Banks Make $38bn from Overdraft Fees

From the middle of September 2008 till about the end of that year, I, as editor of MRZine, received a flood of submissions on the subject of the "Crisis of Capitalism" from assorted leftists. That genre of submissions has virtually disappeared, as it became clear to all, even leftists, that -- given the ruling-class alacrity in solving their collective action problem and the working-class difficulty in solving ours -- this is not a crisis of the capitalist class but a crisis of the working class, which is apparently not as exciting a topic for leftists as the idea of the Crisis of Capitalism.

The biggest international news this year so far has been the Israeli bombing of Gaza and the electoral dispute in Iran, which has even eclipsed the first successful military coup d'etat in South America since the end of the Cold War, let alone a little matter of bailed-out banks' ill-gotten gains: e.g., Saskia Scholtes and Francesco Guerrera, "Banks Make $38bn from Overdraft Fees" (Financial Times, 10 August 2009). I suspect a nefarious Zionist-Islamist conspiracy to try to hoodwink international leftists.

Mark Weisbrot: It's Time for Latin America to Take Charge

Regrettably, so far there has been no large protest in the US to pressure the USG to reverse the coup in Honduras. Such protests as have happened in the US on this issue appear to have been even smaller than the Iranian Green protests in the US, which have largely consisted of Iranian immigrants of various political persuasions, from leftists to liberals to monarchists and the Iranian Mojahedin (from which most non-Iranian leftists, including vocal Green Movement supporters, have abstained). There is such an immense political vacuum on the US front in the struggle against the Honduran coup that Mark Weisbrot now suggests that the solution has to come from Latin America, without the US: Mark Weisbrot, "U.S.-Brokered Mediation Has Failed -- It's Time for Latin America to Take Charge" (MRZine, 31 July 2009). This shouldn't be impossible, as long as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the key powers, act forcefully, 100% united with El Salvador and Nicaragua, as well as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela.

25 July 2009

Two protests on 25 July 2009. One is a grassroots protest against the US-backed coup in Honduras, spearheaded by SOA Watch South Florida. The other is a slickly packaged campaign to "to demand respect for the human rights of the Iranian people and to demonstrate worldwide solidarity with the civil rights movement in Iran" (a topic pleasing to Western powers), spearheaded by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, which is a project of the highly suspect Dutch Foundation for Human Security in the Middle East. You know which one gets more corporate media coverage.

From Iran to China, Skipping Honduras

As far as the Western mass media are concerned, they went from Iran (electoral conflict in an oil-rich country) to China (ethnic conflict in an oil-rich region), skipping Honduras (a coup d'état in an oil-poor country dependent on foreign aid and remittances where the USG has a military base).