Archive | December, 2017

  • White Helmets workers posing with the bodies of dead Syrian soldiers

    U.S.-funded White Helmets assist in public execution in rebel-held Syria for at least the second time

    In a new video Syria Civil Defense members—popularly know as the “White Helmets,” the Nobel Prize-nominated group that has received at least $23 million in funding from USAID (a wing of the State Department)—are shown assisting in a public execution in a rebel-held town in Syria. It is at least the second such execution video featuring members of the Nobel Prize-nominated group, which operates exclusively within the armed Syrian opposition and works closely with al-Qaeda’s local affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, and even ISIS.

  • Honest Accounts 2017

    Honest Accounts 2017: How the world profits from Africa’s wealth

    Research for this report calculates the movement of financial resources into and out of Africa and some key costs imposed on Africa by the rest of the world. We find that the countries of Africa are collectively net creditors to the rest of the world, to the tune of $41.3 billion in 2015.1 Thus much more wealth is leaving the world’s most impoverished continent than is entering it.

  • Oscar Lopez

    Interview with Oscar López Rivera: “Fighting is not a Futile Exercise”

    While many of us could hardly concentrate on everyday matters as we thought obsessively about the fragile and unfortunate fate of Oscar López Rivera, the former political prisoner painted peacefully in the prison in Terre Haute Indiana. Then on January 17, at 3:30 pm a guard called him to let him know that he had […]

  • Protests in Brazil

    ‘We need direct elections now and an emergency plan for the people’

    Leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), Joao Pedro Stedile, on the Brazilian political scenario, the role of the O Globo media network, the internal divisions among the putschists, and the need of building a transition government and the people’s project of Brazil.

  • Paul M. Sweezy in 1942

    Final examination given in the class “Economics of Socialism,” taught by Paul Sweezy in 1940

    During my recent archival visit to Harvard, I was able to copy a magnificent trove of final examinations in economics (up through 1949…there is much more going forward, but I had to move on). Now I begin the curatorial work of pairing some of those examinations to course materials I have posted earlier and where the exam […]

  • 'What Was Done': Jeremy Corbyn

    ‘What Was Done’

    This short satirical film from Bella Caledonia (by Edinburgh filmmaker Bonnie Prince Bob) was originally banned by YouTube when it was released three weeks ago (it has since returned). As far as we are concerned it is a brilliant piece of propaganda that should go viral once again.

  • ISIS propaganda photo of execution

    The erasure of Syrian voices in Western media

    “There were always two parallel streams in the Syrian uprising at the beginning. The civil activists who wanted democratic reform and change in the form of a secular state, and the conservative stream, which was markedly more Islamist and sectarian in its tone and demands.… the former was mostly urban, the latter rural.… As the uprising went on and the violence intensified, the civil movement became increasingly silenced and weak, while the Islamist movement became quickly more militant and radicalized”

  • Russian President on May 17th in Sochi after a meeting with Prime Minister of Italy Paolo Gentiloni

    Dimwitted and dangerous

    Since losing the presidential elections the Democratic Party has been waging non-stop war against President Trump, focusing on his allegedly dubious connections with Russia. Abetting them have been members of the security and intelligence services who have been leaking information to the press. You might say that ‘all is well in love and war’, and that it’s quite fair to use whatever weapon one can to attack your political opponents. But in this case, I think, the attacks have not only long since became entirely divorced from reality but have also descended into gross irresponsibility.

  • David Clarke, nominated for assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security

    Trump nominates actual fascist David Clarke for Department of Homeland Security

    Words like fascist and authoritarian get thrown around too promiscuously. But there is no other way to describe David Clarke, who today announced that he was named assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. (The Department has not confirmed Clarke’s appointment.) Clarke occupies the extremist, anti-democratic fringe of far-right officials, even by the standards of the Trump administration.

  • Climate Change

    Anything wrong with eco-socialism?

    Political feasibility becomes irrelevant when science teaches us that this is the course human society must follow if we are to survive.

  • Labour’s manifesto is a shift to the left: it’s no time for compromises with the right

    It must be part of a bold and insurgent campaign based on resistance to racism, austerity and war that focusses on mass rallies and mobilisations. Giving in to the right can only make it weaker.

  • Sqwawkbox

    Exclusive: Gardiner on defence, manifesto, Boulton—and being internet sensation

    As the SKWAWKBOX examined this morning, Labour spokesman and front-bencher Barry Gardiner has become one of the sensations of the General Election campaign so far, with his charming but emphatic handling of various mainstream media interviewers.

  • FBI surveillance video

    Russia Blog #6: The FBI has no legal character but lots of Kompromat

    The host of the daytime NPR program asked his guests how serious, and how “unprecedented” Trump’s decision to fire his FBI chief was. The guests answers were strange: they spoke about “rule of law” and “violating the Constitution” but then switched to Trump “violating norms”—and back again, interchanging “norms” and “laws” as if they’re synonyms. One of the guests admitted that Trump firing Comey was 100% legal, but that didn’t seem to matter in this talk about Trump having abandoned rule-of-law for a Putinist dictatorship. These guys wouldn’t pass a high school civics class, but there they were, garbling it all up. What mattered was the proper sense of panic and outrage—I’m not sure anyone really cared about the actual legality of the thing, or the legal, political or “normative” history of the FBI.

  • Protesting Miners in Iran

    Silicon Valley’s toys contribute to Iran’s 2017 presidential election

    With a few days to go to Iran’s upcoming presidential elections on 19 May, six candidates could survive the vetting process of the Guardian Councils.… The role of the media, both in Iran and throughout the diaspora, to shape public opinion is significant. Iranian state media, radio and television are supposed to give the “hopefuls” an opportunity to continue campaigning for office, as they speak about their future plans and defend past performances, but they often fall short.

  • Argentina: memory, unity and mobilization is the recipe to make Macri Retreat

    May Square was, once again, the containment wall under the umbrella of the human rights organizations, which beyond their lamentable divisions, are the only reference that all great majorities respect. Precisely because when the society was muted by terror, from there emerged the first voices of pain, anger and decision so that impunity would not keep advancing. And these organisms exists because previously thousands of patriots fought in any possible way for a society without exploited people. Now Macrism is trying to vanish -for a second time- the legacy of this militancy that since 1955 and on, struggled against the dictatorships and fought for the Revolution.

  • Supporters of President Nicolas Maduro rally to support him while carrying pictures of late Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, in Caracas, Venezuela, May 8, 2017.

    Standoff in Venezuela

    Venezuela has been rocked in recent weeks by almost daily protests and counter-protests, as right-wing opponents of socialist President Nicolas Maduro seek to bring down his government.

  • ‘Trump Is Just Tearing Off the Mask’

    It’s very easy to say, “Oh, Trump’s gone off the reservation.” But actually, this is part of the American political culture, past and present.… Go back to the Know-Nothings, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, the Southern strategy. This is an important strand of our political culture.…That’s a more frightening thought than calling Trump a lunatic and an aberration.

  • Noam Chomsky

    The Labour party’s future lies with Momentum

    On a recent visit to Britain, Noam Chomsky explained that an “extremely hostile media” is damaging Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal, and as a result is responsible for Corbyn’s unpopularity.

  • World Economi Forum on Africa, May 2017

    South Africa’s business community has not stepped up honestly

    Prof Patrick Bond from the University of the Witswatersrand (Wits) tells Business Day TV why the World Economic Forum, which held its annual Africa meeting last week, serves the interests of the ruling elite at the expense of communities.

  • A Venezuelan opposition protester wears a U.S. flag bandanna around his face.

    Venezuela Government Accuses U.S. of Bankrolling Right-Wing Violence

    The U.S. media’s treatment of the crisis in Venezuela is almost as craven as the corporate media in Venezuela itself. Articles like the following from TeleSur, and an article we recently posted from The Dawn, provide a much-needed corrective. As Marta Harnecker explained the April 2017 issue of MR (“A New Revolutionary Subject“): “The attacks […]