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We bid Farewell to 2014 and Welcome the New Year with a different kind of festive mood. All videos have been shot by @kinimatini and Tar in Athens, during December 2014, except the “flying” Santa at the end, that has been shot by AgitPropULA.

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We bid farewell to the year 2014 with flashbacks of collective resistance, imprinted in our memories and engraved in the story of this world, to be reminded of our past, so that we keep on fighting in the future, to turn our dreams of a self-organized society without rulers, from Utopia to Reality.

Wherever you …

Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian’s prime Hasbara mouthpiece, praised Israeli President Reuven ‘Ruvi’ Rivlin yesterday. Freedland wrote that that in spite of being a “lifelong member of Israel’s Likud party, and on the right of that rightwing bloc… ever since his elevation to Israel’s largely ceremonial presidency in June he (President Rivlin) has acted as something like his country’s conscience.”

Let’s examine how Freedland justifies his dubious choice for 2014’s hero.

In November the Israeli cabinet backed a Jewish state bill that would enshrine discrimination against Israel’s 1.7 million Arab citizens, denying them the full rights of citizenship accorded to Jews. …

Practicing freedom of assembly is an ongoing struggle, and it can get scary, as was our experience in Oakland on Saturday, December 13th, on the evening of which six or seven hundred of us gathered at the Oscar Grant Plaza for a march, setting out shortly before dark. Notebook in hand, I jotted down that it was 4:59 p.m. and joined in, scribbling a timeline as we marched out on 14th, then south on Jackson towards the freeway, chanting “Black lives matter!” and “Shut it down! Shut it down!” Arriving at the on ramp, we found that the police …

THE PRESIDENT: Good afternoon.

Today the United States is changing its relationship with Cuba and the rest of the world, and we are beginning a project to lift the veil on the reality of our brutal and audacious imperial arrogance that has brought so much misery and suffering to Cuba, the hemisphere, and the world.

We have come to recognize that it is not Cuba that is stuck in the past, quite the contrary, Cuba is living and working toward a better and livable future; it is U.S. power that is stuck in the past, a past and present of …

The Palestinians are seeking a vote in the United Nations’ Security Council on a resolution favoring their statehood, unquestionably a reasonable proposal in the minds of most of the world’s people. Of course, the United States, a permanent member of the Security Council, would automatically veto such a resolution, as it vetoes all efforts to restore order to the chaos of the Middle East. And of course, were such a resolution somehow miraculously to pass, Israel would simply ignore it, as it has ignored a long list of binding UN resolutions. But a veto and certain contempt are not enough …

Historic outcomes of pivotal events often dangled on threads of various possibilities. As they were outnumbered by more than two to one, an early morning fog enabled America’s future first President, George Washington with his command, to escape death or capture by British troops on Long Island, New York in 1776. As the last of 9000 men to board one of the transport boats, it’s unlikely Washington would have safely made the East River crossing without the fog’s appearance. Subsequent U.S. history along with the world’s entire geopolitical scene could be something entirely different than it is today. America went …

The vote last week in the Ukrainian parliament was a seriously disturbing move — it has made reconciliation with Russia near impossible.

The parliament voted to work for Ukraine’s membership of Nato, a red rag to a bear.

The truth is this whole Russian-Ukrainian-Western confrontation could be largely solved if the Ukrainian and Western sides wrote on paper that they don’t want to see Ukraine in Nato.

This is the key issue for Russia. But it must be written down. Moscow no longer trusts verbal understandings that can be broken, as when the Reagan Administration gave President Mikhail Gorbachev the …

Who will remember what this age was like? And how will it be remembered? For the abyss of silence at the center of all the noise? The fierce shadow cast by all the blazing lights that never went off, that shone night and day?

The one terminal war foreshadowed endlessly in the last century shattered into a dozen endless wars all going on simultaneously, fought only by the poorest people in the most degraded landscapes? (Where there was nothing but oil. Nothing but diamonds. Nothing but cobalt.) Two towers coming down, a hundred towers going up. The slums stretching as far …

It’s been a year of fervent activism on police accountability, living wages, climate change, personal freedoms, immigrant rights, an open internet and diplomacy over war. The electoral beating the Democrats received has prompted both the Administration and some spineless congresspeople to realize that support for progressive issues could reinvigorate their base —a realization that has already led to Obama’s executive action on immigration and the opening to Cuba.
So here are some of the 2014 highlights.
1. Uprising for police accountability. The movement for police accountability has swept the nation, spawning brilliant new leaders from communities most affected, …

The U.S.-led NATO war on Afghanistan has lasted so long they’ve decided to rename it, declare the old war over, and announce a brand new war they’re just sure you’re going to love.

The war thus far has lasted as long as U.S. participation in World War II plus U.S. participation in World War I, plus the Korean War, plus the Spanish American War, plus the full length of the U.S. war on the Philippines, combined with the whole duration of the Mexican American War.

Now, some of those other wars accomplished things, I will admit — such as stealing half of …

Despite being disproven as a strategy for reducing crime, the broken windows policing theory is still utilized in New York and throughout in the United States to crack down on disorder and nonviolent crime. To think that harsh enforcement of this type of “crime” would prevent serious crime like homicide and assault is patently absurd on its face. If you want to rid society of the most serious crimes, you should be enforcing the most serious crimes, like aggressive war. Call it broken countries policing.

In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping …

Regime change in Cuba? Che rolling in his grave? The first shriek comes from a liberal, the latter a Marxist. With all due respect to both, I think the former quite confused if he thinks that Castroite Cuba more closely reflects his own Keynesian delusions, and the latter seems not to understand Che’s significant contribution to the normalization of relations between Cuba and the US (even though it occurs long after his death). Che was the Beard’s partner in the charade that was Cuban socialism, and his ally in the effort to rid that island of all forms …

Comrades all:

We have all lived through intense and exciting moments in the last few days.

In this very month of December we successfully held the Fifth CARICOM-Cuba Summit. Last Sunday we held the Thirteenth Summit of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America and, on that occasion, we paid a well-deserved tribute to their founders: our close friend and Bolivarian President, Hugo Chávez Frías, and the Commander of the Cuban Revolution, Comrade Fidel Castro Ruz.

Present in this session are Gerardo, Ramón and Antonio, a source of genuine rejoicing and happiness for all of our people. I will elaborate on …

Accumulation by Dispossession, Dispossession by Criminalization

Workfare and broken windows policing are mutually reinforcing political-economic institutions, but they do not have to be. As Smith explains, the level of “revanchism” displayed by the Giuliani administration “was neither a politically nor a socially necessary outcome of economic crisis and restructuring. It was a choice by a narrow group of political and corporate leaders who really do constitute, with others, a ruling class.” ((Smith, Neil. “Which New Urbanism? The Revanchist 90s.” Perspecta, Vol. 30, Settlement Patterns (1999), 105.)) Whereas the Keynesian urban policy in place from the 1930s to the 1970s was …

“The violence is not a new thing,” says Jose-Pablo Buerba about Mexico’s civil unrest and protest in recent weeks. An international political economist from Mexico City, Buerba works with heads of state around the world on matters economic. He is a native of Mexico City, where he has lived and worked these last few months.
 
Before his December 2014 departure from the Distrito Federal (Mexico City), Buerba had asked not to have his identity revealed in an interview he had granted me within twenty-four hours of protestors setting fire to Mexico’s National Palace door. “Please don’t,” he had requested, adding that he …