thalidomide scandal which obliged them to carry out rigorous tests on their products before they could be sold. In the West, the law stipulated that any patients taking part in such tests had to be fully informed of the risks involved. However, in East Germany such restrictions were waived or “modified” in an increasingly desperate effort to procure enough hard currency to rescue an ailing economy.
Roche tested the “blood-booster” Epo on 30 premature babies. Bayer was also revealed to have tested Nimodipin – a drug designed to improve blood circulation in the brain– on a group of alcoholics who were suffering from such acute delirium that they could not give their consent.
The controls on knowing consent were introduced in the wake of Nazi doctors experimenting on the concentration camp victims.
An investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel said international conglomerates such as Bayer, Hoechst, Roche, Schering and Sandoz carried out more than 600 tests on patients, mostly without their knowledge, at hospitals and clinics in the former state.
The companies were said to have paid the regime the equivalent of €400,000 (£338,000) per test. Schering, a concern which now belongs to Bayer, was said to have offered East Germany the equivalent of €3m to carry out a series of tests at an East Berlin hospital.
Pharmaceutical companies are known to have turned to cash-strapped Eastern Bloc countries in their search for human guinea pigs after the 1960s thalidomide scandal which obliged them to carry out rigorous tests on their products before they could be sold. In the West, the law stipulated that any patients taking part in such tests had to be fully informed of the risks involved. However, in East Germany such restrictions were waived or “modified” in an increasingly desperate effort to procure enough hard currency to rescue an ailing economy.
Roche tested the “blood-booster” Epo on 30 premature babies. Bayer was also revealed to have tested Nimodipin – a drug designed to improve blood circulation in the brain– on a group of alcoholics who were suffering from such acute delirium that they could not give their consent.
The controls on knowing consent were introduced in the wake of Nazi doctors experimenting on the concentration camp victims.
The Tax Fiddlers
Labels:
tax avoidance,
tax evasion
0
comments
The UK's 100 biggest public companies are running more than 8,000 subsidiaries or joint ventures in onshore and offshore tax havens, 1,685 subsidiaries in UK Crown dependencies such as Jersey, or overseas territories such as the British Virgin Islands , Bermuda and Gibraltar.according to research published on Monday, raising fresh concerns about the full extent of corporate tax avoidance. Barclay’s, for instance, has more than 120 subsidiaries in the Caymans alone.
Tullow Oil, which describes itself as "Africa's leading independent oil company" draws 84% of its revenues from the continent, but only four of the 81 companies it lists as subsidiaries are registered in African countries. By contrast, more than half (47) are registered in tax havens including the St Lucia, the Channel Islands and Netherlands.
Mike Lewis, ActionAid's tax justice policy adviser added: "Poor countries lose three times more money to tax havens than they receive in aid each year.”
Tullow Oil, which describes itself as "Africa's leading independent oil company" draws 84% of its revenues from the continent, but only four of the 81 companies it lists as subsidiaries are registered in African countries. By contrast, more than half (47) are registered in tax havens including the St Lucia, the Channel Islands and Netherlands.
Mike Lewis, ActionAid's tax justice policy adviser added: "Poor countries lose three times more money to tax havens than they receive in aid each year.”
The Filipino Family Mafias
Labels:
Corruption,
Philippines
0
comments
Family dynasties rule 73 out of 80 provinces in the Philippines. Half come from the old landed elites, while the rest turned up after the 1986 popular revolt that ousted dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
“These are the same elites who control the economic resources of the country,” Bobby Tuazon, director for policy studies at the Centre for People Empowerment in Governance, told Al Jazeera.
In the up-coming elections Tuazon projected that when all votes are counted, 21 of the 24 Senate seats will fall under the control of political families. In the House of Representatives, about 80 percent of the 229 seats will also be dominated by dynasties.
"A dynasty, is a dynasty, is a dynasty," Raymond Palatino, a youth sector representative in Congress, explained "I refuse to believe that out of a population of 92 million, only a few families have this monopoly of intellect, passion and intention to serve our people."
Miriam Santiago, a senator, summed it all up when she said the Philippines is "the world capital of political dynasties", equating political families with "Mafia crime" syndicates.
“These are the same elites who control the economic resources of the country,” Bobby Tuazon, director for policy studies at the Centre for People Empowerment in Governance, told Al Jazeera.
In the up-coming elections Tuazon projected that when all votes are counted, 21 of the 24 Senate seats will fall under the control of political families. In the House of Representatives, about 80 percent of the 229 seats will also be dominated by dynasties.
"A dynasty, is a dynasty, is a dynasty," Raymond Palatino, a youth sector representative in Congress, explained "I refuse to believe that out of a population of 92 million, only a few families have this monopoly of intellect, passion and intention to serve our people."
Miriam Santiago, a senator, summed it all up when she said the Philippines is "the world capital of political dynasties", equating political families with "Mafia crime" syndicates.
Sunday Sermon - Teach your children well
We’re a band of little Comrades
Walking in the path of truth;
We are marching onward, onward,
Through the flowery land of youth.
Marching onward up to Manhood,
When we mean to join the fight,
Of the weak against oppression,
In the battle for the right.
The Socialist Sunday School Song Book
Socialist Sunday Schools were an outcome of the London Dock Strike of 1892, when Mary Gray (who later went on to become a member of the Socialist Party), began teaching the children of striking dockers about the causes and consequences of poverty. The idea caught the imagination and more than 200 Socialist Sunday Schools had been set up in the UK by 1914 and the concept became international. Socialist parents sent their children to the schools to ensure they were politically-aware. There were ten precepts and commandments to learn, and tunes or hymns to sing. Socialist Sunday School placed emphasis on teaching children socialist principles through play, and imbuing them with ideals of community spirit and fellowship. They worked in close harmony with the Labour Movement and were concerned with the spiritual and social objective of the human race with regard to daily life and conduct. At a time when youth movements were usually organised on gendered lines, they encouraged boys and girls to mix together in thought and play.
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