"FISHY" Lawsuit Against CASHLESS NATIONAL PARKS
15 Mar 2024
At first I applauded this action, but then I dug deeper and was dismayed by what I found out. Why the deception??
This is the problem with common law. The truth of of it is common law can only exist in jurisdictions where the people involved broadly agree to obey what is outlined in the Commandments. As soon as they don't, as soon as they replace then as themselves being the arbiters of right and wrong, the common law just becomes a system to be games, like any other system. And this is where I agree with David Harvey.
RSA ANIMATE: Crises of Capitalism
28 Jun 2010
In this RSA Animate, celebrated academic David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?
This specifically.
CAPITAL CANNOT ABIDE A LIMIT
This includes the Rule of Law...Common Law. So it pays "The Brights" and "The Footlights" to find a way to CIRCUMVENT the system at any cost the the society it parasites off.
I think what we get confused with, people doing jobs, taking one set of commodities and transforming them into something different with value, then exchanging them for a common item of value to make life easier to swap them for other items of value at a later date is not Capitalism. What I have described has always existed, firstly in the form of barter, Capitalism includes the idea of competition, markets and bidding for the lowest tender...transforming everything into a measure of cost and value.
I put up an article here that states Laissez-faire Capitalism is Liberalism. It doesn't matter if you are a "classical liberal", a "social liberal" or a "neoliberal", it's all liberalism, it's all Capitalism, it's a model that fundamentally requires slavery as part of the model to function.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-original ... ed-slavery
Slavery as free trade
The 18th-century thinkers behind laissez-faire economics saw slavery as a great example of global free trade
For nearly four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of people into bondage. Scholars estimate that around 1.5 million people perished in the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. The slave trade linked Africa, Europe and the Americas in a horrific enterprise of death and torture and profit. Yet, in the middle of the 18th century, as the slave trade boomed like never before, some notable European observers saw it as a model of free enterprise and indeed of ‘liberty’ itself. They were not slave traders or slave-ship captains but economic thinkers, and very influential ones. They were a pioneering group of economic thinkers committed to the principle of laissez-faire: a term they themselves coined. United around the French official Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759), they were among the first European intellectuals to argue for limitations on government intervention in the economy. They organised campaigns for the deregulation of domestic and international trade, and they made the slave trade a key piece of evidence in their arguments.
For a generation, the relationship between slavery and capitalism has preoccupied historians. The publication of several major pieces of scholarship on the matter has won attention from the media. Scholars demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution, centred on the mass production of cotton textiles in the factories of England and New England, depended on raw cotton grown by slaves on plantations in the American South. Capitalists often touted the superiority of the industrial economies and their supposedly ‘free labour’. ‘Free labour’ means the system in which workers are not enslaved but free to contract with any manufacturer they chose, free to sell their labour. It means that there is a labour market, not a slave market.
But because ‘free labour’ was working with and dependent on raw materials produced by slaves, the simple distinction between an industrial economy of free labour on the one hand and a slave-based plantation system on the other falls apart. So too does the boundary between the southern ‘slave states’ and northern ‘free states’ in America. While the South grew rich from plantation agriculture that depended on slave labour, New England also grew rich off the slave trade, investing in the shipping and maritime insurance that made the transport of slaves from Africa to the United States possible and profitable. The sale of enslaved Africans brought together agriculture and industry, north and south, forming a global commercial network from which the modern world emerged.
It is only in the past few decades that scholars have come to grips with how slavery and capitalism intertwined. But for the 18th-century French thinkers who laid the foundations of laissez-faire capitalism, it made perfect sense to associate the slave trade with free enterprise. Their writings, which inspired the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), aimed to convince the French monarchy to deregulate key businesses such as the sale of grain and trade with Asia. Only a few specialists read them today. Yet these pamphlets, letters and manuscripts clearly proclaim a powerful message: the birth of modern capitalism depended not only on the labour of enslaved people and the profits of the slave trade, but also on the example of slavery as a deregulated global enterprise.
The thing with that description, the idea that workers in the cotton textile factories of England, who were apparently free to contract with any manufacturer they so chose, were any better off than the enslaved in America is a logical fallacy. Swings and roundabouts. If you were a slave in America, you had accommodation, you were given food, your owner enforced a rule of law among his slaves, your life was short, you didn't get to choose, but your owner was entirely responsible for you, even up unto burying you. When one reads 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists', a part biographical account of the horrors of the Victorian age in England, poverty wages, contract to contract begging for work, always the threat of sickness and the Workhouse.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3608
Chapter 21
The Reign of Terror. The Great Money Trick
During the next four weeks the usual reign of terror continued at “The Cave”. The men slaved like so many convicts under the vigilant surveillance of Crass, Misery and Rushton. No one felt free from observation for a single moment. It happened frequently that a man who was working alone—as he thought—on turning round would find Hunter or Rushton standing behind him: or one would look up from his work to catch sight of a face watching him through a door or a window or over the banisters. If they happened to be working in a room on the ground floor, or at a window on any floor, they knew that both Rushton and Hunter were in the habit of hiding among the trees that surrounded the house, and spying upon them thus.
There was a plumber working outside repairing the guttering that ran round the bottom edge of the roof. This poor wretch’s life was a perfect misery: he fancied he saw Hunter or Rushton in every bush. He had two ladders to work from, and since these ladders had been in use Misery had thought of a new way of spying on the men. Finding that he never succeeded in catching anyone doing anything wrong when he entered the house by one of the doors, Misery adopted the plan of crawling up one of the ladders, getting in through one of the upper windows and creeping softly downstairs and in and out of the rooms. Even then he never caught anyone, but that did not matter, for he accomplished his principal purpose—every man seemed afraid to cease working for even an instant.
The result of all this was, of course, that the work progressed rapidly towards completion. The hands grumbled and cursed, but all the same every man tore into it for all he was worth. Although he did next to nothing himself, Crass watched and urged on the others. He was “in charge of the job”: he knew that unless he succeeded in making this work pay he would not be put in charge of another job. On the other hand, if he did make it pay he would be given the preference over others and be kept on as long as the firm had any work. The firm would give him the preference only as long as it paid them to do so.
As for the hands, each man knew that there was no chance of obtaining work anywhere else at present; there were dozens of men out of employment already. Besides, even if there had been a chance of getting another job somewhere else, they knew that the conditions were more or less the same on every firm. Some were even worse than this one. Each man knew that unless he did as much as ever he could, Crass would report him for being slow. They knew also that when the job began to draw to a close the number of men employed upon it would be reduced, and when that time came the hands who did the most work would be kept on and the slower ones discharged. It was therefore in the hope of being one of the favoured few that while inwardly cursing the rest for “tearing into it”, everyone as a matter of self-preservation went and “tore into it” themselves.
They all cursed Crass, but most of them would have been very glad to change places with him: and if any one of them had been in his place they would have been compelled to act in the same way—or lose the job.
They all reviled Hunter, but most of them would have been glad to change places with him also: and if any one of them had been in his place they would have been compelled to do the same things, or lose the job.
They all hated and blamed Rushton. Yet if they had been in Rushton’s place they would have been compelled to adopt the same methods, or become bankrupt: for it is obvious that the only way to compete successfully against other employers who are sweaters is to be a sweater yourself. Therefore no one who is an upholder of the present system can consistently blame any of these men. Blame the system.
If you, reader, had been one of the hands, would you have slogged? Or would you have preferred to starve and see your family starve? If you had been in Crass’s place, would you have resigned rather than do such dirty work? If you had had Hunter’s berth, would you have given it up and voluntarily reduced yourself to the level of the hands? If you had been Rushton, would you rather have become bankrupt than treat your “hands” and your customers in the same way as your competitors treated theirs? It may be that, so placed, you—being the noble-minded paragon that you are—would have behaved unselfishly. But no one has any right to expect you to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of other people who would only call you a fool for your pains. It may be true that if any one of the hands—Owen, for instance—had been an employer of labour, he would have done the same as other employers. Some people seem to think that proves that the present system is all right! But really it only proves that the present system compels selfishness. One must either trample upon others or be trampled upon oneself. Happiness might be possible if everyone were unselfish; if everyone thought of the welfare of his neighbour before thinking of his own. But as there is only a very small percentage of such unselfish people in the world, the present system has made the earth into a sort of hell. Under the present system there is not sufficient of anything for everyone to have enough. Consequently there is a fight—called by Christians the “Battle of Life”. In this fight some get more than they need, some barely enough, some very little, and some none at all. The more aggressive, cunning, unfeeling and selfish you are the better it will be for you. As long as this “Battle of Life” System endures, we have no right to blame other people for doing the same things that we are ourselves compelled to do. Blame the system.