Honduras: Opposition Supporters Hold Nationwide Protests

teleSUR | December 15, 2017

• Opposition supporters during a protest over a disputed presidential election in Tegucigalpa, Honduras December 15, 2017. | Photo: Reuters

  The protests are directed at the probable fraud that has marked the country’s presidential elections.

  Opposition Alliance supporters in Honduras are out on the streets in a nationwide protest after presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla and former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya called for the people to begin a “peaceful” and “permanent” national demonstration and labor strike.

Venezuela: We Demand Recognition for the Chavista & Communard Peoples’ Right to Political Participation

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | December 13, 2017

(RachaelBoothroydRojas)

“Sovereignty resides within in the people & is untransferable, whom may exercise it directly in the way foreseen in this Constitution and the law, and indirectly, by means of suffrage, through the state organs of Popular Power. The organs of the state emanate from popular sovereignty and are subject to it.” – (CRBV, Article 5)

“The commune must be the birthplace of socialism. Socialism should emerge from the grassroots, it cannot be decreed; You must create it. It is a popular creation […] The commune is the space where we are going to conceive and give birth to socialism, from the small-scale. A mountain is built grain by grain, stone by stone” – (Hugo Chávez, Aló Presidente Teórico Nº 1, 11.06.09)

US Donates Almost USD$1M to Pro-Venezuelan Opposition Think-Tank

by Rachael Boothroyd Rojas

VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM | December 13, 2017

In 2013, the Atlantic Council presented an “international distinguished leadership award” to then-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. (Atlantic Council)

Bogota, December 13 2017 (venezuelanalysis.com) – A small bureau at the US State Department donated almost $USD1 million dollars to the Atlantic Council think-tank in September to work with the Venezuelan opposition.

The USD$900,000 in taxpayers’ money was donated to the organisation as part of the US State Department’s “Peace Process Support Network” programme in order to “promote non-violent conflict resolution” in the South American country. Venezuela is currently suffering from an acute economic crisis and political impasse between the national leftist government and the opposition, though a third phase of official dialogue between the two began at the beginning of December.

FACE OF AN ECONOMY: Poverty in Alabama, US

A Journal of People report

 

A neighborhood with rundown homes on March 6, 2015 in Selma, Alabama. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Poverty in Alabama, US, is shocking. To the mainstream-believers, it seems strange also. But it is a fact from the capitalist state, one of the richest countries in the world.

A report in The Independent, US, said: The US state of Alabama has some of the worst conditions of poverty in the developed world, according to a visiting United Nations official.

The “UN shocked by level of poverty in Alabama: ‘We haven’t seen this in the first world’” headlined report by Andrew Buncombe from Birmingham, Alabama said:

Red Is The Color Of The Poor: Sumanta Banerjee Looks Into The Naxalbari Uprising In India

by Farooque Chowdhury

Countercurrents.org | November 17, 2017

Sumanta Banerjee (b. 1936), political and civil rights activist and social scientist, moved to the revolutionary position of the Naxalbari peasants’ upsurge in the north-eastern India while working as a journalist for The Statesman in the late sixties, and joined the movement in 1973. He had to resort to underground life while carrying on his revolutionary tasks in rural and industrial areas, Srikakulam forests and hills, and Kolkata slums. As an active participant in the toilers’ political struggle armed with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought he had the opportunity to know the movement closely from his work with comrades from grassroots and a part of leadership, and working with Liberation, the clandestine English organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Sumanta Banerjee, author of In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India(Subarnarekha, Kolkata, 1980), Marxism and the Indian Left: From “Interpreting” to “Changing” It(Purbalok Publication, Kolkata, 2012), The Parlour and the Street: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and Logic in a Popular Form (2002), regularly contributes to The Economic and Political Weekly from Mumbai. He is also editor of Thema Book of Naxalite Poetry(1987). In this interview, conducted in late-September-early-October, 2017 by Farooque Chowdhury, Sumanta Banerjee looks into the Naxalbari Uprising.

Income of World’s Top .001% Skyrockets by 636%: Report

teleSUR | December 14, 2017

Average annual income for the bottom 50 percent of earners has stayed constant at US$16,000 over the last four decades. | Photo: Reuters

The report, which highlights the growing gulf between haves and have-nots, was compiled by five economists, including scholars Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

Global Economic Inequality is surging, further widening the pay gap between the haves and have-nots, according to a new World Inequality report.

Che Guevara in the Congo

by David Seddon

Pambazuka News | December 15, 2017

Jacobin

The idea of Guevara as a latter-day Don Quixote, setting out on his adventures to undo wrongs and bring justice to the world, and, despite a series of disastrous encounters, managing to survive with spirits undiminished until the very end, is one that appeals to the romantic in all those who see themselves as revolutionaries.

Introduction

The recent death of Fidel Castro on 25 November 2016 prompted me to re-visit the extraordinary history of the Cuban Revolution and in particular the role of the Cuban government under Castro in supporting what they considered to be progressive movements and radical governments throughout the world, including in Africa, over a period of three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s. Diplomatic recognition, political support and military assistance were all provided to national liberation struggles and independent states in Algeria and Western Sahara, in Eritrea and Ethiopia, in Zanzibar, and in the Portuguese colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. The military victories won by Cuban soldiers in Angola, in 1975-76 and again in 1987-88, against the South African army were in my opinion a crucial part of the eventually successful struggle against White rule in Namibia and in South Africa itself.