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Weekly Review And Open Thread 2017-46
Due to this week's network problems at my home you were offered too few posts. Most of the research I do is naturally online. So while I probably could have posted I lacked the material to write up decent pieces. I was told that my regular network and phone connections will be back by Monday afternoon. We'll see …
Dec 12 – U.S. Surrenders On Syria – Resistance Turns Eyes On Israel
A New Yorker piece by a borg journalist suggests that the U.S. political heave mind has for now given up on regime change in Syria. The military junta in the White House still seems to disagree with that, but might be coming around. There will for sure be no clear-cut change, but a gradual move away from the senseless occupation of north-east Syria. Meanwhile the first truck convoy from Iran reached Syria by road. This new supply line will give the Israeli military some serious headaches.
Dec 14 – "Russian Influence" – $0.97 That Changed The Fate Of Britain
The "Russian influence" nonsense is dying a slow death for lack of any evidence that there is any "Russian influence" campaign. The subject is now changing to "Chinese influence". The Rothschild organ The Economist has a title story about that nefarious "Chinese influence" and laments its alleged attempts to move public opinion to its favor. That is of course something "the west" would never even do! To prove that this is a well coordinated campaign the U.S. Council of Foreign Relations adds a piece of its own on "Chinese Influence" . Australia just kicked out a minister for allegedly being to frendly with something Chinese. Trump's new strategic guidance for the military will emphasize China as the new potential enemy. This is a stupid move that will only solidify the Russian-Chinese partnership and further isolate the U.S.
Dec 15 – Haley Fails To Make Case About Yemeni Missiles – Ignores Saudi War Crimes
Haley tried to give her best Colin Powell imitation but failed. Defense Secretary Mattis has said that there will be no military move against Iran. Thus some sanity prevails on the issue. But only in the U.S.. Some Saudi organization put out a funny comic movie (vid) about a Saudi attack on Iran. In it the Saudis defeat the Iranian navy, air- and missile forces. They invade Iran, capture IRGC General Suleimani and are welcome by the people in Tehran with sweets and flowers. Clown prince MbS is overseeing the operation. It is hilarious fiction.
But why do the Saudi grunts talk in English?
Please use the comments as open thread …
@Perimetr | Dec 18, 2017 1:32:30 PM | 46
Monsieur, that is a depresing situation you are describing here, that of a worker who gets into poverty even when having a job or two, which is something very similar, if not plainly equal, to “slavery”, if you have not noticed. Then you have also workers who do not manage to have a “health insurance”, or those who suffer “energetic poverty”, not being able to pay for heatting or enlighting their homes, even during their working life or then at retirement after having working the whole life…. But not only, you have besides that young people become indebted since their tender teens to then never being able to have their own home, not to mention to form their own family, in a distopian world which keeps them dependant from their aging parents for…ever?….Soon people will not inherit money or anything of value except debts… may be we are already there, aren´t we?….
This may be, perhaps, the first time in history when people who have a job continue being poor, that is “the measure of the swamp”…
Some would say that today we have many “devices” and “superfluous things” which could be deemed “luxuries”, but then you have that is precisely “employers”, the “educational system” and “The System” in itself which force us to have all this since they at the top require always more from us, “mobility of job” and “full time location”, for to have a job and make a living, and so, you need a car if you work far from your home, lest you will pass your sleep time going or coming from home to job and viceversa….I have already heard of people who, in spite of working at supposedly more or less well payed jobs, like teachers, are living into their cars in the US….
This “still” is not happening in Europe, because we “still” enjoy the “remnants of the welfare state”, achieved precisely by no other reason than the counterweight it possed the existence of a succesful socialist system at the other side of the “iron wall”, and so, I hope we will “fight with teeth and nails” to defend our right to have a decent and comfortable life whenever we go to work everyday, every year, till we are old enough to not do it….
What I wonder is, if the reality there in the US is such depressing, why in the Earth you elected an oligarch to fix things instead of trying to fix them by yourself as has been always the destiny of all the workers in the world….Ah, yes, I know, that you did not consider yourself a worker, but “middle class”… Yes, I have heard that here too….That was the ilusion “The System” took a great trouble to mark with wrought iron in your head to veil your senses and sight so that you departed from the common fight of all the workers in the world, and considering yourself a “winner”, worthy of the podium in the fictional Olympus capitalism is, you could be able to forget about “solidarity” with your peers when they were having a bad time….”Divide and conquer” they at the top call it…and it is their main “strategy” in “class war”….Because this is a war…and never ended to be…
Sorry to say, but this is called “Capitalism”, and your government took a great trouble during the last decades to discredit and erase from the surface of Earth everything, and everybody, with could sound “socialist” or “communist”, so that you would not have neither anywhere to look, nor anybody to hear, to compare….But, well, this is called “deideologization”, and not only every government along your nation´s short history, but also your current administration, and its mercenary army of commenters/bloggers in the so called “US alt-media”, took the great trouble to talk against “ideologies” and even “democracy”, and “equate communism with fascism”… No other thing I have read during all these last 4 years…., so that you got to believe that a billionaire could anytime “drain the swamp”, resulting any benefit for you…..This is why I feel a deep “contempt and disgust”( “profundo desprecio y asco”, in Spanish, in case of any doubt or tendence to soften the meaning… ) for everybody who have taken part in this “scam”, and I could tell you a bunch of names, real and nicknames….Some of them were already commenting some weeks ago about the “resurgence and good health of communism” , in spite of all….The little man who has previously confessed to have been all his “deplorable” life and continue being an “anti-communist agent” ( in spite of having played before the “communist friend”, most probably as another way to achieve more mercenary income by delating “his preys” achieved by this way… ) sounded quite scared and worried, indeed…
This is why you do not need to worry about the dissapearance of internet communication, since comrades of all ages in the surface of Earth have managed to meet, talk and organize ( from, at least, the times of Jesus around the so fighted for, Jerusalem ) to fight the “beast of fascism” which is given birth by “capitalism” when in their final pregnant fase, “Imperialism”, the shit is high enough to hit the fan…. A beast that only brings misery, poverty, slavery and perpetual war, except for those of mercenary unscrupulous condition, those who will sell their mothers into slavery for the single goal of just rising hardly their heads over the “swamp”, since this is how they feel well, when shit reaches everywhere and everybody, and they feel, finally, like “kings of the shit”…( well, some of them have grudges for having lost a remote aristocratic past because of the “communists”, and the thing is to be “king of something”, no wonder it could be the very shit )…You know, “they love their privileges”…..
Thus, may be it is time to stop losing our time at “blogs”, which could well only serve the “purpose” of locating dissent to get it blacklisted, and start contacting our peers and our neighbours ( socialists or not ) to start thinking “what is to be done”, since any fake-tanned billionaire keen on touching women without permission and hitting a little ball with a stick in fields better cared than most of the population of his damned country, without anything resembling a scruple, will do such a work for you, since it is against its very nature….
Sorry to be so cinic, but I fear this is the “state of affairs” in planet Earth right now.
A well administered dose of reality did never do any harm to anybody, as every of your beloved and sacrified mothers will corroborate anytime you give them the opportunity…..
Posted by: elsi | Dec 18 2017 22:42 utc | 54
So here is a description of how the English Commons evolved through enclosures from David McNally – Monsters of the Market_ Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism
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It is often forgotten that capitalism fully emerges only where older, communal forms of economic life have disintegrated, or, more accurately perhaps, where they have been dissected. For capitalism to develop, customary ties between people and the land must be severed, and communal obligations among people disrupted. Throughout most of recorded history, the majority of human beings have lived as peasants, organised into family-units whose members work the land collectively (usually along patriarchal lines) and share resources within the community. Access to land in such societies generally required the performance of services for powerful lords and masters. But, on such terms, such access was usually heritable. Peasants thus typically possessed land as their primary means of producing the goods of life, and often enjoyed access to common lands open to nearly all members of the village-community. The subsistence of people in such rural societies was largely secured, therefore, without recourse to the market. Because almost every household held land, and usually had access to communal lands as well, they could directly procure the foodstuffs, fuel and materials necessary for survival (barring drought or violent appropriation of their produce). While people might go to the market to sell surplus-goods and acquire specific items, their survival did not depend upon market transactions.
Capitalism, by contrast, is a society of systematic market-dependence, one in which survival depends upon individuals finding a buyer for a good or service (usually labour) that they offer on the market. What distinguishes capitalism, therefore, is not the existence of markets, but the unique imperatives of market-compulsion in which owners and labourers have no means of reproducing themselves other than by selling and buying.50 And, for the majority of people, such compulsion arises only where they have been detached from direct access to the means of life of the sort provided by family-plots and common lands. Once the majority is so subjected to markets, including the market in labour, people become both regular sellers (of their labour-power) and regular buyers (of the subsistence-goods they require). Capitalists, too, become market-dependent; they purchase their means of production (labour, raw materials, tools and machines) on the market, just as they sell there the goods whose production they supervise. Although the market-experience is radically different for each group – a potential source of profit for the capitalist and a constant site of exploitation for the worker – it is the central regulator of social-economic life for both.
The rise of such a market-system required the destruction of the older village-economy, whose death knell was sounded with the widespread enclosure of land, particularly common lands, and the extinction of the open-field system. At the most basic level, enclosure involved a spatial reorganisation of land-ownership and use. The traditional feudal economy had been organised around the lord’s manor with most land in the hands of peasants who held leases (usually as either freeholders or copyholders, whose terms and obligations were outlined in manor-documents), and were obliged to pay rents and services to their lord. Family-holdings were often geographically dispersed (a given owner possessing scattered strips of land) and much land was organised as open fields available to the entire village-community after harvest and in fallow seasons. In addition to open fields, the manorial economy contained common fields, forests and ‘wastes’ where any inhabitant could graze livestock; hunt; fish; pick fruit, berries and herbs; glean grain; gather wood (for both building materials and fuel) as well as peat, coal and stones; and pick bulrushes that could be woven into mats, baskets, seats for chairs, or used for bedding. These rights of the community (or of most of its members) were regulated by an assembly of cultivators – either the manor-court or a gather- ing of the village-community.51
The reader may have noticed that I have used the word ‘held’ rather than ‘owned’ in my description of peasant-possession of land. Under classical feudal law, all land belonged to the king of the realm. Individuals, including lords, had rights to use land only if they rendered proper service to their superiors. Rights to property were thus conditional; the idea of absolute private property simply had no place in such a society. Indeed, historians have been unable to find a clear definition of ‘property’ in English legal writings prior to the eighteenth century.52 Nevertheless, long leases, which were typical in the period 1450–1700, gave peasant-households a stability of possession, and their common rights gave them an enduring sense of community-membership. Moreover, because privately-held fields were generally open, and sometimes subject to a variety of communal rights, the peasant-economy was both public and shared.
The early enclosure-movement initiated a long process by which common rights and the open-field economy were displaced by capitalist forms of private property. Not that any of this could have been clear at the outset to those wealthy tenant-freeholders in search of larger farms, or lords look- ing for higher rents, each of whom began to concentrate and enclose land. Yet, in facilitating the construction of spatially unified properties bounded by hedges and fences, the first enclosures began the dissolution of communal rights. Spatial concentration of land may have made possible the application of new techniques – which were often cost-effective only if applied on a relatively large scale – but it also went hand in hand with its social concentration, as poor peasants were bought out (often when land was demanded as debt- payment), defrauded of land (in cases where there were no written records of their tenancies), or forced out by jacked up rents or entry-fees when leases expired. In arranging local enclosures to the benefit of wealthy tenants, lords deepened divisions within the village-community, exacerbating the disparity between rich and poor peasants, and weakening the capacities of communities to resist collectively. As some of the earliest enclosers, rich tenants or yeomen also undermined their poorest neighbours, for whom enclosure was frequently disastrous.
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He goes on to detail the enclosure movement from 1500 on in detail as this quote shows
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The scale of the transformation that occurred over one hundred and fifty years was staggering: whereas peasants had occupied two thirds of all lands at the Restoration (1660), they held a mere ten percent by the end of the next century.
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Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 19 2017 5:48 utc | 92
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