Overview of the maoist victory in the Nepalese Constitutent Assembly election by long-term observer and sympathiser Gary Leupp, a US academic and regular Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) contributor.  It's not necessary to agree with Leupp that the maoists stand for 'communism' to recognize that the election result represents a major strategic success for the provisionally demilitarized 'people's war' and a geopolitical upheaval at the borders of India (where the Naxalite maoists continue to wage war) and China.  More open to question, perhaps, is Leupp's claim that the event is overlooked or unreportable in Western media.  The FT ran a remarkably positive full-page feature the day before yesterday, followed up yesterday with renewed emphasis on Party assurances the immediate agenda is not 'socialism' but the replacement of 'feudalism' with 'capitalist development'.  (This is what Leupp says too, and it's the only part of his article to be criticised on the Kasama maoist website, where the article is reproduced (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/).)  Incidentally, the article is tagged 'site-specific' (as in 'art') here because the maoists say they want to put a red flag on Mt. Everest that's big enough to see from the moon.  

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity with the Royal Mail workers.)  This Private Eye squib mentions the workers only in passing and the Directives not at all, but it draws attention to an important mediating stage in the restructuring: the banker-run Shareholder Executive, created in 2002 to subject the UK's remaining state-owned companies to the ultra-short-term criteria of 'shareholder value'