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13th September 06, Vanessa Arrington, Associated Press Iran, Syria, North Korea and more than 100 other nations are pushing to broaden the world's definition of "terrorism" to include the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Converging on Fidel Castro's communist Cuba for a summit this week, members of the Nonaligned Movement complain of a double standard: powerful nations like the United States and Israel decide for the world who the terrorists are, but face no punishment for their own acts of aggression. A draft of the group's joint declaration condemns "terrorism in all its forms," especially violence that targets civilians. |
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 Members of the U.S. Congress spent the summer touring the United States in what they said was an effort to find common ground on the difficult choices involved in fixing America's broken immigration system. Talking to Americans might help legislators take the temperature of voters on a tough and divisive election issue. But it adds little to Congress's understanding, or the American public's, of the larger forces driving contemporary migration - and of the debates and lessons learned from around the world.
The news media hasn't been of much help either in lifting the level of debate. A review of 150 newspaper editorials from the first eight months of 2006 on the subject of immigration reform revealed that only nine gave serious consideration to the multiple economic and social factors at work in migration today. And only four called for increased efforts by the United States to work more closely with its neighbors to the south to foster economic and social development in the region.
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 Physicists have suspected since the 1930s the existence of stuff they call dark matter, material that is not visible to ordinary observation. Dark matter has great significant effects for the behavior of galaxies and the expansion of the universe.
In August 2006, astronomers announced that they had detected direct evidence of the existence of dark matter, based on the effects of collisions among galaxies. Douglas Clowe at the University of Arizona in Tucson and other colleagues, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, examined a cluster of galaxies named 1E0657-56, where the center of mass has shifted, implying that dark matter is located in that space. In the X-ray spectrum, they could see two huge clouds of dust in between the galaxy clusters, remaining from the collision of two original clusters. These dust clouds are much more massive than the galaxies. These findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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 "Global carbon taxes, wealth redistribution ... radical social solutions are globalisation's last chance"
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist, former adviser to Bill Clinton and million-selling author, is on a mission to save globalisation from itself. With his twinkly eyes, grey beard and impeccable academic credentials, Stiglitz is an unlikely warrior for global justice. But, in London to promote his new book before flying to Paris and then back to the US to spread the word, he has a stark warning to deliver. Without radical action to share the benefits of burgeoning international trade more fairly, he believes globalisation is at risk of being swept away by a wave of protectionist fury.
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 Days of Reckoning There’s growing concern among economists and market-savvy pundits that the global financial system is hanging by a few well-worn threads that could snap at any time. The $10.4 trillion real estate “bubble” has attracted the most attention, but the shaky derivatives market, hedge funds, and falling dollar are equally worrisome. 20 years of deregulation has created an economic monster which is increasingly unmanageable and threatens to bring down the whole system in a heap.
As Gabriel Kolko said in a recent CounterPunch article (“Why a Global Economic Deluge Looms” ), “The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways its nominal leaders never expected. Instability is increasingly its hallmark….Contradictions now wrack the world’s financial system, and if we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, it may very well be on the verge of serious crisis.” |
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Devinder Sharma examines the links between globalisation, trade, and corporate interests, arguing that aggressive trade interests have topped the EU economic and political
agenda, even though many developing world increasingly seeing through the inequities of international trade.
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 Can the Bolivarian Process Achieve Socialism?
Beyond the misiones and the Bolivarian process (el proceso Bolivariano) of empowering working people and the poor, two of the most significant initiatives of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela have been the restarting of closed factories under workers’ co-management with the state, and the rapid expansion of the cooperative sector of collectively-owned and collectively-operated enterprises. For it is these transitions in the social relations of production that will play a pivotal role in determining the future of the Venezuelan state – whether it develops along a capitalist, state capitalist, statist, socialist, or some as yet undetermined path. Case studies of five worker-controlled factories in Venezuela were presented in a documentary film by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 5 Fábricas – Control Obrero en Venezuela (81 minutes, Spanish, 2006). While these factories illustrate some optimistic beginnings, it is necessary to view them in historical context in order to understand their socio-economic potential. |
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 Osama bin Laden's still free, global anti-U.S. feelings are rampant, our military is stretched thin -- and Bush says we're more secure. Five years after 9/11, the Bush administration has run out of troops, ideas and political capital. But there's still plenty of Kool-Aid in the White House fridge.
That's why President Bush was able to assure us this week that "America is safer" after five years of the war on terror.
Safer? Do you feel safer? |
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 From water to peace, from knowledge to work, from the sea (the Mediterranean) to the coasts of the South, from energy to territory - these are the themes of an agenda that helps us to build an economy based on Common Goods. This economy is not founded on commoditisation, privatisation, war, but on people's rights, on equality and solidarity - an economy that is thus an alternative to our model of growth.
The theme of this conference is utopian and proudly so. Let us remember that U-topia does not mean "impossible" but no-place. Or perhaps no place yet. The topics above introduce it and will be discussed by the opening round table in which I've been kindly asked to participate.
Which of the terms it puts forward are now "Common Goods"? Let us look first at the state of play, then what might be done to change it.
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7th September 2006 - Laura MacInnis, Reuters More than a billion people still have no clean water to drink as the international community falls far behind in its plan to halve their number by 2015, two U.N. agencies said on Tuesday. |
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