Archive | January, 2019

Lacking, for now, the support of Venezuela’s own military the only way the coup can succeed is with military help from a foreign power, the obvious candidates being the U.S., NATO and Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro——a cross between Pinochet and a used car salesman.

A young Venezuelan intellectual argues that the revolutionary potential of Chavismo may be in abeyance, but it could come back to life again.

The National Guardsmen who rebelled in Caracas early Monday morning have been arrested and are reportedly providing information to authorities.

It is plain as day that the United States wants to overthrow the government in Venezuela.

Dr Martin Luther King’s writings and speeches “should be a part of the curriculum of public schools,” said Larry Hamm, chairman of the People’s Organization for Progress, based in Newark, New Jersey.

The U.S.-Russia talks in Geneva regarding the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty have ended in failure.

The Empire’s European castle of vassals is crumbling. Right in front of our eyes. But Nobody seems to see it. The European Union (EU), the conglomerate of vassals–Trump calls them irrelevant, and he doesn’t care what they think about him, they deserve to be collapsing.

Last month Branko Milanovic published a blog post about the Yellow Vest movement against the fuel tax in France. He was worried–like many analysts–that the uprising proves it will be virtually impossible to roll out the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. He’s convinced that people simply won’t accept it.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics just published its latest news release on union membership. Unfortunately, the downward trend continues.

Granma International reproduces excerpts from Ignacio Ramonet’s interview with the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.

The Israeli-U.S. war declared on the Palestinian boycott movement is coming to a head, culminating in a well-orchestrated effort aimed at suffocating any form of tangible protest of the ongoing Israeli colonization of Palestine.

The scale of environmental crisis is absolutely terrifying. So I was very pleased to read Victor Wallis’ new book Red-Green Revolution which aims to both explain capitalism and environmental destruction and offer a clear strategy for building a movement to challenge both.

Late last year, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton went to Miami (USA), where he coined a new–chilling–phrase: troika of tyranny. It echoed former U.S. President George W. Bush’s phrase, axis of evil. Bush’s axis included Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

​Silvia Federici is one of the most important feminist thinkers of our time–anyone looking for profound analyses of the role of housework, violence against women, or the importance of control over the body in capitalism inevitably encounters her writings.

The World Bank’s latest annual report on poverty and shared prosperity has an unsurprisingly positive message that only 10% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 2015, which is the most recent year that available data allows for global poverty estimates to be made.

As the Yellow Vest movement in France continues its novel and inspiring revolt, president Emmanuel Macron could not help expressing his class disdain for ordinary people: at a gala speech on 11 January, he declared: “Too many French people don’t know the meaning of the word ‘effort’. That’s part of the explanation for the present troubles”.

I don’t remember where I was on September 12, 2012. I was in Chicago, but I wasn’t in the streets when the approximately 26,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) walked out of school and onto the picket lines.

In this episode, we’re joined by Steven Attewell, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.

The masses of red flowers for Karl Liebknecht and, even more for Rosa Luxemburg, was higher than I have ever seen them. Both were murdered one hundred years ago. Why do those two names mean so much to so many people?

Today, U.S. politics (and those of close allies) are much like the Upside-Down of Stranger Things: an inversion of how things should be, and a shadowy ghost world where logic goes to be torn apart by terrifying monsters.