Subjects Archives: Movements

Many people have given up on the idea of government as an instrument of progressive social change, especially the federal government.

WhatsApp and fake news go hand-in-hand in both Brazil and India. And judging by the Facebook-owned messaging app’s effect on Brazil’s recent presidential election, India may be slated for some serious trouble next spring.

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” —Malcolm X

A few days from now–on 29-30 November–a very large number of people will gather in New Delhi, the capital of India, to say that they stand with India’s farmers (kisans).

Whatever you may think of the multi-billionaire founders of Amazon and Alphabet-Google,⁽¹⁾ there would seem to be one undeniable fact about their companies: they have massively improved productivity. Amazon has an e-commerce system that delivers very efficiently; Google has revolutionised Internet search.

This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017.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

Of all the genetic engineers who have renounced the technology—Arpad Pusztai, Belinda Martineau, Thierry Vrain and John Fagan, among others—because of its shortsighted approach and ability to produce unintended and potentially toxic consequences, Caius Rommens’ story may be the most compelling.

One of the central and most concrete themes that the break should cover concerns the way public indebtedness is used to justify austerity policies.

Julian Assange, a hero in the struggle against imperial wars and the lies that states tell to justify them, is in mortal danger.

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.

Red Flag editor Ben Hillier speaks with Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of the essay collection U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty, about the meaning of the midterm election results and what comes next.

It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.

AT THE BEGINNING of October, Amazon was quietly issued a patent that would allow its virtual assistant Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics and emotional state based on their voice. Characteristics, or “voice features,” like language accent, ethnic origin, emotion, gender, age, and background noise would be immediately extracted and tagged to the user’s data file to help deliver more targeted advertising.

A Review of Michael Hudson’s new book AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS

The tremendously destructive Woolsey Fire has been widely reported as beginning “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne), but it appears that the fire began on the Rocketdyne property itself.

For six months, Argentina has been confronted with a new economic and social crisis on a massive scale. In the context the devaluation of local currency, rising inflation, and a deep recession, Mauricio Macri’s administration struck an agreement with the IMF, marking a major shift in the country’s future. The agreements slash public spending and prioritize the repayment of debt, among other measures. This dossier examines the different dimensions of the crisis, the open disputes, and the possibilities for the immediate future.

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing U.S. Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new–both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters–Trump’s emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in U.S. history.

The camps organised by nationalist parties train children as young as 8 to hate Russians, foreigners and gay people—and they now receive considerable government money to do so, reports YURAS KARMANAU

Ex-Trump aide’s visit ‘legitimises racist views’

Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about U.S. politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders.