A word of advice to people shopping in Enniskillen: Buy your bread and milk from the local shopkeeper. He provides a valuable service by alerting the police to what's happening in the area. He can usually be relied on to come to some needy person's assistance and often has a reputation for doing someone a good turn unlike the big supermarkets (and their clientele).
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On this theme,a digression into the advocates of charity i.e. the nests of charity collectors is relevant to the theme of good works.
Charity-collectors and the Catholic Church in the town of Enniskillen think that Unemployment Benefit suffices for human need and poor social ideaisation for proper sustenance. They do not visit the poor nor do they pay church heating bills out of their copious resources and "investments". They reckon that independent -minded people enslaved and maligned by the priests, Orange Order, British Army,big business interests and those in high office should leave them every last penny in their wills. The clergy think that the poor should grow dockens and nettles in their back garden and window-boxes to feed themselves.
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A precedent was set for those gangsters by the GLUTTONS,the Epicureans.
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On the theme of private charity,the proper type,True Christians say to the clergy,"Buck up your act!"
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The clergy and the church builders
Whatever might be said about the Italians and most nurses,the anarchists in London and republicans of the nationalist stripe (and any organised socialist party or group) they can be relied on to do their best to help at least one of the needy who they meet in the course of their daily endeavours......
...... I speak as someone who was fed by Italians in Paris after my carte bancaire was stolen and I "fell amongst brigands".
The true organisers and cultivators of Christian charity are the Italians. They have few equals for self -sacrifice and good works by virtue of the long-standing inculcation of Christian values.
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13.11.2021
Charity collectors. The golden rule as regards shopping
Never shop anywhere there is not at least one charity-box because what they are selling is old or about to go out-of-date. Pay no heed to the particular charity since shopkeepers don't give a hang about it. In such instances,they are only anxious to send out a message that they are ethical traders and socially responsible.
26.11.2021
A cautionary tale...
Do not indulge a shopkeeper's appetite for ripping you off by leaving you with old currency under the pretence of an honest transaction. It is improper tender. You should you not welcome strangers connected to him in any way into your home. Those are the sort of people who beat you up,rob you and bring scandal and ruin to you and your family. They are what is known as gougers and their synopsis is that you owe their patron for small favours money.
4.1.2022
Materialism. Commerce.
Shoppers,customers and readers,a publican and small shopkeeper is connected to the police in some police station or other. He covets your money not your approval as does any businessman. He can be dangerous and,if you antagonise him or do not give him custom and respect, he will speak up against you in the highest court in the land.... after spreading rumours,gossip and innuendo about you to even members of your own family. That was what happened to me at the fiat of the Northern Ireland Office and British Army. The other end of this witching stick was the Provo publican. That type is a failed politician who nobody takes seriously. People laugh at him behind his back. Apart that is from those who know that he is dangerous,too. He harbours grudges long after others have forgotten the slight. Like an elephant or unschooled Arab or Jew,he never forgets a slight and will always seek revenge for an imagined injury to the only thing he values, his business reputation.
The ingrate shopkeeper
Report him to the police if he sells you contraband tobacco. He intends to sell illegal drugs too should you be foolish enough to indulge his appetite for cash sales and overcharging the customer.
This moneylender's ultimate destination is prison for loansharking.
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12.4.2022
The beneficial side to small business? Marx in Soho 1848-52
Marx was profoundly affected by his experience as a penniless exile in Dean Street,Soho,London. He existed on credit from small shopkeepers. He complained in the years from 1848 to 1852 of being accosted by'promoters' i.e. those hawking their wares on behalf of shopkeepers.
Perhaps,it was his early experience of penury which persuaded him to talk of money as the Universal Equivalent (Capital,Volume 1). That contention is not entirely transitory nor is it entirely false. Academically and theoretically the belief has long been eroded in visibility and undermined since the 1840's and I dare to say,his money-worshipping prose was the cause of the ruin of his camp followers in Russia in December 1991.
Die Wende. The change in Eastern Europe April-December 1989. At the core of the transition to market economics lay Marxist materialism.
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The Russian dimension
Raisa Gorbachev was a Professor of Marxism Leninism, the real power behind the scenes in the Soviet Union. She was bitterly opposed to Reagan and unschooled yakkng birds such as Thatcher as well as Western market economists e.g.Elliott and Brunner of the Manchester Guardian. (The Free Trade school based around Thatcher knew nothing about Russia that wasn't out-of-date by the 1950's.) Those two aforementioned journalists of that ludicrous newsrag were the main source of false and misleading information in the English -speaking world about the Soviet Union. Both journalists in question concealed the roles of foreign intervention and domestic trade unions opposition to Gorbachev. The Soviet Union collapsed because it could not deliver higher living standards,a feature of its existence due to political and economic stagnation.
Dialectics? The neglected study of change
No one in the West understood then that historical development is a continuous and ongoing process which cannot be ignored. Socialism is a science still in its youth which has suffered a serious setback but certainly not a crushing defeat as Chinese development proves abundantly. Where there is a clear political will and economic flexibility at all levels,there is a path to be followed. That only happens if the tide of history is not against a regime or way of life AND in a situation of international equanimity. Today,the shoe is on the other foot and the world is universally hostile to the American way of life unlike the past.
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Marx? His conditions of existence in his latter formative years? Soho...
Small Anglo-Saxon shopkeepers in London during the period 1848-1852 extended Karl Marx and his family credit. Perhaps rather than the City of London financial concerns they may have had marginally greater culpability for the end of the Soviet Union than O Riordain's pedantic nonsense about a 'CIA plot'(Justice Books,2000).
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21.11.2022
But,I digress from my theme of the contemporary small shopkeeper and owner of a small chain of shops connected to a larger supplier or wholesaler...
Read a guide to ethical trading and you will invariably see products from family businesses and producers who treat their workers fairly on the shelves of small shops. It is when the retailer is big and anonymous that the Indian or Brazilian blackleg producer and his wares make their appearance.
Ethical spending?
Lenin wrote, TEST,THEN VERIFY.When in doubt about ethical retailing,consult a Christian lay group or Oxfam or War on Want for purchasing guidance.
Shop Fair Trade and ethically and leave sub-standard and inferior products-an unethical producer has no future, long-term,in business- to the undiscerning who settles for SECOND BEST and the fly-by-night operator out to make a quick killing at the expense of the unwary shopper.
" I rest my case,me 'ol' guv'nor" (The 'Play'of July-August 1988, "Ochon!Ochon!Ochon!", "Round the floor and mind the dresser...").
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5.12.2022
Do not go to a small shopkeeper or other small businessman too regularly and thereby build up a dependence on him or you will be ripped off of your hard-won earnings and meagre income.You will,in the case of the Irish small shopkeeper,be the subject of extortion. However buy as much of his wares as possible,those that is that are reasonably priced and do not pose a risk to your mental health or domestic hygiene.
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A legal saw....
Caveat emptor?
Not so on most occasions,more a case of not trusting a cheat.
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