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UK: P&O Ferries’ Job Cuts

" The plan seemed to be: Sack 800 staff with immediate effect by three-minute video message ; manhandle those who refuse leave their posts (using handcuffs if necessary); leave customers stranded in various ports because there's no one to crew ships; and replace all staff with cheap labour in a few weeks. What could possibly go wrong?" says Kate Hartley, author of "How to Communicate in a Crisis".   Related “The Office for Budget Responsibility painted a bleak picture of the UK's immediate economic prospects, saying that living standards are set to take the biggest hit since records began in the 1950s .”

Albright. No, it Wasn’t All Bright

No tears to shed over a woman who was part and parcel of an imperialist criminal state. “[Madeleine]  Albright was also champion of Nato expansion , overseeing the addition of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1999 - a move whose repercussions are being keenly felt today.” On May 12, 1996, Albright defended  UN sanctions against Iraq  on a  60 Minutes  segment  in which  Lesley Stahl  asked her, "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it." In the context of the 1998 Iraq campaign, Albright expressed another justification , saying, "But if we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."  In 2014, a released diplomatic cable  revealed  that as amba

Capitalism and Unquestioned Beliefs about History

The increasingly transparent weaknesses and contradictions in the capitalist system may eventually convince even some of its more uncritical supporters that an alternative needs to be found. But the conviction that there is and can be no alternative is very deeply rooted, especialyl in Western culture. That conviction is supported not only by the more blatant expressions of capitalist ideology but also by some of our most cherished and unques­tioned beliefs about history – not just the history of capitalism but history in general. –Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism , 2002, p. 2

Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today

You can put Marx back into the nineteenth century, but you can’t keep him there. He wasted a ridiculous amount of his time feuding with rivals and putting out sectarian brush fires, and he did not even come close to completing the work he intended as his magnum opus, “Capital.” But, for better or for worse, it just is not the case that his thought is obsolete. He saw that modern free-market economies, left to their own devices, produce gross inequalities, and he transformed a mode of analysis that goes all the way back to Socrates—turning concepts that we think we understand and take for granted inside out—into a resource for grasping the social and economic conditions of our own lives. with his compatriots in the nineteenth century, and that certainly does not wear well today, after the experience of the regimes conceived in his name. It therefore sounds perverse to say that Marx’s philosophy was dedicated to human freedom. But it was. Marx was an Enlightenment thinker: he wanted a wo