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On May 6 voters will choose their preferred candidates for Stroud District Council, Gloucestershire County Council, the Gloucestershire Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and parish councils (if contested). We asked each party fielding multiple candidates to write why residents should vote for them.

Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson has presided over a coronavirus catastrophe that has left over 127,000 people dead, the highest number in Europe. There is anger at this and 10 years of Tory cuts and privatisation to health, education, youth services, libraries, womens refuges, child care facilities, day centres for the elderly and more.

That is why despite the lockdowns there have been many movements and protests: Black Lives Matter, NHS workers fighting for a pay rise, the struggle to end violence against women, defending the right to protest, and more. TUSC candidates have participated in all.

These movements have made an impact but there is no mass party that has the programme and organisation to offer a political voice in opposition to the injustices and inequalities, including class inequality, of capitalist society.

Labour under Corbyn remained 'two parties in one', a pro-capitalist party, and a potential anti-austerity party based on Corbyn's supporters. But that era is now over with Starmer's takeover.

The building of a new mass workers' party remains an urgent task. TUSC candidates are committed to voting against all cuts. And that requires a programme to fund the needs of the community.

TUSC candidates have pledged to support councils initially using their reserves and prudential borrowing powers to avoid making cuts. But we argue that the best way to mobilise the mass campaign that is necessary to defend and improve council services is to set a budget that meets the needs of the local community and demand that government funding makes up the shortfall.

TUSC candidates are committed to using any elected position to build a mass, united struggle for that government funding. That includes support for all workers' struggles against government policies which make ordinary people pay for the crisis; and the fight for a united working-class struggle against racism and all forms of oppression.

The Covid pandemic has laid bare the class character, inequalities and chaos of the profit based capitalist system.

We need an end to austerity, which is a direct wealth transfer from the working class and poorest to the richest through cuts to jobs, services and benefits.

Instead of handouts to the bosses, we call for the major firms and banks that dominate the economy to be brought into democratic public ownership.

Production and services could then be planned by workers to meet the needs of all. This is socialism.

Read the original post:
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition: Why you should vote for us - Stroud News and Journal

There seems among our younger citizens to be a growing disdain for capitalism with more and more embracing the socialism peddled by many university professors. I hope to shed some light on the two and differences therein

What is free market capitalism? I have seen it said that capitalism is the worst economic system available, except for all the others. In other words, capitalism is not a perfect system. If a perfect system of any kind exists I have yet to see it. Beyond that, free market capitalism is defined by Merriam-Webster as an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.

Notice that nowhere in this definition are the words with government approval or subject to any other restriction. Todays capitalism in the U.S. is more a system of crony capitalism whereby government laws, restrictions, and spending determine more of a companys success by currying favor rather than actually producing something competitive. A good example is the housing and mortgage market, where home prices are greatly influenced by mortgage rates, which are keyed off of 10-year U.S. Treasury rates, and by governments direct and indirect involvement in the mortgage industry. Is that good or bad. I dont know, except that it is not free market capitalism.

Some say capitalism has failed. I dont know why, because we still have one of the most robust economies in the world despite governments efforts to ruin it. Capitalism in and of itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. Capitalism cant get you a bigger house or a job. It does create an environment that allows you to more easily seek those things. It is only when government interferes, no matter how well intentioned, that things go awry. A good example are large national banks.

During the 2007 downturn, numerous banks were on the verge of collapse, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Some of their difficulty was brought about by previous government meddling and the rest was all their own doing. Yet they got bailed out. Guess what? Since there is no consequence for bad behavior, as free market capitalism would inflict, they are doing the same things again.

Socialism is defined by Merriam-Webster as an ideology or system based on the collective, public ownership and control of the resources used to make and distribute goods or provide services. This involves ownership of such things not by private individuals but by the public (the community as a whole), often in the form of a centralized government. In other words, the government that brought you the Postal Service, Amtrak, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are better qualified to run your business than you are.

A novel way of thinking about the differences is to think of capitalism as a bundle of positives and socialism as a bundle of negatives. Capitalism gives you the chance but not the obligation to take action. Socialism restricts or restrains the chance to take action.

But what about democratic socialism, you ask? Democratic socialism is defined as having a socialist economy in which the means of production are socially and collectively owned or controlled, alongside a democratic political system of government. That is eerily similar to just plain socialism. And the U.S. is not a democracy, it is a republic. More on that at another time.

So when you are confronted with those who support socialism, here are five questions to ask them.

First, what is the difference between democratic socialism and socialism? The only real difference is that people choose democratic socialism while socialism is imposed on them. Democratic socialism will soon become socialism as human nature prevails.

Second, where has socialism ever worked? Nowhere. Even France, Demark and Sweden have rolled back their experiments in socialism.

Third, who pays for all the free stuff you get? Sooner or later, the money runs out. There will be no more rich or middle class.

Fourth, what stops democratic socialism from becoming socialism? Nothing.

Five, why would we want that here? If the democratic socialist utopia becomes plain old socialism, what is the benefit?

Steve Jobs once opined that in todays business and political environment (this was in the early 2000s) Apple could not have created. That is a sad commentary of todays government foot on the neck of business.

View post:
Tom Riggins: On capitalism and socialism | Serving Carson City for over 150 years - Nevada Appeal

Its not often that a piece of junk mail makes me burst out in laughter, but thats what happened recently when I picked up a flimsy yellow leaflet from the doormat and read: Capitalism is the problem; socialism is the solution. It turned out that the leaflet is the British Communist Partys plea for our vote in the upcoming elections for the Greater London Assembly, in which the Party is bravely standing nine candidates. It was so laughable because it reminded me yet again how impossible it is to exaggerate the human beings capacity for self-delusion. And dressing up communism as socialism is such a tired old chestnut, one wonders why they bother.

Im just grateful that even in todays left-liberal-driven, woke-obsessed Britain, very few people are stupid enough to vote communist. Well, perhaps one or two Guardian readers. I say that because, after all, their former columnist (and Jeremy Corbyn sidekick) Seumas Milne is a self-avowed apologist for Stalin, and then there is the infamous case of Richard Gott, one-time editor on the lefty rag, whose murky dealings with the KGB were long ago exposed by authorities on Cold War espionage. Yes, the Guardians journalism has long had a dodgy smell about it; the IRA-loving Roy Greenslade is just the latest discredited hack.

Anyway, the only people who can still honestly believe that communism is the answer to any of lifes thorny issues are those who have never lived under the communist system. While the eastern half of Europe suffered under Stalins brutal cosh, the western half was home to the wilfully duped (e.g. silly old George Bernard Shaw) or, much worse, those who were fully aware of the terror and murderous purges but chose to brush them aside because you cant make an omelette without breaking eggs (e.g. Eric Hobsbawm here and Jean-Paul Sartre in France). Of course it took George Orwell to observe: But wheres the omelette?

China is the one exception in all this. It is quite true that millions have been lifted out of poverty and into a new middle class; the standard of living in China has never been higher. But isnt it interesting that this miracle happened only after the communist regime had wholeheartedly embraced capitalism? Chinas combination of an unashamedly capitalist economic system with an oppressive totalitarian political system has been rather clever, I have to admit. For China, it seems, capitalism has turned out to be the solution to the problems created by socialism. But which of us would choose to be a subject of Xi Jinpings ruthless surveillance state? Not many people from the West have emigrated to live under socialism with Chinese characteristics.

So where exactly has a more undiluted Marxism oh excuse me, socialism worked? North Korea? In Cambodia under Pol Pot? In poor starving Venezuela, the sad legacy of Hugo Chavez? In the Castro brothers Cuba, such a delightful paradise that the flight of Cuban refugees to nearby Florida has not abated in the past six decades, so that there are now 1.5 million Cuban-Americans living in that state alone?

No, dear readers, the only problem to which socialism is the solution is: how can we destroy as many lives, societies and economies as possible, while pretending to care about humanity?

See the article here:
Whatever the problem may be, socialism is not the solution - TheArticle

Emissions also fell under Mr Trump, contrary to the assumption that a deregulatory agenda is bad for the environment, and Mr Biden inherits a market in which green innovations, such as electric cars, are rapidly emerging. Consumer attitudes have adjusted; crucially, the technology has moved on (Lithium-ion battery pack prices, for example, fell 89 per cent over the past decade).

Capitalism, in other words, can be good for the environment, and it would be a huge error to conflate addressing climate change with socialism when, as with any other period of industrial change, it is the market that will be the engine of innovation. Smashing the windows of HSBC, as Extinction Rebellion activists did yesterday, pathetically misreads the situation, along with corporate attitudes towards ecology. Banks will be at the heart of financing the technology needed to address climate change without destroying our living standards.

It is easy for politicians to set targets. More useful would be to explain how we are going to create the economic conditions that encourage technologicaldevelopment. Britain, and the rest of the world, already faces an uphill struggle to recover from the pandemic: the threat of an even higher burden in the form of, say, higher green taxes is a terrible mistake. They should be green tax credits instead. To succeed, this revolution must be powered by the private sector, not the dead hand of the state, which has failed to achieve so many of its social goals before.

See the article here:
Science and the market, not socialism, will fix climate change - Telegraph.co.uk

To the Editor:

Don Noltes 3/26/21 letter, Will we choose hate or love?, is an olio of all kinds of stuff. I hardly know where to begin, though it is important to know, at the outset, that he is a New York Times (NYT) junkie.

For starters, he stated, The grim reality of our life, the NYT editorial board wrote, is that each new mass killing leads to a fevered study of motives and meaning. Was the latest shooter motivated by racism, misogyny, religion, revenge or a combination thereof? Those are not questions that members of a healthy society should routinely be forced to ask or answer.

Apparently, he is unaware that the majority of people are inherently nosy. When a tragedy occurs they freely participate in or seek out any discussions about the causes of the sad events. Whats abnormal about that? Everybody has an opinion.

Further on, Nolte claims that the demagoguery of Donald Trump was responsible for the recent wave of domestic terrorism. No facts, no tie-ins, just a generalization.

Then, he stated that China was Trumps scapegoat for covering up his mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. All I can say about that is if Nolte doesnt recognize that China is the primary threat to Americas future welfare, he needs to have his senses examined, and to stop reading the NYT. It is leading him down the garden path.

Considering that Nolte has been brainwashed by the NYT, it is obvious that in his view, welcoming and settling hundreds of thousands of illegal southern border crossers in America, is a much higher priority item than worrying about the threat of China to Americas future.

Adolf Ochs who coined the NYT masthead phrase, All the news thats fit to print, in 1897, would spin in his grave if he knew what his newspaper is doing these days - it surely isnt following its own prerogative.

Nolte and the NYT preach the virtues of socialism (e.g. diversity), while damning capitalism as breeding bigotry and hatred for all. The America that we currently live in is the result of living under capitalism for 245 consecutive years. Looking at the same period of world history, it is seen that socialism always fails. Take your pick.

Irving W. Glater

Exeter

Read the rest here:
Opinion/Letter: Preaching the virtues of socialism - Seacoastonline.com