Archive | December, 2022

For all the public outcry, official probes and hearings, financial penalties, apologies and proposed regulations, Facebook remains the world’s foremost surveillance tool–weaponized in all manner of malevolent ways by any number of hostile elements.

Barack Obama recounts in his memoir ‘Dreams from my Father’ reading a book about Africa as a young man. He remembered how he was filled with ‘an anger all the more maddening for its lack of a clear target’ at the way that the dominant images of the book shifted from the independence struggles of leaders like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah to ‘famine, disease, the coups and counter-coups led by illiterate young men wielding AK-47s like shepherd sticks’ (p.515).

“Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay,” Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin jointly announced on Thursday. A similar announcement will come from Sweden on Sunday.

We gather around the school in Mariupol. All windows without exception are broken. The rooms inside are fully demolished. The Ukrainian have used the school and its surrounding as defense position. At 09:00 in the morning, humanitarian aid will be distributed. We start talking with Mariupol’s locals.

Land is and means different things to different people. Indigenous, pastoralist, and rural farming communities are especially dependent on land, which is widely recognised by conservation organisations. Such communities are often uniquely vulnerable to the effects of ecosystem destruction while simultaneously having strong social norms and cultural values that support ecosystem preservation.

This is not a dispatch, editorial, or an article, but a brief note.

On May 2, 2022, a memo written by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was leaked to Politico.com. Alito made clear that the court with a 6 to 3 conservative majority intends to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which made abortion legal in the United States.

These are deeply upsetting times. The COVID-19 global pandemic had the potential to bring people together, to strengthen global institutions such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), and to galvanise new faith in public action.

Americans don’t merely acquiesce to the imperium’s wars, interventions, collective punishments and assorted other deprivations. They actively embrace them.

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the decline of the U.S. dollar, the sanctions war on Russia, his concept of “free-trade imperialism,” and financial parasitism.

This week, Grace talks to John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review. They discuss Marx’s theory of nature and the relationship between humanity and nature under capitalism.

Palestinians are mourning the killing of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot in the head by Israeli forces while covering a raid in Jenin refugee camp.

Last week’s shocking leak exposing the Supreme Court’s draft plan to overturn Roe v. Wade has brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in struggle.

A spectre is haunting Latin America: the ideas of Hugo Chávez. A “new progressivism” is adopting them as their banner and claiming them as their own, thus invisibilizing Venezuela’s role in attempts at promoting regional integration and sovereignty over the last two decades.

The Supreme Court’s draft abortion opinion is poised to revive some of the worst traditions of white patriarchy.

Prices of commodities can be broken down into the three main components: labour costs (v= the value of labour power in Marxist terminology, non-labour inputs (c =the constant capital consumed, and the “mark-up” of profits over the first two components (s = surplus value appropriated by the capitalist owners). P = v + c + s.

Coronaviruses have been with us for as long as conspiracies, so it’s natural to link them. But the history of epidemics provide better explanations than any conspiracy theory and useful advice to those who learn from it. 

The government’s clampdown on free speech is part of a wider campaign to erode all civil liberties. Students must resist, writes Jack Ballingham

For years, the loss of land and livelihood has been upheld as the sacrifice people would have to make in order to get jobs and money later on. It does not seem to matter that any sort of prosperity has failed to trickle down to the people till date, barring those few who get to fatten their pockets.

After the most titanic, nightmarish war in modern history, after rivers of blood shed from Kiev to Moscow, from Stalingrad to Kursk, the workers and farmers of the Soviet Union had vanquished the most vile killing machine the world had yet seen.