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Showing posts with the label poverty

Quote of the Week: Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline Pankhurst, probably the most venerated in the mainstream British media, defended the presence and reach of the British Empire:  Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth. ... If we can only realise and use that potential wealth we can destroy thereby poverty, we can remove and destroy ignorance. For years she travelled around England and North America, rallying support for the British Empire and warning audiences about the dangers of Bolshevism. Quoted in Purvis, June, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography, London 2002 Why is a London School of Economics’s building named after her?   There is a Memorial of her in Victoria Tower Gardens, south of Victoria Tower at the southwest corner of the Palace of Westminster

Gaza in Three Charts – FT

Source: the Financial Times 02 January 2024 Related Visualising Palestine: Gaza

Capitalist Modernity: Child Labour Has Risen

According to Unicef UK, Every day, 14-year-old Tenasoa, who has lost the use of her legs, works in a mine to earn money for her family. "I don't know the origin of her disability,” explains her mother. “She has to work because it allows us to increase our income.” In Madagascar, about 10,000 children work in the mica mining sector . Mica is commonly found in products such as cosmetics, paints and electronics – and mining it requires people to work in dangerous conditions underground. Long-term exposure to mica dust can irritate the lungs and cause irreversible fibrosis that causes blood to be coughed up. In the mine where Tenasoa works, she sorts and cleans 2 kilogrammes of mica per day. Forty children work in the mine. They labour for seven days a week, with no access to school or health services. The dry, rocky landscape leaves few other ways to make a living. As one of the elders says, "If we don't work, we don't eat, it's very simple. Men, women and childr

The Polycrisis of Capitalism in the 21st Century

There is a focus on capitalism in the UK .  I don’t understand what Michael Roberts means by three socio-economic systems. Is it not capitalism the socio-economic system of our era?

The Violence of Demanding Perfect Victims …

and Western and Arab regimes complicity with the Israel’s crimes The solution is “dismantling the structure of violence.” Who’s going to do it is the issue. The international situation does not favour the oppressed anywhere. The failure to topple the Arab regimes in 2011 has even made the possibility of a genuine change more remote. The imperialist powers have the upper hand on the means of violence, ‘diplomacy’ bribing, manufacturing public opinion, arm-twisting, domination and subjugation. For the Palestinians, like for the Russians and Ukrainians, there is no solution but a sweeping broom across the board.

Niger: Why Some People Want Russian in and France out

Interesting development in this small country , but the geopolitics of it is of a significance in today’s shifting balance of forces. The defeat of French imperialism in the Sahel is welcomed, but having hopes in the Russian regime although understandable is delusional.  It reminds me of some Jordanian Stalinists who have sided with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. They too are delusional. Related Mapping the Sahel Friends in state terror

Mark Twain and Orientalism

“Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition - it is dreamland.” With these words Mark Twain closed his pilgrimage to Palestine, and in them can be seen the complex attitude of nineteenth-century Americans toward the Orient. For many nineteenth-century Americans, Palestine was a dreamland, a region of the world to be visited through the Bible and travel literature. The intense spiritual connection felt between Americans and the Holy Land, the idea of Palestine, would lead them to the region first as missionaries and then as tourists. Yet, to Americans, such as Twain, coming to Palestine from the western American frontier, Palestine did not compare in beauty, size, or material progress to their homeland. This comparison reflects the influence of materialism on the new wave of middle-class American travelers of which Twain was a member. The

UK: “Leftie is a Slur in Working-Class Towns”

“Because of the polarity between the left and the right, I don’t feel I have an identity with politicians on either side. The left wing have abandoned the working classes, and with a lot of the left – I don’t want to sound like Piers Morgan when I say this – I feel like there is too much nitpicking and stupid fights, especially online. But I hate the Tories with a passion. I was raised to hate them, I still hate them, and I always will. They clearly know who they stand for and they don’t represent people like us. A quarter of the kids in working families in my region are in poverty. Nobody sticks their neck out for the north-east. The line in Aye – “I don’t have time for the very few” – that’s the one thing that always going to be my main gripe on this planet, the sheer disparity between the 1% and the rest of the world. These culture wars are valid wars that need to be fought – there’s a lot of bigotry, a lot of racism and homophobia. But in order to get the Tories out, you’ve got to

Human Rights and Economic Democracy

A good piece as usual by Joseph Massad. However, I think he is doing a disservice to socialism by calling what existed in the Soviet Union and elsewhere before 1990 a ‘socialist world’. Economic democracy is the missing link in the struggle for human rights