IV454 - November 2012

IV454 November 2012 PDF available to download here

Send women back to the home. This is apparently what the present policies for a way out of the crisis are trying to do. These policies have a clear ideological orientation, both economically and socially.

The United States government, following an old and well-rehearsed script, declared its full support of “Israel’s right to defend itself.” This is a rather technical term, which requires translation into ordinary English: It means “Israel’s right to routinely squeeze and starve and population of Gaza and assassinate their leaders until they attempt to fight back, at which point Israel is fully entitled to massacre them from air, sea and land.”

Definitely the evening of Sunday November 25, 2012 was not the night that Artur Mas had dreamed of. Far from the exceptional majority that he had asked for he will now have to head a weakened government from which to manage the promised consultation on Catalan national rights and the already anticipated new package of cuts.

The results of the Catalan elections of November 25, 2012 show clearly that Artur Mas he has failed in his attempt to obtain an “exceptional majority”. Despite his skillful attempt to take the lead of the dynamic opened on 11S and present the election as a plebiscite that would ignore their policy of cuts, his CiU (Convergence and Union) lost 12 deputies. Much of the electorate has not fallen prey to this manipulation, identifying CiU as the party of cuts, faithful to the business world, and as a force that has never wanted a real break with the current constitutional framework.

"The government of the best." That is how Artur Mas described his cabinet immediately after he came to power at the beginning of his term of office, which ends today. And it’s true, “the government of the best” arrived in the Generalitat (the name of the Catalan Government), but it is the government that is "the best with a pair of scissors”.

The concept of financialization is used to refer to the increasing power of financial capital since the 1980s. Although this concept refers to mechanisms as old as capitalism, the neoliberal policies of the last decades have led to unprecedented weight of markets, institutions and financial motives in the world economy.

This resolution was adopted by the Central Committee of the PRT (Mexican section of the Fourth International) on 29 September 2012. At the beginning of September the Electoral Tribunal validated the much contested result of the presidential election of July 1st. Faced with the reurn of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI – Institutional Revolutionary Party) to ruling the country it is more than ever urgent to build a new political force of the workers.

Terry Conway interviewed Au Loong Yu, the author of the forthcoming book China’s Rise Strength and Fragility (Resistance Books, IIRE, Merlin Press) for Socialist Resistance

I decided to chart of left-of-center third-party presidential campaigns covering most of US history, to the extent that that was even a coherent category. (It turned out to be incoherent before 1840 or arguably 1876, as I’ll explain.)