Blog Archives

What is Common Ownership?

April 12, 2010
By FN Brill
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Quite simply, the common ownership of the world’s resources and productive capacity is the basis for a reorganisation of society that would ensure plenty of the necessities of life for everyone on the planet – no more starving, malnourished people, no wandering homeless, no senseless deaths for the want of easily affordable medical care and medicine, no more poverty, unemployment, or inequality. How can this be so? Surely, if it were possible to eliminate these scourges we would have done it long ago. Aren’t we working on these problems anyway? At present we live in a world where the...

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8 years of Lula…

March 26, 2010
By FN Brill

After 8 years of left capitalist rule under the “Workers’ Party” President Lula aa Silva, a UN report says Brazil is the most unequal country in Latin America. The richest 10 percent of the population own 50.6 percent of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 10 percent possess only 0.8 percent of the wealth. Undoubtedly this news will be excused by trotskyists everywhere.

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Desmond Dekker – Israelites

March 22, 2010
By FN Brill

“Get up in the morning, slaving for bread, sir,/So that every mouth can be fed./Poor me, the Israelite. Aah.”

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Strike – the movie

March 15, 2010
By FN Brill

Demo trailer for the movie musical "Strike!" now in pre-production. O'Reilly (Carson Nattrass) convinces his army mate McDougall (Jon Ted Wynne) that they have more in common with their former WW1 enemies than their rulers. ... "Strike!" is based on the actual events of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

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It’s about all of us

March 12, 2010
By FN Brill

In an article Peter Rachleff a professor of History at Macalester College in St. Paul reminds us of some statistics concerning the USA . Between 1979 and 2005, the mean after-tax income of the top 1 percent of income earners rose 176 percent while that of the lower half rose less than 10 percent. In 1970, the average CEO earned forty times as much as the average worker. By 2010, it has become nearly 400 times. 80 percent of all the wealth in the U.S. is owned by the 10 percent at the top of our economic ladder, with...

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Street Sweeper Social Club

March 7, 2010
By FN Brill

“Off the breaking backs of others/Where you got all your bucks/Till we make the revolution I just hope your life sucks” Street Sweeper Social Club is an American rap rock supergroup, formed in Los Angeles, California in 2006. The band primarily consists of guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and vocalist/emcee Boots Riley of The Coup

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The prophet debunked

March 2, 2010
By FN Brill

Trotsky. A Biography. By Robert Service. Macmillan. 624pp. £25. Were Trotsky alive today, he would have the editors of this book shot. It is riddled with irritating errors. Round brackets close square; names change spelling; weird sentences like the idea that Russian radicals “took the bits of Marxism they disliked and discarded the rest” slip through; and apparently Oslo and St. Petersburg lie on the same longitude, 59 degrees North. Macmillan should be ashamed to have allowed this slapdash product into print. This would not matter except that the representatives of Trotsky on Earth have launched a flurry of...

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Demonizing “Socialism”

February 24, 2010
By FN Brill

The Republican faction of the US Capitalist Party has been trying to build a populist movement around an ignorant fear of “Socialism”. According to these folks, “Socialism” is fascism because of the Nazi’s “National Socialism”. And Socialism is totalitarian because the nationalist movements around Stalinism used the world “socialism” for the state capitalism used in their nation building agendas. Here’s an example of such ignorance mongering. From Phyllis Schlafly: The younger generation probably doesn’t realize that the word socialism means and connotes a system that is profoundly un-American. Socialism has virtually disappeared from our national lexicon since the Union...

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The Rich Get Richer

February 21, 2010
By FN Brill
The Rich Get Richer

The percentage of the total national income that went to the top 400 families in the USA tripled, from .52 percent in 1992 to 1.59 in 2007.The top income earners received a total income of $138 billion in 2007. This figure is larger than the yearly output of most of the world’s countries, and is nearly as large as the GDP of Chile. US super-rich get five times more income than in 1995.The incomes of the very rich in the US grew phenomenally between 1992 and 2007.The figures were published on the IRS web site in December of 2009,...

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They’re not the world…

February 16, 2010
By FN Brill

A classic subversion of “We are the world” by the Houston band Culturcide. As Utah Phillips said, “Change the words so they make more sense.”

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