Archive | Commentary

In late June, some 5000 protestors camped out, as part of the “Stop Air Base Ramstein Campaign,” drawing attention to Germany’s increasing militarization via NATO. They demanded the U.S. Army base at Ramstein—where the top generals direct troop movements in Africa and the Near East, and deploy drones to murder anyone the Pentagon decides is an enemy—be shut down.

Everything about the trade war between the United States and China is bewildering. Truces would come out of nowhere but then they would be set aside by U.S. President Donald Trump in a stream of tweets at odd hours. Regardless, Huawei and China are unlikely to blink. They have the upper hand.

Those with responsibility for the strategic direction of universities have a clear choice in this matter. They can embrace the funding and accolades that come from saying things the Government and other funders want to hear; or they can do what most ordinary people think universities are supposed to do.

The context for organizing today that faces working people across the world is one that must grapple with the challenges posed by a decentralized production process and a well-organized ruling class.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) has just released a brief—but very important—report on the impact of heat stress on workers. What the ILO finds is that the areas of the world most threatened by heat deaths of workers are Southern Asia and Western Africa.

It is vital that working people know the score. Only by accurate and complete economic representations can an informed electorate pursue political strategies and tactics that benefit all working people.

In the last week of June 2019, as this article was being written, tensions between the U.S. and Iranian governments escalated sharply. On June 20, 2019, in response to aggressive U.S. actions, including the mobilization of troops, naval forces, and aerial provocations, Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance drone flying  near the Iranian border.

Trump might not have sent in a suite of missiles to hit Iran last week, but the United States has—of course—already opened up a certain kind of war against Iran.

For now the U.S. regime change agenda has been defeated as a result of the mass mobilization in April and May of the Venezuelan masses in defense of their Bolivarian Revolution, a mobilization which succeeded in marginalizing the opposition led by U.S. puppet Juan Guaido, demonstrating how pathetic his claims of legitimacy were.

The Brexiters’ fantasy of a virile Britain freed from the straitjacket of EU regulations are crashing against harsh reality: Britain’s dependence on the European market compels it to maintain close alignment with the EU. But if it is ceases to be a member of the EU, it will have no seat at the ruling table.

The idea of a “just transition” is appearing everywhere these days, most notably in the preamble of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which refers to the need to take “into account the imperatives of a just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities.”

June 2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the current U.S. economic expansion. If it makes it through July it will surpass the 1991-2001 expansion as the longest on record. But while expansions are to be preferred over recessions, there are many reasons to view this record-breaking expansion critically. In fact, the nature of this expansion, hopefully captured in the following portrait, highlights the growing inability of the U.S. economic system, even when performing “well,” to meet majority needs.

Chapter 25 of Karl Marx’s, Capital, vol. 1 (“The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”), not only explains the working conditions of the world’s peoples today; it also explains the conditions of our whole existence. Marx’s general law is nothing less than the lever upon which all our lives now pivot.

In 2017, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a special unit—the Iran Mission Center—to focus attention on the U.S. plans against Iran. This predated the Trump administration.

The war on Afghanistan has been ugly. Death is one consequence of war—2019 has been the deadliest year for civilians since the United States first began to bomb Afghanistan in 2001. Starvation is another—according to the UN, half of the population will need food assistance over the course of this year.

Dossier no. 17 reflects on the hybrid war unleashed against Venezuela. We document the repertoire of tactics, but also the motives behind them. We are interested not only in the recent attack on Venezuela, but in the similarities between this attack and others in Latin America over the past decades.

The recent seven-day strike by the Oakland Education Association (OEA) was eerily similar in key ways to its 26-day strike in 1996. What happened in both cases was that union members and community allies won on the picket lines and in the streets but got a draw, at best, at the bargaining table.

China has increased its oil purchases from Saudi Arabia by 43 percent in April. There is every indication that China will continue to increase its buys from the kingdom during the course of this year—to substitute for Iranian oil and, perhaps, for U.S. oil.

Liberals of all stripes ought to, in the years to come, pay careful attention to the way language is deployed in public discourse, to recognize shibboleths and call them out. Neoliberal reforms were smuggled in via this route, and if the exit-polls are to be believed, fascism will be next.

The United States is the country most easily positioned to address climate change but it has done likely the least out of any rich country. China, a country significantly less wealthy than the United States, has likely done the most. In fact, a recent study provides some evidence that China’s carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2013 and are declining in large part due to changes in China’s industrial structure, which includes pilot programs for pricing carbon, among many other things.