Archive | Commentary

Five years have passed since the death of Hugo Chávez. I had known him for almost ten years and had an enormous respect for his courage, honesty and dedication to the fight against oppression and exploitation.

In the last decades, Western mainstream media have produced biased news and facilitated a selective discourse of shaming accompanied by devastating military interventions.

It takes three days on the open sea to journey from the Marshall Islands capital to Enewetak Atoll. You can’t see the atoll until you’re just miles away as it’s only feet above sea level. As you get closer, the sun fades behind clouds and the islands are shrouded in mist. Beaches are fringed not by coconut palms but Australian pines, trees praised for soaking up salt-spray and airborne radionuclides.

Donald Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs—on solar panels and washing machines now, and perhaps on steel and aluminum down the line—has once again opened up the war concerning international trade.

“An archaeological object, especially iconic, should not be banned from Facebook,” the Museum of Natural History in Vienna said.

Only one force is genuinely suited to exposing the lies and redirecting emotions away from attacks on the poorest victims and towards solidarity with them against the truly guilty forces on high. It is the Left.

Written and directed by Raoul Peck, “The Young Karl Marx” follows a 26-year-old writer, researcher and radical named Karl Marx as he embarks, with his wife Jenny, on the road to exile in an age that has created both new prosperity and new problems.

Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, the “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China” was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.

One achievement of the Russian revolution that is often ignored is the fulfillment of a promise made by the Russian revolutionaries in 1905: that all debts contracted by the Tsarist regime that had been overthrown some eleven months earlier were cancelled.

Imagine a newly elected president of the United States calling in his inaugural speech for an “ecological civilization” that ensures “harmony between human and nature.” Now imagine he goes on to declare that “we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it” and that his administration will “encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.”

After four and a half months of haggling and recrimination and, four days past the deadline, an all-night session, the three parties had finally settled on a coalition government program—179 pages long.

Scott McLemee reviews The Young Karl Marx, which, on the eve of 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth, contains themes of economic crises and inequalities that remain relevant today.

Marx’s ‘Capital’ is one of the most important texts of the modern era and continues to resonate today. Professor David Harvey, the world’s leading expert on Karl Marx, explains the continued importance of Marx’s analysis and how we can apply it to today’s economy and society.

During her last news conference in December, Janet Yellen stood firm on her record stating, “The global economy is doing well. We’re in a synchronized expansion. This is the first time in many years that we’ve seen this.”

Here’s a list of some of the immigration absurdities now circulating in the media and in the political class.

We all know that Hollywood movies are fictional, right? Even the ones “based on actual events”? But at some level, if a fictional film references actual history and includes stunning visuals, great acting, and a powerful musical score, it can become accepted and internalized as “the truth.”

The current expansion has gone on for 102 months. Only the expansions from March 1991 to March 2001 (120 months) and from February 1961 to December 1969 (106 months) are longer. Unfortunately, growth during this expansion has been slow and the gains have largely gone to a very few. And there are signs of economic trouble ahead.

Today, the United States Congress struck a significant blow against the basic human right to read, write, learn, and associate free of government’s prying eyes. 

1. Introduction Capitalist development is based upon labour exploitation and environmental destruction. Through sexism and racism it has established second class citizens who are doubly-exploited. Democracy under capitalism is of the ‘low-intensity’ variety—where decision over economic resource generation and use are off-limits to the majority of the population, and where political systems facilitate the (mis)representation […]

November 2017 marked the centenary of two of the most decisive events in the twentieth century: the Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia and the Balfour Declaration in Britain.… At loggerheads were two mutually exclusive political objectives: the one to promote worldwide, anti-imperialist revolution; the other, to further British imperial interests in the Middle East.