To Drink or Not To Drink

WARNING LABEL NEEDED FOR COFFEE!

New scientific research shows that warning labels are needed for coffee as this substance now joins cigarettes and alcohol as a major threat to humanity!

Drinking three cups of coffee a day 'shrinks women's breasts'
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Storm in a D-cup: Too much coffee can reduce a woman's breast size, scientists say
Scientists have discovered that drinking just three cups of coffee a day can make women's breasts shrink.
Nearly 300 women were surveyed about their bust measurements and how many cups of coffee they drank in an average day.
According to researchers, three cups a day was enough to start making breasts shrink, with the effects increasing for every cup drunk.
They said there was a clear link between drinking coffee and smaller breasts as around half of all women possess a gene that has been shown to link breast size to coffee intake.
'Drinking coffee can have a major effect on breast size,' said Helena Jernstroem, a lecturer in experimental oncology at Lund University in Sweden.
'Coffee-drinking women do not have to worry their breasts will shrink to nothing overnight.
They will get smaller, but the breasts aren't just going to disappear.'
'However, anyone who thinks they can tell which women are coffee drinkers just from their bra measurements will be disappointed.
'The problem is that there are two measures for a bra, the cup size and the girth, so you wouldn't be able to tell.'
It's not all bad news for women however as the researchers also found that regular hits of caffeine can help to cut the risk of developing breast cancer.
Scientists said that the effect of coffee is related to its impact on estrogens - the female sex hormones.
Some substances in coffee can change a woman's metabolism so she acquires a better configuration of various estrogens, therefore lowering the potential risk.
But women with bigger breasts that contain more mammary glands are at a higher risk, the scientists added.

TARP Oversight Committee Chair Elizabeth Warren Explains

Why Unemployment is Not a “Lagging Indicator” of Economic Vitality

By Jim Genova

It is conventional wisdom pontificated ad nauseam on business channels like CNBC and Bloomberg that employment figures are “lagging indicators” of the state of a country’s economy. Their argument is that as recessions begin businesses start to contract the labor force in order to “hedge” against expected declines in revenues and profits, even if they are not at that time losing money. This “streamlining” and “cost-effective” measure is designed to keep businesses profitable even as the economy as a whole slides into crisis. The result is that those employers who take proactive measures by dismissing their workers in advance of a deepening economic crisis will be the healthiest coming out of it. They will have surplus capital available to capture market share and swallow their competition. Such activity is a sign of economic health, so the argument runs, an indication that the “natural functioning” of the business cycle is working and the markets are “correcting themselves.” The result is that healthy businesses that continue to lay off workers as the economy bottoms will invest in new technology, improve efficiency in production, and prepare the ground for the next stage in the economic recovery. That means unemployment is likely to continue increasing even as businesses’ balance sheets get healthy, the stock market rises in value, and productivity rates improve. Those workers still employed are likely to receive better wages through working longer hours (not necessarily wage increases), which improves their purchasing power, thus contributing to the overall expansion of the economy – even as millions continue to languish on unemployment lines and more join them month after month.

The argument outlined above is flawed and reflects the perverted standards used by capitalist economists to measure economic vitality. As is obvious, the perspective outlined above to determine whether an economy is expanding or contracting is taken entirely from the standpoint of corporate balance sheets. A business is deemed “healthy,” i.e. profitable, even as those workers it lays off have seen their lives disrupted if not destroyed through loss of income along with health care and pensions attached to their place of employment. The balance sheet of the unemployed worker is far from healthy, though. Since the current economic crisis began over 5.1 million jobs in the U.S. have officially been destroyed. This masks a bigger picture of many more millions who have lost their jobs then found part-time or lower wage work. In other words, the official tally is a net of total jobs lost in the economy, not a running tally of the number of workers displaced in the crisis. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy must create at least 100,000 jobs a month to account for new entrants into the labor force. In the last year, the economy has lost an average of 400,000 jobs a month, a total shortfall of 500,000 jobs a month for a year. That means as of March 2009 the U.S. economy has failed to generate the 6 million jobs necessary just to keep the employment level even with the earliest period of the current economic crisis, much greater than the total jobs lost figure would indicate. Moreover, such figures do not take into account those workers who have retained their jobs by taking unpaid leaves, pay cuts, steep benefit reductions, and contraction of their hours worked. The carnage among the working class in the U.S. as a result of this crisis is much greater than the official 8.5% unemployment rate (as of March 2009) or the total unemployment rate of 15.6%, which includes discouraged workers and those working part-time who sought full-time employment. This amounts to 24.3 million people unemployed in the U.S., the highest since records have been kept.

Many leading economists have also pointed to the jobs picture as particularly worrisome in the current crisis. Roger Altman, former Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration, warned in an essay published by the Financial Times on 5 April 2009 that this economic contraction should not be measured against previous post-World War II downturns. The difference this time is the extent to which U.S. households have become leveraged in order to maintain their standards of living even as real wages declined. As Nobel Prize winning-economist Paul Krugman argues in his book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, the post- 9-11 Greenspan Bubble of artificially inflating housing prices, maintaining excessively low interest rates to provide easy credit to banks and brokerage firms, and promotion of shady refinancing programs in order to expand the balance sheets of mortgage companies set the stage for the current global meltdown, bringing many of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism to a crisis level. More importantly, it led to a catastrophic debt burden on average working people who now find themselves in homes with mortgages worth far more than the market price for their houses, buried under mountains of credit card debt accumulated to buy necessities when wages were insufficient for a minimum standard of living, and facing joblessness or contracting income as corporations try to save themselves by throwing the people overboard. Altman argues that the average household saw its net worth plunge by 20% in the past two years even as real wages fell, compounding the crisis. He states that as a result, “household debt reached 130% of income in 2008,” and likely has worsened since then. This situation has forced working people to radically curtail spending even as banks have also reigned in credit. Those two factors have produced a rapidly contracting economy plunging the country (and much of the world) perilously close to a deflationary spiral for which no capitalist economist or politician has ever found an answer. A rapidly rising unemployment rate, therefore, indicates a sick and declining economy. It does not lag; it reveals the state of economic health in a society.

Karl Marx long ago recognized the fundamental importance of employment levels and wages as a measure of the relative strength or weakness of an economy. Writing in The Theories of Surplus Value, Marx notes that “[The] relative diminution in the reproduction of variable capital, however, is not the reason for the relative decrease in the demand for labor, but on the contrary, its effect.” In other words, falling profits does not cause rising unemployment, rather declining employment causes a reduction in socially available capital since it is labor power that generates capital. As fewer people are working shorter hours, the amount of “wealth” generated in society declines forcing a contraction in consumption, availability of goods, and shrinking balance sheets. To save themselves, businesses throw more people out of work, compounding the problem, leading to another cycle of economic retrenchment. This is the process identified by Altman in the piece discussed above and by Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party USA, in an address to the Party’s National Committee on 21 March 2009. The dimensions of the current crisis, though, are far beyond those of earlier periods in capitalism’s history because real wages for working people have declined steadily and sharply for better than 35 years. This gap between purchasing capacity and real wages was compensated for by an explosive expansion of credit to all sectors of society (by some accounts even to family pets!). Marx warned of this process as early as 1849 when he described the escalating crises of capitalism. Noting the insatiable appetite of capitalists to expand their capacity to accumulate wealth, Marx recognized that eventually they “set in motion all the mainsprings of credit to this end, [as a result] there is a corresponding increase in industrial earthquakes, in which the trading world can only maintain itself by sacrificing a part of wealth, of products, and even of productive forces to the gods of the nether world.” That is the process outlined above and cheered by capitalist ideologues on U.S. business channels as a marker of economic “recovery.”

Those propagandists for capital assert that “money makes money,” or that businesses with access to credit and surplus capital invest those resources in the economy creating jobs. This is the basis for their claims that the key to economic salvation is massive tax cuts for the rich and for businesses in general. It is an assertion that wealth in society is generated by “putting money to work.” Yet, as Marx noted, this fetishizes money and obscures the production process that created that money in the first place. In the Grundrisse Marx outlined the source of wealth in society and the processes whereby labor power (workers making things) becomes transformed into exchange value (money) that is then circulated back to the worker in the form of alienated labor (commodities). “Production,” he writes, “thus appears as the starting-point; consumption as the final end; and distribution and exchange as the middle; the latter has a double aspect, distribution being defined as a process carried on by society, exchange as one proceeding from the individual.” Without workers making things – transforming raw materials into finished goods by adding their labor power to the product – there is no wealth generated in society. The fact that under capitalist relations of production surplus labor value is seized by the private corporate owner and sold for individual profit on the open market does not negate the fundamentally social nature of production or the source of society’s wealth.

The fact that Western capitalist economies embraced the global and massive expansion of credit as the mechanism to compensate for their seizing ever larger shares of the surplus value generated by workers around the world only delayed the day of reckoning for the contradictions inherent in capitalism while exacerbating them at the same time. Thus, when credit could no longer be absorbed by the productive classes of the world and their debt burden forced a retrenchment in spending – or default on their mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, etc. – this caused a decline in consumption. It was the beginning of an accounting of the decline of real purchasing power by workers that had been accumulating for more than three decades. As consumption slowed, businesses began to lay off workers outright, accelerating the decline in consumption, which led to further layoffs as capitalists sought to protect their profit margins. Simultaneously, we began to witness immense pressure on workers to work shorter hours, take pay cuts, work for free, eliminate benefits, take early retirement (even as their retirement accounts evaporated in the stock market crash), and their credit lines were cut from underneath them as their income dried up.

The result has been mounting unemployment and a corresponding massive contraction in the wealth-generating capacity of the U.S. and global economy even as banks like Wells Fargo announce record profits (thanks to money at 0% interest from the Federal Reserve). Rising unemployment does not tell us what is in the rearview mirror of the economy, it tells us what the current state of the economy is and its trajectory tells us of what things are likely to be in the future for the people of a given society. In each of the last several months the U.S. unemployment rate has jumped by half-a-percent, suggesting a rapid deceleration of the job market and, hence, of socially-available wealth generation capacity. This portends a further contraction of consumption as those without work drop out of the economy and those with work gird for troubles ahead. Such a contraction will furnish the justification for additional employment cutbacks and the rationale for battering workers into deeper concessions. This is not an indication of a “healthy” economy returning to normal activity. Rising joblessness and mounting public debt are symptoms of a decrepit system that is in the throws of crisis, one which the working people are being made to pay for even as corporations shore up their balance sheets through tapping the public treasury, and at the expense of destroying the lives of hundreds of millions of working class households around the world. This is a system collapsing from its own internal contradictions. It is a process that is being fought vigorously by workers around the world, whether through strikes (as in France, Guadeloupe, Italy, the U.K.), factory occupations (as in the U.S., France, Belgium), mass street protests (everywhere and growing larger), and building grassroots coalitions to force their governments to provide real economic stimulus and reign in the financial sector and greedy corporations who are feeding at the public trough. This is the working out of the materialist dialectic so brilliantly elucidated by Marx 150 years ago. The result of this struggle will shape the society of the future. It is a struggle and a future that we shape through our own collective actions.

Milton Friedman's "String Theory"

by Norman Markowitz

Jay Rothermel sent me this remarkable piece from Bloomberg News which I think deserves some commentary, since it comes from the "respectable right" and appears in the media which bears the name of the billionaire Mayor of New York. Jay wrote that he wasn't sure whether to "file it under 'bourgeois ideological rationalization' or latest news from the nuthouse," but I saw a connection with "science", albeit "weird science."

The article, by Kevin Hassett, is titled "Milton Friedman's 'Pluck' Gives Hope to Jobless." Is this the "luck and pluck" that the filled rags to riches stories for young boys of the reverend Horatio Alger, who himself left a school for boys with some charges of hanky panky before he created characters like Ragged Dick the News Boy, in which poverty became a training ground for success. However, Hassett, former Economic Advisor to John McCain and now both Director of Economic Policy Studies for the American Enterprise Institute and a Bloomberg business columnist, has something else in mind, that is, a "theory of economic crisis that Friedman came forward with in 1964 when his ideas were revered in board rooms and some economics departments but had little real influence on public policy:"the economy may be thought of as a plucked string. The further you pluck it, the more forcefully it comes back. The analogy gave the Friedman idea its name the 'plucking model.' '

I can think of other names myself, but Hassett goes on to say that "if the economy is going into decline, its good news to find out that it has been plucked That means a snap back is imminent." But how can you discover if you are dealing with a big pluck or a little pluck (even though Friedman's ideas would seem to suggest that the bigger the downward pluck, the stronger will be the bounce back)? Hassett then puts forward a complimentary "butterfly analogy." The economy is like a butterfly in a room with an upwardly sloping ceiling. The butterfly is always moving upward and sometimes flutters down a bit, but that only means it will move upward again because upward is its only direction. Hassett then quicks Tara Sinclair, an econometrician and apparent follower by the Friedman "pluck" who has looked at post WWII "recessions" in terms of that "theory." Sinclair, according to Hassett, suggest that "my updated results show that the 'pluck part' of the latest recession began in the fourth quarter of 2008" and that "plucks" usually last one year. From that, Hassett conjectures that "recovery may well be rapid and begin later this year," although he is quite worried about the lateness of the "pluck" and wonders if the revival will leave us with the high unemployment, seven percent, which preceded the financial collapse. He concludes that "Sadly, from where we are sitting 7 percent unemployment looks pretty good and the news that we have been plucked provides some comfort as more awful news arrives."

Those who are increasingly uneasy with Geithner's policy and wish President Obama would move more quickly in challenging finance capital (and I am one of those people) might stop and think about where we would be if Hassett were the Secretary of the Treasury or the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in a McCain administration. But the ideas expressed here, their shallowness and silliness, give us some insight into what we are struggling to overcome.

While "string theory" is an important new development in Physics, Friedman's "pluck theory" is an ornamental twist on the capitalist business cycle moving upward, ever upward. In some respects it is a reverse of Marx's view of a structural general crisis, with greater and deeper depressions over time with the concentration of capital, overproduction on a global scale, and the ensuing falling rate of profit. Although here, the crisis, if one takes the idea seriously (which I don't of course) would suggest that the bigger the negative "pluck," the stronger the positive pluck will be. As a historical guide, Hassett quotes Sinclair on postwar recessions which of
course are largely irrelevant to the present crisis, except of course in the longterm stagnation of real wages, the spectacular rise in consumer, state and business debt fueled by deregulation and the "high" formal rates of employment produced by creating millions of low wage service jobs to replace the high wage jobs lost by concentration and the export of capital.

Hassett appears ready to accept longterm high rates of unemployment and connect that to his plucking string and rising butterfly, the way some theologians discussed such vital questions as how many angels can dance on the head of pin as the rise of capitalism shook the clerical foundations of feudal society.

But these ideas, along with Friedman's general monetary theory, are irrelevant to the present crisis, which they helped to bring about in providing a rationale for anti-regulatory and anti-public sector social spending policies. They are a more arcane way of saying what Herbert Hoover said in the early 1930s, that "the economy is fundamentally sound" and that what was needed was to restore "confidence." Hoover at one point said privately that he wished someone could write a great song to restore confidence. That would not have helped too much (Yip Harburg's "Brother Can You Spare A Dime," which was a great song, wasn't quite what Hoover meant.). Hassett's contention that the jobless can find hope in Friedman's "pluck model" makes Hoover over seventy years ago seem like a realist. The jobless and many millions of others seeking to make ends meet in the face of mortgage payments, credit card debt, threatened income decline and job loss, understand that they have been "plucked," but in a very different way than Hassett and Sinclair.

Baghdad: Iraqi CP celebrates its 75th anniversary

Iraqi CP celebrates its 75th anniversary at mass rally at People's Stadium in Baghdad

Thousands of Iraqi Communist Party members and supporters celebrated the 75th anniversary of the party at a mass rally held in the People's Stadium in central Baghdad on Friday 3rd April 2009.

The main sports hall was packed with jubilant people, waving red flags, chanting and singing. The event opened with the national anthem which was recited by the Friendship Group. Comrade Hamid Majeed Mousa, the Secretary of the Central Committee, delivered a speech that saluted the party's heroic history of struggle and sacrifices for the cause of the people and the homeland. The speech dealt with the political developments and the recent provincial elections that were marred by violations and irregularities.

The program of the event included recital of poetry and songs. The candles of the anniversary cake were lit by young children, celebrating the party's foundation on 31st March 1934, while white doves were released along with red balloons. The audience enjoyed a lively carnival atmosphere, with people of all ages joining in the celebrations, singing and dancing, full of hope and looking forward to achieving Iraqi Communists' goal: "For a Free Homeland and Prosperous People".

ROBERT GATES & THE NEW MILITARY BUDGET

GATES' NEW MILITARY BUDGET: SOME OBSERVATIONS

Thomas Riggins

These are some remarks on the new Pentagon budget proposed on Monday by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates as reported in Tuesday's New York Times (4-7-2009).

It appears that Gates want's to eliminate wasteful, redundant, and obsolete programs and prepare the military for its new mission, viz., counter-insurgency warfare as in Iraq and Afghanistan rather that conventional warfare, say attacking the Russian army or the Chinese.

The defense industry is gearing up to fight the changes as its interest is not the security of the United States or the safety of the men and women in the military, but on continuing to get as much money as it can from the government to increase its profit margins.

The new budget is a result of new strategic thinking from the administration "making the system," as the NYT puts it, "more flexible and responsive to the needs of the troops in the way it chooses and buys weapons." Right now the troops take second place, or rather third, behind the needs of capitalist profits for the defense industry and domestic political considerations.

Gates was pretty forthright in saying economic issues and Congressional concerns about jobs (i.e., votes) would render it difficult, in his words, to "make tough choices about specific systems and defense priorities based solely on the national interest and then stick to those decisions over time." Hmmm: BASED SOLELY ON THE NATIONAL INTEREST! We will soon see the defense industry and politicians junking the NATIONAL INTEREST for their own PRIVATE INTEREST-- all wrapped up in the flag of course and presented as their patriotic duty.

Gates wants to end "the hugh cost overruns and delays that have plagued so many programs." He will be fought tooth and nail because these overruns and delays boost profits enormously for the industry.

One boondoggle Gates wants to reform is the missile defense shield. He doesn't want to end it just have it "scaled back by $1.4 billion." He might even end, or postpone ,"some of the more exotic programs." Those are ones that basically don't work but justify dumping billions into the private sector defense industries (such as schemes to shoot down inter- continental ballistic missiles).

He also wants to cut back on the production of more F-22 fighter jets, we really don't need so many and the money could be better spent in ways to actually give more support to our ground troops. But not according to the Republican House member Tom Price of Georgia. There are thousands of defense workers who would be out of work in Georgia if these unneeded aircraft were put to rest. What does Price say?

"It's outrageous that President Obama is willing [note-this is Gates' proposal, it hasn't gone yet to the White House] to bury the country under a mountain of debt with his reckless domestic agenda but refuses to fund programs critical to our national defense." The point is, of course, that an excess number of F-22s is NOT critical to our national defense. This is just pandering for votes on Price's part-- an example of the NATIONAL INTEREST being ignored, and even damaged, on behalf a PRIVATE political interest.

As for those "exotic" and ever so expensive worthless anti-ballistic missile missiles, we are told a bipartisan group of six senators (there was one Democrat!) claims that the new budget cuts to that program "could undermine our emerging missile defense capabilities to protect the United States against a growing threat."

What threat? Neither Russia nor China want to commit suicide. North Korea doesn't even have rockets that fly right, Iran doesn't have a bomb. Neither India nor Pakistan have missiles that can reach us, and are unlikely to attack us anyway. That leaves the Brits-- they won't be attacking us anytime soon. The French have been sorely provoked by the Bushites (dumping their wine in the sewers and coming up with "freedom fries") but Sarkozy loves us, so the French will behave themselves. The last possibility is the Israelis. They did attack the USS Liberty in 1967 and kill 34 of our men but I don't think they will nuke us.

Let me conclude by saying, Gates, a conservative Republican working with Obama, is not about to weaken the US military. He wants to rationalize it for the new type of warfare he sees as being the hallmark of the 21st Century-- local interventions to put down insurgencies and uppity natives. I am quite happy to see the bloated defense industry and sycophantic politicians getting the short end of the stick for a little while. But the industry will still get billions of dollars for non productive instruments of mass destruction. The best defense budget would be just enough to bring all our troops home from everywhere in the world.

Take action on health care reform

From Democracy for America:

HMO lobbyists have been getting their side coverage in the media. PR firms representing the industry have been hitting newspapers hard to ratchet up talk of compromise before a bill even hits Congress.

From the New York Times (4/1/09):

"Lobbyists and Congressional aides have discussed a possible compromise: Congress would authorize a new government-run insurance program, but it would come into existence only if certain conditions were met - if, for example, private insurers failed to rein in health costs by a certain amount after several years."

"If certain conditions were met"? "After several years"? That's not reform. That's more of the same. The media needs to hear from you. We need to fight back before the opposition's message becomes the policy.

WRITE YOUR LETTER TO THE EDITOR NOW

Labor opens unemployment lifeline online

Hardworking families are struggling to get by, and too often, they don't know where to turn for help.

That's where the Unemployment LifeLine comes in. It's a one-stop guide that links workers to the resources in their area, from unemployment offices to veterans' services to child care. It also offers the opportunity to talk to others and share support and lessons learned.

http://www.unemploymentlifeline.com

We're not stopping there, though. Today's jobless workers need help now, and the Unemployment LifeLine is there to connect them with what they need. But if things are going to get better for all workers, we need to join together to push for more jobs, better jobs and a stronger economy. The Unemployment LifeLine will offer regular opportunities for action, empowering unemployed workers to make America's economy work for all.

http://www.unemploymentlifeline.com

Working America, along with the Working America Education Fund, the AFL-CIO and the AFL-CIO's Community Services staff, put this site together. With your help, it can keep growing. If you know of a resource that isn't on the site, we want to know about it, to spread the word further.

Workers Rally in Harrisburg, PA for Employee Free Choice

AFL-CIO Card Check Rally

THE AGE OF THE WARRIOR

The Age of the Warrior, by Robert Fisk

Reviewed by Frank McLynn

Robert Fisk is probably the most celebrated foreign correspondent in Britain, and rightly so. This selection of his journalism finds him at full throttle as he inveighs against a host of familiar, but wholly deserving targets: Bush, Blair, the Iraq war, the insane Western policy towards the Middle East. His loathing of Blair, "this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar... who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands", will strike a chord with millions. Fisk has an equal detestation of "Dubya" Bush, but by now there is nothing more to be said about a man whom history will surely judge as the worst US president ever.

Fisk, who knows the Middle East backwards and is an Arabist, can find almost no consolation when he surveys the area: 150,000 people died in a civil war in Lebanon in 1975-90, caused by the West's meddling, but, since they were not Brits or Americans, no one cares. Another 200,000 died in Algeria when "our sonofabitch" government decided to ignore the results of an election, but there is no pro-democratic regime change there engineered by Washington. Turkey denies that its genocide of the Armenians in 1915 took place, yet its aspirations to join the EU are still taken seriously, again because of US pressure.

As Fisk scathingly remarks, Bush ("the David Irving of the White House") can warn us that Iran is a possible cause of a Third World War yet cannot tell the truth about Turkey in the First. Some of his choicest invective is reserved for Israel: "When Israelis are involved, our moral compass, our ability to report the truth dries up." It has got to the point of doublethink that Webster's Dictionary actually defines "antisemitism" as "opposition to the state of Israel".

Fisk is brilliant at dissecting the clichés, bromides, stock phrases and euphemisms the Western media use when cosying up to Israel. My favourite is the nonsense whereby, whenever an Israeli soldier shoots someone dead, the victim is always described as caught in "crossfire". Fisk has been accused of exaggeration, but the Israel Defence Force recently sought to justify the killing of the British film-maker James Miller by an Israeli soldier, saying he should have realised the dangers of "crossfire".

Fisk's pessimism is not even tempered when he regards his own colleagues. He has some good stories about the cliché-ridden "training" of journalists in the 1960s, where drunken, cynical old hacks would preach the virtues of "hard news" to callow trainees. Fisk makes the valuable point that the ideology of the concrete so beloved by this school of journalists always has the net effect of giving the status quo and its supporters an easy ride. So far from achieving "balance", the "just the facts" approach actually buttresses existing elites.

Fisk is accused of going over the top in his savage indignation, but my main complaint is that he is not savage enough. He rightly sees the humbug and hypocrisy of the Clintons, but does not really go for the jugular. A strong case can be made that Bill's sexual shenanigans cost the Democrats the 2000 presidential election and lumbered us with "Dubya". Yet in general, 500 pages of his truthful scorn left me wanting more. O brave old world, that has such journos in it.

Frank McLynn's latest book is 'Heroes and Villains' (BBC Books)

[reposted from The Independent (London)]

Mass Protests around the World Against the Capitalist Economic Crisis and War

By Jim Genova

Beginning on Saturday 28 March in London and Berlin, and culminating in mass protests around the world on 4 April millions of working people and peace activists mobilized to express their rage at the deepening capitalist economic crisis and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. The week of protests coincided with the meeting of the G20 in London, England, (1-2 April) and NATO in Strasbourg, France, (3-4 April). At the G20 Summit, leaders of the world's 20 largest economies, which account for nearly 90% of all global economic activity, met to discuss their strategies for rescuing capitalism from its own worsening unraveling and to prevent each country from going its own way to resolve domestic concerns. At the NATO gathering, leaders of the Western military alliance sought to reach agreement on the scale and format of escalating that bloc's war in Afghanistan. Protesters motivated by a variety of interests met both meetings to express the deepening anger of people around the world at the calamity orchestrated by 30 years of neo-liberal capitalist globalization and their determination to stop the expansion of NATO's war in Central Asia. They were joined by millions around the world demonstrating in solidarity within their own countries in the largest day of global action since the anti-Iraq War actions in 2003.

Even prior to the opening of the G20 meeting in London, tens of thousands of protesters served notice that the whole world would be watching the deliberations later that week. In London at least 20,000 gathered in a peaceful procession demanding jobs, government control of the financial system, and punishment for those who led the world into economic crisis. In Berlin thousands marched in solidarity, but were met with police violence.

As the leaders of the world's wealthiest countries gathered in London on 1 April, protesters around the world poured into the streets of their respective countries to present an alternative vision to that being articulated at the Summit. In London, tens of thousands of protesters assembled at several points throughout the city. Some met at the Royal Bank of Scotland (a central players in the financial meltdown) and the Bank of England. There, police restricted the movement of the protesters causing some scuffling. Others descended on the U.S. Embassy to protest the escalation of the NATO war in Afghanistan. Finally, large groups marched through The City, London's financial center, demanding nationalization of the banks, dismissal and prosecution of executives who run the leading financial institutions, and even an "end to capitalism." In fact, an overriding theme of the protests in London and around the world was that capitalism has failed and an alternative social and economic order should take its place.

Protests were also held throughout Mexico, where the Party of Communists reported thousands marched against capitalism, for an end to NAFTA, and for the rights of indigenous people. The Mexican Party of Communists kicked off days of national protests on 1 April under the theme, "The day of international struggle for the rights of workers, [and] against exploitation." Demonstrators also gathered in cities across Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Asia on 1 and 2 April.

Further marches took place on Wall Street in NYC on 3 and 4 April where over 10,000 protested against capitalist greed, escalation of the war in Afghanistan as well as the ongoing war in Iraq, and for support of people victimized in the economic crisis through home foreclosures and layoffs while wealthy bankers receive billions in public bailout money.

In fact, on 4 April the world came together in the streets to express their disgust at the global capitalist crisis and its associated war policies. Italian media reported that in Rome over 2.7 million workers marched in joyous procession, led by that country's largest trade union federation (CGIL) and Communist Parties. "There's too big a gap between what needs to be done and what is being done," CGIL leader Guglielmo Epifani told the throng, with banners reading "Together to Build a Different Future" and "Down with the New Mussolini," a reference to Italy's rightist prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. In Strasbourg, France, where leaders of NATO were gathering to "celebrate" 60 years of the capitalist military alliance and plan to ratchet up their war in Afghanistan, over 20,000 took to the streets and at points actually controlled parts of the city.

The protests and palpable sense of rage germinating among the people throughout the world had a noticable impact on the leaders of the G20. Prior to the gathering Brazil's President Lula da Silva pointedly stated that the source of the economic crisis was to be found among the leaders of Western financial companies such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Scotland, Goldman Sachs, DeutscheBank, and Societe Generale (among others). At the G20 Summit the host, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, pronounced the "end of the Washington Consensus" and called for a fundamental re-ordering of the world's economy, which would include a hefty dose of regulation and government intervention.

The Washington Consensus was the guiding philosophy of radical capitalism formulated by Milton Friedman and his allies in the Chicago School of Economics. They became the chief economic advisors to General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., President Ronald Reagan in the U.S., and a host of dictators and crooks around the world from the 1980s onward. Friedman's ideas led to the doctrine of "Shock Therapy" imposed first in Latin America in the 1980s, then on the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union from 1989 onward. It led to the deepening of global poverty, the wrecking of the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world, and the near complete control of the world's wealth by a handful of well-placed Western financial institutions and multinational coroporations. With its emphasis of global unregulated financial markets, complete ease of movement for corporations, erosion of workers rights and safety protections, destruction of environmental regulations, and privatization of all aspects of a nation's economy, the Wasghington Consensus model forced workers into a "race to the bottom" in terms of wages and working conditions, contributed to the rapid acceleration of global warming, and transformed governments from agents responsible for the welfare of its citizens into security agents to protect the interests of global finance capital and multinational corporations. With Reagan in the White House and Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, advocates of the Washington Consensus captured control of the IMF and World Bank, using those powerful institutions as mechanisms to impose draconian economic policies on heavily indebted countries, many of them former colonies only recently having achieved independence from Western imperialist states like the U.K. and U.S. To ensure their perpetual control of the global economy, proponents of the Washington Consensus forced through a string of "Free Trade" treaties in the 1990s including NAFTA and formation of the WTO that further expanded the unfettered reach of multinational corporations and finance capital. It was within that framework that the armature for the current global economic crisis was forged. As Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), noted in a report to the CPUSA National Committee on 21 March 2009, this crisis is "the offspring of a crisis of overproduction ... and overaccumulation ... that are at the core of capitalism's dynamics and contradictions. [T]his is a crisis of capitalism in which its production relations became a parasitic fetter on the development of its productive forces."

The working class and its allies who poured into the streets around the world over the past week clearly understood the nature and source of the current crisis. In Mexico, labor leader Luis Alfonso Vargas Silva explained that the economic meltdown should be "paid for by the rich" who are responsible for it, not the workers "whose lives are imprisoned within the capitalist system." In London, Strasbourg, Rome, and elsewhere banners proclaimed that "capitalism has failed" and that a new global economic order based on justice, equality, and the rights of working people needed to be built on the wreckage of the current system. As Webb said to the CPUSA's National Committee, "[This] is a time when the parameters of the possible have expanded geometrically. ... It is in the course of these and other struggles that the balance of power will shift and new openings will appear for more far-reaching reforms of an anti-corporate, even socialist nature." The past week of global action suggests the growing people's movement in favor of a profound transformation of the world's economy and points to the deepening solidarity of people across every continent, in every country to work for this more just future.

The Case For A Public Health Care Plan

From ThinkProgress.org

Though President Obama and 73 percent of voters strongly support a new public health insurance plan that can compete with private insurers equally and transparently within an insurance exchange, some lawmakers have indicated that a public plan may not be part of the final reform legislation. Yesterday, the Congressional Progressive Caucus threatened "to vote against any health plan that doesn't include a public plan option." "We have polled CPC members very carefully in recent weeks and a strong majority will only support comprehensive healthcare reform legislation that includes a public plan option on a level playing field with private health insurance plans," explained CPC co-chairmen Reps. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ)." Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) has recently said that the public plan is just a bargaining chip to "encourage the private health insurance industry to move in the direction it knows it should move toward -- namely, health insurance reform, which means eliminating pre-existing conditions, guaranteed issue, modified community rating." "I think we can accomplish" health care reform "without" a public plan, Baucus said in an interview with The Progress Report. The insurance industry asserts that a new public plan would underpay medical providers, increase costs for Americans with insurance, and force millions to leave the employer market and move into a public plan. There is also limited bipartisan support for the plan. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) has warned that there is "no GOP support for a plan that included a government option" and in March, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) sent a letter to Obama, effectively taking this option off the table.

LOWERS COST: Despite the opposition, a new public health inurance plan could restore competition into the consolidated health insurance market, lower health care premiums, lead the way in innovation, and improve health quality. As CAPAF Senior Fellow Peter Harbage and Director of Health Policy Karen Davenport argue in a new report about the public plan, "in the face of tremendous consolidation in the health insurance market, employers and individuals have a shrinking set of health insurance options. Private insurers have used this market power to boost their profits." Harbage and Davenport add, "By including a public health insurance plan as another insurance option and creating a health insurance exchange that delivers transparency and accountability to the market, we can assure both viable competitors and real competition." As former Gov. Howard Dean (D-VT) argues, health reform "rises and falls on whether the public is allowed to choose" a public option. In a recent interview with The Progress Report, Dean explained that "the free market does not work in health care, except in very perverse ways. So, you have to find a system that works better in addition to the free market...it's a structural problem in delivering health insurance." According to the Urban Institute, "the presence of a well-run public plan would constrain private spending, as the plans would have to compete on price." Forcing private insurers to compete fairly with a public model that has lower administrative costs and operates with greater efficiency could "reduce projected health care costs by about $2 trillion over 11 years, and lower premiums by about 20 percent on average."

IMPROVES QUALITY: Traditionally, public health insurance plans like Medicare have "been the source of important payment innovations" that private plans have generally adopted." Today's Medicare program, for instance, "promotes quality care alongside cost containment. ... Medicare's refusal to pay medical care providers for 'never events' where a patient suffers a knowable and catastrophic mistake such as having the wrong limb removed is something other major insurers are now adopting." Similarly, Medicare development of its provider-payments systems and its investments in measuring and reporting quality care indicators are "two things that private insurers are now following the Medicare lead in doing." Moreover, "the way in which Medicare pays hospitals -- on a per stay basis rather than by reimbursing on a system that charges for each service or treatment delivered -- helped to change the way that care is delivered in the United States." The Veterans Health Administration has also "implemented a sophisticated electronic medical record systems and a quality measurement approach that focuses on preventive care and chronic disease management." A new public plan has the potential to do even more "to drive improvements in the health care system" and set the standard for developing new payment models and investing in preventive care and care coordination.

DESIGNING FAIR PUBLIC-PRIVATE COMPETITION: While the public option has become the subject of heated debate, few have spent much time sketching out the details for how to foster fair private-public competition. Robert E. Moffit of the Heritage Foundations has argued that it would be impossible to design a framework that pits for-profit private insurers against a government program that need not turn a profit. The government will institute lower rates, taxpayers will assume liability, and private insurers, Moffit warns, will simply go out of business. But eliminating medical underwriting will lower the administrative costs for private insurers and force companies to compete on quality, not risk. As health care economist Uwe Reinhardt explains, "if the new public plan had to negotiate its own prices, then it would not have a competitive advantage any more 'unfair' than is the ability iof large insurers -- such as Aetna and Wellpoint -- to negotiate lower prices with hospitals and physicians than these providers charge smaller insurers. For some reason, no one has ever called this form of price discrimination 'unfair.'" In fact, more than 30 states already have public health insurance options. In their role as self-insured employers, states are responsible for containing costs, promoting quality, and assuring that employees get the benefits and the care they need. In these states, employees may choose between private plans and the public plan, while in some states this pool is open to private employers as well -- a clear example of a public health insurance plan offering additional choices. Len Nichols of the New America Foundation has designed a framework that would ensure that the same body that's running the government plan isn't setting the rules of the competition, charging unreasonably low rates, or assuming too much risk. Such models already exist. Under Nichols' conception of a competing public option, the new program would "be accountable to an entity other than the one identified to govern the marketplace." The managers would be evaluated by patient satisfaction, not profits, and the people running the plan would have no incentive to stint on patient care in favor of the bottom line. In other words, public and private payers compete on a completely level playing field and follow all of the rules of the marketplace. The public plan would be actuarially sound, would not leverage Medicare to force providers to participate or use Medicare payment rates, and would have to adhere to the same rules regarding reserve funds. Costs would be lowered through competition and system-wide reform. By changing the way Medicare and the public option reimburse for services and increasing the efficiency of both programs, the government can encourage private insurers -- who are now competing directly with the new public plan -- to also adopt more efficient payment practices.

News of the Day and Obama's First Hundred Days

by Norman Markowitz

Having been overwhelmed with work, union struggles, car problems, and bad computer connections, I have neglected my PA blogging. Let me get back into it.

First the Obama administration is nearing the end of its first hundred days. The administration has been in its totality, given the global economic situation it faces and the political balance of forces it faces, the most progressive since the New Deal. However, it has not yet begun to take the "left turn" which the New Deal government did in 1935 when it supported the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, the Works Progress Administration providing millions of public works jobs for the unemployed and, unsuccessfully, advocated a national taxation program to sharply raise taxes on the wealthy.

But it has come forward with the largest compensatory fiscal policy in the history of public investments to counteract the looming depression. It has also come forward with the most progressive national budget since The Johnson Great Society budget of 1965 That budget proposed in a very different context, with the economy expanding significantly, the labor movement much stronger and the political balance, following the overwhelming right Republican defeat at all levels in the 1964 elections, much more favorable to the Johnson administration . Although the right Republicans have suffered a major defeat in the 2008 elections at all levels, they have both the deficit question and a stronger position in Congress.

The Obama administration, as witnessed by the G-20 meetings, is also in a very different position than U.S. administrations have been toward the other major capitalist states in the post WWII era. For the first time since the Roosevelt years, the U.S. President and government is taking a more progressive position on global economic questions than the other states that compromise the U.S.-NATO bloc, with the exception of Britain, of course, which continues to publicly "tail" U.S. policy as it has done throughout the postwar period regardless of which party was in power. While many Europeans with some justice blame the crisis on the spread of American"i.e (Reagan Bush) capitalism, it should be remembered that the Thatcher government in Great Britain inaugerated them thirty years ago and they were embraced by capitalist ruling classes globally as a way to weaken labor and peoples movements and most of all to greatly expand short-term profits.

It is Obama who today is calling for international regulation of banking and stock market based hedge funds and the Europeans who are balking. It is Obama who is advocating significantly larger "stimulus" or compensatory fiscal policy to contain the crisis and it is the Europeans who are talking what in the pre 1980s world (that is the Milton Friedman in Wonderland world of Thatcher-Reagan and those who followed them through the Looking Glass) would be considered fiscal conservatism.

But the crisis remains at a chronic level in the U.S. Unemployment is now at 13.2 million (it would be escalating much more, I believe, were it not for the administration's policies, which makes it imperative to have the budget passed without significant cuts) and at 8.5 % nationally, given official figures.

Detroit, center of the U.S. auto industry, has 22 percent unemployment, clearly a depression level by any standard, as the administration takes unprecedented acts to restructure GM. While President Obama is calling for a necessary global regulation of banking, there is still no clear program by the administration to direct the banking sector to infuse capital into the most damaged and threatened sections of the economy in the interests of labor and the people, in spite of the hundreds of billions in public investment that the banks have already received.

While the administration has taken significant steps to strengthen existing regulation of Wall Street and is beginning to call for new regulation to close loopholes that the insurance sector of finance capital has used, there is at this time still no real evidence of a comprehensive reform of banking and stock market regulation, in effect, new Securities Exchange and Federal Reserve Acts (the last positive ones were in 1934-1935) to sweep away the "deregulation" of the last thirty years and also update the SEC, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC et al to deal with the 21st century economy.

Internationally there is the conflict in Afghanistan, the looming "Afghan trap." Here the administration is stressing diplomatic overtures and internal reforms while it is significantly increasing U.S. troop deployment. It is calling for a multilateral effort, but there is no evidence that the other NAT0 states are willing to send more troops.

While the forces in conflict are radically different then they were in Vietnam in 1965, when the Johnson administration (at the same time that it was enacting Medicare, Medicaid, Federal Aid to Education, Civil Rights, and Jobs training programs, launched its planned escalation to use large numbers of U.S. troops to "win" the civil war it privately understood the Saigon regime the U.S. had created could never win) one should remember that the Johnson administration also promised to bring far-reaching economic Reconstruction and reform to South Vietnam, "reforms" that were a cruel joke for the Vietnamese and escalated disillusionment with and opposition to the administration at home by the very groups who were most sympathetic to its domestic programs.

In the U.S. the administration also faces an emerging contradiction which the New Deal government faced and never really resolved through the 1930s. State governments in their budget cutting, their layoffs of public employees and their attempts to impose salary and wage freezes, forced leaves or suspensions without pay (de facto wage and salary cuts) are pursuing anti-stimulus policies, reducing both the employment and mass purchasing power that compensatory fiscal policy is supposed to sustain and expand.

In that 1930s, such policies, along with hostility by state and local governments to the advance of the trade union movement and the implementation of federal reforms (because state and local governments can be influenced if not controlled outright by capital much more than
the national government) led conservative politicians, especially Republicans who historically had supported a strong federal government aiding business and maintaining a strong military, to because champions of "states rights" , denouncing "big government" and Washington.

The Obama administration can begin to act now, as Roosevelt used to say often, to address at least some of these questions. It can begin to make it clear that "stimulus"money to states will be tied to states maintaining both jobs and union contracts(and also accepting the unionization of public employees).

It can intervene with the banks to channel capital into cities like Detroit with what depression unemployment rates(and in Detroit it is high depression unemployment) to provide jobs that will sharply reduce unemployment. It can begin to look at the auto industry in a creative way, establishing perhaps a state agency to purchase used cars at favorable prices in order to encourage the purchase of new U.S. cars, to take over GM directly and manage it as a public corporation, while at the same time addressing the internationalization of the auto industry (what is an "American car" today?). It can and should begin to experiment with the economy the interests of labor and the whole people in the U.S. It should also be very wary of Afghanistan, to avoid the spiral of escalation that brought down the Johnson administration, the last administration that pursued a "liberal" domestic policy in the American sense of that word.

If I were grading Obama at this point, before the conclusion of the first hundred days, I would, compared to the first hundred days of any U.S. administration in my lifetime, give him an A-. Given what we have come to expect from U.S. Presidents, an A+. Given what I see has to be done in the near term, a B+.

Of course, the administration has a long way to go to the midterm (elections) but the pace of change in the global economy is much faster and there grades will be calculated by the people in terms of jobs, living standards, and quality of life.

Fidel RELECTS ON THE G-20 SUMMIT (At its start)

Havana.  April 3, 2009

REFLECTIONS OF FIDEL
The beginning of the Summit
(Taken from CubaDebate)
TODAY the G-20 Summit Meeting began. The experts on economic issues have made a tremendous effort. Some with experience in important international posts; others, as research scholars. The issue is a complex one, the language is new and demands familiarity with terms, economic data, international agencies and the political leaders of most weight in the international sphere. Hence the effort to simplify and explain intelligibly what is taking place in London, as I see it.
It is no surprise to anyone that Obama is the star of the London meeting. He represents the most powerful and richest country in the world. Special circumstances are in his favor. The lying, cynical, warmongering and odious Bush is not there. Neither is the mediocre and ignorant McCain, precisely thanks to the amazing victory of Obama, an African American in the country of racial discrimination, where a majority of white electors voted for McCain, although not enough to compensate for the votes of more than 90% of Black and mixed-race Americans, citizens of Latino origin, the poor and those affected by the crisis. He has just been elected at a point when other G-20 leaders are about to end their terms and Obama will be the probable president of the United States for eight years. Nobody finds it strange that the news from London revolves around him.
What is important for the world is what comes of there, if something does come out. All the attendees have their own national and even personal objectives, as political leaders who will be judged by history.
Obama’s objective, in first place, is to change the image of his country, centrally responsible for the tragedy the world is enduring and which international opinion is rightly blaming for the current devastating economic crisis, for which he has no political responsibility whatsoever. As Joseph Stiglitz, former economic director of the International Monetary Fund and currently a professor at the Massachusetts Technological Institute points out: “He should come out and say that he is not to blame for anything and that he is trying to solve things as quickly as he can.”
His principal European ally, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, is the Summit host and is unrestrainedly aspiring to change the current anti-Labour tendency unleashed by the blunders of his predecessor Tony Blair. Obama has been offered the honor of a visit to Buckingham Palace, where he was received with his wife Michelle. The president gave the veteran queen an iPod, fruit of sophisticated U.S. technology, with songs and images of the queen’s state visit to the United States in 2007 and a book of sheet music signed by Richard Rogers. With Her Majesty he didn’t have to exchange a single word on the worldly G-20 meeting.
On the other hand, Brown is staking all on the crisis. He is aspiring to change the rules of the banking system, promote economic growth, increase cooperation and do away with protectionism. He acknowledges that the negotiations will be difficult.
His slogan is “better to look forward rather than back.” Clearly, if the electors looked back he wouldn’t get many votes.
The desire of both allies at the heart of the G-20 is to minimize differences with France and Germany.
Sarkozy is making no attempt to conceal his displeasure with U.S. policy. He is explosive. He recently threatened to walk out of the meeting. Yesterday he informed the Europe 1 broadcasting station that, for now, there is no satisfactory agreement on the Summit, although he has softened his threats of walking out if there are no advances toward greater regulation. “I will not associate myself with a Summit that does not end with greater regulation.” He states that the negotiators have not reached any agreement.
The Summit draft communiqué, already circulating among journalists, refers to measures to reestablish global growth, maintain market openings and stimulate global trade. “We have to obtain results, we have no choice,” Sarkozy insisted yesterday.
Obama announced a few days ago that the United States proposes to introduce changes to its regulation and supervision system, in the hope that this statement would meet with one part of European demands, by snatching one its banners.
Sarkozy riposted that his undertaking to do away with tax havens is being taken seriously.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is very close to Sarkozy’s positions, is demanding that the agreement should not even include a demand for a stimulus package for the advanced countries, neither should there be any debate on the announcement of a new international currency, the emerging countries’ demand to the G-7.
“The word is at a crossroads,” Merkel declared, “We have to do everything possible to avoid the crisis being repeated.”
“We have to go further than what has been said in Washington,” and she added that everything agreed in London must have a guarantee of implementation. “Not one place, not one product, not a single institution, should be left without supervision and transparency.”
Merkel indicated that she is in favor of raising IMF funds and increasing aid to developing countries, which are essentially suffering the impact of the crisis.
An increase in the resources of the International Monetary Fund would now seem be a fact. On his arrival in London, the Mexican president said that he was negotiating a credit line of 26 billion euros with the Fund. Yesterday, John Lipsky, the International Monetary Fund’s No. 2, stated in London that the IMF is to facilitate a credit line of $47 billion to Mexico in order to guarantee the availability of liquidity in case the situation of the markets worsens because of the crisis. That is a larger sum than Mexico asked for.
As the United States holds the majority of IMF shares, such a credit would not be possible without its support, which also points to Obama’s influence at the London Summit.
The news agencies reported that Obama is to meet in London with Dmitry Medvedev and Hu Jintao, the presidents of Russia and China, to discuss the thorny problems that both countries are confronting with the United States.
The bilateral meetings between the superpower and the two major powers will certainly cover economic problems, or perhaps patiently debated agreements, approved via their diplomatic representatives, will be announced.
Today, April 2, I read an extensive and detailed dispatch from the Xinhua news agency, datelined the 1st, noting that “Chinese President Hu Jintao and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama agreed to work together to build a positive, cooperative and comprehensive relationship in the 21st century.”
The two leaders decided to establish the mechanism of "China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogues…"
“The new commitment, made by the two heads of state during their meeting in London, will chart course for and give a strong boost to the sustained, sound and steady development of China-U.S. relations.”
“China-U.S. relations remain one of the world's most important bilateral relationships in the 21st century, when mankind faces tremendous opportunities and challenges. In the new era, the two countries shoulder important responsibilities for world peace, stability and development and they also share broad common interests.”
“Both sides should keep pace with the times and always handle bilateral relations from a strategic and long-term perspective.”
“They should respect and take into consideration each other's core interests, and seize the opportunities and work together to meet the challenges in the century.”
“The establishment of the China-U.S. Strategic and Economic Dialogues mechanism is an important step to further advance their bilateral relations. With that, the previous strategic dialogue between the two countries has been upgraded to a new level.”
“At a time when the international financial crisis continues to spread, it is in the primary common interests of China and the United States that the two countries support each other and work together to ride out the storm.”
“China and the United States should not only enhance exchange and cooperation in such fields as economy, the fight against terrorism, proliferation and transnational crimes, climate change, energy and the environment, but also strengthen communication and coordination on regional and global issues.”
Such an agreement cannot be discussed in a 60-minute meeting. It was already drafted with all the details.
China, whose current allies on the Asian continent invaded and plundered it barely 70 years ago, is now advancing toward a peak position in the global economy.
It is the principal creditor of the United States and is serenely discussing with the president of that powerful country the rules that are to govern relations between the two countries in a world impregnated with risks.
Maybe the Xinhua dispatch is transmitting one of the most important news items in relation to the G-20 Summit.
It began and ended today while I was writing these lines! Amazing!

Fidel Castro Ruz
April 2, 2009
3:07 p.m.
Translated by Granma International