Archive | December, 2017

  • Skull with Sunglasses fossil

    Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good.

    David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York magazine that has kicked up quite a discussion. It’s about worst-case scenarios…[and] the dystopian future the piece describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most people.… I won’t rehearse the parade of horribles.… Instead, I want to address some of the critical reaction to the piece, which I have found … irksome.

  • Lula and Rousseff

    Brazil’s Lula innocent, conviction attacks democracy: Rousseff

    In the wake of the sentencing of Workers Party leader President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to more than 9 years in prison for alleged corruption charges, former President Dilma Rousseff has joined masses of supporters in denouncing the charges and declaring the popular leader’s innocence.

  • Women taking part in the International Women's Day march

    The pitfalls of radical feminism

    For many socialist feminists, critiquing liberal feminism is easy. Many of us came to socialism from liberalism and have a clear understanding of its limits and flaws. However, the history and substance of radical feminism is less well known. While the “radical” in radical feminism seems to suggest a politics that socialists would embrace… [it is] incompatible with socialist feminism. Plagued by a narrow understanding of gendered oppression and a misguided strategy for change, radical feminism ultimately fails to offer women a clear path to liberation.

  • Pasqualina Curzio

    Empire Files: Abby Martin in Venezuela: supermarkets to black markets

    Abby Martin talks to Venezuelans on the streets of Caracas and investigates the main claim that there’s no free press, and that there is no food in the supermarkets. Using hidden cameras, she takes you through local grocery stores and the underground black market currency exchange, the main source of inflation in the country. Abby sits down with economist Pasqualina Curzio to learn more about the nature of the black market and chronic shortages of goods. Knowing that world leaders are calling for foreign intervention, Abby finds out if locals agree.

  • International Monetary Fund

    The sorry state of the US economy

    Although reluctant to say it, a recent IMF report on the state of U.S. economy makes clear that U.S. policy makers have failed to protect majority living conditions. While the IMF generally pulls no punches in criticizing the policies of most member governments if it determines that they threaten to slow capitalist globalization dynamics, it tends to tap dance around disagreements when it comes to the policies of its more powerful member countries, especially the United States. If we want improved living conditions we are going to have to fight for them. Perhaps greater awareness of just how bad things are in the United States will help speed the effort.

  • Quote from Chief Justice Ed Warren in Sweezy v. New Hamphsire

    Sweezy at sixty

    I did not know that Albert Einstein was a socialist. Maybe I had known once, or more likely, never cared. But in 1949, when the great physicist and Nobel laureate declared his beliefs, in the innocuously titled “Why Socialism?,” a lot of people would have cared. Indeed, by 1953, Joseph McCarthy was after him, and people were sending hate mail to the Institute for Advanced Study asking that Einstein, a founding member of the research center, be sent packing.

  • Empire Files: Abby Martin meets the Venezuelan opposition

    Abby Martin goes on the deadly front lines of the anti government protests in Venezuela and follows the evolution of a typical guarimba—or opposition barricade. She explains what the targets from the opposition reveal about the nature of the movement and breaks down the reality of the death toll that has rocked the nation since the unrest began, and how a lynch mob campaign came after her and the Empire Files team for reporting these facts.

  • Viva Cuba Libre!

    Cuba: critical thought in the socialist transition

    The distance that separates us today from the first issue of Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought) is exactly the same as the distance between this revolutionary, intellectual adventure and the October Revolution: half a century. The coincidence in this case is not limited to random chance.

  • Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

    Fire and riddles at Hamburg

    I wonder whether those so horrified today were sickened then at US attacks on others’ sovereignty. There has been lots of masquerading, I think, by disguised provocateurs or indignant sovereignty defenders. Their threats against even hesitant moves toward dialogue, disarmament, de-escalation in the world’s charged atmosphere are what truly sicken me—and frighten me!

  • Ce que tout écologiste doit savoir à propos du capitalisme (What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism)

    The earth shall rise on new foundations

    The United States is sometimes viewed as the most extreme capitalist society on earth. The decision of the newly elected Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement would seem to affirm such a judgment. It highlights the fact that while capitalism cannot solve the environmental problem, a more extreme capitalist society can, if it is not stopped, eliminate all possibility for a future sustainable society, by accelerating the runaway train to catastrophe represented by today’s business as usual.

  • Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky on Fascism, Trump, and the state of the union

    Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview.

  • A British PR firm spread “white monopoly capital” to distract South Africans from mounting corruption

    A British PR firm spread “white monopoly capital” to distract South Africans from mounting corruption

    It takes a certain level of cynicism to race bait South Africans to protect profits. It’s downright underhanded to hire a public relations firm to do it professionally.

  • Wonder Woman with her allies--"the humane members of the world community, represented by the U.S.–Chris Pine is the male lead and Gadot’s love interest–and a ragtag support group that includes a Scot, a native American, and a generic Arab, presumably symbolizing 'moderate' Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan," writes Jonathan Cook (Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros)

    Wonder Woman is a hero only the military-industrial complex could create

    For a while I have been pondering whether to write a review of the newly released “Wonder Woman,” to peel back the layer of comic book fun to reveal below the film’s disturbing and not-so-covert political and militaristic messages.

    There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up! It’s only a movie!”–as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically.

  • ICE agents are thrilled with Trumps actions so far

    ICE officers told to take action against all undocumented immigrants encountered while on duty

    The head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit in charge of deportations has directed his officers to take action against all undocumented immigrants they may cross paths with, regardless of criminal histories. The guidance appears to go beyond the Trump administration’s publicly stated aims, and some advocates say may explain a marked increase in immigration arrests.

  • Ad for Kakkoos (Latrine)

    Toilet tales

    Kakkoos (Latrine) is a Tamil documentary that is a powerful indictment of society’s apathy towards the thousands who are tasked with cleaning public toilets and sewers. The filmmaker Divya Bharathi talks about why she made a documentary and what is the task at hand, post its tremendous success.

  • Venezuela: ‘our revolutionary democratic experience is at stake’

    Venezuela: ‘our revolutionary democratic experience is at stake’

    Revolutionary activist and sociologist Reinaldo Iturriza has spent many years working with popular movements in Venezuela and writing on the rise of Chavismo as a political movement of the poor. He also served as Minister for the Communes and Social Movements, and then Minister for Culture in President Nicolas Maduro’s cabinet between 2013 and 2016.

  • Trump Is Trying to Make NAFTA Even Worse

    Trump is trying to make NAFTA even worse

    Many on the Left have been deeply critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since before it was fast-tracked into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1994. Now, President Donald Trump’s current plan to renegotiate NAFTA is poised to make the massive trade deal even worse.

  • Union Busting Cartoon

    Ransacking the public sector

    Almost 50% of union members in the United States today work in the public sector. By necessity, they will have to play a major role in the rebuilding of organized labor. But like private sector unions before them, government employee unions face circumstances threatening their very existence.

  • Class Ceiling

    The shifting politics of inequality and the class ceiling

    Britain’s class landscape has changed: it is more polarised at the extremes and messier in the middle. The distinction between middle and working class is less clear-cut. The elite is able to set political agendas and entrench their own privilege. The left needs a clear narrative showing how privilege leads to gross unfairness—and effective policies […]

  • Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

    Big shots in Hamburg

    Years ago the 35th US president made a speech in Germany, four words of which, in American-accented German, remain famous: “Ich bin ein Berliner!”—“I am a Berliner!” That was John F. Kennedy. Will the 45th president, soon to visit Germany’s second city, emulate him and tweet “I am a Hamburger! Wow!”