Archive | July, 2023

Review of Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022). People in the United States generally have confidence in the country’s political system, believing that it has the capacity to solve meaningful problems. Conservatives and liberals alike sincerely respect what they consider the nation’s sacrosanct Constitution, established […]

Oleg Nesterenko: “When we talk about the reasons that led the Russians to intervene militarily in Ukraine, root causes and triggers are often confused, especially in the Western press. The triggers are mistaken for the causes. As for the causes, we don’t even talk about them, or we just talk nonsense. It’s important to distinguish one from the other.”

In honor of the NATO summit July 11 and 12, this is a comparison of how the Nazi leadership in World War Two and today’s collective West similarly underestimated Russia and overestimated their capabilities.

According to a just-released report by the international rights organization, Save the Children, four out of five Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system are beaten and 69 per cent are strip-searched.

Shakur was a prisoner-of-war of a decades-long Black liberation struggle for 37 years. He was only released when he was months away from death.

Clinton administration claimed Serbian forces massacred civilians when deaths at Račak resulted from fighting between Serbian Army and terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which Washington supported

The African continent, like the American continent, was subjected to colonization and intervention by European nations and, although the processes were different, there are common channels between the two histories, just as there are with Asia.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen recalls Cambodia’s “painful experience” with U.S.-dropped cluster munitions in the 1970s, which continue to cause casualties to this date.

There’s a photovoltaic war to prove it-but China’s won it for now.

Durham Miners’ Association general secretary Alan Mardghum said it was an absolute disgrace that the Labour leader had punished MPs for standing on picket lines in support of striking workers.

From 1964 to 1973, the United States released 6,162,000 tons of bombs and other ordnance in Indochina, far greater than the combined amount during the Second World War and the Korean War.

The calls have begun in Mosco, for keeping intact Yevgeny Prigozhin’s conglomerate of military budget contractors. The reason argued is that they have established themselves so strategically in the logistics of the military services that they cannot be purged without doing greater damage than Prigozhin himself has caused. In short, a Russian oligarch who knows too much, with too many mouths to feed, too many pockets to fill, and so too big to fail.

The beginning of July saw the hottest days on record globally.

“Piping water into the sea is an outrage. The sea is not a garbage dump,” said one local fisherman earlier this year.

The promises of environmental stewardship from Canada’s political establishment clash with its support for fossil fuel interests.

Under monopoly capitalism of course this relationship between monopoly capitalists and the state becomes far closer. Rudolf Hilferding in his opus Das Finanzkapital had talked of a “personal union” between banks and industrial capital and the formation on this basis of a “financial oligarchy”, and had suggested a similar “personal union” between the “financial oligarchy” and the State.

President Joe Biden has reportedly given final approval for the transfer of U.S. cluster munitions to Ukraine, ignoring warnings from human rights groups and progressive lawmakers who underscored the indiscriminate weapons’ devastating impacts on civilians immediately upon use and far into the future.

Ursula Huws reflects on the history of ‘prefigurative’ approaches and community ownership models in the UK – and how these can be used to rethink public ownership amid the current cost-of-living crisis.

Kamala Harris wants to be your aunty. The Biden Administration’s controversial Vice President is often presented as either an incompetent sidekick, or a lovable big sister figure who “stays with her hair done”.

Monthly military situation report for June 2023, by Dmitri Kovalevich, in Ukraine, June 29, 2023.