Opinions

In recent weeks, radiation levels have spiked at the Fukushima nuclear power reactors in Japan, with recorded levels of 10,000 millisieverts per hour (mSv/hr) at one spot. This is the number reported by the reactor’s discredited owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co, although that number is simply as high as the Geiger counters go

Britain is reeling after several nights of rioting in major cities across the country–the worst civil unrest in a least a generation. What began at the end of last week as a series of protests against police brutality and racism has escalated into a major crisis of the entire social and political order, with police apparently losing control in parts of major cities.

If we want to understand why there have been widespread incidents of street violence across London for the past few days, we need look no further than the comments of the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, when he announced this Wednesday, “a fight-back is under way!” As if it were another country that had invaded the city!

Credit Rating Agencies are at it again. If the hole in the real economy, the one in which real people live, created by the virtual economy, where the speculators live, aka “rescuing the Banks during the subprime crisis”, were not big enough, Standard and Poor, has “downgraded” the US Credit Rating sending the world economy into a deeper hole. So who are they?

It is necessary to reflect on the possible ways out of the entire crisis in which our society is submerging. The excessive power of financial capital, the widespread debt and enormous concentration of wealth is something which the nation state, captured and blackmailed by that power, is unable to confront.

When one of the most arrogant men in the world is forced to issue a full-page apology in national newspapers, you know that he feels he has little other choice. That must have been the calculation in the inner sanctum of News Corporation when billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch signed off on a full-page ad in several of his (and his competitors’) British newspapers.

What do Bolivia, Iceland, Tunisia, Egypt and Spain all have in common? Given that they are famous respectively for; ladies in bowler hats, volcanoes, mosaics, pyramids and Rafael Nadal there seems to be little to connect these diverse countries, yet they are all undergoing the most radical forms of social revolution witnessed since the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Now that the dust has settled in Greece and the austerity measures are in place our correspondent in Greece reflects about; the great truths about the non-violent nature of the movement of the “outraged” and the historic weekend of the 28th & 29th of June, unprecedented state repression, provocation and media propaganda.

‘No nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars on modernization of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of UN disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of these instruments of terror seems all but inevitable.’

When you don’t acknowledge China’s stupendous achievements, what you find is a country that has little to show and still far to go. When you don’t see the political foundations of economic policies that freed the vast majority of dirt poor and backward Chinese from awesome feudal inequalities, it is taken to be the success of capitalist impulses alone.