Archive | July, 2019

The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are Southern Asia and Western Africa.

It is vital that working people know the score. Only by accurate and complete economic representations can an informed electorate pursue political strategies and tactics that benefit all working people.

Peter Linebaugh’s book comes with a long subtitle, a pithy summary of its contents: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, of Kate and Ned Despard. His timeframe is the period between 1789 and 1804 when, in his view, a series of connected events took place in England, Ireland, France, the Caribbean and North America that formed an Atlantic crucible forging the capitalist world we have lived in since.

That raises a whole range of very familiar and long-standing issues that have afflicted the Left, leading to debates in India (and no doubt in other places as well) between the organised Left and what has come to be called the “ultra-Left” and the insurgent Left.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches its eighteenth dossier, “The Only Answer Is to Mobilize the Workers.” The challenges facing Indian workers and their strategies to fight back are explained through the insights and expertise of K. Hemalata, president of the Center of Indian Trade Unions (CITU).

Humankind and the environment are hurtling toward unprecedented ecological crises. Global warming, sea level rise, and weather extremes due to carbon emissions are catastrophic enough, but they will mix and combine with ocean acidification, air and chemical pollution, water shortages, deforestation, fishery collapse, soil erosion, and mass extinction, throwing both nature and society off a cliff into the unknown.

In the last week of June 2019, as this article was being written, tensions between the U.S. and Iranian governments escalated sharply. On June 20, 2019, in response to aggressive U.S. actions, including the mobilization of troops, naval forces, and aerial provocations, Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone flying  near the Iranian border.