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Jean-Luc Mélenchon: The French, Poetry Reading Presidential Hopeful

Posted on April 26, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Jean-Luc Mélenchon: the poetry-loving pitbull galvanising the French elections by Angelique Chrisafis in The Guardian.

The Text: In a packed agricultural hanger in a rural town in central France, an enraptured crowd raised their fists and chanted: “Resistance! Resistance!” On stage, arms flung wide, sweat pouring down his face, stood the charismatic, hard-left firebrand hailed as the best orator of the presidential campaign. “The French Revolution of 1789 hasn’t breathed its last!” roared Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the poetry-loving pitbull of anti-capitalism. “If Europe is a volcano, France is the crater of all European revolutions!”

Mixing brute rage with killer, comic one-liners about the French political class, Mélenchon whipped up the crowd with promises of a civic insurrection to crush aristocracy and privilege. Hundreds who could not fit into the hall stood freezing in the car-park watching a live feed on a video screen, waving red banners and tricolour flags. “Welcome to Mélenchon-mania,” beamed a student at her first ever rally.

Mélenchon, a former Socialist minister, has emerged as the tub-thumping philosopher-leader of the radical left. His sharp rise in the polls has seen him hailed as the “great revelation” of the French presidential campaign. He has leapfrogged the extreme right’s Marine Le Pen to become the “third man” in the presidential race behind Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande.

The Rise Of The Twee Party

Posted on April 25, 2012 in Articles

The Article: The Twee Party by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine.

The Text: One afternoon last June, the quaint silhouette of a three-masted sailboat made its way into New York Harbor and pulled up at the Red Hook Marine Terminal. The Black Seal, a 70-foot-long schooner, had just completed a 3,000-mile wind-powered round trip to the Dominican Republic. There, it had taken on twenty metric tons of cocoa beans, mostly from La Red de Guaconejo organic-cacao cooperative, whose beans are said to yield chocolate with notes of “sweet pipe tobacco” and “Cabernet Sauvignon.”

The 400 bags of beans were headed for the Williamsburg factory of Mast Brothers Chocolate, maker of artisanal chocolate bars wrapped in gorgeous, thick paper printed with repeating anchors, Florentine swirls, antique bicycles. At first, the brothers bought off-the-rack wrapping paper at a nearby art-supply store, but they now design the patterns in-house and have the paper printed in Long Island City, and the almost-opulent packaging has been no small part of their success.

The boat itself was equally artisanal: It had been built by hand, over 25 years, in the Cape Cod yard of its captain, a man the Masts have called “an American hero.” One of the brothers, Rick, had stayed home from the trip with his pregnant wife, late in her third trimester, but Michael had been aboard the ship for the whole four-week journey from Cape Cod to the Caribbean and back. A lot of work goes into supplying Whole Foods with $9 single-origin craft-chocolate bars sprinkled with Maine sea salt, “created using solar salt houses” on “the mystic coast of Maine.”

The Rise Of The Chinese Military

Posted on April 24, 2012 in Articles

The Article: China’s military rise in The Economist.

The Text: NO MATTER how often China has emphasised the idea of a peaceful rise, the pace and nature of its military modernisation inevitably cause alarm. As America and the big European powers reduce their defence spending, China looks likely to maintain the past decade’s increases of about 12% a year. Even though its defence budget is less than a quarter the size of America’s today, China’s generals are ambitious. The country is on course to become the world’s largest military spender in just 20 years or so (see article).

Much of its effort is aimed at deterring America from intervening in a future crisis over Taiwan. China is investing heavily in “asymmetric capabilities” designed to blunt America’s once-overwhelming capacity to project power in the region. This “anti-access/area denial” approach includes thousands of accurate land-based ballistic and cruise missiles, modern jets with anti-ship missiles, a fleet of submarines (both conventionally and nuclear-powered), long-range radars and surveillance satellites, and cyber and space weapons intended to “blind” American forces. Most talked about is a new ballistic missile said to be able to put a manoeuvrable warhead onto the deck of an aircraft-carrier 2,700km (1,700 miles) out at sea.

China says all this is defensive, but its tactical doctrines emphasise striking first if it must. Accordingly, China aims to be able to launch disabling attacks on American bases in the western Pacific and push America’s carrier groups beyond what it calls the “first island chain”, sealing off the Yellow Sea, South China Sea and East China Sea inside an arc running from the Aleutians in the north to Borneo in the south. Were Taiwan to attempt formal secession from the mainland, China could launch a series of pre-emptive strikes to delay American intervention and raise its cost prohibitively.

For The Rich, Healthcare Is A Social Right

Posted on April 23, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Health care is a social right, not a privilege for the rich by Jerry White in the World Socialist Web Site.

The Text: Last week’s three-day argument before the US Supreme Court on the Obama administration’s health care law was a demonstration of right-wing, pro-corporate politics on both sides of the official “debate.” Whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, all the big business politicians uphold the interests of profit-driven medicine, including the drug monopolies and giant insurance companies.

The Obama administration defended its reactionary “individual mandate” penalizing what it called “free riders,” i.e., low-paid workers who must resort to using emergency rooms because they cannot afford health insurance, and presented the new law as vital to cutting costs for both corporations and the government. One of its allies in the liberal wing of the high court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, made the revealing comment that the goal of the law was “to preserve a role for the private sector, for the private insurers” in the health care system.

The right-wing opponents of the Obama health care reform portrayed the latter as a “big government” social welfare scheme, and even, farcically, as a step towards socialized medicine. Their allies in the right wing of the Supreme Court suggested, particularly in their comments during the third day of argument, that they might use the case as an opportunity to attack the constitutionality of long-established social programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and even Social Security.

Being A Woman In Pakistan

Posted on April 22, 2012 in Articles

The Article: To Be a Woman in Pakistan: Six Stories of Abuse, Shame, and Survival by Zara Jamal in The Atlantic.

The Text: According to a 2011 poll of experts by the Thomson Reuters Foundation Poll, Pakistan is the third most dangerous country for women in the world. It cited the more than 1,000 women and girls murdered in “honor killings” every year and reported that 90 percent of Pakistani women suffer from domestic violence.

Westerners usually associate the plight of Pakistani women with religious oppression, but the reality is far more complicated. A certain mentality is deeply ingrained in strictly patriarchal societies like Pakistan. Poor and uneducated women must struggle daily for basic rights, recognition, and respect. They must live in a culture that defines them by the male figures in their lives, even though these women are often the breadwinners for their families.

Quietly, slowly, in piecemeal legal reforms, female empowerment is coming in Pakistan. You meet inspiring women daily here. Sympathetic employers sometimes give protection and assistance, as do other women who’ve fared better. NGOs and charitable organizations try to help empower women, but not all women take advantage of these resources. They fear their husbands, attracting unwanted attention, somehow hurting the honor of their families, or, often, they simply do not know that help exists. With female literacy at 36%, many women are too uneducated to know their rights.