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The defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain social control in the wake of the largest and most militant protests in recent memory. This article examines the dimensions of how this defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands.

Most propaganda machines are not observable to the naked eye, but the military-entertainment complex hides in plain sight. Long have Hollywood and the Pentagon worked together in what has been called a relationship of “mutual exploitation,” producing war agitprop for the masses. Who is the victim amid all this exploitation?

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics a young man born on the day of Hiroshima nuclear bombing was selected to be the last torch bearer on the relay, to signify that Japan had stood up from nuclear ruin. In an attempt to replicate the 1964 Olympic theme, the Abe government has constructed the idea of a Fukushima “revival,” a returned to normal. Exposing this illusion is an important cultural war.

As monuments to Columbus and confederate heroes topple and Democrats ponder which militarist they wish to glorify in their replacements, it is critical to realize that statues which go up are at least as important as the ones that come down. Perhaps the best nominee for a new statue is Hatuey, who led the first guerrilla warfare against European invasion of the western hemisphere.  

Venezuela’s rate of infection remains low, despite the U.S. unilateral sanctions that have denied the country the right to import drugs and tests for the population.

Taking “movement moments” to change, from the Red Summer to Black Lives Matter.

Simón Trinidad matters; his time has come. This leader of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) faced bizarre and unfounded criminal charges in a U.S. court. He’s being held under the cruelest of conditions in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He will die there unless he is released. Simón Trinidad will be 70 years old on July 30.

There are immense casualties from this Great Lockdown. Incomes have collapsed for half the world’s population, while hunger rates are on the rise. But there are other casualties, other victims, often less remarked upon.

An ad-hoc alliance of radical armies demanding justice for Black lives broke through federal barricades today to storm Capitol Hill.

You see, not all Black folk look or think alike. And not every organization will have the same political analysis of the events before our eyes.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to Noam Chomsky about the state of the world. At one point, Noam smiled and said that he is not aware of any German doctors in Italy, even though both countries are in the European Union; instead, Cuban and Chinese doctors went to Italy to help the Italians fight the global pandemic.

In Iran, this spring brings a historic opportunity for neoliberal opposition parties personified by President Rouhani. The utopian dream will now get its first chance to prove itself as a cash-starved Islamic Republic embarks on its boldest ever embrace of privatization of state-owned companies.

Bring down the statues, surely. But more than that: cancel the debt and provide reparations to the formerly colonized for the centuries of theft and brutality.

In the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25 offers an expanded vision of what it could mean to be a human being. Human beings, it notes, have ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for [their] health and well-being’. This includes ‘food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’; human beings also have the ‘right to security’, which means they have the right to compensation for any lack of livelihood due to circumstances beyond their control.

Hunger, homelessness, and evictions were features of the Great Depression in the United States. Jobs disappeared and working conditions deteriorated. Some “250,000 teenagers were on the road.” And how many others? By 1933 one third of farm families had lost their farms. Unemployment that year was 25 percent. The lives of working people were devastated.

There is no need to wonder why George Floyd (age 46) was murdered in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. The script of his death is written deep in the ugly drama of U.S. history.

The ruling establishment’s intrigue against the WHO might seem at odds with Taiwan’s failed bid to join the World Health Assembly (WHA) this past May, but there was no contradiction between Taiwan being seen fighting a David and Goliath-like battle with both the WHO and China, thereby flaring up geopolitical tensions from without. Both served the interests of the ruling class of Taiwan.

The current ecological and social crisis, a crisis which has seen its effects increased by a public health emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is a crisis which raises serious concerns over environmental sustainability and social polarization and which has a fundamental cause: the blind logic pursued by our economy system, where everything is secondary to profits.

Is oil a stranded asset? Or is the system defunct? This thought-provoking talk was given by Andy Higginbottom, Associate Professor in the Politics Department of Kingston University in Britain. In this talk he looks at Marx’s theory of rent as surplus profit and its parallels within the oil markets.

In this historical conjuncture we are faced with the risk of a double temporality. The double temporality that I have in mind is that between saying, ‘now let’s make the economy restart quickly’, adding ‘later we will think about its contents’. It is an illusion. And a dangerous illusion.