Archive | August, 2020

My Mis-Education in 3 Graphics is a document of the filmmaker’s darkly humorous journey through the mind-boggling constructs of mainstream economics.

Jhuliana Rodrigues works as a nurse technician at the Hospital São Vicente in Jundiaí, Brazil. “It is very difficult,” she says of her job these days. Brazil has just passed 100,000 deaths from COVID-19, with 3 million Brazilians infected with the virus.

Trump’s rhetoric adheres to a longstanding tradition of political paranoia. To understand it, twenty-first century radicals could benefit from an unlikely source: the postwar writings of Richard Hofstadter.

Twitter says it bans ads from state-affiliated media outlets. However, U.S. government propaganda organs like Voice of America’s VOA Persian pay the social media corporation huge sums of money to spread disinformation against Iran and other foreign adversaries.

Last minute information, I denounce that General Ivan Ortiz Bravo, head of the third department of the Armed Forces Command, on the instruction of the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, General (Sergio Carlos Orellana), has a coup d’état plan. – Former Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma

The American economy gained 1.8 million jobs last month, even as the coronavirus surged in many parts of the country and newly reintroduced restrictions caused some businesses to close for a second time.

On August 5, 1895, Frederick Engels died in London. After his friend Karl Marx (who died in 1883), Engels was the finest scholar and teacher of the modern proletariat in the whole civilized world.

In 1913, Lenin published an article in Pravda with a curious title, ‘Backward Europe and Advanced Asia’.[1] The opening of the article accepts the paradoxical nature of the title, for it is Europe–after all–that has advanced it forces of production and it is Asia that has had its forces of production stifled.

Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic.

Fanon’s idea that the measure of time not be that of the moment but that of the rest of the world takes on urgent significance as climate extinction meets global pandemic.

A prominent Hong Kong pundit and anti-China activist named Kong Tsung-gan has become a go-to source for Western media. An investigation by The Grayzone confirms Kong as a fake identity employed by an American teacher who’s a ubiquitous figure at local protests.

In saying that the terrible explosion in Beirut is an ecosocialist issue I am not counterposing this claim to the fact that this is also an issue of corruption, of government incompetence, of health and safety and many other things.

On August 4, 2020, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Venezuela. Appearing before the committee was U.S. State Department Special Representative Elliott Abrams.

One way to evaluate the seriousness of the Trudeau government’s stated objectives in seeking to oust Venezuela’s elected government is to examine their policies elsewhere in the region.

Comics, graphic novels, narrative drawing, illustrated fiction–call it what you like–is a growing arena for serious social and political commentary.

The coordinator of a media platform that works with social movements talks to VA about the history and challenges of popular communication.

The Trump administration wants to keep other countries from weaponizing technology the way the U.S. and its allies already have.

When it comes to China, Democracy Now, Jacobin, The Nation  and others on the imperial-minded U.S. ‘left” are allies of white supremacy.

This week is the 75th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only time nuclear bombs have been used in a conflict—and one could only hope the last time. To commemorate the anniversary, I thought it would be appropriate to devote this column to taking a hard look at current U.S. nuclear weapons policy, and to do that, I had a chat with our new Global Security Program Washington representative, Kevin Davis.

In a major essay to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, John Pilger describes reporting from  five ‘ground zeros’ for nuclear weapons – from Hiroshima to Bikini, Nevada to Polynesia and Australia. He warns that unless we take action now, China is next.