Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Iran’s Ahmadinejad tells UN capitalism’s dying
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a U.N. General Assembly session on poverty this week that capitalism is on the verge of death and that it’s time for a new economic system.
“The discriminatory order of capitalism and the hegemonic approaches are facing defeat and are getting close to their end,” Ahmadinejad said at a summit meeting assessing progress on achieving U.N. goals to drastically reduce poverty by 2015.
“The undemocratic and unjust governance structures of the decision-making bodies in international economic and political fields are the reasons behind most of the plights today humanity is confronting,” he said, according to an English translation of his prepared remarks.
Ahmadinejad usually draws a large crowd for U.N. speeches but Tuesday’s address was delivered to a virtually empty hall.
It was unclear whether the unusually low attendance was due to waning interest in Ahmadinejad five years after he first addressed the assembly or if it was the fact that he was one of the first speakers in the morning session, which began at 9 a.m. EDT. (Many delegations are routinely tardy for U.N. meetings.)
Outside the United Nations, demonstrators have been gathering this week to protest Ahmadinejad’s stand on Israel and the alleged human rights abuses of the Iranian government. Ahmadinejad has repeatedly expressed doubt that the Holocaust took place and suggested that Israel should not exist as a state.
Ahmadinejad, whose country has been hit with four rounds of U.N. sanctions for refusing to halt sensitive nuclear activities, offered no clear alternative to capitalism in his speech but said, “The world is in need of an encompassing and, of course, just and humane order in the light of which the rights of all are preserved and peace and security are safeguarded.”
Capitalism’s “chickens come home to roost” at the UN
Representatives of the world’s poorest countries joined other U.N. member states in New York this week at a three-day meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on the global financial crisis and its impact on the developing world.
Many delegates from “the South” blasted capitalism and the wealthy Western powers for the crisis. For once they could say they did not cause it though they are the biggest victims. Cuban Trade Minister Rodrigo Malmierca Diaz told the delegations — roughly three quarters of the General Assembly’s 192 member states are participating — that retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro had foreseen the current crisis nearly three decades go.
During a conference of nonaligned countries in 1983, Castro said in a speech that “declining foreign trade, hunger and unemployment” would eventually take their toll on the global economy,” Malmierca Diaz said.
“The current state of the world economy and its gloomy outlook should lead to a profound reflection in governments and in the most lucid minds of the developed world,” the minister said, adding that Castro’s analysis was “still valid.”
Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister and finance minister of the Caribbean island nation of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, said the world economy is in “the worst crisis of international capitalism since 1929.”
“The chickens have come home to roost as the poor and the working people suffer consequentially,” Gonsalves said.
Cheryl and gale, perhaps you both should take a good look at multinational corporate dealings throughout Africa. You are correct when you say corrupt African governments are at the heart of the matter. Our governments in the west give every advantage to our corporations to take full advantage of this corruption. This is economic oppression, empire. We enjoy cheap carbonated beverages, clothing, cell phones and more all because we pay to little for the resources we receive from the third world. What do you really think the answer is.
from MacroScope:
Capitalism, Brazilian-style
Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva lays out his views today on how the world will work in the future. It's part of a Financial Times blog on the outlook for capitalism:
