Archive | February, 2022

The question to ask is what today’s New Cold War is trying to change or “solve.” To answer this question, it helps to ask who initiates the war. There always are two sides—the attacker and the attacked. The attacker intends certain consequences, and the attacked looks for unintended consequences of which they can take advantage. In this case, both sides have their dueling sets of intended consequences and special interests.

In the strategic vision of the U.S., Russia should be disarmed to become part of Europe as a “sidekick” and a bridgehead to contain China, the “more dangerous enemy” as Kissinger described it.

Marx’s first sentence in Capital Volume One is: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an “immense accumulation of commodities”, its unit being a single commodity.” (Moore and Aveling translation).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a near-universal understanding among political leaders that NATO expansion would be a foolish provocation against Russia. How naive we were to think the military-industrial complex would allow such sanity to prevail.

As world leaders reacted to the quickly escalating Ukraine-Russia crisis, China once again called on the relevant parties to remain restrained and prevent the situation from sliding out of control.

The story of the Bedouin village Sa’wa in the Naqab is the story of Palestine. Palestinian homes are being demolished and Palestinian families are being expelled to make way for the Israeli settler population.

Russia: “Minsk II”

Twenty years ago, on 11 January 2002, the United States government brought its first ‘detainees’ abducted during the so-called War on Terror to its military prison in Guantánamo Bay.

Russia’s recognition of the ‘people’s republics’ of Luhansk and Donetsk in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbass on Monday is a watershed event.

Under pressure from ultra-nationalists and Russophobes, successive governments in Ukraine have failed to address the grievances of the Russian speaking majority in the Donbass region. Ukraine has also not implemented the provisions of the Minsk agreement signed in 2015 to end the conflict in the region.

Russia says it has no intentions of controlling Ukraine and its military operation is only to “demilitarize” and “de-Nazify” Ukraine in an action taken after 30 years of the U.S. pushing Russia too far, writes Joe Lauria.

Russia’s demand that NATO cease its expansion to Russia’s borders is viewed as such an obviously impossible demand that it can only be understood as a pretext to invade Ukraine.

The discussion of Marx is embedded in Federici’s signature critique of the social reproduction of labor power in capitalist societies.

First published in January 1972, Working is a baggy collection of over seven-hundred and sixty pages, most devoted to the reflections of ordinary Americans about their economic lives. From the Terkel archive, it’s clear that his interest in work was long standing and went well beyond the USA.

Apart from the fact that China’s food system offers lessons that could improve policy-making in both high and low-income countries, the world’s most populous country is also one of the world’s major producers of food despite having less cultivated land.

The reason the party’s cartoon has evoked horror is because we have seen this sort of singular obsession with a targeted religious minority before and know where it leads.

Already threatening war with Russia, the White House this month has unveiled a new imperial grand strategy for the Indo-Pacific that raises the prospects of war with China.

According to defenders of the status quo, the best response to our most serious problems is to let markets work their magic; government regulation of private business activity only makes things worse.

Michael Mann is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, who has played a pivotal role in establishing what is happening to our climate and the forces driving that change.

What about this China factor? Why do Western pundits/savants pay so little heed to this game-changer? It should not require my half-century of studying/reporting on Russia-China relations to notice that China and Russia have never been so strategically close as now.