Proverbs 10:22 says, ”The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, without painful toil for it.” The world’s largest Christian TV channel, the California-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, has become embroiled in a multimillion-dollar financial scandal after members of the family that founded it alleged widespread embezzlement. The claims – by Brittany Koper, whose grandfather Paul Crouch founded TBN, and by Joseph McVeigh, another family member – describe exorbitant spending on mansions in California, Tennessee and Florida, private jets and even a $100,000 mobile home to house the dogs of Crouch’s flamboyant wife. The network’s lawyer said the Crouches travel by private...
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A month off his eighty-fourth birthday, Ian Paisley announced his impending retirement as the Member of Parliament for North Antrim in the British House of Commons. If he has not retired a very rich man he must have been exceedingly profligate for during much of his political career he was one of Europe’s biggest political earners on salary and expenses simultaneously from the European Parliament, the British Parliament, the various Northern Ireland Assemblies. Additionally, of course, he had invented the Free Presbyterian route to heaven, incorporated it into an established religion catering for anti-Papist bigotry where he enjoyed the...
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Are you happy with your life? Is your work fulfilIing? No problems getting up in the morning? No stress? No complaints? Good. We’ re perfectly happy too. But there are a group of dangerous fanatics who say that they’re “anti-capitalist”. These groups are threatening everything we hold dear. Because we are basically satisfied with our lot, we want to defend the status quo, and we need your help. Here’s what YOU can do: LIMIT YOUR VISION Ignore the structural causes of your problems. Pretend that psychological disturbance has nothing to do with social conditions. OK, so stress and depression...
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We socialists like to refer to wage labour as “wage slavery” and call workers “wage-slaves”. Non-socialists may assume that we use these expressions as figures of speech, for rhetorical effect. No, we use them literally. They reflect our view of capitalist society. Socialists use the word “slavery” in a broad sense, to encompass both chattel slavery and wage slavery as alternative ways of exploiting labour. We are aware of the differences between them, but we also want to draw attention to their common purpose. Capitalist language conceals this common purpose by equating chattel slavery with slavery as such and...
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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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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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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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Attempts to reform capitalism, whether through parliament or dictatorship, have failed. This leaves conscious majority revolution as the only way forward. Long before capitalism had emerged as the dominant social order and imposed its exploitive social conditions on the working class that it had created there arose within the minds of human beings the dream of a life beyond mere survival. The dream of a freedom and dignity beyond that of some category of slave to a privileged hierarchy that controlled their means of life. The triumph of capitalism and its ongoing development – what Marx referred to as...
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(SPGB election manifesto) These elections are taking place in the middle of the biggest economic and financial crisis since the 1930s. In a world that has the potential to produce enough food, clothes, housing and the other amenities of life for all, factories are closing down, workers are being laid off, unemployment is growing, houses are being repossessed and people are having to tighten their belts. And for once the main parties are being honest in offering more of the same, competing with each other as to which of them is going to impose the most “savage cuts”. Capitalism...
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In April 2009, interviewers working for the Rasmussen agency asked 1,000 people: ‘Which is a better system – capitalism or socialism?’ 53 percent said capitalism, 20 percent socialism, and 27 percent were not sure. Although ‘capitalism’ came out the clear winner, commentators were shocked that almost half the respondents failed to give the ‘correct’ response on a matter so crucial to the dominant ideology. ‘Capitalism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘the free market’ The interviewers did not define ‘capitalism’ or ‘socialism’, so we are left to guess what respondents understood by these words. No doubt most of those who answered ‘socialism’ did...
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