IV514 - November 2017

Can you go back over the strike on November 9th and the demonstration on the 11th ?

In April 2017, the first part of the Baha Mar, a 1,000 acre luxury mega-resort in the Bahamas that will eventually consist of several hotels, a 100,000 square foot casino, a golf course, spas, shops and restaurants, constructed by China Construction America, finally opened. The event was marked by a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by then Prime Minister of the Bahamas, Perry Christie, who labelled the opening, “the most significant economic development event ever to occur in a single phase within the Bahamas and the Caribbean” [1].

Even ten years on, the first mental image that comes to mind with regard to Therav?da Buddhism is that of Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of August-September 2007: thousands of Buddhist monks peacefully demonstrating in the streets of Yangon, Mandalay, Pakokku, Sittwe and other towns against the ruling military junta. These peaceful monks still exist, although many of them went into hiding, or fled abroad. But the Burmese monks in the headlines today are preaching violence instead of peace, and “firm action” instead of meditation.

In a society that thrives on division, prejudice and fear, the result of the marriage equality postal survey is a triumph.

An interview with Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, who lived with the famous revolutionary the last year of his life by Wladek Flakin.

The Czech Republic’s new leader is a sad symptom of a broader crisis.

Stephanie Luce [2] asks why did Cuomo shift leftward after the 2014 gubernatorial election in New York? Her answer is that progressives working inside the Democratic Party – Working Families Party, Zephyr Teachout, Bernie Sanders, Fight for $15 demos organized by Democratic Party-oriented unions – changed the political landscape and forced Cuomo to move left to recover the left wing of his electoral base.

Before Hurricane Maria smashed into Puerto Rico with devastating force, the previous Hurricane Irma caused relatively manageable damage compared to its horrific impact in much of the Caribbean. Even so, the island’s electrical grid — before Maria utterly destroyed it — had already suffered outages leaving up to 300,000 people without power. Staffing cuts of 50% had left the system without badly needed maintenance and repair capacity, as discussed by journalist Juan Gonzalez on the broadcast of “Democracy Now”. The following article by Rafael Bernabe of the Partido del Pueblo Trabajador-Puerto Rico (Working People’s Party of Puerto Rico) explores what lies behind these events. It’s story also familiar to residents of cities like Detroit — ed.

One would have hoped that the occasion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution would have lead to a serious reimagination of both the event in itself as well as the legacy and history emerging from this monumental event. In the English-speaking world many books have been rolling off the press in an attempt to reread this event in a number of ways [3].

The decision of Missouri Circuit Court Judge Timothy J. Wilson in the case of Jason Stockley, a white former St. Louis police officer charged with the first-degree murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, a 24-year-old African American, was issued early on a Friday morning — a time calculated to avoid economically disruptive, start-of-the-work-week looting (it never came). But little about the case, decided on September 15, 2017, was prompt, or marked by successful foresight, or even rooted in the present tense.