Archive | November, 2018

You all know how the saying goes: “Poor Mexico–too far from God, too close to the United States.”

The Great Lie about the Rwandan bloodbath opened the door to a far larger genocide in Congo and justified U.S. military interventions all over the planet. During a recent campaign event, Florida Senator Bill Nelson said, “That story of Rwanda is very instructive to us because when a place gets so tribal that the two […]

Podcast (co-hosted with Marine from A Privileged Vegan): veganvanguardpodcast.com ___ adrienne maree brown –
Emergent Strategy: https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrat…

By Swampside Chats. Discovered by Player FM and our community—copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio streamed directly from their servers.

In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives–supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order”–rather than in individuals.

In the face of the deep crises of capitalism, with all the safety valves unscrewed so that each crisis is merely an intensification of the previous one; with crises increasingly affecting the everyday lives and living conditions making planning more precarious for an increasing number of women left alone with a double burden to carry, I sent out a call to the Marxists among the feminists whom I had known from the movement of the 1970s, from meetings, trips, visiting professorships, to jointly deliberate the situation.

Physician burnout, depression, and suicide increasingly invade discussions within the medical field. Depression and suicide are more common among male and female physicians, with suicide rates 1.41 and 2.27 times greater than that of the general male and female populations, respectively.

MintPress News reports from the migrant caravan in Mexico City and met with members of the International Migrants Alliance, who gathered under the slogan: “Migrants, refugees and peoples of the world unite and fight capitalist exploitation, plunder and war!”

Italian street artist Jorit Agoch unveiled one of the largest and most impressive murals of the Latin American revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara days ahead of the 51st anniversary of his assassination at the hands of the Bolivian army in La Higuera, Bolivia.   

In his 1999 book The Bridge over the Racial Divide, William Julius Wilson wrote that economic insecurity creates conditions that hollow out the civic values of liberal democracy, and constitutes the “breeding grounds for racial and ethnic tensions”.

Reading University has reminded me, and others, not just that we miss Norman Geras, but that it would be good to hear his views today. Reading University has also reminded us that there is no fool like a learned fool.

Within a timeframe of hardly four years, Stokely Carmichael’s organizational efforts evolved from the mobilization of black voters in Alabama and Mississippi to building a large movement resisting the military draft at the height of the Vietnam war, culminating in the SNCC’s “Hell No! We Won’t Go!” campaign.

It would be a mistake to see Germany’s Greens as radical, well to the left. While the Greens stress environment above all, they have decided that this does not require conflict with big business, which must simply be convinced that ecology and profits can be combined.

Sitting in his office, Donald Trump meets with the head of his economic advisors Gary Cohn. Cohn jokes with Trump. He says, make a speech and say that the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border is ready to be built: the materials are on hand, labour is eager. The only thing that engineers are worrying about is how to spell–over the 2000-kilometre border–the word TRUMP.

Organizing a union is no easy task in the United States. Although organizing a union is supposed to be a protected right, businesses regularly fire union supporters knowing that they face minimal punishment even if found guilty for their actions. In fact, the rights of all workers, regardless of their interest in unionization, are being whittled down. Simply put, U.S. law doesn’t work for workers.

In an interview with Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Jeremy Corbyn said international efforts challenging economic injustice and inequality is needed.

In this interview we talk to Andrés Ruggeri, anthropologist and researcher who directs the Facultad Abierta programme, dedicated to researching and supporting companies and factories recuperated by their workers. Ruggeri tells us about the history of this movement, the challenges it faces, the relations with recent governments in Argentina, and much more.

Although initially obscured by The Economist, among others, the sudden and unprecedented increase in Russian adult male mortality during 1992-1994 is no longer denied. Instead, the debate is now over why?

The October 16 issue of NY Review of Books has an article by Janine di Giovanni titled “Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets”. The article exemplifies how western media promotes the White Helmets uncritically and attacks those who challenge the myth.

The catastrophe–expected and foreseeable–has happened. This immense country, with its 200 million inhabitants, is now in darkness. At best, it will take a decade or two to emerge.