ALB
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More on key waterways. Control over which is probably the second most reason (after control over sources of raw materials) as to why states go to war.
The Canadian Tory party leader Pierre Poilievre seems to be confusing overissuing cash with quantitative easing.
Overissuing “cash” (the word he uses) in the generally accepted meaning of the term (of notes and coins) would cause the general price level to rise as he says. But QE was designed to cause only asset prices to rise. It didn’t affect the price of apples (his example).
But it did have the effect he says of making the rich richer. That was the intention. The authorities thought that if the rich and corporations had more money they would invest more. It didn’t work as, in the absence of profitable markets, they didn’t.
Whether the have-yatchs who tend to support his party appreciate him criticising their feeding trough can be open to doubt, but they will understand the need to dupe the workers into supporting a party that supports them.
In any event, QE was not used to finance government spending as he seems to be suggesting.
I was replying to this you posted last month:
“ A lifelong lover of printed books, like William Morris btw, were I a teenager or in my twenties I would be distraught at their disappearance (which doesn’t bother people on this forum). Fortunately, I’ll be dead before books disappear, and I have hundreds, and can still obtain those I want.
If done properly the USA would not be able to digest Canada. If each province became a state (with Newfoundland as the 61st state) then the Senate would be increased by another 20 Senators. The Electoral College would also be increased.
Since, generally speaking, Canada is more European and civilised than the US Trump should be careful about what he wishes. If Canada had already been part of the USA he would never have been elected President.
Who here has said they are not bothered about printed books disappearing? In fact what is the evidence that they will disappear completely? Why should they?
Most people here will have books too but are not elitist and snobbish about it.I was around at the time but wasn’t living in Britain so didn’t experience what went on there. But I am not sure the comparison of today with the 1970s is that valid. This was certainly a period of “stagflation” ie stagnation plus a continuously rising price level. But then the rate of increase was in double digits (just checked, in 1976 it was 16.5%). Today it is between 2 and 3% and unlikely to increase to double figures.
What is a parallel, though, is that attempts of the governments — Tory as well as Labour — of the decade to end stagnation and bring about “growth” failed. Hardy wrote a good article about this in the August 1975 Socialist Standard in which he noted:
“Any serious student of capitalism knows that the capitalist is in business to make a profit and therefore will not invest more to expand production at those times when there is no prospect of selling the product profitably. Yet in the last recession, in 1971-2, Heath and Barber complained bitterly that though for months on end they pleaded and threatened and offered inducements for increased investment, “nobody would listen”. Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the present government, confesses to having been equally ignorant of the facts of economic life. “One thing I have learnt from my experience in the past seven months [as Chancellor]: there is no chance of investment if business expects a general and prolonged recession, however generous the tax incentives” (Report of speech, The Times, 5th October 1974).”
In imagining that they can get business to expand production when capitalist firms don’t see the prospect of making a profit, the present government is showing the same ignorance of how capitalism works as the Tory and Labour ministers of the 1970s. Maybe at some point we will hear a similar confession to Healey’s from Reeves.
I don’t think we can say that the present Labour government’s policies are responsible for the comparatively stagnant date of the British economy. That’s due to the working of capitalism over which governments have no control.
On the other hand, the double digit inflation of the 1970s was the result of what governments did by inflating the currency, as Hardy’s article explained. The present government is not pursuing the same policy (they want to keep inflation at only 2%).
Hardy’s article can be found here:
The Crisis: Capitalism’s Stranglehold on the Labour Government
Between the last two world wars both America and Canada drew up to invade each other (the Canadian militarists must have been bonkers).
https://macleans.ca/culture/books/how-canada-planned-to-invade-the-u-s-and-vice-versa/
Looking for something else I came across this blast from the blast — the birth of SPEW in 1997. We get a mention 4 minutes in:
Looks like the Labour government has been “blown off course” or “sabotaged by the gnomes of Zurich” already (to quote excuses invoked by previous Labour governments for their failure to control how capitalism works despite their election promises) after only six months of running the political side of capitalism:
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-bond-market-sell-off-heaps-pressure-reeves-2025-01-09/
It is a bargaining opening. The US already occupies militarily Greenland anyway.
Interesting to note that Trump is employing the same “military security” argument for acquiring Greenland as Putin did for Russia invading Ukraine.
Looks as if the pretence of defending democracy and all that is going to be dropped in coming years in favour of naked realpolitik and the doctrine of might is right.
The person asked to review this book reports that it’s turgid in the extreme and that they couldn’t get any further than a couple of chapters.
On the principle that if a book is no good there’s no point in reviewing it we shan’t be.
This assumes that they will be able to do popular stuff later on nearer the next general election. They might calculate on doing this but we know that, capitalism being capitalism, they can’t guarantee that they will be in a position to do this.
In fact we know, from our knowledge of how capitalism works and that it can’t be controlled by governments, that they are unlikely to be able to. Such popular stuff as increasing real wages and social handouts (one of their election promises) is not something in their power to bring about.
This said, there is a chance that they could be lucky in that capitalism might happen to be entering into the boom phase of its cycle a year before the election. I suppose that, if you are a government that has to seek re-election, that this might happen is a gamble worth taking. In fact that’s all they can do.
How can people like him — in fact all left and council communists and other assorted libertarian communists — get away with this when after Marx wrote the passage they misquote or misinterpret he made it clear in a speech a year later that he thought that it might even be possible in some countries and in certain conditions for the working class to win political power by peaceful means:
“Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustain the old institutions, if he is not to lose Heaven on Earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics.
But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same.
You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries — such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland — where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.”https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/09/08.htm
Of course this is Marx’s view and it doesn’t make it right just because he said so. But these people want to claim the authority of Marx for something they advocate but which he did not.
Why don’t they come out openly and say that Marx was wrong on this point?
And we mustn’t forget the Carter Doctrine which is still the cornerstone of US policy in the Middle East to this day:
The Syrian “revolution” explained?
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/syrian-military-housing-former-rebels-101507316.html?
As the French say, “Ote-toi de la, que je m’y mette” move out of the way so I can take your place.
The French phrase is the title of a cartoon by Daumier of a Turkish Sultan which makes it even more relevant to what has happened Syria.
