Second General Strike against President Temer’s Reforms

teleSUR | June 29, 2017

Members of Brazil’s Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) occupy the entrance of Congonhas Airport in the general strike in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on June 30, 2017. | Photo: Reuters

Hundreds of people have been blocking main thoroughfares leading to Brazil’s largest cities in the second general strike this year against President Michel Temer’s labor and social security reform bills.

Demonstrations have been reported around the country, as protesters brought public transportation to a halt.

In Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, bus companies decided to keep their vehicles off the roads, leaving thousands of passengers stranded.

While in Belo Horizonte, metro workers have come out on strike, despite the threat of heavy fines.

US, Pressuring DPRK, Targets Chinese Entities for Sanctions

teleSUR | June 29, 2017

U.S.Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin | Photo: Reuters

The United States is risking a new showdown with China in its attempts to heighten the pressure on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s sovereign right to develop its arms and nuclear program, imposing sanctions on two Chinese citizens and a shipping company while leveling charges at a Chinese bank accused of laundering money for Pyongyang.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said at a press conference that the actions were designed to cut off funds that the DPRK uses to develop its weapons program. “We will follow the money and cut off the money,” he said.

A Treasury statement named the bank as the Bank of Dandong and the firm as Dalian Global Unity Shipping Co Ltd. It named the two individuals as Sun Wei and Li Hong Ri.

The need for a new U.S. policy toward North Korea

by MARTIN HART-LANDSBERG

People’s World | June 30, 2017

U.S. Air Force nuclear-capable B-1B bombers, left, and second left, and South Korean F-15k fighter jets fly over the Korean Peninsula on June 20. The United States flew the two supersonic bombers over the Korean Peninsula in a show of force against North Korea, South Korean officials said. | South Korean Defense Ministry via AP

U.S.-North Korean relations remain very tense, although the threat of a new Korean War has thankfully receded. Still the U.S. government remains determined to tighten economic sanctions on North Korea and continues to plan for a military strike aimed at destroying the country’s nuclear infrastructure. And the North for its part has made it clear that it would respond to any attack with its own strikes against U.S. bases in the region and even the U.S. itself.

Oklahoma tries to crush Native American environmental protesters

by MARK MAXEY

People’s World | June 26, 2017

Led by the Sacred Water Canoe Family singing a warrior song, hundreds of demonstrators march in Tacoma, Wash. in support of the Standing Rock Sioux protest in North Dakota against DAPL, the oil pipeline, Nov. 12, 2016. Alan Berner | The Seattle Times via AP

When Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin signed HB 1124 into law in May, 2017 it was yet another strike against Native Americans and the entire nationwide working class of which they are a part – a strike against the 99 percent.

At heart is the Plains All American Pipeline which has been protested several times in Norman, Oklahoma.The law is designed to harshly penalize protesters. The protest movement uses hashtag #NoPlainsPipeline to document their concerns.

Iron worker Democrat Randy Bryce is Trump and Ryan’s worst nightmare

by TERESA ALBANO

People’s World | June 30, 2017

Screenshot of Bryce’s campaign announcement featuring Bryce in his iron worker regalia.

Union ironworker Randy Bryce is Paul Ryan’s and Donald Trump’s worst nightmare. Democrat Bryce, of Caledonia, is running for Congress in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District, currently represented by House Speaker Ryan. He will face at least one primary opponent.

Bryce lit up the Internet when he launched his campaign June 19 with a poignant video on why he is running.

With his Ron Swanson-esque mustache, stickered hard hat and actual blue collar, Bryce cuts a genuine working-class hero figure in opposition to the caricatures of the “white working class” that both Trump and Ryan are eager to portray and claim they represent.

Plebeian Democracy in India

by Harasankar Adhikari

Frontier | Jun 29, 2017

“In the world there is no one but the vulgar.”

Politics in Indian democracy is a business of power, authority and wealth making. Party dominated democratic government rarely reveals grassroots empowerment in politics. Overall system of democracy makes people advantageous to ruling party from lower houses to upper houses. Unfortunately, we see that it teaches ‘how not to be good’. Indian democracy might be considered as a “plebeian” model of democracy in late republican Rome. Plebeian democracy teaches to combat hierarchical social structures based on differentiated socioeconomic classes through equal right to voting and participation in government. Purposively, Indian democracy is empowering plebeians in all respects. Patrician reshapes themselves as plebeians for the sake of gaining power and authority. According to McCormick, it breaks ‘economic elites’ hold on electoral power, and an expanded capacity for ordinary citizens to deliberate and make public judgments’.  As per the view of Machiavelli, there is the fundamental discontinuity between political ethics and ethics as such. The  transvaluation of moral values has been described : “[A] man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and use this and not use it according to necessity”.  

A Few Letters From The Spring Thunder-Time

by Farooque Chowdhury

Countercurrents.org | June 26, 2017

Sudeb, a young revolutionary walking along the path of proletarian revolution, was shot at and beaten to death by jotedar’s [owner of a large farm landholding or a de facto sub-proprietor, often with land leased out to sharecroppers] henchmen at Keshpur, Midnapur in June 1970, said press reports. Sudeb’s father wrote:

“Let no other father face the terrible task of having to recall the memories of a son after his death.…

“In his [Sudeb’s] opinion, the hour of revolution had already arrived, and to stand by at that moment was sheer stupidity.…

“Sudeb had another trait in his character – a stern and unalterable dedication to ideals….

Stolen Police Helicopter Attacks Venezuela Top Court, Interior Ministry

teleSUR | June 27, 2017

Oscar Alberto Perez has been identified as the pilot who stole the helicopter. | Photo: Screenshot from Twitter video.

A helicopter from the Venezuela’s Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations agency was stolen Tuesday evening, circled around the Supreme Court building, firing shots toward the building, followed by two explosions which were said to be grenades, according to official sources.

The top court’s building in northern Caracas was sealed off after the national guard repelled the attack, which occurred around 5 p.m. local time.

A banner was unfurled from the helicopter that read, “350 Libertad,” in reference to article 350 of the Bolivarian Constitution that opposition forces are attempting to invoke to stop the National Constituent Assembly.

Venezuela’s Maduro Condemns Helicopter Attack on Supreme Court, Justice Ministry

by LUCAS KOERNER

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | June 27, 2017

Caracas, June 27, 2017 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has denounced a “terrorist attack” on the offices of the Supreme Court and Justice Ministry in downtown Caracas late Tuesday afternoon.

According to the head of state, the attack was perpetrated by a member of the Venezuelan forensic police (CICPC) piloting a stolen police helicopter.

The assailants reportedly circled the Supreme Court, opening fire and dropping at least four hand grenades, one of which did not explode. The president indicated that the attack coincided with a “social function” in the Supreme Court, which he said could have resulted in “dozens of dead or injured”.

Down from the Mountain

by Greg Grandin – LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | June 26, 2017

President Hugo Chávez with residents of the Caracas barrio of Antímano. (Archive)

By the end of the last century, Venezuela’s old constitutional order, which for four decades had rotated power between two ideologically indistinguishable parties, was close to collapse. The crisis had started decades earlier, in 1983, when the bottom fell out of the world oil market. Then, as now, Venezuela derived most of its state revenue from the export of petroleum. By that point, the country had become heavily urban: 16 of its 19 million people lived in cities, a significant majority below the poverty line, with many in extreme poverty. Most of these urban poor resided in shanty towns sprawling up along the mountain walls that encircle Caracas, where the better-off live. In 1989, the government tried to solve the crisis of cheap oil with IMF-brokered austerity, which drove the poor down into the city, where they rioted and looted for three days. According to some observers, the military killed more than a thousand people, though the number is disputed and there has never been an official tally. The Caracazo, as the uprising became known, marked the beginning of increasingly focused opposition throughout most of Latin America to post-1970s economic orthodoxy, which held that high interest rates, balanced budgets, low tariffs, privatised industries, weakened labour laws and reduced social spending were the keys to development. Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile and El Salvador would all eventually come to elect governments trying to find a way out of the neoliberal straitjacket.