Solidarity 213, 3 August 2011

The English Defence League plans to march through Tower Hamlets in East London (an area with a large Asian, mostly Muslim, population) on 3 September. As racist violence has been a feature wherever the EDL has held large mobilisations, working-class activists in Tower Hamlets and beyond need to organise to confront the EDL and prevent them from marching. Unfortunately, that is not the strategy on offer in Tower Hamlets right now. We need a direct-action anti-fascist movement based on working-class, socialist politics that can physically confront the far-right in the streets and provide a...

The Syrian state under Bashar al-Assad used tank fire and heavy machine guns on Sunday 31 July as the army overran barricades erected by the citizens of Hama. 500,000 had marched in Hama on Friday 29 demanding “the regime must go!” Shooting wildly, soldiers attacked mainly peaceful demonstrators who — amazingly, bravely — ran into the firing from the ramshackle barriers, demanding the tanks stop. The Syrian National Organisation for Human Rights estimates 142 people died on Sunday in Hama and three other Syrian towns. It seems the regime wants to break the protests before the start of the...

It is six months since the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and in that time, although intense struggles have continued throughout the Arab world, especially in Libya and Syria (probably the two most repressive Arab states), as yet no other dictators have fallen. Egypt remains, however, central to the future of these revolutions: it is the most populous Arab country, with the most developed political culture. In the last six months, a whole range of new political parties have come into being; extremely sophisticated political and ideological debates have taken place; and the most important, if...

On Wednesday 27 July Britain became the latest state to recognise the rebel National Transition Council (NTC) as the “sole [Libyan] governmental authority”. 30 countries, including the United States, have now recognized the NTC. UK Foreign Secretary, William Hague declared, “This decision reflects the National Transitional Council’s increasing legitimacy, competence and success in reaching out to Libyans across the country.” In London a Libyan diplomat was summoned to the Foreign Office to be told all Qaddafi officials must pack their bags and leave. The NTC had been complaining that many of...

China’s people and its media have defied state censorship to condemn the government’s development drive, which is coming with a terrible cost. After a high-speed rail crash on 24 July which killed 39 people, questions are being asked about the real motivations behind projects such as the high-speed railway and the Jiaozhou Bay sea-bridge, which opened in late June 2011 despite fears that it was not safe. In the immediate aftermath of the rail crash, the Chinese government appeared unwilling to respond to questions about the incident and attempted to prevent the national media from probing too...

On Monday 1 August Democrat and Republican members in the US House of Representatives voted through a cuts package of more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years. The deal ended weeks of wrangling that could have resulted in the US defaulting on its debts. But these huge cuts at the state level follow cuts, and attacks on unions at a federal level. The following editorial* from the July-August edition of Against the Current , the journal of US socialist group Solidarity, describes the political lines of those attacks. The full frontal assault on public workers and their unions in one state...

In last May’s administrative elections, and a national referendum that followed, tens of millions of Italians gave an unequivocal thumbs down to Silvio Berlusconi. So general and widespread was the feeling of triumph and hope that many believed an Italian “spring” was in the offing. However so far there has been only increased misery and a mounting sense of helpless desperation. This was magnified dramatically by the money markets’ flight from Italian treasury bonds, revealing the stark truth about the Italian economy and its jerry-built financial system. Under pressure from the Northern...

Standard and Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s have got their way. Three relatively small New York finance companies have strong-armed the mighty US government into big cuts in social spending. Standard and Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s are the “ratings agencies” which had threatened to mark down the US government’s IOUs (bonds) to less than 100% good-as-gold. Their threat was so powerful that it pulled into line both the right-wing “Tea Party” Republicans who wanted a financial panic so that they could force even bigger social cuts, and Obama and the Democrats, who preferred smaller cuts and reversal...

In 2005, the USA scraped together an alliance of warlords which it hoped would rule Somalia from the capital, Mogadishu. Somalis despised the warlords, and the majority helped the Islamists of the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) to oust them in 2006. The UIC offered peace to Mogadishu for the first time in 15 years, and established its rule in most of southern Somalia. An Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, sponsored by the USA, began in December 2006. It displaced more than a million people and killed close to 15,000 civilians. Eventually Ethiopia was compelled to withdraw the bulk of its troops...

The average household of four in the USA’s top one per cent spends $3 million a year on luxuries. In famine-stricken Somalia, more than half the population of nine million live on less than $1 a day. Each one of those rich households in the USA, if it limited itself to necessities, could spare enough to double the income of almost one million Somalis. The richest one per cent in the USA — three million people — consume between them 70 times as much as the entire income (consumer spending, public services, investment, the lot) of 92 million people in Somalia and Ethiopia. The richest one per...