Archive | July, 2017

The upper classes of Venezuela are trying to regain their lost fiefdom. The program of violence they are implementing, which has rocked Venezuela since April 4, 2017, is part of that effort.

The current civilian slaughter, chaos, and daily indignities in Yemen create the perfect recruitment tool for the expansion of terrorist organizations. Al-Qaeda has been operating in Yemen for a long time.… In addition, IS has begun to make their presence felt in Yemen.

The latest issue of the London Review of International Law features an interesting review essay by Robert Howse, in which he makes the case for progressive international lawyers attending to the discipline of economics and the insights that can be gained from it, in particular from what he sees as more progressive economists. Howse’s essay […]

The indirect effect of ​the increase in income inequality is economically more injurious than the erosion of company earnings or a stock market downturn.

Greece is on track to privatize its water systems, while other countries like Germany are in an opposite position of de-privatization due to poor management and exorbitant price hikes.

Class is primary—not in the sense of more important, but in the sense of being the limit, the foundation, the point where profit is extracted and the point where it can be challenged. The centrality of class is tactical, not moral.

Trump did us all an enormous favor. His election was such a shock that millions of people went into the street. And to see women in the lead meant a great deal to me as a feminist.

The Trump administration’s combination of continuously attacking mainstream media and relying on right-wing outlets to carry their message played out again last week in service of the Attorney General.

Neither the recent report on the civilian deaths and war crimes in Mosul (published by Amnesty International), nor the broader issue of the civilian toll in the US war against ISIS, has come close to penetrating US corporate media. Can one imagine this frame in reporting on Russia’s siege of Aleppo? Can one imagine highlighting Syrian and Russian doctors, treating the very civilians their governments just bombed, in such an uncritical manner? Can one imagine the US media blaming all the deaths caused by Russian bombing as the sole fault of those occupying the city?

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, many media executives and top journalists of almost all major U.S. news outlets, political and business magazines, public broadcasters and press agencies have long been members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In a recent poll of Venezuelans reveals that the will of the majority flatly contradicts the distortions of mainstream media within and outside of Venezuela.

These racial/ethnic differences mean that our general push for more and better jobs must be accompanied by policies designed to overcome the discriminatory and segmented nature of the US labor market.

A white woman from Australia was gunned down by militarized police in Minneapolis – part of the collateral damage that flows from the U.S. mass Black incarceration regime. The intended targets are Black women like Charleena Lyles, killed by Seattle cops, last month. “Although Black women and girls make up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, they account for 33 percent of all women killed by police.”

The neoliberal right has succeeded in pushing concentrations of wealth and income to an ever smaller group of tycoons at the top, while the pluralizing Left…has had precarious (and highly variable) success in its efforts to advance the standing of African Americans, Hispanics, women, diverse sexualities, and several religious faiths.… One minority placed in a bind between these two opposing drives…has been the white working and lower middle class. Portions of it have taken revenge for this neglect…. That has created happy hunting grounds for a new kind of neo-fascist movement, one that would extend white triumphalism, intimidate the media, attack Muslims, Mexicans, and independent women, perfect the use of Big Lies, suppress minority voting, allow refugee pressures to grow as the effects of the Anthropocene accelerate, sacrifice diplomacy to dangerous military excursions, and displace science and the professoriate as independent centers of knowledge and pubic authority.

You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science.  Everything “networked.”  It was to be a glorious […]

Abby Martin addresses the criticisms with Head of the Presidential Commission to oversee the Constituent Assembly process, Elias Jaua, speaks to supporters and participants of the Assembly, interviews historian Chris Gilbert and explains what is at stake in Venezuela if the social programs instated under Chavez are terminated by the opposition.

Both Democrats and Republicans have used social security funds to hide government debt—i.e., to trick the public. This was made possible by a huge surplus engineered by fund actuaries to account for baby boomers. In the next few years the fund will need to cash in on its bonds and this will cause the federal debt to balloon.

Eugene Victor Debs was not only the builder of the social movement in America but arguably the most important political figure of the 20th century, before being crucified by the capitalist class when he and hundred of thousands of followers became a potent political threat. The most notable moments of Debs life were the railroad strikes in 1894, his campaign for Congress in 1916 until he was arrested under the Sedition Act by President Wilson and finally his speech moments before his sentencing in 1918.

Our very modes of thinking about the social are fragmented, or intersectional…[which is] why intersectionality has become such an important paradigm for feminism. It conceives of different experiences of oppression and exploitation as coming from different and separate systems and tries to recombine the fragments of oppression without denying their singularity. Social Reproduction Feminism seeks to include and to go beyond intersectionality by saying both that we need to understand capitalism as the very specific socio-economic system in which those forms of oppression are generated and nourished, and that there are not ‘separate’ systems of oppression or exploitation under capitalism that can be understood in isolation one from the other.

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry in a statement rejected the U.S. government’s “unbelievable” comments on Venezuela that “shows its absolute bias towards the violent and extremist sectors of Venezuelan politics, which favor the use of terrorism to overthrow a popular and democratic government.”