The Great Gray Hope has bowed out of the presidential primary race, leaving tottering Joe Biden as the last Democrat standing. What Bernie Sanders accomplished electorally was remarkable, revealing both how far a progressive can venture and the limits proscribing further advancement to the left within the Democratic Party.
Sanders pushes the limits of the system
That Sanders was once the frontrunner and might have swept the Democratic primaries is an indicator of the neoliberal order’s decay. The coronavirus pandemic was both the final blow to the Sanders campaign …
Leaked report shows that staff worked relentlessly to damage the party’s leader, including by exploiting antisemitism
by Jonathan Cook / April 16th, 2020
The findings of a leaked, 860-page report compiled by the British Labour Party on its handling of antisemitism complaints is both deeply shocking and entirely predictable all at once.
For the first time, extensive internal correspondence between senior party officials has been revealed, proving a years-long plot to destroy Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who recently stepped down.
The report confirms long-held suspicions that suspected cases of antisemitism were exploited by head office staff to try to undermine Corbyn. Anyone who was paying close attention to events in the party over the past five years already had a sense of that.
In Part I of this article I discussed how when Vygotsky’s work was exported to the United States it was narrowly defined as encompassing his work in child-development and cooperative learning. His interest in art history, European history and his commitment to Marxian political economy is barely mentioned. Secondly, I contrasted the differences between capitalist psychology and socialist psychology across the categories of psychological disorders, attitude towards social class, what is consciousness, motivation, emotions, intelligence, the place of the unconscious, consumptive patterns, work, free will and therapy. Then I showed how Marxian theories of individual human development differed from bourgeois …
John Lennon, prolific as a writer as much as a performer, wrote this:
Working Class Hero
As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
While some have applauded Senator Bernie Sanders for endorsing former Vice-President Joe Biden for president, some have criticized the endorsement. Redacted Tonight host Lee Camp joins Rick Sanchez for analysis.
In the June 2017 UK general election, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn came within a whisker of power. If just 2,227 votes had gone the other way, seven Tory knife-edge constituencies would have been won by Labour, putting Corbyn in a strong position to lead a coalition government.
Labour achieved 40 per cent in the election, increasing its share of the vote by more than any other of the party’s election leaders since 1945. As we noted at the time, it was one …
Caleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved many struggles for social justice. He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well 21st Century Socialism.
What’s the matter with science? By that, do I mean, why don’t we turn away from corrupt politics and religion and follow the way of science? Or do I mean, why have we allowed science to so corrupt our politics and our culture? I mean, of course, both.
Spitting at someone is a universal insult. In Israel, however, spitting at Palestinians is an entirely different story.
Now that we know that the deadly coronavirus can be transmitted through saliva droplets, Israeli soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers are working extra hard to spit at as many Palestinians, their cars, doorknobs, and so on, as possible.
If this sounds to you too surreal and repugnant, then you might not be as familiar with the particular breed of Israeli colonialism as you may think you are.
God help us all. The acrid stench of death wafts through the air. I cough, choke, every breath is an effort, and non-stop nausea portends retroperistalsis. The ceaseless, somber wail of ambulance sirens permeates every fiber of my being. They are busy non-stop, blasting through the streets, hauling the dying and the dead to overflowing Tucson, Arizona hospitals. Soon they’ll be burning piles of corpses in the streets. There is nowhere to hide. My neighbor has become my potential assassin. I avoid her, and the virus which likely infects her, like the plague. Covid-19 changed everything…wait, I’ve heard something like that before…
In truth, none of the drivel in the first paragraph …
Cuba complained recently that a shipment of test kits, masks and respirators, donated by the Chinese Alibaba group, didn’t arrive because the American company tasked with transportation feared breaching US sanction rules. Washington imposed an embargo on Cuba in 1962 after the island nation nationalized its oil industry. The measures have been denounced by the United Nations 28 years in a row.
PressTV: What are your views on this?
Peter Koenig: First, there are no words to describe the cruelty of this and many other similar acts by the United States, to utilize this pandemic to …
Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have never stopped working to funnel as much public money as possible from public schools into their own private pockets, even if this means undermining the education and future of students attending those public schools. This massive transfer of public funds from public schools to charter schools also undermines teachers’ working conditions and has a negative impact on society, the economy, and the national interest.
Much of this unprincipled transfer of large sums of public wealth to the private sector has been …
A new study in Nature (April 2020) casts a disturbing light on the prospects of abrupt ecosystem collapse. The report analyzes the probabilities of collapsing ecosystems en masse, and not simply the loss of individual species. ((Trisos, C.H. et al, “The Projected Timing of Abrupt Ecological Disruption From Climate Change”, Nature, April 8, 2020.))
The paper states that a high percentage of species will be exposed to harmful climate conditions at about the same time, potentially leading to sudden and catastrophic die-offs of biodiversity. If high greenhouse gas emissions remain in place, abrupt events are forecast to begin before 2030 in …
These are dark days. As the COVID-19 crisis turns our world upside-down, the social isolation and atomization of capitalism has given way to full-blown social distancing. At a time when we most need to come together, we’re told that human contact can kill us. Alarm bells are flashing everywhere as the dead pile up, the economy burns, and more and more people’s mental health deteriorates. This is the most severe and far-reaching global crisis that most of us who are alive today have ever experienced. Its a terrifying, alienated, and stressful time. It’s also no time to give up. No …
The conflict between the Navy high command, a captain and his threatened crew could underscore a new meaning of national security after the pandemic runs its course, says Gareth Porter.
There’s an interview of Bill Gates in which Gates reveals more than he might have intended. Rosemary Frei details many of the Orwellian aspects of Gates’ plans. In particular, consider these comments by Gates from disparate parts of the interview:
It’s [Covid19] quite infectious, way more infectious than MERS or SARS were. It’s not as fatal as they were ….. Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But money — ya know — bringing the economy back and doing money — that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back …
There is a debate on the Left about the role of Bernie Sanders. A good many (probably a majority) are enthusiastic. Some believe that he represents a truly progressive force and brings renewed hope in reshaping the Democratic Party to become that party of the working people, the “minorities,” women, that it supposedly once was. These folks talk about working to transform the party, call upon progressives to join and/or become active. This position is most clearly articulated by the progressive film-maker Michael Moore.
Perhaps some of us were harboring naïve hopes. We were thinking: If it became obvious that China and its government are doing things much better than the West, many of the ‘opposition figures’ in Hong Kong, including the most hardened rioters, would see reason, repent, and once and for all change their minds.
Nothing like that has happened.
Increasingly it is becoming clear that Hong Kong’s anti-government forces are not rational, not rational at all. They are not seeking the best possible solution for their territory. They are encouraged, and some of them even paid, to overthrow the system, to antagonize Beijing, …
Preparing for a pandemic requires understanding that a change in the relationship between people is primary and the production of things is secondary and flows from social factors. Investors in profit-based medicine cannot comprehend this concept. Nothing could exemplify it more clearly than Cuba’s response to the corona virus (COVID-19).
The US dawdled for months before reacting. Cuba’s preparation for COVID-19 began on January 1, 1959. On that day, over sixty years before the pandemic, Cuba laid the foundations for what would become the discovery of novel drugs, bringing patients …
In the backdrop of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, Michael D. Yates, decades-long union activist, director of Monthly Review Press and former Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine, discusses condition of the working people and steps required. The interview of Professor Michael Yates, whose academic fields include labor economics and the relationship between capital and labor, was taken on March 28, 2020.
Farooque Chowdhury: For a long time, you have been working with unions, as an organizer, educator, and negotiator. Your works on class and labor are significant. Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the working people in countries, from Thailand, …
As any risk-taking pioneer knows, it is lonely taking the lead and suffering the derisive scorn of one’s compatriots. I have been there and so can understand what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the public face of the U.S. government’s coronavirus efforts, must be feeling. Fauci was recently quoted by Time magazine as saying to interviewer Kate Linebaugh:
I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.
Time got the quote wrong. He actually said:
I don’t think we ever should ever shake hands ever again, to …
“For my opinions,” wrote Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci, “I am willing to lose my life, not only to stay in prison. And this is why I am calm and at peace with myself.” Gramsci spent 11 years in prison during the fascist reign over Italy, a brutal regime that crushed every form of political dissent between 1922 and 1943. He died only six days after he was released.
Gramsci’s revolutionary life and untimely death at the age of 46 reflected his own definition of the “organic intellectual,” someone who is not a mere “mover of feelings and passions” but an “active …
Like most everyone else, I don’t get out much lately due to shelter-in-place. But when I walk around my community, I am heartened by neighbors asking if there is anything we might need. I suspect this scenario is taking place everywhere.
Around the world amidst the pandemic, people step out at a mutually designated evening hour to make noise in a collective show of gratitude for heroic frontline healthcare workers. In New York City and Rome, they bang pots and pans. They’re cheering from rooftops in London and Vancouver. Elsewhere they sing in harmony. Here in Marin County, just north of …
What is already a crisis in the territory barely needs a nudge from Covid-19 in order to be tipped into a health disaster
by Jonathan Cook / April 14th, 2020
The Palestinians of Gaza know all about lockdowns. For the past 13 years, some two million of them have endured a closure by Israel more extreme than anything experienced by almost any other society – including even now, as the world hunkers down to try to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.
Israel has been carrying out an unprecedented experiment in Gaza, using the latest military hardware and surveillance technology to blockade this tiny coastal enclave by land, air and sea.
Nothing moves in or out without Israel’s say-so – until three weeks ago, when the virus smuggled itself into Gaza inside two Palestinians …
Tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump constantly bashes “do nothing Democrats.” In fact, it’s Mopey Mitch McConnell who’s the do nothing man, refusing to act on nearly 400 bills passed by Pelosi’s House.
One big Democratic initiative did manage to become law, pushed through as part of a late-2019 budget deal. Titled the SECURE Act, it’s the latest effort to reshape and repair America’s private-sector retirement system.
SECURE stands for Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement. The bill doesn’t come close to doing that, partly because the job is so huge.
Despite extensive use of 401(k)s, IRAs and the like, …
So the War on Populism is finally over. Go ahead, take a wild guess who won.
I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t the Russians, or the white supremacists, or the gilets jaunes, or Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, or the misogynist Bernie Bros, or the MAGA-hat terrorists, or any of the other real or fictional “populist” forces that global capitalism has been waging war on for the last four years.
What? You weren’t aware that global capitalism was fighting a War on Populism? That’s OK, most other folks weren’t. It wasn’t officially announced or anything. It …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / April 13th, 2020
Save Our Planet Save Our Future, Belgium, January 31, 2019 (Photo: EuroNews/Twitter)
This is the fourth newsletter in our series on the 2020s as a decade of transformation See Remaking International Relations, Remaking the Economy for the People, and Remaking Healthcare. In addition to COVID-19 and the economic collapse, multiple crises are reaching a peak and the world is changing as a result. How the world changes will be determined in some part by our actions. This week, we look at what can be done to …
On 12 March, British PM Boris Johnson informed the public that families would continue to “lose loved ones before their time” as the coronavirus outbreak worsens.
He added:
We’ve all got to be clear, this is the worst public health crisis for a generation.
In a report, the Imperial College had warned of modelling that suggested over 500,000 would die from the virus in the UK. The lead author of the report, epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, has since revised the estimate downward to a maximum of 20,000 if current ‘lockdown’ measures work. Johnson seems to have based his statement on Ferguson’s original figures.
The DeVos Department of Education’s new “Proposed Rules” for federal regulations of “Distance Education and Innovation” (85 FR 18638) will effectively open the floodgates for online education corporations to put public brick-and-mortar schools out of business by streamlining “adaptive-learning and other artificial intelligence” technologies that replace “human instructors” with “competency-based education (CBE)” software which provide “direct assessment” through “subscription-based” courseware that data-mine students’ cognitive-behavioral algorithms to “personalize” digital lessons.
What Is Computerized CBE? No More Classrooms, No More “Credit Hours”
As I have documented in several articles, “CBE” is a euphemism for educational methods that deploy computer …
A little over 20 years ago, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted a military exercise that involved a “hypothetical scenario” of hijacked planes flying into both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
One year later, on October 24-26, 2000, another “hypothetical” military exercise was played out featuring an airline crashing into the Pentagon killing 341 people followed by yet another May 2001 Department of Defense “hypothetical scenario” which saw hundreds of medical personnel training for a “guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner” crashing into the Pentagon.
