Archive | December, 2018

  • Berlin Bulletin by Victor Grossman

    GROKO or NO GROKO?

    It happened in Bonn last Sunday, on January 21st. There were close to 650 delegates, the gallery in the congress hall was also packed with observers. The suspense was almost visible, also among the demonstrators outside. All over Germany millions were watching closely to see if the future path of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), […]

  • Shit pile dive

    The shitty new communist futurism

    Editors’ note: This is the first in a series of ENTITLE blog articles that critically engage with the ongoing discussions about “eco-modernist socialism” and “communist futurism”, projected in Jacobin magazine’s climate change issue ‘Earth, Wind, and Fire.’ 

  • Warren Buffett (Rebalance IRA)

    Warren Buffett & imperial economics

    Warren Buffett is one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is also Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Berkshire Hathaway, a huge U.S. investment conglomerate. Looking at Berkshire’s investment policy reveals some important features of the economics of imperialism today and the role of money capitalists.

  • Protests in Honduras intensify leading up to inauguration day

    Juan Orlando Hernández, who was “elected” president in Honduras as a result of fraud and corruption, will hold his swearing in ceremony on January 27 in what may be the first closed-door inauguration (although his government has purposely not shared details about the ceremony).

  • Lula Da Silva

    Lula, Brazil elections and the left

    In an exclusive interview with teleSUR, Brazilian professor and researcher Sabrina Fernandes discusses former President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s Jan. 24 corruption trial and forthcoming elections in the South American country.

  • Utopia and the right to be lazy

    Utopia and the right to be lazy

    Students are much too busy to think these days. So, when a junior comes to talk with me about the possibility of my directing their senior thesis, I ask them about their topic—and then their schedule. I explain to them that, if they really want to do a good project, they’re going to have to quit half the things they’re involved in.

  • Demonstrators in Zurich this week. While many are poised to recoil at President Trump’s arrival in Davos this week, much of the moneyed elite there are willing to overlook what they portray as the president’s rhetorical foibles in favor of the additional wealth he has delivered to their coffers. (Ennio Leanza/European Pressphoto Agency)

    Dutiful dirges of Davos

    Thousands of people will gather next week in Davos. Their combined wealth will reach several hundred billion dollars, perhaps even close to a trillion. Never in world history will be the amount of wealth per square foot so high. And this year, for the sixth or seventh consecutive time, what would be one of the principal topics addressed by these captains of industry, billionaires, employers of thousands of people across the four corners of the globe: inequality…

  • Red Guards and students

    The struggle for actually building socialist society

    “The economic base built in Mao’s era laid the foundation for a sovereign capitalist development.”

  • A shantytown in São Paulo, Brazil, borders the much more affluent Morumbi district. Credit: Tuca Vieira / Oxfam

    The Billionaire boom: 82% of global wealth produced last year went to richest 1%

    Forida is a 22-year-old sewing machine operator in a clothing factory in Dahka, Bangladesh. She often works 12-hour days producing clothes for brands such as H&M and Target. Sometimes, during busy production cycles, the hours are even longer.

  • István Mészáros

    After alienation

    Since the collapse of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, many on the left seem to have swallowed the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism.

  • Workers Of The World Unite! (Photo Credit: Marxist Student Federation)

    This is for the Guardian, NYT and the BBC: 1939 to 2018

    Before I go any further with this let me state that I’m not a Trotskyist, or a Leninist, or a Stalinist or a Maoist (but I might have been all of the above, with exception of Maoist, at one time or another).

  • Habaneros wade through floodwaters near El Malecón after Hurricane Irma. YAMIL LAGE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

    Cuba embarks on a 100-year plan to protect itself from climate change

    On its deadly run through the Caribbean last September, Hurricane Irma lashed northern Cuba, inundating coastal settlements and scouring away vegetation. The powerful storm dealt Havana only a glancing blow; even so, 10-meter waves pummeled El Malecón, the city’s seaside promenade, and ravaged stately but decrepit buildings in the capital’s historic district. “There was great destruction,” says Dalia Salabarría Fernández, a marine biologist here at the National Center for Protected Areas (CNAP).

  • Ahed Tamimi

    Sympathy for Ahed Tamimi is not enough

    Unless you have been living under a rock for the past few weeks, it is unlikely that Ahed Tamimi’s story, will come as news to you, despite the mainstream media’s best efforts.

  • Dismantling doomsday: Daniel Ellsberg on the risk of Nuclear apocalypse

    Daniel Ellsberg is perhaps the premier whistleblower of all time, the man who in 1971 dragged the Pentagon Papers out of top-secret darkness into the light. Yet even as excerpts from the papers’ 7,000 pages were being published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers, Ellsberg was sitting on an entire second set of secrets, having nothing to do with Vietnam: all his material on nuclear policy, such as the operational plans for general nuclear war that he had drafted for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in his job as a RAND Corporation defense analyst.

  • Created with Highcharts 6.0.4 Median Family Wealth for Those Born 1943–51 White Black 30s and 40s 40s and 50s 50s and 60s $0 $100 000 $200 000 $300 000 $400 ... (Image Credit: Urban Institute)

    Too many whites are in denial about the extent of race-based economic inequality

    A recently published paper by three Yale scholars reveals “that Americans, on average, systematically overestimate the extent to which society has progressed toward racial economic equality, driven largely by overestimates of current racial equality.”

  • Images of Cherokees, a tribe ethnically cleansed in the 1830s, from the North Carolina Trail of Tears Association

    What’s wrong with colonialism?

    I remember many years ago sitting through a seminar at Macquarie University in Sydney during my Honours studies in Politics. That particular seminar focused on Western colonialism in the South Pacific, and modern Western imperialism in general. I remember one thing vividly from that class that remained etched into my mind. It was a question that the lecturer asked U.S. repeatedly and insistently. ‘Why is it so important for indigenous people to maintain their identity? What is so bad with a particular way of life or culture disappearing?’

  • Google and Facebook

    Facebook and Google outline unprecedented mass censorship at U.S. Senate hearing

    Behind the backs of the U.S. and world populations, social media companies have built up a massive censorship apparatus staffed by an army of “content reviewers” capable of seamlessly monitoring, tracking, and blocking millions of pieces of content.

  • U.S. Wages Bottom 50% Top 1%

    What’s the matter with America?

    Last week, Thomas Frank welcomed Paul Krugman to the ranks of those who believe that the American working-class in recent decades has often voted against its fundamental economic interests by supporting conservative Republicans.

  • President Trump

    Leaked nuclear posture review lays out policy changes that would increase risk of nuclear war

    A draft of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review leaked to the Huffington Post indicates that the White House is planning changes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its nuclear-use policy that would increase the risk that nuclear weapons will be used.

  • George Monbiot

    Monbiot is a hypocrite and a bully

    It is time for George Monbiot’s legion of supporters to call him out. Not only is he a hypocrite, but he is becoming an increasingly dangerous one.