Recently, the New York Times praised Chelsea Clinton’s current successes and commitment to public service. Ms. Clinton is the daughter of current U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton. The Times reported Ms. Clinton is making the sacrifice of leading us because she feels a responsibility to serve the public good and “hopes to make a positive, productive contribution.” Ms. Clinton’s newsworthy steps toward public service, noted by the NYT, include: meeting people such as Elton John and Richard Gere, taking a public role with her father’s Clinton Global Initiative, presenting an award to her...
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The World Socialist Party is frequently lambasted for its opposition to reformism. The workers clamor for something concrete now, it is claimed , not abstract socialist principles. They demand immediate improvements that can be obtained by campaigns for legislation it is argued. The World Socialist Party case that although some reforms may be of material benefit to the working class, advocating party policy to struggle for particular reforms hinders the struggle for socialism and diverts our energies into what often results in dead-ends. We found this article by Stephanie Luce on the Labor Notes website particularly relevant in that it offers some...
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Bankers are unpopular. Not the ordinary bank teller or the back-up IT staff, but the directors and top managers who award themselves huge salaries and big bonuses. They are so unpopular, in fact, that the chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, Stephen Hester, has been forced to give up a bonus of nearly £1m while his predecessor, Sir Fred Goodwin, has been stripped of his knighthood. The banks defend themselves by arguing that they bring “wealth” into Britain, and pay a considerable amount of tax on it. Some even describe themselves as “wealth creators”. This is absurd. What...
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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 “comrade” 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’s exclusive Lazimpat befitting a “man of Prachanda’s stature” 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,...
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"This is not to say that Marx's ideas can't be measured against experience. His predictions need to be compared with the history of capitalism over the last 200 years. From this perspective, Marx's ideas come off very well, as the main tendencies he predicted for capitalism – towards the supplanting of human labour by machinery, the concentration and centralisation of capital, the spread of wage labour, the tendency towards widescale unemployment, and above all the recurrence of periods of depression – have been realised. In fact, I would say that Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of...
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Money and power bring privileges of many kinds. Not just command over goods and services, labor and other resources, but also social deference and very often immunity to legal penalties. As they say, there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. Let’s look at a few examples. Fraud is a good place to start. Rewarding business acumen Before going into politics in 2010, Rick Scott was CEO of the Hospital Corporation of America. In this capacity, he masterminded schemes to defraud Medicare of an estimated $7 billion. Without admitting guilt, he settled all claims against...
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American global hegemony continues its steady decline. The most striking recent case in point is the overt shift of Pakistan, long a U.S. client state, into China’s sphere of influence. The U.S., no longer able to supply its forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan, has no choice but to withdraw rapidly from that country. (The old Soviet supply route through Uzbekistan is inadequate on its own, and we know from Wikileaks that the U.S. asked China to allow a new route through Chinese territory but was refused.) Afghanistan will revert to its traditional status as a dependency of Pakistan, whose...
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No, ALEC is not a new kid on the block. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC was born in 1973 – the brainchild of Paul Weyrich and a group of Republican Party state legislators. This was not Weyrich’s first brainchild: he also fathered the Heritage Foundation and somewhere along the way coined the expression: “the moral majority.” ALEC says it is not a lobby and not a front group. ALEC describes itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organization. Bloomberg Businessweek (BBW; Dec. 5-11, 2011, p. 68) found 92 ALEC veterans in the U.S. House of Representatives, 87 of...
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In the Second World War Russia (or the U.S.S.R. as it was then), which had been fighting Germany since the Nazi invasion of 1941, only got round to declaring war on Japan on 8 August 1945. That was three days after the first atomic bomb landed on Hiroshima and one day before the second landed on Nagasaki. The Japanese empire was now squeezed between the vast armed forces of Russia and America, and it disintegrated. Japan had forcibly annexed Korea in 1910, but the Japanese were now driven out. The U.S.S.R occupied the northern half of Korea with its...
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Recently the media has focused extensively on Toronto Mayor, Rob Ford’s proposed cuts to the student nutrition programs. At the time of writing, it seems as if Ford has been forced to back off owing to the howl of outrage this proposal produced. A ten per cent cut would mean 58 of its 669 programs would be closed, affecting about fourteen thousand children. The city is considering cutting $380 000 from its annul $3.8 million contribution to nutrition programs which cost a total of $12 million to run, the rest coming from the province and donations. To put it...
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