Added to the raft of problems soccer-loving cynics have predicted will plague South Africa as a result of the World Cup is the threat of 'another dose of xenophobia' from both state and society, writes Patrick Bond. Allowing immigrants to be blamed for crime and joblessness, says Bond, is a ‘scapegoat’ strategy for the government’s failure to address root causes of the social stress, from mass unemployment and housing shortages, to ‘South Africa’s regional geopolitical interests which create more refugees than prosperity.’

cc Alarmed at the fondness for neoliberal solutions to the global financial crisis among the Nobel Prize Winners Muhammad Yunus and Joseph Stiglitz, Patrick Bond suspects that the two economists are simply aiding rather than challenging the global capitalist system. With Yunus and Stiglitz both set to give talks in Johannesburg this week, Bond fears that civil society's calls for social and environmental justice will continue to remain overlooked.

Following the South African brokerage of a power-sharing deal between Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) and Zanu (PF) Patrick Bond explores whether, in the face of myriad threats to the country’s democracy, the wishes of the Zimbabwean people – as expressed in the People’s Charter adopted at a convention in February – could prevail. As South Africa and the African Development Bank join the Bretton Woods Institutions in calls for Tsvangirai to repay Mugabe’s odious debts, and South African firms hover in the wings to buy up the country’s assets for a song, what is at stake says Bond, is who will win the new economic chimurenga (liberation war) being waged in Zimbabwe. This article was presented at seminars in February, prior to the introduction of the Short-Term Emergency Recovery Programme and revised 2009 Budget.

Drawing on examples such as Thabo Mbeki’s role in damaging HIV/AIDS policies in the early 2000s and a current case in a San Franciso court against Chevron for 1998 murders in the Niger Delta, Patrick Bond argues that a similar process of critical treatment is appropriate for Barack Obama’s new leading economic advisor, Paul Volcker. Citing the opinions of a number of prominent political commentators, Bond reviews Volcker’s disastrous economic policy at the end of the 1970s, highlighting the deleterious effect of high US interest rates on developing countries’ debt repayments and economic development. But with Obama set to ‘accelerate Africa’s integration into the global economy’ under Volcker’s influence, the author argues that it is crucial the new president-elect seek alternative economic viewpoints to dominant neoliberal policy less rooted in brutal US national self-interest.