from the page: "..At the end of the summit's first day, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that member countries had agreed to contribute 1% of their international reserves toward the bloc's main bank in order to create a reserve fund. The Bank of the Alba was established in 2008 with the intention of providing economic support to people-centred regional projects and to contribute to sustainable social and economic development across the region. The Bank is also cited as acting as a continental alternative to the International Monetary Fund... The heads of state also discussed the possibility of increasing the commercial use of the sucre, the bloc's virtual currency. The sucre is currently used for direct trading between the ALBA countries, allowing them to circumvent the U.S dollar and minimise the foreign-exchange risk.

from the page: "...From a vacuum of political power and severe economic necessity, grew new political formations outside of traditional party politics. Hundreds of neighborhood assemblies came together to meet peoples’ most basic needs and create a space for local dialogue. Bartering clubs (with their own forms of currency) experimented in alternative economics, and workers of bankrupt businesses began to occupy and run enterprises on their own... Neighborhood assemblies referred to themselves as “autoconvocados” (self-convoked) and made decisions using a consensus model in which all had equal say and majority voting was often a last resource. There was also a renewed sense of solidarity between classes, as assemblies in middle-class neighborhoods directed many programs to the poor and unemployed... In a country where inequity often pits the poor against the middle class, this kind of solidarity was unique and critical..."

from the page: "..it [sanctions] will boost Iran’s non-oil exports and help local industry in competition with cheap Chinese imports. In sum: a devalued rial stands a reasonable chance of actually reducing unemployment in Iran... Iran may be “isolated” from the United States and Western Europe, but from the BRICS to NAM... it [china] is likely to get its oil and gas at a lower price as the Iranians grow ever more dependent on the China market... That Iranian isolation theme only gets weaker when one learns that the country is dumping the dollar in its trade with Russia for rials and rubles... the new sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank that will go into effect months from now, ignore Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz (especially unlikely given that it’s the main way Iran gets its own oil to market), and perhaps one key reason the crisis in the Persian Gulf is mounting involves this move to torpedo the petrodollar as the all-purpose currency of exchange.

from the page: "Some believe it [the NATO/US-led Libyan invasion] is about protecting civilians, others say it is about oil, but some are convinced intervention in Libya is all about Gaddafi's plan to introduce the gold dinar, a single African currency made from gold, a true sharing of the wealth. Gaddafi did not give up. In the months leading up to the military intervention, he called on African and Muslim nations to join together to create this new currency that would rival the dollar and euro. They would sell oil and other resources around the world only for gold dinars... In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars. Some say sanctions and an invasion followed because the Americans were desperate to prevent OPEC from transferring oil trading in all its member countries to the euro. A gold dinar would have had serious consequences for the world financial system, but may also have empowered the people of Africa, something black activists say the..

from the page: "...Chinese exporters operate on narrow profit margins, because the prices of their products are dictated by their overseas corporate customers who, in many cases, can easily switch their orders to other low-wage countries such as Vietnam. In almost every Chinese industry, there is already vast overcapacity, resulting in intense competition between companies for overseas orders. These firms are also being squeezed by high commodity prices and rising wages... According to one estimate, if a product is worth $US10, an EMS manufacturer makes only a few cents in net profit. Most of the profit flows to the multinational corporations... Low profits and grim export prospects are driving capital from manufacturing into speculation on China's inflated and unstable housing market... if huge numbers of Chinese firms are bankrupted and unemployment skyrockets, working people will challenge the regime’s authority...

from the page: "...He [Liu] speaks on behalf of a layer of the Chinese ruling elite that advocates limited democratic rights as a means of forestalling a social explosion... The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu gives a boost to the ideological component of the Obama administration's aggressive campaign to demand economic concessions from Beijing, particularly on the revaluation of the yuan, and to undercut growing Chinese influence in Asia and internationally. The lack of "human rights" in China is exploited to highlight Chinese support for repressive regimes on the world stage such as Burma and Sudan—while keeping a diplomatic silence, for instance, on the oppressive US-led military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.." --I agree to the writer's views on the committee but not on Liu, who chose to carry the democratic movement in the repressive police state, unlike activists who escaped to "free" states, which encourage to speak out about the enemy to the western ruling elite.

from the page: "China has a huge number of unemployed college graduates. In July, China’s ministry of education revealed that over 25 percent, or roughly 1.5 million of the 6.3 million students who had graduated this year, were unemployed. Of those who graduated last year, 800,000 remained unemployed... An official report last year found that after years of study, often using up their families’ life savings, the average wage of a college graduate was equal to or less than that of a rural migrant labourer, just hovering above the poverty-level income of 1,500 yuan ($US224) a month... China’s population planning agency has predicted that the urban population will increase to 700 million by 2015, outnumbering the rural population for the first time in the country’s history. As a result, urban unemployment is likely to rise... Wen warned that a 20-40 percent revaluation [of the yuan] would cause large-scale factory closures and "there will be major turbulence in the Chinese society"..

from the page: "..‘Aid can be placed in a continuum from left to right, starting with Purple Aid (based on the provision of global public goods), Yellow Aid (based on the principle of geopolitical strategic and security interests), Orange Aid (based on the commercial principle), and Red Aid (based on an ideological principle).’... donors have often used ‘human rights’ as a cover to push money into many of our own civil society organisations in the South to advance their own agenda in our countries... Its global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the WTO and the OECD are losing legitimacy and credibility. The countries of the South, on the other hand, are beginning to reassert their national independence... I am also doing some research and writing on African integration and regionalism. This is under threat from the EPAs, and continued fixation of our leaders to the flawed neoliberal policies of the Bretton Woods institutions."