John Pilger

Israeli soldiers prepare white phosphorus 155mm artillery shells (light green) as troops
keep position on the Israel-Gaza border. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images

A new global movement is challenging Israel's violations of international law with the same strategies that were used against apartheid.

The farce of the climate summit in Copenhagen affirmed a world war waged by the rich against most of humanity. It also illuminated a resistance growing perhaps as never before: an internationalism linking justice for the planet with universal human rights, and criminal justice for those who invade and dispossess with impunity. And the best news comes from Palestine.

The Palestinians' resistance to the theft of their country reached a critical moment in 2001 when a UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, identified Israel as an apartheid state. To Nelson Mandela, justice for the Palestinians is "the greatest moral issue of the age". The Palestinian civil society call for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS) was issued on 9 July 2005, in effect reconvening the great, non-violent movement that swept the world and brought the scaffolding of African apartheid crashing down.

“Through decades of occupation and dispossession," wrote Mustafa Barghouti, a wise voice of Palestinian politics, "90 per cent of the Palestinian struggle has been non-violent . . . A new generation of Palestinian leaders [now speaks] to the world precisely as Martin Luther King did. The same world that rejects all use of Palestinian violence, even clear self-defence, surely ought not begrudge us the non-violence employed by men such as King and Gandhi."

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Fred Sheehan

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke gave a speech on January 3, 2010 that was incomprehensible. The address itself will be discussed later. It is important first to consider the precedent of Federal Reserve chairmen making absurd claims – and getting away with it.

A place to start is Alan Greenspan's 2002 speech in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The then Federal Reserve chairman explained that central banks could not identify bubbles because "only history books and musty archives gave us clues to the appropriate stance for the policy." There are several problems with this excuse, not to mention his even less credible fiddle-faddle. More important though, is that the chairman's address was disseminated with very little opposition along channels of communication. Economists cheered or remained silent. With a few notable exceptions, the media reported Greenspan's speech as if it was a press release, which it was.

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Mark Anderson

Most people probably assume that the reason for China’s enormous economic growth rates is simply size: anything powered by 1.2B people is bound to make a big splash. But India, with the self-proclaimed “oldest democracy in the world,” is about to exceed China’s population.

What makes China so different?

Westerners remember China’s turn toward “socialist market economics” under Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-ping). Deng was a political adept who outmaneuvered Mao’s hand-picked successor, Hua Guofeng, and often ruled without a specific single title of power. (See our “Takeout Window” for more biographical data.)

Deng once said: [chinese characters]

Translation: “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white; as long as it catches the mouse, it is a good cat” (commenting on the whether China should turn to capitalism or remain strictly in adherence with the economic ideologies of communism). Westerners assumed this meant that Deng, the pragmatist, was turning China toward free markets.

Deng did not turn China into a market economy; far from it. Here is a quick description of early Deng achievements, from The Hutchinson Encyclopedia:

“By December 1978, although nominally a CCP vice chair, state vice premier, and Chief of Staff to the PLA, Deng was the controlling force in China. His policy of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ misinterpreted in the West as a drift to capitalism, had success in rural areas.

“His reputation, both at home and in the West, was tarnished by his sanctioning of the army’s massacre of more than 2,000 pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in June 1989.”

In summary: the fellow who brought market economics to China, really didn’t. Instead, he helped install an economic model designed to gut its trading partners, described in detail below.

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