Subjects Archives: Strategy

This reneging on international agreements by the U.S. is not an isolated case. This is the pattern that the U.S. has been following now for the last 25 years.

Ecological resistance in the twenty-first century has more and more been informed by the development of Marxian ecology and ecosocialism more generally.

On every scale, from the smallest cells to the entire planet, the essential elements of life are constantly used and re-used. Biogeochemical cycles are the basis of the biosphere.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s reliance on data behemoth and right-wing affiliate Palantir for its Iran analytics raises the possibility that it will be used as a Trojan horse for intelligence-gathering by Iran’s enemies such as the U.S. and Israel.

Given the clearly right-wing nature of the ruling parties in the countries that withdrew from UNASUR, the move can be seen as the latest blow against a fading trend of left-wing governments in the region and a result of the increasingly bitter inter-state debate swirling around Venezuela’s political future.

On the campaign trail and during much of his time as president, Donald Trump has repeatedly railed against “radical Islamic terror,” which he once promised to eradicate “from the face of the Earth.” Less than two years into his presidency, however, Donald Trump has now threatened to attack a sovereign nation, Syria, at the behest of a radical Wahhabi terror group known as Jaysh al-Islam, or the Army of Islam, which seeks to topple Syria’s secular government and replace it with an Islamic state based on an extremist, Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

The Syrian government has won the war in the country. Two barriers to total victory remain. First, that there are pockets of rebels in the towns around Damascus and there is the province of Idlib which is controlled by rebels. Second, there are the tracts of land that are held by the United States (in the north-east), by the Turks (in the north), by Israel (in the south-west) and by Hezbollah (in the west).

The evidence — or lack thereof — of chemical weapons use by Syria is eerily similar to the events that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was justified using baseless humanitarian accusations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Seriously folks, this is the third and final part in an introductory series on the need for a humane socialist U.S. agriculture policy. (Part 1: www.dailykos.com/…; Part 2: www.dailykos.com/….) For over a year I have been plodding along in my spare time researching, thinking, and writing U.S. agriculture-related pieces from what I will call a progressively socialistic perspective. Along the way I have developed the firm conviction that the lack of a comprehensive practical focus on agricultural issues is a major problem for the U.S. left, politically and programmatically.

Under Ecuador’s new government, the gagging of Assange has long been a matter of when, not if. It’s only the latest sign of a once-defiant nation’s newfound subservience to Washington and Europe.

The 2016 presidential exit polls “substantially underestimated the number of Democratic white working-class voters…and overestimated the white college-educated Democratic electorate,” New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall (3/29/18) writes.

With the acceptance of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s invitation, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited China from the 25th of this month to the 28th, for the first time since assuming office in 2011. Timed just before Kim’s meeting with the South Korean President Moon Jae-in the next month, followed by a summit with U.S President Donald Trump-where the prospects of denuclearization is expected to be discussed-this meeting with Xi Jinping, in which Kim has reaffirmed his commitment to denuclearization, has been seen my observers as a crucial diplomatic development.

In a recent interview that went viral, Russian President Vladimir Putin repudiated NBC journalist Megyn Kelly, when she pressed him on the so-called “Russiagate” scandal.

Raoul Peck, the Haitian lmmaker, opens his film—Der Junge Karl Marx (2017)—in the forests of Prussia. Peasants gather fallen wood. They look cold and hungry.… Some of the peasants die. Even fallen wood is not allowed to them.

I have been arguing, since 2016, that one of the likely outcomes of the kind of corporate tax cuts Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have supported—and, as we saw, eventually rammed through—would be an increase in inequality.

The March 2018 Italian elections open a chaotic period the outcome of which remains uncertain. Only a few years ago, the country was among the most “Euro-phile.” Now, the population is “Euro-skeptic” at level of 50% or more.

The dystopia of the American healthcare system certainly invites a utopian response—a ruthless criticism as well as a vision of an alternative.

The decline in the payroll share of output is class power at work: unfortunately theirs, not ours.

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley explores the radical Black politics of scholar Cedric J. Robinson—from his historical understanding of race and capitalism as inherently inseparable systems, to his vision of the possibilities of politics, rooted deep in struggles past and present.

In 2010 the oil and gas geopolitics of the Mediterranean changed profoundly. That was when a Texas oil company, Noble Energy, discovered a huge deposit of natural gas offshore Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, the so-called Leviathan Field, one of the world’s largest gas field discoveries in over a decade.