Archive | May, 2022

“There is really no true solution to the problem of global food security without bringing back the agriculture production of Ukraine and the food and fertilizer production of Russia and Belarus into world markets despite the war.” These blunt words by UN Secretary-General António Guterres accurately describe the present global food crisis.

America made a neoliberal deal with the devil when it began to whittle away New Deal protections for the vulnerable.

The Oklahoma state legislature has passed perhaps the most extreme anti-abortion law in the United States. This law, known as HB 4327, takes the right-wing offensive against reproductive rights to an outrageous new height by banning all abortions in the state starting from the moment of fertilization.

In Davos and beyond, NATO’s upbeat narrative plays like a broken record, while on the ground, Russia is stacking up wins that could sink the Atlantic order.

Amidst intense fighting under way, Russian forces entered Severodonetsk city in Luhansk, Donbass region, May 24, 2022

U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said his goal is “to get wages down,” complaining workers have too much power in the labor market. Economist Michael Hudson says this is “junk economics,” and corporate monopolies are driving inflation, not wages.

Almost as soon as the administration of President Joseph Biden announced a redeployment of U.S. Special Operations Forces to Somalia on May 16, the Western media began to spin the intervention.

Even as his administration is ramping up its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, President Biden is on his first visit to Asia, colluding with major allies and strategic partners to step up the U.S.-led confrontation with China, to economically weaken it and prepare for war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a goal of his war in Ukraine the ‘denazification’ of the country.

In Cuba, abortion and all healthcare is free, and enshrined in a constitution democratically voted on by the people. In the US, nine unelected, life-long judges control society based on a 1787 constitution written by slaveowners.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR. A class war is being waged in the name of fighting inflation. All too many central bankers are raising interest rates at the expense of working people’s families, supposedly to check price increases.

About the Ukraine war, “green” price gouging and the wrong course of the Left Party. A conversation with Oskar Lafontaine.

World military spending has passed U.S.$2 trillion for the first time, according to new data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Last year was the seventh consecutive year that world military spending increased; total expenditure has almost doubled this century.

One million people in the United States have died of COVID-19. Coronavirus was written on their death certificates as the cause.

Although the cases of Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, and Tupac Shakur may seem like cautionary tales for musicians who may be inclined to politicize their lyrics they have served as an inspiration; especially Tupac.

Thank God, Russia eschews any triumphalism over the surrender of the so-called neo-Nazi Azov regiment in the Azovstal factory complex in Mariupol. The Defence Ministry in Moscow announced on Friday that a total of 2,439 “Azov Nazis” and Ukrainian servicemen had laid down their arms since May 16, and that the entire Azovstal complex is now under control of Russian forces. 

I’ve been toiling on this Berlin Bulletin for weeks, altering it, agonizing, starting anew. Events are simply too complicated and bitter–in the world and in Germany, too. Most dreadfully in Ukraine.

If you follow the news it must seem like joining a union is a step outside the norms of U.S. law.

The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s highly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board,” launched with much fanfare just three weeks earlier, was to close, and that its director, Nina Jankowicz—former fellow at the quasi-state Wilson Center think tank, and Ukrainian foreign ministry communications adviser–had resigned.

Among the figures of neo-Nazism that supposedly does not exist in Ukraine, there is Dmytro Iaroch, the emblematic figure of one of the worst extremist movements in Europe: Pravy Sektor (Right Sector). His story, like that of many other neo-Nazis in Ukraine, is edifying, and speaks for itself, of what has been happening in Ukraine since well before the Maidan of winter 2013-2014.