Workers Solidarity Movement

The notion that the fall of Kobanê could be prevented by the intervention of the Turkish army is a smokescreen that covers the truth that they are already intervening - on the side of ISIS. The Turkish state's selective blockade of the border, which allows arms and volunteers to cross for ISIS, but strangles them for the YPG defenders of Kobanê is the decisive intervention that is giving ISIS the upper hand.

This fundamental truth has been put forward by some minority voices in the mainstream media. Chiefly those intrepid reporters on the ground trying to cover the story. Honourable mention should be made of the BBC's Paul Adams amongst others. But these marginalised voices have been drowned out by the official media line issuing from the central editorial offices downwards, that the Kurds of Kobanê and Turkish Kurdistan are protesting "against Turkey's inactivity" or "failure to intervene". This is the world turned upside down. And Orwellian newspeak where the exact opposite of the truth is reported as accepted fact. The banners the protesters are holding say "Turkey Stop Supporting ISIS".

Geo-strategically the Al Qa’ida leadership (Azzam, bin Laden, Zawahiri) are products of the Cold War, specifically the Afghan Mujahidin war against the USSR. Rather like their American neo-con previous employers, Al Qa’ida view the end of the Cold War as a victory over the USSR by their own side. The Al Qa’ida perspective is that, having “defeated” one superpower, the global jihad now needs to turn its offensive against the remaining superpower.  Al Qa’ida worry that the Zarqawists of ISIS may be restricting the struggle to a parochial Mesopotamian sectarian struggle that could fail to engage Muslim jihadists around the world, outside the MENA region, say in West Africa or Indonesia and the Philippines  where the US is a more credible #1 enemy than Iran.

Following on from the rapid spread of Isis in Iraq & Syria Paul Bowman presented an update intended to inform on the contemporary politics of Jihadism and its entanglement with regional and global imperialist power plays.

He starts by looking in detail at the ideological / religious background of the Salafist movements including ISIS and how such movements differ from those of the Muslim Brotherhood / Ikwanite.

Unless you're a economics geek you've probably never heard of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. But that doesn't mean their work isn't affecting your life. A paper by these two prestigious Harvard economists has been a key justification for post-2008 austerity policies, with its oft-repeated claim that a national debt level of over 90% of GDP is fatal to growth. Yesterday we found out that paper was based on a spreadsheet that doesn't add up. Epic maths fail.

Over a quarter of a million people demonstrated against government austerity and Troika rule in Lisbon this Saturday gone. Hundreds of thousands more demostrated in towns and cities the length and breadth of Portugal. The biggest demonstrations against austerity yet in the Eurozone. Who's afraid of the Eurozone's most rebellious PIG? The Irish media, apparently, given the failure of RTE, Irish Times or the INM stable to cover the story. Maybe they think we'd get funny ideas? In any case, the next time someone tells you about media censorship in place like Russia, China and North Korea, don't forget to mention the Irish media's coverage of Portuguese resistance to the Troika. 

This Sunday, 3rd March, Swiss voters, by a whopping majority of by 68%, struck fear into the corporate world by backing a citizen’s initiative referendum to curb top executives pay. Over two-thirds of the citizenry backed a package of proposals including a ban on “golden hellos” and “golden parachutes”, making shareholder votes on pay binding on corporate boards, requiring yearly term limits to board membership and requiring pension fund shareholder votes to be transparent, along with jail terms for executives that break the rules. The citizen’s initiative passed against the background of vocal screeching from the united ranks of the corporate elite, Switzerland’s largest multinationals including Nestlé, Credit Suisse, Novartis, ABB and nearly all the political parties.