Month: April 2015

Source: Counterpunch

The beach at Visakhapatnam, the largest city in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, was a sea of red this Sunday. Over a hundred thousand communist activists and sympathizers of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI-M, gathered to conclude its 21st Party Congress. The CPI-M is the largest and most significant Left party in India, although it has been in close alliance with other Left parties with a new emphasis on the creation of a platform of Left Unity.

The CPI-M gathered at a difficult time for the Indian people. Half of India’s 1.2 billion people live in conditions of deprivation. Government policy over the past three decades – inspired by the neoliberal policy slate – has produced a hostile environment for survival. A quarter of a million farmers and peasants have committed suicide across the country, a direct consequence of capitalist agriculture and an adverse global trade order. The current government of the Hindu Right is not only the complete inheritor of such harsh economic policies, but it has the added disadvantage of being culturally suffocating. Attacks on freedom of expression and speech as well as a spectrum of threats against cultural and religious difference have begun to mark the social landscape. read more

Source: Counterpunch

Three decades ago, with the end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the South American dictatorships, many hoped that the much talked about ‘peace dividend’ promised by Bush senior and Thatcher would actually materialise. No such luck. Instead, we have experienced continuous wars, upheavals, intolerance and fundamentalisms of every sort – religious, ethnic and imperial. The exposure of the Western world’s surveillance networks has heightened the feeling that democratic institutions aren’t functioning as they should, that, like it or not, we are living in the twilight period of democracy itself. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Barack Obama is playing all sides against each other, but support for the Saudi war in Yemen will only spread conflagration in the Middle East

So relentless has the violence convulsing the Middle East become that an attack on yet another Arab country and its descent into full-scale war barely registers in the rest of the world. That’s how it has been with the onslaught on impoverished Yemen by western-backed Saudi Arabia and a string of other Gulf dictatorships.

Barely two weeks into their bombardment from air and sea, more than 500 have been killed and the Red Cross is warning of a “catastrophe” in the port of Aden. Where half a century ago Yemenis were tortured and killed by British colonial troops, Houthi rebels from the north are now fighting Saudi-backed forces loyal to the ousted President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Up to 40 civilians sheltering at a UN refugee camp in the poorest country in the Arab world were killed in a single Saudi air attack last week. read more