China: In who's interest does the state serve?
The fight for football: Is the `world game’ the people’s game?
By Duroyan Fertl
June 27, 2010 -- Green Left Weekly -- The 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa began its final round of 16 on June 26. It came amid the unrelenting drone of vuvuzela horns, the knockout of big teams such as Italy and France, and street protests by local residents angry at the 40 billion rand the government has spent on the corporatised event. Meanwhile, South Africa’s poor suffer substandard housing and access to basic services.
Football, or “soccer”, is the “world game”, played by millions of people around the world and watched by hundreds of millions more. But is it truly the “people’s game”?
On its own terms, football is an often thrilling exhibition of human skill. A high-quality football match commands comparisons with art. Little wonder, then, that it is so popular worldwide.
Behind the New York Times' hatchet job on Oliver Stone's "South of the Border"
Trailer for South of the Border.
By Oliver Stone, Mark Weisbrot and Tariq Ali
[The following letter was sent to The New York Times.]
June 27, 2010 -- South of the Border -- The New York Times' Larry Rohter attacks our film, South of the Border, for “mistakes, misstatements and missing details”. But a close examination of the details reveals that the mistakes, misstatements and missing details are his own, and that the film is factually accurate.
Pakistan: Thousands of Punjab peasants rally to mark 10 years of struggle
By Maqsood Mujahid
June 30, 2010 -- Three months' notice has been given to Punjab government to decide the fate of the 68,000 acres of agriculture land owned by Punjab government and cultivated by tenants for more than 100 years. The tenants have been demanding land ownership rights. Despite promises to do so by former prime ministers Benazhir Bhutto and Mian Nawaz Sharif, the land in question has not been allotted to the tenants.
Zimbabwe: Struggle, dictatorship and the response of the social movements
By Leo Zeilig
June 28, 2010 – Zimbabwe’s economy has been in free fall. Between 2000 and 2005, the economy contracted by more than 40 per cent. Today GDP per capita is estimated to be the same as it was in 1953. Before the replacement of the Zimbabwe dollar with the US dollar and the South African rand in 2009, the country had the highest inflation rate in the world, soaring to 165,000 per cent in February 2008.
Bolivia's Pablo Solon: We need 'a global movement to defend Mother Earth'
Bhopal: Corporate genocide, appeasement of imperialism, environmental hypocrisy
By Kavita Krishnan
July 2010 -- Liberation -- More than 25 years after the infamous Bhopal gas disaster, the verdict of a trial court in Bhopal is nothing but a cruel mockery of justice. With charges already diluted by the Supreme Court of India, the June 7 trial court verdict could only be a formal burial of justice. Not only does the verdict insult the victims of one of the world’s worst industrial disasters by letting off, either scot-free or with a ridiculously light sentence, the mighty CEOs who were the chief perpetrators, it amounts to an assurance to multinational corporations that they will enjoy total impunity in India even when their negligence and violations of regulations leads to the loss of thousands of Indian lives and injury to several thousand more.
On December 2-3, 1984, 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked out of the Union Carbide Corporation’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, exposing more that 5,000,000 people to the toxic fumes. As many as 25,000 people have died as a result, and hundreds of thousands suffered irreversible damage to their health. The poison in the soil and water continues to affect future generations.
In defence of the People's Agreement -- Tanuro and Invernizzi get Cochabamba wrong
[For more information about, documents from and discussion of the World People's Conference on Climate Change, click HERE.]
By Ben Courtice
June 28, 2010 -- In their article "World People's Conference on Climate Change: Some critical comments on the People's Agreement", the Fourth International's Daniel Tanuro and Sandra Invernizzi have missed the main usefulness of this document.
They note, “The words `coal' and `natural gas' are simply not mentioned. The expression `renewable energies' is also absent” and that the document “overlooks the struggle against the capitalist energy lobbies and the sectors linked to it (cars, petrochemicals, shipbuilding, the aeronautics industry, transport …), whereas this is obviously the key question in the framework of an anti-capitalist strategy of stabilisation of the climate.”
It is true the conference did not target the hydrocarbon industries. The Bolivian hydrocarbon ministry in fact had a stall at the conference.
Toronto G20: `Toxic remedies' will make workers and poor pay for the crisis
By Damien Millet, Sophie Perchellet and Eric Toussaint. Translated by Christine Pagnoulle and Marie Lagatta
The socialist revolution and the mass revolutionary party
Lenin: "In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation".
By Dave Holmes
Venezuela: Workers’ control and the contradictions of the Bolivarian process
Gustavo Martínez interviewed by Susan Spronk and Jeffery R. Webber
June 21, 2010 – The Bullet – On June 10, 2010, we caught up with Gustavo Martinez, a union leader in the worker-controlled, nationalised coffee company, Fama de América, in Caracas, Venezuela. The company has 350 workers at the national level, with two separate plants – one in Caracas and one in Valencia. We sat down with Martínez to discuss the centrality of workers’ control in the ongoing struggle to transition toward socialism and some of the most pressing contradictions of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela today.
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To start off, can you tell us your name, how long you've worked in this coffee company, your job in the company, and your role in the union?