Archive | Newswire

  • When you reject class-based politics

    When you reject class-based politics

    If you reject from the outset the idea of uniting a majority based on shared economic interests, then pretty much all you’ve got left is the “thoughtful and humane co-optation” of racism and xenophobia.

  • Comic about Trump in the LA Times

    John Bellamy Foster interviewed on Law and Disorder radio

    Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”

  • The MQ-9 Reaper, a combat drone, in flight

    Killer drones and the militarization of U.S. foreign policy

    In the eyes of many around the world, diplomacy has taken a back seat to military operations in U.S. foreign policy. The drone program is a prime example.

  • Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro participate in a rally in support of the National Constituent Assembly in Caracas

    What do Venezuelans think?

    Venezuelan public opinion is not what you’d expect if you rely on the disinformation loop in which corporate media and Washington-friendly NGOs like HRW participate.

  • Toilet paper money roll

    The U.S. is where the rich are the richest

    In the U.S., where wealth is most highly concentrated, almost a quarter of income goes to the rich. So it should come as no surprise that a big chunk of the world’s richest call America home. Two out of five millionaires and billionaires live there, and their ranks are growing fast.

  • Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor

    Over 170 years after Engels, Britain is still a country that murders its poor

    Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. It’s never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for “commercial confidentiality”, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism. One courtesy we should pay the victims of Grenfell is to drop the glossy-brochure euphemisms. Let’s get clear what happened to them: an act of social murder, straight out of Victorian times.

  • Since Trump’s election, 20 states have moved to criminalize dissent

    In what is being called the “biggest protest crackdown since the Civil Rights Era,” Republicans in at least 20 states have put forward or passed laws with the intention of making protest more difficult and the punishment for expressing dissent more draconian since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

  • The prospect of change

    The prospect of change

    A limited partial breach has been made in the neoliberal edifice, through the demonstration by Corbyn, McDonnell and their allies that a programme and leadership that challenges these orthodoxies and proposes alternatives to them can do better electorally than those which conform to it.

  • Capitalists Tipping Scales "Change"

    Finance, Crisis, and Stagnation

    In this presentation Mexie begins to elaborate the theory of monopoly capitalism developed by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, incorporating recent theoretical development by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney. Mexie has produced a number of other videos on the topic as well.

  • A union march in Detroit

    Improving our quality of life will require rebuilding union strength

    Unions provide workers with voice and the means to use their collective strength to gain job security and say over key aspects of their conditions of employment, including scheduling and safety. These gains are significant in our “employment at will” economy.

  • Tim Portlock, CA$H_4_GOLD

    This new museum imagines a world where capitalism is dead

    Visitors will be invited to reflect on capitalism as if looking back at it from a world in which capitalism is dead. “Much of the evidence of capitalism is either eroding over time or simply not known or easily accessible to the public,” the mission statement reads. “Our ambition is to connect and integrate these many efforts before the evidence is erased forever.”

  • Attendees at York University's international conference on "Marx’s Capital after 150 Years"

    York hosts international conference on “Marx’s Capital after 150 Years”

    An international conference to mark the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Marx’s Capital was held May 24 to 26 at York University.

  • Juneteenth

    Juneteenth: Time for liberation now

    Juneteenth is not just a day in the park. It memorializes the most significant event in African-American history, what W.E.B. Du Bois in the magnificent “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” calls “the coming of the Lord,” the destruction of slavery.

  • May-Corbyn

    The general election in Great Britain

    When it came to the general election in Britain, everything was settled in advance. The Conservative Party led by Theresa May was supposed to prevail. The Labour Party, victim of its own confusion, its refusal to support the will of millions of members and voters who wanted to put an end to the straitjacket of the European Union, was supposed to be trounced.

  • Puerto Rican Day Parade

    Politics of a parade

    In a modern-day manifestation of the old colonial divide-and-rule tactic, corporations and New York City politicians, including the mayor, were recently caught trying to engage in backdoor deals to divide the city’s Puerto Rican community over a pro-Puerto Rican independence activist’s participation in the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

  • West London Housing Project Fire

    Britain’s Katrina moment could put radical left into power

    After this week’s high-rise fire in West London—the most deadly British disaster in a generation—officials still have no idea exactly how many people were crammed into the dangerous, outdated public-housing block that stands in London’s richest borough.

  • Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez

    Venezuela responds to Pence

    Responding to the United States vice president’s recent statements that “democracy is undermined” in Venezuela, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez strongly rejected Pence’s claims.

    The Bolivarian leaders denounced the plan to destabilize Venezuela as “imperialist,” saying that the “extremism” and “militarism” of the U.S is a “serious threat to humanity.”

  • José Carlos Mariátegui

    José Carlos Mariátegui: 87 years later

    Mariátegui’s funeral was one of the largest processions of workers ever seen in the streets of Lima, Peru, but in the U.S. his death was hardly noticed.

  • White Phosphorus in Syria, Iraq: Nothing will Change' Unless Wester Govts Do

    White phosphorus in Syria, Iraq

    Photographs and video clips posted online on June 8 show blinding spots of light over the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. The pictures, distributed by the Amaq News Agency, which is linked to Daesh, and activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, show puffs of white light and smoke, which are signs of white phosphorous.

  • venezuelan-right-wing

    The political defeat of the Venezuelan right-wing

    Foreign support to the Venezuelan right in the form of money, weapons, and propaganda is ongoing. Some oil corporations, such as Exxon Mobil, are directly involved in destabilization policies.