US Military and CIA Interventions Since the War

US Imperialsm for Beginners

Cronin’s The Citadel and the British National Health Service

A J Cronin’s famous novel, The Citadel, a story of a coal mining company doctor’s struggle to balance scientific integrity with his obligations to his employers, incited the establishment of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. It exposed the inequity and incompetence of medical practice at the time. In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public health service to defeat the wiles of those doctors who "raised guinea-snatching and the bamboozling of patients to an art form".

Dr Cronin and Aneurin Bevan, the British Labour Party cabinet minister who devised and introduced the “free at the point of delivery” National Health Service (NHS)—at a time when the UK was flat broke and deep in debt as a consequence of the war—had both worked at the Tredegar Cottage Hospital in Wales, which was the basis for the NHS. Now, although the UK is much wealthier than it was then, the Tory government is trying its best to undermine the NHS prior to selling it off piecemeal to the private sector. There is no reason or excuse for it except doctrinaire capitalist politics.

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• Refer to Wikipedia, sv "A J Cronin" and "Aneurin Bevan" for more information.

Wealth Distribution in the USA:Worse than we Imagine... Much Worse!

A revealing video with only the fault that its dismissal of socialism as equality of income is propagandist and not true. Socialism means "from each according to their ability to each according to their work", but with a much more equitable distribution of wealth than under capitalism, and so approximating more to what the film depicts as the average US citizen's idea of an ideal distribution.

Sylvia Pankhurst—Trailer

This is the trailer for the inspiring new feature length documentary Sylvia Pankhurst: Everything is possible now available on DVD from the charity WORLDwrite. The full film is packed with little-known facts, rare archive imagery, expert interviews and exclusive testimony from Sylvia's son, Richard Pankhurst and his wife Rita. The campaigns Sylvia led embraced far more than 'votes for women' as she uniquely understood the fight for democratic rights required a challenge to the system. For full details visit:
www.worldwrite.org.uk/sylviapankhurst.

A Tribute to Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution

Uploaded on Jul 8, 2010

In this programme in the Islam Channel's Timeline series, Stop the War's John Rees investigates the revolution of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Chimpanzees Only Cooperate With a Fair Distribution of Rewards!

The Yerkes National Primate Research Center's research programs are exploring how the interaction between genetics and society shape who we are, and advance knowledge about the evolutionary links between biology and behavior. Researchers there, at Georgia State University and at Emory University, have shown chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) have a sense of fairness that was once thought as uniquely human. It suggests a long evolutionary history of the human aversion to inequity as well as a shared preference for fair outcomes by the common ancestor of humans and apes. One of the authors, Frans de Waal, says:

Until our study, the behavioral economics community assumed the Ultimatum Game could not be played with animals or that animals would choose only the most selfish option while playing. We've concluded that chimpanzees not only get very close to the human sense of fairness, but the animals may actually have exactly the same preferences as our own species.

As a direct comparison with our chimpanzee relatives, the study was extended to human children. Six adult chimpanzees and 20 human children (ages 2 – 7 years) played the Ultimatum Game. The game was played with a pair of subjects, one chosing between two differently colored tokens that could be exchanged for rewards—small food rewards for chimpanzees and stickers for children—subject to their partner's cooperation,. One token offered equal rewards to both players, whereas the other token favored the one making the choice at the expense of their partner. The chooser handed the token to the partner, who exchanged it with the experimenter for food. Thus, both partners had to agree so as to get the reward. Another author, Darby Proctor, added:

We used the Ultimatum Game because it is the gold standard to determine the human sense of fairness. In the game, one individual needs to propose a reward division to another individual and then have that individual accept the proposition before both can obtain the rewards. Humans typically offer generous portions, such as 50 percent of the reward, to their partners, and that's exactly what we recorded in our study with chimpanzees.

Both the chimpanzees and the children responded as adult humans do, typically. When the partner insisted with shows of indignation at an unfair distribution, chimpanzees and children split the rewards equally. When a partner was passive or could not reject the unfair offer, both chimpanzees and children chose the selfish option. Chimpanzees are cooperative in the wild and have apparently evolved a sensitivity to reward distributions to maintain the benefits of cooperation.

It suggests that cooperation in our relatives, the chimps, and our own species, depends upon fairness but requires the opportunity to object to, and, one surmises from other studies, to punish selfishness. The study invites consideration of the effects of unfairness in human societies, in such as the development of the law, institutions like trade unions, protest, and revolution! It seems we will respond to perceived unfairness. The distribution of wealth in the world, especially the western world is grossly unfair, and might suggest we are heading for a period of social upheaval in protest.