Attack shows Hypocrisy towards Indigenous Peoples.
Subjects Archives: Imperialism
Imperialism, Globalization, and War
Health check: U.S. manufacturing is in trouble
President Trump is all in, touting his success in rebuilding U.S. manufacturing. For example, in his state of the union address he claimed: We are restoring our nation’s manufacturing might, even though predictions were that this could never be done. After losing 60,000 factories under the previous two administrations, America has now gained 12,000 new […]
‘This is an apocalyptic future that we’re facing’
CounterSpin interview with Karl Grossman on the weaponization of space.
No excuses–we have to shut down the fossil fuel industry
In the face of an ecological catastrophe as enormous and terrifying as this season’s bushfires, you might think that policy might begin to shift, as those in power face up to the reality of human-induced climate change. But you’d be wrong.
The climate and the fat tail risk
My gap year ends in August, but it doesn’t take a college degree in economics to realise that our remaining 1,5° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don’t add up.
Marxism and the Climate Crisis: African Eco-Socialist Alternatives
There is a rich inheritance of emancipatory Marxism in Africa, which includes Frantz Fanon, Ruth First, Samir Amin, Sam Moyo, Harold Wolpe and many others. Today, Satgar argues, the challenge is to defeat carbon capitalism accelerating the climate crisis and fomenting exclusionary nationalisms and for this there has to be a return to Marx.
I am tired of holding other worlds in my fist
In November 2019, the Bolivian army–with a nudge from the shadows–told its President Evo Morales Ayma to resign. Morales would eventually go to Mexico and then seek asylum in Argentina. Jeanine Áñez, a far-right politician who was not in the line of succession, seized power; the military, the fascistic civil society groups, and sections of […]
Over 4000 Professors and Scholars from across Canada and around the world sign “Statement of Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people of British Columbia”
We ask that the illegal work on Unist’ot’en territory by Coastal Gas Link be immediately stopped. We request that the federal and provincial governments respect Indigenous rights as outlined in our constitution, in countless court rulings, as well as the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous people (UNDRIP) and ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law)
The Iowa fiasco and the Democrats’ shadowy plot to stop Bernie
Yogi Berra, the great Yankees catcher, had the memorable line, “It’s like deja vu all over again.” Bernie Sanders supporters might have been thinking the same thing after the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses.
Bolivia: An election in the midst of an ongoing coup
On May 3, 2020, the Bolivian people will go to the polls once more. They return there because President Evo Morales had been overthrown in a coup in November 2019.
The blockade, a weapon that causes more death than war
It deliberately affects defenseless civilians, such as children, the elderly and the sick. The US blockade against Cuba is the most severe and prolonged applied against any country, but it is estimated that one third of the world’s population suffers its effects: there are more than eight thousand sanctions in 39 countries.
Rosa Luxemburg and debt as an imperialist instrument
In her book titled The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913, Rosa Luxemburg devoted an entire chapter to international loans in order to show how the great capitalist powers of the time used the credits granted by their bankers to the countries of the periphery to exercise economic, military and political domination on the latter.
U.S. uneasy as Iraq gets new prime minister
The protest movement in Iraq, which is now entering its fourth month, has come to be the principal instrument for Washington to surreptitiously advance the broader geopolitical confrontation with Iran that is being played out within the country.
Acronym group that sabotaged Iowa caucus birthed by billionaire who funded Alabama disinformation campaign
Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman funded the creation of ACRONYM, the group that sabotaged the Iowa caucus results, after bankrolling voter manipulation campaigns including the notorious online “false flag operation” in Alabama’s 2017 senate race.
Blue Acceleration: Capitalism’s growing assault on the oceans
“A new phase in humanity’s relationship with the biosphere, where the ocean is not only crucial but is being fundamentally changed”
Libya is being torn apart by outsiders
Ghassan Salamé is the head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya. He took over this job in 2017, six years after the catastrophic NATO war on Libya. What Salamé inherited was a country torn into shreds, two governments in place—one in Tripoli and one in Tobruk—and one civil war that had too many […]
Dossier 25: People’s Polyclinics: The initiative of the Telugu communist movement
Under the shadow of the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), countries are obliged to guarantee the right to health. The 1946 Constitution of the World Health Organisation (WHO) defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of […]
Anti-Colonialism and anti-Semitism in Harlem
The strong anti-colonial, anti-Zionist sentiment within the African-American community renders it impossible for organizations such as the Anti-Defamation-League (ADL) to assess its anti-Semitism accurately, as they conflate Judaism with Zionism and Israel, and anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
![The new weapon has been rolled out with remarkable speed. The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review called for the development of “a low-yield SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] warhead to ensure a prompt response option that is able to penetrate adversary defenses” and close “an exploitable ‘gap’ in US regional deterrence capabilities.” The pretext for the warhead’s deployment was the unsubstantiated claim that Russia is developing similar weapons and has adopted a doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate” or “escalate to win” by utilizing low-yield nuclear weapons, with the expectation that Washington would not retaliate with strategic warheads for fear of initiating an all out thermonuclear war. The Pentagon’s argument has been that a low-yield and rapid reaction ballistic missile is needed to “restore deterrence.” The report by the FAS strongly suggests, however, that this alleged Russian doctrine is a pretext and that “it is much more likely that the new low-yield weapon is intended to facilitate first-use of nuclear weapons against North Korea or Iran.” It points out that both the US National Security Strategy and the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) envision the use of nuclear weapons in response to “non-nuclear attacks, and large-scale conventional aggression,” and that the NPR explicitly stated that the W76-2 warhead was designed to “expand the range of credible US options for responding to nuclear or non-nuclear strategic attack.” Washington does not rule out a nuclear strike, including against non-nuclear armed countries like Iran. The deployment of the USS Tennessee with its new “usable” nuclear warheads came at roughly the same time as President Donald Trump huddled with his top aides on December 29 at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, ordering the criminal drone missile assassination of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s top officials. The drone killing was carried out at Baghdad’s international airport five days later. In a report Thursday, NBC News, citing unnamed senior US officials, established that at the same meeting in Florida, “Trump also authorized the bombing of Iranian ships, missile launchers and air defense systems... Technically, the military can now hit those targets without further presidential authorization, though in practice, it would consult with the White House before any such action.” The report warned that “the two sides remain in a dangerous boxer’s clench, in which the smallest miscalculation, some officials believe, could lead to disaster.” In other words, for all the talk of war having been averted following the act of war and war crime carried out by Washington in the murder of Suleimani, the reality is that the world remains on the knife’s edge of a catastrophic military confrontation, which could rapidly escalate into the first use of nuclear weapons in three-quarters of a century. The threat against Iran is part of a far broader buildup to global war through which US imperialism is seeking to offset the erosion of its previously hegemonic domination of the global economy by resorting to the criminal use of overwhelming military force. After securing a $738 billion military budget for 2020 with the support of an overwhelming majority—Democratic and Republican alike—in the US Congress, the Trump administration is now preparing to push through a 20 percent increase in the budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency overseeing the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal. This $20 billion budget proposal, made public this week, represents only a fraction of the more than $1 trillion the US is projected to spend on “modernizing” the arsenal over the next three decades—plans that were set into motion under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, before Trump took office. Trump is a war criminal. His threats to carry out the “obliteration” of Iran and to rain “fire and fury” upon North Korea are not merely hyperbole. The “usable” nuclear weapons to commit such atrocities have already been placed in his hands. As the Senate impeachment trial of the US president limps to an ignominious close, it is striking that Trump’s greatest crimes, including acts of war and his threat to drag the world into a nuclear war, feature in no way in the charges against him. On the contrary, the articles of impeachment center on allegations that he withheld lethal military aid to Ukraine and has been insufficiently aggressive in confronting Russia. This charge is made, as Newsweek pointed out this week, after the Pentagon staged an unprecedented 93 separate military exercises between May and the end of September of last year, all of them simulating or preparing for war against Russia. This includes practice bombing runs less than 500 miles from the Russian border and the steady build-up of ground forces in the three Baltic states and Poland, together with escalating US air deployments described as “bomber assurance” and “theater security” programs. The drive to war has its source not in the diseased mind of Donald Trump, but rather in the insoluble crisis of global capitalism. There exists no antiwar faction within the US ruling class, including its Democratic representatives, only tactical differences over how US imperialist interests should best be pursued on the global arena. The struggle against a new imperialist world war and the threat it poses to the survival of humanity can be based only upon the struggles of the working class, which is engaged in a wave of strikes and social upheavals across the planet. These emerging mass struggles must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unify workers in the common fight to put an end to the source of war and social inequality, the capitalist system.](https://mronline.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/First-launch-of-a-Trident-missile-on-January-18-1977-at-Cape-Canaveral-Florida-Credit-U.S.-Navy-file-photo-200x200.jpg "U.S. deploys “usable” nuclear weapon amid continuing war threats against Iran")
U.S. deploys “usable” nuclear weapon amid continuing war threats against Iran
The Pentagon deployed a new, smaller nuclear warhead aboard the ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee as it sailed into the Atlantic last month in the midst of the spiraling crisis with Iran. The weapon, known as the W76-2 warhead, has an explosive yield of roughly five kilotons, a third of the destructive power of the […]
Aboriginal society, European invasion, and the bushfire disaster
Now even right wing politicians are talking about using traditional Aboriginal land management techniques to mitigate fire risk. But pre-Invasion land management wasn’t about logging and clearing land for profit: it combined knowledge of land with collective, egalitarian planning.
