Month: September 2018

Ten years on from the financial crash, Labour showed at its conference this week that it understands the scale of change needed, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE.

We recently marked the 10th anniversary of the financial crash and as Labour conference met this week, keynote speeches from leader Jeremy Corbyn, shadow chancellor John McDonnell and shadow secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy Rebecca Long-Bailey MP showed that – unlike the Tories – Labour understands both the reasons for this crisis plus the radical approach and policies needed to improve people’s life and stop this happening again.
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Trump’s threats of war, sanctions and promises to make America great again could be dismissed as the ranting of an eccentric politician. But this isn’t all about Trump. What he advocates is representative of much of the US elite.

The president and his generation of Americans grew up in a world where the USA was the greatest superpower in human history. It was not just their vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and their war machine but, in 1945, around 50 percent of the entire world’s economy was in the United States of America, with Britain and the USSR hobbling along with around 10 percent each.
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In eight weeks’ time Americans go to the polls for the midterm elections. America’s had some corrupt presidents and quite a few incompetents, but there’s never been anything like the chaos in the White House today.
Former President Obama has delivered an aggressive attack on Trump and appealed to the voters to ‘restore a healthy democracy,’ saying Trump is an unprecedented threat to the country’s future “appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security would be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us, or sound like us or pray like we do.”
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This month marks 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, but governments have failed to make changes necessary to prevent a similar collapse.

Back in the 1930s, the US government responded to the Great Depression by introducing new laws that made it illegal for the local high street banks, in which we all deposit our own money, to make risky gambling decisions.
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The labour movement and all progressives must do more to expose the gutting of democracy and workers’ rights in Brazil, writes KEN LIVINGSTONE.

TWO years ago this week, President Dilma Rousseff was removed through a “parliamentary coup” in Brazil. The most extraordinary thing about it was that just 55 senators overturned the will of 54 million Brazilians at the ballot box who had re-elected her.

For those of us who expressed solidarity with activists against the US-backed dictatorship in Brazil from 1964-1985, and stood with the Chilean people against General Augusto Pinochet following the 1973 coup, alarm bells immediately rung at this right-wing attempt at regime change.
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