Subjects Archives: Imperialism

For popular movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, achieving high levels of political awareness and organisation is not enough whilst the ruling classes, in one way or another, maintain control of the armed forces.

Economic inequality in the United States and around the world is now so obscene, and has convinced more and more people to do something about it, that the business press has initiated a campaign to deny its very existence.

Troop movements today promise anything but peace. Every two years military maneuvers encircle Russian borders; every nine months a new brigade of 4500 U.S. soldiers was flown over to “gain experience”. This year it will be a division of 20,000, joined by soldiers from 18 countries, 37,000 in all.

Thirty years ago there were fifteen border walls around the world. Now there are seventy walls and over one billion national and international migrants. International migrants alone may even double in the next forty years due to global warming.

Mumia Abu Jamal, the nation’s best known political prisoner, says the U.S. is living up to its reputation as an international assassin with its hit on an Iranian general on Iraqi soil. “America is more hated today than ever,” said Abu Jamal, co-author of the multi-volume book, “Murder, Incorporated.”

Economic imagery pervades societal discourse. Part of this imagery projects markets as existing everywhere; the common societal parlance sees talk of the car market, the grocery market, the computer market, or, simply, the market.

As the longest running belligerent occupation of a foreign country in the history of international relations, the United States has been in violation of international law for over a century.

The U.S.-backed administration of Jeanine Añez is arresting prominent members of the press and even doctors in what it calls a “dismantling of the propaganda apparatus of the dictatorial regime of Evo Morales.”

The international corporate media have entered crisis mode following the replacement of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as head of the country’s National Assembly.

Yes, we’ll be less efficient. But we’ll be happier, more useful and better able to tackle climate change.

At this point in human history, the limits of capitalism and the limits of our species’ life on Earth have converged. We have never been here before, and we cannot go back.

On January 5, Iran made a major announcement regarding its nuclear program, stating that it will no longer observe limits on the number of centrifuges that it uses to enrich uranium. While the announcement is significant, it was not altogether unexpected. And it most certainly does not constitute the “harsh revenge” that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, promised following the killing of Qasem Soleimani last week.

Let’s begin with Prophesy Deliverance. What you do in this book is incredible. You draw from Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, then the famous Afro-centrist Professor James E. Cohn, and then the pragmatic tradition with which you were already familiar while you were doing PhD work at Princeton. Then you put them together and, much more importantly, you also do something extraordinary.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. The U.S., in the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

In October of last year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its flagship World Economic Outlook. In that report, the IMF said that the global growth rate would stumble at 3% in 2019. A month ago, the IMF’s main economists returned to this theme; ‘Global growth’, they wrote, ‘recorded its weakest pace since the global financial crisis a decade ago’.

Millions of Indians hit the streets today in support of the general strike and as part of nationwide coalition-building efforts to resist the policies of the right-wing Modi government.

On January 5, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Barbara Lee announced that they are introducing a War Powers Resolution in the House. The legislation would remove U.S. forces from any conflict with Iran that hasn’t been granted congressional approval and is a companion to a Senate resolution that was introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) two days prior.

The contradictions between imperialist actions and the legal standards they create can do much to raise mass consciousness and accelerate revolutionary momentum. But this can happen only if people know what the law is in the first place. Imperialists have been vigilant in their efforts to obscure and distort legal standards. We must be just as vigilant in ensuring clarity.

The Trump administration claimed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on U.S. interests when it assassinated him. That lie was just destroyed, but not before countless corporate media outlets transmitted it to the public.

The decade ends with two major threats to humanity: global warming leading to a climate catastrophe and the threat of a nuclear war extinguishing our civilization.