Subjects Archives: State Repression

Murders of trade unionists and social leaders, paramilitary activity, coca production… If we only paid attention to the mainstream media we would not get the idea that these problems are actually growing in Colombia, one year after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC came into place. To get a better picture and understand how all these elements connect to US policy and corporate interests, we interviewed Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer and human rights activist who has long been involved in the struggle for peace and justice in Colombia.

Duterte is a consistent political swindler and demagogue who depends heavily on lying.

Since May 2015, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has sustained a permanent military invasion against Yemen, the poorest country of the Middle East. The House of Saud argues that the lands and air attacks are due to the advancement of the Ansarolá movement, born in the core of the Houthis tribe which exercises the Zaydi shi’a Islam.

Although Nicos Poulantzas is rightly regarded as one of the most innovative Marxist theoreticians of the state, most analyses tend to focus on his account of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state in the organization of the hegemonic bloc of the capitalist class.

The meeting was seen by many in the Greek left as an “unprecedented manifestation of subordination to the U.S. imperialists,” who backed violent Greek monarchists and military juntas throughout the Cold War.

What happened to Herman isn’t unique in New York State, where brutal—sometimes fatal—assaults by guards on prisoners have persisted for years.

Last week, CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and asked if he thought President Donald Trump’s punishing response to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico had something to do with “race or ethnicity.” Sanders hesitated a bit but ultimately said, “We have a right to be suspect.”

For the vast majority of media outlets Africa is a continent in chaos, a place of countless massacres, epidemics, and starvation caused by conflicts, that generate extremist groups which mercilessly loot, rape, and kidnap.

While President Trump threatens to enact sanctions on Venezuela, this week will be crucial in the insurrectionary offensive of the opposition and imperialism. The hope for human rights and the breakdown of inequality is on its way.

A white woman from Australia was gunned down by militarized police in Minneapolis – part of the collateral damage that flows from the U.S. mass Black incarceration regime. The intended targets are Black women like Charleena Lyles, killed by Seattle cops, last month. “Although Black women and girls make up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, they account for 33 percent of all women killed by police.”

Abby Martin goes on the deadly front lines of the anti government protests in Venezuela and follows the evolution of a typical guarimba—or opposition barricade. She explains what the targets from the opposition reveal about the nature of the movement and breaks down the reality of the death toll that has rocked the nation since the unrest began, and how a lynch mob campaign came after her and the Empire Files team for reporting these facts.

Revolutionary activist and sociologist Reinaldo Iturriza has spent many years working with popular movements in Venezuela and writing on the rise of Chavismo as a political movement of the poor. He also served as Minister for the Communes and Social Movements, and then Minister for Culture in President Nicolas Maduro’s cabinet between 2013 and 2016.

Many on the Left have been deeply critical of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) since before it was fast-tracked into law by former President Bill Clinton in 1994. Now, President Donald Trump’s current plan to renegotiate NAFTA is poised to make the massive trade deal even worse.

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who famously exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and more recently, the U.S. military’s abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. This weekend, Hersh reported that the alleged chemical attack in Idlib, Syria, this March was not perpetrated by the Syrian military, as the Trump administration has claimed

US policy toward Cuba (Trump reverses Obama’s Cuba deal, limiting travel and trade, 17 June) has been hijacked by a clique of Cuban-American politicians, who have sold their support in Congress to President Donald Trump. Above all, these individuals – and Trump – have demonstrated the corrupt and clientelist nature of the US political system. Can such a system serve as a symbol of “freedom” to anyone in the world?

Is Trump a neofascist? Thoughtful analysts on the left like Cornell West, Noam Chomsky, and Judith Butler think he is. But mainstream liberal commentators refuse to associate the Trump phenomena with fascism. They call him a right wing populist. What is neofascism? Right wing Populism? Does it really matter what Trump is called? The great German playwright and political thinker who lived in Germany during Hitler’s reign, Berthold Brecht, asked in 1935: “How can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he’s willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it fourth?” We speak today with John Bellamy Foster, the editor of the venerable magazine “Monthly Review”. He wrote the lead article in the current June 2017 issue titled “This Is Not Populism.”

In a modern-day manifestation of the old colonial divide-and-rule tactic, corporations and New York City politicians, including the mayor, were recently caught trying to engage in backdoor deals to divide the city’s Puerto Rican community over a pro-Puerto Rican independence activist’s participation in the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

After this week’s high-rise fire in West London—the most deadly British disaster in a generation—officials still have no idea exactly how many people were crammed into the dangerous, outdated public-housing block that stands in London’s richest borough.

A number of commentators have noted two different trends. First, across the nation Republican lawmakers are pushing for bills criminalizing protests. Second, a number of state legislatures have passed or considered, often at the impetus of Democratic lawmakers, bills aimed at silencing the movement for Palestinian human rights by targeting boycotts of Israel.

The article discusses surveillance in today’s capitalist society with a reference to a recent revelation that the German intelligence agency spied upon scores of foreign journalists.