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No one likes to think about how extreme weather events could devastate food production which could cause global panic and disaster. However, scientists, led by Chris Kent, of the Met Office, focused their initial efforts on how extreme weather would affect maize, one of the world’s most widely grown crops. Along with maize other staple crops could be affected including those of rice, wheat and soya beans.

The possibility of an open civil war in Venezuela is not shocking. People are tensing up with the International left being reluctant to show solidarity with the Maduro government and the Bolivarian socialist movement. The need to examine what “neutrality” or, allowing the opposition to come to power via an illegal and violent transition, would mean.

The worst case scenario is now coming to fruition for DACA participants. All of the personal information needed to carry out deportations of these children and their families is conveniently in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. The thousands of children who lined up for the chance at the limited rights offered by the program gave their names, addresses, countries of origin, their personal histories and signed a document admitting to being in the country illegally.

“The ‘culture war’ against higher education has been an astroturfed conflict, a well-funded propaganda campaign bankrolled for decades…. Conservative’ figures from the business world (there is nothing conservative about unfettered capitalism that commodifies everything and makes ‘the market’ the arbiter of all moral questions) have funded a decades-long attempt to delegitimize higher education in the eyes of American citizens.”

In 1912, more than 1000 working class men, mostly members of the Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, being loaded into cattle cars in Bisbee, Arizona, July 12th, for the purpose of being deported from the state of Arizona.

In one amendment, we have taken the land of the free to the land where 1 of 4 people are shackled and held as a slave.

The “scandal” of Russia influencing or at the very least meddling with the 2016 presidential elections, pushing Donald Trump to be our now president, has become something of fact without argument. Through propogated news and social media putting out false truths and allegations taken as facts, makes it hard to know the truth. But there will always be ones who go deep and find that truth. However, as long as there are liers and cheaters in this world, the “truth” itself my never really be truthful.

On 10 July 2017, Iraqi’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in the city of Mosul to declare it liberated from the Islamic State. What did al-Abadi see when he looked across the expanse of Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities? He would have seen not only the violence visited by ISIS upon this historic city – including destroying a large part of its Great Mosque of al-Nuri – but also the destruction of the city by this current onslaught that has lasted nine months.

A total of 147 non-nuclear states have expressed support for the ban treaty process, while 37 non-nuclear states have not.… [But] a single variable correlates almost perfectly with this breakdown: 89 percent of the non-nuclear states that have criticized the ban are “umbrella states” that belong to an alliance with a nuclear power or are actively seeking to join such an alliance, while only 4 percent of the non-nuclear states supporting the ban are umbrella states.

Today, “we’re cognizant of the fact that there is no future unless there is an ecological future.” That’s a reality one comes to see clearly after clicking through the digital pages of the “Atlas for the End of the World.”

WIth 8 men holding the same wealth as 50% of the world, you have to wonder if there is something systamatically wrong with the way the world is. Capitalism is no longer ideal in the world we live in today. People are starting to realize this in the forms of inequality of wealth, food, resources. Now is the time to change that, and it can be done.

In the wake of the sentencing of Workers Party leader President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to more than 9 years in prison for alleged corruption charges, former President Dilma Rousseff has joined masses of supporters in denouncing the charges and declaring the popular leader’s innocence.

For many socialist feminists, critiquing liberal feminism is easy. Many of us came to socialism from liberalism and have a clear understanding of its limits and flaws. However, the history and substance of radical feminism is less well known. While the “radical” in radical feminism seems to suggest a politics that socialists would embrace… [it is] incompatible with socialist feminism. Plagued by a narrow understanding of gendered oppression and a misguided strategy for change, radical feminism ultimately fails to offer women a clear path to liberation.

Abby Martin talks to Venezuelans on the streets of Caracas and investigates the main claim that there’s no free press, and that there is no food in the supermarkets. Using hidden cameras, she takes you through local grocery stores and the underground black market currency exchange, the main source of inflation in the country. Abby sits down with economist Pasqualina Curzio to learn more about the nature of the black market and chronic shortages of goods. Knowing that world leaders are calling for foreign intervention, Abby finds out if locals agree.

Although reluctant to say it, a recent IMF report on the state of U.S. economy makes clear that U.S. policy makers have failed to protect majority living conditions. While the IMF generally pulls no punches in criticizing the policies of most member governments if it determines that they threaten to slow capitalist globalization dynamics, it tends to tap dance around disagreements when it comes to the policies of its more powerful member countries, especially the United States. If we want improved living conditions we are going to have to fight for them. Perhaps greater awareness of just how bad things are in the United States will help speed the effort.

I did not know that Albert Einstein was a socialist. Maybe I had known once, or more likely, never cared. But in 1949, when the great physicist and Nobel laureate declared his beliefs, in the innocuously titled “Why Socialism?,” a lot of people would have cared. Indeed, by 1953, Joseph McCarthy was after him, and people were sending hate mail to the Institute for Advanced Study asking that Einstein, a founding member of the research center, be sent packing.

Abby Martin goes on the deadly front lines of the anti government protests in Venezuela and follows the evolution of a typical guarimba—or opposition barricade. She explains what the targets from the opposition reveal about the nature of the movement and breaks down the reality of the death toll that has rocked the nation since the unrest began, and how a lynch mob campaign came after her and the Empire Files team for reporting these facts.

The distance that separates us today from the first issue of Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought) is exactly the same as the distance between this revolutionary, intellectual adventure and the October Revolution: half a century. The coincidence in this case is not limited to random chance.

The United States is sometimes viewed as the most extreme capitalist society on earth. The decision of the newly elected Trump administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement would seem to affirm such a judgment. It highlights the fact that while capitalism cannot solve the environmental problem, a more extreme capitalist society can, if it is not stopped, eliminate all possibility for a future sustainable society, by accelerating the runaway train to catastrophe represented by today’s business as usual.

Over the past few months, as the disturbing prospect of a Trump administration became a disturbing reality, I decided to reach out to Noam Chomsky, the philosopher whose writing, speaking and activism has for more than 50 years provided unparalleled insight and challenges to the American and global political systems. Our conversation, as it appears here, took place as a series of email exchanges over the past two months. Although Professor Chomsky was extremely busy, because of our past intellectual exchange, he graciously provided time for this interview.