Archive | December, 2023

After a certain point criticizing the hypocrisy and contradictions of the U.S.-centralized empire starts to feel too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. But hell let’s do it anyway; the barrel’s right here, and I really hate these particular fish.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the brutal murder of the South African Communist Party (SACP) General Secretary, Comrade Thembisile Martin “Chris” Hani.

“The Party Is Ending for French Retirees.” That’s the headline the Wall Street Journal (3/14/23) went with just days before French President Emmanuel Macron invoked a special article of the constitution to bypass the National Assembly and enshrine an increase in the retirement age in national law.

The UN Human Rights Council voted overwhelmingly to condemn sanctions. The only countries that expressed support for unilateral coercive measures were the U.S., UK, EU member states, Georgia, and Ukraine.

The U.S. attempt to diminish China’s economic success is a bipartisan project, and a unanimous congressional vote to strip China of developing nation status is just the latest act in the aggressive but futile effort.

Southern service workers allege that South Carolina’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration discriminates against Black workers.

The Biden State Department refused to condemn Israel’s storming of Al-Aqsa mosque, and blocked a U.N. Security Council statement criticizing the raids.

What do you call it when a Canadian ambassador justifies the placing of a bomb in a café to kill a prominent member of the media and which injures dozens of others? Diplomacy?

This world needs revolutionaries who refuse orders to kill and exploit. Two midwives named Shifra and Puah were such revolutionaries. When a racist ruler asked them to limit the reproduction of slaves—out of fear of a slave uprising—they disobeyed.

Only an ecosocialist revolution can stop our demise, but capitalism’s behemoth keeps people deceitful and mostly unaware of being on the verge of a catastrophic end. We must arise—now!

The idea of ‘equal pay for equal work’ was established in the ILO’s Equal Remuneration Convention (1951) in recognition of the fact that women had always worked in industrial factories, increasingly so during the Second World War.

The Biden administration’s efforts to completely eliminate the NSO Israeli spyware are faced with what remains behind closed doors.

John Mullen writes from Paris on the background to the current strikes and the very different patterns of union organisation in France.

Chile’s neoliberal government is close to securing a new law that expands the right of security forces to use firearms against the population. The Naín-Retamal Law, a proposal of the executive branch, was today approved by the Senate for a third and final reading.  

If democrats were smart, Donald Trump would be a disgraced former president, forgotten by all but his most ardent admirers. But they aren’t smart and they may have given him a political resurrection.

John Bellamy Foster, John Ross, Deborah Veneziale, and Vijay Prashad, Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 108 pages, $15. The “singular reality” (my phrase) on display here is the imagined reality in the mind’s eye of Beltline/Pentagon global strategists. Few readers will be surprised at the cravings of […]

Israeli surveillance is used to crush Palestinian resistance and their model is being exported across the globe.

After scoring half a million from oil and gas interests, New York’s Democratic governor wants to allow utilities to burn fossil fuels for decades longer than currently permitted.

Any attempt by a Ukrainian government to “take back” Crimea would be met with firm opposition and resistance from the people who live there.

“It is evening in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, one of NATO’s easternmost members. I am waiting at the edge of Izvor Park in the city center to meet with a young friend who has fled Ukraine.” – Fergie Chambers