International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

• Syria

  Syria: Fishing in Troubled Waters

  9 May, by Gilbert Achcar

  Israel has accustomed us to fishing in troubled waters. The Zionist state has long been interested in sowing discord and fanning its flames in striving to redraw the map of the Middle East in its image, so that the logic of sectarian and ethnic fragmentation prevails over the logic of citizenship and shared loyalty to a state that merges sectarian and ethnic groups into a single melting pot while preserving their rights. Inspired by the Roman Empire’s famous principle of “divide and conquer”, Israel has sought, since its inception, to exploit the differences it found in its immediate and distant surroundings, playing sectarian minorities against the regional Sunni majority and ethnic minorities against the Arab majority: Druze, Christians, Kurds, and others – even Shiites during the time of the Shah of Iran, before that country became a hotbed of anti-Israel hostility and contributed in turn to fuelling Shiite sectarianism in neighbouring Arab countries in an effort to expand its regional influence.

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• DRC - Rwanda

  Peace under the seal of business

  8 May, by Paul Martial

  The option of peace between the DRC and Rwanda is now becoming plausible, albeit fraught with obstacles. However, this is proving disadvantageous for Kinshasa.

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• South Africa

  Climate sanctions against fossil-addicted capitalists

  7 May, by Patrick Bond

  The implications of climate-unjust politics are ever more important to interpret and resist. United States President Donald Trump, an unabashed ‘climate denialist’, withdrew his country, the main historic emitter of greenhouse gases, from United Nations negotiations, and should now be sanctioned. But annual UN COPs (Conferences of the Parties) won’t, because the ‘climate action’ approach is dominated by the West and BRICS. They continue to deny the world long-overdue ‘climate justice’ and they won’t punish Trump’s climate crimes.

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• Britain

  Reform – Labour is feeding the monster

  6 May, by Dave Kellaway

  The centre cannot hold! In the wake of Reform’s massive gains in local elections, Dave Kellaway investigates the new political landscape.

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• East Asia

  East Asia: War and revolution

  5 May, by Pierre Rousset

  Once France had been defeated after the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu (1954), the great powers imposed the Geneva Accords, which were highly unfavourable to the Vietminh, temporarily dividing the country into two military regrouping zones.

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...and the rest of the current issue

• USA

  May Day in America, is it now here to stay?

• Nigeria

  Nigeria: against oil industry impunity

• Mexico

  Mexico: “The right-wing parties are practically in the worst phase of their history”

• Zambia

  Zambia: people are victims of extractivism

• USA

  Trump and America: One-hundred days in the waiting room of fascism

Recently posted Features

• Series: Governments submit to “Too Big to Fail” banks (part 4)

  United States : the Fed Bails Out Wall Street

  29 September 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  Since 2008, the Fed has granted unlimited credit to banks at an official rate of 0.25%. In fact, as the General Accounting Office (GAO) has revealed, the Fed has lent close to $16 trillion at an interest rate below 0.25%. [1] The report shows it has not followed its own prudential rules and has not notified Congress.

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• Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF : 70th anniversary (Part 8)

  World Bank and IMF support to dictatorships

  29 September 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  After the Second World War, in a growing number of Third World countries, policies diverged from those of the former colonial powers. This trend encountered firm opposition from the governments of the major industrialised capitalist countries whose influence held sway with the World Bank (WB) and the IMF. WB projects have a strong political content: to curtail the development of movements challenging the domination/rule of major capitalist powers. The prohibition against taking “political” and “non-economic” considerations into account in WB operations, one of the most important provisions of its charter, is systematically circumvented. The political bias of the Bretton Woods institutions is shown by their financial support to dictatorships ruling in Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua, Congo-Kinshasa and Romania.

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• Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF : 70th anniversary (Part 7)

  Domination of the United States on the World Bank

  9 September 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  The concept of the World as a huge bureaucracy, gradually freed from the influence of the US, is actually a far cry from reality. This mistaken conception is revealed in particular by the North American environmentalist Bruce Rich in his insightful book on the World Bank. [2] In real terms, the institution is firmly under the control of the US government which negotiates, with the governments of other major capitalist powers, the policies to be followed within the World Bank, and under its leadership. It has frequently failed to make the effort to reach a consensus with its principal partners (since the end of the 1950s, these are Japan, Germany, Great Britain and France) and it imposes its views directly on the Bank.

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• Series: Governments submit to “Too Big to Fail” banks (part 3)

  Private banks shamefully enjoy a monopoly of lending to the public sector

  8 September 2014, by Éric Toussaint

  The eurozone banks have the monopoly of lending to the public sector. It is prohibited for the ECB and the eurozone’s central banks to grant loans to public authorities (see box on the ECB). The governments in the eurozone have the possibility of borrowing from publicly owned banks where they still exist, but they do not do so.

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