Showing posts with label us ruling class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label us ruling class. Show all posts

Monday, May 25, 2009

Madeleine Albright: a woman of justice and peace?

In 1996, this famous exchange occured on 60 Minutes:
Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.
Today in nrc/international
Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright is to take up a job in The Hague. De Volkskrant newspaper reports that Albright will sit on the supervisory board of a new research and academic institute, provisionally named the Institute for Global Justice.

Working closely with Leiden University, the institute is to offer a prestigious degree course in the field of peace, justice and international security.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

OBAMA'S BETRAYAL OF THE WORKING CLASS

'The crisis in which we find ourselves is not a crisis of the capitalist class, much less a crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Nor is it even a crisis of neoliberalism. It's a crisis of the working class, plain and simple.

As Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," and, sure enough, the Barack H. Obama administration is doing all it can to make it easy for the capitalist class to make the best of the opportunities presented by this crisis and to further cut back the wages and benefits of workers in the primary labor market.'


And this, from Counterpunch

We are witnessing one of the fastest betrayals of the Democratic Party base in modern memory, as President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate slither away from a crucial constituency, the labor movement, and from support of labor’s key legislative agenda item: passage of a bill, “The Employee Free Choice Act,” which would restore a measure of fairness to labor relations.

Obama, who once supported the measure, and who campaigned saying he would sign the bill, has stood shamelessly silent as a massive corporate campaign mounted by such lobbying powerhouses as the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation, hiding behind a fake “citizen action” organization called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (sic), has descended on Congress, and especially the Senate, has worked to peel away support for the bill among both Democrats and swing Republicans who had formally backed the measure.