China’s Third Plenum Signals New ‘Paramount Leader’

from chinaworker.info

“More market, less freedom, and much more power to Xi Jinping”—this was the verdict of Beijing-based journalist Ola Wong, on the decisions of the recently concluded third plenary meeting of the CCP’s 18th Central Committee. Third Plenum meetings have a special status in China’s authoritarian system, because of the key 1978 meeting (11th Central Committee’s Third Plenum), which sealed the triumph of Deng Xiaoping over Mao Zedong’s designated heir Hua Guofeng and launched the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) onto the path of pro-capitalist “reform and opening.” Expectations among the capitalists in China and globally have accordingly been high.

For the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act

by Curtis Kline, Intercontinental Cry

Native Americans in the northern Great Plains have the highest cancer rates in the United States, particularly lung cancer. It’s a problem that the United States government has woefully ignored, much the horror of the men and women who must carry the painful, life-threatening burden. The cancer rates started increasing drastically a few decades after uranium mining began on their territory.

According to a report by Earthworks (PDF), “Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioactive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive elements can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects.”

Today, in the northern great plains states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, the memory of that uranium mining exists in the form of 2,885 abandoned open pit uranium mines. All of the abandoned mines can be found on land that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.

The Grassroots Civil Opposition Survives

by Leila Shrooms, Tahrir-ICN

The discourse on Syria has been dominated by discussions of militarization, Islamization, sectarianism and geopolitical concerns. Conversely there has been relatively little focus on Syria’s grass roots civil opposition. This has led to a lack of knowledge outside of Syria for activists who want to stand in solidarity with Syria’s revolutionaries but don’t know where to start. This article attempts to provide an introduction to some of the many civil resistance initiatives taking place on the ground and efforts at revolutionary self-organization.

by Burkely Hermann, World War 4 Report

“It’s not ethnic cleansing. The world needs to understand that the fear is not just on the side of the Muslims, but on the side of the Buddhists as well.”

No high-ranking US State Department official spoke these words. It was Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, in an interview with BBC, dismissing credible claims of the genocide of Burma’s Muslim Rohingya people, put forward by Genocide Watch, Foreign Policy in Focus, UN Dispatch, Der Spiegel writer Jürgen Kremb, the Kassandra Project, Ramzy Baroud of the Pakistani publication The Nation, and many others. Suu Kyi continued, saying that she condemns “any movement that is based on hatred and extremism,” that “the reaction of Buddhists is also based on fear,” that the government should deal with these extremists so it isn’t her responsibility, and finally that “Burma now needs real change…a democratic society.” These comments are deeply disturbing coming from someone given the Nobel prize in 1991 for “her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.” Some have even asked if she should be stripped of her Peace Prize for statements such as this one.

The struggle of the two stateless peoples in Burma—the Rohingya and Shan—and broader geopolitical issues such as the race for dirty energy tie into one central question: is Burma really open for the business of exploitation and genocide?

by Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero, World War 4 Report

Two landmark scientific reports on climate change have just been published. File them under “H” for “horror.”

The first one is a digest of the most recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was formed in 1988 to advise the United Nations on all scientific information relevant to the implementation of the UN Climate Change Convention. The Panel periodically publishes a summary of the latest climate science for policymakers, which is subject to line-by-line approval by the 195 participating governments.

by Pete Dolack, Systemic Disorder

The secret Trans-Pacific Partnership is about to become even more secret, perhaps seen as a necessity in light of plans to make it easier for tobacco companies to sue while making health care more difficult to obtain.

The governments negotiating the draconian TPP still don’t want you to know what’s in it. Many of them issued cheery press releases congratulating themselves for the “progress” they made last week in Brunei. But you will search in vain for any information on what TPP negotiators are up to. They will now end their practice of “consultation”—the August 23 to 30 negotiations (the 19th round) are the last scheduled. Instead, negotiators will begin to meet in unannounced meetings.

In other words, not only is the text of the TPP to remain a secret, the negotiations themselves are to now be secret.

Supertankers to Ply the Great White Slushie

by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice

Not a Crisis or a Coup

by Nawal El Saadawi, IslamiCommentary

Every revolution in history has had its counter-revolution. Most recently, internal and external forces allied, as they did in Egypt, to abort the January 2011 revolution.

But the Muslim Brotherhood failed to abort this latest revolution on June 30, 2013, and they will continue to fail because those who have rebelled against them have learned the lessons of the past. Their consciousness has deepened with organization and unity.

Thirty-four million youth, men, and women went out into the streets and squares. They were determined to topple the religious government, under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as stand up to all who supported the Brotherhood, at home and abroad .

An Interview from Tahrir Square

by Joshua Stephens, Waging Nonviolence

I met Mohammed Hassan Aazab earlier this year over tea at a table of young anarchists in downtown Cairo. The anniversary of the revolution had just passed with massive protests and the emergence of a Western-style black bloc that appeared to have little to do with anarchists in the city. At the time, much of the ongoing grassroots organizing was against sexual violence—in particular, the mob sexual assaults that have become synonymous with any large gathering in Tahrir. The trauma of such violence carried out against protesters was apparent in our conversation. In fact, Aazab told me that he was done with protests and politics, and had resigned himself to the dysfunction of day-to-day life in Egypt.

Then came June 30. Crowds reportedly as large as 33 million took to the streets to call for the Muslim Brotherhood to step down from power, just a year after Mohammed Morsi took office. In the pre-dawn moments of July 1, as Aazab’s phone battery dwindled steadily, I reconnected with him to chat a bit about his return to resistance.