Subjects Archives: Democracy

The problem for any negotiations is that the U.S. position is untenable. The U.S. wants to prevent Iran from exercising its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968) to enrich uranium even to low levels. It is this impossible position by Washington that will prevent diplomacy.

On June 2nd Christian Democrat Walter Lübcke was shot dead in front of his home. Stimulated by fascist blogs, one of them that of a prominent adherent of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the murderer, a dyed-in-the-wool fascist, had been plotting the attack ever since hearing Lübcke’s fierce reply to vicious anti-foreigner catcalls at a public event four years earlier.

In late June, some 5000 protestors camped out, as part of the “Stop Air Base Ramstein Campaign,” drawing attention to Germany’s increasing militarization via NATO. They demanded the U.S. Army base at Ramstein—where the top generals direct troop movements in Africa and the Near East, and deploy drones to murder anyone the Pentagon decides is an enemy—be shut down.

After the first round of Democratic primary debates, the line from corporate media and their overwhelmingly centrist sources was clear: The Democrats are moving dangerously to the left, at their own peril.

Trump might not have sent in a suite of missiles to hit Iran last week, but the United States has—of course—already opened up a certain kind of war against Iran.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The newspaper’s fact-checker might need to work on his own understanding of the facts, because Sanders seems on pretty solid ground here

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.

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

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.

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.

An election of “firsts:” Women, LGBTQ, Muslims, African-Americans and Native Americans score seats in the House and Senate.

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.

Last weekend was surely the most complex in ages! Were the results favorable for “the good side”?

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.