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For sharing 30 songs on a P2P network, Joel Tennenbaum was ordered by an American court to pay 675,000 dollars in damages to the record companies suing him. A month earlier, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay 1,920,000 dollars in damages to these same record companies for sharing 24 songs on a P2P network. [...] Health care reform is compatible with capitalism. Health itself is not. [...] When a revolutionary points out that reformist movement in a foreign country isn’t worth the participation of that country’s working class, the invariable reaction of the leftist is to dismiss the revolutionary’s arguments with snide comments like “that’s easy for you to say.” The leftist assumes she is taking the side of the poor [...] In a previous post I mentioned how the peculiar bourgeois logic of anti-fascism leads leftists to a position of support for the Allied imperialist camp during the Second World War (and for all other capitalist parties, states and movements who oppose “fascism”). In that post I discussed briefly the left’s uncritical support for the [...] Most of the European states are girding for a summer of working-class discontent. The French Prime Minster has warned that “there is a risk of the revolution” in his country. In the United States, notwithstanding the bourgeoisie’s campaign of lies presenting the crisis as a result of the working class “living beyond its means” [...] A few years ago the American leftist Mike Davis wrote an opinion piece called “Remembering Bill and Ivan,” which implored American readers, then celebrating the 60th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, to remember the pivotal role played by the USSR in ending the Second World War. As a matter of military history, it [...] Bottled water is almost entirely useless. Numerous studies show it to be no safer than tap water.1 This is no surprise considering that one “spring water” was pumped from a parking lot next to a hazardous waste site.2 The FDA itself says that the standards by which it regulates bottled water differ very little from the standards by which the EPA regulates tap water.3 And when the American television show 20/20 conducted a blind taste test of bottled and tap water, tap water won and the most expensive bottled water — Evian (spells Naive backwards!) — fared the worst.4 Thus the production of bottled water is almost entirely wasteful. In 2001, 1.5 million tons of plastic were used to bottle 89 million liters of water.5 Add to this the cost of packaging, shipping, and promotion and you have tremendous waste of natural resources and human activity. To make matters worse, Americans throw out 60 million water bottles a day.6 So why does bottled water sell? One part of the explanation can be found in the incontrovertible fact that tap water is laden with chemicals of every sort. Problem is, as already noted, bottled water isn’t any better, and so either way you cut it, our health and our planet lose out to a system concerned only with making profits. Socialist society, on the other hand, will mean, as Bordiga put it, the Continue reading Reason 4955 Why Turning off Your Lights Won’t Save the Planet As I made my internet rounds yesterday, I had the misfortune of coming across the following text, evidently put out by a Russian group called “Alternatives.” Nothing I’ve seen indicates that this text or Alternatives have anything to do with today’s Financial Fool’s Protest, but as this group and the groups in London are [...] The Wired Science blog reports on a new study that links childhood poverty with impaired cognitive development. Bad news for the 1.4 billion people worldwide who live on less than $1.25 a day (according to the World Bank), not to mention the hundreds of millions of proletarians in the west who struggle to survive [...] Postally speaking, I lead a quiet life. Now and then I get a letter from my parents or a book I’ve ordered. Usually they’re accompanied by a couple items of junk mail. Recently, however, I spiced up my postal life by taking out a NetFlix subscription. Today as I opened my mailbox to retrieve [...] For good or ill, this site is stuck with what might be considered a controversial name. There are two reasons for the name Dictatorship Now! First, the name is something of a parody of the liberal radio program Democracy Now!. This isn’t arbitrary, however — in every conceivable way, the communist movement stands opposed [...] |
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