SolidarityEconomy.net

by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net

. Transnational capitalists hedge US investments
In November US investors bought a record number of foreign assets ($39.1B) amid fears of the weakening dollar. Wall Street Banks are also profiting from a boom in global business with international revenues growing three times as fast as their US investments. The world’s biggest bank, Citigroup, said its international revenues jumped 34 percent compared to an increase of about 10 percent in the US. For the first time operations in Europe and Asia earned (more…)

by Graham Bowley, Financial Times

Andy Hines is stuck in traffic. Predictable enough for Houston at rush hour, but frustrating none the less. The 44-year-old gesticulates with a wiry, tattooed arm at the lines of red tail- lights forecasting a slow drive ahead, but focuses most of his ire on something less immediately tangible: the future. Or rather, the role of futurology - his chosen profession - in the corporate world.

“I should have just gotten an MBA,” Hines says, explaining that futurists are seldom given credit for their ideas within the big organisations where (more…)

by Ismael Hossein-Zadeh

“The military-industrial-complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials.”

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.”

- General Smedley D. Butler (more…)

[From SolidarityEconomy.net editors: While there’s been plenty of coverage of Chavez’s ‘ruling by decree,’ little has been said about the matters concerned and how its part of his country’s legal system. It also gives an idea of how something like ‘Economic Democracy’ might be brought into being in other countries as well.]

By Venezuelanalysis.com, Caracas, January 17, 2007

Venezuela’s National Assembly approved a resolution yesterday, according to which the legislature would declare emergency sessions for the approval of an “enabling law,” which will allow President Chavez to pass law-decrees on specific issues in the next 18 months. The National Assembly (AN) will begin deliberations on the law tomorrow. (more…)

by John McMillian

Recently I finished teaching a freshman seminar at Harvard called “From Reform to Revolution: Youth Culture in the 1960s.” When I built the syllabus, I asked students to ponder a single, overarching question: “How did the youth rebellion of the 1960s happen?” That is, what caused millions of young people to pierce the bland and platitudinous din that characterized the early Cold War years? Why did so many youths — many of them affluent and college-educated — suddenly decide that American society needed to be radically overhauled? (more…)

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philippines

As expected, de facto President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo lost no time in trying to parlay her claimed “success” at the 12th ASEAN Summit and the East Asian Summit into glowing predictions about the economy not just in the medium-term but within the year 2007.

Understandably, Mrs. Arroyo is basking in the afterglow of two regional summits that turned out to be one grand production (incidentally, with a price tag of two billion pesos) in terms of the sprucing-up of the public infrastructure of Cebu; the elaborate table-settings and sumptuous food served at the official receptions; the pleasing song-and-dance numbers in (more…)

by Jerry Harris

.Starbucks in China’s Forbidden City

Starbucks Forbidden City location has been called an “affront to Chinese culture” in a protest by netizens to get the coffee shop relocated. China has 123 million people on-line where the campaign has found a home on blogs. Writes Rui Chenggang, “This is not globalization but abuse of Chinese culture.”

. Tesco to use carbon labels

Tesco is a UK corporation and the world’s fifth largest retail chain. It recently announced it will create an index (more…)

Stephen Hawking warns:

We must recognise
the catastrophic dangers
of climate change

By Steve Connor

Science Editor
The Independent (UK)
January 18, 2007

Climate change stands alongside the use of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats posed to the future of the world, the Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking has said.

Professor Hawking said that we stand on the precipice of a second nuclear age and a period of exceptional climate change, both of which could destroy the planet as we know it.

He was speaking at the Royal Society in London yesterday at a conference organised by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists which has decided to move the minute hand of its “Doomsday Clock” forward to five minutes to midnight to reflect the increased dangers faced by the world. (more…)

by Chris Floyde

January 12, 2007

I. The Twin Engines of Bush’s War

The reason that George W. Bush insists that “victory” is achievable in Iraq is not because he is deluded or isolated or ignorant or detached from reality or ill-advised. (more…)

Financial Times

George W. Bush’s new direction in Iraq is certainly not a strategy for victory, whatever that word, which is used ever more desperately by the US president, now means. It may be one last heave. It may be a cover for
US withdrawal. But two things are quite clear.

Right now, Mr Bush has the support of no more than one in four Americans for this so-called surge of an extra 20,000 or so troops. Very soon, as the already indecipherable ethnic and sectarian patchwork of Iraq is pulled further and even more bloodily to pieces, he will have none. (more…)

Max Ogden, SolidarityEconomy.net

January 16, 2007, Australia

With acknowledgements for helpful comments – Dave Davies, Dave Feickert, and Greg Pettiona

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has led a very fine campaign against the reactionary industrial relations legislation and is winning the public debate. However in the long term the union movement needs to add another important dimension to its strategy, if it is not only to regain and increase membership and the critical role that a (more…)

by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net

. Brazilian capital moves abroad

For the first time Brazilian companies invested more abroad than the amount of direct investments coming into Brazil. In 2006 Brazilian companies had foreign investments of $26B compared to inward investments of $18B. CVRD lead the way with a $17.6B acquisition of Canadian miner Inco. CVRD is the world’s biggest exporter of iron ore and the second biggest mining group in the world. They have operations in 11 countries with their     biggest market being China. These figures point to the growth of the transnational capitalist class in the third world and trade relations growing outside the US/European axis. (more…)

Interview with Heinz Dieterich
By Cristina Marcano, Rebelion.org

Q. Professor Dieterich, did you invent the concept of “Socialism of the 21st Century”?

A. Yes. I developed it, beginning in 1996. It has been published with its corresponding theory in book form, from 2000 on, in Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina, Central America, Brazil, and Venezuela, and, outside Latin America, in Spain, Germany, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, and Turkey. Since 2001, it has been appropriated all over the world. Presidents like Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa use it constantly, and so do labor movements, farmers, intellectuals, and political parties. (more…)

by John Nichols

In a sober address to the nation Wednesday night, President Bush confirmed his determination to surge the United States military deeper into the Iraq quagmire by sending roughly 21,500 more troops to that troubled land.

The president went even further than his critics feared he might, outlining a dangerous program of integrating U.S. and Iraqi military units – with U.S. trainers and strategists embedded in Iraqi units and U.S. brigades partnered with Iraqi brigades. And he signaled that he will implement his new approach before Congress has a chance to consider it. Indeed, the first new U.S. brigade is scheduled to hit the ground in Iraq Monday. (more…)

by Stephen Philion and Chi Hua*

Robert Weil’s recent (June 206) MR article on the condition of the Chinese working class has provided us with a rarely visited and lucid view of the impact of China’s turn to markets on both the economic and political decline of China’s working class. Such work, based on in-depth field interviews, can only serve as a basis for a deeper understanding of both the contradictions of China’s economic growth and potential for present and future organization in defense of China (and the world’s) working class. However, despite these laudable strengths, Weil’s article falls short at the level of analysis, which reflects that of political (more…)