TV entertainment that focuses on the lives of prostitutes has not, until recently, been an evening viewing option, in Australia or many other countries.

Swiftness

“Complaints are taken seriously and acted on swiftly.” – Ian Macdonald, NSW primary industries minister, on two Sydney KFC restaurants being fined for cleanliness and pest violations committed between May 2007 and February 2008.

Today the state is so all-pervasive in nearly everyone’s life that it can be difficult to imagine a society in which it didn’t exist. But there have been societies without a state, and Marxists expect that there will be another in the future. The state is an organisation that seems to stand above society and regulate its operations and mutual relations.

Sorry, but could you explain the irony?

“Ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself.” – Kevin Rudd in his essay in the Monthly.

Nationalism is the belief that the members of a nation share common interests that are different from the interests of other nations and different from the interests of the human race as a whole.

And take the rap if they didn’t?

“The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war.” – British robotics expert Colin Allen, who has been hired by the US Navy to advise on the programming of military robots.

Conflict in Palestine

Unfortunately the present ceasefire in Gaza is no real solution to the conflict in Palestine. As long as the Israeli occupation continues and Palestinians have no homeland, the resistance and violence will go on.

The winners of capitalist competition tend to become monopolies. Monopolies, in turn, reverse the character of capitalist investment. When there was widespread competition in an industry, there was great pressure on each company to reinvest its profits in order not to be left behind technologically and thus to lose out.

“The severity of this economic contraction is a once-in-a-hundred-year phenomenon. It really does compare in severity to the Depression of the late 1920s and through the ’30s”, Donald Brean, a professor of finance and economics at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, told the November 11 London Financial Times.

The World Energy Outlook 2008, released by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on November 12, makes an alarming prediction: Without new government policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and assuming current rates of growth in energy demand continue, global GHG emissions could rise 45% by 2030.

In its earliest stages, capitalism necessarily began from what was provided by the feudal economy that preceded it. This was primarily an extremely low level of productivity, based mostly on very simple tools and producers (peasants and artisans) with few skills.

The optimist

“If you print enough money, you can create inflation.” – Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former IMF chief economist, on trying to prevent deflation and economic stagnation.

The realist

“The undercurrent in the market is one of absolute terror.” – a US stockmarket “veteran trader”, quoted in the November 21 Wall Street Journal.

Solidarity’s privatisation ‘campaign’ backflip

The October issue of Solidarity magazine shares the same sense of disappointment found in the most recent articles coming out of other far left newspapers like Green Left Weekly and Socialist Alternative – all of which hyped up the Unions NSW “campaign” against electricity privatisation – since new NSW La

The visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Sydney in July for the Catholic World Youth Day festival has focused attention on the relevance of religion in the 21st century. One of the most bizarre spectacles of the 400,000-strong event was the grisly worship of the 83-year-old corpse of Italian Catholic Pier Giorgio Frassati, flown in for the festival.

Since the September 15 failure of Wall Street-based Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the US, the world’s capitalist governments have been scrambling to keep the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s from turning into a total collapse of the global financial system.

Brussels – In 2007-2008, the standard of living of more than half of the world population dropped dramatically when the price of food soared. There were massive demonstrations in at least 15 countries in the first half of 2008.

There’s a difference?

“Is this the US Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?” – US Democratic member of Congress Dennis Kucinich, speaking on the US$700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

George Bush

As the sun sets on an American empire sliding into recession, it is time to pay tribute to the enduring efforts of George Bush whose end of term rapidly approaches. Is he the greatest simpleton out of America to ever lurch across the world stage, or insane war criminal that has made America number one rogue state in his axis of evil jingoism?

If you listen to capitalist economists, media commentators or major party politicians, two things you will always find treated with reverence are private property and free markets. These, we are told, are essential not only to economic progress but even to “democracy” and “freedom”. US presidents have used these holy concepts as justification for threatening, or launching, wars.

Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston.

As the Sun disappeared below the horizon of the North Pole on September 22 – ending the Northern hemisphere’s summer – it left behind the second-lowest minimum level of Arctic summer ice cover since satellite records began 29 years ago.

Overcoming difficulties

“Privatisation, of course, has always been a difficult issue for the Labor Party.” – Anthony Albanese, Labor MP and federal infrastructure minister.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Starring John Cho, Kal Penn, and Neil Patrick Harris
Directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg
Runtime 102 minutes

[The following is the address given by Cuban Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado to the UN General Assembly on September 24. It has been slightly abridged.]

Contrary to what some ideologues would like us to believe, the economic arrangements we know as capitalism are not of long standing. Capitalism arose fairly recently in history (in the late mediaeval period), in a particular place (western Europe, mainly in Flanders and England).