alanjjohnstone
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Apologies for my naivety but where does quantitative easing feature in the creation of money and credit?
An SPGB summary is here
But I stay baffled
I should have mentioned that KPD and Nazi cooperation had earlier roots such as what is called the Schlageter Line, an alliance between them against the French occupation of the Ruhr. Similar collaboration persisted up to 1932 with the Berlin transport strike, organising joint pickets.
In 1931 the KPD endorsed the Nazi referendum campaign to destabilise Prussia’s SPD state government and Franz Borkenau pointed out in his history of Comintern,
“This was no longer simply the theory of ‘Social-Fascism,’ the belief that there was no difference between Fascism and democracy and that the Social-Democrats were just as bad as the Nazis… Their participation in the Nazi referendum implied more. It implied the view that to overthrow the last defense of German democracy, the Prussian government, in co-operation with the Nazis, meant progress, that a Nazi régime was preferable to a democratic régime”
The U-turn to anti-fascist “Popular Front” strategy was 1933/34. Up to then whenever the SPD offered an alliance with the KPD, it was spurned. Comintern rejected the idea that there existed a qualitative difference between social democrats and Nazis.
Both the KPD and the Nazis share the same anti-democratic principles so they could prop one another up.
Let’s not forget Comintern’s Third Period when all the “labour” parties became “social fascists”, placed on par with the Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_fascism
And there were the “national bolsheviks”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism
And then there were the Strasserites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
Does it matter if it is the right or left jackboot that stomps your face?
I initially thought the story was an urban legend, but it isn’t.
The USA devoted lots of expensive research into developing a pen that worked under zero-gravity conditions for astronauts. The Russian cosmonauts instead chose to use a pencil.
I also have a vague distant memory that during the 1950s-60s the US disparaged the radio technology in Soviet planes as being obsolete but then it was pointed out that their more modern ones in a nuclear war would be inoperable due to the effect of electromagnetic pulse whereas the Russian would be less affected.
When discussing state capitalism, didn’t Engels refer to it as a development of joint-stock companies. Capitalism run by managers without individual capitalists?
“…Xinomics envisages a model of corporatization within the tight boundaries set by Party bureaucracy’s strict surveillance. And, ever since Xi’s ascendance to power in 2012, CPC has been concentrating on tightening bureaucratic control over the economic system through the systematic creation of Party cells within private corporate entities…Along with Party’s growing hold over Chinese companies, Party supervision of foreign MNCs operating in China has also become regular feature of Xinomics. To be precise, systematic strengthening Party bureaucracy in tandem with the growth of corporate-finance capital has become a salient feature of Xinomics or Xi Jinping Thought.”
” …A corollary of this strengthening power of state bureaucracy together with growing corporate accumulation by both domestic companies (including state-owned and private) and foreign corporates has been capitalist history’s horrific levels of super-exploitation of Chinese working class. Amidst the rapid advancements in technologies including frontier technologies such as digitization, labour-productivity in China is very high while wages are the lowest in the world…On an average, the monthly wage of an unskilled worker in Chinese factories is as low as $100 which is a small fraction of the wage in other imperialist countries. As a result, the cost of producing a commodity in China hovers around 10 percent of that in Western countries. The resulting huge surplus value extraction is the basis on which the powerful bureaucracy and corporate companies, both domestic and foreign flourish in China…”
The article concludes
“…to what extent the further consolidation of bureaucratic power and state monopoly capitalism under Xi and his male-only team can confront the impending crisis-ridden international and domestic situation is a debatable question now. In spite of the omnipotent power the Chinese bureaucratic state, being far removed away from socialism except in name, its maneuverability will ultimately be constrained by market forces…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_India_(Marxist%E2%80%93Leninist)_Red_Star
World Bank says it is too expensive for governments to help everyone with their soaring energy bills. Malpass said he was concerned that the additional help for people will push inflation even higher.
Malpass said many of the Covid subsidies were not targeted. “They went to everyone…and now the consequences are coming home…People will be left for years and even decades paying for that debt,” he added.
The Institute of International Finance reports that global debt topped $305 trillion earlier in the year and is expected to increase further.
If you can’t pay your energy bills, you are very unlikely to be disconnected – instead, your energy supplier will require you to have a prepayment meter.
There is the danger of people “self-disconnecting” – basically, you can’t afford to top up. “Forcibly moving people in debt on to prepayment meters is disconnection by the back door,” Gillian Cooper, head of energy policy at Citizens Advice, told the Guardian. “If people can’t afford to top up, they’re at real risk of the heating going off and the lights going out.”
4.5 million domestic customers use energy prepayment meters, and many of them are on low incomes. With one of these, you pay upfront for your gas or electricity. It lets you pay small amounts often, but it is more expensive than getting a bill.
the government’s energy price guarantee (EPG) is about 2% higher for prepayment customers than for those who pay by direct debit, so those with the least have to pay more.
unlike direct debit customers, they cannot spread the cost across the whole year. That could translate into £200-£300 more spent on energy just this winter. On top of that, prepayment meter households will often have the most poorly insulated homes.
Two-thirds of people supported taking non-violent direct action to protect the UK’s nature, with 34% opposed. Support for such action dropped to 44% among Tory supporters.
Archibald, Belinda and Cuthbert reminds me of this story that I am sure you all have heard a version of.
A rich tourist stops at a hotel and puts a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.
As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.
The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the feed store.
The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her services on credit.
She rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.
The hotelier now places the $100 back on the counter so the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
At that moment the tourist comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money and departs.
No one produced anything and no one earned anything. However, the whole village is now out of debt
Who is risking a nuclear meltdown?
Although the Zaporizhzhia plant’s six reactors have been shut down, they need a constant supply of electricity to keep the nuclear fuel inside cool and prevent a meltdown.
The recent and very successful Russian offensive against Ukraine’s electric grid has often temporarily cut off its external power and forced it to rely on its emergency back-up diesel generators, with only several days of reserve fuel.
It was a loss of power that led to nuclear fuel overheating and the hydrogen gas this produced then exploded, releasing radioactive contamination at Fukushima in Japan in 2011.
The structure of nuclear power stations has been built to withstand direct attacks so shelling is not the primary threat.
Importantly, that is not to say targeting secondary buildings and spent-fuel rod storage would not result in serious knock-on consequences with radioactive leakage.
We condemn both sides who are willing to gamble on a nuclear catastrophe.
“I’m extremely concerned by the shelling yesterday at Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which underlines the very real risk of a nuclear disaster,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said. “There are contradictions between the accounts of the Russian and Ukrainian sides,” Grossi said. “I receive information . . . but I have no way of determining whether it corresponds to the facts.”
As in all wars, both sides claim clean hands to escape responsibility. Both sides are culpable and guilty. And that is why we don’t choose one over the other.
Much of the media makes headlines that he is the first UK/Asian PM.
But not that he is the umpteenth elite public school PM Or that he is the umpteenth millionaire to be PM…
A typical Tory PM
Can I draw people’s attention to this earlier exchange on banking
It is a very long discussion but worth viewing
