Archive | December, 2020

Noam Chomsky has been writing about the lack of democracy under neoliberal hegemony for decades, which is why I was so surprised that he signed the recent Harper’s Letter.

The struggle for African/Black freedom in the United States began with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to this territory in 1619.

Six months ago, on January 30, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Ten days before this, the Chinese government had said—to great alarm—that the coronavirus could be transmitted from human to human.

Can China do much to fight back against the power wielded by the U.S. in the world economy? At first sight, that looks unlikely. China is big, but world trade is conducted in dollars, and the U.S. has economic, political and military influence across the globe.

On this episode of Red Menace Alyson and Breht discuss ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ by Karl Marx

Marx’s Ecology: John Bellamy Foster details the ecological foundation of Marx’s critique of capitalism and argues that it has great relevance to understanding the environmental crisis we face today.

Japan was ready to surrender, making the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki two days later, totally unnecessary and morally indefensible, say a panel of scholars in two video discussions.

Two things seem certain at this point: (1) The Trump administration will continue to extend its heavy handed neofascist tactics in the next three months, seeking to expand its political base by these means, and (2) the White House and the Republican Party will try to engineer another set of stimulus payments/tax cuts in early September with Trump’s name all over it.

Here’s a look back at July’s political news and the best new albums that related to it.

Black politics does not exist in the Democratic Party, because the duopoly system serves only the corporate rulers.

The Donald Trump administration uses every mechanism to cut China out of the global supply chain, but nothing seems to be working as a resolute China is unwilling to back down and dismantle its technological gains.

“Now this liberal virus, which pollutes contemporary social thought and eliminates the capacity to understand the world, let alone to transform it, has profoundly penetrated the whole of the ‘historical left’ formed in the aftermath of the Second World War” (Samir Amin, 2003, 41)

Janine Jackson interviewed legal scholar Marjorie Cohn about secret police in Portland for the July 24, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

No one should have been surprised by COVID-19. Epidemiologists have been warning for decades about the increasing danger of novel virus pandemics that could cause major human suffering, disrupt the economy and exacerbate the growing inequalities that characterizes the modern world.

Climate progressive countries United Kingdom and Sweden have to ramp up their commitments to reach the Paris Agreement goal, according to a new study led by Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and Upsalla University.

The new $1 trillion GOP HEALS act includes billions for F-35 fighters, Apache Helicopters, and other welfare programs for the Pentagon.

The back cover of Diana Johnstone’s Circle in the Darkness calls the memoir “a veteran journalist’s lucid, uncompromising tour through half a century of contemporary history,” one that “recounts in detail how the Western Left betrayed its historical principles of social justice and peace and let itself be lured into approval of aggressive U.S.-NATO wars on the fallacious grounds of ‘human rights.’”

All told, 54.1 million American workers have filed initial unemployment claims during the past nineteen weeks.

It is therefore from 1971-72, after the emergence of the first ecological movements and following his reading of the pioneering works of Elmar Altvater, Harry Rothman and Barry Commoner, that he began to integrate the ecological dimension into his thinking.

On 23 July, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the world now has 15 million people infected by COVID-19.