Archive | Commentary

A majority of Germans want peaceful relations with Russia (and in general), despite the media, politicians and big biz groups pulling toward catastrophe.

These two matters—the battle of ideas and the new intellectual—take up the first two parts of this dossier. The third part enters a brief discussion of our political context and offers a map of our concerns and our research. We look forward to your response to our invitation to a dialogue.

New report predicts the impact of climate change on Nepal’s mountains may be much worse than we thought.

On Tues, Feb. 5, as the Macron government pushed harsh repressive laws against demonstrators through the National Assembly, the Yellow Vests joined with France’s unions for the first time in a day-long, nation-wide “General Strike.”

Donald Trump imagines Juan Guaidó is the rightful president of Venezuela. Mr. Guaidó, a man of impeccable illegitimacy, doesn’t have a constitutional leg to stand on for this open attempt at a coup.

The Secretariat has the honour to transmit to the Human Rights Council the report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, Alfred de Zayas, on his mission to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Ecuador, pursuant to Council resolution 36/4.

The practice of citing conservative agitators is often characterized as “bothsidesism,” but here the news outlets only presented one side—the one on the far right—without even a hint that the claims might not have a factual basis.

Maduro cut relations with the U.S. and said that envoys of the countries who have stopped recognizing him as elected president have 72 hours to leave the country.

Lacking, for now, the support of Venezuela’s own military the only way the coup can succeed is with military help from a foreign power, the obvious candidates being the U.S., NATO and Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro——a cross between Pinochet and a used car salesman.

Last month Branko Milanovic published a blog post about the Yellow Vest movement against the fuel tax in France. He was worried–like many analysts–that the uprising proves it will be virtually impossible to roll out the policies necessary to reduce carbon emissions. He’s convinced that people simply won’t accept it.

The masses of red flowers for Karl Liebknecht and, even more for Rosa Luxemburg, was higher than I have ever seen them. Both were murdered one hundred years ago. Why do those two names mean so much to so many people?

Ahead of the 2019 elections in India—the largest exercise of electoral democracy in the world–Brinda Karat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) discusses the current political context in the country and the left-led resistance to the deepening assault on basic human rights led by India’s right-wing.

In this essay, I will argue that the leadership of the climate justice movement and the movement for radical social change, which in my opinion is essential for tackling the eco-social world crisis, have fallen short to meet the opportunities and challenges that the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests in France (Greeman, December 3, 2018; December 28, 2018) and the Sunrise Movement in the United States have presented.

Is Russia Imperialist is a look at capitalist Russia today and its place in the world economic system. In this article we look at the degree capitalist Russia today shares in the features outlined by Lenin in his book Imperialism. We consider the role Russian capitalist monopolies play in the world imperialist system, the nature of Russia’s export trade, the export of Russian capital, the world role played by Russian finance capital, and finally Russian military power.

Here are 2018’s top ten conscious films that made it through these barriers, plus twenty more released this year that you may want to check out.

It has been almost a year since we got off the ground. Our offices across the world humming with activity. You have received forty-four newsletters from us, eleven dossiers and one notebook and one working document. More is on the way as we enter our second calendar year.

It is sad to see how completely misrepresented Adam Smith (1723-1790) is when pundits call upon him to vindicate neoliberalism and the status quo. It seems many have not really bothered to read his works.

In this article we discuss the (non-) implementation of the Colombian peace accords, based on a conference given by Victoria Sandino, a leading FARC figure. We also examine an initiative, Ecomun, to build peace through the construction of alternative economies in the Colombian countryside.

Germany’s feverish political scene cooled off just a little. Two big sighs of relief permitted some people, at least temporarily, to stop chewing their fingernails.

Even if we cut emissions by 3.5 percent a year after 2020, we’ll hit 4 degrees Celsius warming by the end of this century. Just let that sink in for a minute. When babies born now are in their 80s, there could be no human civilization left to speak of.