En Passant

This piece, Tax avoidance in Australia: is it just one bad Apple? was my second most read article in 2014. After explaining various tax arrangements, it concludes:

Company tax avoidance is not a failing of capitalism: it is its logical expression.

There are two ways to really tax the rich. The first is for workers to win bigger pay increases to stop the bosses getting their hands on more of our money before they can play funny buggers with it. The second is to overthrow the capitalist system which produces corporate tax avoidance.

This particular Saturday’s socialist speak out had a lot of readers. It covered a range of subjects and here is a snippet.

Isn’t it time the Community and Public Sector Union organised its members to strike to stop the jobs massacre in the ATO and elsewhere across the public service? If not, then the best thing Abbott and Hockey have going for them is CPSU leader Nadine Flood.

The question is how to break out of the hamster wheel of Liberal and Labor conservatism. Is putting a socialist in the Senate viable? Do you support it?

I saw you at the mall
You did not notice

We workers create the wealth Hockey and Abbott are redistributing to the rich

Where does all this income – profits, rents, dividends, interest, wages etc – and the taxes imposed on it, come from? It is the wealth (or more precisely, in Marxist terms, the surplus value) we workers create that we are talking about. It is ours. We should decide where it goes, not the parliamentary popinjays of profit.

Nobel peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai is a Muslim, a feminist and a socialist. Isn’t it funny we don’t hear about these defining themes in her life?

Here is number 9 in my top ten most read articles this year. The article the ANU student ‘newspaper’ refused to publish.

This was the tenth most read article on my blog this year. Why the attacks on the disabled, pensioners, the low paid, the unemployed, students, the sick, Aborigines…? Here is a snippet:

Marx identified the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the dagger at the heart of capitalism. The more successful individual capital is, the more of a problem it produces for capitalism. Labor is the sole source of value. The drive for more profit over competitors sees as a generalisation more and more profit reinvested in capital compared to labor at a greater rate than increases in value extracted from workers. Profit rates fall.

From my verandah
I can see the storm, coming,

My latest missive to the Canberra Times, prompted by a page one article about solar panels.  Given I have a success rate of 0% these days with the Canberra Times letters, I expect this too to go into their rubbish bin of history. _______________________ The article ‘Solar take-up through the roof’ (Kirsten Lawson, The Canberra […]