The Guardian makes an interesting comment upon the the head of the IMF’s alleged rape of his hotel’s chamber maid, ”…it is likely that Strauss-Kahn’s alleged victim might not have felt confident enough to pursue the issue with either her supervisors or law enforcement agencies, if she had not been protected by a union contract.” The housekeepers...
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Union Maid
The Waste of Luxury
Like hunger and homelessness, the global trade in luxury goods is booming. Turnover fell from $254 billion in 2007 to $228 billion in 2009 – a decline that observers attributed to “luxury shame”. Rich people could still afford all the luxuries they wanted, but apparently they felt a trifle uneasy about flaunting their wealth...
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The Killing of Bin Laden: Understanding the American Reaction
A large majority of Americans – 87 percent, according to one poll – approve of the killing of Bin Laden. Many were visibly overcome by joy when they heard the news, and the subsequent warning by CIA director Leon Panetta that the operation would actually increase the terrorist threat to the US only slightly...
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The Myth of the Transitional Society
by Adam Buick, in Critique (Glasgow) . – 1975 (5) : pp. 59-70 Critique has recently published the translation of an article by Ernest Mandel, in which he develops his now familiar theme that, in the course of social evolution, there intervenes – and must intervene – between capitalism and socialism a transitional...
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Capitalism – barrier to useful work
Many are suffering the misery of unemployment while much useful, necessary work remains undone. One of the contradictions of capitalism. We want free time, to reduce the working day so that we can move beyond the tyranny of survival into free and creative mutual activity. Both employment and unemployment are capitalism preventing our human...
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Poverty is Being Poor
The number of American people living in poverty has soared to record-high levels. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 47 million Americans out of a population of about 310 million live in poverty in the Unites States. In January, figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau stated that one in five children in the...
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Food Prices – speculation and hoarding
Jomo Kwame Sundaram , United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development writes :- “Lack of food is rarely the reason that people go hungry. The world today produces enough food to feed everyone. The problem is that more and more people simply cannot afford to buy the food they need. Even before the recent...
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Crisis? What crisis?
There is no crisis. That deserves to be said twice. There is no crisis. What happened in Japan was a crisis. Haiti was a crisis. What we have is a failure of mathematics – the mathematics of greed. We as a society have never been so productive, and we have never had such wealth...
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Seeing the Trees and the Wood
A tree surgeon reflects on why no business can give due regard to the needs of workers and the environment I am, I suppose, a businessman; not, I should say, from choice but more from the need to follow a prescribed and necessary course; necessary, because, were one not to, inevitably the business would...
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Are Workers Brainwashed by Capitalism?
If you want to know the truth, you cannot rely on newspapers. We have that on good authority – in fact, on the authority of the more honest newspapers. (The more honest papers are those that are read mainly by capitalists who need reliable information about the world in order to make investment decisions,...
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