Archive | September, 2019

Last week, Agence France-Presse got its hands on a draft UN report called Special Report on the Ocean and Cyrosphere in a Changing Climate. This 900-page document is study of the oceans for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007.

The American occupation of Haiti lasted from 1915–34. The U.S. subjected Haitians to the hated forced labor system of the corvée, seized control over Haitian finance, and rewrote the Haitian Constitution at gunpoint, enabling foreign companies to acquire land in the country. The distorting and oppressive impacts of the U.S. occupation have been felt in Haitian society ever since.

I read with interest a recent press release of Rep. Michael McCaul—the Republican incumbent in the Texas 10th Congressional District and my opponent in the 2018 election—in which he announced a new bill  to respond to domestic terrorism.

More than 27 years have passed since Fidel’s warning, during the Earth Summit in Brazil, that an important species was endangered: human beings.

The Industrial & Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU)—a trade union, rural peasant movement, and urban squatters’ movement—formed on the docks in Cape Town in 1919. Within a decade, the ICU had expanded across Southern Africa without regard for national borders and counted people from various African countries and the Caribbean in its leadership, as well as people who were Indian and mixed race. The largely forgotten history of the ICU is well worth recovering in a time of escalating chauvinism and xenophobia. Our Dossier #20 offers an introduction to this extraordinary popular movement.

Extractivist governments are stoking destruction in the Amazon and beyond. International alliances and Indigenous technologies can help protect the biome and support its 30 million inhabitants.

Patriotism…..

A towering intellectual, pathbreaking thinker, and preeminent sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein passed away. He lived a deep commitment to scholarship, justice and change.

Under the Sanders plan, federal contracts could be revoked or denied to low-wage employers, union busters, and companies that engage in offshoring (read: most American companies). Making federal funds contingent on “good behavior” is a powerful means of leverage.

Kevin Blowe is the coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) from 2014 when it began focusing on the policing of opposition to fracking across the country. He regularly contributes to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s work on protecting rights to freedom of assembly and spent 25 years as a campaigner with the Newham Monitoring Project in East London.

The burning of the forest immediately gave way to an aggressive campaign in social networks and media against President Evo Morales, attributing the fires to Decree 3973 and Law 741 that supposedly allow deforestation and controlled burning for activities oriented to agriculture and cattle ranching.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal explains how Nicaragua celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution just one year after defeating a U.S.-backed coup effort — and how U.S. sabotage efforts continue today.

Sweden might have some credibility if it banned weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. It is not enough to be moved by the tragedy in Yemen. Action is necessary.

In Saxon and Brandenburg, the leading parties held their lead and headed off the threat by the AfD. But in both states they were painfully weakened.

“Marx on tax” is seen as an “empty box” by David Harvey in his latest book on Capital, but Marx and Engels had plenty to say about tax. Their tax theorizing is no anachronistic curiosity but perfectly applicable to the income and wealth inequalities of our own era.

A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.

Wallerstein was a renowned critic of capitalism whose work was aimed at fighting for justice and change.

Labor Day often gets short shrift as a worker’s holiday. Marked primarily by sales on patio furniture and mattresses, the day also has a more muddled history than May Day, which stands for internationalism and solidarity among the working class. Labor Day, by contrast, was declared a federal holiday in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, fresh off his administration’s violent suppression of the Pullman railroad strike.