The Political Economy of Dissent Peter Blunt
What I Saw in Ukraine: 2015-2022: Diary of an International Observer Benoit Paré
America's Hijacked Peace Dividend: Long Overdue and Immediately Payable John Rachel
Mind Abuse: Media Violence and Its Threat to Democracy Rose Dyson
Class War, Then and Now: Essays toward a New Left Chris Wright
Killing Democracy: Western Imperialism's Legacy of Regime Change and Media Manipulation Finian Cunningham, Daniel Kovalik, Jeremy Kuzmarov, KJ Noh, & Ron Ridenour
At the Lost and Found: Personal & Political Dispatches of Resistance and Hope Edward Curtin
Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth Stan Cox
Broken Stars: Gaza Poems Buff Whitman-Bradley
Martyrs to the Unspeakable: The Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK James W. Douglass
Michael Yates focuses on US labor
May Day is one of the most important days to the exploited people. Michael D. Yates, director of Monthly Review Press and former Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine, focuses on US labor and its movement in the following interview from April 2019 by Farooque Chowdhury. Professor Michael Yates, whose academic fields are labor economics and the relationship between capital and labor, also discusses labor’s new initiatives at grass roots level, defying and contesting “official” labor leadership.
*****
Farooque Chowdhury: You have been closely associated with labor in the United States for more than 30 years. You …
A new report has uncovered 36 code-named US military operations in Africa. This comes after last year’s news that US special forces were operating in west Africa’s Niger. Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, joins RT America’s Manila Chan to unpack the news.
We are still writing to you from the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, DC where we are here as the Embassy Protection Collective with the full permission of the Venezuelan government. We have the grave responsibility to hold this space from takeover by the opposition, which would happen with the assistance of US law enforcement, until the Venezuelan government can complete negotiations with the United States over the status of their respective embassies.
What hangs in the balance is the possibility of a peaceful and orderly resolution to the end of …
On March 7, the Inter Press Service (IPS) published my article, “Eight Years on, Fukushima Still Poses Health Risks for Children,” and I am very gratified to learn that it was the second most popular article published in IPS News that week. It also appears that many readers were surprised to learn that removal of the irradiated cores from the three crippled nuclear reactors at Fukushima would take at least forty years.
This revelation reminds me of my conversation with the late Dr. Hans-Peter Durr, former Director of the Max Plunch Institute of Germany, when the Fukushima accident occurred …
A new report on April 25 by a respected think tank has estimated that US sanctions imposed on Venezuela in August 2017 have caused around 40,000 deaths. This atrocity has been almost entirely blanked by the British ‘mainstream’ media, including BBC News. Additional sanctions imposed in January 2019 are likely to lead to tens of thousands of further deaths.
The report was co-authored by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs for the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. CEPR was founded in 1999 ‘to promote …
OSU chemist, students study carcinogens in Superfund Sites already cleaned up
Note: I enjoy intersecting with scientists who are associated with universities that are now struggling to keep afloat, for many reasons to include the rise of the admin class, deanlets, non-academic departments, states lowering the matching rate to pay for faculty, presidents of universities making way too much money but throwing more at the athletic departments; and, alas, these vibrant and fully-packed schools — supposedly the smartest and brightest — have continuously sold out by taking bribe money from major corporations to shunt true research away from the capitalists’ intended and unintended crimes of their engines of profit.
I think, though, …
Graffiti opposing US imperialism in Venezuela. Photo credit: Aljazeera.comPresident Donald Trump and the likes of the New York Times might seem like strange bedfellows but they have found common cause in seeking regime change in Venezuela, a country that poses no threat to the United States but sits on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Trump administration sanctions have already killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans while U.S. media outlets drum up support for a possible military intervention to replace the socialists in …
Humans Über Alles … to the Bitter End
For years now I have made it clear that I consider the environmental outlook for this planet very, very bleak.
I have written repeatedly that I believe only a massive, rapid, internationally-coordinated and mandatory program to transform the world economy – involving a fast phase-out of fossil fuels, a ban on the manufacture of most plastics, radical restrictions on industrial agriculture and meat production/consumption, a stop to world deforestation, a shift to regional economies not dependent on worldwide shipping, and much more – that only such a fundamental restructuring of the world’s economic systems might have a chance of preventing probable …
In February 2010, the Indian government placed an indefinite moratorium on the commercial release of Bt brinjal. Prior to this decision, numerous independent scientists from India and abroad had pointed out safety concerns regarding Bt brinjal based on data and reports in the biosafety dossier that Mahyco, the crop developer, had submitted to the regulators.
Campaigner Aruna Rodrigues explains:
The then Minister of the Ministry of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh instituted a unique four-month scientific enquiry and public hearings. His decision to reject the commercialisation of Bt brinjal was supported by advice he received from several renowned international scientists. Their collective appraisals demonstrated …
More writers, commentators, and researchers are increasingly reminding the public that a large number of democrats at all levels of government have long supported and promoted privately-operated charter schools that annually siphon billions of public dollars from thousands of over-tested and vilified public schools.
The oft-repeated myth that the privatization and destruction of public education has always largely been “a Republican thing” or “a right-wing thing” is slowly dissolving. It was always a fairytale. Just like the widely-rejected No Child Left Behind Act, and its much-worse successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, nonprofit and for-profit charter schools continue to have bipartisan …
Ed Lehman is a Canadian Communist, and a comrade of mine. I don’t say such things often or lightly, especially about Westerners. But he became my comrade, and we struggled shoulder to shoulder, for five days. Not in the South American wilderness, not in Afghanistan or Syria, but in Regina, a small Canadian city, the capital of the province of Saskatchewan.
I admit, before being invited there, I knew close to nothing about Regina. I did not even know how to pronounce it, correctly. But one day, an email arrived, and I was invited to become a keynote speaker at the Peace Conference …
A deep dive into the details of the political economy that allows law enforcement to defeat civilian reform efforts, and what can be done to change it.
Values, values and more values. Another dreary dish added to the smorgasbord of Democratic hopefuls for the White House. This one is a bit cured and worn, smoked by history. Biden, having performed the role of Vice President for Barack Obama and senator for Delaware, is making his third attempt to not so much gallop as crawl into the US executive.
That said, there was initial promise, a teaser sent out to media outlets that the venue of his launch on Wednesday would be Charlottesville, Virginia. Memories of August 2017, with the death of protestor Heather Heyer at the white-supremacist riot, …
Review of The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 by Michael Joseph Roberto
Fascism is usually thought of as a quintessentially and almost exclusively European phenomenon, as having begun with Mussolini, culminated with Hitler, and been eradicated in World War II. The U.S., in particular, is thought to have been largely immune to it, given the absence of mass movements similar to Nazism or Italian Fascism. But there exists a different narrative, or at least there did in the 1930s, before it was buried under an avalanche of patriotic American propaganda and liberal historiography. According to this alternative understanding, the U.S. was falling victim to fascism already in the 1920s—though a different sort …
Review of Bret Easton Ellis’ White
A few weeks ago, days before the release of his first nonfiction book, White, Bret Easton Ellis was ambushed—or “punked,” as he later put it—by the New Yorker. In an interview that reads like a cross-examination, “Q and A” specialist Isaac Chotiner bombards the Glamorama author (that, not American Psycho, is his best novel) with questions about his views on Donald Trump, making his derision known with surly demands and sarcastic responses to Ellis’ rather feeble efforts to explain himself. “Tell me what you meant.” …
While Justin Trudeau’s government embraces repressive Middle East monarchies, they want us to believe their campaign to oust Venezuela’s government is motivated by support for democracy and human rights.
On a tour of the Middle East last week Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan met his United Arab Emirates counterpart Mohammed bin Ahmed Al Bowardi in Abu Dhabi. According to Emirates News Agency, Canadian and UAE officials discussed “cooperation in the military and defence sectors” at a time when the oil rich nation plays a key role in the horrendous violence in Yemen.
The Trudeau government is promoting arm sales to …
A Review of The End of Ice
The question is not are we going to fail. The question is how?
— Stephen Jenkinson, author and storyteller.
Water, glaciers, oceans, food, forests and fires – all of these things are part of global warming under the magnifying glass of Dahr Jamail in his book The End of Ice.
Jamail is a first class hunter-gatherer of information. It is not just finding and reading scientific papers. It is climbing the mountains; it is meeting with and listening to the indigenous people living on the edge of disaster; it …
An Open Letter to Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg
Dennis A. Muilenburg
Chairman, President, and
Chief Executive Officer
The Boeing Company
100 North Riverside
Chicago, IL 60606
Dear Mr. Muilenburg:
On April 4, 2019 you somewhat belatedly released a statement that “We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents.” You added that a preliminary investigation made it “apparent that in both flights” the MCAS “activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”
Your acknowledgement of the problems with the 737 MAX somehow escaped inclusion in your messages to shareholders, the capital markets, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is now stunningly clear that your overly optimistic outlook on …
Whenever, in ordinary circumstances, the subject of violence comes up, most people throw up their hands in horror and comment along the lines that it is ‘in our genes’, ‘nothing can be done about it’ or other words that reflect the powerlessness that most people feel around violence.
It is true that violence is virtually ubiquitous, has a near-infinite variety of manifestations and, at its most grotesque (as nuclear war or run-away climate catastrophe), even threatens human extinction in the near-term.
Nevertheless, anyone who pays attention to the subject of violence in any detail soon discovers that plenty of people are interested …
Recently, a certain political concept has been resurrected that warrants interrogation. The notion of a ‘red-brown’ alliance has been thrown around so ubiquitously as a form of political slander that any substantive meaning to the term has been evacuated. Rather than accurately designating any associations that may exist between the left and far right, the idea of a ‘red-brown’ coalition, or ‘querfront’ (cross-front in German), is a generic abstraction cited to mischaracterize a perceived convergence of political opposites. In many respects, it is a stand-in for a similar hypothesis used by liberals?—?that of ‘horseshoe theory’, or the impression that the …
Of ghost bikes and bike lanes.
I grew up on a bicycle. At least once I learned to ride. Somehow or other I didn’t manage to do that until the age of ten. But starting then, the bicycle became the ticket to freedom and independence, as well as another way to appreciate the natural world and get a lot of exercise.
For many people who grew up in suburbs similar to the one I grew up in, what I’m describing will be familiar. Looking at it …
Paris, 15 April 2019 — The heart of France is on fire. An inferno rocked France. Notre Dame, cultural icon of France and UNESCO declared World Heritage, was burning. The flames devastated the wooden roof and the spire. They caused, at first sight, only light damage on the 12th century cathedral’s structure and historic treasures, as most of the latter were either removed for the ongoing renovation, or were removed just in time by firefighters. Some damage to religious artifacts may have been caused by the enormous amounts of water used by the 500 firemen who dozed the blaze which took …
Embassy protectors pack the Hugo Chavez library for an event with John Kiriakou (Photo by Margaret Flowers)
Washington, DC – Thursday, April 25, the day activists anticipated the Secret Service might evict them from the Venezuelan embassy, turned into a day of growing support for and attention to the embassy protection efforts. Activists are making it clear that they are in the embassy with the permission of the foreign ministry. In fact, on Wednesday night, Carlos Ron, the Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs for Venezuela, sent a video message to the …
A socialist party that some say is a relic from the past clinging to life-support, is hoping its message can still resonate, and is attempting to sow its ideas in more favorable soil, now that American political life is showing promising signs of a revival. However, a definite class ideology by no means exists as yet and the task still remains to build a mass workers’ movement.
The increasingly reformist nature of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) led some of its members in Detroit to leave in 1916 and form the Socialist Party of the United States although a name …
I owe the corporate media an apology. For the last few years, I’ve been writing all these essays explaining how they were perpetrating an enormous psyop on the American public … a psyop designed to convince the public that Donald Trump “colluded” with Russia to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton. Up until a few days ago, I would have sworn that they had published literally thousands of articles and editorials, and broadcast countless TV segments, more or less accusing him of treason, and being a “Russian intelligence asset,” and other ridiculous stuff like that. Also, and I’m still …
For decades it was all but taboo to suggest that pro-Israel lobbies in the United States like AIPAC used their money and influence to keep lawmakers firmly in check on Israel-related issues – even if one had to be blind not to notice that that was exactly what they were up to.
When back in February Ilhan Omar pointed out the obvious – that US Representatives like her were routinely expected to submit to the lobby’s dictates on Israel, a foreign country – her colleagues clamoured to distance themselves from her, just as one might have expected …
The number of dead is bound to rise, already standing at more than three hundred. The bombs, worn by seven suicide bombers, struck at three churches during the period of Easter Sunday worship, and three hotels. As the dead were counted and the wounded accounted for, the situation through the glass darkly was a troubled one. Information relayed had either been ignored or discounted. In some cases, it never reached necessary recipients.
While the individuals behind the bombings were hardly forthcoming about their handiwork, there were suggestions as early as April 4 from Indian security sources that one group was readying …
While in poor countries, people defend BRI
The second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation is about to open in Beijing. It will take place from 25th to 27th April, 2019. The Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to deliver the keynote address.
It is expected to be an event of tremendous proportions and importance: leaders from 37 countries will participate, including Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and President Duterte of the Philippines. Beijing will host 5,000 guests from 150 countries, as well as 90 international organizations.
Africa – BRI: New China built highway
The Belt and …
We have told the State Department that if they enter the Venezuelan Embassy they are violating international law and if they arrest members of the Collective for trespass or unlawful entry these will be unlawful arrests. Members of the Collective are in the embassy with the permission of the elected government of Venezuela.
In two messages to the State Department today, the Collective explained that we are not violating the law and if there are unlawful arrests we will pursue legal action to hold people responsible for ordering arrests or …
The world is not so much a stage as a simulacrum for those who think it so. And if the stage goes bad, it is fitting that those who get thrown onto it change it in the most daring and provocative way. Politics is now as much a director’s production as it is an estranging show for the participating voter. The shock to such formulae is when a political aspirant decides to either reject the director’s cut entirely or, as in the case of Ukraine, embrace it as a mocking demonstration of bankruptcy. We know it is a joke: vote …
