Critical Times

Source: Vanguard May Issue

In the first decade of the 21st Century, scientists of different disciplines are alerting people and governments to a second crisis of capitalism, a crisis bigger than the current economic crisis. That crisis is the destruction of the environment caused by the ‘growth at all costs’ logic of capitalism. The enormity of the crisis is summarised in the following statement by the Swedish Talberg Foundation 2008 Report, Grasping The Climate Crisis; A Provocation:
“The world at present faces a breakdown of the global financial system.

So, what is a quadrillion? It’s a thousand trillion, or one million billion. A bit later in this article, I’ll direct you to an amazing series of graphics that tries to give some sense to these terms.

For the moment, let us just note that the Bank of International Settlements has recently reported that global outstanding derivatives have reached 1.

Source: Global Research

By José Miguel Alonso Trabanco

Eurasia is currently experiencing serious problems derived from financial and economic difficulties such as unemployment, GDP negative growth, currency depreciation, overall economic slowdown and so on. Several members of both the European Union and NATO (Poland, Hungary, Iceland come to mind) are already dealing with a considerable deal of domestic discontent. Some States from the Former Soviet Union (notably Ukraine, Belarus and the Central Asian Republics) and even Russia itself are facing similar problems.

See Mark Fiore’s animated satire on Wall Street’s approach to overcoming economic stagnation and socialism!

Source: Climate Emergency Network – South Australia

Dear Michelle and Barack,

We write to you as fellow parents concerned about the Earth that will be inherited by our children, grandchildren, and those yet to be born.

Barack has spoken of ‘a planet in peril’ and noted that actions needed to stem climate change have other merits. However, the nature of the chosen actions will be of crucial importance.

Source: International League of Peoples’ Struggle

Written by Prof. JOSE MARIA SISON
Sunday, 04 January 2009
Professor JOSE MARIA SISON
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle

Since December 27, 2008, the US-supported Zionist Israel has carried out a war of aggression against the Palestinian people in Gaza. It has launched air strikes by F-16 jet planes and Apache helicopters and artillery shelling by naval vessels in order to massacre hundreds and injure thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and destroy their homes, mosques, schools, public buildings, oil depots, power plants, water facilities and other infrastructure.

Source: Monthly Review
by Rick Wolff

In Marxian terms, the current crisis emerged from the workings of the capitalist class structure. Capitalism’s history displays repeated booms and busts punctuated by bubbles. Capitalism’s cycles range unpredictably from local, shallow, and short to global, deep, and long.

Written by Doug Norberg
Wednesday, 26 November 2008

On November 4, 2008, millions of new voters stepped into political life with the hope that the traditional (as many put it) rich-white-male-Christian cultural monopoly on political power would no longer determine the conditions of life in the United States. These millions who stepped forward to be counted—young, poor, women, people of color, the wronged and abused, the falsely accused, sick and disabled, atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, and progressive Christians, displaced, evicted, and laid-off, and other “outcasts” and have-nots—were repelled by that de facto oligarchy, which had, they felt, excluded them. The Bush regime had arrogantly and unsuccessfully led that traditional elite for 8 years of widening wars and monstrous economic crises, which drew widespread domestic and global anger and condemnation.

Issued by the Commission on Socio-Economic Development and Social Equity of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, September 20, 2008

Prepared for the Commission by the IBON Foundation

The deep problems of the imperialist-dominated world capitalist systemare in very sharp focus today. The majority of humanity has long suffered unremitting poverty and exploitation – but the people are being pushed into even greater difficulties by the current episode of intense economic and financial crisis which is feared to be the worst since theGreat Depression of the 1930s. The current descent into greater socioeconomic turmoil doesn’t just underscore the inevitability of crisis under capitalism.

Story by Ozee

Even the CIA says Iran has No nuke building programme ,but the U$ and Israel still do a song and dance about “enriched uranium.”Why?

It may not be the Bomb and enriched uranium that the US is worried about but the depleted uranium by-product usefull for making uranium metal tipped weapons big or small.

If ,you run a nuclear energy plant using enriched uranium ,depleted uranium is the waste by-product.

For those on the world stage hoping that the forthcoming US Presidential elections will result in a US Government more in keeping with the environmental views of other industrialised countries, Senator John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as running mate might be an indication of business as usual if the Republicans win. Palin favours drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, has opposed initiatives banning the discharge of pollution from metal mines into salmon streams, and has blocked moves to list polar bears as threatened species. Furthermore, she has so far failed to set emission reduction targets for Alaska, and has even questioned the science behind global warming predictions.

Source: Serve The People

The sub-prime mortgage crisis which developed in the USA in August 2007 continues to develop.

As noted bourgeois commentator Henry C.K.

Contribution to the Forum on Global Financial Crisis,
Third International Assembly, Hong Kong, 19 June 2008

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle

I wish to comment on the gravity of the current financial crisis of the
world capitalist system and on the impact of this in the various major
contradictions in the world, with special attention to the people’s
resistance in Asia, Africa and Latin America and in the imperialist
countries.

Gravity of the Global Financial Crisis

The economic and financial crisis of the US and world capitalist system
has worsened to a new and unprecedented level since the Great
Depression.

Guerilla gardeners across the world say they are fighting a win-win war, writes Kate Kelland.

THEY work under the cover of night, armed with seed bombs, chemical weapons and pitchforks. Their tactics are anarchistic, their attitude revolutionary.

A Japanese crew were discovered selling salted whale meat from their ship on return from Antarctica which violates Japan’s ’scientific research’ permit. The Nisshin Maru crew members were interviewed, informing Greenpeace that dozens of workers resold salted meat not included in the official whaling statistics. The ship’s operator Kyodo Sempaku insisted that giving crew members ’souvenir’ meat was a decade-old custom.

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the New Labour government is destroying one of the the venerable features of “communal decency” in Britain – the local post office. Economies need to be made, though not in the pursuit of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community.

Compared to the euro, the value of the US dollar has fallen 76 per cent in the last five years. So who would want to be paid in a currency that’s losing its grunt? Not Iran. It’s hedging its bets by selling its oil in a basketful of currencies brimming with euros and Chinese yuan.

A speech by ARUNDHATI ROY

This article was delivered as a lecture in Istanbul on January 18, 2008, to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper Agos.

I NEVER met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago, I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying “We are all Armenians,” “We are all Hrant Dink.

HUMAN-generated climate change is making flowers bloom sooner and autumn leaves fall later and is turning polar bears into cannibals and birds into early breeders, a global study has found.

Hundreds of previous studies had noted specific changes and most suggested a link to so-called anthropogenic (human-generated) global warming, but a new analysis published in the journal Nature correlated earlier studies with changes in temperature, the study’s lead author said.

The study found the early arrival of migratory birds in Australia, declining water levels in western Victoria and a 50 per cent decline in Antarctica’s Emperor Penguin population were linked to rising temperatures.

Bob Briton

From “The Guardian” 23 April, 2008

The warnings are dire: “Imminent wars will break out due to worsening living conditions in poor countries,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said recently. On top of the planet’s climate change crisis and oil resources crisis, we now have a food crisis that threatens the existing order. The world market price of staple foods has gone up 75 percent in the past two months.