Archive | August, 2021

Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. Today’s guest is Prabhat Patnaik. He is talking about his read on the history of capitalism that he breaks up into 5 periods from colonialism into the present.

On the night of 14 August 1791, enslaved Africans gathered in the Bois Caïman forest and planned the revolt that would begin the Haitian Revolution. Last week, on the 230th anniversary of this meeting, Haiti was hit by an earthquake that has upturned the lives of more than a million people.

Despite the announcements from the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that “everything is under control”, Turkey is experiencing one of the deepest crises in recent years. A conversation with Hasan Durkal.

People frequently refer to Colombia as “the coffee-growing country,” due to its high volume of coffee exports, but in recent years Colombia has found itself in headlines for a different commodity.

Daniel tanuro responds to the recently released IPCC Physical Basis Report, which is a contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report on climate change.

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

Six Principles for an Increasingly Authoritarian Age.

Cuba is a small country. But because it became in 1959 the first country in the Western hemisphere to thoroughly break with U.S. domination, and embark on a path of national independence, events concerning Cuba have a geopolitical significance many times greater than its size. Present events show that this continues to be the case.

The UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its latest comprehensive report on the state of the earth’s climate. The much-anticipated report dominated the headlines for a few days in early August, then quickly disappeared amidst the latest news from Afghanistan, the fourth wave of Covid-19 infections in the US, and all the latest political rumblings.

On Sunday, 15 August, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled his country for Uzbekistan. He left behind a capital city, Kabul, which had already fallen into the hands of the advancing Taliban forces.

Helen Keller (1880-1968) was one of the most inspirational figures of the 20th century. But most people know the writer and activist for her determination to overcome the barriers facing people with physical disabilities in her lifetime, not for her equally fierce determination to replace American capitalism with a system in which the workers control the means of production.

Does our commitment to reconciliation mean anything while we support settler-colonial regimes abroad?

Activist Chao Xiaomi is inspiring transgender Chinese to reject the gender binary. But the community continues to face deep-seated discrimination.

Cuba’s anti-imperial foreign policy helped end apartheid in South Africa and sustain liberation movements worldwide. Historian Piero Gleijeses says that’s one of the main reasons why the US has terrorized the island nation through today. 

For any working period—whether it be a day, an hour, or five minutes—part of the period is “necessary labor” and another part is “surplus labor.”

Bourgeois pundits are alarmed by the Chinese government’s latest regulatory changes. A Wall Street Journal headline is typical: “China’s corporate crackdown is just getting started. Signs point to more tumult ahead.”

When the big shutdown finally takes hold in the Bakken, the frackers will have gone and most wells abandoned, and people in the region will still have to deal with the illegal trash dumps, polluted streams, health problems, and other unfortunate effects of the boom.

Joe Biden’s response to the earthquake was to put war hawk Samantha Power, who now heads USAID, in charge of U.S. relief efforts in Haiti.

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

According to this conceptual genealogy sketched by literary theorist Justin Clemens, two important homophonic variants of “Pandemick” emerged in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars.