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	<title>World Socialist Party (US) &#187; FN Brill</title>
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	<copyright>Copyright &#xA9; World Socialist Party (US) 2010 </copyright>
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		<title>World Socialist Party (US)</title>
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	<itunes:category text="Society &#38; Culture" />
	<itunes:author>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:author>
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		<itunes:name>World Socialist Party (US)</itunes:name>
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		<title>Old Fraud, New Face</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/04/old-fraud-new-face/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/04/old-fraud-new-face/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 21 Apr 2012 02:03:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2558</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Many people imagine that a country run on the lines of the American republic is a democratic state, that the institutions of America are democratic institutions, that the spirit of such a state is the democratic spirit, and that the philosophy of such a state – the “Rights of Man” is the democratic philosophy. All of which ideas are wrong. The common meaning of the term “democracy”, a form of society in which supreme power is lodged in the hands of the people – is correct enough as far as it goes, and is sufficient in all that it implies. But it implies something very different from the American republic and its institutions. On November 6, Americans will go to the polls to decide who gets to be blamed for all the country’s problems for the next four years. Politicians supply demons. They supply a singular address for evil upon which you can blame everything. Where the economy is a mess, where people’s mortgages are underwater, it is much easier to find one single person or group of people to blame for all their problems than it is to analyze the extremely complex subject of, for instance, mortgage-backed Wall Street [...]


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		<title>Water Wars</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/water-wars/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/water-wars/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 25 Mar 2012 02:57:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Environment]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2547</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Water has always been an issue in the American west. For 90 years, Nevada and six other south-western states have shared the waters of the once-mighty Colorado river, according to an established formula. It became clear, however, that the allocations of water decided in 1922 were overly optimistic about the projected rivers flows of the Colorado. Nevada, which for years has been drawing more water from its Lake Mead reservoir than has been flowing in, could be at serious risk of going dry in 20 years. Las Vegas needed a Plan B. &#8221;When you have got a community of 2 million people and it is 90% reliant on the Colorado river you have to have a contingency plan,&#8221; Pat Mulroy, the manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority said. Las Vegas, where the population had been doubling every decade until the most recent recession, planners had an idea. They want to tap into groundwater and pump up to 300bn litres of water a year out of valleys in eastern Nevada and transport it 300 miles south to the thirsty metropolis of casinos and golf courses. Opponents of the pipeline say draining the desert of groundwater would destroy the livelihoods of the cattle [...]


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		<title>Letter from Zambia</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/letter-from-zambia/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/letter-from-zambia/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:18:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2500</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What started as a new political revolution in Zambia has proved to be a mere political hullabaloo. There can be nothing new under capitalism – except half meal political and economic reforms that in all respects only help to undermine working-class political and class solidarity. In every part of the world the workers have the class franchise to elect a political party into power. It is the inability by the workers to use their class franchise to utilise their political consciousness as a weapon for socialism. The election of Michael Sata of the Peoples Front (PF) as President is what is dubbed a new dawn in Zambian politics. Reading through the newspaper headlines one may easily notice the absence of political criticism today. The PF has been a pro-poor people’s budget – in the sense that the government has reduced pay as you earn income tax below those earning K2 million. The reduction of income tax comes at a time when the government is contemplating enacting a minimum wage for those earning below K2 million. The political strength of the PF government will be judged by the workers and unemployed youth, who massively voted for it during the 2011 general [...]


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		<title>Kenyan Nurses Strike</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/03/kenyan-nurses-strike/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/03/kenyan-nurses-strike/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:15:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Africa]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2497</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Kenya&#8217;s public hospitals face a potentially devastating health worker shortage after the government fired 25,000 striking nurses. Luke K&#8217;Odambo, chairman of the National Nurses Association of Kenya, said that the sacking did &#8221;not make sense in any way&#8221;, and that it was not possible to dismiss such a large part of the workforce. &#8220;We are ignoring the sacking threat.&#8221; Alex Orina, spokesman of the 40,000-strong Kenya Health Professionals Society, said. &#8221;These are cat-and-mouse games, you cannot sack an entire workforce. It is a ploy to get us to rush back to work, but our strike continues until our demands are met,&#8221; . The nurses went on strike on March 1 to protest the government&#8217;s failure to implement a salary increase agreed last year, when they also stopped work to press for improved services in Kenya&#8217;s mostly ill-equipped public hospitals. On average, a health worker earns about 25,000 shillings ($300) a month in salary and allowances, and this amount was likely to double if their demand for higher allowances were met. Private hospitals and clinics, where richer families send their sick, have opened as usual because their nurses are not members of the strikers&#8217; union. In public hospitals patients pay as little as one [...]


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		<title>Nepali Maoism is Bankrupt</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2012/02/nepali-maoism-is-bankrupt/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2012/02/nepali-maoism-is-bankrupt/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 26 Feb 2012 05:12:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Asia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2433</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In 2008 we commented on the Nepali Maoist Party, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, rise to state power and their simultaneous capitulation to any sort of pretense of being socialists. Like the &#8220;comrade&#8221; in this cartoon, it turns out they would much rather break-unions and shake down their members for money in order for their leader, Prachanda, to live in a home in Kathmandu&#8217;s exclusive Lazimpat befitting a &#8220;man of Prachanda&#8217;s stature&#8221; than carry the manure for the revolution. Yeah, not surprising at all for us. Maoism, as a form of Leninism, derives from the theories of Social-Democracy not marxism. In social-democracy, there is an emphasis on changing the leadership of capitalism rather than overthrowing it. What they advocate, in essence, is trading one boss for what becomes another set of administrators of capitalism. Check out a longer article over at libcom.org No related posts.


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		<item>
		<title>Food Prices &#8211; speculation and hoarding</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/05/food-prices-speculation-and-hoarding/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/05/food-prices-speculation-and-hoarding/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 15 May 2011 16:05:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Food]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2244</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Jomo Kwame Sundaram , United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development writes :- &#8220;Lack of food is rarely the reason that people go hungry. The world today produces enough food to feed everyone. The problem is that more and more people simply cannot afford to buy the food they need. Even before the recent food-price increases, a billion people were suffering from chronic hunger, while another two billion were experiencing malnutrition, bringing the total number of food-insecure people to around three billion, or almost half the world’s population. Global food prices are at the highest level since the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization started monitoring them in 1990. The World Bank estimates that recent food-price increases have driven an additional 44 million people in developing countries into poverty. The rapid rise in world prices for all basic food crops – corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice – along with other foods like cooking oils, has been devastating for poor households all over the world. But almost everybody’s standard of living has been reduced. Middle-class [-income] people are increasingly careful about their food purchases; the near-poor are losing headway and falling below, rather than staying above, the poverty line; and the [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Crisis? What crisis?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/05/crisis-what-crisis/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/05/crisis-what-crisis/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 14 May 2011 16:04:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2242</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There is no crisis. That deserves to be said twice. There is no crisis. What happened in Japan was a crisis. Haiti was a crisis. What we have is a failure of mathematics – the mathematics of greed. We as a society have never been so productive, and we have never had such wealth available to us, as we have today. Our ability to produce has grown faster even than is needed to provide for longer and happier lives. Think what has supposedly caused this crisis. Too much was produced. In particular, too many houses were produced for poor Americans. We had not yet produced enough for our whole community, but we were doing well – all too well. What happened? Building workers were stopped from building. People living in good houses were thrown out of them, and the houses left to become derelict. Across the world, workers who were producing wealth for their communities were stopped from doing so, by being thrown out of work; and then we were all forced to live on less. Why would something so crazy happen? Because production is not for use, it is for a profit. No work is allowed to take place, [...]


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		<title>Are Workers Brainwashed by Capitalism?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/04/are-workers-brainwashed-by-capitalism/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/04/are-workers-brainwashed-by-capitalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 02 Apr 2011 06:14:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Theory]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2231</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If you want to know the truth, you cannot rely on newspapers. We have that on good authority – in fact, on the authority of the more honest newspapers. (The more honest papers are those that are read mainly by capitalists who need reliable information about the world in order to make investment decisions, as opposed to those that are read mainly by workers.) In a startlingly frank appraisal of the history and practice of the public relations (PR) industry, The Economist (18 December 2010) admits that PR was invented in the early 20th century to counter working-class struggles, and rising popular resentment against capitalism, by getting newspapers and journalists, until then sympathetic to the workers, on the side of the business class. American business was at the time worried by the rise of a new phenomenon: public opinion. The business élite feared this, especially as it was developing in an anti-capitalist direction, and were determined to take control of it and manipulate it for their own ends. PR’s founding father, Edward Bernays, was quite explicit about the aim: ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised opinions and habits of the masses’. That all this is true, and that [...]


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		<item>
		<title>Capitalism &#8211; the Sick Society</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/03/capitalism-the-sick-society/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/03/capitalism-the-sick-society/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:44:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Health]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2170</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Mental illness in America has become an established epidemic. So-called miracle drugs like Prozac are taken by 11% of the population – and Prozac is only one of the 30 available antidepressants on the market. Antidepressants are accompanied by anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs. Xanax, America&#8217;s leading anti-anxiety medication, is so ubiquitous that Xanax generates more revenue than Tide detergent. Anti-psychotics drugs alone net the pharmaceutical industry at least $14.6bn dollars a year. Psycho-pharmaceuticals are the most profitable sector of the industry, which makes it one of the most profitable business sectors in the world. Americans are less than 5% of the world&#8217;s population, yet they consume 66% of the world&#8217;s psychological medications. Do these psycho pharmaceuticals work to restore mental health? Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that they fail. Antidepressants, the most popular psycho-pharmaceuticals, work no better than placebos. They work 25% of the time and stop working when the user stops taking them. In addition, they may actually harm patients in the long run. They disrupt brain neurotransmitters and may usurp the brain&#8217;s organic soothing functions. Psycho-pharmaceuticals are less effective in the long run than talk therapy. Talk therapy, like drugs, does change brain and body chemistry; unlike drugs, [...]


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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Was the crisis just a mistake?</title>
		<link>http://wspus.org/2011/03/was-the-crisis-just-a-mistake/</link>
		<comments>http://wspus.org/2011/03/was-the-crisis-just-a-mistake/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:04:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>FN Brill</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Economics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[News]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[USA]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://wspus.org/?p=2167</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up by the US government reported at the end of January. They concluded that the crisis of 2007 and 2008 was the result of “human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire”, but “of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds” and so avoidable. Obviously, the crisis was the outcome, even if unintended, of decisions by humans to behave in particular ways, but that’s not at issue. We need to know why the economic decision-makers involved took the decisions they did. What was the context of their decisions? What were the constraints acting on them? The driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profits by competing enterprises. As the Commission put it, “in our economy, we expect businesses and individuals to pursue profits…” If there is a chance to make a profit from some activity then the businesses in that field will go for it. If the profits are high enough then other businesses will enter the field to share in the bonanza. This is what happened in the US. From 1997 until 2006 there was a boom in house building and buying. Big profits were to be made from [...]


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