Archive | December, 2020

A statement signed by former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and Indian Kerala State’s finance minister Thomas Isaac, among others, highlights the inadequacy of the measures announced recently by the G20 and IMF to postpone debt repayment.

The Trump administration is stepping up its unconstitutional moves toward dictatorial rule, tear gassing antipolice violence protesters in Portland, Oregon and announcing the deployment of federal police to three more cities—Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee—in addition to Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Radical Reviewer reviews the book Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

Capitalist food production is based on ecological destruction, imperialism, inhumane labor practices, and the degradation of human health. A socialist program that guarantees healthy food for all is the only alternative.

Most American leftists are incoherent on the term fascism, and Democrats have utterly destroyed the word’s meaning.

For much of human history, most people—men and women—wore loose fitting robes of various types to cover their bodies. It is thought that trousers were invented relatively recently in human history, around 1000 BCE, so that people could be more comfortable riding horses.

“If the small economy of Cuba can improve the health of millions of the world’s people, imagine what could be accomplished if America’s enormous productive capacity changed from creating useless and destructive junk to producing what people throughout the world actually need.”

COVID-19 has exposed the lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all, the fiction that unpaid care work isn’t work, the delusion that we live in a post-racist world. We are all floating on the same sea, but some are in super-yachts and others clinging to drifting debris.

The real problem with the World Bank’s poverty estimates, is that its International Poverty Line is set at an impossibly low level, which greatly underestimates world poverty.

Since the end of May, demonstrators opposing police violence and white supremacy have thronged the streets of Portland, Oregon, clashing with law enforcement officers. Last week, aspiring autocrat Donald Trump escalated the situation by announcing that he would be sending federal agents around the country to assert his authority through acts of violence against protesters.

Mikael Lyngaas argues that post-work theorists ranging from Bob Black to Srnicek and Williams are utopian socialism for the current era.

The rogue deployment of secret federal police forces in Portland, Oregon, has added a new complication to negotiations over reauthorizing the Trump administration’s vast surveillance powers and appropriating new money for the Department of Homeland Security.

Donald Trump’s attacks on Venezuela, Syria and Iran are criminal, but Joe Biden vows to be even worse.

The existing alphabet soup of possible recoveries—V, U, W, and so on (which I discussed back in April)—is clearly inadequate to describe what has been taking place in the United States in recent months.

In a period of ecological and climate crises, figuring out ‘how to save nature’ is perhaps the principal challenge facing our planet. Yet, a largely unchallenged view is the misconception that overpopulation is among the primary drivers of these crises.

Unemployment insurance laws were developed prior to the widespread use of contingent faculty, and were designed to prevent K-12 teachers and full-time college professors from collecting unemployment during scheduled term breaks and summer vacations when they weren’t teaching. In nearly all states, these laws are being used to prevent adjuncts, who have since become the majority of professors, from collecting compensation when they are unemployed. This situation is exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Haftar, who was once an intimate of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is now prosecuting a seemingly endless and brutal war against the United Nation’s recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) based in Tripoli and led by President Fayez al-Sarraj.

The legal right to sexual violence is part and parcel of policing. This will not end until we eliminate police discretion over women’s bodies.

In what may come to be viewed as a historic court case, a group of UK Uber drivers from London, Birmingham, Nottingham and Glasgow have launched a legal action against Uber in the Netherlands, supported by the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU), the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW) and Worker Info Exchange.

The excessive use of force and killings of unarmed Black Americans by police has fueled a popular movement for slashing police budgets, reimagining policing, and directing freed funds to community-based programs that provide medical and mental health care, housing, and employment support to those in need. This is a long overdue development.