One hundred years ago the Russian Revolution shook the capitalist world order to its foundations. Here for the first time ever, the Russian workers, led by Lenin and the Bolshevik party, took power into their own hands. The ruling classes have never forgiven this.
John Key has announced that he his standing down as Prime Minister on 12th December. This has sent shock waves through the National Party. He stated family reasons and getting out whilst he is ahead. These reasons are flimsy ones and bears no serious scrutiny.
Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential elections has delivered the biggest political upset in history; a political earthquake that has shattered the entire global Establishment, making Brexit look like a minor tremor in comparison.
Thus ends the “School of the Democrats.” What once seemed unthinkable—akin to an episode of the Twilight Zone—has become a surreal reality. As Hillary’s “blue wall” of “secure” states came tumbling down, tipping irreversibly in The Donald’s favour, the media pundits tried to maintain their composure, but they were clearly shellshocked—along with millions of others.
Obama offered the feeble consolation that “the sun will rise in the morning.” As night follows day, the sun will indeed rise in the morning. But it will rise over a very different world: one that has witnessed the overnight collapse of the rotten Clinton dynasty and the shattering of the lesser evil electoral strategy.
The world waits with bated breath as the "leader of the free world" is selected. Election 2016 has been a rollercoaster for voters, pollsters, pundits, and candidates alike. The campaign has been like no other seen in the US for a century or more.
What is money? Where does it come from? and what does it represent?
Photo: Pictures of Money/Flickr
The champions of the free market never miss an opportunity to extol its virtues: peace, prosperity, efficiency, integrity, a wide range of freedoms, and let’s not forget: lots and lots of choices. If you work hard and play by the rules, you too can get ahead. However, far from the myth peddled by the free marketeers, capitalism is organically and incurably irrational, exploitative, and corrupt.
(Editorial of the latest edition of Socialist Appeal (USA))
Trump and Clinton - by Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 4.0
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ndeed, the saint-making business is thriving these days (in three years Francis has canonised 29 saints). Pope Francis has also been careful to varnish the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and its pantheon of saints with a gloss of social justice. Francis has attempted to paint his newest saint as a friend of the poor, a woman who “made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created”. The truth, however, is very far from Francis’ adulations of this “saint of the gutters”.
[Read also a longer article about the role of Mother Teresa here: Wojtyla and Teresa, or a Case of Saintly Overproduction]
Photo by Túrelio CC BY-SA 2.0 de
Dramatic events shook Turkey yesterday as armed troops moved onto the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. They closed down the main airports and bridges while military jets were roaring very low above the cities. A coup was in the works.
We are living in a period of sharp and sudden changes. The result of the British EU referendum was yet another such sharp and sudden changes. In a further dramatic turn of events yesterday the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party voted by a majority of 14 to 18 to allow Jeremy Corbyn to defend his position as Labour leader without having to seek nomination by Labour MPs.
This year, Wellred Books has been working on the completion of a historic project. Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence is the final unfinished masterpiece of the great Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Painstakingly restored over a ten-year period, this version will be the first to include all of Trotsky’s own words in full, 100,000 of them previously unpublished, with the distortions of previous editor Charles Malamuth removed. In consultation with the Harvard archives and the English, French and Russian editions, we have produced the most complete version ever published in any language.
The Chilcot report into the 2003 Iraq war and how Britain was dragged into it has finally been published after a delay of seven years. It fell like a bombshell on the British political scene that was already reeling from the effects of the EU referendum.
