Archive | April, 2021

On Sunday night on 21 March 2021, a gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

Reed has been held in federal pretrial detention without bail for ten months after a prior high school acquaintance reported him to the police for a different satirical social media post about planning a protest or ‘riot’ at the courthouse that never actually happened.

The Black-murder-by-cop next door to Minneapolis shows the world the dehumanization that is built into the white supremacist DNA of settler-colonialism will continue to produce crimes against our collective humanity.

Truck drivers at Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, represented by the Teamsters union, started strike action against Universal Logistics Holdings (ULH) this week, adding further to extraordinary congestion woes at America’s principle west coast maritime gateways.

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General and renowned international human-rights attorney who stood against U.S. military aggression worldwide, died peacefully April 9 at his home in New York City, surrounded by close family. He was 93 years old.

JAPAN has come under fire after its government announced today that it would release more than a million metric tonnes of radioactive water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.

The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study on Black men is but the best known of the plethora of medical experiments on Black and Brown people in and out of prisons, and other vulnerable populations.

How media language encourages the left to support wars, coups and intervention.

On 11 April 2021, Guillermo Lasso (52,4%), the right-wing candidate, defeated Andres Arauz, the candidate supported by Rafael Correa and part of the Left, by 52.4% vs 47.6% in the second round of ballots for the presidential election.

China surged past the United States to become the #1 carbon emitter in 2006. Currently (2019 data from BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy), its CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning are over 9,800 million metric tons (“tonnes”) a year.

At the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) convention last week, party members overwhelmingly passed a motion to sanction Israel. The policy book forthe center-left political party, which has existed in Canada since 1961, will now include a boycott of goods from illegal settlements and an arms embargo on the country.

U.S. trial judge Loretta Preska has denied all Zoom access to the upcoming contempt trial of human rights lawyer Steven Donziger in a widely condemned move that his lawyers say is designed to limit public access to an unprecedented one-sided trial run by a private Chevron prosecutor. 

On 28 June 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a coup d’état engineered by the Honduran oligarchy and the United States government. The reverberations of the coup extend into present-day Honduras, which continues to struggle to maintain its political sovereignty.

Following the publication of the special issue on Samir Amin, we post short interviews by the authors on the influence of Amin on their lives and research.

COVID-19 – A socialist response

In this feature-length documentary, Anthony Wilks traces the connections between the events of Hobsbawm’s life and the history he told.

A video clip has emerged showing a female office worker beating her over-eager boss with a cleaning instrument, to the delight of women viewers.

Both the pandemic and the response to it represent the irrationality and destructiveness of capitalism. The crisis of care was already evident before the outbreak of Covid, but was greatly exacerbated by it.

In the Notes from the Editors to the March 2021 issue of Monthly Review, the MR editors questioned some of the arguments in Richard Smith’s book, China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse, as well as replied to Simon Pirani’s related criticisms (writing under his pseudonym of Gabriel Levy) of MR editor John Bellamy Foster on China and the environment. Both Smith and Pirani have written replies to our March editorial, which we are publishing here, along with our own rejoinder.

Her understanding of oppression was bolstered by personal circumstances: female in an overwhelmingly male public sphere, Jewish in a climate of vicious antisemitism, Polish at a time when Poles suffered national oppression, and an individual who lived with a disability.