Geography Archives: Americas

The new Cold War is escalating, fueled by Washington’s bid to isolate or strangle Russia.

In 2018, Cambridge Analytica, the data mining and analytics company, dominated the news about political campaigning and data. But they are not alone in using personal data for political influence. Since we began actively documenting this industry, our global list has expanded to 329 organisations, and it is still growing.

In May 2017 artist Joana Moll, alongside Tactical Tech, purchased 1 million online dating profiles for 136€ from U.S.Date, a supposedly U.S.-based company that trades in dating profiles from all over the globe.

The historically low black unemployment rate is one of Donald Trump’s favorite applause lines. Even Reuters [ht: ja] declares that Trump is right.

The guardians of the status quo refused to learn the lesson of Trump’s election, and so it will be with Bolsonaro.

In this interview, VA talks with a key cadre of the Alexis Vive Patriotic Force, an organization based in the 23 Enero barrio that has worked to build Venezuela’s most emblematic urban commune.

The violent theft of land and capital is at the core of the U.S. experiment: the U.S. military got its start in the wars against Native Americans.

As the word intersectionality falls from the lips of Hillary Clinton and increasingly is normalized and sanitized, we should be clear about its radical moorings.

Many people have given up on the idea of government as an instrument of progressive social change, especially the federal government.

WhatsApp and fake news go hand-in-hand in both Brazil and India. And judging by the Facebook-owned messaging app’s effect on Brazil’s recent presidential election, India may be slated for some serious trouble next spring.

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” —Malcolm X

Julian Assange, a hero in the struggle against imperial wars and the lies that states tell to justify them, is in mortal danger.

Many wonder how it is possible, following the democratic governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma Rousseff, that Brazilians have elected as President a shady federal deputy and die-hard defender of the military dictatorship that ruledthe country 1964-1985.

Red Flag editor Ben Hillier speaks with Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of the essay collection U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, about the meaning of the midterm election results and what comes next.

Capitalist industrialization has led us to the edge of the precipice of climate change, and avoiding the end of civilization as we know it may require the development of a view in direct opposition to the way in which capitalism “values” nature, according to John Bellamy Foster.

AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS

The tremendously destructive Woolsey Fire has been widely reported as beginning “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne), but it appears that the fire began on the Rocketdyne property itself.

After fifteen years in the cold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) returned to Argentina this May. President Mauricio Macri promised to attract foreign direct investment and to make his country the ‘supermarket of the world’. Instead, Argentina’s economy went into a tailspin. The IMF entered with its shop-worn prescriptions, a recipe that it has effectively sold for the past four decades: structural adjustment.

For six months, Argentina has been confronted with a new economic and social crisis on a massive scale. In the context the devaluation of local currency, rising inflation, and a deep recession, Mauricio Macri’s administration struck an agreement with the IMF, marking a major shift in the country’s future. The agreements slash public spending and prioritize the repayment of debt, among other measures. This dossier examines the different dimensions of the crisis, the open disputes, and the possibilities for the immediate future.