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Using Democratic institutions to smash Democratic aspirations (the Brazil model)
Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has now been in prison since April 2018. More than four hundred Brazilian lawyers have signed a statement that expresses alarm at what they see as procedural irregularities in the case against him.
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Review of Alan Nasser’s, Overrripe Economy
Alan Nasser has written a masterful book, one that belongs in every serious leftist and socialist library, and one that certainly deserves to be widely and extensively read.
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Imagining the Green New Deal with Robert Hockett
In this episode, we speak with Robert Hockett, Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. At Cornell, about his role in crafting the Green New Deal Resolution, his conception of finance as a franchise, and his experience as an advisor to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well to Senators Sanders and Warren.
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Venezuela in the Crisis
The solution of the Venezuelan “crisis” lies in good faith negotiations between the government and the opposition, an end to the economic war, and the lifting of sanctions.
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The Green New Deal’s magical realism
The half-measures and failed “market mechanisms” of the mainstream more “unrealistic” than the bold plans put forward by the Green New Deal. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but that won’t mean very much if, within just a few decades, the planet can no longer sustain life as we know it.
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Killing the most beautiful things we own
The fight over the Amazon is not new, but the scale of its potential destruction has considerably increased. The protagonists of the murder of the Amazon are clear: capitalist firms of different scales and the political class that enables them.
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Trillion dollar Wall Street bailouts, Bernie Sanders, and the Washington Post
The newspaper’s fact-checker might need to work on his own understanding of the facts, because Sanders seems on pretty solid ground here
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Sighs of relief
Germany’s feverish political scene cooled off just a little. Two big sighs of relief permitted some people, at least temporarily, to stop chewing their fingernails.
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The Historic Anachronism and Necessary Supersession of the State
This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017. —The Editors
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The defeat of democracy in Brazil
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.
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A political seesaw
It would be a mistake to see Germany’s Greens as radical, well to the left. While the Greens stress environment above all, they have decided that this does not require conflict with big business, which must simply be convinced that ecology and profits can be combined.
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History made as minorities elected to Congress
An election of “firsts:” Women, LGBTQ, Muslims, African-Americans and Native Americans score seats in the House and Senate.
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The great un-blackening: the corporate project to erase black people from politics
Corporate rule imposes a duopoly system in which one party is overtly white supremacist and the other party refuses to tackle racial oppression–but both pursue austerity and war.
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A big rally and a Bavarian vote
Last weekend was surely the most complex in ages! Were the results favorable for “the good side”?
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Future of western democracy being played out in Brazil
Geopolitical and global economic reverberations will be immense. The Brazilian dilemma illuminates all the contradictions surrounding the Right populist offensive across the West, juxtaposed to the inexorable collapse of the Left. The stakes could not be higher.
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Cassandra calls
Eye-catching in Chemnitz were not just Hitler salutes under the statue of Karl Marx but the friendly cooperation between leaders of nasty PEGIDA anti-Islam movement, local pro-fascist thugs and a representative of the racist Alternative for Germany party (AfD).
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Stop blaming workers for Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism
The search for explanations of our current political climate, especially the rise of nationalists like Marine LePen in France, Narendra Modi in India, and our own president in the United States, has led pundits to return to the concept of “authoritarian” tendencies as a psychological phenomenon.
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Stand up with new hope?
If you regretted (or rejoiced) that the left-wing German scene, rarely mentioned by US media, was an unimportant sideshow, be prepared for a surprising new hope, called Aufstehen: Stand Up—or for its opposite, more fear.
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Cuba celebrates 65th anniversary of the revolution
CUBA celebrated the 65th anniversary of the revolution today as First Secretary of the Communist Party Raul Castro vowed that Cubans would remain loyal to the ideas of Fidel despite “Yankee imperialism” and economic blockades.
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Democratic Party politics 101 with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the corporate media
Some who read my writing may ask, “why don’t you criticize the Republicans as much as you do the Democrats?” My response to such a question is that it should be obvious by now which of the two corporate parties currently holds the Black polity and working class “constituencies” generally in a state of political captivity.