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.
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
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.
Indeed, 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
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.