Ford may have to cut production of some models, which will reduce U.S. jobs, and all these are because of tariff war with China, which the U.S. has initiated.
Ford has informed employees this week of a planned reorganization that will cut salaried jobs as the automaker seeks to improve profits and revive its stock price.Read More »
Sweden, an amazing economy to many utopians or to the naive about capitalism, is experiencing pains capitalist economies feel. Capitalist crisis has already torn down that façade of the utopia. Ordinary citizens in Sweden are seeing the dream demolished. It is being manifested into politics, into electoral process in Sweden. At the same time, ordinary citizens are trying to stand against deceptions that all varieties of bourgeoisie politics practice. The following interview of Bosse Kramsjo, a participant in an on-going Occupy Movement, about 20-months long, to save a hospital, narrates the movement. Bosse, now engaged with ecological farming along with his wife Maria Norgren, has authored books and articles exposing capitalist development, NGO-trickery and micro credit business. To Bosse and Maria, engagement with ecological farming is part of their struggle against profit-driven, chemical-stuffed agriculture-industry owned by big companies. Bosse was a faculty member in a development studies related institute run by the Swedish government. Farooque Chowdhury, a freelancer from Dhaka, Bangladesh, recently interviewed Bosse. The movement shows the Occupy Movement, in many forms, illuminates areas in regions far away from the heart the movement originated. The Occupy Movement also shows that people initiate moves in areas and at times, the mainstream abandons.Read More »
Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century by John Smith, Monthly Review Press, 2016.
Even in the days of Brexit and Donald Trump, the dominant theme of the corporate media remains that the rising tide of ‘globalisation’ will lift all boats. Some go so far as to claim that the UK and the US are not for globalisation because it favours the developing nations. Others do recognise the division between the exploited multitude and the exploiting elite, but they pose such divisions at a global level, independent of the division between developed and developing nations. Even those who discuss imperialism have focussed on the spheres of finance and/or the realm of extractive industries, and may ignore the sphere of manufacturing.Read More »
The persistent insistence of US President Donald Trump at the General Assembly of the United Nations when he stated that “all options are on the table” to solve the crisis in Venezuela has aroused alarm in political circles in Washington and throughout Latin America regarding potential US military action or, more probably, [action carried out] using Colombian or Brazilian troops.
Promoting or supporting sanctions, wars, or “humanitarian interventions” is easy, any fool can do it.
The difficult thing is to see the whole picture of the issue, or what intellectuals call having a holistic view. When one makes an effort to look beneath the surface, one begins to notice great complexities, half-truths, lies, and even sometimes discover that the good are not so good, and the bad are not so bad. Venezuela seems to be one of those cases.
As was widely predicted, Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate of the Social Liberal Party, won the first round of the Brazilian presidential election, with just over 46% of the vote. But because he didn’t win a clear majority, he must now face Fernando Haddad of the left-wing Workers’ Party (who won 29% of the vote) in a second round on October 28.
A year after the Harvey Weinstein story first broke, India’s own #MeToo movement is finally taking off and spreading like wildfire. Working women are coming forward on social media with stories and details of various forms of sexual harassment and misconduct. These stories, painful as they are to process, are necessary to read so as to engage with some important questions that they raise: what is it that keeps the perpetrators of sexual harassment and misconduct continually in positions of power? What keeps victims silent? And above all else, what steps need to be taken to remedy this?
Agra: The inner courtyard of Shaukat Ali’s house, circled by five other hutments, seems like any other village household near Agra. Six brothers sit on a string cot under a leafy peepal tree smoking a hookah. A pleasant breeze wafts the grey smoke away.
Nothing seems out of tune in this bucolic milieu until a muezzin’s azaan call breaks the afternoon lull.
Journal of People 