Subjects Archives: Agriculture

“Mr. President [Santos]: I would like to have you tell me to my face that I am a guerrilla.  None of us are.  We are workers, peasants who try to live as we can.  It’s not easy to live here.  Our crops produce only losses.  We have to sell very cheap and can’t buy things. […]

August 12-21, 2013 While the mainstream media speculates about the future of the Bolivarian Revolution since the passing of Hugo Chavez, for the Venezuelan people, there is no question.  Come learn about the process currently transpiring in Venezuela as the people, reinvigorated by the legacy of Chavez, deepen and further radicalize their struggle in defense […]

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa‘s idea that we are not “living in an epoch of change” but rather “in a change of epoch” is very much to the point.  There is an obvious worldwide decline of existing imperialisms and historic changes in the correlation of social, class, and nation-state forces.  There have arisen popular movements of […]

Fred Magdoff: What I would end with is just a couple of ideas — not to give you a blueprint of another type of system but a couple of ideas of what it might be like.  I would say one in which basically the economy and politics are both under social control, under democratic social […]

  Rebekah Wetmore and Ryan Romard (RW/RR): The crisis of world capitalism starting in 2007 was the most severe crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression and thus far the recovery, both globally and within Canada, has been weak at best.  With this mind, to what extent is the current crisis cyclical and in what […]

  January 10, 2013 This week, in Washington, D.C., Presidents Obama and Karzai will discuss a proposed Bilateral Security Agreement between Afghanistan and the United States.  Presumably, they’ll note some of the main security problems Afghanistan faces. The people of Afghanistan have only seen cosmetic improvement in their living conditions.  UNICEF reports that 36% of […]

Is it true that you are communist? What else can one be, the way things are? Communism left 70 million dead. . . That wasn’t communism. What was it, then? Industrialism.  Lenin proposed electrification plus soviets, that is to say, popular control . . . but popular control evaporated! And what remained? Industrialism.  Stalin imposed […]

For farmers small and large?  For the tens of millions of food-consuming households, poor or just getting by?  For the governments and bureaucracies of small countries who want to import less and grow more?  For the organic cultivators on their small densely bio-diverse plots?  Or for the world’s large food production, trading, and retail corporations, […]

  Salem Waqef (Photo: Lydia De Leeuw) Haneen Tafesh (Photo: Gisela Schmidt-Martin) Ahmed Durghmush (Photo: Lydia De Leeuw) Basma Mahmoud el Tourouq (Photo: Lydia De Leeuw) Mohammed Abu Amsha (Photo: Gisela Schmidt-Martin) Zuhdiye Samour (Photo: Lydia De Leeuw) Duaa Hejazi (Photo: Lydia De Leeuw) Gaza City, 16 November 2012 The Israeli attacks across the Gaza […]

  Najaf, Iraq, November 11, 2012 I returned from Baghdad last night.  Over coffee this morning, I filled the father of my host family in on my trip.  I told him it was wonderful to see everyone, but I only heard sad stories. A few minutes ago a fierce wind rose, blowing the trees and […]

My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism.  Money — the […]

I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East.  What is your […]

  “This discussion has changed my mind about homosexuality.  Now I understand what my Lesbian friend went through.  When she graduated from medical school in Cuba, she cried.  She told me that she could live her life the way she wanted to when she was in Cuba.  But now she would return to Honduras as […]

  Hay un número importante de personas en los países adinerados que cree que los grandes problemas de la reducción de los recurso con que cuenta el planeta y la contaminación ambiental global, son causados principalmente por la enorme cantidad de habitantes que tiene el mundo: actualmente más de 7 mil millones, y que esta […]

There are significant numbers of people in the wealthy countries who believe that the great issues of resource depletion and global environmental pollution are caused primarily by the huge number of people on the globe — currently about 7 billion — and that things will only get much worse with the anticipated increase to about […]

Speech at the Occupy Oakland Rally, 28 January 2012 “This Land!  Don’t you feel it?  Doesn’t it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them — as if it must be clinging to their corpses — some authenticity. . .” Those are the words of […]

Experience firsthand the change sweeping through Latin America in the areas of food sovereignty, indigenous resistance, climate justice, and human rights through a trip to Bolivia or Venezuela this summer. Delegation to Bolivia: Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Resistance, and Climate Justice (May 29-June 9, 2012) We will be celebrating indigenous resistance and exploring food sovereignty issues […]

The Great Depression of the 1930s saw the outbreak of a multitude of radical social movements on the Left and on the Right — or ones that were simply sui generis like the “Share Our Wealth” campaign launched by the fiery Louisiana populist politician Huey P. Long, Jr.  Long came from a poor pinewoods parish […]

  During Barack Obama’s visit to Australia in November 2011, the US and Australian governments announced the establishment of a permanent Marine presence in Darwin, located on South East Asia’s doorstep.  By 2014, some 2, 500 Marines plus associated hardware such as military aircraft, tanks, artillery, and amphibious assault vehicles will be based near the […]

On December 6th, 2011, the Irish government announced a new and harsh austerity plan through a tight budget.  The annual budget, now stripped of a regular rise in social welfare payments, is part of a dreaded aspect of living in 21st century Ireland, a country plagued by a seemingly incurable economic depression.  Cuts were made […]