Archive | September, 2008

The Communist Party of Israel condemns law enforcement authorities’ lenient hand with settler groups. The Extreme Right is a threat to democracy. Prominent Israeli historian Professor Ze’ev Sternhell was lightly wounded in the early hours of the morning on Thursday after a bomb went off outside his front door on Shai Agnon St. in Jerusalem.  […]

In a brief 15-minute speech, the President of the United States made some assertions that, had they come from the mouths of any of his adversaries, they would have been described as atrocious and cynical slanders against the economic system of his country which he named “democratic capitalism”.

Around 35,000 Cuban health specialists are providing free or paid services in the world. Furthermore, some young doctors from countries such as Haiti and others among the poorest of the Third World are working in their homelands thanks to the assistance provided by Cuba. In Latin America, our main contribution has been the ophthalmologic surgeries that will help to preserve the eyesight of millions of people. In addition, we are assisting in the training of tens of thousands of young medical students from other nations, both in and outside Cuba.

Faced with the failure of the financial sector and the possible collapse of the economic system, Republicans and Democrats are working together feverishly to come up with a plan and find the funds to save the American financial system.  The Congress that has been unable to provide adequate funding to health, education, housing, public transportation, […]

Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has adopted the rhetoric of change which has captured the imagination of many Americans and non-Americans around the world. But when it comes to the foreign policy, there are enough reasons to remain sceptical.  Will he adopt a foreign policy with objectives which differ from those of George Bush, […]

In US capitalism’s greatest financial crisis since the 1930s Depression, status-quo ideology swirls.  The goal is to keep this crisis under control, to prevent it from challenging capitalism itself.  One method is to keep public debate from raising the issue of whether and how class changes — basic economic system changes — might be the […]

“The West is living through an economic and social crisis so unprecedented in its tempo, so complex in its effects, that there are many who do not know that it is taking place.”                     — Michael Harrington, The Next Left (1987) The nationalization of American International […]

  The financial sector meltdown spelt an opportunity for the system to reinvent itself. Will the financial sector meltdown in the developed economies lead to a rethink about the path the global economy has traversed in the last few decades? Simply put, will it curb the primacy of finance, will it rein in the penchant […]

  In a statement drafted in scrupulously selected terms and circulated with exceptional discretion, the so-called U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) has publicly confessed to having squandered taxpayers’ money in its dirty war on Cuba. It did so in the face of warnings by certain scandalized congress members and the embarrassing revelations of audits […]

  On September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez.”   The report contains biases and inaccuracies, and wrongly purports that human rights guarantees are lacking or not properly enforced in Venezuela.  In addition, while criticizing Venezuela’s human rights in the political context, it fails to mention the […]

Elegy is a fitting title for Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s recent adaptation of the short novel by Philip Roth, The Dying Animal.  It is a pensive lament for its principal character, who sadly is never fully realized in this work. The film follows the life of sixty-something David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), a professor and critic […]

Relative calm has returned to Bolivia following a three-week offensive of violence and terrorism launched by the US-backed right-wing opposition denounced by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “civil coup.” This campaign of terror, centered on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was […]

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride in and out of Southern African ruling-party politics, down the troughs of world capitalism, and up the peaks of radical social activism.  Glancing around the region and world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual. Looking first to South Africa, Saturday’s […]

The news agencies are reporting that Chávez will visit Cuba tomorrow on his way to China, Russia, Belarus, France and Portugal.

Watching Venezolana de Televisión I learned that he was signing energy investment agreements in Caracas with important businessmen from Japan, Russia, Malaysia, Italy, Argentina, the United States, Qatar, and Portugal. The deals are for the extraction of gas from one of the reserves located in an area of 500,000 square kilometers of territorial waters.

A new crisis of capitalism, in the style of 1929.  The theories of casino capitalism are confirmed.  The US government contradicts itself again and heavily intervenes, demonstrating that its confidence in the market isn’t as great as its propaganda displayed.  Neoliberal capitalism spills its guts, and the theories of the Left — Keynesian or anti-capitalist […]

Yesterday we were talking about the Financial Ike that is driving the empire mad. America can’t find a way of reconciling consumerism with unjust wars, defence spending and the massive investments in the arms industry, which kill peoples, rather than feeding them or otherwise satisfying their most basic needs.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the agreement on September 8 between Nicolas Sarkozy of France in his capacity as current president of the European Union (EU) and Dmitri Medvedev, President of Russia.  It marks the definitive end of Act I of the new world geopolitical order. What was decided?  The […]

If the United States manages to unleash a civil war in Bolivia, the plan is to extend it throughout the region and to resort to massive and extensive use of violence to regain ground, said Luis Bilbao, director of Revista América XXI, in an interview with Ernesto Villegas (via satellite) for the VTV program “Mediodías […]

Virtually the only certainty in the current financial situation is that there will be more problems ahead.  Those who controlled the levers of economic and financial policy neglected their greatest responsibility, which was to ensure an orderly financial market and prevent exactly the sort of collapse that we are now seeing.  This was a policy […]

Reading the cables will suffice.

In the reflection I wrote the day before yesterday I stated that Cuba would not accept any donation from the government that is blockading us and that, in the Verbal Note handed over to the U.S. Interests Section, we had requested authorization so that U.S. companies could sell us construction materials; that same Note made no reference whatsoever to foodstuffs. There was an additional request for trade in those materials to take place under normal conditions, including credits, something that is only logical considering that, for eight years, our country has been paying in cash for the few commodities that U.S. companies are authorized to export to Cuba.