PM Book & Record Shop

Independent Bookshop in Hastings providing new books ranging from the Social Sciences, social history, to culture, fiction, graphic novels & lots of vinyl.

[PM Book & Record Shop @PMBookshop]

https://t.co/KUNacQNwiM

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

Seeing sooo many tweets about “costing the taxpayer…”, “taxpayer’s money…” it really rips ma knittin’.
When govt spends it ADDS to the private sector. What it is spent on and who benefits is another matter, but it’s NOT a cost to taxpayers. Learn to reframe the argument.

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

You see, the problem is, the West's financial elite regard the real economy of production and services, along with those who work in it, as nothing more than an inconvenience. As profits fell in the productive sector after WWII, they outsourced production to low-currency nations abroad. They imported container loads of cheap crap and gave everyone credit cards. It still looked limp, so they blew up huge bubbles in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors. They ran down public services and bought up public property to increase their private investment and rentier opportunities. They lent loads of cheap bank credit to businesses and householders who struggled to pay it back. They digitalised marketing and closed down high streets. They preyed on the carcasses and asset-stripped. Private debt got out of hand, workers were placed under huge pressure for ever more efficiency and the 'working poor' emerged. They forced austerity on nations to punish borrowers and workers as they tried to protect the value of their hoarded money and income streams. They threatened national governments with currency attacks if they even suggested increased public investment. Then the BRICS got their act together and started to develop their own economies, threatening their financial dollar-dominance and cheap supply chains. So they panicked and started threatening war. Basically, its finished. Endgame. We need a real, hard-nosed political opposition, otherwise we face chaotic decline. The financial elite must be deposed.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

All the takes are correct and yet they also miss the point.

Yes, it was insane for the Democrats to think they could win by running a soulless candidate, without a shred of progressive policy vision, pursuing endorsements from neocon war-hawks everybody hates, while arming and funding a genocide, and belittling and crushing those who have enough morality to protest it.  It is enraging that the Democrats are so smug and blind to this.

But these are all just symptoms.  The deeper reality is that liberalism has failed, liberalism is dead, and people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises and it must be abandoned.

Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even *basic* steps like public healthcare, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee - things that would dramatically improve the material, social and political conditions of the working classes. And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a liveable future.

Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation. And for liberals capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, it is their only consistent commitment.  At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies. Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development.

The Democrats have done all this purposefully and knowingly, for my whole life, not as some kind of "mistake" but in full consciousness that it is in the interests of capital.

And because liberalism cannot address our crises, and because it crushes socialist alternatives, it inevitably paves the way for right-wing populism.  They know this pattern, and yet they risk it every time - this election being only the most recent example. They did it in 2016, when they actively crushed the Sanders campaign and sent Trump to the White House. They do it because ultimately they (and I mean the liberal ruling class here) don't really mind if fascists take power, so long as the latter too ensure the conditions for capital accumulation. They 100% prefer this to the possibility of a socialist alternative.

So, progressives have to face reality. The dream of "converting" the Democratic party is dead. This is now a fact and it must be accepted. The only option is to build a mass-based movement that can reclaim the working classes and mobilize a political vehicle that can integrate disparate progressive struggles into a unified and formidable political force and achieve substantive transformation. This will take real work, actual organizing, but it must be done and that process must begin now.

[Fadhel Kaboub فاضل قابوب @FadhelKaboub]

The biggest financial fraud in the history of the world is unfolding. It's a carbon bubble on a biblical scale. The climate Minsky moment is coming.

Full episode @BadFaithPod @briebriejoy: https://t.co/ChPnXrbCMh

Join me in endorsing @fossiltreaty https://t.co/4W6zLyXIEI

[Steven Hail @StevenHailAus]

Labo(u)r parties around the world campaign hard to get elected, apparently so once elected they can spend their time claiming things are so bad they are essentially beyond repair, doing nothing progressive about fundamentally shifting the system, and waiting to lose power again.

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

Economic bollocks. No one can ever save enough for healthcare, pension, and social care during a lifetime. This is not sensible at all, it’s based on a completely false understanding of the money system.
Taxation is not a funding mechanism. Govt finances are not like a household.

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

There is no such thing as taxpayers’ money https://t.co/bVm84zdoKC It’s an economic truth that every time a government spends, it creates new money to do so. It does not spend what is commonly called taxpayers’ money. Nor does it spend funds borrowed from the City. It simply asks the Bank of England to make a payment – and that’s what that Bank does, extending an overdraft to the government to let it do so.

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

Will all journalists, political commentators, and so called “economists” please pause and think about it. A currency issuing govt can’t run out of its own fiat currency.
Whatever is achievable is affordable.
Money is created at no cost when govt spends. No taxes, no “borrowing”.

[Stephanie Kelton @StephanieKelton]

Labour’s fiscal rules are a dead end for the party and for society. Being a good steward of public money isn’t about closing “fiscal holes” and “paying it back.” It’s about closing real deficits—health, infrastructure, education, etc—-and paying it forward for future generations.

[PM Book & Record Shop @PMBookshop]

Thanks for supporting the shop.

[Mark Garrod @markdg78]

Dayglo ... a beautiful book by @ladyzoe2dots and Celeste Bell from the excellent @PMBookshop in good company too @kennardmatt

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

NICs do not fund anything. A surplus cannot exist in an accouting vacuum, and if the govt has a "suplus" in the NIF it must, by accounting convention, have another account which has the matching deficit. Absent a private sector net deficit, the govt can never be in surplus.

[Malcolm Reavell @malcolm_reavell]

The irony is this “crisis” is deliberate policy choice, not happenstance, not economics, not for of money, nothing to do with “affordability”. Labour are shysters who now have a mandate to push through a level of privatisation that the Tories would never have dreamed of or dared.

[PM Book & Record Shop @PMBookshop]

RIP Jane McAlvey @rsgexp https://t.co/UOycGmGzjh