Archive | November, 2021

A few days before the Nicaraguan presidential elections on November 7, Facebook and other social media companies began closing down many of the pages used by Sandinista supporters in their campaign to re-elect President Daniel Ortega.

Leaders of the six Palestinian human rights organizations that Israel has declared to be “terrorist” spoke to a global audience last Friday on a webinar convened by mainstream Washington thinktanks and they repudiated the secret dossiers that Israel has circulated in seeking to ban the organizations.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over […]

Dialectical materialism combines two philosophical traditions: historical materialism formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and dialectics, an idealist philosophy formulated by German philosopher Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel.

It remains an open question as to how successful the upcoming action against the Cuban government will be. But who is behind the protests is hardly in doubt.

What are western values? One often hears a representative of a western country praising its western values. In a 2017 statement Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau adumbrated Canadian values as “openness, compassion, equality, and inclusion.”

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: Current climate mitigation plans will result in a catastrophic 2.7°C world temperature rise. US$1.6–3.8 trillion is needed annually to avoid global warming exceeding 1.5°C.

The damage done to the Wikileaks co-founder in his decade of incarceration and uncertainty, including more than two years in Belmarsh is beyond doubt. But so, too, is his courage beyond doubt.

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do little.” —Edmund Burke

If Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were writing the Communist Manifesto today, it is not inconceivable that they would begin with the sentence: “A spectre is haunting humanity—the spectre of extinction.”

Polanco Fuentes drew attention to how as soon as the march was announced, it received public support from U.S. legislators, political operators and the media that encourage actions against the Cuban people, try to destabilize the country and urge military intervention.

This is far from a “hot take”: financial wealth in the United States is highly concentrated, with most households, especially Black and Hispanic households, owning few financial assets

Education in post-independence India was supposed not just to provide knowledge and skills to students, but also to facilitate the process of “nation-building” (to use a clumsy word).

CounterSpin interview with Paul Paz y Miño on Chevron vs. Steven Donziger.

We cannot give ourselves the luxury of being technophobic, of negating the importance of technologies and their potential in the struggle. At the same time, we cannot believe in the idea that technology in itself will result in advances for the organised working class.

Mat Forstater joins Money on the Left to discuss the origins of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the vicissitudes of heterodox economics, and the challenges of building alternative institutions in and beyond the academy. As one of the principal architects of MMT, as well as teacher and advisor to many of the more recognized MMT scholars and advocates today, Forstater is perhaps the best equipped heterodox economist to give us the details on the innovative assumptions and arguments that created the firmament for what we now know as Modern Monetary Theory.

After spending weeks conducting backroom negotiations with Sen. Joe Manchin, Sen. Krysten Sinema and other right-wing Democrats in Congress over the social program budget, the Biden administration announced yesterday a “framework” that abandons some of the most important elements of the original proposal.

We are children of our Mother Earth, and as such we must take care of her and protect her, respecting her rights and fulfilling our duties and obligations to protect Mother Earth as a living and sacred being.

Unlike the agreements entered into by Western multinational corporations such as Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the Cuba-Vietnam agreement sets a precedent of solidarity and prioritizes people’s health over business profits.

The IMF caused social and economic decadence in the world; they and other international financial organisations are responsible for the global crisis.