NOAM Chomsky has called it a “soft coup”, presumably because no guns or tanks have been involved as yet; but the forced resignation of Dilma Rousseff, the democratically elected  president of Brazil belonging to the Left-wing Workers’ Party, and her replacement by a Right-wing politician Michel Temer, who has lost no time in constituting an all white and all male conservative cabinet, is nothing short of a coup.Dilma Rousseff is to be impeached on charges of “corruption”, but this “corruption”, contrary to the impression conveyed both at home and abroad by a powerful segment of the Brazilia

THE index of industrial production for 2015-16 which has recently been released shows that the growth rate of the industrial sector for the financial year (over the previous year) comes to a meagre 2.4 percent. This virtual stagnation in industrial output is not just some sporadic occurrence. In fact the industrial growth rates for the last four financial years have been as follows: 2012-13: 1.1 percent2013-14: -0.1 percent2014-15: 2.8 percent2015-16: 2.4 percent This constitutes industrial stagnation with a vengeance.

EDWARD Snowden, the NSA whistleblower from the United States, has called it the “biggest leak in the history of data journalism” ever to have occurred in the world. Mossack Fonseca, a law firm based in Panama, had made it its business to arrange investments by the rich and the wealthy all over the globe in several off-shore companies in a clandestine manner, which, it had promised its clients, could never be breached.

ONE is witnessing the emergence of a strange and unprecedented phenomenon in the advanced capitalist world, namely the charging of negative interest rates. The European Central Bank reduced its deposit rate to -0.1 percent in June 2014, and since then it has reduced this rate further, to-0.2 percent in September 2014, -0.3 percent in December 2015, and to -0.4 percent in March 2016. And apart from the ECB, four other national central banks, those of Switzerland, Japan, Denmark, and Sweden, have also reduced interest rates on certain parts of their deposits to negative levels.

UNEMPLOYMENT has become so persistent a phenomenon in contemporary times that there is a common feeling that it is a “natural” state of affairs, that nothing can ever be done about it, and that the only way to have greater employment opportunities coming your way is either to oppose the system of job “reservations” for the deprived segments of the population altogether, or to demand that your own “caste” or “community” be included in the category of those eligible for such “reservations”.But this view that unemployment is a “natural” state of affairs is based either on ignorance or on loss