Ecuador’s Lenin Moreno Defeats Banker in Presidential Election

teleSUR | 03 April, 2017

Lenin supporters celebrate in central Quito.

Progressive candidate and renowned disability activist from the ruling Alianza Pais party, Lenin Moreno, won the Ecuadorean presidential election Sunday.

With 99 percent of the official vote counted, Lenin defeated former banker Guillermo Lasso, candidate for the right-wing CREO-SUMO alliance, with 51.16 percent to 48.84 percent, according to results issued by the country’s National Electoral Council on Monday morning.

In what many had already predicted, right-wing vice presidential candidate Andres Paez has called for a recount, even though the CNE said it was a transparent and successful election process, calling for everyone to respect the results.Read More »

Neofascism in the White House

by

Monthly Review Volume 68, Issue 11 (April 2017)

Parody of the gleichschaltung process

Parody of the gleichschaltung process by Walter Wesinger.
There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.

Jack London, The Iron Heel1

Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This neofascism characterizes, in my assessment, the president and his closest advisers, and some of the key figures in his cabinet.2 From a broader sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases, class constituencies and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism that brought Donald Trump into office. Neofascist discourse and political practice are now evident every day in virulent attacks on the racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists, and workers. These have been accompanied by a sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the military and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new ideology and political reality.Read More »

Bangladesh-March-1971: Not the theater of the absurd

by Farooque Chowdhury

Frontier | 26 March, 2017

Source: Internet

“Portraying the current crisis [the political development in 1971-Pakistan] as something from the theater of the absurd, he [Bhutto] observed that framing a constitution for Pakistan without the participation of the PPP [Pakistan People’s Party] would be ‘like staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’.” (Richard Sisson and Leo E Rose, War and Secession, Pakistan, India and the Creation of Bangladesh, University of California Press, 1990) But the political development in 1971-Pakistan was neither a theater of the absurd nor staging Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Political dynamics within Pakistan led to the days of 1971, especially to the torrid March-days in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and on March 25, 1971, the state began enacting its last act as an un-bifurcated state with genesis in gone-away-years.Read More »

World Bank declares itself above the law

Read More »

The BRICS New Development Bank meets in Delhi: Dashing Africa’s green-developmental hopes?

by Patrick Bond

Pambazuka News | 30 March, 2017

BRICS leaders often state their vision of establishing alternatives to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Indeed the NDB leadership began with environmentally-oriented loans last year, and in 2017 wants to add $3 billion in new credits.

But looked at from South Africa, questions immediately arise about key personnel, as well as the willingness of the only local NDB borrower so far – the electricity parastatal Eskom – to support renewable energy, and perhaps most importantly whether the country and the continent can afford more expensive hard-currency loans.Read More »

The role of culture in Africa’s development

Read More »

Catalonia has not abandoned its hopes of independence

Granma | 03 April, 2017

Source: Internet

Attempts by Catalonia to separate from Spain continue to make the news, with the region’s legislature recently approving a budget for 2017 which included funds for the holding of a referendum on the issue.

In one of the body’s most controversial votes, the measure was approved by a slim margin, with the independence forces, Juntos por el Sí (United for a yes) and the People’s Unity Candidature, winning with 64 votes, while Ciudadanos, Partido por los Socialistas, Cataluña Sí se Puede, and the Partido Popular mustered 62 no votes.Read More »

Fidel and a program that changed the lives of thousands of youth

Granma | 28 March, 2017

cuba.jpg

Fidel in Celia Sánchez Plaza, in Manzanillo, Granma province. Photo: Juvenal Balán

MANZANILLO, Granma.–The evening of March 28, 2002, waiting in a plaza on the city’s waterfront, didn’t cause Sheila Pons Delgado the chill she felt as that tall man, dressed in olive green, approached her.

The impression left a usually talkative Sheila speechless, as Fidel peppered her with questions: “How do you feel? How do they treat you? tell me about your studies.

All she could manage to answer was: “Good, very good.”Read More »