By Alex Lantier,
POLITICAL COMMENTATOR, WSWS.ORG (a socialists organization)
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington this week for discussions with President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other top US officials, who pressed him on economic and trade issues. He is traveling on to Iowa and California, to announce deals by Chinese corporations with US agricultural and film interests.
Xi is expected to become China’s president after this autumn’s 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which will significantly reshuffle the CCP’s top leadership. Of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the CCP’s leading organ, only two—Xi and his apparently defeated rival for the presidency, Li Keqiang—will keep their positions. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
Post sponsored by Gaither Stewart, Senior Editor, TGP
With our thanks to Paul Carline / From our Scottish brothers and sisters
By Moira Dalgetty in Athens.
Bella Caledonia
Television images of demonstrators being teargassed by riot police in Athens on Sunday night followed the usual rules of media coverage of civil unrest – plenty of graphic images with little or no honest representation of the story behind the actual events.
Make no mistake: what took place in Greece on the 12th of February 2012 – the agreement by the Greek parliament to the wholesale sell-off of their country – is about something far bigger, and much more insidious and dangerous, than debt, the story that is being sold to the public across Europe. To demonise the Greek people, as the European media has largely done, for failing to pay their taxes and therefore being responsible for what has happened, is simply smoke and mirrors on the part of the powers-that-be. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
BY PAUL SWEEZY & HARRY MAGDOFF
THE EDITORS OF MONTHLY REVIEW
As we write in early May (this piece, written by the editors, appeared in Monthly Review in June 1972—Eds), the long-expected crisis stemming from the collapse of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy has burst upon the world. How it will be resolved is still unknown, and anything that might be written on the question would certainly be overwhelmed by events long before it could be published. But it does seem an appropriate time to try to improve our understanding of the forces at work, especially one of the most elusive of these forces which has taken on enormous significance at this stage of history, i.e., the thought processes of those responsible for making U.S. policy. What are their preconceptions and prejudices? What are their aims, ambitions, hopes? How do they think they can get what they want? What is, or is likely to be, their reaction to failure? These are some of the questions that immediately come to mind. And while there are obviously no simple or uniformly valid answers, there is a great deal of relevant evidence at hand which ought to be carefully examined and weighed. In what follows we shall focus mainly though not exclusively on one piece of such evidence, the recently published autobiographical memoir by General Maxwell Taylor, who for many years was at the very center of the events which led up to the present crisis. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Big Oil ranks among the most profitable enterprises on earth. But capitalist corporations don’t pay their own costs – these are borne by the people and their environments. Few have paid a higher price than the oil-producing regions of Nigeria, now among the most devastated and toxic wastelands on the planet.
Since its nominal independence from Britain in the 1960s, the West African nation of Nigeria has been the scene of a vast, murderous and ecocidal wave of corporate crime. The leading culprits are the continuing corporate criminal conspiracies of Big Oil, including Shell, Texaco, Mobil, Conoco, BP, Total, and others, aided by a succession of compliant military and civilian governments, armies and police forces. The job of capitalist corporations is to maximize profits by externalizing, or shedding their costs onto other entities, and Big Oil has been massively successful in Nigeria. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
Healthcare as it should be
Cuba’s doctors also treat foreigners either in Cuba or as part of Cuba’s wordlwide system of medical missions to the poorest countries. As part of the aptly named “Operation Miracle”, targetting eye diseases, the Cuban physicians have treated more than 750,000 people for eye conditions like cataracts and glaucoma since the program started. And it’s all free, calibrated on the basis of need.
___________________
What is being done, in Cuba and Venezuela puts to shame the dysfunctional healthcare system of the US and exposes the Coalition government in Britain as it steers the NHS towards the profit-driven American model. Peter Arkell reports.
Of the many statistics in Steve Brouwer’s book, Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba are changing the World’s Conception of Health Care, one in particular stands out. There are more students, about 73,000, in medical school in Cuba and Venezuela, with a combined population of 39 million people, than there are in the whole of the US with a population of 300 million. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
By Ben McGrath, WSWS.ORG
Steve Jobs: Was he ignorant or just indifferent?
7 February 2012
US technology giant Apple last month released its annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report, detailing its commitment to improving working conditions in the international network of factories that produce its products. These yearly reports, which began in 2007, are nothing but a cynical public relations exercise designed to whitewash the company’s image.
The latest report declares that Apple requires its suppliers to “provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes.” This claim, issued for public consumption in the US and other markets, bears no relationship to the harsh regimes throughout the factories of its suppliers in China and other countries. Read more…
Did you like this? Share it:
