SolidarityEconomy.net

by Bill Bianchi, SolidarityEconomy.net

Imagine a Republican strategist, a little unnerved by signs of a Progressive revival across the US during the past few years, asking himself, ‘what can I do to discourage those fledgling leftist”? Well, sir, you couldn’t do much better than have them all read Robert Brenner’s speculative piece, Structure Vs. Conjuncture: the 2006 Election and the Rightward Shift. It relentlessly crushes any flowers of optimism that might have bloomed from last November’s Democratic electoral victories.

Brenner starts by framing the results as purely anti-Bush with no chance that they could also signal a surge of progressive movement within the Democrat party and in the country. No support is offered for this pronouncement, other than to say that it is “generally acknowledged”. Despite the Democratic victory in both houses of Congress, Brenner characterizes the Republicans loss a “remarkable” feat in which they “held their own” because their base, roughly one third of the electorate, turned out in (more…)

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philppines

The initial report of UN rapporteur Philip Alston on his investigation into extrajudicial killings in the Philippines has vindicated the position of the victims’ families and zealous advocates of justice for the victims such as the human rights organization Karapatan, activist people’s organizations and a host of local and international faith-based, academic and professional groups and institutions that took up the cudgels for the victims. In sum, according to Mr. Alston, extrajudicial killings are a fact, they are significant in number and impact, and government is responsible for a “climate of virtual impunity” that allows the killers to get away with their crimes and for the killings to continue unimpeded.

The UN report constitutes a stinging rebuke of the chorus of denials that have consistently been issued by the de facto President Mrs. Macapagal-Arroyo, the high Cabinet officials who compose the (more…)

by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net

.Third World corporations on world stage

Antoine van Agtmael, former World Bank official head of the Emerging Markets Growth Fund, says new Third World corporations are a better breed than their developed world peers. In his new book, The Emerging Markets Century he lists the 25 emerging multinationals set to dominate the world. Among them are Samsung and Hyundai from S. Korea, Embraer and  Aracruz from Brazil, Yue Yuen the athletic shoes manufacturer from Taiwan and Telmex from Mexico. To make Agtmael’s list companies need have a top three market share in enough markets to be global players and be (more…)

The 2006 Elections and the Rightward Shift

by Robert Brenner

How should the Democrats’ 2006 recapture of Congress be interpreted in the context of the broader trends in American politics over the last decades? In what follows, I will examine the development of the two parties against the background of underlying shifts in the balance of class forces in America, to read the conjuncture of 2006 against the deeper structural movements of the American polity—from the labour struggles of the 1930s and construction of the New Deal Democrats, through the Great Society reforms of the postwar boom, to the political paradigms of the capitalist offensive with the onset of the long downturn. Within this framework, I will argue that the rise of the Republican right, building from bases in an expanding, non-unionized South, (more…)

by Mitchel Cohen, Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, and co-founder, Red Balloon Collective

FORTY YEARS IT’S BEEN. In October 1967, I was an 18-year-old junior at SUNY Stony Brook, organizing students to participate in the first militant demonstration on the East Coast against the Vietnam war. At the Pentagon.

Phil Ochs — my hero — was scheduled to perform at Stony Brook that night. Many students were saying they weren’t going on the march because they wanted to go to Phil’s concert instead. SDS wrote letter after letter trying to get him to change the date. No answer. Finally — oh, how it cut my heart out — we organized a boycott of his records. (more…)

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philippines

How ironic that while the rest of the world, including the people of the USA, are waking up to the Bush administration’s big fat lies about the “war on terror”, Filipinos continue to be fed with the same sort of lies by the Arroyo regime. In fact the latter is in the process of completing the railroading of a so-called Anti-Terrorism Bill (ATB) that is the result of high-profile lobbying as well as arm-twisting by high officials of the Bush government. A two-day special session of the Lower House of Congress has been called by Mrs. Arroyo to ratify the bill so that she can quickly sign it into law. (more…)

Reviewed by Joseph Matthews

For those Guild members who know Paul Harris from his time as President of the NLG, the fact that he has written a book about characters with deep political convictions will come as no surprise. The same is true for those who know him as co-founder of the San Francisco Community Law Collective, or as the teacher of “guerrilla law” in his guise as Charles Garry Professor of Law at New College in San Francisco. That this novel presents a convincing and powerful historical account of the collision of radical politics and the “justice” system will also make perfect sense to anyone who has read his earlier non-fiction exposition of guerrilla law in action, Black Rage Confronts the Law (NYU Press, 1997). (more…)

by Glen Ford

“Barack Obama is our son and he deserves our support,” declared Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., speaking to a gathering of Black Democrats at the party’s winter meeting, in Washington, earlier this month. By Jones’ logic, Condoleezza Rice deserves automatic African American support as “our daughter,” and Colin Powell, her predecessor as George Bush’s Secretary of State, was due fealty as “our brother.”

Jones’ embrace of the entire African American family tree must also, therefore, extend to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, the most reactionary, anti-Black member of the High Court; and to “our brother” J. Kenneth Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State whose consuming mission in 2004 was to deny the franchise to as many fellow Blacks as possible. (more…)

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philippines

Not a few friends and even fellow activists have asked whether the right thing to do in the coming May polls is simply to boycott the darned thing what with the numerous signs that bode ill for a honest, fair and clean elections that would give a fighting chance for the electoral Opposition to win a significant number of congressional and local government seats.

The discredited head of the Commission on Elections refuses to relinquish the job while failing to undertake any major reforms such as the dismantling of the entrenched (more…)

by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net

. US bars students and loses scientists

Tighter visa laws have keep thousands of potential foreign students from enrolling in US universities and make it difficult for US companies to hire and meet with foreign employees. Some estimates put the loss to the US economy at $30B. On the flip side cuts in government funding of scientific research is forcing many young scientist to leave the US, most going to the UK, Australia and Singapore. Says Xandra Breakefield from Harvard Medical School, “The situation is incredibly bleak, I find myself telling (more…)

by Carol Pagaduan-Araullo, Philippines

The Melo Commission created by the Arroyo administration to address extrajudicial killings of activists and journalists has submitted its 89-page report to Mrs. Arroyo but she has so far refused to make it public. All we know about it are the initial, off-the-cuff comments by the commission’s chairman and a bishop-member to the media, subsequent Malacanang press releases and Mrs. Arroyo’s pretentious, if rather smug, statements to the diplomatic corps during the traditional vin d’honneur at the Presidential Palace.

The refusal of Malacanang to release the report for the scrutiny of all interested parties, not least of all the aggrieved kin of victims of summary executions, attempted killings (more…)

by Jerry Harris, SolidarityEconomy.net

.Abdullah Badawi rejects Clash of Civilizations

The prime minister of Malaysia and chairman of the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Conference rejected the well known “clash of civilizations” thesis of Harvard’s Samuel Huntington. Speaking of rising conflicts throughout the Middle East and world Abdullah Badawi said, “They may mobilize themselves along ideological or religious lines. But at heart the conflicts are driven by the impulse for power, territory and resources, and by resistance to this.” He also called on (more…)

Presidents Bush and Ahmadinejad have lost face at home; now others must forge peaceful settlements in the Middle East

by Henry Porter, Observer

There is a striking likeness in the expressions of George W Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran as they confront each other over the issues of uranium enrichment and dominance in the Middle East. It falls somewhere between the chastened and defiant playground bully. (more…)