Economy

Confronting Injustice: Social Activism in the Age of Individualism Umair Muhammad www.confrontinginjustice.com Too many supposedly radical books are written by academics for academics, apparently competing to see who can produce the most incomprehensible prose. My list of “books to be reviewed” contains literally dozens of overstuffed and overpriced volumes that only a handful of specialists will ever read, and with little relevance to the non-university world.

Live coverage of a speech by Britain's Trade Union Congress general secretary Frances O’Grady was cut off minutes after she had warned of a return to a “Downton Abbey” society, The Independent said on September 8, “for a newsflash announcing that the Duchess of Cambridge is expecting her second child”.

Palestinian boycott hitting Israel's economy In the last two months, Palestinians across the West Bank have begun heeding calls to boycott Israeli goods in increasing numbers as popular campaigns have taken to the street to promote the campaign, Ma’an News Agency said on August 28. Economic analysts say the campaign could potentially have a major negative effect on the Israeli economy. It could also buoy the Palestinian economy.

In the months leading up to Ecuador’s October 2006 presidential election, the US Embassy in Quito claimed to be impartial. Rather than supporting one particular candidate, then-US ambassador Linda Jewell said the embassy only wanted to help facilitate “a fair and transparent electoral process”.

US woman with four jobs dies while napping “A New Jersey woman who worked four jobs, who sometimes 'wouldn’t sleep for five days' according to a co-worker, died Monday while napping between shifts in her car on the side of the road. Maria Fernandes died in her 2001 Kia Sportage after inhaling carbon monoxide and fumes from an overturned gas container she kept in the car ...

There is a political movement in Scotland that is quite beyond anything containable by or even comprehensible through the terms of conventional parliamentary, tick-some-scoundrel's-name-every-four-years politics. Many of us have had our political senses so numbed for so long by broken promises of change that it’s taken a long time for people to wake up to this fact.

Since the two-party political establishment in the Spanish state ― the People’s Party (PP) of prime minister Mariano Rajoy and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) ― got less than 50% in the May 25 European elections, its nightmares have been getting scarier. The spectre disturbing their sleep is Podemos, the political expression of the indignado movement that in May 2011 exploded against austerity and corruption and for “real democracy”.

Global Imperialism & the Great Crisis: the Uncertain Future of Capitalism Ernesto Screpanti Monthly Review Press, 2014 New York, 256 pages The goal of Ernesto Screpanti’s new book is to theoretically elaborate a model of a new phase of imperialism. Screpanti’s argument is that the kind of imperialism written about by the likes of Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin belongs more and more to the past. Although the work of people like Lenin retain relevance, Screpanti argues a new kind of imperialism has been taking shape over the past two decades.

More than 3000 landless families occupied the Santa Monica farm in Brazil on August 31. The farm, registered in the name of businessperson and Brazilian Democratic Movement Party Senator Eunicio Oliveira, is a complex of more than 20,000 hectares. It is self-declared as unproductive. The occupation was organised by the Landless Workers' Movement (MST), a powerful Brazilian social movement that fights for land for the poor.

“World leaders are failing to address the worst ever Ebola epidemic, and states with biological-disaster response capacity, including civilian and military medical capability, must immediately dispatch assets and personnel to West Africa,” international health NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said in a September 2 statement.

According to John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist who chronicled the Great Crash of 1929, the Great Depression did not actually end. Rather, it was swept away by World War II. Something eerily similar seems to be happening with the global economy since the onset of the global financial crisis (GFC) six years ago. The vice-chairperson of the US Federal Reserve, Stanley Fischer, said: “The global recovery has been disappointing … year after year we have had to explain from mid-year why the global growth rate has been lower than predicted as little as two quarters back.”

In Place of Fear II: A Socialist Programme for an Independent Scotland By Jim Sillars Vagabond Voices Publishing, 2014 www.inplaceoffear.com Jim Sillars is a well-known and well-respected figure on the Scottish political scene. Elected a Labour Party MP for South Ayrshire in 1970, he shifted away from mainstream Labour Party politics due to his commitment to setting up a Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.