By Colin Fox
October 21, 2010 -- The British people have a long and proud history of defeating repression, tyranny and injustice. They stood up to Hitler in World War II and defeated Thatcher's poll tax in 1991 by invoking an inspiring spirit of resistance against seemingly insurmountable forces. And it’s just a well because they need to call on those traditions once again to defeat those behind the unprecedented and brutal cuts proposed for our public services.
When you stand back from discussions like the one BBC Scotland broadcast on October 14 in which Glen Campbell quizzed an invited studio audience on where the axe should fall you realise there’s an enormous injustice at the heart of this debate. It is the people, the masses, the vast majority, who are being forced by the elite, the rich, landowners, factory owners, bank owners and those who "own" our politicians to pay for this crisis. As usual the hired "commentariat" cannot see "the wood for the trees". They are apparently oblivious to the fact the victims of this economic crime are again being punished by its perpetrators.
Britain: Con-Dem government to roll back social gains won since WWII
Greens MP Caroline Lucas addresses the October 20, 2010, protest against the cuts in London, organised by the Coalition of Resistance.
By Raphie de Santos
October 21, 2010 – Socialist Resistance – The Conservative Party-Liberal Democrat Party (Con-Dem) coalition government has announced the most severe cuts in public spending since the great depression of the 1930s. The £81 billion (bn) of announced cuts and the £30 bn of tax increases for the next four fiscal years starting in April 2011 are on top of the already announced £8bn cuts for this fiscal year. Add in the hidden cuts (the National Health Service) and it all amounts to a rolling back of a large part of the gains that people have fought to establish since the end of the second world war.
Venezuela and the Millennium Development Goals
By the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Australia
October 20, 2010 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, with the permission of Monthly Review Press, is excited to offer its readers an excerpt from the The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, an important new book by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York. Links' readers are urged to purchase the book. Please click here to order your copy. You can download (in PDF) the chapter, "The ecology of consumption", below the following introduction, or read it on screen.
* * *
1,000,000th visitor to Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
October 20, 2010 – In the early hours of October 20, 2010, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal passed an historic milestone – its 1,000,000th visitor (since statistics beg
South Asia: A regional `new politics' needed to challenge neoliberal agenda
October 14, 2010 -- Fisherfolk rally for debt cancellation, Karachi.
By Farooq Tariq
October 2, 2010 -- The recent devastating flood, affecting the lives of more than 20 million people in Pakistan, has once again revealed the severe poverty that people of Pakistan are facing. The only property that many hundreds of thousands were left with after fleeing their mud homes perhaps was just a trunk, few clothes and pottery and may be a donkey, cow or a buffalo.
Germany: Greens' support surges as two-party system unravels
Chairperson of the German Greens' parliamentary group in the Bundestag Renate Künast.
By Duroyan Fertl
October 17, 2010 -- Green Left Weekly -- Coasting on the back of environmental protests and a hemorrhaging two-party system, the German Greens have sent shock waves through German politics, surging into the position of main opposition party for the first time.
The Greens party, which was part of a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from 1998-2005 at the expense of many of the party’s principles, is benefiting from the unraveling of Germany’s traditional two-party system.
Nevertheless, the two major parties — the centre-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union coalition (CDU/CSU) and the centre-left SPD — retain a monopoly over government in Europe’s biggest economy.
But the facade appears to be truly falling apart at last. Opinion polls in early October put the Greens on 24%, one point ahead of the SPD.
Afghanistan: Malalai Joya -- `for our people, Obama is a warmonger, like another Bush'
Malalai Joya visits a girls' school in Farah province in Afghanistan. Photo: AfghanKabul.
By Malalai Joya
October 10, 2010 -- rabble.ca -- In the United States, many looked to the ballot box and hoped for real change when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008.
To be honest, I never expected that he would be any different for Afghanistan than President George W. Bush. The truth is that Obama's war policies have turned out to be even more of a nightmare than most people expected. Obama talked a lot about hope and change, but for Afghanistan the only change has been for the worse.
After almost two years of Obama, the number of US troops occupying Afghanistan has more than doubled. And the number of drone attacks in Pakistan has increased. Obama's so-called surge of troops has resulted in increased Afghan civilian deaths.
The documents released by Wikileaks prove what we have been saying about war in Afghanistan. There are more massacres by NATO forces than they wanted us to believe. Now the whole world should know this war is a disaster.
The new climate-change denialism: Who promotes it, and how to answer it
By Renfrey Clarke
October 15, 2010 – You remember the scandal provoked by the errors and exaggerations in the 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? And you know all about the even bigger “Climategate” scandal last year, when stolen emails revealed that leading climate scientists were manipulating data to fit their alarmist political agenda? Now we have the next instalment. In a new Guide to the Science of Climate Change the world’s top science body, Britain’s Royal Society, has quit playing politics and stopped peddling its claims of looming disaster.
The left cannot ignore China's achievement in poverty reduction
Source:UN Human Development Report, 2007/2008.
By Reihana Mohideen
October 15, 2010 -- China’s achievements in reducing poverty have been outstanding. From 1978 – when the restructuring of the Chinese economy began – to 2007 the incidence of rural poverty dropped from 30.7% in 1978 to 1.6% in 2007. The biggest drop took place between 1978 and 1984 when the number of rural poor almost halved, from 250 million in 1978 to 125 million in 1985. During this period the per capita net income of farmers grew at an annual rate 16.5%. Urban poverty, measured by an international standard poverty line of US$1 per day, reduced from 31.5% in 1990 to 10.4% in 2005. No other Third World country has achieved so much and made such a significant contribution to reducing global poverty, as China has, over this period.