Geography Archives: United States

It’s a new year, and the U.S. has found a new enemy—an Iraqi militia called Kata’ib Hezbollah. How tragically predictable was that? So who or what is Kata’ib Hezbollah? Why are U.S. forces attacking it? And where will this lead?

Facebook isn’t the only Silicon Valley firm with partisan oversight of what we see: the bipartisan billionaire class and their security state have partnered with tech firms since the dawn of the internet to control the parameters of users’ thinking.

Conservative leader Boris Johnson swept to power in the UK’s December 12 elections, winning 365 of a possible 650 seats. Labour’s socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn announced his resignation, after a bitterly disappointing night for his party.

“In the richest country in the history of the world, we have an obligation to turn this around and make sure our kids live healthier and better lives than we do.”

“Is that a big deal?”, some may ask. It is to those who have pushed for achieving the far-reaching liberalisation of trade in an unequal global order, first under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and then under the auspices of the agreements that established the WTO and defined and expanded its remit.

However, this is by no means the most embarrassing thing.

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to use a definition of antisemitism that conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism when investigating civil rights complaints alleging antisemitism on campus.

There aren’t many ways ordinary Americans have a say in what happens to the surplus that determines their fate.

There are many reasons for those at the top of the U.S. income distribution to celebrate the performance of the U.S. economy and tout the superiority of current U.S. economic and political institutions and policies.  Unfortunately, there is a strong connection between the continuing gains for those at the top and the steadily deteriorating employment conditions experienced by growing numbers of workers.

What are the real interests of the U.S. and corporations in the region? Freedom, democracy, human rights? No. Their goal is to preserve imperialist domination of our natural resources.

The corporate Democrats are effectively exonerating themselves and their Republican brethren of the full spectrum of lawlessness that is everyday politics in the belly of the racist, imperial beast.

Labour’s massive loss to the Tories has bummed out a lot of people. Everyone’s discussing it and arguing about what went wrong and who’s to blame. I don’t have any special insight into UK politics, but one thing that really shocked me about the election is the way that Jewish identity and fabricated charges of antisemitism were weaponized in a smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and the mild leftwing shift of his Labour Party.

The Green New Deal is an exciting social program generating a great deal of interest on the left. Like its predecessor, the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the GND holds out the promise of preventing the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change, and guaranteeing a better standard of living for its participants.

The anti-neoliberal spirit of the Seattle protests of two decades encapsulated an internationalist but anti-globalisation mass movement that has lessons for us today, argue Chris Nineham and Feyzi Ismail

For the past 30 years, no matter which party has been in power, the U.S. economy has produced more and more “bad” jobs–because the Race to the Bottom is ruling class policy.

Three rightwing Latin American governments have forced out Cuban doctors at work in their countries. What they and the US government object to is the revolutionary vision and revolutionary praxis that they represent.

Chicago, never an enlightened city, where in a December 4, 1969 predawn west side raid at 2337 W. Monroe, fourteen cops in cahoots with, we now know, the FBI, blasted their way Capone style, ninety-nine flying bullets into a Black Panther apartment.

Blood has become big business in the United States and there is no shortage of corporations ready to exploit America’s most vulnerable populations in order to get a piece of the pie.

Those living in the U.S. are encouraged to think that they live in the best country in the world with little to learn from the experiences of working people in other countries. This sense is reinforced by the fact that the mainstream media generally discusses U.S. problems without reference to developments or trends in other developed capitalist countries.

The law was popularly named for African-American leader H. “Rap” Brown; its formal title was “The Civil Obedience Act of 1968.”