Archive | Commentary

As part of the ongoing Nakba, Israel has once again unleashed its latest reign of terror on Palestine, in response to resistance by Palestinians against ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem (meant to eviscerate both Palestinian social and cultural life from the city).

A week ago Saxony-Anhalt voted! The media prediction – a neck-and-neck race – was cock-eyed! But outside Sachsen-Anhalt (in German), did anyone really give a damn? Yes, some did!

Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. His dream of an Indigenous confederacy largely died with him. Yet his appreciation of the moment and the possibilities for transformation lived on and should give us all pause.

India’s big capital, in close cahoots with the political class, took advantage of privatisation policies to seize public resources (including profitable public sector assets), acquire vast tracts of land by displacing village and forest communities, control the nation’s mineral resources, and undermine public sector banks through a cascading set of fraud and non-payment schemes.

There appears to be a reluctance in the United States to wear the mantle of “working class.” Its connotation appears to be a relic from the economic revolutions of Europe in the late nineteenth century. However, they remain the economic class that built the nation’s now failing economy.

A new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Making Peace with Nature (2021), highlights the ‘gravity of the Earth’s triple environmental emergencies: climate, biodiversity loss, and pollution’.

Cuba, the first Latin America country to develop its own COVID-19 vaccines, presently is short of syringes for immunizing its population against the virus. It’s not feasible for Cuba to make its own syringes. The U.S. blockade prevents Cuba from importing them from abroad.

The events of the last few weeks have provoked worldwide recognition of realities on the ground in Occupied Palestine, realities of systemic discrimination, of oppression, and of settler colonialism.The events of the last few weeks have provoked worldwide recognition of realities on the ground in Occupied Palestine, realities of systemic discrimination, of oppression, and of settler colonialism. We are at a new juncture regarding the Question of Palestine. The impunity that the Israeli government has long enjoyed is coming to an end.

If the social consequences of adopting an ultra-neoliberal project weren’t enough already, the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the gross mismanagement and negligence in combatting the virus have led to the worst-case social, economic, and health scenarios.

“The Israeli warplanes bombed many different places in my area with more than 40 consecutive missiles, without issuing the prior warnings they used to issue in the past three wars. The sound of the bombing and shelling was so terrifying that I cannot describe it.”

One Marxist line of inquiry into environmental problems has outshone all others in creativity and productivity: the theory of the metabolic rift.

On April 14, 2021 the House Committee on Natural Resources held hearings on two competing bills to end Puerto Rico’s colonial status. H.R.1522, the Puerto Rican State Admission Act and H.R.2070, the Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act.

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 was criminal. It was criminal because of the immense force used to demolish Afghanistan’s physical infrastructure and to break open its social bonds.

For the very first time in United States history, therefore, a jury composed of people of whom half identify as white convicted a white cop for the second-degree murder of a Black person, the most serious charge to date. If there is an exception, it certainly is not as visible as this instance. Thus, a historic milestone—a victory to be celebrated, a victory, more importantly, that points the way forward.

The Green party was at first an iconoclastic bunch, leftish, even radical. Its deputies, often women, showed up in the Bundestag knitting or even wearing woolen sweaters, shocking the conservatives. But its radicals grew older; many got rewarding professional jobs; its fundamentalist wing (“fundis“) lost out to the pragmatic “realos“ (realists). The Green retreat has continued ever since.

While an assertive Hindutva deep state was already a work in progress under Narendra Modi, what is striking is how the contingency of the pandemic has been used to mask it with a no-holds-barred steamrolling of market reforms.

We concur that linking land-use change science, ecology, and epidemiology is a critical step towards developing a more robust understanding of zoonotic diseases. Yet we are wary of the way the authors omit the historical specificities, political economy, and agroecological dynamics of land-use change, and their implications for disease ecologies.

The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War. It redistributed land, socialised the means of production, and collectivised the agricultural system.

On 28 June 2009, President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a coup d’état engineered by the Honduran oligarchy and the United States government. The reverberations of the coup extend into present-day Honduras, which continues to struggle to maintain its political sovereignty.

As tensions heat up on the Ukraine-Russia border, Vijay Prashad takes a look at the factors and interests behind what is happening.